Forests of the Heart

by Charles de Lint

  “And I am an only child,” Sunday replied.

  Nuala sighed. “We are all who we are, none of us more important than the other.”

  But Tommy’s eyes had gone wide. Miki knew exactly how he was feeling because she was still stumbling over Sunday describing the housekeeper as belonging to the spiritworld.

  “Wait a sec’,” she said. “Do you mean—”

  “We don’t have time for this,” Zulema said, interrupting.

  Nuala nodded. She sat down on a piece of the wall. With the bowl on her lap, she began to caress its perimeter with the stick. Within moments the circular motion woke up a deep, resonant drone that seemed far out of proportion for the size of the bowl. Sunday and Zulema sat on their heels in front of Nuala so that the three of them made up the points of a triangle. Miki and the others stood back, watching.

  Sunday took smudgesticks out of her pocket and gave one to her sister. When they lit them, the sweet smell of cedar and sage filled the air. Miki shook her head. Anyone looking at them would think they were getting soaked by the freezing rain that continued to fall a heartbeat away from wherever it was that they were standing, but here they were, untouched by the weather and dry enough to be burning smudgesticks.

  Sunday and Zulema began to chant, their voices rising and falling in twinned cadences that played against the thrumming drone that came from the bowl. Nuala remained silent, but her eyes were closed in concentration.

  “What’re they saying?” Miki whispered to Tommy.

  “I don’t know exactly. Calling on the spirits to help, I’m guessing.”

  “We’re not going to see them, are we?” Miki asked. “I mean, they’re not going to actually show up or anything, right?”

  Salvador leaned close to catch Tommy’s answer, a worried look in his features.

  “I don’t think so …”

  “Todo está loco,” Salvador muttered.

  Miki didn’t really know any Spanish, but it wasn’t hard to figure out what he’d said. Things were crazy.

  “No kidding,” she said.

  And then the strangeness factor got cranked up yet another notch.

  The chanting suddenly broke off. The hum of the bowl took longer to fade, although Nuala had removed the stick from its rim long moments before.

  Turning back to look at the wall of the house, Miki and the others were just in time to see a flood of light come spilling through the makeshift wooden barrier that had been built over the hole the Glasduine had made when escaping. It was a dazzling display made up of a thousand different shades of green, veined with blue and gold and amber bands, all of it shimmering and shifting. The light hung there by the wall, a throbbing glow that swelled with each rhythmic pulse until it suddenly sped off across the lawn, disappearing into the trees. In its wake it left behind a pathway of that same green and gold light that undulated from the wall of the house to where it ran into the woods. It was like a ribbon touched by a constant breeze, four feet across. light in which colors glimmered and flared, watching.

  The three women backed away from it until they were standing near Miki and the others.

  “This isn’t right,” Zulema said.

  Sunday nodded, turning to Nuala. “Believe me. This is nothing we called up.”

  ‘It’s easy to see now that

  “I know,” the housekeeper said, her voice tired. it was there all along—invisible until we allowed it to manifest itself. I knew we should have left well enough alone.”

  “But what is it?” Miki wanted to know.

  She walked up closer to it. The pulsing of the colors woke an odd yearning inside her. They put her in mind of childhood days when she was able to escape the pubs and kitchens where her uncle held court, and her father drank himself senseless. The smell of peat came to her. The rich greens of hills.

  “It has something to do with the Glasduine,” Nuala said. “I can feel its presence in that light.”

  Miki glanced at her before returning her gaze to the mesmerizing ribbon of light.

  “But the Glasduine’s evil,” she said. “Isn’t that what you told us? This doesn’t feel evil at all.”

  “No,” Nuala agreed. “It simply is.”

  Sunday nodded. “This is the thread connecting the Glasduine to the place from which it was drawn.”

  “You mean like some kind of spiritual umbilical cord?” Tommy asked.

  “Pretty much,” Zulema told him.

