The Onion Girl

by Charles de Lint

  “I think her name’s Pinky Miller,” I say.

  “She looks—”

  “Like white trash.”

  That gets me another puzzled look.

  “Cheap,” I say. “Like she’s just waiting for you to ask ‘How much?’ before you get down to business.”

  I’m surprised at the bitterness in my voice. I don’t even know the woman. I’m happy when Toby doesn’t focus on her.

  “This explains why you seem to be like an Eadar,” he says instead.

  Now it’s my turn for the puzzled look.

  He nods his head over the rise. “Your dreaming self and otherworld self shouldn’t be sharing the same world. It makes for a conundrum that will only create deeper and more profound discordances if left unchecked. The geas … the compulsion you felt, and must be still feeling—”

  “Though not as intensely.”

  “Is your other self calling your dreaming self back into it. You need to be one entity, not two.”

  “And how does that work?”

  “Physical contact should be enough to allow the two of you to merge.”

  “And then I’ll be what?”

  “As you are in the other world, except here.”

  I crawl back up the slope and stare in sick fascination at the Broken Girl. My sister’s yelling something at her limp form but I can’t hear what she’s saying. Pinky’s sitting on a stone outcrop and seems to be cleaning her nails.

  “Is there no other way?” I ask Toby.

  “If there is, there’s no time to lose,” he says.

  I turn to see him get up and do his fade into the underbrush. I watch him vanish through the trees, not quite believing he’s deserted me once more. I can’t even muster any anger toward him this time. It’s hard to blame him. Now that he’s real, the last thing he’s going to want is to saddle himself with a cripple who can’t even feed herself.

  I start to feel nauseous. To be the Broken Girl here … I’d soon find myself yearning for that helplessness I know in the World As It Is. There, at least, I have support—the rehab staff, my friends. Here I’ve got nothing. If I end up back in that body, all I’d be able to do is maybe crawl around on the forest floor for a while until I die from exposure or an attack by some predator. And even if I could get to someplace like Mabon, I’d still only be the Broken Girl with no escape at all—no place to go in dreams and seek relief because I’d already be in the dreaming world.

  But at least now I understand why my sister’s brought the Broken Girl here. She’s probably going to abandon me the way I abandoned her. I guess I shouldn’t complain. It’s a fitting revenge and it’s not like I don’t deserve it.

  I just wish Toby hadn’t left me. This is a hard thing to face alone.

  Like Raylene had to, my guilt says.

  There’s nothing I can say in reply to that.

  Joe

  MANIDÒ-AKÌ

  Bo’s not at the camp when we get back, but the fire’s still smoldering so we know he hasn’t gone far. It’s late afternoon here in Cody’s heart home, going on evening, and we find Bo at the edge of the mesa, dangling his feet over a drop of a couple of thousand feet, staring out across the red rock canyons. As the sun continues to lower, the shadows get more and more dramatic. It’s the kind of view that can swallow you whole, leaves you feeling bigger inside than when you first stopped to have yourself a look.

  “We had company while you were gone,” Bo says without turning around.

  “Anybody we know?” I ask.

  Bo finally looks away from the view and draws one knee up against his chest, holds it there with his arms, fingers linked.

  “Remember in the long ago,” he says, “when they used to tell a story about Nokomis having a sister?”

  I shake my head. “Before my time.”

  “I remember,” Whiskey Jack says. “Nobody ever saw her and she didn’t have a name.”

  Bo nods. “But people had names for her. They’d call her Fate. Or Destiny.”

  “Or Grace,” Jack adds.

  “I thought Grace was a state of being,” I say. “Or maybe even a place. Though I guess I’ve heard people talk about it as a light.”

  “In the shape of a woman,” Bo says.

  Jack sits down beside him, lets his own legs dangle. “Cody always said she was the one who gave birth to the humans.”

  “After he impregnated her,” Bo says.

  “But he didn’t force himself on her.”

