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“Yes!” he whispered. “Got you, you godly little recluse, you. I knew you had to be in there!” He grabbed Julie’s hand and drew it straight up to the vegetable-looking forest surrounding the distant castle. “Right there, peeping coyly out like Julia’s feet, you can’t miss him.”
But she could, and she did, for a maddening while; until Farrell made her focus on a tiny shape, a gray-white bulge at the base of one of the trees. Nose hard against the glass, she began at last to see it clearly: all robe and beard, mostly, but stitched with enough maniacal medieval detail to suggest a bald head, intense black eyes and a wondering expression. Farrell said proudly, “Your basic resident hermit. Absolutely required, no self-respecting feudal estate complete without one. There’s our boy.”
It seemed to Julie that the lady and the two men were straining their embroidered necks to turn toward the castle and the solitary form they had forgotten for five centuries. “Him?” she said. “He’s the one?”
“Hold our friend up to see him. Watch what happens.”
For a while, afterward, she tried to forget how grudgingly she had reached into her coat pocket and slowly brought her cupped hand up again, into the light. Farrell shifted position, moving close on her right to block any possible glimpse of the unicorn. It posed on Julie’s palm, head high, three legs splayed slightly for balance, and one forefoot proudly curled, (exactly like every unicorn I ever drew when I was young.) She looked around quickly—half afraid of being observed, half wishing it—and raised her hand to bring the unicorn level with the dim little figure of the hermit.
Three things happened then. The unicorn uttered a harsh, achingly plain cry of recognition and longing, momentarily silencing the Brueghel lecturer around the corner. At the same time, a different
sound, low and disquieting, like a sleeper’s teeth grinding together, seemed to come either from the frame enclosing the tapestry or the glass over it. The third occurrence was that something she could not see, nor ever after describe to Farrell, gripped Julie’s right wrist so strongly that she cried out herself and almost dropped the unicorn to the gallery floor. She braced it with her free hand as it scrambled for purchase, the carpet-tack horn glowing like abalone shell.
“What is it, what’s the matter?” Farrell demanded. He made clumsily to hold her, but she shook him away. Whatever had her wrist tightened its clamp, feeling nothing at all like a human hand, but rather as though the air itself were turning to stone—as though one part of her were being buried while the rest stood helplessly by. Her fingers could yet move, enough to hold the unicorn safe; but there was no resisting the force that was pushing her arm back down toward the tapestry foreground, back to the knight and the squire, the mincing damsel and the strangling garden. They want it. It is theirs. Give it to them. They want it.
“Fat fucking chance, buster,” she said loudly. Her right hand was almost numb, but she felt the unicorn rearing in her palm, felt its rage shock through her stone arm, and watched from very far away as the bright horn touched the tapestry frame.
Almost silently, the glass shattered. There was only one small hole at first, popping into view just above the squire’s lumpy face; then the cracks went spidering across the entire surface, making a tiny scratching sound, like mice in the walls. One by one, quite deliberately, the pieces of glass began to fall out of the frame, to splinter again on the hardwood floor.
With the first fragment, Julie’s arm was her own once more, freezing cold and barely controllable, but free. She lurched forward, off-balance, and might easily have shoved the unicorn back into the garden after all. But Farrell caught her, steadying her hand as she raised it to the shelter of the forest and the face under the trees.
The unicorn turned its head. Julie caught the brilliant purple glance out of the air and tucked it away in herself, to keep for later. She could hear voices approaching now, and quick, officious footsteps that didn’t sound like those of an art historian. As briskly as she might have shooed one of NMC’s kittens from underfoot, she said, in the language that sounded like Japanese, “Go on, then, go. Go home.”
She never actually saw the unicorn flow from her hand into the tapestry. Whenever she tried to make herself recall the moment, memory dutifully producing a rainbow flash or a melting movie-dissolve passage between worlds, irritable honesty told memory to put a sock in it. There was never anything more than herself standing in a lot of broken glass for the second time in two days, with a faint chill in her right arm, hearing Farrell’s eloquently indignant voice denying to guards, docents and lecturers alike that either of them had laid a hand on this third-rate Belgian throw rug. He was still expounding a theory involving cool recycled air on the outside of the glass and warm condensation within as they were escorted all the way to the parking lot. When Julie praised his passionate inventiveness, he only growled, “Maybe that’s the way it really was. How do I know?”
