The Onion Girl

by Charles de Lint

  “I don’t think that’s even possible,” Jilly said. “I mean, then there’d be two of me, wouldn’t there? And I certainly don’t remember walking around on Yoors Street.”

  “Weird.”

  Jilly gave a tiny nod. “And kind of creepy.”

  They fell silent again. This time it was Sophie who spoke first.

  “I think I know a way we can be together in the dreamlands,” she said.

  “How’s that?”

  “If we go to sleep together. Lying here on your bed, holding hands.”

  The gleam of anticipation was back in Jilly’s eye.

  “I’m game,” she said.

  Sophie laughed. “You’re always game for anything.”

  “This is true. It’s one of my many gifts. Even as the Broken Girl, I’m always ready and willing to go forth and be dazzled.”

  “It might not work,” Sophie warned her.

  “Oh, pooh. What have we got to lose?”

  “Absolutely nothing.”

  With that she stretched out on the bed beside Jilly. They lay shoulder to shoulder. When Sophie took Jilly’s hand in her own, Jilly gave her fingers a weak squeeze.

  “Will you be able to go to sleep?” Sophie asked. “I mean, just like that?”

  “It’s the one thing I’m good at these days,” Jilly told her.

  Sophie wanted to argue that point, but instead she simply closed her eyes. She listened to Jilly’s breathing even out and timed her own breathing to the same rhythm. A moment later she could feel the room fade away around her.

  2

  Once upon a time …

  I guess I’m not really expecting it to work. After all these weeks of looking for Sophie in the dreamlands, this falling asleep together seems, I don’t know, too obvious a solution. But it does work. I fall asleep in my room in the rehab and when I open my eyes, I’m in the dreamlands, lying on a bed of moss with Sophie, still holding hands. We turn our faces to each other, grinning. I laugh and give her a kiss on the nose, then bounce to my feet and dance around.

  “We did it!” I sing. “We diddly-diddly-did it! Ain’t life grand.”

  I try to do a little soft-shoe, but the moss soaks up the impact of my sneakers and they don’t make a sound. Doesn’t matter. I don’t know how to tap dance anyway. So I do a spin instead, like I did when I was a little girl, before my life turned horrible, arms spread out wide, head thrown back.

  But then I realize that Sophie’s still lying there. And when I look at her, I see she’s crying. I drop down to my knees on the moss beside her.

  “What’s the matter, Soph’? We’re supposed to be in happy mode.”

  “It … it’s just you’re so you again.”

  For a long moment, I don’t understand what she means. She sits up and lifts a hand to my cheek. But then I get it. I’m so used to being my old self, here in the dreamlands, I don’t even think twice about it. But it’s a shock for Sophie, who’s only had the Broken Girl to relate to for all this time.

  “And look at you,” she says. “You look like you did when we first met in university.”

  I smile. “When we were uppity arts students who knew it all.”

  “You were never uppity,” she says.

  “Neither were you.”

  I remember Joe telling me once that when you dream yourself into the spiritworld, you come looking like you think you are—the way you see yourself—not necessarily the way you look back in the World As It Is. But I never really thought about it until now. No wonder Toby was coming on to me before he suddenly went walkabout away on me—he thought I was some spry little twenty-year-old. Which is what I am, I guess, when I’m here.

  A lot of people talk about how they always feel—inside, I mean—like they’re still a teenager, doesn’t matter how old they really are, or how responsible they are in their lives. But my teenage years are closed up in that bad memories box, along with my years as a child, so it makes sense that my self-image is from my university years. That was the first time I felt that I could actually be someone. Be my own person. Act, instead of reacting.

  Sophie looks younger, too, even younger than me. Eighteen, maybe, or nineteen.

  “Have you ever looked in a mirror when you’re over here?” I ask.

