Greg gave them the address.
“We’ve got a rehearsal today,” he added, “so if you don’t catch her at home, I’ll let her know that you’re looking for her.”
“What’s her phone number?” Henk asked. “Maybe we should give her a call before we drop by.”
“She doesn’t have a phone.”
“So how do you get in touch with her?”
“Oh, you know Jemi. She’s always around. Are you coming to see us this weekend? We’re playing the Saucy Noodle three nights.”
“We’ll definitely make it.” Henk put Larry down and gave him a pat on the rump. “Better get back to those cookies, tiger.”
Larry looked fiercely at him and growled. Henk laughed and pretended to back off from him.
“Listen, thanks, Greg. If we don’t see you sooner, we’ll catch you at the Noodle.”
Greg nodded. “I’ll tell Jemi you’re looking for her if I see her first.”
“That’d be great,” Henk said. “Stub a toe okay?”
Greg laughed and “waved them off.
They took a #1 bus downtown and walked over to the Sandy Hill address that Greg had given them. It proved to be a three-storywood-frame rooming house on Sweetland, near the corner of Laurier. The building stood at the top of a hill, the street dropping sharply down the remainder of its three-block length. They tried the front door and it was open, so they walked in. Jemi’s name was on the mailboxes in the foyer room 11.
“Anybody here?” Henk called.
They waited a moment or so, then, just before Henk called out again, a large woman came from the back of the building. She wore a tent-like pinafore over a T-shirt and faded overalls. Her face was like a full moon big and friendly and she wore her hair in a long braid that hung over one enormous breast.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“We’re looking for Jemi,” Henk said.
“I don’t think she’s up yet at least I haven’t seen her. Come to think of it, I don’t remember her coming in last night. My room’s just beside hers and I was up late last night reading the new Caitlin Midhir book To Drive Away the Northern Cold. Have you read it yet?”
“Uh
” Henk began.
“Well, it’s not like her other stuff at all,” she informed them. “She’s having fun here, with the way we see things in the here and now, you know? But it’s still got that magicky feel that”
“Excuse me,” Johnny broke in, “but would you mind knocking on her door to see if she’s in?”
The woman blinked, then frowned.
“Room eleven,” she said. “Go knock yourself.”
The she turned and went back down the hall.
“What floor?” Johnny called after her.
“Second. Turn right at the top of the stairs.”
“Thanks.”
There was no reply.
Johnny and Henk looked at each other, then shrugged. Johnny took the lead up the stairs. Room 11 was at the far end of the hall. The door had an All Kindly Toes poster on it, dating back to a gig at the Rainbow earlier in the summer. Johnny knocked briskly, knocked again after a few moments when there was no answer.
“Well, that’s that,” he said, turning away from the door after a third knock and the same lack of success.
Henk bent over the lock. “I can get us in.”
“We can’t do that, Henk. It’s not right.”
“Maybe your fiddle’s just sitting in there, Johnny. Besides, she gave you a runaround last night, didn’t she?”
“Yeah, but”
“It’ll just take me a couple of secs.”
“That woman downstairs knows we’re up here,” Johnny said as Henk took his wallet out. “She’s probably listening for us right now.”
“Let her listen.”
Henk took out a credit card and wedged it behind the door’s casing trim. The trim was loose obviously somebody had used this way of getting in before.
“What are you doing with a credit card?” Johnny asked.
“I just use it for ID when I’m writing a cheque. Hang on now.”
He slipped the card down behind the angled latch bolt, turned the door handle, and pushed. The door swung open.
“See?” he said. “Nothing to it.”
Johnny looked nervously back to the head of the stairs.
“Come on,” Henk said, and pulled him inside, shutting the door behind them.
Now that they were inside, Johnny looked curiously around. At first glance there was no sign of either his fiddle or Jemi’s tenor saxophone case. Instead there was a double bed that took up about a quarter of the room, a closet, a dresser, a bay window with an easy chair and a reading lamp beside it, and a small bookcase near the bed, the top of which was obviously being used as a night table.
