Spiritwalk
Authors: Charles de Lint
Portions of this work—“Ascian in Rose,” “Westlin Wind,” and “Ghostwood”—were previously published in limited editions by Axolotl Press/Pulphouse Publishing, in 1986, 1989, and 1990 respectively. “Merlin Dreams in the Mondream Wood” first appeared in issue #7, 1990, of
Pulphouse, the Hardback Magazine
.
Grateful acknowledgments are made to:
Susan Musgrave for the use of a quote from her novel
The Charcoal Burners
, McClelland and Stewart, 1980.
Ingrid Karklins for the use of a quote from the liner notes of her cassette,
Kas Dimd
: copyright © 1989 by Ingrid Karklins. For information about Karklins’s music, write: Willow Music, 500 Terrace Drive, Austin, TX 78704.
Ron Nance for the use of a quote from “Jackalope Blues,” which first appeared in
The Magazine of Speculative Poetry
#2; copyright © 1985 by Ron Nance.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.
SPIRITWALK
Copyright © 1992 by Charles de Lint
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
This book has been printed on acid-free paper.
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10010
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
De Lint, Charles
Spiritwalk / Charles de Lint.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-85204-5
I. Title
PR 9199.3.D357S66 1992
813′.54—dc20
92-823
CIP
First Edition: May 1992
Printed in the United States of America
0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In prior appearances, some of this material bore dedications that I’d like to repeat here.
Spiritwalk
is for:
MaryAnn Harris
Claire Hamill
Alan Stivell
Robin Williamson
Midori Snyder
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Dean Wesley Smith
To which I’d like to add, at this time:
Terri Windling
Ron Nance
Charles R. Saunders
My thanks to them all for inspiration and support.
There are graves in the forest:
in its moss,
the bones of memories.
—Wendelessen; from “Names”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Spiritwalk
is related to another book of mine,
Moonheart
. A familiarity with the events in that previous novel is recommended, though not, I hope, altogether necessary.
TAMSON HOUSE, OTTAWA, ONTARIO
Extract from “Chapter Three: Mystical Buildings and Other Structures,” first published in
Mysterious North America
by Christy Riddell (East Street Press, 1989)
On September 23, 1906, one of Canada’s most notorious lumber barons went for an afternoon ride in the Gatineau Mountains and never came back. He left behind a flourishing lumber business and an extensive trail of theories, rumors and conjectures. He also left behind the architectural oddity known as the Tamson House.
To this day, the mysterious whereabouts of Anthony Tamson is no more certain than it was on the day of his disappearance. Adding to the mystery surrounding one of the major figures of the turn-of-the-century Canadian business world were the subsequent disappearances of both his son Nathan in 1954 and his reclusive grandson James in 1982.
There was a funeral for James—known in literary circles as “Jamie Tams”—but it was a closed-coffin affair and rumors persist that there was, in fact, no body interred. The current owner, Sara Kendell, James Tamson’s niece, is proving to be as much of a recluse as were her forebears and is rarely seen in public.
Tamson House is situated in the heart of a residential district known as the Glebe. The house takes up an entire city block east of Bank Street, is fronted on three sides by residential streets, and on the fourth by Central Park. The general appearance from any view is that of a long block of old-fashioned townhouses set kitty-corner to each other. There are three towers, one each in three of the structure’s corners; an impressive observatory, oddly unaffected by light pollution from the city, occupies the fourth.
Inside, there is a labyrinth of corridors and rooms, an impressive library and a garden surrounded on all four sides by the house, the actual acreage of which is subject to question as evidently no two measurements have come out equal.
Beyond the odd disappearances and reclusive nature of most of its owners, not to mention its existence as an architectural curiosity, Tamson House is listed in this volume for two further reasons.
The first is that while much of Ottawa’s downtown core is built upon a limestone headland, the area surrounding Tamson House was originally fenland, reclaimed by those who settled the area. Before the arrival of European explorers and settlers, however, the native peoples of the area spoke of a sacred island in the fens, the location of which, legend has it, is where Tamson House now stands.
The island was considered a gateway to the spiritworld, the place from where the manitou came to visit the world of men. Until the coming of the Europeans, the island was a regular site for the
jessakan
, or conjuring lodges, of shaman from local tribes as well as those from tribes that lived as far as a thousand miles away. Curiously, there was never any protest made when first Philemon Wright and then Braddish Billings brought settlers into the area in the early 1800s, subsequently cutting off shamanistic access to the island.
