Spiritwalk

by Charles de Lint

  “Tucker!” he cried, interrupting the inspector’s explanation of Canadian civil rights.

  Watkins was violently thrashing about on the bed now. His eyes were open, but it was readily apparent that he wasn’t seeing the room around him. But whatever he was looking at made him mad with fear. Blue lifted his rifle and aimed it at the flailing figure, unwilling to take the chance that this wasn’t some grandstanding play on Watkins’s part.

  “What the hell?” Tucker said, rising from his chair.

  Eleanor Watkins was quicker. She was up and across the room, before Tucker could grab her.

  “Albert!” she cried. “Albert!”

  So her smugness could be breached, Blue had time to think, but his momentary satisfaction dissolved as the woman reached for her husband. There was a flare of sparks and the aniselike scent stung the air. Watkins’s protective shield flung his wife bodily away, directly against Tucker. She hit Tucker with such force that she pushed him halfway across the room before they both fell in a tangle of limbs, Tucker under the woman.

  Blue returned his gaze to Watkins, his finger tightening on the trigger of his rifle. But he held his fire. He grimaced at the change Watkins was undergoing. The translucency of his skin grew more pronounced until he was like a figure from some horror film—muscles, veins and bone had all become visible through his skin. His mouth was open; it looked like he was howling, but no sound came forth.

  By now his wife had regained her feet. She stared at Watkins with open dismay.

  “No!” she cried.

  She rushed to him again, but this time Tucker caught her before she could touch her husband. She struggled in Tucker’s arms, crying wordlessly now as the enveloping aura that surrounded Watkins began to fail. His skin became opaque again. His struggles grew weaker; then finally he lay still. The aura was gone. All that remained was a dead old man, lying in the bed.

  Blue poked cautiously at the body with the butt of his rifle. He touched an arm that had been flung out and now lay hanging over the side of the bed. There was no spark, no movement at all. The prodded limb gave way to the pressure he put on it, then fell back when he pulled the rifle butt away.

  “No,” Eleanor Watkins said, her voice soft and broken now.

  When Tucker let her go, she fell to the side of the bed and threw her arms around the corpse. She laid her head on its chest, her shoulders shaking convulsively. Her pitiful sobbing had Blue feeling as uncomfortable as Tucker looked.

  “What the hell happened?” Tucker asked.

  “Beats me. Looks like he just... died.”

  “Died,” Tucker repeated.

  “Have you got a better explanation? Maybe the House had some last line of defense that he wasn’t aware of and it just kicked in.”

  Tucker looked out the window. “The House is supposed to be in the Otherworld, right?”

  “The insides are,” Blue replied. “You know—the way it happened the last time.”

  “Yeah, well, if the House is gone, then how come there’s lights on inside it?”

  Blue crossed the room to where Tucker was standing. Looking out the window, he saw that Tucker was right. All along the length of the block that was Tamson House, lights burned in dozens of the windows.

  “It’s back,” he said. He turned to Tucker with a grin. “We did it!”

  “Did what? I didn’t see us doing dick.”

  Before Blue could reply, Maggie called up to them from downstairs. Blue’s grin widened.

  “And Sara’s back, too!”

  He was out the door and clomping down the stairs, taking them two at a time, before Tucker could even reach the hallway. Blue found Sara sitting up on the couch. She looked woozy and obviously needed the supporting arm that Maggie was giving her. Blue leaned his rifle up against the wall by the front door and beamed at her.

  “Oh, man,” he said. “You had me worried, Sara.”

  She gave him a weak smile that never reached her eyes.

  “Yeah, well I didn’t have a whole lot of choice,” she said. “He just took me away.”

  “Took you where?” Tucker asked as he joined them in the living room.

  Sara explained what had happened. No one interrupted her until she spoke of Jamie.

  “Wait a second,” Tucker said. “What Jamie are we talking about here? The only one I know connected to the House died about seven years ago.”

  “He kind of came back,” Blue said.

