The Onion Girl

by Charles de Lint

  I want to look around but I’m scared of turning my back on Mr. Congeniality here.

  The Tattersnake looks past me with a sour expression—all his fun spoiled, I guess. He downs the rest of that weird blue drink and stands up, tall and foreboding.

  “We’re not finished, you and I,” he says as he brushes by me.

  I turn now to watch him go, follow to the door after he’s stepped out into the courtyard. He turns to the left and walks toward the archway opposite the one I came in by. When he steps under its stone span, there’s a flicker of amber light and he’s gone, just like that. I stare for a long moment. I’d been wondering what an inn was doing up here on top of a hill in the middle of nowhere and not a road in sight, but I guess if you can just teleport through its door, it could be on the moon and still have a regular clientele.

  When I’m sure the Tattersnake’s not coming back, I turn back inside to find my benefactor standing over the table the Tattersnake vacated, wiping the blue circles from the smooth wood with a cloth. He looks up at my return.

  “Sorry about that,” he says. “Ruefayel’s not the best company when he’s in a mood.”

  I guess this is the innkeeper. He looks sort of like a jovial biker or construction worker—a large, almost square man in a white muscle shirt that shows off his big arms and the tattoos that run up and down them. They’re all of animals—lizard, wolf, lynx, eagle, dragon. He has long brown hair, tied back in a ponytail, and a small goatee. But unlike the Tattersnake—or I guess Ruefayel, as this guy knows him—he exudes friendliness.

  “He told me his name was the Tattersnake,” I say.

  “It’s more a description—like I’m an innkeeper. Name’s William, by the way. William Kemper.”

  I remember then that Toby had said pretty much the same thing about the Tattersnake. It’s not a name, it’s a title.

  I introduce myself to William and follow him to the bar where he washes out Ruefayel’s glass in a stainless-steel sink and then starts to dry it. I’m surprised by the modern sink and running water, but I’ve got bigger questions on my mind.

  “So what’s a Tattersnake?” I ask.

  William grins and gives me a shrug. “Who knows? He first came in a while back and just introduced himself as Ruefayel Grenn, the Tattersnake. Seemed a little put out that no one recognized him.”

  “Is … is he dangerous?”

  “Everybody’s dangerous, if you push them hard enough. But—” He nods. “Yeah, Ruefayel’s pretty much dangerous all the time. Got a chip on his shoulder the size of a log and he’s been in a fight or two. What was he bothering you about?”

  “I don’t really know. He seems to think he knows me and he really doesn’t like what he knows.”

  “You a writer?”

  I shake my head.

  “Then I haven’t a clue. Would you like something to drink?”

  I look at all those bottles with their oddly colored contents.

  “I wouldn’t know what to order,” I tell him.

  “What do you usually have—at home, I mean.”

  “Beer. Coffee.”

  “I’ve got both.”

  “Then coffee, I think.”

  “Cream and sugar?”

  When I tell him just black, he takes down one of those bottles and pours steaming coffee from it into a fat china mug and puts it on the bar in front of me. He grins at the look on my face.

  “Come on,” he says. “This is the dreaming place. Things work differently here.”

  I smile. “I guess I haven’t been around it enough. So far I’ve only explored some parts of Mabon and the Greatwood.”

  He nods. “And then you got depressed and ended up here.”

  “Is that your only clientele—depressed people?”

  “No, we get all kinds. You should see it in here on a full moon. But a name like the Inn of the Star-Crossed tends to attract its fair share of unhappy and unlucky people. A lot of first timers come because of the name.”

  “I’m not really depressed,” I tell him. “At least not when I’m over here. Back in the World As It Is, I’m not so happy.”

  He just gives me another nod, a barman’s universal response. I can keep talking, or I can stare into my coffee. Either way, it’ll be fine by him. I have a sip of my coffee.

  “It’s delicious,” I tell him, then add, “Why did you ask if I was a writer?”

  “Because of Ruefayel. He doesn’t like them.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well …”

  William looks past me for a moment, not really focusing on anything.

  “Guys like him I call peripherals,” he says, bringing his gaze back to my face. He lifts a hand before the question in my eyes can reach my lips. “You know. They’re not native to the dreaming lands, and they don’t come through the gates of sleep like you did. Somebody made them up, so they have a limited shelf life, as it were, existing only so long as there’s people that believe in them.”

  “The Eadar,” I say, remembering the conversation I had with Toby. “The people that come from the middleworld.”

  He gives me a curious look. “Yeah. Where’d you hear about them?”

  I tell him about Toby.

  “I know him—calls himself the Boyce, right? I think the two of them are from the same story. I’ve seen a few others from it, but they’re pretty insubstantial these days.”

  “So it’s true? They really fade away if they’re not believed in?”

  “Oh, yeah. Talk about your raw deals.”

  “I still don’t understand why Ruefayel was so mad at me.”

  “That’s his way of being remembered,” William says. “He pisses people off and they don’t forget him.”

  I shake my head. There seemed to be more to it than that, but I don’t know where to go with the idea.

  “Well, I could be wrong,” William says.

  “I wasn’t disagreeing,” I tell him. “It just seemed more personal than that.”