  Bo nods. “Yeah, when it comes to women, Cody never has to force anything. Funny, thinking of him settled down with a magpie.”

  “Funny thinking of him as settled down, period,” Jack says.

  I squat on my haunches between the two of them and let my gaze lose itself in the red rock canyons, tracing the lengths of the hoodoos, starting at the top of one, dropping way down to the canyon floor where the shadows lie thickest, then going up the one beside it, back to where the sun’s still waking highlights in the red stone.

  “Everything changes eventually,” I say. “That’s about the only constant we get. It just takes some of us longer.”

  Bo gives me a look and smiles. “Listen to the philosopher king,” he says to Jack.

  “So this Grace you’re talking about,” I say. “Is that who came visiting?”

  “I don’t know. She looked like Nokomis, but she didn’t have her scent. Didn’t sound like her, either. You know, the way the old woman thinks. I just saw her in the Greatwood not too long ago, so she’s kind of fresh on my mind.”

  “I’m guessing there’s a point to all of this,” Jack says.

  “What did our visitor have to say?” I ask.

  Bo sighs, doesn’t look at us.

  “That we should let things be,” he says.

  Jack and I exchange glances.

  “You mean she condones these killings?” Jack says.

  “She didn’t come right out and say that. What she said was that there’s too much magic in this world, not enough in the other. These things have to balance out.”

  “But the killings …”

  “I asked her about that,” Bo says, “and she gives me this look—it’s like, how dumb are you?—and then wants to know when it was I forgot that dying doesn’t end anything; it just changes where you are.”

  We all fall silent for a long moment.

  “I’ve got to think on this,” Jack says.

  I know just what he means. He offers us smokes and we all light up, studying the canyon once more. I don’t know where they go in their heads, but I’ve got two memories floating in mine. One’s from long ago, that night my uncle and I came upon the unicorn, singing to the moon. The other’s a lot closer in time. It’s of me and Jack disturbing that pack of dreaming wolves and chasing them off of their kill. I don’t know as the World As It Is deserves magic if it’s got to be paid for in the blood of innocents.

  And if that same pack is hunting Jilly, this whole thing is too personal for me to ignore.

  I take a last drag on my cigarette and put it out. Pocketing the butt, I stand up. Bo and Jack turn to look at me.

  “I’m going home,” I tell them.

  “Are you letting it go?” Jack asks.

  “Yes, no—hell, I don’t know. I don’t think I can, but I need to talk to Cassie about it.” I hesitate a moment, then add, “I tell you this, though. It’s getting under my skin. These wolves. The killings. Some old spirit coming along, telling us what we should and shouldn’t do, what’s wrong and what’s right.”

  Jack nods. “Yeah, I’m not too comfortable myself with the idea of the greater good having more weight than an individual’s right, especially when it comes to killing. You start thinking along those lines and where do you stop? Unicorns today. Maybe canids or corn girls tomorrow.”

  I nod. “You see something wrong, you fix it today.”

  “A lot of those old spirits don’t see the human factor.”

  “We’re not human,” Bo reminds us.

  J
ack turns to him. “You know what I mean. They don’t have anything invested in living in the here and now. They just kind of float on through life with their sights fixed on all the big issues. I’m not saying they’re wrong, or even purposefully cruel. They’re just not considering all the little pieces that make up the puzzle.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “If there’s a problem with the balance of magic between the worlds, there’s got to be other ways of dealing with it. That spirit’s thinking it’s natural selection, I guess, but it’s too much like the start of a forest fire for me. Sure, you know that in the long run the forest’ll come back bigger and stronger than before, but what about all the lives that are lost while it burns? We’re supposed to look the other way and let them die?”

  “When you put it like that …” Bo says.

  “I still need to talk to Cassie,” I tell them. “She’s plugged into some whole other kinds of mystery and she’s got an eye for this kind of thing.”

  Jack nods. “The question isn’t, are we going to do anything, but what’s the best thing we can do?”

