Charles de Lint - Forests of the Heart

“What did you do?” a friend asked him.

“I just let go,” he’d replied. “I just lay there in the middle of the bloody floor and let it take me away. Eight hours, gone out of my life, just like that. And that’s why it’s Guinness, and only the gargle, for me now.”

And that’s what he did now. He stopped struggling and let the monstrous beast fill him. It allowed the pain to go away. It allowed him to go away. Where his spirit had been, there was now only the raw emotion that had fueled so much of his life. The anger. The rage. The pent-up fury. The railing against the unfairness of the world when it came to how it treated Donal Greer.

Ellie woke suddenly out of a dead sleep. She bolted upright, pulse racing, confused, wondering where she was, why she was still wearing her clothes, what had woken her. Then she felt it again, a sensation like fabric tearing, except the fabric was a piece of the world and she was feeling it through the threads that connected her to it. It was as if someone was tearing away a piece of her.

She put her hands to her head and pressed against her temples, as though the pressure would restore her equilibrium the way it could sometimes ease a headache. It helped, but only a little. At least she was able to orient herself. She was in a back bedroom in the house of one of Tommy’s aunts, a room where the warmth from the stove didn’t reach. She was wearing all her clothes because it was so damned cold with all the power lines down and she’d been too tired to get undressed anyway.

But this thing that had woken her, this lost and desperate feeling…

Then the door of the bedroom opened and a tall woman stood there, the shadow of an enormous spider rearing up behind her. Aunt Nancy, Ellie thought and she shivered. For this time the impression of the spider didn’t slip away.

“You said it was broken,” Aunt Nancy said. There was a grim darkness in her voice. “You said it was broken and you hadn’t even started to make a new one.”

“But…it’s true…”

“Then how do you explain this?”

This? Ellie thought. But then it came again, that tearing sensation, and she knew.

“I can feel it,” she said. “It’s like something’s tearing.”

The older woman said nothing.

“I swear,” Ellie told her. “I had nothing to do with whatever’s going on. Not that I know of, anyway.”

“Yet the world has a hole torn in it and the Great Wheel falters.”

“Why?” Ellie asked. “What is it?”

Aunt Nancy regarded her from the doorway for a long moment. The shadowy spider grew wide and tall, spilling into the room.

Please don’t let it touch me, Ellie thought.

She held her breath, waiting, arms wrapped around her knees to stop herself from shaking, until slowly it faded away.

“Something terrible has been born,” Aunt Nancy said in a quieter voice.

“This has to do with the mask?”

The older woman nodded. “Someone has put it on and woken a sleeping monster.”

“But it was broken. Right in two. I saw it. I held the pieces in my own hands.”

“That doesn’t seem to have made much difference.”

“But who did it?” Ellie asked. “Who put it on?”

And if it was so dangerous, why would they be so stupid?

“It must have been your friend,” Aunt Nancy said. “The Irishman.”

“Donal?”

When Aunt Nancy nodded, Ellie slumped, her hands falling to the bed. Of course. Donal could be that stupid. Hadn’t Hunter told them about the painting and what Miki had said, how Donal thought the power of the mask would allow him to get some sort of payback for all the wrongs that had been done to him, imagined and real.

“So now what do we do?” she asked.

“We find him and we stop him.”

“And you know how to do this?”

For a moment she thought Aunt Nancy was going to get all pissed-off again, but then the older woman slowly shook her head.

“No,” she said. “But there are things we can try.”

When Aunt Nancy turned and left the doorway, the room seemed to brighten, as though some of the shadows had followed after her. Ellie tried not to think of that huge spider presence she kept seeing behind Aunt Nancy. She didn’t need this, any of this, the magic and the scariness and the way her whole life seemed to be slowly dissolving into one that belonged to a stranger.

The problem was, no one was listening to her. No one was coming up to her and saying, it’s okay, we’ll take it from here. Instead it was just more and deeper weirdness every time she turned around.

She waited a long heartbeat. No one was calling her, but she knew they were waiting for her all the same.

I don’t have anything except for inexperience and disbelief, she wanted to tell them, but that didn’t cut it anymore. Not with all she’d seen. Not with manitou and the powerful Gentry and the spider shadow and this thing inside her, this tearing sensation like an open wound.

Deal with it, she told herself.

Yeah, right.

Slowly she lowered her feet to the floor and got up to follow Aunt Nancy out into the main room of the house.

It was mostly the writers who took up residence in the cabins behind Kelly-gnow. Bettina wasn’t sure why. Perhaps they felt solitude a closer companion, here under the trees, than it could be in the house itself. Except Penny Angelis stayed in one of the cabins and she seemed to spend most of her time in the house, hanging out in the kitchen, gossiping with the various artists in their studios, writing in the library, so what did that say? That people were different, Bettina supposed.

She and Chantal passed by Penny’s cabin without bothering to check it since the blonde writer was already accounted for, and moved on to the last of the small outbuildings. It stood on the edge of the property, just before the land took its sudden plunge to the city’s streets far below in a tumbling waterfall of granite, hemlocks, and cedar.

“This is August’s cabin, isn’t it?” Chantal said as they drew near.

Bettina nodded. “Though I haven’t seen him for a couple of weeks.”

“That’s not saying much.”

It was true. August Walker wasn’t the most sociable of Kellygnow’s residents, but sociability wasn’t exactly a prerequisite. Only talent was. The one slim volume of his work that Bettina had read was astonishing. Tender, wry, lyric, warm. Not one adjective that would have suited the author himself. He was almost as much of a recluse as the mysterious Musgrave Wood.

“It’s funny,” she said, thinking of how she’d kept returning to passages in August’s book, simply to savor their beauty. “You’d never think, from reading him, that he could be so—”

She was unable to finish. A nova flare of white light exploded between her temples and she dropped to her knees as though she’d been physically struck. Chantal immediately crouched in the snow beside her, her knees crunching through the icy crust. She put her arms around Bettina’s shoulders, her gaze darting nervously about.

“Bettina!” she cried. “What is it? What happened?”

Bettina allowed her to help her sit up. For a moment she couldn’t speak. All she could do was look at the house while the intense pain in her head slowly faded to a dull ache.

“Something old and dangerous has been called into the world,” she finally said.

“What are you talking about?”

“In the house,” Bettina said. “Someone has torn through the fabric of the world…”

Someone? Her pulse quickened. Not someone. Donal Greer. So eager to get out of the wet and cold when he had barely seemed to be touched by the weather. Of course. He’d been waiting in the between for an opportunity to get inside the house and commandeer the mask.