Charles de Lint - Forests of the Heart

The windows he’d left open earlier in the day had helped some, but the stench was still overpowering. Hunter pulled a small plastic bag out of his pocket. Inside was a handkerchief, dabbed with sweet-smelling oil, some sort of peach/apple mixture. He tied it around his face and it helped a bit more, though with his luck, some neighbor would think he was a burglar wearing this thing and call the police and the next thing he’d know, he’d be down at the Crowsea Precinct, trying to explain what he was doing in this fouled apartment. Hell, they’d probably think he was responsible. Still, what could he do? He had to deal with the stench and this was the best he could come up with, though even with the perfumed handkerchief the reek of the urine and feces was enough to make him gag. Maybe he should have brought along a clothespin instead.

He decided to start in the kitchen and took his bag of cleaning supplies back there with him. Rescuing a large metal pail from one corner, he banged out its dents as best as he could with a heavy ladle, then filled it with hot water. He stirred in an industrial-level cleanser that was heavy on the ammonia, pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and got to work with a sponge. There was a secret ingredient to any cleanup, his mother used to say, and that was good, old-fashioned elbow grease. Well, she’d be proud of him tonight.

Funny, he thought as he scrubbed the linoleum, how things had turned out. The last people he’d have thought to be at odds with each other were Miki and Donal. Granted, Donal had given a good show of knowing nothing about the apartment being trashed, but Hunter wasn’t sure what to believe anymore. If you could have faerie lords like the Gentry wandering about with their skinhead attitude and bladders the size of hot air balloons, then maybe anything was possible.

He had to laugh at himself. Twelve hours ago he would have had a hard time believing in ghosts, or even precognitive hunches, but now here he was considering a whole shadowy otherworld peopled with creatures from folklore and legend, mean-tempered Gentry, doomed Summer Kings and all. Still, with all those stories… was it really such a huge leap of faith to accept that maybe they’d grown up around some kernel of truth? Mythic barnacles attaching themselves to the bones of somewhat plausible events until they took on their current legendary status.

Well, yes, he thought. It was. But here he was, allowing the possibility all the same. Or at least beginning to accept that these Gentry were more than ordinary. Still, you’d think if you were a magical being you’d do more with your life than these losers apparently did. Drink Guinness, listen to music, rough up somebody every now and again, trash an apartment, piss on your handiwork. Mind you, for some people, that might be considered living large. Unfortunately, the world did take all kinds.

He began to make good progress, carrying on a conversation with himself in his head, for lack of anything else to listen to. Drudge work like this always went better with good music—some Motown would definitely go down well right about now—but Miki’s system was a bust, literally, and he hadn’t thought to bring a boombox, or even his Walkman, along with him. He supposed he could try singing himself, but even he hated the sound of his own voice, raised in song. He was okay singing along with a recording, if you cranked the sound way up, and he could certainly be enthusiastic, but talented he wasn’t.

Whenever one ami got sore, he used the other. Look at me, he thought. The amazing ambidextrous cleaning man. He was even getting used to the awful reek—or maybe his efforts were actually beginning to make a dent in the stench.

“Toilets of the Gentry,” he muttered to himself as he dumped a pail of fouled water into the toilet and filled it up again. “Coming soon to a theater near you. Experience the horrors of faerie piss in widescreen, stink-o-vision. If you dare.”

He added a generous ration of cleanser to the hot water and got back to his task, amusing himself by casting the movie in his head. A blond Christina Ricci to play Miki, he decided. Did Ricci have a brother with the same witchy eyes who could be Donal? Buffy’s Joss Whedon to write the screenplay, definitely. Or maybe Kevin Williamson. Either way they’d all sound smarter and a little more hip than they really were. At least he would. Who to play himself? He’d pick someone like Brad Pitt, but with his luck he’d get Pee-Wee Herman.

He was so caught up with the .work and the stream-of-consciousness soliloquy running through his head that he didn’t realize someone else had come into the apartment until he heard the harsh, heavily accented voice speak to him from the kitchen doorway.

“You just don’t learn, do you?”

A twinge of phantom pain grabbed his side as Hunter looked up to see one of the hard men standing there. He had long enough to register that the newcomer wasn’t even wet—had he been hiding in the apartment all this time?—before the man started forward.

Hunter surprised himself. He should have been scared. He was scared. He was almost wetting himself. But more than that he was angry. For the second time that night, the first response that came to mind was violence. He half-rose at the hard man’s approach, bringing up the pail of hot water and cleanser as he did. The hard man was so sure of himself that Hunter’s response took him by surprise. Hunter had a good momentum going by the time the pail sped by the hands, raised in defense too late. The pail struck the man in the head, showering dirty, ammonia-sharp water all over the kitchen. His eyes went wide with shock, and he stumbled back.

Hunter hit him again with the pail, only half-full now, and the hard man went down, cracking his head on the side of the counter as he fell.

“Oh, fuck,” Hunter said.

He stared down at the still body splayed out on the linoleum and had trouble swallowing. Blood leaked from a gash on the side of the man’s head. Ordinary red blood, turning pink where it ran into a puddle of water. ,•

“Wh—why couldn’t you just leave me alone?” he said.

The hard man made no response. Was he dead?

Hunter swallowed, his throat feeling thicker than ever. He was scared and his pulse was hammering, but the worst of it was, it had felt good to strike back as he had. He was horrified to see the slack figure sprawled on the floor at his feet, unconscious, maybe even dead, and he’d put the man there. But an immense satisfaction rose up in him all the same, swamping the already confused mess of emotion running through him.

He’d never done anything like this before.

The pail dropped from his hand and went clattering across the linoleum. He gave the doorway a quick glance. Were there more of them out there? He cocked his head to listen, but heard nothing, only the rattle of the ice stonn outside. His gaze crawled back to the man on the floor, half-expecting from Miki’s stories for the body to dissolve into dust or go up in smoke or something. But it simply lay there, still, unmoving.

Nervously, he gave the man’s leg a push with the end of his boot.

Still no response. Hunter wasn’t even sure if the man was breathing.

Self-defense, he thought. If I killed him, it was in self-defense.

If he’s dead…

His stomach lurched at the thought.

That was bad enough. But what if he wasn’t? What was going to happen when he came around? Or when his buddies found out what had happened to him?

Hunter backed away until he was brought up short by the kitchen counter.

Whatever way you looked at it, he was screwed. If this was just a man, then he was going to have to do a lot of explaining to the police. He was going to have to live with the fact that he’d killed a man. And if the hard man was some kind of supernatural creature, then basically, Hunter was a dead man, too, because he had no illusions as to what the Gentry would do to him when they caught up with him. If they’d sucker punch him simply for dancing with Ellie…