  “That pretty much sums it up for me,” I say.

  “We’ll be waiting for you here,” Bo says.

  Jack nods. “And you tell that good-looking woman of yours hello from me.”

  That earns a laugh.

  “Like hell I will,” I tell him. “Last thing I want is you sniffing around my back door.”

  Jack smiles and turns to Bo. “Kind of sad, isn’t it? Man has such little faith in his woman. Course, he knows that when she sees a handsome man like me, all memory of him’s just got to go sliding right out of her mind.”

  I leave to the sound of their laughter, chuckling myself. We all know Cassie’s not one to be swayed by anything but her own mind. It’s one of the reasons I love the woman as much as I do.

  2

  NEWFORD, MAY

  Arriving after visiting hours was getting to be a habit, Wendy thought as she walked from the bus stop to the rehab building at about nine-thirty that evening. She’d planned to come much earlier, except they’d had a disaster at work. Marley Butler’s computer, which held all the final files for the next issue of In the City, had crashed while she was working on some designs for that same issue. While their resident computer tech worked on getting the machine running properly again, everyone in the office had been going through their own computers and the various backup discs scattered through the office, trying to reconstruct the next issue as best they could in case Ralph couldn’t get Marley’s machine up and running again.

  In the end Ralph had worked his usual miracle, but a number of files remained corrupted. By the time they’d gone through everything, replacing the corrupted files with clean ones, it was almost seven-thirty. Since none of them had taken a break since the disaster first occurred, they went out for dinner as a group and it was just a little past nine before Wendy was able to get away and catch a bus up to the rehab.

  In a way, Wendy hadn’t minded the delay the problems at work had created. The truth was, for all of Cassie’s urging, she wasn’t entirely sure it was really the best idea to talk to Jilly right now. How was she supposed to convey how she was feeling so left out without the very fact of her bringing it up creating even more problems between the three of them? It wasn’t as though she could ask—or even wanted—them to stop their wonderful dreamland adventures. How could she make Jilly feel guilty for the freedom those visits provided for her?

  Wendy just didn’t want to be left behind.

  Sighing, she made her way through the parking lot. She got to the front door, then paused. A little nagging thought made her turn around and look behind her. There was something in the parking lot—something important—that she just now realized she’d seen but it hadn’t really registered …

  She scanned the pavement, gaze roving from the pools of shadow to the light cast by the parking lot’s lighting until her gaze fell on the long pink Cadillac parked a few spots down from one of those oversized all-terrain SUVs that the yuppies seem to need just to drive from one part of town to the other. She stared at the Caddy for a long moment. How could she have missed it?

  That was the car she’d seen in Cassie’s cards, the one Sophie had seen near Jilly’s apartment. The one that belonged to Jilly’s little sister, which meant Raylene and her friends were—

  “Oh, my god!” she cried. “Jilly!”

  She turned and wrenched open the door of the rehab building. Halfway down the long hall, right by Jilly’s door, she saw figures. A tall, blonde woman carrying a limp, bandaged figure in pajamas. Another, smaller woman with curly dark hair ushered the pair of them through a doorway directly opposite Jilly’s room.

  “Hey!” she called after them.

  They didn’t even turn, just vanished into the doorway. Wendy started to run down the hall, but one of the nurses came from behind the counter at the nurses’ station and caught her arm.

  “Visiting hours are long over,” she said firmly. “And we certainly don’t appreciate your shouting—”

  Wendy tugged free and ran down the hall. Behind her she heard the nurse ask someone to call for security, then set off in pursuit. Wendy skidded to a halt in the doorway to Jilly’s room to find the bed empty. Heartbeat drumming, she turned to look back across the hall where she’d seen the figures disappear. There was no doorway there, only a blank wall. The doorways, when she looked, were staggered down the hall, none of them facing each other.

  But she was sure she’d seen them go from this room into another through a doorway that was directly across from Jilly’s door.

