The Urban Fantasy Anthology

by Peter S. ; Peter S. Beagle; Joe R. Lansdale Beagle

  True to his prediction, the unicorn had not moved from the mirror when Julie came home late in the afternoon; and it was still in the same spot when Farrell arrived after the restaurant’s closing. NMC was beside it, now pushing her head insistently against its side, now backing away to try one more forlorn mother-call, while the first kitten to make it into the wide world beyond the cat box was blissfully batting the tufted white tail back and forth. The tail’s owner paid no slightest heed to either of them; but when Julie, out of curiosity, knelt and began to move the mirror away, the unicorn made a sound very like a kitten’s hiss and struck at her fingers, barely missing. She stood up calmly, saying, “Well, I’m for banana cake, Bringing Up Baby, and having my feet rubbed. Later for Joseph Campbell.” The motion was carried by acclamation.

  The unicorn stayed by the mirror that night and all the next day, and the day after that. On the second day Julie came home to hear the sweet rubber-band sound of a lute in her apartment, and found Farrell sitting on the bed playing Dowland’s “The Earl of Essex’s Galliard.” He looked up as she entered and told her cheerfully, “Nice acoustics you’ve got here. I’ve played halls that didn’t sound half as good.”

  “That thing of yours about locks is going to get you busted one day,” Julie said. The unicorn’s eyes met hers in the hand mirror, but the creature did not stir. She asked, “Can you tell if it’s listening at all?”

  “Ears,” Farrell said. “If the ears twitch even a bit, I try some more stuff by the same composer, or anyway the same century. Might not mean a thing, but it’s all I’ve got to go by.”

  “Try Bach. Everything twitches to Bach.”

  Farrell snorted. “Forget it. Bourrees and sarabandes out the yingyang, and not a wiggle.” Oddly, he sounded almost triumphant. “See, it’s a conservative little soul, some ways—it won’t respond to anything it wouldn’t have heard in its own time. Which means, as far as I can make out, absolutely nothing past the fifteenth century. Binchois gets you one ear. Dufay—okay, both ears, I’m pretty sure it was both ears. Machaut—ears and a little tail action, we’re really onto something now. Des Pres, jackpot—it actually turned and looked at me. Not for more than a moment, but that was some look. That was a look.”

  He sighed and scratched his head. “Not that any of this is any help to anybody. It’s just that I’ll never have another chance to play this old stuff for an informed critic, as you might say. Somebody who knows my music in a way I never will. Never mind. Just a thought.”

  Julie sat down beside him and put her arm around his shoulders. “Well, the hell with unicorns,” she said. “What do unicorns know? Play Bach for me.”

  Whether Farrell’s music had anything to do with it or not, they never knew; but morning found the unicorn across the room, balancing quite like a cat atop a seagoing uncle’s old steamer trunk, peering down into the quiet street below. Farrell, already up and making breakfast, said, “It’s looking for someone.”

  Julie was trying to move close to the unicorn without alarming it. Without looking at Farrell, she murmured, “By Gad, Holmes, you’ve done it again. Five hundred years out of its time, stranded in a cat box in California, what else would it be doing but meeting a friend for lunch? You make it look so easy, and I always feel so silly once you explain—”

  “Cheap sarcasm doesn’t become you, Tanikawa. Here, grab your tofu scramble while it’s hot.” He put the plate into the hand she extended backwards toward him. “Maybe it’s trolling for virgins, what can I tell you? All I’m sure of, it looked in your mirror until it remembered itself, and now it knows what it wants to do. And too bad for us if we can’t figure it out. I’m making the coffee with a little cinnamon, all right?”

  The unicorn turned its head at their voices; then resumed its patient scrutiny of the dawn joggers, the commuters and the shabby, ambling pilgrims to nowhere. Julie said, slowly and precisely, “It was woven into that tapestry. It began in the tapestry—it can’t know anyone who’s not in the tapestry. Who could it be waiting for on East Redondo Street?”