A more current reason for Tamson House’s inclusion in this volume is that over the years—particularly from the time that James Tamson took ownership, late in 1954—the house has proved to be a haven for certain individuals who might be considered “outsiders” to normal society. It has been home not only to an impressive array of poets, artists, musicians, scholars and writers, but also to those not traditionally considered to be involved in the arts, but who still communicate in terms not readily accepted as the norm.
So circus performers have lived there, side by side with those involved in occult studies; it has been home to strippers and Bible students, martial arts
sensei
and chefs, gardeners and hedgerow philosophers; it has been a waystop for travelers from many lands as well as backpackers and hikers from closer to home.
What draws them to Tamson House is a sense of community, the opportunity to collect their strengths in a safe haven before they must go out once more to face the world that lies beyond the house’s walls. Most remain for no more than a few weeks or months, a year at the most, although there do appear to be a few permanent residents.
There is no hidden sign or handshake required to gain admittance, no secret societal obligation involved for those who find welcome in Tamson House. The harmony that lies behind its walls appears to have an indefinable source, but it has such potency that, according to some previous residents, those who might bring discord with them feel so uncomfortable once they’ve stepped through one of the house’s many doors that they don’t remain long enough to cause any harm.
Regardless of its history, visitors to Tamson House will certainly be struck by the “feel” of the building—a sensation akin to that found in certain other places that we remember forever, our subconscious memory stirring in recognition of some hidden facet of mystery that stands revealed, if only for a moment.
MERLIN DREAMS IN THE MONDREAM WOOD
MONDREAM
—an Anglo-Saxon word which means the dream of life among men
I am Merlin
Who follow the Gleam
—Tennyson, from “Merlin and the Gleam” (“gleam” = inspiration/muse)
In the heart of the house lay a garden.
In the heart of the garden stood a tree.
In the heart of the tree lived an old man who wore the shape of a red-haired boy with crackernut eyes that seemed as bright as salmon tails glinting up the water.
His was a riddling wisdom, older by far than the ancient oak that housed his body. The green sap was his blood and leaves grew in his hair. In the winter, he slept. In the spring, the moon harped a windsong against his antler tines as the oak’s boughs stretched its green buds awake. In the summer, the air was thick with the droning of bees and the scent of the wildflowers that grew in stormy profusion where the fat brown bole became root.
And in the autumn, when the tree loosed its bounty to the ground below, there were hazelnuts lying in among the acorns.
The secrets of a Green Man.
“When I was a kid, I thought it was a forest,” Sara said.
She was sitting on the end of her bed, looking out the window over the garden, her guitar on her lap, the quilt bunched up under her knees. Up by the headboard, Julie Simms leaned forward from its carved wood to look over Sara’s shoulder at what could be seen of the garden from their vantage point.
“It sure looks big enough,” she said.
Sara nodded. Her eyes had taken on a dreamy look.
In was 1969 and they had decided to form a folk band—Sara on guitar, Julie playing recorder, both of them singing. They wanted to change the world with music because that was what was happening. In San Francisco. In London. In Vancouver. So why not in Ottawa?
With their faded bell-bottomed jeans and tie-dyed shirts, they looked just like any of the other seventeen-year-olds who hung around the War Memorial downtown, or could be found crowded into coffeehouses like Le Hibou and Le Monde on the weekends. Their hair was long—Sara’s a cascade of brown ringlets, Julie’s a waterfall spill the color of a raven’s wing; they wore beads and feather earrings and both eschewed makeup.
“I used to think it spoke to me,” Sara said.
“What? The garden?”
“Um-hmm.”
“What did it say?”
The dreaminess in Sara’s eyes became wistful and she gave Julie a rueful smile.
“I can’t remember,” she said.
It was three years after her parents had died—when she was nine years old—that Sara Kendell came to live with her Uncle Jamie in his strange rambling house. To an adult perspective, Tamson House was huge: an enormous, sprawling affair of corridors and rooms and towers that took up the whole of a city block; to a child of nine, it simply went on forever.
