Forests of the Heart

by Charles de Lint

  “I know, I know,” Bettina said. “Of course you’re not. But I felt betrayed by spirit dogs.”

  “Se traicionamos.” We were betrayed.

  “Sí. I understand that now.”

  She waited for them to go on, but they fell back to their silent watching.

  “What can I do to make amends?” Bettina asked.

  Still they gave back silence.

  “For favor,” she said. “Lo imploro. Hable a mi. “ Speak to me.

  Finally one of them blinked.

  “Why should we trust you?” it asked.

  “You only want us to kill monsters,” another said.

  “You think we are monsters.”

  “No somos monstruos.”

  “Somos los cadejos.”

  “Infeliz.” Unhappy.

  “No deseado.” Unwanted.

  “Los homeless.”

  Bettina thought her heart would break. They were still so serious and grave, so unlike the happy creatures she’d known. She could hear the pain in their voices and to know that she was the one who had put that pain there, that she had stolen away their joy, was almost too much for her to bear.

  “I can’t make you trust me,” she said. “How could I? I can only ask you to give me another chance to prove myself true.”

  Los cadejos looked at each other, as though communicating silently.

  “We see you are sincere,” one of them finally said.

  “Or think you are sincere.”

  “So we are willing to forgive you.”

  “But there is a cost.”

  Bettina refused to look at her wolf. She knew what he was thinking, but it didn’t matter.

  “What will be the cost?” she asked.

  “You must give up that which you hold most dear.”

  “For as long as you gave us up.”

  “By this you will earn our trust.”

  Bettina looked at them for a long moment, then slowly shook her head.

  “I can’t do it again,” she said. Los cadejos cocked their heads.” ¿Qué significa?” one of them asked.

  “Don’t you see?” she told them. “During all that time … Abuela, Papa, you … all were lost to me. How can you ask me to do so again?”“We were part of what you held dearest?”

  “Then why did you abandon us?”

  “I did not know I was doing so until you were gone. And then … then … you must understand. The coming of the clown dog marked the beginning of all my losses. It made me angry and afraid of spirit dogs.”

  “I can vouch for that,” her wolf said.

  Los cadejos looked his way.

  “Please,” Bettina said to him. “This is between us.” She returned her attention to the half-circle of rainbow-colored dogs that sat before her. “I was wrong. But I did not send you away. You left on your own. What I did wrong was not calling you back to me until now.”

  “We must think on this,” one of los cadejos said after they had all looked at each other again.

  “Gracias.”

  “We promise nothing.”

  “I understand.”

  “We are not here to hunt monsters for you.”

  “Sí” Bettina said. “I understand. I do not ask this of you.”

  The little dogs rose then and returned the way they’d come, disappearing among the prickly pear. Bettina sighed. Then why are you here? she had wanted to ask them. Why did you ever choose me in the first place? Surely they could make a home for themselves anywhere.

  “Well, that was productive,” el lobo said.

  Bettina turned to look at him, disappointed.

  “How could I ask anything of them but forgiveness?” she said.

  He shrugged. “You said it yourself. You didn’t send them away. Your only crime was in not calling them back to you when they left.”

  “It seems to me more complicated than that.”

  “Perhaps. But now we’re back where we started. There’s a monster loose and we have no way to find it. Unless …” He gave Bettina a thoughtful look.

  “Unless what?” she asked, certain she wasn’t going to like whatever it was.

  “You call the Glasduine to us,” he said. “The way you called the little dogs.”

  “I have nothing in common with that monster.”

  “No. But you knew the pup.”

  “Barely.”

  “And,” her wolf went on, “if he had even an ounce of manhood in him, he would have found you attractive.”

  Bettina blushed. “Oh, please …”

  “But don’t you see? It’s a connection. I’ll wager that if you call to it, the Glasduine will come.”

  “And then?” she asked.

  “We will deal with it as we must.”

  He sounded far more confident than he could be, Bettina thought. But she knew they had no other choice than to try. It was that, or abandon the chase and then whatever harm the Glasduine did, they would have to accept some responsibility for it, since they hadn’t tried to stop it.

  “Bien,” she said. “But not here. I won’t have it come to this place—not now that I know what it is and have so recently found it.”

  “Agreed,” el lobo said. He rose smoothly to his feet and offered her a hand up. “Where did you have in mind?”

  Bettina dusted the dirt from her knees. She raised her gaze to the sky, wishing her papa was there, that she could ask his advice. But she already knew what he would say: Don’t get involved in any struggle between spirits. See where it led your abuela.

  “Somewhere out of the view of those sacred mountains,” she said.

  El lobo nodded. He glanced up the hill to where los cadejos had disappeared.

  “And the little dogs?” he asked.

  “They will find us when they’re ready.”

  He nodded again. Neither of them said what lay unspoken between them: If there was anything left of them to find after they had confronted the Glasduine.