The two men moved quickly through the room.
Under the bed were dozens of pairs of shoes and boots. The closet was full of clothes, mostly brightly-coloured and dating from the forties and fifties, though there were some Tshirts and jeans. A sopranino sax sat in its case on the windowsill with a handful of tin whistles, all in different keys. The bookcase held mysteries and best-sellers. The dresser was a clutter of makeup and costume jewelry. Necklaces hung from a small knob on the side of the dresser’s mirror rhinestones and fake pearls, beads and coloured glass.
“Look at this,” Henk said.
Johnny came over to the dresser and saw what Henk was pulling free from the other necklaces. It was a carving of a little bone flute that was hanging from a leather thong. Johnny took his own bone carving from his pocket.
“They’re like a matched set,” he said.
Henk nodded. “Well, they were sisters, you said.”
Johnny frowned, remembering Jemi’s anguished features.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
“You should take this,” Henk said, holding out the bone flute. “Trade it to her for your fiddle.”
“It’s just a pendant.”
“Yeah. But I don’t know. I’ve got a feeling it means something important.”
Johnny did too, more so than Henk perhaps. He’d felt a tingle touching it, and for some reason envisioned the two carvings pulling at each other like the opposite ends of a pair of magnets.
He took the pendant from Henk’s hand and rehung it with the other necklaces.
“I’m not taking anything,” he said. “Now, let’s go.”
He opened the door and peered nervously out, but the hallway was empty. Motioning to Henk, he stepped out into the hall. Henk joined him, shutting the door, and they made for the stairs.
Johnny felt terrible. He was missing his fiddle and last night was still a “weird collage of disjointed images in his head, but it wasn’t right to go poking through somebody else’s personal things. It was too much an invasion of their privacy.
They made it downstairs and outside without meeting anyone. It wasn’t until they were a few blocks away that Johnny began to breathe easier.
“Listen,” Henk said. “I’ve got to get to work. Are you going to be okay?”
Henk worked afternoons in a record store called Record Runner on Rideau Street.
“Yeah,” Johnny said. “I’ll be fine.”
“What’re you going to do about your fiddle?”
“Drop in on the AKT rehearsal, I guess.”
“Okay. Talk to you tonight and watch it around those pink-haired ladies.”
A faint smile touched Johnny’s lips gone almost before it was there.
“Sure,” he said. “Thanks again, Henk.”
Henk lifted a hand in farewell and set off, leaving Johnny at the corner of Laurier and King Edward. Johnny decided to walk home by way of the bike path along the canal, taking his time. When he finally got back to his apartment, he was feeling a little more clear-headed, if no closer to understanding anything. He had some lunch, then phoned Greg’s place. Greg’s wife, Janet, gave him Trudy MacDonald’s number wh
ere the band was rehearsing. When he called there and got Greg on the line, Greg told him that Jemi hadn’t shown up yet.
“Don’t know what happened to her, man. She’s usually pretty good about rehearsals she just likes to play, you know?”
“Sure. If she shows up, will you have her call me?”
He gave Greg his number.
“No problem,” Greg said. “And if you see her, tell her to shake her ass down here, okay?”
“Sure.”
Johnny hung up and stared at the phone. When he thought of Jemi, the way she’d looked the last time he’d seen her, head tilted back, screaming at the sky
If that was a true memory, he supposed he wasn’t all that surprised that she hadn’t shown up for the AKT rehearsal. But where did that leave him? He had a gig himself on the weekend two nights at the Earl of Sussex and while he had a spare fiddle, there was no way he was going to give up the one he’d lost. Tom had given it to him. Just one day, out of the blue. He’d handed Johnny the fiddle, saying, “I think you’re ready for this one now.”
