The Ivory and the Horn n-6

by Charles de Lint

  But though that's part of my problem, it's not the real root of it. Every woman has to deal with those same social strikes against her. For me, it all comes back to my dad, to this belief that if I'd been better, prettier, he wouldn't have killed himself; that if I could somehow regain the sexless body of a child— look like a child, be the perfect child— I could win him back again.

  Understanding that is even harder.

  I weigh a hundred and twenty-seven pounds now, but I still haven't taken up smoking again. As for my finances— I'm working on them. I had to declare personal bankruptcy, but I'm going to pay everybody back. I have to, because I don't think anybody else should have to pay for my mistakes— no matter what the extenuating circumstances leading up to those mistakes. A friend of Jilly's got me a job at The Daily Journal doing proofing, copyediting, that sort of thing. The pay's not great, but there's room to move up.

  Things never really worked out between Jim and me— my fault again, but I'm trying not to feel guilty about it. I just couldn't accept that he cared for me after he'd seen how screwed up I can get. I know it wasn't pity he felt— I mean, he obviously liked me before things got really weird— but I could never look at him without wondering what he was seeing: me, or that creature I became by the well. Jilly says he still asks about me. Maybe one day I'll feel confident enough to look him up again.

  There was no rusalka—that's pretty much the general consensus, myself included. Sort of. Wendy says I must have seen a reflection of myself in the window of the motel room and just freaked out. My therapist simply says there's no such thing, but won't offer explanations for what I thought I saw except to tell me that I was in a disturbed state of mind and that people are liable to experience anything in such a situation.

  I don't quite buy it. I don't know if there really was a water-wraith or not, but there's something in water that's still haunting me. Not a bad something, not a nightmare creature like the rusalka, but still something not of this world. When I talked about it with Jilly once, she said, "You know the way Christy talks about ghosts being a kind of audiovisual memory that a place holds? Well, water's supposedly the best conductor for that sort of a thing. And that's why there are so many holy wells and sacred lakes and the like."

  I suppose. The ghosts in my head are gone, but I hear water all the time and my dreams always seem to take me underwater. I'm never scared, it's never spooky. Just... strange. Dark and cool. Peaceful in a way that I can't explain.

  Wendy says I shouldn't let Jilly fill my head with her weird ideas, but I don't know. The interesting thing about Jilly is that she's totally impartial. She accepts everything with the same amount of interest and tolerance, just as she seems to love everybody the same— which is why I think she's never really had a steady boyfriend. She never quite has that extra amount of love it would take to make a relationship with just one person work.

  Wendy disagrees with that. She says that Jilly just can't get close to a man that way. I get the feeling it's got to do with something that happened to Jilly when she was growing up, but Wendy's as closemouthed about that as she is with any bit of privileged information, and I've never quite got up the nerve to ask Jilly herself. I'd hate to remind her of some really awful thing in her past— if that's truly the case.

  Whatever it was, she's moved beyond it now. Her life is so contained, so steady, for all her fey impulses. I think I envy that about her more than her thinness now.

  I wonder if there's anything she envies in other people.

  ***

  It's autumn now— months later. Like I said, the ghosts don't come to me anymore, but sometimes I still hear voices drifting up from out of the well when I go for my Sunday drives up to the motel. Or maybe it's only the wind. All I know is that I still like to come sit on the old stone wall here by the well and when I leave, I feel... different. It's as though the calmness that's hidden away in that well enclosed by its rose bushes imparts something to me: maybe no more than simply another way of seeing things.

  I don't worry about it; I just appreciate it. And if I come back a little spacey, saying odd things which seem very insightful to me, but are confusing to other people, nobody seems to mind. Or at least they don't say anything about it to me.

  As for Ellie, I went up into the rooms above the office where she said she lived and there was nothing there. No Ellie, no sign of anyone living there, except it was very clean, as though someone took the trouble to sweep it out regularly and maybe put some wildflowers in a vase on the window sill when they're in season. There was a glass jar with dried flowers in it when I was there, and it didn't smell musty the way the other rooms do.

