The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Sixth Annual Collection

THE BONE WOMAN Charles de Lint

No one really stops to think of Ellie Spink, and why should they?

She’s no one.

She has nothing.

Homely as a child, all that the passing of years did was add to her unattractiveness. Face like a horse, jaw long and square, forehead broad; limpid eyes set bird-wide on either side of a gargantuan nose; hair a nondescript brown, greasy and matted, stuffed up under a woolen toque lined with a patchwork of metal foil scavenged from discarded cigarette packages. The angularity of her slight frame doesn’t get its volume from her meager diet, but from the multiple layers of clothing she wears.

Raised in foster homes, she’s been used, but she’s never experienced a kiss. Institutionalized for most of her adult life, she’s been medicated, but never treated. Pass her on the street and your gaze slides right on by, never pausing to register the difference between the old woman huddled in the doorway and a bag of garbage.

Old woman? Though she doesn’t know it, Monday, two weeks past, was her thirty-seventh birthday. She looks twice her age.

There’s no point in trying to talk to her. Usually no one’s home. When there is, the words spill out in a disjointed mumble, a rambling, one-sided dialogue itemizing a litany of misperceived conspiracies and ills that soon leave you feeling as confused as she herself must be.

Normal conversation is impossible and not many bother to try it. The exceptions are few: The odd pitying passerby. A concerned social worker, fresh out of college and new to the streets. Maybe one of the other street people who happens to stumble into her particular haunts.

They talk and she listens or she doesn't—she never makes any sort of a relevant response, so who can tell? Few push the matter. Fewer still, however well-intentioned, have the stamina to make the attempt to do so more than once or twice. It’s easier to just walk away; to bury your guilt, or laugh off her confused ranting as the excessive rhetoric it can only be.

I’ve done it myself.

I used to try to talk to her when I first started seeing her around, but I didn’t get far. Angel told me a little about her, but even knowing her name and some of her history didn’t help.

“Hey, Elbe. How’re you doing?”

Pale eyes, almost translucent, turn towards me, set so far apart it’s as though she can only see me with one eye at a time.

“They should test for aliens,” she tells me. “You know, like in the Olympics.”

“Aliens?”

“I mean, who cares who killed Kennedy? Dead’s dead, right?”

“What’s Kennedy got to do with aliens?”

“I don’t even know why they took down the Berlin wall. What about the one in China? Shouldn’t they have worked on that one first?”

It’s like trying to have a conversation with a game of Trivial Pursuit that specializes in information garnered from supermarket tabloids. After awhile I’d just pack an extra sandwich whenever I was busking in her neighbourhood. I’d sit beside her, share my lunch and let her talk if she wanted to, but I wouldn’t say all that much myself.

That all changed the day I saw her with the Bone Woman.

I didn’t call her the Bone Woman at first; the adjective that came more immediately to mind was fat. She couldn’t have been much more than five-foot-one, but she had to weigh in at two-fifty, leaving me with the impression that she was wider than she was tall. But she was light on her feet—peculiarly graceful for all her squat bulk.

She had a round face like a full moon, framed by thick black hair that hung in two long braids to her waist. Her eyes were small, almost lost in that expanse of face, and so dark they seemed all pupil. She went barefoot in a shapeless black dress, her only accessory an equally shapeless shoulder-bag made of some kind of animal skin and festooned with dangling thongs from which hung various feathers, beads, bottle-caps and other found objects.

I paused at the far end of the street when I saw the two of them together. I had a sandwich for Elbe in my knapsack, but I hesitated in approaching them. They seemed deep in conversation, real conversation, give and take, and Ellie was— knitting? Talking and knitting? The pair of them looked like a couple of old gossips, sitting on the back porch of their building. The sight of Elbe acting so normal was something I didn’t want to interrupt.

I sat down on a nearby stoop and watched until Ellie put away her knitting and stood up. She looked down at her companion with an expression in her features that I’d never seen before. It was awareness, I realized. She was completely here for a change.

As she came up the street, I stood up and called a greeting to her, but by the time she reached me she wore her usually vacuous expression.

“It’s the newspapers,” she told me. “They use radiation to print them and that’s what makes the news seem so bad.”

Before I could take the sandwich I’d brought her out of my knapsack, she’d shuffled off, around the corner, and was gone. I glanced back down the street to where the fat woman was still sitting, and decided to find Ellie later. Right now I wanted to know what the woman had done to get such a positive reaction out of Ellie.