  “I’ve called security,” the nurse said as she caught up with Wendy and grabbed her arm again. “Now will you please—”

  “You idiot woman,” Wendy said.

  “Perhaps you think—”

  “You called security? Good. Maybe they can tell us who kidnapped my friend. Though if they’re as good at figuring things out as they are at keeping watch, what’s the hope in that?”

  “What?”

  Wendy pointed to Jilly’s empty bed. “My friend’s gone.”

  The nurse’s hand fell from Wendy’s arm. “But she can’t even feed herself, little say walk.”

  “Well, duh. I saw two women carrying her. That’s why I was yelling. I thought they went through a doorway across the hall, but there isn’t one there.”

  “They must be in one of the other rooms,” the nurse said.

  She went to the nearest doorway to look in while Wendy went to the one on the other side. All she saw were two sleeping patients. She bent down to look under their beds. Nothing. Opened the bathroom door. Empty.

  “You just saw this happening?” the nurse asked her when they met again in the hall.

  Wendy nodded.

  The other nurse and security guard came trotting down the hall. The guard started for Wendy but the nurse she was with waved him off.

  “Someone’s taken one of our patients,” she said.

  As they discussed what to do next, Wendy ran back to the nurses’ station and picked up the phone. From the front pocket of her jeans she took out the business card that Lou had given each of them a few weeks ago. She had a bad moment trying to dial out—it took an eight rather than a nine to get an outside line—but soon she had the phone ringing on the other end of the line. She went out as far into the hall as the cord would allow and looked out through the glass doors. The pink Caddy was still in the parking lot.

  “That’s their car,” she told the security guard when he and the nurses joined her at the station. “The pink Cadillac. Hello, Lou?” she said into the phone receiver as her connection was made. “You’d better get down here. Someone’s kidnapped Jilly from the rehab center.”

  3

  It’s quiet when I step into the apartment. I can smell the leftover traces of a cedar smudgestick and the fresh sweetgrass that’s lying in a basket on the coffee table, waiting to be braided. The only light is cast by candles. Cassie’s funny. When we were living in squa
ts, she was always wishing we had electric lighting. Now that we’ve got it, she just keeps on using the candles.

  I see Cassie lying on the sofa and I think she’s asleep, though that wouldn’t be like her with all those candles burning. Then I realize her eyes are open and she’s smiling up at me. She stretches like a cat and reaches up to me with both arms. I stand there for a moment, appreciating the sight, then I slide down on the sofa with her and for a time there I don’t have any worries at all. All I’ve got is my woman on my mind.

  “Bo said she was known as the Grace?” Cassie says later.

  We’re sitting in the kitchen, having a little whiskey that we wash down with sips of coffee.

  “Actually it was Jack called her that,” I say. “Bo came up with Fate and Destiny.”

  “Do you think such abstractions can actually have walking, talking personas?”

  I shrug. “Anybody can call themselves or be called anything. Doesn’t mean it’s true.”

  “But it could be.”

  “With spirits, anything could be. You know that the same as me. Everything about manidò-akì kind of circles around a central core of ‘why not?’”

  Cassie nods. “I’ve just never met the personification of Love, say. Or Dreams. Like the Greek and Roman gods.”

  “I’m not saying they exist or they don’t,” I tell her, “because I don’t know. But everybody’s got something they’re good at and some of them’ll take a name from that.”

  She smiles. “Like you with your bones.”

  “At least you didn’t say boner, shugah-baby.”

  That earns me another smile, but she also reaches across the table and cuffs me lightly on the top of the head with her open hand.

  “Don’t be rude,” she says, like she wasn’t saying anything stronger herself an hour or so ago, back there on the sofa.

  “Getting back to the matter at hand,” she adds, “what if this woman was right? What happens if you go ahead and deal with these dream wolves? Will she come after you?”

  “Depends on how strongly she feels about it, I guess. And how strong she is.” I pause for a heartbeat, then add, “You think I should let it go?”