  “It almost looks like you could pick it up,” Miki said. “Like … like the fabric they use in those installations that people have done where they run some piece of cloth that’s hundreds and hundreds of yards long over the side of a building, or across a lawn like this. I wonder what it feels like.”

  “Don’t!” Nuala and Sunday said simultaneously.

  But they were too late. Miki had already stooped down to touch the pulsing ribbon. Her hands went into the light and she was immediately pulled onto it and carried away, tumbling head over heels along the length of the path that the Glasduine had taken after bursting through the wall.

  “Oh, shit!” Tommy cried.

  He ran forward to try and grab her legs before it took her too far away. Zulema moved to block his way, but she miscalculated and only succeeded in knocking him off-balance. His arms pinwheeled for balance before he fell onto the ribbon as well. The light carried him off, as quickly and smoothly as it had Miki, and then they were both gone.

  “We must—” Sunday began.

  “Do nothing,” Zulema said, her voice heavy with the loss they were both feeling. “Except finish the task Nancy left us. We’ll follow the path to where it crosses over and close this world to the creature.”

  “But…”

  “I know. We should have realized that Whiteduck’s prophecies always have a way of fulfilling themselves, no matter how we try to forestall them.”

  “But Miki,” Salvador said, staring helplessly at the pulsing ribbon. “And your nephew. What will become of them?”

  “We must protect this world from the creature’s return,” Zulema told him. “That is our first priority.”

  The Creek sisters left the two of them standing there by the house and followed the ribbon of light into the woods, their backs stooped as though they carried a great weight.

  Salvador turned to Nuala. “¿Y bien?” he said. “They said you have some power over the spirits. Won’t you help them?”

  Nuala shook her head. “I can’t. I have no power except for that which lets me protect this house in my charge.” She glanced at where the creature had broken through from the sculpting studio. “And you see how effective I have been.”

  She collected her singing bowl from where she’d left it, then walked back towards the kitchen door.

  “Mayo ellos vaya con Dios,” Salvador said in a low voice.

  He made the sign of the cross, then slowly followed the housekeeper inside.

  7

  At some point, the Gentry simply refused to run anymore.

  What passed for hours in the world they’d left behind was a hunt of long days and nights in the spiritworld. The Gentry ran as wolves through an ever-changing landscape, deeper and deeper into the spiritworld, the Glasduine following relentlessly on their heels. They managed to keep ahead of the creature, but it pressed them so close that they could get no respite, not even a moment’s rest. No matter what tricks or wiles they brought into play, the Glasduine saw through them all. In the end it came to a test of endurance and finally the Gentry turned on their pursuer, determined to make a stand while they still had the strength to fight.

  What they had wasn’t enough, Donal realized as the Glasduine finally came face to face with its quarry. What they had would never have been enough. They were a primal force, but the Glasduine was a part of the very source from which the Gentry drew their strengths.

  Most recently, the chase had led through a territory of high mountains and deep canyons, with the Gentry loping along ridgebacks, scrambling up slopes of loose
rock fragments and boulders, the Glasduine following in their wake as though they were joined, their minds linked, their fates inexorably tied to each other. The Gentry made their stand at the flank of a towering butte where two canyons met in a V. They were to await the leader’s signal, attacking as a group, rather than individuals. But when the Glasduine came upon them, one of the wolves couldn’t wait.

  He lunged for the Glasduine’s throat only to be plucked from the air and torn to pieces. Sickened, Donal tried to turn the Glasduine away from attacking the rest, but with that first kill, he couldn’t pretend to be in control any longer. While he might have set the Glasduine on the trail of the wolves, the creature had taken up the chase only because it had its own score to settle with them.

  For a long moment the Gentry stood motionless, staring at the remains of their comrade that lay scattered upon the stones around the Glasduine. It was only when they attacked, coming at the creature from all sides in a snarling rush, that Donal realized that they, too, knew they had no hope to bring their pursuer down. They attacked as they did so that they would die fighting, as the hard men they were, rather than be hunted down like rodents.