  She smiles and nods. Her eyes are still glistening. Forget about the Broken Girl, I want to tell her. When we’re here, she doesn’t matter. But I don’t have to. I think she’s already doing it on her own. I think it’s easier for her to just connect with the me that she knew before the accident, because she’s known that me for so long, the Broken Girl only for a few weeks. Though she never looks away when she visits me.

  “It’s a kick, isn’t it?” she says. “If we could bottle this and bring it back, we’d make a fortune.”

  “I can’t tell what I look like,” I say, running my hands through my hair. I did notice, right away, the first time I came, that when I’m here my hair’s all grown back where it’s only stubble on the Broken Girl. Then I never thought about it again.

  “I need a mirror, I guess,” I say.

  “You look wonderful,” Sophie assures me.

  I hold out my hands, fingers spread. Though I haven’t been near a paintbrush in weeks, I have bits of paint all over my hands.

  “It’s in your hair, too,” Sophie tells me. “Just like always. Must be just—” She grins. “This gift you have.”

  “It’s cheaper than nail polish.”

  “And ever so much more colorful.”

  I laugh with her.

  “We have to get Wendy here, too,” I say.

  Sophie nods. “Wherever here is.”

  We stand up and look around ourselves. I don’t recognize the place at all. It’s a little like the Greatwood, but it feels older, even if the trees aren’t as big. There’s more undergrowth, too. The light’s dimmer, the night side of twilight, and the air smells deep-wood mysterious. It’s so quiet that I hear our breathing and I’m beginning to regret my little impromptu song-and-dance when we first arrived. There are a lot of dangerous places in the dreamlands, as Joe never gets tired of telling me. This place doesn’t feel particularly dangerous as it stands. It’s more like walking on the far side of some mystery, something old and resonant. But there’s still the potential of danger in the air. My shenanigans might have brought us to the attention of who knows what kinds of nasties.

  “Do you have any idea where we are?” I ask Sophie.

  She shakes her head, which isn’t exactly the reaction I was hoping for.

  “It’s no place I remember being before,” she says. “I guess we should have been concentrating on where we wanted to end up before we went to sleep.”

  I can’t explain my sudden uneasiness. I’ve never felt like this in all the times I’ve crossed over since the accident. But something definitely feels a-kilter here.

  “Maybe we’re on the outer reaches of the Greatwood,” I say. “This place has that kind of feel to it—you know, like it’s full of magic. Old.”

  “It reminds me a little of the fairy-tale world where I first met Jeck,” Sophie says.

  That’s not encouraging to hear. Except for Jeck, the fairy-tale world is full of nasty haunts and quicks and goblins, not to mention the mercurial Granny Weather with her pet Baba Yaga shed that walks around on chicken legs. According to Sophie, Granny Weather can be your friend or turn you into a toad. It just depends on the mood she’s in when you meet her.

  “You don’t think that’s where we are, do you?” I say.

  “Could be,” Sophie says. “But don’t be too worried. I mean, think of all the times you’ve told me you wanted to be in a story. Can’t get more storyish than the fairy-tale world. Stories are all its made up of.”

  It takes me a moment to realize she’s teasing.

  But then I think of the professor’s theory about how people need to be storied to get over their fears. Which I suppose includes those boxes of bad memories that I have stored in my head like an attic full
of half-remembered shadows. Maybe being in the fairy-tale world wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Maybe that’s exactly what I need, to be re-storied, and not just from hearing a fairy tale, but from being in one.

  “You’ve gone all serious,” Sophie says. “You know I was joking, right? I really have no idea where we are.”

  I nod. “But I was just thinking how the fairy-tale world might not be such a bad place for me right now.”

  She gives me a quizzical look.

  “You know,” I say. “Because of what Joe was saying about how I need to deal with all my old hurts before I can really get past the new ones.”

  She gets it immediately. “You’re thinking of all that stuff that the professor used to talk about—using fairy tales as templates for moral structure and dealing with problems and whatnot.”

  “Can you think of a better place to put them into practice?”

