Charles de Lint - Forests of the Heart

“And in the meantime… ?” Ellie asked.

“Enjoy each other’s company,” Nuala told her.

They waited until they were around a corner and out of Nuala’s sight before giving each other high-fives, smiling and laughing like a trio of schoolgirls on an unexpected holiday. Ellie didn’t know why she was so giddy. Part of it was simple relief that she wasn’t going to be responsible for Chantal’s getting sent away. But mostly it was the unexpectedness of making new friends in a place where she hadn’t really anticipated she’d fit in at all. Truth was, she’d half-expected to be found out as a fraud and turned away from the front door before she’d even gotten a chance to step inside. Because, really. The caliber of artists who’d been in residence here was way out of her league.

“I am so happy,” Bettina said, linking arms with them as they continued down the hall. “My old friend and my new both get to stay.”

“Actually,” Chantal told Ellie, “it’s just that she’s really vain and didn’t want me out of here until I finished the bust of her that I’m working on.”

Bettina blushed, but she smiled when Ellie laughed.

For once, Ellie thought, things were going her way.

When they reached the stairs, they went down single-file. Halfway down, Ellie paused at a side window. She’d been distracted at first by a group of figures on the lawn, a group of men, Natives, she guessed from their dark skin and black braided hair, standing in a loose circle, smoking and looking up at the house—right at her, it felt like. Then she realized that they were only wearing thin white shirts and broadcloth suits, some of them not even bothering with their jackets. She leaned closer to the window. And standing barefoot in the snow.

“What is it?” Chantal asked from a few steps lower down.

“There’s these guys out there,” Ellie replied. “It’s like they think it’s summer.”

When Chantal and Bettina joined her at the window, the sculptor gave Ellie an odd look.

“What guys?” she said.

“Ha, ha.”

“No, seriously,” Chantal told her. “I don’t see anything except for an empty lawn, covered in snow.”

Ellie turned to look at her and was shocked to realize that the other woman wasn’t simply teasing her.

“Chantal can’t see them,” Bettina said.

Ellie slowly turned to face her. “What do you mean?”

“Dark-haired, dark-skinned men,” Bettina said. “Dressed in dark suits and white shirts. Barefoot. Smoking. Staring up at us.”

Ellie nodded along with the description. “Exactly.”

“I don’t see anything,” Chantal repeated.

“Your sight isn’t strong enough,” Bettina said.

Ellie shook her head. “Hang on here. Are you trying to tell me—”

“They stand in la epoca del mito,” Bettina told her. “The spiritworld. That is why you can see them and Chantal can’t.”

“No. That isn’t possible.”

“Everyone carries magic in them,” Bettina said. “But to be able to use it, one must be either trained in its use, or have a high natural ability.”

“But… I’ve never seen things before. Things that aren’t there, I mean.”

Except they were. Dark eyes watching her from below, cigarette smoke wreathing about their heads.

“Then something has woken it in you,” Bettina said.

“Tell me you’re just putting me on,” Ellie said to Chantal. “This is all some kind of initiation prank, right?”

Chantal continued to stare out the window, but she shook her head.

“I swear to you,” she said. “I don’t see anything. I wish I did.”

Ellie turned away from the window and leaned against the wall. That eerie sensation of something moving up her spine had returned and her chest was tight, as though her bones were shrinking.

“I don’t want this,” she said.

Bettina laid a steadying hand on her arm. “Unless you specifically seek it out, the spiritworld makes those choices for you. It’s better to accept its interest in you as best you can, for fighting it only adds to the stress you feel. Come,” she added. “Let’s go back to the studio. I’ll make you a tea that will calm you down.”

“More…” Ellie had to clear her throat. “More magic?” Bettina shook her head. “No. A simple herbal remedy, nothing more.”

“Okay,” Ellie said and let the smaller woman lead her away. “Can you make me one that’ll let me see this stuff?” Chantal asked from behind them.

Ellie didn’t know if Bettina had put some enchantment on the herbs and the boiling water she used to make her tea, or if it was simply the natural properties of the ingredients, but the tea did calm her down. The soothing liquid couldn’t erase the memory of what she had seen, nor the unfamiliar sensations it had woken in her—a kind of floating in her nerve ends, a sharpening of her vision, a clarity in her thinking. But it laid a thin gauze between the immediacy of the idea of magic, the anxiety it had woken in her, and her normal self.

After a while she was actually able to take her suitcase up to her room and unpack, then rejoin the other women in the studio. There she set up her side of the studio and worked on some preliminary sketches for Musgrave Wood’s mask while Bettina sat for Chantal on the other side of the room.

She was a little jealous of Chantal having Bettina as a model and kept glancing in their direction. It wasn’t simply that Bettina was so beautiful, though she certainly was. No wonder Donal had been smitten with her. But there was more to her than that. She had great character in her still-youthful features and something else as well. Some undefinable charisma that made it impossible to not want to make a rendering of her.

In the end, Ellie found herself filling a half-dozen pages of her sketchbook with surreptitious drawings of the pair, Bettina on her stool, Chantal at the modeling stand, her large fingers pulling the most delicate details from the bust. She didn’t think Ms. Wood would mind. After all, there had to be a settling-in period, didn’t there, and she had already come up with some great ideas for the mask.

The one thing she did, Bettina’s tea notwithstanding, was keep her gaze away from the windows in the studio. They looked out onto the rear lawns where she’d seen the strange group of men and she wasn’t taking any chances. Perhaps it was childish—pathetic, really, for a grown woman to expect that if she couldn’t see something, then it wasn’t there—but she couldn’t help herself. From the way Bettina had spoken earlier, if she did look, she might find a whole other world waiting for her out there, and Ellie truly wasn’t prepared for anything but the simple winter landscape that rationality told her had to be on the other side of the window’s panes.

“Oh, man,” Fiona said when she heard about what had happened to Miki’s apartment. “That really sucks. What is wrong with people, anyway?”

She sat perched beside the cash register on the front counter of Gypsy Records in full Goth mode: long straight hair, lace blouse, calf-length skirt and leather bodice, all black and contrasting sharply against her porcelain skin. Here and there silver jewelry twinkled about her person like stars viewed through a layer of dark clouds. Rings, bracelets, earrings, an eyebrow ring, choker.

“Many of them,” Miki said from where she was slouched on a chair behind the counter, “are simply shite.”

“Yeah, really. I wonder who you pissed off.”

Miki only shrugged.

“Because a friend of mine—remember Andrea? She’s sort of gangly, with long black hair and a slinky wardrobe.”

“Fiona, that describes most of your friends—male and female.”

“Yeah, well. When the people in her building found out she was a pagan, there was this big fuss about having a Satanist living in the building, you know, conducting unspeakable rituals and all that crap, as if. But before it all died down, someone broke into her place and trashed it, wrote Biblical quotations all over the walls and stuff.”