  They made their way down to the dry wash and walked along the smooth sand under the mesquite trees, backtracking the course the water took rushing down from the higher ground during the rainy seasons. After a while, the wash brought them to a long, meandering arroyo that cut deeply into the hills. Scrambling around boulders, they moved steadily uphill, the sides of the arroyo rising just as constantly on either side of them until eventually they reached a place where the peaks of the Baboquivari Mountains could no longer be seen. Bettina finally stopped by the long, ribbed remains of a saguaro that had toppled over many years ago. It was obviously a place where others had stopped in some long-ago time for many of the stones on either side of the gorge held marks that the previous visitors carved onto their surfaces.

  “This will do,” Bettina said.

  El lobo nodded. He wandered over to the side of the gorge and traced a spiraling pictograph with his finger before joining her by the fallen saguaro.

  “Have you been here before?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “But I’ve been in places like it outside of la época del mito.”

  “I have not,” he told her. “It’s all rather… remarkable. There seems to be so much space and the sky has such weight I almost find it hard to breathe.”

  Bettina smiled. “It’s just the opposite for me,” she said. “Here I feel light-footed and my heart swells to fill the space around me. Your forests make me feel claustrophobic.”

  “But it’s easier to avoid prying eyes in my forests. And here everything is so … prickly.”

  “It’s easy enough to find privacy here if you want it,” she told him. “The difference is it has more to do with stillness and distance.”

  “You will have to show me … when this is done.”

  “Sí. When this is done.”

  She chose a broad, flat stone near the dead saguaro and sat cross-legged upon it. From her pocket she took the rosary her mother had sent her. Her wolf gave it a dubious look.

  “Do you think that will help with a spirit as old as this?�
�� he said.

  “It’s not for the Glasduine,” Bettina told him. “It’s for me. To remind me that I have my own ancient spirits looking out for me.”

  El lobo regarded the small cross. “The Glasduine was already ancient when the man they hung on that cross was born.”

  “Perhaps,” Bettina said. “But who made spirits such as the Glasduine? Who called it and all the world into being? Is He not more ancient still?”

  “I have heard a different story as to how the world came into being.”

  Bettina shrugged.

  “And you trust this God?” her wolf asked. “I’ve heard he doesn’t think so highly of women.”

  “I’ll admit I’ve had my difficulties with that as well,” Bettina said. “But when I pray, it’s not to the Father or the Son, but to la Novia del Desierto. The Mother who was a bride of the desert before she was a bride of the church.”

  El lobo regarded her for a long moment, then nodded. “As things stand, I wouldn’t turn my back on anyone who might be able to help us. I’d welcome the devil himself if I thought he could give us a hand.”

  “Don’t even joke about such a thing,” Bettina said and quickly made the sign of the cross.

  “Who said I was joking?”

  “Please…”

  “I’m sorry,” he told her, when he saw that she was genuinely upset. “But you know, one religion’s demons can be another’s gods.”

  “Sí,” Bettina said.

  She knew that. She had only to look at herself, at how she was brought up with the curious mix of folklore and Christianity, to understand the contradictions that could mingle, jostling elbow to elbow in one’s belief systems.

  “But I think,” she went on, “that we have only ourselves to look to for strength in what we undertake today.”

  Her wolf nodded. They both knew the dangers of what they were about to attempt. De verdad, Bettina doubted they’d be able to either heal or destroy this creature she was about to call up. But they had to make the attempt.

  “I’ve had a thought,” el lobo said, as though reading her mind. “About the Glasduine.”

  Bettina raised her eyebrows in a question.

  “It came to me,” he said, “from this business of croí baile we spoke of earlier. What you call el bosque del corazón.”

  “What of it?”

  “Well, the Glasduine must have one as well—don’t you think? Its own heart home.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “But it stands to reason. All spirits must have one.”

  “¿Y así?”

  “Well,” her wolf said. “If it turns out that you can’t heal it, and I can’t kill it, perhaps we can trap it in its croí baile. Lock it in there so that the only thing it can hurt is itself.”

  “It would be a terrible place,” Bettina said. “Wouldn’t it? If the Glasduine was created out of Donal’s basest instincts …”

  “It would probably not be good,” he agreed.

  “And Donal? Do we trap him in there with it?”

  “There is always a price to be paid,” el lobo said. “The pup knew the danger when he played with the mask.”

  Did he? Bettina wondered. But she knew her wolf was right. If Donal needed to be sacrificed for the greater good of ending the Glasduine’s menace, she could make no argument against it.

  “Es verdad,” she said. It’s the truth. “Now prepare yourself.”

  Her wolf shook the tension out of his hands and rolled his shoulders.

  “I’m ready,” he said.

  At least one of them was, Bettina thought.

  Running her finger along the seeds of the rosary her mother had sent her, she closed her eyes and sent out the summoning call. Not asking this time, as she had with los cadejos, but demanding. Firmly, with a strength she didn’t truly feel.

  5

  Aunt Nancy lifted her head. “Did you hear that?” she asked.

  Ellie swallowed, and gave a slow nod. She realized that it had been floating there on the periphery of her senses for some time now, only drifting into her awareness at this moment, when the call had suddenly grown so much stronger. It was an eerie sound, audible only inside her head. She recognized it as a summons, but while it made her skin prickle, she knew it wasn’t directed at her. When she glanced at Hunter, she saw that even he had heard the silent call. The unnatural intrusion into his mind had drained his features of much of their color.