  “Oh, please,” Sophie says. “He meant it metaphorically. He believed that reading fairy tales lets you connect with the stories in your own life and can help you deal with problems you might be having. The operative word being ‘reading.’ He didn’t mean that you had to literally be in a fairy tale.”

  “Except I’m such a literal girl,” I say.

  “You’re a literal something,” she tells me with a smile.

  We might have gone on along those lines except we both hear it at the same time. What exactly, I’m not sure at first, but it’s enough to make us stop and hold our breath, listening. Then we hear it again. There’s something running through the undergrowth, the noise of its movement rising and falling. I can picture some largish animal, pushing through thickets, then across a soft carpet of moss and pine needles that swallows the sound of its passage, then the noise arising once more as it enters another stretch of undergrowth.

  Faster than I would have thought possible, a small russet shape suddenly appears in front of us. We have a moment to register the human face—long and pointed features, but still human—on a fox’s body, then the creature’s gone again, the sound of its passage diminishing as quickly as it arose from its approach.

  Sophie puts a hand on my arm. I look at her and we both have the same thought: something’s chasing that man-faced fox and right now we’re between the hunter and its prey.

  My first thought is to go up the closest trunk, climb as fast and high as we can, but Sophie’s already pointing through the trees.

  Wolves.

  The lean gray shapes are almost invisible in the dim light, loping toward us, their own passage soundless for all that they’re each at least four times the size of the little man-faced fox they’re chasing. I count four, no five, no six of them. They become aware of us only moments after we spot them. I guess the wind’s blowing from them to us and we’ve been standing here so silently that they simply didn’t notice us until now, when they’re almost upon us.

  They stop in a half circle maybe twenty paces away. We’re too late to try to escape by climbing a tree. I don’t much relish the thought of turning my back to them while I try to scramble up. They’d be pulling us down before we got to the first branches which are far lower than those on the giants in the Greatwood.

  “Maybe they won’t attack us,” Sophie says, her voice a whisper.

  I nod, but I don’t believe it and I doubt she does either. There’s something very feral about these wolves and all I have to do is think about the terrified look on that little man-faced fox’s face to understand that the pack means business.

  One of the wolves breaks away from the others to approach us, stiff-legged, hackles rising. The pack leader, I decide from the way the others give way to her. I think it odd that the leader is a female, but as the others draw nearer, I see that they’re all female. I look in the wolf’s eyes and I’m shocked at the raw rage I see burning there. What’s even more troubling is that I see a human mind behind those eyes. Someone’s wearing that wolfskin and she hates me. Not me in a general sense, a member of the human race or whatever, but me personally, and that makes no bloody sense at all.

  “I … I thought wolves didn’t go after people,” Sophie says from beside me, her voice still pitched low. I hear the quaver in it, recognize the fear because I’m tasting it, too. “Isn’t that what all the environmental groups are always telling us?”

  I have to clear my throat before I can speak, my gaze never leaving the wolf’s.

  “These aren’t normal wolves,” I say.

  “Right. They’re dreamland wolves.”

  “No,” I say. “Look at them. There are people behind their eyes.”

  “So you’re saying they’re animal people—like out of Jack’s stories? What does that mean for us?”

  I almost don’t hear her. I’m mesmerized by the pack leader. There’s something about this wolf that’s both familiar and scary all at the same time.

  “We are so screwed,” Sophie says.

  I glance at her, return my gaze to the wolf’s. “No, we’re not. You always forget the most important thing when you’re having your dreamland adventures.”

  “And that is … ?”

  “We can always just wake up.”

  And as the pack starts to move closer, joining the leader, that’s what we do. Or at least, I get Sophie to.

  3

  Sophie woke with a jerk, disoriented, her heart beating wildly in her chest. It took her a long, frightening moment to realize that the wolves were gone, that they’d left them behind in the dreamlands and they were safe now, here on Jilly’s bed in the rehab.

