The Onion Girl

by Charles de Lint

  “What? With Jilly caught up in the middle of it? Not a chance. I was just measuring the odds.”

  “I never bet when it comes to the old spirits,” I tell her. “There’s no percentage in it because you can’t tell what they’re going to do.”

  I’m about to go on about how I don’t see Nokomis having a sister, anyway. You hear Raven or Cody tell it, from when everything came to be, she was always the world underfoot—the land, the water, and the moon reflected in it. If she had a sibling, it’d be Micomis, who was the sky and the sun and fathered the thunders, though most of the stories I’ve heard say they used to be related only through an old marriage and it’s Micomis who’s got the siblings—his brother thunders.

  So I can’t say who came by the camp to see Bo—not who she was, or how old and powerful.

  But the phone rings, making Cassie jump and all that goes unsaid. Cassie gets up and lifts the receiver on the second ring. I watch her face, knowing it’s bad news from her expression as she listens, just wondering how bad.

  “We’ll be right there,” Cassie says.

  She cradles the phone and looks at me.

  “That was Wendy,” she says. “Calling from the rehab. Jilly’s been taken away by her sister and a blonde-haired woman.”

  I’m getting really tired of all these sisters popping up, I think.

  “She call Lou?” I ask.

  Cassie nods. “Before she called us. He’s on his way.”

  “So are we,” I tell her.

  I stand up from the table and go back into the living room to put my shirt and boots on. Cassie goes into the bedroom and comes back to toss me a clean T-shirt, then heads back in to get dressed herself. There are times it can take her an hour to get ready, and all we’re doing is going to the bookstore. Tonight I’ve barely finished lacing up my boots and she’s dressed and waiting for me.

  No bright colors for her tonight. Plain blue jeans, a dark green jersey, a buckskin jacket, brown walking boots.

  “I didn’t know you even owned stuff that drab,” I tell her, trying to lighten the tension we’re both feeling.

  But she’s not like the cousins in this and doesn’t crack a smile.

  “I’m worried about Jilly,” she says.

  That’s not an explanation for what she’s wearing; it’s to tell me to stop screwing around and let’s get rolling.

  So I take her hand and we step into Meadhon, the middleworld, to find a quick path to take us over to the rehab center. Cassie closes her eyes to slits, tightens her grip on my hand. She doesn’t like this place, the way you can see both manidò-akì and the World As It Is at the same time. “Give me one or the other,” she always says. “Just not the between.” But tonight we need the speed it can give us. We’re halfway across town, but it takes us only a couple of minutes of quick walking to reach the rehab, step out of the middleworld and up to the front door.

  There’s already a cop on the door.

  “Lieutenant Fucceri called us in,” I tell him when he steps up to block our entry.

  It’s not true, but it doesn’t matter. It gets us into the building and if this is going down the way I think it is, Lou’s going to need our help.

  I look back and see the cop scratching his head, still trying to figure out how we came out of nowhere and into his view so fast.

  4

  Some more guards from the security company’s head office showed up while Wendy and the head nurse on duty stood by the nurses’ station, waiting for the police to arrive. The security people left a man guarding the pink Cadillac and others at the exits, while the remaining men made a sweep of the building and the grounds outside. They came up with nothing.

  That’s because they went into the otherworld, Wendy thought, having already figured it out while she was waiting for help to arrive. There was no other explanation. But try telling that to Lou.

  “You say this is where they went—right into the wall?” he asked when she showed him the stretch of hallway where she’d seen Raylene and Pinky disappear with Jilly.

  “I know how it sounds,” Wendy said. “And—okay, I was a-ways down the hall at the time. I admit that. But I saw them come out of Jilly’s room and walk directly across the hall. And then they disappeared. I thought they’d gone through a doorway. Once we saw there wasn’t one right there, we thought they had to have gone into one of the two rooms on either side of this stretch of hall, but we checked them both and—”

  “We’ve checked all the rooms,” the head nurse broke in, “as well as the basement, all storage areas, the kitchen and exercise area, the lounges, the grounds.”