She could wander down corridor after corridor, poking about in the clutter of rooms that lay spread like a maze from the northwest tower near Bank Street—where her bedroom was located—all the way over to her uncle’s study overlooking O’Connor Street on the far side of the house, but mostly she spent her time in the Library and in the garden. She liked the library because it was like a museum. There were walls of books, rising two floors high up to a domed ceiling, but there were also dozens of glass display cases scattered about the main floor area, each of which held any number of fascinating objects.
There were insects pinned to velvet and stone artifacts; animal skulls and clay flutes in the shapes of birds; old manuscripts and hand-drawn maps, the parchment yellowing, the ink a faded sepia; Kabuki masks and a miniature Shinto shrine made of ivory and ebony; corn-husk dolls, Japanese
netsuke
and porcelain miniatures; antique jewelry and African beadwork; Kachina dolls and a brass fiddle, half the size of a normal instrument....
The cases were so cluttered with interesting things that she could spend a whole day just going through one case and still have something to look at when she went back to it the next day. What interested her most, however, was that her uncle had a story to go with each and every item in the cases. No matter what she brought up to his study—a tiny ivory
netsuke
carved in the shape of a badger crawling out of a teapot, a flat stone with curious scratches on it that looked like Ogham script—he could spin out a tale of its origin that might take them right through the afternoon to suppertime.
That he dreamed up half the stories only made it more entertaining, for then she could try to trip him up in his rambling explanations, or even just try to top his tall tales.
But if she was intellectually precocious, emotionally she still carried scars from her parents’ death and the time she’d spent living with her other uncle—her father’s brother. For three years Sara had been left in the care of a nanny during the day—amusing herself while the woman smoked cigarettes and watched the soaps—while at night she was put to bed promptly after dinner. It wasn’t a normal family life; she could only find that vicariously, in the books she devoured with a voracious appetite.
Coming to live with her Uncle Jamie, then, was like constantly being on holiday. He doted on her, and on those few occasions when he
was
too busy, she could always find one of the many houseguests to spend some time with her.
All that marred her new life in Tamson House was her night fears.
She wasn’t frightened of the House itself. Nor of bogies or monsters living in her closet. She knew that shadows were shadows, creaks and groans were only the House settling when the temperature changed. What haunted her nights was waking up from a deep sleep, shuddering uncontrollably, her pajamas stuck to her like a second skin, her heartbeat thundering at twice its normal tempo.
There was no logical explanation for the terror that gripped her—once, sometimes twice a week. It just came, an awful, indescribable panic that left her shivering and unable to sleep for the rest of the night.
It was on the days following such nights that she went into the garden. The greenery and flowerbeds and statuary all combined to soothe her. Invariably, she found herself in the very center of the garden, where an ancient oak tree stood on a knoll and overhung a fountain. Lying on the grass sheltered by its boughs, with the soft lullaby of the fountain’s water murmuring close at hand, she would find what the night fears had stolen from her the night before.
She would sleep.
And she would dream the most curious dreams.
“The garden has a name, too,” she told her uncle when she came in from sleeping under the oak one day.
The House was so big that many of the rooms had been given names just so that they could all be kept straight in their minds.
“It’s called the Mondream Wood,” she told him.
She took his look of surprise to mean that he didn’t know or understand the word.
“It means that the trees in it dream that they’re people,” she explained.
Her uncle nodded. “’The dream of life among men.’ It’s a good name. Did you think it up yourself?”
“No. Merlin told me.”
“
The
Merlin?” her uncle asked with a smile.
Now it was her turn to look surprised.
“What do you mean
the
Merlin?” she asked.
Her uncle started to explain, astonished that in all her reading she hadn’t come across a reference to Britain’s most famous wizard, but then just gave her a copy of Malory’s
Le Morte d’Arthur
and, after a moment’s consideration, T. H. White’s
The Sword in the Stone
as well.
“Did you ever have an imaginary friend when you were a kid?” Sara asked as she finally turned away from the window.
Julie shrugged. “My mom says I did, but I can’t remember. Apparently he was a hedgehog the size of a toddler named Whatzit.”
“I never did. But I can remember that for a long time I used to wake up in the middle of the night just terrified and then I wouldn’t be able to sleep again for the rest of the night. I used to go into the middle of the garden the next day and sleep under that big oak that grows by the fountain.”
“How pastoral,” Julie said.
Sara grinned. “But the thing is, I used to dream that there was a boy living in that tree and his name was Merlin.”