  Tucker gave him a considering look. He started to speak, but then just shook his head.

  “Never mind,” he said. “I’ll take a rain check on that for now.” He turned back to Sara. “So then what happened?”

  Blue watched Sara’s eyes well up with tears as she spoke of Jamie’s second death. An emptiness grew inside him—a cold, dark wasteland of despair. He reached out and took her hand, taking as much comfort from the contact as he gave.

  “I didn’t know what to expect when I heard the drumming,” Sara said, finishing up. “It didn’t even matter by that point. But when I turned, I found it was Pukwudji. He’d gone to bring the rath’wen’a back to help us, but they were too late for Jamie. Ha’kan’ta said that they couldn’t have done anything anyway. She said he’d dealt with the problem in the only way that... that was open to him.”

  She couldn’t go on. Blue took Maggie’s place on the couch and held her to him. There wasn’t anything he could do to ease her grief; all he could was share it.

  Tucker and Maggie left them alone. Maggie went up to help Eleanor Watkins while Tucker got on the phone to call in some members of his squad to deal with the cleanup. He returned to the living room when he hung up.

  “You’d better get going,” he said when Blue looked up. “This place is going to be crawling with my men in about ten minutes and I don’t think either of you are ready for that just now. I’ll come by the House and talk to you tomorrow.”

  Blue nodded. He helped Sara to her feet.

  “Thanks,” he said. “This is one I owe you.”

  “I’m not keeping a tab,” Tucker told him. “But I do want to know more about all of this—Jamie, the House, the whole shot.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Blue began.

  “This isn’t idle curiosity,” Tucker told him. “It’s got to do with national security, Blue. I need to know some things.” He glanced at Sara. “But I’ll give you some time.”

  Sara looked up at him. “I’m not the one you want to talk to,” she said.

  “You’re the one who owns the House.”

  Sara nodded. “But Esmeralda is its new guardian. You’ll have to talk to her.”

  Tucker sighed. He’d met Esmeralda before.

  “I’d have better luck getting information from a stone,” he said. “That woman should be a poker player.”

  “She is,” Blue told him. “And she almost always wins.”

  The simple walk across the street to one of the Clemow doors of the House seemed a far longer journey than it actually was. The only thing Blue really noticed was that the owls were finally gone. When he mentioned it to Sara, she gave an answering nod, but she didn’t seem much interested. They both paused when they stepped inside the building. They expected the House to feel different, to reflect the sorrow that lay so heavily on them, but while there was a sense of bittersweetness in the air, Jamie’s second death didn’t appear to have made much of a change.

  Esmeralda met them in the hallway.

  “We’ll all miss him,” she said, aware of what they were feeling. “The House itself, perhaps most of all, but its Mystery turns on its own wheel. It can’t ever focus on simply one individual. If it did, it wouldn’t be the haven it is to so many.”

  “But Jamie...” Sara began.

  “It’s not the House remembering him, but how we do, that will give his death meaning,” Esmeralda said.

  “He said he’d wait for me—in the Place of Dreaming Thunder.”

  Esmeralda nodded. “But he wouldn’t want us to hurry to th
at meeting. There’s still a lot we have to do here, before it’s our time to go on.”

  She slipped her right hand into the crook of Sara’s arm, her left into Blue’s.

  “The rest of them are waiting for us in the Postman’s Room,” she said. “They’ll want to hear what happened. Do you think you’re up to it?”

  “I guess so,” Sara said.

  They were waiting, but there weren’t many of them. Emma met them in the doorway and embraced Blue. Ginny sat in the chair by the desk, Judy on the desk itself. Ohn and Julianne were on the floor, using a bookcase for a backrest. Tim was sitting in one of the club chairs, but he got up when they came in.

  “What happened?” Blue asked. “Where is everybody?”

  “As soon as we got back,” Emma said, “they all took off. “

  Judy nodded. “Can’t say as I blame them. This kind of thing happen often here, Blue?”

  He shook his head. His gaze traveled across their familiar faces until it reached Julianne.