  Farrell had coffee for her, but no answer. They ate their breakfast in silence, looking at nothing but the unicorn, which looked at nothing but the street; until, as Farrell prepared to leave the apartment, it bounded lightly down from the old trunk and was at the door before him, purposeful and impatient. Julie came quickly, attempting for the first time to pick it up, but the unicorn backed against a bookcase and made the hissing-kitten sound again. Farrell said, “I wouldn’t.”

  “Oh, I definitely would,” she answered him between her teeth. “Because if it gets out that door, you’re going to be the one chasing after it through Friday-morning traffic.” The unicorn offered no resistance when she picked it up, though its neck was arched back like a coiled snake’s and for a moment Julie felt the brilliant eyes burning her skin. She held it up so that it could see her own eyes, and spoke to it directly.

  “I don’t know what you want,” she said. “I don’t know what we could do to help you if we did know, as lost as you are. But it’s my doing that you’re here at all, so if you’ll just be patient until Joe gets back, we’ll take you outside, and maybe you can sort of show us…” Her voice trailed away, and she simply stared back into the unicorn’s eyes.

  When Farrell cautiously opened the door, the unicorn paid no attention; nevertheless, he closed it to a crack behind him before he turned to say, “I have to handle lunch, but I can get off dinner. Just don’t get careless. It’s got something on its mind, that one.”

  With Farrell gone, she felt curiously excited and apprehensive at once, as though she were meeting another lover. She brought a chair to the window, placing it close to the steamer trunk. As soon as she sat down, NMC plumped into her lap, kittens abandoned, and settled down for some serious purring and shedding. Julie petted her absently, carefully avoiding glancing at the unicorn, or even thinking about it; instead she bent all her regard on what the unicorn must have seen from her window. She recognized the UPS driver, half a dozen local joggers—each sporting a flat-lipped grin of agony suggesting that their Walkman headphones were too tight—a policewoman whom she had met on birdwatching expeditions, and the Frozen-Yogurt Man. The Frozen-Yogurt Man wore a grimy naval officer’s cap the year around, along with a flapping tweed sport-jacket, sweat pants and calf-length rubber boots. He had a thin yellow-brown beard, like the stubble of a burned-over wheatfield, and had never been seen, as far as Julie knew, without a frozen-yogurt cone in at least one hand. Farrell said he favored plain vanilla in a sugar cone. “With M&Ms on top. Very California.”

  NMC raised an ear and opened an eye, and Julie turned her head to see the unicorn once again poised atop the steamer trunk, staring down at the Frozen-Yogurt Man with the soft hairs of its mane standing erect from nape to withers. (Did it pick that up from the cats? Julie wondered in some alarm.) “He’s harmless,” she said, feeling silly but needing to speak. “There must have been lots of people like him in your time. Only then there was a place for them, they had names, they fit the world somewhere. Mendicant friars, I guess. Hermits.”

  The unicorn leaped at the window. Julie had no more than a second’s warning: the dainty head lowered only a trifle, the sleek miniature hindquarters seemed hardly to flex at all; but suddenly—so fast that she had no time even to register the explosion of the glass, the unicorn was nearly through. Blood raced down the white neck, tracing the curve of the straining belly.

  Julie never remembered whether she cried out or not, never remembered moving. She was simply at the window with her hands surrounding the unicorn, pulling it back as gently as she possibly could, praying in silent desperation not to catch its throat on a fang of glass. Her hands were covered with blood—some of it hers—by the time the unicorn came free, but she saw quickly that its wounds were superficial, already coagulating and closing as she looked on. The unicorn’s blood was as red as her own, but there was a strange golden shadow about it: a dark sparkling just under or beyond her eyes’ understanding
. She dabbed at it ineffectually with a paper towel, while the unicorn struggled in her grasp. Strangely, she could feel that it was not putting forth its entire strength; though whether from fear of hurting her or for some other reason, she could not say.

  “All right,” she said harshly. “All right. He’s only the Frozen-Yogurt Man, for God’s sake, but all right, I’ll take you to him. I’ll take you wherever you want—we won’t wait for Joe, we’ll just go out. Only you have to stay in my pocket. In my pocket, okay?”

