Holly smiles. “I haven’t run into Cerridwen yet, but yes on both counts to the other two. All I got for my trouble was one very happy dog and a face full of licks.”
“So they didn’t work.”
“They didn’t work for me,” Holly says. “Maybe I’m just not magical enough.”
If you have to have magic to make them work, then I’m really out of luck.
“There was a whole bunch of other stuff in the Wordwood,” Holly goes on, “none of which struck me as having any more practical application than the ones we’ve already talked about. But you could look them up. Are you on-line? I can give you the Word-wood’s URL if you like.”
“I’ve already got it bookmarked.”
Holly waits for a long moment, then says, “But visiting the site makes you uncomfortable.”
“How did you know that?”
She shrugs. “People either fall in love with it, or get spooked— though most of the ones who do get spooked would probably never admit that, even to themselves. They’ll just convince themselves it’s too boring to revisit.”
“So there is something weird about it.”
“There’s something weird about everything,” Holly says, sounding like Jilly.
“Do you believe in magic?” I have to ask.
“I think so. I believe in something. There’s too much anecdotal evidence to discount the idea that there’s more to the world than what we can see. I believe that there’s always been more, but each generation categorizes it a little differently.”
“How so?”
“I correspond with this fellow in Arizona named Richard Kunz,” Holly says, “and he has a really interesting take on all of this. He thinks that the detonation of the first atom bomb forever changed the way that magic would appear in the world. That the spirits live in the wires now instead of the trees. They live and travel through phone and modem lines, take up residence in computers and appliances, and live on electricity and lord knows what else. How else do you explain the spooky ways computers act sometimes?”
“So the Wordwood... ?”
My question trails off because I’m not even sure what it is that I want to ask.
“We started the Wordwood simply as a digital storehouse of knowledge,” Holly says. “An electronic library of all the world’s books. But then we started noticing texts appearing in it that none of us had entered and its URL no longer led to a hard drive with a physical address. The spirits got into it and now it’s something else again, something we can no longer control and can’t explain.” There’s an odd look in her eyes when she adds, “And some of those spirits have even crossed back over into our world again.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Do you know Christy’s girlfriend, Saskia?”
I nod.
“I think she was born in the Wordwood.”
“But that… that’s impossible.”
Holly nods. “So’s magic.”
We sit for a while, Holly with Snippet on her lap, me with Fritzie’s head on mine. I’m anthropomorphizing him again, but I’d swear he’s been following our conversation. I think about Saskia Madding. I’ve only met her a few times, but there is something … well, luminous about her. Like a Madonna or one of the saints in a Botticelli painting. She just glows. I would never have thought magic. Charisma, yes. But maybe that’s a part of magic. A glamour …
“You know what I’d do?” Holly says.
I pull myself up out of my thoughts to look at her and shake my head.
“I’d make my own ritual,” she says.
“What do you mean?”
She straightens a couple of books on her desk, before lifting her gaze up to meet mine.
“It’s just what Christy and Jilly say,” she tells me. “The magic’s already there. Here. All around us. To tap into it you have to really be able to focus on it—it’s like what mystics do when they meditate. It’s all intent and concentration. That’s the whole idea behind spells and rituals. They force you to focus completely on what you’re doing.”
“So they don’t really work,” I say.
Holly shakes her head. “No, they do. But not for the reason we think they do. They work because they make us concentrate so completely that the magic has to pay attention to us. It’s like communion and singing hymns in church. People really do get closer to God because they’re focusing on these rituals and no longer listening to that constant dialogue that goes on inside their heads.”
“I wouldn’t know how to make up a ritual,” I tell her.
She smiles. “Me, neither. But it sounds good in theory, doesn’t it?”
That night I give it a try, making it up as I go. Fritzie follows me from room to room as I gather up candles and herbs and whatever else I can think of and bring them all into the dining room. I turn off all the lights and sit in the dark for a few moments before I light the candles. I burn some piñon incense. I paint symbols on a clay platter from a mixture I’ve made up of red wine, spit and flower pollen. I have an old Tangerine Dream album playing at low volume on the stereo. I write the words, “I want to hear Fritzie talk,” on a slip of rose-colored paper, then cut it up into tiny pieces and burn it on the platter with pinches of herbs. Anise. Thyme. Cilantro. Mint.
The odd thing is, the more I get into it, the more I feel it’s actually going to work. I can feel something, like the charge in the air before a big storm.
Be patient, I tell myself. Focus. Believe.
I sit there for a long time, taking in the acrid smell of burning paper and dried herbs as it mixes with the piñon.
Then I have to laugh at myself.
“So what do you think, boy?” I ask Fritzie. “Is any of this making you feel talkative?”
He comes over and licks my hand.
“Yeah, I thought about as much.”
I turn on the overhead and put everything away. I don’t know why I thought it would work in the first place. It’s weird the things we’ll do for hope.
Before I go to bed, I check my e-mail. I delete the messages as I read them, reply to a couple. Then I find this one:
Date: Wed, 08 Jun 1999 17:55:42-0700
From:
[email protected] To:
[email protected] Subject: Your question
Why do you want to speak to your dog?
