Charles De Lint - The Ivory and the Horn

I remembered Peter. He'd come into the room and caught me as I was getting up from his mother's bed, putting on my gloves. I almost bolted, but I didn't want to leave a different kind of night fear in the little tyke's head, so I told him what I'd done, couching the information in words I thought he'd understand. He'd been really brave and hadn't cried at all.

"He said he'd keep the secret," I say.

"Give the kid a break. He's only six."

I nod.

"Anyway," Chris says, "something clicked for me then. It seemed... well, impossible, but I couldn't stop thinking about it. What if there really was someone out there that could do what Peter had said his angel had done? I've been fighting the freaks for years with hardly anything to show for it. It's heartbreaking work."

I nod again. I've got a hundred percent success rate myself, but there's only so many places I can be at one time. I know all about heartbreak.

"I felt like a fool walking around out here, trying to get your attention, but I just had to know. And if it was real, I wanted a part of it."

I think of the anima that came to me all those long months ago.

"It's not something that can be shared," I tell him.

"But I can help, can't I?"

"I don't think that's such a good—"

"Look," he breaks in. "How do you figure out who to hit? I'll bet you just skulk around outside windows, hoping to get lucky. Am I right?"

Too right, but I don't answer.

"I can provide you with names and addresses," he says.

I remember him saying hat earlier. It's part of what drew me down from the rooftops to hear him out.

"You won't have to waste your time guessing anymore," he goes on, voice so damn eager. "With what I give you, you can go right to the known offenders. Just think of how much more effective you can be."

It's tempting. Oh, who am I kidding? It's another gift, as unexpected, but as welcome, as those the anima gave me.

"Okay," I tell him. "We'll give it a try."

I barely get the words out of my mouth, then he's dragging a folded sheet of paper out of the pocket of his jacket.

"These are just some of the worst, ongoing situations that we've got on file," he begins.

My heart sinks. There must be fifty names and addresses on that one piece of paper.

So many monsters.

5

The relationship works better than I think it might. I was working blind before, hanging around on fire escapes and ledges outside windows, crawling down from rooftops, listening, watching, until I got a fix on one of the monsters. And even then I had to be careful. Not every domestic argument leads to spousal abuse. Not every child, crying in the lonely dark, has been molested.

I'm also careful with the tips I get from Chris. I may have taken on the roles of judge and jury, but I always make sure that I'm really dealing with a monster before I step into his head and turn him off. But Chris's information is usually good. We don't just use what he's collected on his own, either. He takes what we need from all the files in his office, his and the other caseworkers', as well as from Children's Aid and the like, to avoid suspicion falling on him the way it might if all the monsters I dealt with came from his caseload.

If Chris could make the connection, then so could someone else— someone perhaps not as sympathetic to my particular working methods. I've no idea how I'd deal with prison. I think the gifts of the anima would make it a thousand times worse for me. I think I'd rather die first.

A few weeks into our partnership, Chris asks me what got me started with all of this. I don't know what to say at first, but then I just tell him that I lost a good friend which leaves him with the impression that it's revenge motivating me. I let him believe that, even if it's not exactly true. What killed Annie isn't something anyone can fight against.

It's funny. I never think of Annie looking as she did when she died. It's like my mind's dosed off the image of how frail she became toward the end. She was just skin and bones, a pale, pale ghost of herself lying there in the hospital ward. Chemotherapy had stolen that gorgeous head of hair, but she refused to wear a wig.

"This is who I am now," is all she'd say.

When I think of her, I see instead the woman I fell in love with. She could have been a model for one of those nineteenth-century painters whose work she so admired: Rosetti, Burne-Jones, Dixon— that crew. She was beautiful, but more importantly to me, she completed me. Until I was with Annie, I never felt whole. I was just an observer going through life, never a participant, which might be the reason I became a journalist.

I remember telling her that once and she just laughed.

"I don't think so, Jaime," she said. "If you really just wanted to report on life, you wouldn't have worked for The Examiner. I think, secretly, there's a novelist living inside you, just dying to get out. Why else would you be drawn to a job that has you making up such outlandish stories, day after day?"

Who knows what we secretly want— I mean, really, seriously want? I knew that with Annie I had everything I could ask for, so I had no more need for secrets. When I came out, it didn't raise an eyebrow among my coworkers. The only people who changed toward me were my family. Ex-family. Can you get a divorce from your flesh and blood? To all intents and purposes, I certainly have.

But that's okay. I was never close to them anyway. See, that's the real revenge motive that let me take the anima's gift: lost innocence.

Both my parents were alcoholics. I'm surprised I even survived some of the beatings I got as a kid. It was different for Annie. Instead of being beaten, her father started molesting her when she was in the cradle. The nightmare lasted until she was in her teens.

"What's scariest," she told me once, "is that I didn't even know it was wrong, It didn't feel right, but I never knew any different. I thought that was how it was in every family."

What are the statistics? I think it's something like two out of every three women have been sexually assaulted by the time they're in their twenties. Everything from being abused as children to being raped when they're older.

Lost innocence.

Somehow, Annie regained hers, but most people aren't that lucky. I know I never have.

But that's why I think of what I'm doing as something I'm doing for her. So many monsters, and I've barely made a dent in their numbers. I wish there was a way to get rid of them all in one fell swoop. I wish I could deal with them before the damage is done. It kills me that it's all ending for me before I've realty gotten started with my work.

See, by the beginning of July my savings finally run out and I begin to lose the amenities because I can't pay my bills anymore. The phone goes first, then the power. By the time I meet Chris, I've lost my apartment.

So I become a baglady superhero— do they ever deal with that in those comics? I know I'm obsessed, but I don't have anything else to do with my life. It was bad enough when I was on my own, tracking the monsters down by trial and error. I'd deal with one, maybe two in a week— three tops. But now, with Chris's help, I can hit that same number on a good night.

I'm proud of what I'm doing, but it's starting to take its toll. That little piece of myself I was losing every time I dealt with one of the monsters has escalated to where now it feels as though what I'm losing is falling off the way clumps of dirt can be shaken from a piece of sod. The empty patches inside me just keep getting bigger. It's as though my spirit is dissolving, bit by bit. I stare down at the anima residue I leave on their beds and want to pick it up and somehow stick it back onto me. I'm so wasted come morning now that I don't care where I sleep— on a park bench, in an alleyway, in some deserted building.