  I tried to find an obit for her, but as someone pointed out to me, she could have died anywhere. If she didn't die in or around the city, there wouldn't be an obit in the morgues of any of our local papers. Still, I looked.

  Jilly's got another answer, of course. She says she knows what Ellie meant about the well being cursed: Ellie must have wished that she'd always be at The Wishing Well, so after she died, her ghost was forever doomed to haunt the motel. Which, as Wendy put it, is par for the course, considering the way Jilly sees the world.

  I like to think Ellie's just gone south for the winter.

  ***

  The first time I go back to the wishing well, I find four dollar bills held down by a stone on the wall of the well. I look at them and wonder, a refund for the days I'd paid for, but didn't stay at the motel?

  I drop them down into the shaft, one after the other, but I don't make a wish. My life's not perfect, but then whose is? All I can do is forget about miracles and try to take things one day at a time. I'm the only one who can empower myself— I don't need my therapist to tell me that.

  ***

  I don't think the well ever was cursed. The only curse comes from the ghosts a person brings to it.

  ***

  I still think about my dad a lot. I guess we had more in common than I thought, since we both screwed up our lives pretty badly. I think he'd be proud of me for finding a solution different from the one he did.

  ***

  WKPN's on the radio when I drive home. "Rock and gold, without the hard rock and rap." They're playing Buddy Holly.

  Wella, wella.

  I turn the dial, chasing static and stations until I hear a black woman's voice, clipped rhymes, ghetto poetry riding the back of a sliding beat that's so contagious my pulse can't help but keep time with it. She's talking about standing up for herself, being herself, facing the world with what she calls a buffalo stance.

  You can keep your "rock and gold," I think. I'm tired of living in the past. I'm like the wishing well, in a lot of ways, full of old ghosts that I just can't seem to exorcise. They're what keeps dragging me down. It's when I listen to them, when I start to believe that all the unhappy things they're saying about me is true, that I'm at my worst.

  What I want is what this woman's singing about, something that's here and now. What I need is my own buffalo stance.

  I think I'm finally on the right road to finding it.

  Dead Man's Shoes

  There are people who take the heart out of you, and there are people who put it back.

  — Elizabeth David

  In her office, her head rests upon her arms, her arms upon the desk. She is alone. The only sounds are those of the clock on the wall, monotonously repeating its two-syllable vocabulary, and the faint noise of the street coming in through her closed windows. Her next appointment isn't until nine P.M.

  She meant merely to rest her eyes for a few moments; instead, she has fallen asleep.

  In her dream, the rain falls in a mist. It crouches thicker at knee level, twining across the street. The dead man approaches her through the rain with a pantherlike grace he never displayed when alive. He is nothing like Hollywood's shambling portrayals of animated corpses; confronted by the dead man, she is the one whose movements are stuttered and slow.

  Because she is trapped in flesh, she thinks.r />
  Because in this dreamscape, he is pure spirit, unfettered by gravity or body weight, while she still carries the burden of life. The world beyond this night's dreams retains a firm grip, shackling her own spirit's grace with the knowledge of its existence and her place in it.

  Not so the dead man.

  The rain has pressed the unruly thicket of his hair flat against his scalp. His features are expressionless, except for the need in his eyes. He carries a somewhat bulky object in his arms, bundled up in wet newspapers. She can't quite identify it. She knows what he carries is roundish, about the size of a soccer ball, but that is all. All other details have been swallowed in the play of shadow that the rain has drawn from the neon signs overhead and the streetlight on the corner.

  She is not afraid of the dead man, only puzzled. Because she knows him in life. Because she has seen him glowering from the mouths of alleyways, sleeping in doorways. He has never been truly dangerous, despite his appearance to the contrary.

  What are you doing here? she wants to ask him. What do you want from me? But her voice betrays her as much as her body, and what issues forth are only sounds, unrecognizable as words.