  The unicorn quieted slowly between her hands. She could not read the expression in the great, bruise-colored eyes, but it made no further attempt to escape when she set it down and began to patch the broken window with cardboard and packing tape. That done, she donned the St. Vincent de Paul duffel coat she wore all winter, and carefully deposited the unicorn in the wrist-deep right pocket Then she pinned a note on the door for Farrell, pushed two kittens away from it with her foot, shut it, said aloud, “Okay, you got it,” and went down into the street.

  The sun was high and warm, but a chill breeze lurked in the shade of the old trees. Julie felt the unicorn move in her pocket, and looked down to see the narrow, delicate head poke out from under the flap. “Back in there,” she said, amazed at her own firmness. “Five hundred, a thousand years—don’t you know what happens by now? When people see you?” The unicorn retreated without protest.

  She could see the Frozen-Yogurt Man’s naval cap a block ahead, bobbing with his shuffling gait. There were a lot of bodies between them, and she increased her own pace, keeping a hand over her pocket as she slipped between strollers and dodged coffeehouse tables. Once, sidestepping a skateboarder, she tripped hard over a broken slab of sidewalk and stumbled to hands and knees, instinctively twisting her body to fall to the left. She was up in a moment, unhurt, hurrying on.

  When she did catch up with the Frozen-Yogurt Man, and he turned his blindly benign gaze on her, she hesitated, completely uncertain of how to approach him. She had never spoken to him, nor even seen him close enough to notice that he was almost an albino, with coral eyes and pebbly skin literally the color of yogurt. She cupped her hand around the unicorn in her pocket, smiled and said, “Hi.”

  The Frozen-Yogurt Man said thoughtfully, as though they were picking up an interrupted conversation, “You think they know what they’re doing?” His voice was loud and metallic, not quite connecting one word with another. It sounded to Julie like the synthesized voices that told her which buttons on her telephone to push.

  “No,” she answered without hesitation. “No, whatever you’re talking about. I don’t think anybody knows what they’re doing anymore.”

  The Frozen-Yogurt Man interrupted her. “I think they do. I think they do. I think they do.” Julie thought he might go on repeating the words forever; but she felt the stir against her side again, and the Frozen-Yogurt Man’s flat pink eyes shifted and widened. “What’s that?” he demanded shrilly. “What’s that watching me?”

  The unicorn was halfway out of her coat pocket, front legs flailing as it yearned toward the Frozen-Yogurt Man. Only the reluctance of passersby to make eye contact with either him or Julie spared the creature from notice. She grabbed it with both hands, forcing it back, telling it in a frantic hiss, “Stay there, you stay, he isn’t the one! I don’t know whom you’re looking for, but it’s not him.” But the unicorn thrashed in the folds of cloth as though it were drowning.

  The Frozen-Yogurt Man was backing away, his hands out, his face melting. Ever afterward, glimpsing him across the street, Julie felt chillingly guilty for having seen him so. In a phlegmy whisper he said, “Oh, no—oh, no, no, you don’t put that thing on me. No, I been watching you all the time, you get away, you get away from me with that thing. You people, you put that chip behind my ear, you put them radio mice in my stomach—you get away, you don’t put nothing more on me, you done me enough.” He was screaming now, and the officer’s cap was tipping forward, revealing a scarred scalp the color of the sidewalk. “You done me enough! You done me enough!”

  Julie fled. She managed at first to keep herself under control, easing away sedately enough through the scattering of mildly curious spectators; it was only when she was well down the block and could still hear the Frozen-Yogurt Man’s terrified wailing that she began to run. Under the hand that she still kept in her pocket, the unicorn seemed to have grown calm again, but its heart was beating in tumultuous rhythm with her own. She ran on until she came to a bus stop and collapsed on the bench there, gasping for breath, rocking back and forth, weeping dryly for the Frozen-Yogurt Man.

  She came back to herself only when she felt the touch of a cool, soft nose just under her right ear. Keeping her head turned away, she said hoarsely, “Just let me sit here a minute, all right? I did what you wanted. I’m sorry it didn’t work out. You get back down before somebody sees you.”