The Wordwood
http://www.thewordwood.com/
I stare at it, my cursor arrow hovering on the link to the site, but I don’t click my mouse to take me there. After a long moment I remember to breathe. I close my e-mail reader and turn off the computer.
It’s late and I should get to bed. Instead I go out and sit on the balcony, Fritzie lying at my feet. I stare out at the darkened city and have no idea what I’m thinking about. I just sit there, waiting for morning.
Remember when I said that Sophie is a fairy tale? It’s this theory that Jilly has. She says Sophie has fairy blood, but Sophie only smiles when the topic comes up, so who knows what she really thinks. But Sophie does have these fascinating serial dreams that, if you were given to believing in parallel worlds and the like, would certainly lend credence to the theory. She has this whole other life, apparently, over there in her dream world, but the strange thing is that she says she’s met people here, in what Christy calls the World As It Is, that know her from her dreams.
It’s not a traditional fairy tale, but then, Jilly says, it’s not supposed to be. And we’re still in the middle of it, so it’s hard to say how it will all turn out.
Do I believe it’s true? Of course not. But when I’ve had a glass or two of wine, and Jilly’s there pumping Sophie for the latest installment of her dream serial, and Sophie’s describing these wonderful things, all so matter-of-factly, like how her boyfriend there is this guy named Jeck who can turn into a crow, or this wonderful shop where you can buy all the books and paintings that never got made in our world, somehow it all does make a certain kind of lopsided sense. And I realize that whether or
not it’s true isn’t what’s important; what’s important it’s that we have the story.
Because, getting back to Robert Nathan’s books for a moment, there’s this bit in The Elixir where he says that the difference between man and animals isn’t that we have thumbs, but that we have fairy tales. Everything has a history, even the rocks and trees. But we have legends and dreams that weave into one another. We’re part of them, and they’re part of us. The trees have history, but they have no legends.
I think of it all as a metaphor for imagination, but I want it to be real. I want what we call Jinx, the reason that mechanical objects don’t work properly around Sophie—her wristwatch running backwards, Christy’s computer crashing when she tries to use it, her radio bringing in signals from Australia when it’s tuned to a local frequency—to have a magical rather than a biochemical explanation.
So the next morning, as soon as the hour’s decent, I take Fritzie out for his morning constitutional and follow a meandering path that leads us to the door of Sophie’s building. Because what I need now is for one of my muses to lend me some of her imagination.
Sophie sits us out on the old sofa on her balcony for tea and biscuits. She seems a little amused when I tell her why we’ve come— not amused at me; more amused at the idea of her fairy blood, the way she always is, but not denying it either.
“I can’t do anything here,” she says after a long pause. “But maybe in Mabon you can find someone who can help you.” She smiles. “Since it exists because of magic, somebody there should know how to make an enchantment work.”
Mabon is the name of her dream city. Fritzie seems to pick up his ears when she mentions it.
“Can you take us there?” I ask, but then I think of how often Jilly’s asked the same question.
Sophie shakes her head. “People seem to have to find their own way,” she says. “I don’t think it’s a rule so much as just the way it works.”
“Find my own way,” I repeat.
“Have you ever tried lucid dreaming?” she asks.
“I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“You have to picture the place you want to be when you start to dream,” she says.
I sigh. More of this focus/centering oneself business.
“But I’ve never been there before,” I tell her.
How could I? The place doesn’t exist except in Sophie’s dreams.
But she smiles and gets up. When she returns from inside, she’s carrying a small ink drawing of an old-fashioned storefront. The leaded windows are crammed full of books and above the door a sign reads:
MR. TRUEPENNY’S BOOK EMPORIUM AND GALLERY
“Try using this,” she says as she gives it to me. “That’s where it started for me.”
When I get home I put the drawing beside my bed. I called in sick before I went out this morning, but I’m feeling too guilty to take the whole day off. There are so many projects on the go at the moment and if I’m not there it just means everybody else has to take up my slack and work that much harder. So I change into my office clothes, send this email:
Date: Wed, 09 Jun 1999 11:49:34.0400
From:
[email protected] To:
[email protected] Subject: Re: Your question
>Why do you want to speak to your dog?
Because he used to live with my best friend before she died and I want to talk to him about her.
And go to work.
There’s no reply from the Wordwood when I return to the apartment that evening. Fritzie and I go for a long walk after supper. I do a little work on some files I brought home from the office, then try to watch some TV, but I can’t concentrate. I keep thinking of the drawing that Sophie gave me, of lucid dreaming and the possibility that it might actually take me into Mabon—in the sense of my dreaming I’m there, of course. I have a bath to try to get rid of some of the day’s tension, but it doesn’t really help. When I finally go to bed, Fritzie curled up on the end where he usually sleeps, I can’t stop thinking.
I lie awake for hours until finally I get up and check my email again. Still nothing from the Wordwood.
