Spiritwalk by Charles de Lint
The downside of all this was that she had no idea that he was so crazy about her—or at least she never let on that she did—because he’d never got up the nerve to tell her. He’d been very cool about everything, just hanging out with her, not coming on, being her pal, and now he just didn’t know how to broach the subject.
He probably wasn’t even her type. Probably she’d go for a guy like Blue, who—thankfully—already had a girlfriend. But in the three weeks he’d known her, he hadn’t seen her go out with anybody, so he didn’t know what her type was.
Maybe it was him.
Yeah, and maybe the Easter Bunny really did hide all those eggs on Easter Eve....
Tonight it was just the two of them, sitting together in the small ground-floor parlor on the Patterson Avenue side of the House where the people interested in the old religion usually gathered in the evenings. The room was called the Birkentree Room—which was very appropriate, Julianne had told him once, seeing how the birken tree was another name for the birch, which stood for the first month of the druidic calendar of the trees and represented a time of beginning and cleansing. But Esmeralda had told Cal one day that the name actualy came about because a Scots folksinger used to live in the room. “The Birken Tree” was an old traditional song that was kind of her signature tune, so eventually people just named the room after it. When Cal had mentioned this to Julianne, she’d just smiled and told him that it didn’t make any difference; it didn’t change the appropriateness of the room’s name.
Naturally, even though she obviously hadn’t thought it was a stupid thing for him to have mentioned, he’d still ended up feeling like he was about an inch tall. He got all flushed whenever he thought about it—it and the hundred other times he figured he’d made an ass of himself around her.
“It’s so weird,” she was saying now.
“About your cloak?” Cal said.
Julianne nodded. “I just can’t figure out what happened to it. I hung it up in my closet right after I got in from the ritual last night and it was still there when I put away my bathrobe after my shower, but this morning it was gone. Someone had to have come in while I was sleeping and taken it.”
“Weird,” Cal agreed.
He was still trying to ignore the image of her taking a shower that refused to leave his mind’s eye.
Down, hormones, down, he commanded.
It didn’t do much good. Not when she was sitting there on the other end of the sofa, her legs folded under her, looking so damn gorgeous that it was all he could do not to stare. He crossed his legs to hide the telltale indication of his more than platonic interest in her.
Julianne sighed. “Things just don’t get stolen in Tamson House,” she said. “It just... doesn’t happen.”
“Did you talk to Blue about it?” Cal asked.
“No. I didn’t want to start up any weird vibes, because maybe it’s just someone playing a prank on me. But still...” She turned the deep green of her gaze fully on him. “There’s something different in the air tonight, don’t you think? It’s like something’s about to happen—everything’s all crackling with pent-up energies just waiting to let go.”
Cal wished she hadn’t used those particular words to describe what she was feeling. He knew all about pent-up energies. And he was going to get lost in those eyes. Then he realized that she was waiting for him to say something.
“I... uh”—he cleared his throat—“know what you mean.”
Oh, brilliant. What was it about her that always left him tongue-tied and thinking about sex? He wasn’t like this normally. Hell, he worked as a data processor in an office with a half-dozen beautiful women and he just hung out with them, made jokes, life was easy, they were all friends. Why couldn’t he just relax for once? Or at least tell her how he felt?
She’d fallen silent, head cocked to one side as though she was listening to something just out of hearing range.
Just do it, Cal told himself. Tell her now before somebody else comes into the room.
“You know, uh, Julianne,” he began.
She blinked lazily, then focused on him. His pulse jumped into double time.
“I—”
There was a sudden roaring sound and he never got a chance to finish what he’d barely begun. The sofa they were sitting on tumbled over backward and to one side, spilling Julianne into his arms, but he had no time to appreciate the moment. The air was filled with the crackle and crunch of breaking wood and then a tree—a giant, full-grown, honest-to-real, no-fooling, enormous old oak tree—came pushing up out of the floor, splintering floorboards and anything else in its way.
He tugged Julianne aside as a large branch whipped out of the jagged hole in the floor and whistled by them, cutting the air just where she’d been. Adrenaline whined through his body so that he was manhandling the big sofa before his rational mind could tell him that what he was doing wasn’t possible. He pulled it the rest of the way across the room, all the way over, with the two of them between it and the wall, the body of the sofa protecting them from the other branches as they came whipping out of the floor as well as from the slabs of plaster and wood that crashed down from the ceiling as the tree continued its rapid upward movement.
And then he collapsed and just hung on to Julianne.
The air was thick with plaster dust and the sound of tearing wood, which was as loud as thunder. The floor and wall against which they were pressed shook with the violent fury of the tree’s passage through the room. Julianne gripped him back, arms holding him tightly, head buried against his shoulder.
They were going to die, Cal thought.
Fear raced at a panic-quick speed through him, but for all his terror, he found himself focusing on Julianne being in his arms and realized that if they were going to die—
Well, at least I’m dying happy.