  “I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Trust me, I’ve seen him do the nasty more times than I care to remember. I keep threatening to bar him, but …” He shrugs. “I guess I feel sorry for him.”

  “You don’t seem very busy,” I say to change the subject.

  “Well, most of my business is with the peripherals and we had us some of the old cousins in here this morning, kind of scared them away. You’ve heard about the effect pure bloods have on them?”

  I nod. “Do you think it’s true?”

  “Doesn’t really matter. If the peripherals believe it, they’re going to take off anyway. But yeah, it’s probably true.”

  “I wonder if the cousins know?”

  “Hard to say,” William says. “But I kind of doubt it. They keep to themselves pretty much anyway, and since the peripherals take off whenever one of them’s around, who’s there to tell them?”

  You could, I think. But I’m not going to annoy anybody else today if I can help it. I’ll just ask Joe about it the next time I see him.

  “Do you get any shapechangers in here?” I ask.

  “You mean besides the cousins?”

  “I guess.”

  I hadn’t even considered that the wolf hating me so much could be one of the People.

  “Not really,” William says. “Dreamers like yourself usually get themselves a shape when they cross over and stick with it. And the peripherals are pretty much the same—except if whoever made them up added in the ability to shift shape, I suppose. But unless they shifted in front of you, how would you know?”

  “So you don’t get wolf people in here?”

  He smiles. “Oh, we get lots of canids—pure bloods, I mean.”

  “Besides them.”

  “Anyone in particular you’re looking for?”

  Just for one that hates me, I think, but I shake my head.

  “No, I’m just curious, is all.”

  He leans his elbows on the bar, face close to mine.

  “Maybe it’s none of
my business,” he says, “but these days, that’s something you shouldn’t be too curious about. There’s a bunch of dreamers crossing over as wolves and they’re hunting unicorns and pure bloods.”

  I can feel my eyes go wide, the flush on my skin.

  “Yeah,” William goes on. “It’s kind of got everybody on edge, as you can well imagine. I hear some of the cousins are trying to track them down and if they think you’re involved, you could be looking at a world of trouble.”

  “I … I’m not one of them,” I say. “But I think I saw them. They attacked me and a friend earlier tonight.”

  “But you woke up and got away.”

  I nod.

  “Natives can’t do that. They’ve got no place to wake up to and this pack’s been cutting them down. Nobody knows how long it’s been going on, but it must have been awhile. The canids are particularly pissed, seeing how these dreamers are wearing one of their shapes.”

  I’m starting to feel sick to my stomach. What if Sophie’s right? What if it is my sister leading that pack?

  “I … I better go,” I say. “How much do I owe you?”

  “It’s on the house,” William says. His gaze locks on to mine. “You’ve got quite a glow, sitting there inside you.”

  I sigh. “Apparently. At least nobody seems to get tired of telling me that.”

  He holds my gaze a moment longer, then straightens up.

  “Watch your back,” he says. “That kind of shine’s like a beacon.”

  “I wish it was something a little more useful than this ‘Hello, here I am’ kind of an advertisement.”

  “It’s useful,” William assures me. “But a thing like that, it can take its time letting you know the how and why of its usefulness.”

  Which is ever so helpful, I think.

  I stand up from my stool. “Thanks for the coffee and the conversation,” I tell him.

  “You be careful.”

  I give him a small smile. “And for all the advice.”

  “Hey, I’m only trying to—”

  I put a hand on his where it’s resting on the bar.

  “I wasn’t being sarcastic,” I tell him. “I am grateful. Honestly.”

  I give his hand a squeeze and leave the common room. I pause in the courtyard, looking around. I still get the feeling that there are people watching me. Maybe it’s some of the Eadar, insubstantial and fading. I walk quickly across the cobblestones and through the archway I came in.

  The view sucks me in and for a long time all I can do is stand there and look out on the enormous sweep of the Greatwood. When I think of how big the individual trees are, the vast forest lying out there below me becomes almost impossible to take in. I look for a moment longer, then I let myself wake up again.

  3

  Sophie hadn’t created the dreamlands. She knew that. By all accounts, that otherworld had existed forever, perhaps longer, and was known by as many names as there were beings to name it.

  But Mabon, that sprawling dream city, was hers.

  Not now, perhaps. Not any longer, or at least not entirely. But it had begun with her.

  It wasn’t like a painting. She hadn’t stretched the canvas, sketched the design upon it, laid in the background with large blocks of color and slowly worked up the details. She hadn’t planned it at all.

  She’d been a little girl, a latchkey kid, taking refuge after school in the home that she shared with her father, for her mother had left them a long time ago. Sophie could barely remember her. They’d been poor in those days and there was no money for art supplies and books. So she amused herself while she waited for her father to come home by drawing on old shopping bags and reading the stack of books she took out from the library, once a week. She kept the house, made their dinner, did her homework, but there was still plenty of time to read and draw. Too much perhaps. By Tuesday she’d usually already gone through the five books that she took out from the library on Saturday mornings. And so she began to daydream.