  She wakes just as he begins to hand her what he is carrying.

  ***

  The dream was very much upon Angel's mind as she later looked down at the pathetic bundle of rag-covered bones Everett Hoyle's corpse made at the back of the alley. But since she had always believed that the supernatural belonged only to the realm of fiction, film and the tabloids, she refused to allow the dream to take root in her imagination.

  Jilly would call what she had experienced prescience; she thought of it only as an unhappy coincidence, and let it go no further. Instead she focused her attention on the latest addition to the city's murder-victim statistics.

  No one was going to miss Everett, she thought, least of all her. Still, she couldn't help but feel sorry for him. It was an alien reaction insofar as Everett was concerned.

  The streets were filled with angry individuals, but the reasons behind their anger usually made sense: lost homes, lost jobs, lost families. Drink, or drugs. Institutions turning out their chronic psychiatric patients because the government couldn't afford their care. Victims of neglect or abuse who discovered too late that escaping to a life on the street wasn't the answer.

  But Everett was simply mean-spirited.

  He had a face that would make children cry. He wasn't deformed, he simply wore a look of rage that had frozen his features into a roadmap of constant fury. He stood a cadaverous six-four, which was more than merely intimidating to those from whom he was trying to cadge spare change; it could be downright frightening. With that manner, with his matted shock of dirty grey hair and tattered clothing, he didn't seem so much a man down on his luck as some fearsome scarecrow that had ripped itself free from its support pole and gone out to make the world around him as unpleasant as he felt himself. Which put him about one step up from those men who had to kill their families before they put the gun in their own mouth and pulled the trigger.

  No, Angel corrected herself. Think in the past tense now, because Everett had terrorized his last passerby.

  Surprisingly, death had brought a certain calm to his features, smoothing away the worst of the anger that normally masked them. This must be what he looked like when he was sleeping, Angel thought. Except he wasn't asleep. The blood pooled around his body bore stark testimony to that. She'd already checked for a pulse and found none. Having called the police before she left the office, now it was simply a matter of waiting for them to arrive.

  The scene laid out before her held an anomaly that wouldn't stop nagging her. She took a step closer and studied the body. It was like a puzzle with one piece missing, and it took her a few minutes before she could finally pinpoint what was bothering her. She turned to the young white boy who'd come to her office twenty minutes ago and brought her back to where he'd found the body.

  "What happened to his boots, Robbie?" She asked.

  Everett's footwear had been distinctive: threadbare Oxfords transformed into boots by stitching the upper half of a pair of Wellingtons onto the leather of each of the shoes. Olive green with yellow trim on the left; black with red trim on the right. The Oxfords were so old and worn that they were devoid of any recognizable color themselves.

  "I guess Macaulay took 'em," the boy replied.

  "You never said Macaulay was here with you."

  Robbie shrugged.

  She waited for him to elaborate, but Robbie simply stood beside her, face washed pale by the streetlight coming in from the mouth of the alley, thin shoulders stooped, one Dr. Marten kicking at the trash underfoot. His dirty-blonde hair was so short it was no more than stubble. He wouldn't meet her gaze.

  Angel sighed. "All right," she said. "I'll bite. Why did Macaulay take the boots?"

  "Well, you know what the homes are saying, Miz Angel. Man gets nined, you got to take away his shoes or he's gonna go walkin' after he s dead. He'll be lookin' for who took him down, usually, but Everett now— he's so mean I suppose anybody'd do."

  With all her years of working with street people, dealing with the myriad superstitions that ran rampant through the tenements and squats, Angel thought she'd heard it all. But this was a new one, even on her.

  "You don't believe that, do you?" she asked.

  "No, ma'am. But I'd say Macaulay surely do."

  Robbie spoke casually enough, but Angel could tell there was more to what had happened here tonight than he was letting on. He was upset— a natural enough reaction, considering the circumstances. Keeping Everett's corpse company until the police arrived had upset her as well. But the tension underlying Robbie's seeming composure spoke of more.