But she knew without asking that he had seen what she had seen: the pale shadow peering back at them from its sanctuary in the wood, and the opaline glimmer of a horn under the hermit’s hand. Knight, lady and squire—one another’s prisoners now, eternally—remained exactly where they were.
That night neither Farrell nor Julie slept at all. They lay silently close, peacefully wide-awake, companionably solitary, listening to her beloved Black-Forest-tourist-trash cuckoo clock strike the hours. In the morning Farrell said it was because NMC had carried on so, roaming the apartment endlessly in search of her lost nursling. But Julie answered, “We didn’t need to sleep. We needed to be quiet and tell ourselves what happened to us. To hear the story.”
Farrell was staring blankly into the open refrigerator, as he had been for some time. “I’m still not sure what happened. I get right up to the place where you lifted it up so it could see its little hermit buddy, and then your arm…I can’t ever figure that part. What the hell was it that had hold of you?”
“I don’t see how we’ll ever know,” she said. “It could have been them, those three—some force they were able to put out together that almost made me put the unicorn back with them, in the garden.” She shivered briefly, then slipped past him to take out the eggs, milk and smoked salmon he had vaguely been seeking, and close the refrigerator door.
Farrell shook his head slowly. “They weren’t real. Not like the unicorn. Even your grandmother couldn’t have brought one of them to life on this side. Colored thread, that’s all they were. The hermit, the monk, whatever—I don’t know, Jewel.”
“I don’t know either,” she said. “Listen. Listen, I’ll tell you what I think I think. Maybe whoever wove that tapestry meant to trap a unicorn, meant to keep it penned up there forever. Not a wicked wizard, nothing like that, just the weaver, the artist. It’s the way we are, we all want to paint or write or play something so for once it’ll stay painted, stay played, stay put, so it’ll still be alive for us tomorrow, next week, always. Mostly it dies in the night—but now and then, now and then, somebody gets it right. And when you get it right, then it’s real. Even if it doesn’t exist, like a unicorn, if you get it really right…”
She let the last words trail away. Farrell said, “Garlic. I bet you don’t have any garlic, you never do.” He opened the refrigerator again and rummaged, saying over his shoulder, “So you think it was the weaver himself, herself, grabbing you, from back there in the fifteenth century? Wanting you to put things back the way you found them, the way he had it—the right way?”
“Maybe.” Julie rubbed her arm unconsciously, though the coldness was long since gone. “Maybe. Too bad for him. Right isn’t absolutely everything.”
“Garlic is,” Farrell said from the depths of the vegetable bin. Emerging in triumph, brandishing a handful of withered-looking cloves, he added, “That’s my Jewel. Priorities on straight, and a strong but highly negotiable sense of morality. The thing I’ve always loved about you, all these years.”
Neither of them spoke for some while. Farrell peeled garlic and broke eggs into a bowl, and Julie fed NMC. The omelets were almost done before she said, “We might manage to put up with each other a bit longer than usual this time. Us old guys. I mean, I’ve signed a lease on this place, I can’t go anywhere.”
“Hand me the cayenne,” Farrell said. “Madame Schumann-Heink can still manage the Bay Bridge these days, but I don’t think I’d try her over the Golden Gate. Your house and the restaurant, that’s about her limit.”
“You’d probably have to go a bit light on the garlic. Only a bit, that’s all. And I still don’t like people around when I’m working. And I still read in the bathroom.”
Farrell smiled at her then, brushing gray hair out of his eyes. “That’s all right, there’s always the litter box. Just don’t you go marrying any Brians. Definitely no Brians.”
“Fair enough,” she said. “Think of it—you could have a real key, and not have to pick the lock every time. Hold still, there’s egg on your forehead.” The omelets got burned.
A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to Urban Fantasy
Paula Guran
No publishing mastermind creates genres, subgenres, or categories. They arise due to public demand. No writer sets out to invent them. An imaginative author—who is influenced by what she or he has experienced, heard, seen, knows—writes her or his unique work. Often, around the same time, there is another writer or two who—through sheer serendipity or cultural zeitgeist—may be writing stories that have a similar appeal. For various reasons that one can theorize about, but no one really understands, the fiction gains popularity. If a type of fiction is seen as marketable, the places that sell books want more of “that sort of book,” and the publishers provide them. An example, as Joe R. Lansdale has pointed out elsewhere in this volume, is horror. It did not become a commercial ca