  “What… what is it?” he asked.

  “That pair we’re following,” Aunt Nancy said. “They’re calling the Glasduine to them. Come, we must hurry.”

  If Ellie had ever taken a stranger journey, it was only in her dreams. Truth was, all of this felt like dream—from first seeing the men smoking their cigarettes in Kellygnow’s backyard to this increasingly disconcerting expedition. Stepping across from the Newford ice storm into a fairy-tale autumn wood had been unsettling, though not altogether unpleasant, but the subsequent journey was leaving her feeling more and more disoriented with each chunk of distance they put behind them. Because nothing stayed the same.

  One moment they were in the fairy-tale wood, then they were walking across arctic tundra, the horizon stretching impossibly far on all sides with no sign anywhere of the forest they’d just quit. They moved from marshlands where they had to pick their route with care, every lifted step making a sucking sound as they pulled their feet from the wet ground, to arid badlands where the dry air seemed to pull all the moisture out of their skin and the air tasted like dust. A dip in the ground took them into a lush, sleepy valley where willows clustered along the banks of a slow-moving river and herds of grazing deer barely raised their heads at their passage, then they turned a bend to find mountains as tall as the Rockies rearing up all around them, the ground underfoot turned to shale and loose stones.

  The seasons changed, too, running through spring and summer, autumn and winter, following no particular order. Sometimes the climate changed with the landscape, sometimes it abruptly shifted while the landscape remained the same. They went from carrying their winter jackets under their arms, to bundling up and wishing they had down parkas.

  What was most disconcerting was that these transitions between the various landscapes and climates were subtle. There was no abrupt change like that first cross-over; you simply became aware that you were somewhere else, or that the pleasant summer’s day had suddenly acquired a wind with a winter’s bite. The seamless flow from one to another was what made the journey feel so dreamlike in particular. Where else but in a dream could one experience such a phenomenon?

  “So,” Ellie said at one point. “Is it always so confusing here? How do you even know where we’re going?”

  Because unless all of these pocket worlds were laid out in some set pattern, she had no idea how anyone could navigate so easily among them.

  Aunt Nancy shrugged. “Manidò-akì is what we make it.”

  “We’re doing this?”

  “Not just the three of us, but all people. Everyone carries a piece of the spiritworld in them, and that fragment is echoed in our hearts—we call it our abinàs-odey. One’s heart place. What we are traveling through here is an area that is thick with them, a quilt pattern that overlays the spiritworld, little pockets of many people’s abinàs-odey.”

  “Can anybody just—” Ellie searched for the word. “Connect with their heart place? I mean, travel there?”

  “Most people do so only in their dreams.”

  “And it’s always like this?” Hunter asked. “Some lonesome place out in the wilderness?”

  “Oh, no. You can find whole cities created out of the crazy-quilt pattern of several thousand abinàs-odey. Cities, towns, villages, but also more solitary places of habitation like a single farm, or a hunt camp.”

  “Mine would definitely be a city place,” Hunter said. “All this wild country kind of spooks me.”

  They were traveling at the moment through a landscape of rugged red hills, the predominant vegetation b
eing scrub brush and clumps of dry, browning grasses. The sun was just starting its climb up from the horizon and the air was chill enough for them to see their breath.

  “I like it,” Ellie said. “Especially places like this, where it feels like all the excess has been stripped away and you can see the real heart and bones underneath.”

  “I prefer the woodlands of the Kickaha Mountains,” Aunt Nancy said. “There’s something comforting about the close press of the trees when you move through those forests. You can’t take a step without touching something and it feels to me like the land itself is welcoming me with the scrape of a twig, the brush of a leaf. Like a mother, tousling the hair of her child as she runs by.”

  “I like that, too,” Ellie said. “And I like the way you put it. It’s not what…”

  Her voice trailed off as she realized what she’d been about to say.

  “What you expected from some old bush woman?” Aunt Nancy finished for her.

  “No. Well, maybe a little bit.”

  What had happened was that the simple poetry of how Aunt Nancy had described walking in the woods around her home had made Ellie reconsider the image she was carrying of the older woman. She wasn’t just this brusque, kind of scary old medicine woman.

  Aunt Nancy shot her a grin, as though aware of what Ellie was thinking.

  “There’s a lot we don’t know about each other,” the old woman said. “Which is why it’s always better to walk up to any new experience without any preconceptions.”

  Ellie nodded. “I should know that. I’m sorry.”

  But Aunt Nancy’s grin only grew wider. “Hell, girl. Don’t be sorry. I cultivate that image. I can’t tell you how much wasted time it’s saved me, not having to get all warm and cuddly with people who just want a piece of my medicine but otherwise wouldn’t give me the time of day. I figure if I make it a little tough on them, maybe they’ll take the time to think of some way they can deal with their problems on their own, instead of always looking for a quick medicine fix.”

  They reached the crest of one of those tall-backed red hills. The sun was higher and the hills just seemed to go on forever. The summons for the Glasduine grew more urgent for a moment, then faded again, as though the force of its call was being swept back and forth across the spiritworld and they were no longer directly in its range.