  “I do always forget that I can just wake up,” she said as she turned to look at her friend

  Her voice trailed off. Jilly was still lying there, eyes closed. Asleep.

  “Jilly!” she called, pitching her voice firm, but low enough to not attract attention from the nurses’ station out in the hall.

  She put her hand on the shoulder closest to her, the one that wasn’t paralyzed, and gave Jilly a little shake.

  “Jilly,” she repeated. “Wake up!”

  But there was no response.

  4

  I mean to go with Sophie, but there’s something about that lead wolf that won’t let me go. I need to understand it.

  “You know me, don’t you?” I tell the gray-furred creature with the human mind behind its eyes. “You know me and you really don’t like me much.”

  The wolf makes no response, but it doesn’t need to. That hatred’s plain in its eyes.

  Great, I think. Someone hates me enough in the World As It is to destroy all my faerie paintings—maybe they were even the same person who ran me down with their car. Maybe the accident was anything but. And now I’ve got someone in the body of a wolf, hating me here.

  I guess I should be more scared than I am. But a kind of fatalistic indifference to danger has come over me. I don’t just want to know who this is, what they’ve got against me. Why the mind behind those eyes seems so familiar. I need to know.

  But then the wolf lunges at me and self-preservation takes over. I wake up and instantly I’m back in the rehab, in the body of the Broken Girl, with Sophie leaning over me, shaking me.

  “Why didn’t you come back with me?” Sophie is asking. “You had me scared to death.”

  I give a small nod, the most I can do here, in the World As It Is with the limitations of the Broken Girl’s body.

  “Jilly?” she says.

  I finally focus on her.

  “What happened back there? What kept you?”

  “It was that wolf,” I say finally. “She was so familiar.”

  Sophie gives me a blank look.

  “She reminded me of my sister,” I explain.

  I realize it’s true the moment the words come out of my mouth although this is the first time I’ve actually stopped to consider that. It’s like some deep part of my subconscious has spit the information out between my lips and my brain’s only catching up with it now.

  “Your sister? But you haven’t seen her …”


  Sophie’s voice trails off and she gets this awkward look. Not a whole lot of people know that whole story. What I did, the guilt I carry. But Sophie does. She probably knows all my secrets—even the ones I’ve never told her. It’s her faerie blood, though she’d never admit to that. At least she wouldn’t have before tonight. Who knows how she’d deal with it now that she’s decided not to hide from the truth anymore.

  “I know,” I say. “It doesn’t make any sense. What would she be doing in the dreamlands, running around like a wolf?”

  “What even got you thinking about her?” Sophie asks.

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking about her, though obviously some part of me was. I guess some part of me’s always thinking about her.”

  “You were just a kid yourself,” Sophie says. “There’s nothing you could have done.”

  “Maybe.”

  It’s true. I was just a kid. And then there was all that time I lived on the streets—a whole lifetime compressed into a few short years. It wasn’t until I came out of the far side of all that pain and misery that I could even start to think about what I’d left behind in an old farmhouse in Tyson.

  “But it would make sense,” I say. “For her to still hate me after all these years.”

  Sophie just looks at me. I can see she’s still struggling with the very idea of someone hating me. It’s good to have such loyal friends. But she has no idea how bad it was in that house of my childhood, how leaving my sister behind was the most awful thing I could ever have done.

  “You know,” I add. “She looked just like me when I was her age.”

  “You mean … ?”

  I nod. “My sister.”

  I can see it when understanding dawns for Sophie. This doesn’t necessarily explain the wolf part, out there in the dreamlands, but it makes a good argument for what’s been happening closer to home, here in the World As It Is. The hit-and-run. All those faerie paintings destroyed. Even the doppelgänger.

  “We have to tell Lou,” Sophie says, but I’m already shaking my head.

  “I’ve been responsible for enough pain in her life,” I say. “I won’t add any more.”