  Lou nodded. “And since they were on foot, how far could they have gotten?” He laid a hand against the wall and pressed. “But there’s no way they walked through this wall.”

  “That depends,” a new voice said.

  Wendy turned to see that Joe Crazy Dog and Cassie had joined them. Lou frowned—probably wondering how they’d gotten through the cordon he’d had his officers set up around the building. “Nobody in or out without my say-so,” he’d told his officers.

  Cassie came over to where Wendy was standing and gave her a hug.

  “You’re okay?” she asked.

  Wendy nodded.

  “I guess this is your kind of thing,” Lou said to Joe in a tone of voice that added an unspoken “And I don’t like it one bit.”

  Joe nodded. “Seems like it.”

  Everyone knew how Lou felt about anything that didn’t fit into the way the world was supposed to work. He’d been in Newford long enough to have run into any number of inexplicable phenomena, but he still managed to put each one in its own little box marked “anomaly” and then carry on with his unswerving belief in a rational world. People like Joe, or Christy and Professor Dapple, made him uncomfortable because they were willing to accept what he couldn’t, and that played against his own hard-held view of the world.

  He and Joe usually avoided each other when they were both at some gathering put together by Jilly. It was easier that way. But tonight they had no choice and Wendy saw that Joe, at least, was obviously doing his best impression of someone who had only helpful efficiency to offer. Considering how intense he could be, not to mention how wild, Wendy could never figure out how he managed to pull this sort of thing off. But once again, it seemed to work. Lou studied him for a long moment before giving him a grudging nod.

  “What did you mean when you said it depends?” he asked Joe.

  “I meant it depends on how you view the world and what you expect to see when you look at it.”

  Lou sighed. “Now’s not the time for one of the prof’s lectures, especially not a secondhand one.”

  “You see a wall,” Joe said, going on as though Lou hadn’t spoken. “But I see a door.”

  With that he stepped up to the wall, then started walking through it as though it wasn’t there. Wendy heard the nurse gasp. Lou swore. Her own reaction was to grab Cassie’s hand just before she disappeared behind Joe. She could feel Cassie try to jerk her hand free as Wendy’s fingers closed around hers, but Wendy tightened her grip before the other woman could pull free. The wall came up to her face and she flinched, but then she went through it just as Joe and Cassie had and she was standing hand-in-hand with Cassie in a forest she didn’t know where.

  Cassie turned to her. “Oh, Wendy,” she said.

  For a moment Wendy found it hard to concentrate on much of anything. They’d gone through this weird fuzzy area where she’d felt as though she was going to lose her dinner, but that was already fading. Now she was just in awe. She was here. In the spiritworld. She was actually, really and truly, here.

  She realized her mouth was hanging open and closed it. She tried grinning at Cassie and Joe, but her charm wasn’t working, or at least not on Joe if his frown was anything to go by. He could give Lou serious lessons on how to look fierce.

  “You can’t stay here,” he told her. “I need Cassie to go to Cody’s heart home to fetch Jack and Bo,
while I see if I can track where they’ve taken Jilly. We don’t know how many we’re up against, but the last time I ran into them, that sister of Jilly’s had a good-sized pack of wolves at her beck and call. We just don’t have the time to baby-sit you.”

  “I … I only wanted to help,” Wendy said.

  “And see the dreamlands,” Joe added.

  “Well, yeah. That, too. But I’m not, like, helpless.”

  Those stern eyes of Joe’s softened for a moment.

  “I know,” he said. “Normally you’re not. But in this place, you are. Trust me on that. We can’t be looking out for you and helping Jilly.”

  “But—”

  “She can come with me,” Cassie said. “I’m just going to that mountaintop of Cody’s, right? How dangerous can it be?”

  Joe regarded them both for a moment, then gave a slow nod.

  “Okay,” he told Wendy. “Stick to the paths and do whatever Cassie tells you to do. Can you promise me that?”

