Charles de Lint - Forests of the Heart

She had a moment’s hysterical thought. So what? Did people in the spirit-world go around in wigs or something? What was that all about?

“Are you certain this is your wish?” the man who’d been holding Hunter asked her in response to her telling him to leave Hunter alone.

All Ellie could do was stare at him. An unsettling sensation of deja vu worried through her. She could hear Nuala’s voice in her head, what the housekeeper had said when they’d gone to her to ask if she and Chantal could share the studio.

Are you certain this is what you want?

Who were these people? Why was what she wanted so important to them?

But though her head was brimming with questions, she had enough of her wits about her to nod in response.

“Yes,” she said. Her voice came out as a croak. They were so scary-looking, these men, spirits, whatever they were. She cleared her throat before adding, “I’m sure.”

The hard man gave her a feral grin and turned away to where Tommy was sitting up, one hand rubbing the back of his head where he must have hit it. She replayed the moment when the man had basically tossed Tommy out of the way and shivered, finally beginning to believe that there was something more than human about these guys.

“All… all of us,” she managed.

“Oh, aye,” the man said. “And is the whole fucking world under your protection?”

“I... I...”

He walked past Tommy, stopping by the black jeep with the broken window. He bent down and hooked the fingers of one hand under the running board. In one sudden movement he lifted the vehicle and heaved it onto its side.

Ellie winced at the sound of the crash, her eyes wide with shock. The small gibbering voice of panic that had been hiding in the back of her head reared in mindless fear and it was all she could do to just stand there and at least pretend to be strong.

“Fair enough,” the man said, still grinning. There was no humor in his eyes. “But remember to fulfill your side of the bargain or I’ll hunt the lot of you down and gut you like the little shites you are.”

Bargain? Ellie thought. What bargain?

But she knew enough to keep her mouth shut and simply nod her head.

The hard man held her gaze for a long moment. Ellie could feel her knees turning to water. Then he finally gave a brusque nod to his companions and turned away. As silently as they’d come, untouched by the weather and unencumbered by the unsteady footing, the men went back the way they’d come.

Ellie collapsed against the side of the van, holding onto the mirror for support.

“Somebody want to tell me what the hell that was all about?”

She glanced over at Tommy to see he was now standing. His hair and shoulders had acquired a thin sheath of ice and his face was dripping. She was getting soaked herself, standing out here in the freezing rain, but he’d landed in a puddle and was far wetter than she was.

“I don’t know,” she told him. Her gaze drifted to the far end of the street where the men were just turning the corner. “Those are Donal’s hard men, but they could be twins to the guys I saw at Kellygnow.”

“M-m-miki says they’re called the Gentry,” Hunter put in.

They both turned to look at him. He was like a wet rat, utterly drenched and shivering, and somewhat ludicrous with the bright yellow rubber gloves he was wearing.

“What’s with the get-up?” Tommy asked him. “You given up selling CDs for some new career as a janitor?”

“C-c-can we take this inside?” Hunter said. “I’m fr-fr-freezing.”

Ellie nodded. She slid open the side door and they all piled in. Too cold and miserable to be shy, Hunter stripped off his sodden clothes and put on dry pants, socks, a shirt, and a sweater that he picked out of the spare clothes they kept in the back for the homeless. When he was dressed, he wrapped himself up with a couple of blankets. It made him look like a derelict—a weird derelict with those rubber gloves. Ellie watched him try to deal with the gloves, but his hands were too numbed from the cold. She helped him peel them off, then handed him a coffee. He cupped his hands around the Styrofoam cup, spilling hot coffee onto fingers, but he didn’t seem to feel the liquid.

Ellie and Tommy used a couple of other blankets to dry themselves off and helped themselves to coffee as well.

“Th-th-thanks,” Hunter said finally. “For everything. For all of this. I mean it. But especially for getting those guys off my back.” He took a sip of the coffee, sloshing more down his chin than he got in his mouth. “How did you do that anyway?”

“Yeah, Ellie,” Tommy said. “What gives? That one guy was talking about some bargain.”

“I don’t know,” she told them. “I’ve seen them in The Harp whenever there’s a session on, but I’ve never talked to them. They’re the ones who beat Donal up awhile back, remember?”

Tommy nodded.

“But the weirdest thing is, give them long hair and they could be the men I saw this morning at Kellygnow, hanging around in the backyard, some of them just in shirtsleeves. Like the cold couldn’t touch them.” She turned to Hunter. “What did you call them?”

“Ge-gentry. They’re some kind of…”

His voice trailed off and he got an embarrassed look on his face.

“Spirits,” Tommy put in.

Hunter gave him a grateful look and nodded. He took another long swallow of coffee, this time drinking more than he spilled. The hot liquid seemed to be helping, since he wasn’t shivering so much and his teeth had finally stopped chattering.

“They trashed Miki’s place earlier this morning,” he went on. “I went out there tonight and thought I’d try to clean things up for her, but then one of those guys showed up and… and…”

He had such an anguished look on his face that Ellie reached over and laid a comforting hand on his arm.

“I think I killed him,” Hunter finished.

“Oh, man,” Tommy said. “No wonder they’re so pissed off at you.”

“They haven’t liked me from the start,” Hunter said. “Ever since—” His gaze went to Ellie. “—that night at the community center when I met you and one of them warned me to stay away from you.”

“What?”

Hunter nodded. “I know. It didn’t make any sense to me either. Donal said he’d figure out what they wanted—what was going on, you know?—but that was before he went all weird.”

“All weird how?” Ellie asked.

Hunter told them then. About the painting Donal had been working on, Donal and Miki’s fight, how she’d thrown him out of the apartment after he’d destroyed his canvas, all the weird things she’d told him, what had happened to her apartment, meeting Donal just before the hard man showed up. It was a long convoluted story that complicated things more than it explained, so far as Ellie was concerned. The more Hunter talked, the more she shook her head in disbelief. None of this made any sense.

“Has the whole world gone insane?” she asked when he was done.

“Is that a rhetorical question,” Tommy asked, “or did you really want an answer?”

“You’ve got an answer?”

He nodded. “The world’s like it always was. You’re just seeing it differently.”

“Oh, great.”

“So what do you think the hard man was talking about?” Hunter asked. “With this bargain, I mean.”

Ellie thought she knew at least that much, though it didn’t explain things any better.

“You said the figure in the painting was wearing a mask?” she asked.

Hunter nodded. “Miki called it a Green Man’s mask. It looks like it’s made of leaves and vines and stuff.”

“I know what it looks like,” Ellie said. “That’s what my commission from Musgrave Wood is. To make a new version of this old wooden mask they have.”