Johnny had never played a fiddle that sounded so sweet. The bass strings woke a low grumble, the high strings just sang. Everything sounded good on it though by the time he first played that instrument, he’d been studying with Tom for twelve years. If Tom hadn’t taught him everything that Tom himself knew, Johnny couldn’t imagine what it could be.
He got up and stared out the front window, hands in his pockets. He felt the bone carving, remembered the bone flute in Jemi’s apartment, remembered a hollowed hill
.
He stood there for a few moments longer, just staring, then got his bike and pedaled down to Vincent Massey Park.
Puxill, he thought. I’m going to look for the Pook of Puxill.
He said the words aloud, then smiled, seeing the play of words on the title of the Kipling book.
He wondered which had come first.
Dunrobin Finn had a small underground home under the grassy verge between Rideau River Drive and the river itself. Fifteen years or so ago, the spot was a public beach. Now all that remained of its former use was a low stone wall near the river. The sandy beach had been taken over by reeds and rushes. Swans and ducks floated nearby in summer. In winter, the north winds blew down the frozen expanse of the river. But Finn’s home was cool in summer, and snug in winter.
Physically it stood in Faerie, so that its grassy door, or the smoke from his hearth, could only be seen by those few mortals who could see into the Middle Kingdom.
Inside, the hollow was one large, low-ceilinged room, “with a small sleeping area curtained off on one side. The hearth was used for both warmth in winter and cooking. At the moment a pot of tea sat steeping on the warm stones in front of it, the fire already burning low. Woven reed carpets covered the floor, except for near the old sofa and reading chair where a worn Oriental carpet that Jacky and Kate had given the hob lay. Like most faerie not directly connected to the Court; Finn preferred comfortable furnishings old-fashioned stuffed sofas and Morris chairs with fat pillows.
Near the hearth was a tall pine kitchen hutch with an enamel counter where Finn did his preparations for cooking. A stool stood nearby that he used to reach the top shelves of the hutch, where he kept the herb simples and poultices that he used as a skillyman. The walls of the big room were covered with antique portraits. Finn collected sepia-toned photographs from bygone years mostly portraits and loved to hand-tint them on long winter nights. Each photo had its own wooden frame, ornately carved by the hob. Kate and Jacky each had a few of his portraits hanging in their bedrooms.
Kate and Finn were sitting by the hearth now, Finn in his chair, Kate stretched out on the sofa with Caraid on a cushion beside her. They sipped hot honeyed tea and were quiet now that Kate had finished telling the hob all of what she’d learned the previous night. She’d been nodding off when they first arrived, but the conversation and tea had quickly revived her.
“These droichan,” Finn said finally. “They’re quite rare now. So few mortals are prepared to accept that Faerie even exists, they don’t much seek out its secret knowledge anymore.”
“They don’t sound much different from the Unseelie Court,” Kate said.
“Oh, they’re quite different. For all their enmity to us, the Host gets its luck the same as us as a gift from the Moonmother Arn.”
“But they’re evil
.”
“Oh, they’re bad all right, but not much different from our own Court, really. We’re like two of your countries in a constant war, Kate. The folk of both countries need to eat the same food, need to sleep at night and relieve themselves. It’s the same with faerie only our ideologies are different. But droichan
“They turn widdershins to Faerie. In the old days, they started out mostly as shargies changelings that one or another of the Courts took in. Sometimes they’d just go bad, and no one knows why.”
“Caraid says they could be giants or ogres, too, but that they’re mostly gruagaghs.”
Finn shrugged. “Don’t know enough about it myself. But a droichan usually becomes a gruagagh in the end there’s no argument there.” He looked at Caraid then. “Now, that book of yours isn’t it a skilly thing!”
Kate smiled. “I feel like I’ve had it all my life.”
“That’s a true gruagagh’s use of magic, making that thing. I couldn’t stitch a spell like that if my life depended on it.”
“I just used a wallystane.”