  It began with Mr. Truepenny and his curious shop in which you could find all the books that authors hadn’t gotten around to writing, with a gallery in the back that held the same never-to-be-seen treasures of the great artists.

  There, sitting in one of the leather club chairs that dotted the store, she read books like North Country Stoic by Emily Brontë. Lord Dunsany’s The Peregrine’s Broken Waltz. The fifth canto of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. The Knight in the Shadow by Alan Garner.

  She was able to take in private viewings of sketches Watteau and Dali would have made had they lived to do them. Paintings by Waterhouse and Collier, etchings by Sargent, pastels by Degas—none of which had ever been seen in the World As It Is. But she could see them and more in the little gallery in the back of the bookshop.

  She daydreamed the shop and its contents with such clarity that her time spent imagining them was as real to her as the world around her when she was awake. And slowly a city built up around that shop. First it was only the street outside as seen from inside, then the buildings on either side of Mr, Truepenny’s establishment and across the street, finally the city blocks that started up on either end of the street. The city grew and spread out, no longer under her control, its existence fueled now by other dreamers who came and stayed and added their own ideas and considerations. It became inhabited by these dreamers and by the Eadar drawn out of the middleworld, whose existence here depended on the belief of those with whom they interacted.

  But Sophie was aware of none of that. She grew up, went to university, became an artist herself, and forgot all about the city, the curious little shop, even Mr. Truepenny himself until about eight years ago, when a chance meeting with another of the city’s dreamers brought it all back to her. Without her influence—her “faerie blood,” as Jilly would have it, which was apparently the glue that held the whole magical construct together—the city was coming apart at the seams, tattered and worn, its inhabitants fading as they rattled about empty buildings and increasingly deserted streets.

  Her return brought the city back to life.

  The downside was that was about the time that Jinx came back into her life, as well. As soon as she started what Jilly called her “true dreaming,” electrical and mechanical items began their jittering arbitrary dance of going awry around her on a regular basis, just as they had when she was a kid. It was something she’d managed to forget until Jinx’s return.

  But at least Jinx stayed behind in the World As It Is when she crossed over into the dreamlands. However it was connected to her dreaming or her faerie blood, once she stepped between the worlds any problems that came up were ones that she had usually generated on her own. It was nice to be able to wear a watch that worked, to play with an art program on a computer and not have the machine crash, to stick in a videotape and see the movie that was supposed to be there instead of something she wasn’t even close to being interested in watching.

  That was the part of it that drove Jilly particularly crazy: how Sophie could be in a magical dreamworld, where surely anything was possible, but spent her time in a city not so different from Newford, doing the same things she’d do if she were at home.

  “Well,” Sophie would respond to Jilly’s suggestion that she should be doing more with her gift than simply spending the evening doing nothing with her boyfriend Jeck. “I guess I just don’t have much of an imagination.”

  “But you’re magic—simply brimful of faerie blood.”

  “As if.”

  “You could be living a fairy-tale life.”

  “Having Jeck for my boyfriend and not being under attack by any errant toaster or telephone I happen to come across is a fairy-tale life so far as I’m concerned.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I suppose I do,” Sophie would say. “But I wouldn’t know how to change.”

  Jilly’s usual response at that point would be a shake of her head, accompanied by a theatrical sigh, and then she’d satisfy her curiosity by poring over
the sketches and drawings Sophie did from memory of the interesting places and people she’d seen in Mabon.

  She was particularly fascinated with Jeck, as much because of his crow blood as the fact that when Sophie did have adventures in the dreamlands, it was usually in his company. To this day neither of them could decide if he was a native to the dreamlands, a dreamer such as Sophie herself, or one of the Eadar, drawn up out of the middleworld by someone’s story. Sophie herself had never asked, and Jeck didn’t volunteer, and just because Sophie had found a story in Mr. Truepenny’s shop that seemed to coincide with some of the incidents in Jeck’s family history—a lovely little chapbook called “The Seven Crow Brothers” by Hans Christian Andersen, illustrated by Ernest Shepard, unavailable in the World As It Is, of course—it didn’t mean he was an Eadar.

  But whatever his origin, he knew far more about the dreamlands than Sophie did herself. He had a confident knowledge, that of a native, or someone who had spent much of his life here. The sort of knowledge that was simply part of one’s makeup and background, as opposed to the haphazard information that Sophie had acquired over the years.

  So when she met up with him in their apartment that evening, after first filling him in on all the odd occurrences that had been scattered through what felt like a very long day since she’d seen him the night before, she asked his advice on how to track down Joe. Because if anyone here would know, it would be him.

  “I don’t know any canids,” he said, “but they’d be the ones to ask.”

  “These are like the original animal people, right?” Sophie asked. She never paid nearly as much attention to this sort of thing as Jilly could and did. “The ones that can be wolves or dogs?”

  Jeck nodded. “Or foxes or coyotes. They say the clans of the People can find those of their own clan much more quickly than others might.”

  Joe had canid blood, Sophie knew. He also had crow blood, but it wasn’t the same as the crow blood that ran through her boyfriend’s veins. Jeck’s shapeshifting could only take place in the fairy-tale world where she’d first met him; it wasn’t bred into his blood and bones like it was for the People.