8
Ginny Saunders was putting away books in the Library that evening. Esmeralda marked the passages and chapters to be entered into the computer, and the students they’d hired did the actual data entry, but it was Ginny who knew where to find the necessary texts and insisted on replacing them on their shelves herself afterward. If was the last thing she did every night before leaving the Library, the final task of her daily routine.
She enjoyed the solitude at that time of day, the sense of orderliness and completion that the practice of tidying up left her with. She read voraciously, but was also a lover of books for their own sake. She appreciated the look of the bindings, lined up in neat rows on the shelves, the idea that so much knowledge and thought was tucked away between the boards of all those many books under her care.
She knew that there were people who thought she was a little strange—“moling away” in here, as Tim liked to put it—but it didn’t bother her for a moment what people thought. She’d been wealthy in her time, and she’d been poor, but this was the first time she’d been responsible for something and she liked the feeling. It might just be a private library, in an odd old house, and she received only her room and board for her work, but it was still a full-time job and the satisfaction she derived from it more than made up for what people thought she was missing in the world that turned and spun on its mad axis beyond the Library’s walls. She’d spent most of her life in that world and found only sorrow and pain there.
Neither existed for her here. Here she didn’t need a shell to protect her from the world—the House itself provided that. Here she could vicariously experience what she’d never had the nerve or understanding to sample before. Here she could finally relax and be herself. And it wasn’t boring. Not for a moment. Not with all these books, nor the glass display cases laden with curiosities and artifacts, nor the trickle of genuinely interesting people who made their treks into what she thought of as the mind of this fascinating building.
She hummed tunelessly under her breath as she shifted the ladder to the next shelf. Beth Norton, a second-year Carleton University student, had just left to pick her daughter up from the ba
The book felt odd in her hand. The leather binding was suddenly rough with an almost barklike texture. The weight was different than she remembered it to be.
Frowning, she took it over under a light. The binding looked as though someone had taken a vegetable grater to its surface. She ran a finger across the roughness and her frown deepened. The binding hadn’t been marred. There was something stuck to it. She rubbed a fleck of it away to reveal the gleam of leather underneath. Peering closer, she realized that the book was covered with some kind of moldy growth that had hardened on the leather.
She looked worriedly at the shelves nearest to her, visions of mildew or worse ruining her precious books firing up in her imagination, but the spines facing her were unmarked.
Thank God, she thought. It was only this book.
But even one book was one too many.
She took it over to her desk, where she kept a box of tissues. Holding the book under the brass desk lamp, she started to clean its cover, but stopped when she realized that the book appeared to be getting thicker.
The only explanation she could come up with was that somehow the book had sustained massive water damage and the damp pages were swelling. How that could have happened in here, she couldn’t begin to guess. There were no leaks in the roof—it wasn’t raining, anyway. No plants that needed watering....
Idly she flipped back the cover, then dropped the book as a tree branch sprang out into her face. She stared at where the book lay on the desk, the branch, complete with leaves, growing from between the signatures in its gutter. A second, then a third, branch joined the first, bursting forth—bud, to leaf, to twig, to bough—with impossible speed.
Shaking her head, she backed her chair slowly from the desk. She stood up, and retreated further, unable to keep her gaze from the bizarre sight. A small tree grew from the book now. And...
An uncontrollable shiver started in her calves and crawled up her nerves.
Vines crept up the legs of the desk, entwining about the lamp and various knickknacks scattered on its roll top. Moss sprouted, thickened on the blotter around the book. Twigs and small knobby buds sprouted from the wood of the desk itself.
“No,” Ginny murmured, shaking her head.
It wasn’t possible.
A sharp cracking sound whipped her around to find vegetation overtaking the long rows of bookshelves all around her.
“No!” she cried.
She took a half-step to the nearest shelf and began to tear the vines and branches away. She never heard the rumbling underfoot, only felt the floor begin to sway. As she backed away, the room shook. Books tumbled from the higher shelves. The display cabinets rattled. In one, a clay flute in the shape of a bird suddenly sprouted beak and feathers and began to peck away at the glass locking it inside.
She was going insane, Ginny realized.
She tried to keep her balance as the rumbling grew into thunder, but stumbled to her knees. The House shuddered around her. Dozens of books came crashing from their high perches. She brought her arms over her head to protect herself from the sudden onslaught and crawled toward the center of the room, where the hail of falling books was the lightest. There she crouched, staring with an anguished gaze as the Library was transformed from her quiet haven into a landscape that could only have grown from the imagination of some mad surrealist, armed with vegetation in place of paint and brush.
9
“Do you remember the way?” Ha’kan’ta asked.
Sara nodded. It was the first time she’d be making the journey on her own, but she’d gone often enough with Tal taking the lead to know how to make it on her own.