“Go on,” Julie scoffed.
“No, really. I mean, I really had these dreams. The boy would just step out of the tree and we’d sit there and talk away the afternoon.”
“What did you talk about?”
“I don’t remember,” Sara said. “Not the details—just the feeling. It was all very magical and... healing, I suppose. Jamie said that my having those night fears was just my unconscious mind’s way of dealing with the trauma of losing my parents and then having to live with my dad’s brother who only wanted my inheritance, not me. I was too young then to know anything about that kind of thing; all I knew was that when I talked to Merlin, I felt better. The night fears started coming less and less often and then finally they went away altogether.
“I think Merlin took them away for me.”
“What happened to him?”
“Who?”
“The boy in the tree,” Julie said. “Your Merlin. When did you stop dreaming about him?”
“I don’t really know. I guess when I stopped waking up terrified, I just stopped sleeping under the tree so I didn’t see him anymore. And then I just forgot that he’d ever been there.... “
Julie shook her head. “You know, you can be a bit of a flake sometimes.”
“Thanks a lot. At least I didn’t hang around with a giant hedgehog named Whatzit when I was a kid.”
“No. You hung out with tree-boy.”
Julie started to giggle and then they both broke up. It was a few moments before either of them could catch their breath.
“So what made you think of your tree-boy?” Julie asked.
Another giggle welled up in Julie’s throat, but Sara’s gaze had drifted back out the window and become all dreamy again.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I was just looking out at the garden and I suddenly found myself remembering. I wonder what ever happened to him... ?”
“Jamie gave me some books about a man with the same name as you,” she told the red-haired boy the next time she saw him. “And after I read them, I went into the Library and found some more. He was quite famous, you know.”
“So I’m told,” the boy said with a smile.
“But it’s all so confusing,” Sara went on. “There’s all these different stories, supposedly about the same man.... How are you supposed to know which of them is true?”
“That’s what happens when legend and myth meet,” the boy said. “Everything gets tangled.”
“Was there even a
real
Merlin, do you think? I mean, besides you.”
“A great magician who was eventually trapped in a tree?”
Sara nodded.
“I don’t think so,” the boy said.
“Oh.”
Sara didn’t even try to hide her disappointment.
“But that’s not to say there was never a man named Merlin,” the boy added. “He might have been a bard, or a follower of old wisdoms. His enchantments might have been more subtle than the great acts of wizardry ascribed to him in the stories.”
“And did he end up in a tree?” Sara asked eagerly. “That would make him like you. I’ve also read that he got trapped in a cave, but I think a tree’s much more interesting, don’t you?”
Because her Merlin lived in a tree.
“Perhaps it was in the idea of a tree,” the boy said.
Sara blinked in confusion. “What do you mean?”
“The stories seem to be saying that one shouldn’t teach, or else the student becomes too knowledgeable and then turns on the teacher. I don’t believe that. It’s not the passing on of knowledge that would root someone like Merlin.”
“Well, then what would?”
“Getting too tangled up in his own quest for understanding. Delving so deeply into the calendaring trees that he lost track of where he left his body until one day he looked around to find that he’d become what he was studying.”
“I don’t understand.”
The red-haired boy smiled. “I know. But I can’t speak any more clearly.”
“Why not?” Sara asked, her mind still bubbling with the tales of quests and wizards and knights that she’d been reading. “
Were
you enchanted?
Are
you trapped in that oak tree?”
She was full of curiosity and determined to find out all she could, but in that practiced way that the boy had, he artfully turned the conversation onto a different track and she never did get an answer to her questions.
It rained that night, but the next night the skies were clear. The moon hung above the Mondream Wood like a fat ball of golden honey; the stars were so bright and close Sara felt she could just reach up and pluck one as though it were an apple, hanging in a tree. She had crept from her bedroom in the northwest tower and gone out into the garden, stepping secretly as a thought through the long darkened corridors of the House until she was finally outside.
She was looking for magic.
Dreams were one thing. She knew the difference between what you found in a dream and when you were awake; between a fey red-haired boy who lived in a tree and real boys; between the dreamlike enchantments of the books she’d been reading—enchantments that lay thick as acorns under an oak tree—and the real world where magic was a card trick, or a stage magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat on
The Ed Sullivan Show
.