  Before she could find just the right way to persuade him to open up to her, one of the sirens that could be heard at all hours of the day or night in this part of the city disengaged itself from the general hubbub of night, sounds and became more distinct. Moments later, a cruiser pulled up, blocking the mouth of the alley. The cherry-red lights of its beacons strobed inside the alley, turning the scene into a macabre funhouse. Backlit, the two officers who stepped out of the cruiser took on menacing shapes: shadows devoid of features.

  At Angel's side, Robbie began to tremble, and she knew she wouldn't get anything from him now. Hands kept carefully in view, she went to meet the approaching officers.

  ***

  Angelina Marceau ran a youth distress center on Grasso Street, from which she got her nickname, the Grasso Street Angel. She looked like an angel as well: heart-shaped face surrounded by a cascade of dark curly hair, deep warm eyes, next to no makeup because she didn't need it with her clear complexion. Her trim figure didn't sport wings, and she leaned more toward baggy pants, T-shirts and hightops than she did harps and white gowns, but that didn't matter to those living on the streets of Newford. So far as they were concerned, all she lacked was a visible halo.

  Angel wasn't feeling particularly angelic by the time three A.M. rolled around that night, She sat wearily in her office, gratefully nursing a mug of coffee liberally spiked with a shot of whiskey, which Jilly had handed to her when she walked in the door.

  "I appreciate your looking after the place while I was at the precinct," she said.

  "It wasn't a problem," Jilly told her. "No one showed up."

  Angel nodded. Word on the street moved fast. If the Grasso Street Angel was at the precinct, no one was going to keep his appointment and take the chance of running into one of the precinct bulls. The only one of her missed appointments that worried her was Patch. She'd spent weeks trying to convince him at least to look into the sponsorship program she administered, only to have this happen when she'd finally gotten him to agree. Patch was so frail now that she didn't think the boy would survive another beating at the hands of his pimp.

  "So how'd it go?" Jilly asked.

  It took Angel a moment to focus on what she'd been asked. She took a sip of her coffee, relaxing as the warmt
h from the whiskey reached her stomach.

  "We were lucky," she said, "It was Lou's shift. He made sure they went easy on Robbie when they took our statements. They've got an APB out on Macaulay."

  "Robbie. He's the skinny little peacenik that looks like a skinhead?"

  Angel smiled. "That's one way of putting it. There's no way he could have killed Everett."

  "How did Everett die?"

  "He was stabbed to death— a half-dozen times at least."

  Jilly shivered. "They didn't find the knife?"

  "They didn't find the weapon and— I find this really odd— they didn't find Everett's boots either. Robbie says Macaulay took them so that Everett's ghost wouldn't be able to come after anyone." She shook her head. "I guess they just make them up when they haven't got anything better to do."

  "Actually, it's a fairly old belief," Jilly said.

  Angel took another sip of her whiskey-laced coffee to fortify herself against what was to come. For all her fine traits, and her unquestionable gifts as an artist, Jilly had a head filled with what could only charitably be called whimsy. Probably it was because she was an artist and had such a fertile imagination, Angel had eventually decided. Still, whatever the source, Jilly was ready to espouse the oddest theories at the drop of a hat, everything from Victorian-styled fairies living in refuse dumps to Bigfoot wandering through the Tombs.

  Angel had learned long ago that arguing against them was a fruitless endeavor, but sometimes she couldn't help herself.

  "Old," She said, "and true as well, I suppose."

  "It's possible," Jilly said, plainly oblivious to Angel's lack of belief. "I mean, there's a whole literature of superstition surrounding footwear. The one you're talking about dates back hundreds of years and is based on the idea that shoes were thought to be connected with the life essence, the soul, of the person to whom they belonged. The shoes of murdered people were often buried separately to prevent hauntings. And sorcerers were known to try to persuade women to give them their left shoes. If the woman did, the sorcerer would have power over her."