“But there’s a good and a bad way to use a wallystane,” Finn said. “As you well know from the first time you tried yourself.”
He grinned suddenly. Mostly his eyes had a cunning, almost sly look to them, but when he was in a good humour, they sparkled with a light all their own and left others wondering how they could ever have seen him as other than a cheerful hob.
“And see,” he added, “what you spelled just goes on. It’s not a one-time thing useful as that can be. This wee book of yours will give you knowledge, Kate. Maybe even turn you into a wisewife or gruagagh yourself. You’ve already got the name the only Crackernuts in Kinrowan, that’s for sure, though once the name was a bit more common. You’re clever enough, by far. All you need to do is learn a few tricks and a bit of magic, and away you’ll go. I didn’t know you were looking to learn, or I would’ve taught you some stitcheries myself. It’s not too late to start now.”
“There’s the droichan to be dealt with first,” Kate said.
“Oh, yes,” Finn said grimly. “There’s not a light in the sky that a cloud can’t cover. Spike the damn hound for breathing.”
“Finn. What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know. Rescue Jacky. Look for help.” He sighed, staring at the last embers of the fire. “What does your book say?”
“Just that we have to find the droichan’s heart.”
“And that won’t be easy. Let’s see that book a moment, Kate.”
She passed Caraid over. Finn took the stub of a pencil from his pocket and opened the book to a blank page. He sucked on the end of the pencil, thinking, then wrote:
Where do we start?
Kate leaned forward to see what Caraid would answer, but the book made no reply. She had the sudden fear then that it would only work in the Tower, in the Gruagagh’s study.
“Oh, Finn. Does this mean”
“Only that you spelled it to listen to you,” the hob said. “To you and no one else.” He handed the book back to her. “You ask it.”
“I wish I could just talk to it and it could talk back to me,” Kate said. “Could that be done?”
“Well, now
I can’t make it speak to you, but maybe I can let it hear you.”
He got up and fetched a silver needle and a spool of red thread from the hutch. The spool for the thread was a thick chunk of a rowan branch. He took the book back from her and with quick deft movements, stitched an embroidered ear onto the front of the book.
“A
sk it something,” he said.
Kate started to reach for the book, but Finn shook his head.
“Just speak the question,” he told her.
Kate cleared her throat. “I feel silly talking to a book.”
“There’s sillier things. Try chasing a spunkie into a marsh like some mortals do. The sluagh just grab them and that’s not nice at all at least not for the one that’s caught.”
“I suppose.” She cleared her throat again, then gave it a try. “Uh
hello, Caraid. Can you hear me?”
Under the four words that Finn had written earlier, her question appeared, in her own handwriting.
Hello, Kate, the book replied.
“Can you just hear me, or can you hear everything that goes on around you?”
Everything. But I’ll only answer to you. You’re my only friend.
“That’s the thing with names,” Finn remarked.
“What should we do?” Kate asked the book. “Where do we start? The droichan’s caught Jacky and I can’t just leave her to him while I go off looking for his heart. I might never find it.”
Her words appeared on the page as quickly as she spoke them. Kate watched them take form, fascinated.
“We need help, Caraid,” she added.
Rowan will break the droichan’s spell on the Jack unless he had blooded her. But you must be careful. The white wood or the red berry are only effective against his spells. If he was to catch you, neither will help you then.
“What does ‘blooding her’ mean?” Kate asked.
It made her stomach feel a little queasy as her imagination brought up images of what she thought the phrase meant.
“Luck flows like blood,” Finn answered. “To free the luck from a body, the droichan will have to cut it open.”
“Oh, God!” Kate stood up quickly. “We’ve got to get back to the Tower.”
“First we need a plan.”
“A plan? Finn, this is Jacky we’re talking about!”
“Yes. But if he catches us as well, then what hope does she have? And there’s this to think about as well: A creature like a droichan will gather the mean-spirited and evil about, simply by his presence. Bogans and other Unseelie folk.”