  “I do. I promise.”

  Joe turned to Cassie. “I need them here as fast as they can come.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Cassie said. “But you know how Jack can be. He’s going to make me go through a whole song and dance before I even get to tell him why I’ve come.”

  Joe nodded, then faded into the woods, moving as silent as the memory of a ghost.

  “He’s not really mad at me, is he?” Wendy asked.

  “No. He’s just worried. Now come on.”

  Cassie took her hand and led her off along no discernible trail that Wendy could see.

  After her initial excitement of actually being in the dreamlands, Wendy grew a little disappointed. The forest she and Cassie were tramping through wasn’t much different from the wooded foothills of the Kickaha Mountains where she used to go hiking with an old boyfriend who’d been a real nature buff. There were more deciduous trees and less undergrowth, but it was neither the Greatwood with its cathedral trees that both Jilly and Sophie had described to her, nor the fairy-tale wood she’d imagined, in which one might catch glimpses of sprites and faeries and other sorts of magical woodland creatures. The air did feel remarkably clean and she understood what Jilly had meant about almost feeling as though it could sustain you all on its own, but it wasn’t quite the magical experience she’d been hoping for.

  Don’t complain, she told herself. They weren’t here for her own personal pleasure, but to help Jilly.

  And yet, and yet …

  She almost said something to Cassie, but she was still trying to decide the best way to frame what she wanted to say without sounding ungracious, when she realized how cold it had gotten. Blinking, she looked around herself. When had the trees lost their leaves and the air grown so chilly?

  “We should have brought heavier jackets,” Cassie said. “I didn’t realize the way we’d have to take would get so cold.” She glanced at Wendy. “Are you okay?”

  “Um … I guess …”

  “Don’t worry. It’ll change soon.”

  And it did. They came up a rise and somehow as they topped the ridge the forest was gone. The air grew warmer and they descended into a vast meadow of wildflowers.

  “Okay,” Wendy said. “This is weird.”

  Cassie laughed. “I forgot. This is all new to you.”

  “Pretty much. And it’s nothing like Sophie and Jilly described it as.”

  “That’s because we’re going through the quicklands—places where time runs faster than it does in the World As It Is. It means you end up going through a lot of different kinds of landscapes and climates at what feels like an accelerated rate. Each one of them is what Joe calls an abinàs-odey—a heart home. The places that people go to in their dreams where they feel safest and most real. We all have one—you, me, the cousins, everybody—and large parts of the dreamlands are just one big quiltwork of these places.”

  “Well,” Wendy said, “I was wondering where the magic was and now it’s here. But it’s … different from what I was expecting.”

  “Expect the unexpected—that’s what Joe says.”

  “Is everybody’s heart home like this?” Wendy asked. “I mean, forests and mountains and, you know, wild places?”

  “There are as many different kinds as there are people to be home to them. It just depends where you go. That city of Sophie’s—”

  “You mean Mabon?”

  Cassie nodded. “Whole sections of it are the heart homes of people that have become attached to her original imagining. There are homes all in darkness, underwater, in landscapes that appear to be one huge factory, or even places that seem to be no more than confusing tangles of pipes and inexplicable machines …” She shrugged. “They’re whatever can be imagined—anyplace that someone might find true comfort. Most of us only visit them in our dreams and don’t remember having been there when we wake up.”

  “I sure don’t,” Wendy said.

  Though she could recall times when she’d woken up with this indescribable sense of well-being, slightly tinged with bittersweet, but that was only because she knew she was leaving the source of that feeling behind.

  As they continued to walk through the shifting landscape, Wendy still found the sudden changes of locale and climate disconcerting for all that Cassie had now explained the twisty dream-logic behind them. She supposed what was oddest was how she couldn’t see the seams. One moment they were climbing up a rocky slope in what felt like spring weather, the next they were making their way through the thick undergrowth of a new forest in a summer heat, but she could never seem to focus in on that exact moment when one changed to the other.