When I finally fall asleep, it’s almost four in the morning and the next thing I know my alarm’s going off. I drag myself out of bed, walk Fritzie, then hurry off to work. Getting home, I find this waiting for me:
Date: Wed, WJun 1999 16:51:57-0400
From:
[email protected] To:
[email protected] Subject: Re: Your question
>l want to talk to him about her.
Perhaps he simply has nothing he wants to say.
The Wordwood.
http://www.thewordwood.com/
“Is that true?” I ask Fritzie.
It’s not something I ever considered. That maybe he can talk; he just doesn’t want to.
Fritzie cocks his head like a curious crow. He knows I’m asking him something, but since I’m not using his primary vocabulary— “Hungry,” “Walk,” “Get the ball”—he can’t do anything except wag his tail and look at me. So scratch that theory, Mr. Webmaster.
I try the lucid dreaming again that night, fixing the image from Sophie’s drawing firmly in my mind before I go to bed, but I’m so tired that I drop off like I’ve been drugged. If I have any dreams, I don’t remember them.
I think maybe the intense focus everybody’s telling me about isn’t the way to go with this. Maybe magic can only be approached from the side. Maybe it wants you to slip up on it like an image will in the corner of your eye.
I’m thinking this because I have no luck the next night either. On the fourth, I don’t even think about it. Fritzie and I stay up to watch the news, then go to bed after Leno’s monologue and the next thing I know we’re standing on a cobblestoned street looking at the physical counterpart to the bookshop in Sophie’s drawing. By the light, it seems to be late afternoon. There are people around us, window-shopping, or simply out walking. They’re of all sorts— from Bohemians to those dressed for the office—and of all nationalities. No one pays any attention to the fact that I simply popped into existence here, though one little girl across the street gives me a happy wave with her free hand, the other held fast in her mother’s.
I wave back, then study my surroundings a little more.
What surprises me the most isn’t that it worked, that I’ve dreamed my way into Sophie’s city, or at least my own version of it, but that Fritzie’s here with me. He looks at me, grinning, tail slapping the cobblestones. I expect him to say something—after all, we’re in a dream now; we’re in this magical city—but he only gives me that “test the limits” look animals get, then gets up and casually walks over to the nearest lamppost to give it a sniff, checking over his shoulder to see if I’m going to call him back.
As he lifts his leg, I turn away and study the signs on the other shops that line the street. Halfway down the block, on the other side of the street, I spy a sign that reads:
KERRY’S CAULDRON
HOPES MET, DREAMS FULFILLED
I remember the story Holly told me about the Welsh goddess and her magical cauldron. Kerry is close enough to Cerridwen, so far as I’m concerned. And anyway, this is my dream, isn’t it? If I want there to be a shop here with a magical solution waiting for me in it, then why shouldn’t it simply be here as needed?
I call Fritzie and he trots along at my side as I cross the street. The lack of motorized vehicles reminds me of the Market area back home, but I can hear traffic, cars and buses, one or two blocks away. A bell tinkles when I enter the shop and my eyes have to adjust to the dim lighting. It’s like an old-fashioned apothecary inside and has a bewildering smell: herbal, but like a garden, too, and underneath it all, something wild. There are shelves and shelves of bottles holding all sorts of powders and dried herbs, each neatly identified with small, handwritten labels. Bunches of herbs hang from the ceiling behind the long wooden counter with its glass top and sides. I spy boxes of candles, mortar and pes
tles, sacks and little boxes of oddly-named teas, innumerable packages and pouches with labels in no language I can recognize.
A lace curtain behind the counter is pulled aside and a tall, dark-haired woman steps out from behind it. She looks a bit like a Gypsy—or at least my romanticized image of one: dark complexion, white blouse, flower-print skirt, long black hair spilling in loose tangles from under a red kerchief. Her gaze goes to Fritzie who’s sniffing a barrel by the window with great interest.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I say. “I never thought to ask if he could come in. Come here, Fritzie,” I add, hoping he doesn’t decide to pee on the barrel.
She smiles. “True dreamers are always welcome here.”
I don’t know what to say to that. Does she mean me or Fritzie?
“How can I help you?” she adds.
That I can answer. It’s why I’m here, after all.
“Hmm,” is all she says once I’ve explained.
Then she lifts a lovely paisley scarf off what I realize is a notebook computer and starts it up.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“I don’t know that spell,” she tells me, “so I need to look up the recipe in the Wordwood.”
“You’re kidding me, right?”
Bad enough a database is sending me e-mail. Why does it have to be in my dream as well?
She looks puzzled. “Why would you think that?”
“I don’t want it here,” I say.
“You don’t—?”
I’m feeling like a petulant child, but I can’t seem to stop myself.
“It’s my dream,” I tell her, “and I don’t want that… that whatever it is in it with me.”
She gives me a long look and then that smile returns. “This is your first visit to Mabon, isn’t it?”
I nod.
“I thought so,” she goes on. “Did you get here by accident, or did someone show you the way?”
“Someone showed me. But—”
“Well, the first thing you need to know is that you’re not dreaming. It’s true that Mabon exists because Sophie Etoile first brought it into being, but it’s taken on a life of its own since then.”