  “Even Cal?” he asked.

  “Maybe especially Cal,” Julianne replied. “But I don’t think it was for the same reason that the others did. Still, I think he’ll be okay. And he might even be back to help with the cleanup.”

  Esmeralda led Sara to the club chair that Tim had vacated and sat down in the other one.

  “I want you all to listen carefully to what Sara’s got to tell us,” she said. “You might not have known Jamie, but if it wasn’t for him, the Tamson House that we all know would never have existed. His story’s as much a part of the House’s mystery as the House itself.”

  Blue had thought it might be too much for Sara to go through it all again, but while her eyes were still shiny, her voice was strong and sure as she began to speak.

  The day came and went. As its light began to leak into evening, Blue, Esmeralda and Sara stepped into the garden and walked to where the Apple Tree Man kept watch over his orchard. Pukwudji and Ha’kan’ta waited for them there, a wolf standing to either side of the rath’wen’a.

  “I made Tal go back,” Sara had explained to them earlier. “Because of the initiation. But the only way he’d agree was if I returned tonight.”

  “We understand,” Esmeralda had replied.

  “You know you’ve got my support—all of it,” Sara told Esmeralda now.

  Esmeralda nodded.

  Sara turned to Blue. “I’m not going to stay away so long anymore,” she said.

  “You’ve got your own life to live,” Blue said.

  “Yeah, but you’re a big part of it.” She kissed him, then Esmeralda. “We’ll all come back to help with the cleanup,” she added. “We’ll even drag Kieran back, so don’t try to do it all by yourselves.”

  “Tell that to Ginny,” Blue said. “She’s determined to have the Library back in order by the weekend.”

  Sara just shook her head. She looked around the orchard. It was that moment of the twilight when everything seemed incredibly defined, that moment just before it gave way to night.

  “Jamie used to read me Pooh books out here,” she said.

  Then she turned and walked to where Ha’kan’ta and Pukwudji waited for her. The little honochen’o’keh took her hand. Ha’kan’ta and Sara waved farewell, and then they were gone.

  “I remember the Pooh books,” Esmeralda said. “Piglet and Eeyore and the Hundred Acre Wood and all. Do you remember them, Blue?”

  “Sure,” Blue said. He gave her a tired smile. “Only it was Sara who used to read them to me.”

  “Everything connects,” Esmeralda said. “Especially here.”

  “Especially here,” Blue agreed.

  He stayed a while longer in the orchard, standing alone under the Apple Tree Man, looking up at the cross-hatching of its branches silhouetted against the sky.

  “I’m going to miss you,” he said softly after a while.

  He wasn’t sure if he was talking to Jamie or Sara.

  Then he followed Esmeralda into the House.

  The Wheel of the Wood

  The Wood—shelter.

  —Weirdin Disc; Secondary: Second Rank, 31.a

  Pan dead?

  You may not hear his pipes.

  I do.

  —Thomas Burnett Swann from “The Return of Pan”

  1

  Summer was almost gone and autumn was in the air. The day had been warm, but the wilting humidity of August was finally a thing of the past. The evening was cool. A light breeze stirred the leaves of the Penny Trees, making them shimmer like spinning coins in the fading light. The noise of the city beyond the House’s walls didn’t penetrate into the garden. The only sound was the bell-like notes of Ohn’s zither that, by some odd trick of the garden’s acoustics, carried from where he sat by the door of the Silkwater Kitchen all the way across the garden to where Emma was walking.

  She came up to the fountain and looked up into the branches of the old oak tree that still stood guard over it in the center of the garden. It was in its branches that Tim had seen the three green-skinned children hanging, she remembered.

  “But why did they pretend to be dead?” Tim had asked Esmeralda one day while the three of them were cleaning out the debris from one of the rooms.

  “It was a joke,” Esmeralda said.

  “A joke”

  Esmeralda nodded. “Their kind of a joke. I don’t pretend to understand their sense of humor.”