  The battle was short, though the Gentry fought like devils. The leader was the last to die. He met the Glasduine’s gaze without flinching, a half-smile playing on his lips, blood dripping from a half-dozen wounds, his companions torn apart, transformed by the Glasduine into nothing more than chunks of bleeding flesh.

  “Ah, you’re hard,” he said. He spat on the stones at his feet, a spew of red. “I’ll give you that. But I’ve this much bloody consolation. You’re corrupted now and there’s no going back for you. All it took was killing the first of us and you’re just as bloody damned as I am.”

  Donal couldn’t tell if the Gentry’s leader was talking to him or the Glasduine. It didn’t matter. Either way it was true.

  “So fuck off away with yourself,” the leader managed to get out before he made his final charge and the creature tore him apart.

  For a time the Glasduine went away into itself then, its mind going somewhere Donal couldn’t follow. He drifted out of its body, still linked, but no longer housed in the flesh. He floated in the still air, slowly turning in a circle, still the ghost. He would always be a ghost now. There would be no return to how things had been.

  Now what? he thought.

  He’d managed to turn the Glasduine away from those he loved, from the world he’d imperiled, but what was to stop it from returning? They were deep in the spiritworld, so deep he knew it would take him forever and a day to find his way back, if he even could. But that was him. He was nothing. The Glasduine might be able to return in the blink of an eye. And once there it would—

  His mind went still when he saw that the Glasduine had returned from whatever place its attention had drifted to. Its head was cocked, listening. And then Donal heard it, too. The summons. An insistent call that demanded to be heard and answered. Like the Glasduine, he recognized its source. He knew the Glasduine was so powerful that this summoning call had no power over it, but because of who it was that called, it would answer. For its own corrupt reasons.

  No, he thought. You can’t—

  But he had no more control of the Glasduine now than he had ever had.

  As it allowed itself to be drawn to the source of the summoning call, there was only time for Donal to will himself back into the Glasduine’s flesh and ride along in the creature’s body to where it would execute its next act of horror.

  8

  Bettina hadn’t actually expected the summoning to work. Unlike her wolf, she didn’t believe that she had any true connection to either the Glasduine or Donal, nor did she consider herself to have the necessary brujería the spell would require. But there was so much at stake that she had to make the attempt.

  So she sent out her summoning call with a pretense of strength she didn’t feel. Sent it out with power when all she truly held were small parcels of luck. Her brujería was a healing magic, augmented by her father’s blood, perhaps, but mostly entwined with her knowledge of a curandera’s art. She knew herbs and the use of medicines from what her abuela and Loleta Manuel had taught her. She had her relationship with los santos and the spirits. She could infuse charms and milagros with the push those who accepted them needed to accomplish what they could have done on their own, if they only had the necessary self-confidence to do so.

  These weren’t powerful spells. They were only small magics that depended more on paying attention to how the world worked, to recognizing the pattern all things had to one other and helping to make connections between them when those connections were severed, or too tangled to be of practical use. They were a curandera’s magic, not a bruja’s, and she was sure that they would no more help her summon the Glasduine than they could raise the dead.

  But it did respond.

  The Glasduine arrived in the canyon like a dervishing wind, with a suddenness and force that knocked her and her wolf off their feet. That wind sent up a cloud of dust and tore apart the remains of the fallen saguaro, spraying its broken ribs about them like bullets. It was only because they were sprawled on the dirt at the time that neither of them was hit by one of the wooden projectiles.

  “Sweet Bridget,” el lobo said, his voice holding the same shock that Bettina was feeling, “How could we be so naive as to think we could stop such a creature by ourselves?”

  Bettina had no words to reply. Through the settling dust, she stared in horror at the towering monstrosity. It seemed to be as much tree as human, a man-shaped fusion of bark and branch and corded roots from which sprouted an untidy snarl of twigs and leaves, feathers and bits of matted fur. But the barklike skin was supple and the Glasduine moved with an easy, panther’s grace. Its face was the wooden mask she remembered from the sculpting studio in Kellygnow, only now the features were mobile, snarling, eyes dark with a cunning rage. The rough tangle of vines and leaves that trailed from its shoulders and made up its hair and beard moved of their own accord, coiling and writhing like a nest of disturbed snakes.