She’d changed into a pair of patched jeans and a tatty old sweater—they were the best she could come up with for traveling clothes that wouldn’t also make her look too outlandish when she got back home. She’d decided that the beaded buckskin dresses or hunting leathers that she usually wore in the Otherworld were just a little too exotic for Ottawa’s streets.
Never draw attention to yourself, Kieran had told her once, passing along one of the basic lessons that his own mentor, Tom Hengwr, had taught him. If you appeared to be the kind of person that no one would look twice at, then no one would remember you either.
Sara was all for not standing out from the crowd—to do otherwise raised the possibility of too many awkward questions, such as, Where had she spent the last year? So she’d just have to wear this stuff for now and pick up some new clothes while she was home. All that had survived this past year in the Otherworld intact were her walking shoes—and that was because she mostly went barefoot or in moccasins while she was here.
She finished tying up her laces, caught up her pack by one strap and was ready to go.
“And you’re sure you don’t want any company?” Ha’kan’ta asked.
I’d love company, Sara thought.
But she knew how much Kieran’s part in the ceremony meant to Ha’kan’ta and wouldn’t have dreamed of asking the rath’wen’a to come with her.
“I’ll be fine,” she said. “Honestly. It’s just for a couple of days.”
Ha’kan’ta regarded her consideringly. The blue of her eyes was a startling contrast against the deep coppery hue of her skin. She was taller than Sara, almost as tall as Tal or Kiernan, and always reminded Sara of some Indian princess with her white doeskin dress and its beaded collar, the two long braids entwined with cowrie shells and feathers that hung to either side of her face, the dramatic beauty of her features.
“I was thinking of the wolves,” Ha’kan’ta said.
She had two of them—Shak’syo and May’asa, Winter-Brother and Summer-Brother, respectively; not exactly pets, but they weren’t wild animals either. They were just friends, Sara had realized a long time ago. The pair were lying at Ha’kan’ta’s knees at the moment, regarding Sara with expressions that seemed to say that they understood every word that was being said and were now just waiting on her reply.
“I don’t think so,” Sara said. “It’s kind of hard to go unnoticed when you’re flanked with a pair of wolves. And that goes for Ak’is’hyr, too,” she added before Ha’kan’ta could mention the moose that was the third of her constant companions.
She slipped the straps of her pack over her shoulder, adjusting the pack until it hung comfortably. Ha’kan’ta followed her outside the lodge.
“You know what we do?” Ha’kan’ta asked before Sara could say goodbye. “With the rath’wen’a?”
Sara nodded. To the Drummers-of-the-Bear fell the task of righting the wrongs, appeasing the offended and repairing the harm that the tribes brought upon themselves through unavoidable as well as disrespectful actions. They were intermediaries between the spirit world and the world of skin and bone, their charge as much the land itself as their people. They were healers, restoring harmony when discord threatened. They journeyed out of ordinary reality to bring back Beauty and nurture it in those—human hearts as well as heartlands—that had let their spirits become thin.
“You are as much a part of the journey we undertake as any drummer,” Ha’kan’ta said, “only you step your road intuitively, rather than following a path that has been set out before you.”
“We’ve talked about this before,” Sara said.
“Yes. But we haven’t talked about faith.”
That made Sara feel uncomfortable.
“Why do you look embarrassed?” Ha’kan’ta asked.
Sara shrugged. “It’s just... you know. It makes me think of people who are too... obsessed.”
“Faith is important,” Ha’kan’ta said. “It needn’t be invested in a particular deity—most who do so, do it by rote anyway. But you must believe in something or your life has no meaning.”
“What do you believe in?”
<
Sara nodded. Of course.
“And you?” Ha’kan’ta asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“Then think of this: Have faith in yourself. In your path. In all you do. Believe that you make a difference. Faith can make that be real.”
“It’s that easy?”
Ha’kan’ta shook her head. “It’s the hardest kind of faith there is for you must accept it on your own. No one can do it for you.”
Sara took that thought with her when she left the camp.
There were three ways to cross the borders that separated the Otherworlds from the land of Sara’s birth.
The first was the most common; it required a great deal of preparation, entailing various rituals, purifications of spirit and body, and the like. It could also employ chanting, meditation, or music.
The second was to find a place—a crossroads, a “haunted” section of road or ancient stonework—where the veils of the borderland were thinner than usual and one could simply step through. The garden enclosed by Tamson House was one such site, but there were others, enough so that a whole body of folklore had grown up of mortals straying into Faerie, the modern equivalent being tales of UFO abductions. Coming back from the Otherworld by this manner required traveling through a number of such sites, depending on how deeply one had entered the spirit worlds.
The third, least common and most difficult, was by intent; to focus through the secret strengths of one’s taw and will a passage between the worlds. This was the technique of the honochen’o’keh, those little mysteries that Europeans called faerie. Mortals could learn it, but to the mysteries it came as naturally as breathing.