  “But it doesn’t make sense,” Tim had protested.

  Emma had silently agreed.

  “If you want sense,” Esmeralda said, “don’t look to bodachs for it. Although...” She had paused a moment, considering. “There are things they can teach us. Sometimes they do the things they do just to shock us—to wake us up and make us see things differently.”

  Emma was seeing things differently now, though she couldn’t decide if it was due to the events they had all experienced in the Otherworld, or a natural change she would have grown into in her own time. The source of the change wasn’t important, anyway; just the change itself.

  The House had a new roster of guests—the fullest house it had had in years, according to Blue—but Emma had the garden to herself this evening. Blue was doing bike things with Judy again, Esmeralda was actually out on a date with one of John Tucker’s assistants and Emma had managed to slip out on her own before anyone else could corner her.

  She walked on until she came to one of those parts of the garden that Tim called the Wild Walks. There she stood quietly for a while, her hands stuffed in the pockets of her jacket, listening to the distant sound of Ohn’s music and remembering the seventeen-year-old girl she’d once been.

  Dark hair a-tangle, she’d climb out of her ground-floor bedroom window at two or three o’clock in the morning and go for walks in the woods and fields around her parents’ house. Everything was more magical at night, and she was enamored with magic. She would feel a wind touch her cheek and when she got home she would draw a picture of herself, standing in a moonlit field with Esmeralda nearby, Esmeralda’s hair blowing in the wind, strands of those gold-and-brown locks reaching out to touch Emma’s cheek.

  She’d write on the back of the drawing: “Last night I walked out past the Fields We Know to a hilltop where your wind remembered me. I found this picture in my mind when I came home. Were you there? Could you hear me singing?” Into an envelope the drawing would go, off to Esmeralda in the morning mail.

  And inevitably—a few days, perhaps a week or two later—an envelope would arrive from Esmeralda, stuffed with poems and a brief note, all signed with a flourishing “Westlin Wind.” It was Esmeralda who first told her she carried the Autumn Gift in her heart, who called her the Autumn Lady, who made magic seem real.

  But that seventeen-year-old girl grew up, went to college where she took commercial art, never had time for midnight walks in the woods and fields, met a different crowd of people from the ones who hadn’t had time for her in high school because she was too wrapped up in her art to be normal. H
er fellow college students, and later coworkers, loved real art just as much as she did, for all that they made their livings designing logos, illustrating advertisements and posters and the like.

  She wasn’t sure what magics they had known when they were younger, if any. All she knew was that she’d lost hers.

  Esmeralda still wrote, but they never talked about Westlin Winds and Autumn Ladies. Esmeralda seemed determined to be a perpetual student. She moved to England; she spent her summers traveling through Europe and the Middle East. There were hints of arcane mysteries couched in her letters, but they were only the vaguest of whispers, easily tuned out. Magic was gone, if it had ever been.

  Until that night she met Blue.

  Until she’d finally had to accept that magic had been there all along; she had simply turned a blind eye to it.

  The Autumn Gift wasn’t a ghostly memory. It was real. And it carried a grave responsibility that she’d been fighting for some three years now.

  “You must be so fed up with my wishy-washiness by now,” she’d said to Esmeralda a few nights ago.

  Surprisingly, for all the hectic activity of getting the House back in order, and how tired that left them all in the evenings, she’d begun drawing again. She and Esmeralda were sitting in the Silkwater Kitchen’s nook that evening—Esmeralda doodling words on a pad of yellow foolscap, Emma doodling pictures.

  “You never get fed up with the people you love,” Esmeralda replied.

  Emma laid down her pencil. “This Autumn Gift,” she said, finally broaching the subject she’d been trying to bring up for days. “What if it’s all that makes me special?”

  Esmeralda lifted her eyebrows.

  “You know. I get along easily with people. People seem to like me; they like my art.... What if it’s only because of the gift?”

  “You had a magic of your own long before the gift was drawn to you,” Esmeralda said. “It was your own magic that brought it to you.”