  The only movement in the canyon were those vines. Neither Bettina nor her wolf felt able to get up from where they’d been thrown. The sheer weight of the Glasduine’s presence paralyzed them. They could see that they wouldn’t be its first victim. The creature had blood splattered on the bark of its limbs and torso—stark against the green leafing and barklike skin. Fresh blood, from the wet glisten of it.

  For a long moment the Glasduine seemed content to simply hold onto its anticipation, devouring Bettina with its dark gaze. When it finally took a step toward her, she scrambled to her feet. Before she could dodge, a long powerful arm reached out to snatch her, fingers with a grip like a vise closing on her shoulder.

  “No!” she cried, but the sound came out as the shriek of a hawk.

  The Glasduine’s touch woke something inside her—a long frenzied wail that shifted the bones under her skin, an ache rising deep up from the marrow of her soul. It brought her father’s blood bubbling up through her veins and she was wracked with an indescribable pain, as though every muscle she had was spasming, her skin tearing, her bones grinding against each other. Her mother’s rosary dropped from her hand. Feathers burst out over her skin, her face pulled into a sharp, narrower shape, and she was suddenly only a fraction of her normal size, slipping free from the rough fingers that had trapped her.

  The Glasduine tightened its grip, but not quickly enough to stop the hawk Bettina had become from rising up, panicked, frantically beating the air with her wings. She might have escaped then, but she was too unfamiliar with this new form, floundering where her father would have easily risen up into the sky. The Glasduine’s other fist whipped around and struck her a glancing blow that sent her tumbling head over heels through the air, down into the dirt. Barely conscious, stunned as much from her own transformation as from the blow, she could only lie there and watch the Glasduine move towards her.

  But her wolf was quicker.

&nb
sp; He had transformed, too, from a handsome wolf of a man into a true wolf, though unlike Bettina’s change, his was of his own will, practiced and smooth. He darted ahead of the Glasduine and snatched her up with a bite that was firm enough to hold her, but didn’t break the skin. The Glasduine roared as el lobo took off, racing down the canyon with his small feathered burden. No fool, he. One look at the creature was all he’d needed to know that they couldn’t possibly stand up to it. Their only hope was to flee.

  He ran as only an felsos could run, blindingly swift, like wind, like lightning, weaving around boulders and other obstructions when he couldn’t simply clear them with a bound.

  But the Glasduine was as quick, perhaps quicker. It kept up easily. Too easily. Glancing back over his shoulder, el lobo despaired. That first burst of distance he’d managed to put between them and the Glasduine was steadily being eaten away and the damned thing was almost on his heels.

  9

  Ellie wasn’t as quick to recover as Aunt Nancy, but she still managed to get to the top of the rocks where Hunter had collapsed in time to see Bettina and her companion’s transformations, the Glasduine’s attack, the fleeing wolf with the hawk in its mouth, the monster hot on its trail. She put a palm against her temple, pressing hard in a futile attempt to relieve some of the pain that had lodged behind her brow.

  “That’s what we’re supposed to be stopping?” she said to Aunt Nancy, staring at where the Glasduine had disappeared around a bend in the canyon. “Are you completely insane?”

  “There’s no one else,” Aunt Nancy said.

  “Like hell there isn’t. There must be something stronger than us that can try to deal with it.”

  Aunt Nancy gave her one of those discomforting grins that did nothing to put Ellie at her ease.

  “You have no idea how strong we are, girl,” she said.

  “That’s right,” Ellie told her. “I have no idea about anything that’s been going on since I was first stupid enough to show up at Kellygnow.” She took another look at the now-empty canyon. “I guess Bettina and her friend were playing out of their league, too.”