  Finally they came out of an evergreen forest to the red rock slopes of a canyon.

  “We’re almost there now,” Cassie told her. “And our surroundings should stay fixed.”

  “I kind of liked the way they kept switching around.”

  “Maybe you were born to walk the dreamlands after all.”

  Wendy gave her a smile. The slope they went up was steep and they’d been walking at a quick pace for over an hour, but she didn’t feel the least bit winded.

  “I feel like I’ve come home,” she said.

  Cassie nodded. “And somewhere in this quiltwork of the dreamlands, you’ll really get that feeling—at least I hope you’ll get the chance, because too many of us never get to visit our heart home when we’re awake and in our physical bodies.”

  “Have you been to yours?”

  Cassie nodded.

  “What’s it like?”

  “Nothing like this. This is Cody’s place, though from what Joe’s told me, he’s set it aside and a bunch of canids have taken it over.”

  “Canids are like corbæ, but they’re wolves—right?”

  “Wolves, foxes, coyotes, dogs …”

  Just then they came up onto the mesa top and Wendy got her wish to see some of the magical inhabitants of the dreamlands. There were two men sitting by a fire, both dark-skinned and dark-haired, dressed in casual clothes. One of them looked pretty normal but, under the black brim of his hat, the other had a wolf’s head in place of a human’s.

  “Oh, my,” Wendy said and took Cassie’s hand.

  “It’s okay,” Cassie told her. “This is who we’ve come to find.”

  Don’t stare, Wendy told herself. They might take offense.

  But the two men were looking her over with their own unfeigned curiosity, especially the one with the wolf’s head. He stood up and doffed his hat in an exaggerated courtly gesture.

  “I swear,” he said. “You pray often enough and sooner or later you get what you were asking for. Ladies, we are yours for the taking. You only have to say the word and we’ll be your love slaves forever.”

  Cassie laughed. “Always the charmer, hey, Jack? But you’ve got to work on your script. I mean, it makes me feel like I’m in some bad seventies bar instead of this beautiful place.”

  “Beautiful? It doesn’t hold a candle to you and your gorgeous friend.”


  “And it’d help if you lost the dog face,” Cassie said.

  Wendy blinked as the wolf’s features morphed into that of a handsome, dark-skinned man. The transformation so riveted her that she almost missed their names when Cassie introduced the pair to her.

  Bo gave her a wave from where he still sat by the fire.

  “Nice to meet you,” he said.

  There was nothing so casual for the more flamboyant Whiskey Jack. He smiled warmly, hat in hand, his teeth flashing white. When he walked toward her, arms opened to give her an embrace, Wendy didn’t know whether she should straight-arm him or more politely hide behind Cassie. She was never fond of people who were so touchy-feely right off the bat. It didn’t matter how charming they might make themselves out to be, they just made her squirm.

  “It’s not simply nice to meet you,” he was saying. “Trust me when I say that, in this lonely place, it’s an honor and a privilege to—”

  Cassie intercepted him, saving Wendy her decision. He wrapped his arms around Cassie, winking at Wendy over her shoulder.

  “If only you weren’t my best friend’s gal,” he told Cassie.

  Cassie good-naturedly returned his hug, then disengaged herself from his embrace.

  “See the problem,” she said to Wendy, “is that canids like these—and especially our good friend Jack, here—live in their libido, twenty-four seven.”

  “And that’s a problem because?” Jack asked.

  Cassie ignored him. “That’s the part the stories seem to miss or gloss over. Take ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ When they say the wolf ate her grandmother—”

  “Now you’re just being rude,” Jack said, but he was smiling.

  “Anyway,” Cassie went on. “The point is, they don’t mean to be so lecherous, it’s just hardwired into their genes—”

  “I love it when you talk dirty,” Jack told her.

  “And they rarely force their advances on anyone.”

  Jack turned to Wendy. “It’s that we don’t have to,” he said.