  A warm breath stirred the hairs on Julie’s arms, and she raised her head to meet the hopeful brown eyes and all-purpose grin of a young golden retriever. The dog was looking brightly back and forth between her and the unicorn, wagging its entire body from the ears on down, back feet dancing eagerly. The unicorn leaned precariously from Julie’s pocket to touch noses with it.

  “No one’s ever going to believe you,” Julie said to the dog. The golden retriever listened attentively, waited a moment to make certain she had no more to confide, and then gravely licked the unicorn’s head, the great red tongue almost wrapping it round. NMC’s incessant grooming had plainly not prepared the unicorn for anything like this; it sneezed and took refuge in the depths of the pocket. Julie said, “Not a living soul.”

  The dog’s owner appeared then, apologizing and grabbing its dangling leash to lead it away. It looked back, whining, and its master had to drag it all the way to the corner. Julie still huddled and rocked on the bus stop bench, but when the unicorn put its head out again she was laughing thinly. She ran a forefinger down its mane, and then laid two fingers gently against the wary, pulsing neck. She said, “Burnouts. Is that it? You’re looking for one of our famous Avicenna loonies, none with less than a master’s, each with a direct line to Mars, Atlantis, Lemuria, Graceland or Mount Shasta? Is that it?” For the first time, the unicorn pushed its head hard into her hand, as NMC would do. The horn pricked her palm lightly.

  For the next three hours, she made her way from the downtown streets to the university’s red-tiled enclave, and back again, with small side excursions into doorways, subway stations, even parking lots. She developed a peculiar cramp in her neck from snapping frequent glances at her pocket to be sure that the unicorn was staying out of sight. Whenever it indicated interest in a wild red gaze, storks’-nest hair, a shopping cart crammed with green plastic bags, or a droning monologue concerning Jesus, AIDS, and the Kennedys, she trudged doggedly after one more street apostle to open one more conversation with the moon. Once the unicorn showed itself, the result was always the same.

  “It likes beards,” she told Farrell late that night, as he patiently massaged her feet. “Bushy beards—the wilder and filthier, the better. Hair, too, especially that pattern baldness tonsure look. Sandals, yes, definitely—it doesn’t like boots or sneakers at all, and it can’t make up its mind about Birkenstocks. Prefers blankets and serapes to coats, dark hair to light, older to younger, the silent ones to the walking sound trucks—men to women, absolutely. Won’t even stick its head out for a woman.”

  “It’s hard to blame the poor thing,” Farrell mused. “For a unicorn, men would be a bunch of big, stupid guys with swords and whatnot. Women are betrayal, every time, simple as that. It wasn’t Gloria Steinem who wove that tapestry.” He squeezed toes gently with one hand, a bruised heel with the other. “What did they do when they actually saw it?”

  The unicorn glanced at them over the edge of the cat box, where its visit had been cause for an orgy of squeaking, purring and teething. Julie said, “What do you think? It was bad. It got pretty damn awful. Some of them fell down on th
eir knees and started laughing and crying and praying their heads off. There were a couple who just sort of crooned and moaned to it—and I told you about the poor Frozen-Yogurt Man—and then there was one guy who tried to grab it away and run off with it. But it wasn’t having that, and it jabbed him really hard. Nobody noticed, thank God.” She laughed wearily, presenting her other foot for treatment. “The rest—oh, I’d say they should be halfway to Portland by now. Screaming all the way.”

  Farrell grunted thoughtfully, but asked no more questions until Julie was in bed and he was sitting across the room playing her favorite Campion lute song. She was nearly asleep when his voice bumbled slowly against her half-dream like a fly at a window. “It can’t know anyone who’s not in the tapestry. There’s the answer. There it is.”

  “There it is,” she echoed him, barely hearing her own words. Farrell put down the lute and came to her, sitting on the bed to grip her shoulder.

  “Jewel, listen, wake up and listen to me! It’s trying to find someone who was in that tapestry with it—we even know what he looks like, more or less. An old guy, ragged and dirty, big beard, sandals—some kind of monk, most likely. Though what a unicorn would be doing anywhere near your average monk is more than I can figure. Are you awake, Jewel?”