When I approached, the fat woman was sifting through the refuse where the two of them had been sitting. As I watched, she picked up a good-sized bone. What kind, I don’t know, but it was as long as my forearm and as big around as the neck of my fiddle. Brushing dirt and a sticky candy-wrapper from it, she gave it a quick polish on the sleeve of her dress and stuffed it away in her shoulder-bag. Then she looked up at me.

My question died stillborn in my throat under the sudden scrutiny of those small dark eyes. She looked right through me—not the drifting, unfocused gaze of so many of the street people, but a cold far-off seeing that weighed my presence, dismissed it, and gazed farther off at something far more important.

I stood back as she rose easily to her feet. That was when I realized how graceful she was. She moved down the sidewalk as daintily as a doe, as though her bulk was filled with helium, rather than flesh, and weighed nothing. I watched her until she reached the far end of the street, turned her own corner and then, just like Ellie, was gone as well.

I ended up giving Elbe’s sandwich to Johnny Rew, an old wino who’s taught me a fiddle tune or two, the odd time I’ve run into him sober.

I started to see the Bone Woman everywhere after that day. I wasn’t sure if she was just new to town, or if it was one of those cases where you see something or someone you’ve never noticed before and after that you see them all the time. Everybody I talked to about her seemed to know her, but no one was quite sure how long she’d been in the city, or where she lived, or even her name. I still wasn’t calling her the Bone Woman, though I knew by then that bones were all she collected. Old bones, found bones, rattling around together in her shoulder-bag until she went off at the end of the day and showed up the next morning, ready to start filling her bag again.

When she wasn’t hunting bones, she spent her time with the street’s worst cases— people like Elbe that no one else could talk to. She’d get them making things— little pictures or carvings or beadwork, keeping their hands busy. And talking. Someone like Elbe still made no sense to anybody else, but you could tell when she was with the Bone Woman that they were sharing a real dialogue. Which was a good thing, I suppose, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something more going on, something if not exactly sinister, then still strange.

It was the bones, I suppose. There were so many. How could she keep finding them the way she did? And what did she do with them?

My brother Christy collects urban legends, the way the Bone Woman collects her bones, rooting them out where you’d never think they could be. But when I told him about her, he just shrugged.

“Who knows why any of them do anything?” he said.

Christy doesn’t live on the streets, for all that he haunts them. He’s just an observer—always has been, ever since we were kids. To him, the street people can be pretty well evenly divided between the sad cases and the crazies. Their stories are too human for him.

“Some of these are big,” I told him. “The size of a human thighbone.”

“So point her out to the cops.”

“And tell them what?”

A smile touched his lips with just enough superiority in it to get under my skin. He’s always been able to do that. Usually, it makes me do something I regret later which I sometimes think is half his intention. It’s not that he wants to see me hurt. It’s just part and parcel of that air of authority that all older siblings seem to wear. You know, a raised eyebrow, a way of smiling that says “you have so much to learn, little brother. ”

“If you really want to know what she does with those bones,” he said, “why don’t you follow her home and find out?”

“Maybe I will.”

It turned out that the Bone Woman had a squat on the roof of an abandoned factory building in the Tombs. She’d built herself some kind of a shed up there—just a leaning, ramshackle affair of cast-off lumber and sheet metal, but it kept out the weather and could easily be heated with a woodstove in the spring and fall. Come winter, she’d need warmer quarters, but the snows were still a month or so away.

I followed her home one afternoon, then came back the next day when she was out to finally put to rest my fear about these bones she was collecting. The thought that had stuck in my mind was that she was taking something away from the street people like Ellie, people who were already at the bottom rung and deserved to be helped, or at least just left alone. I’d gotten this weird idea that the bones were tied up with the last remnants of vitality that someone like Ellie might have, and the Bone Woman was stealing it from them.

What I found was more innocuous, and at the same time creepier, than I’d expected.

The inside of her squat was littered with bones and wire and dog-shaped skeletons that appeared to be made from the two. Bones held in place by wire, half-connected ribs and skulls and limbs. A pack of bone dogs. Some of the figures were almost complete, others were merely suggestions, but everywhere I looked, the half-finished wire-and-bone skeletons sat or stood or hung suspended from the ceiling. There had to be more than a dozen in various states of creation.

I stood in the doorway, not willing to venture any further, and just stared at them all. I don t know how long I was there, but finally I turned away and made my way back down through the abandoned building and out onto the street.

So now I knew what she did with the bones. But it didn’t tell me how she could find so many of them. Surely that many stray dogs didn’t die, their bones scattered the length and breadth of the city like so much autumn residue?

Amy and I had a gig opening for the Kelledys that night. It didn’t take me long to set up. I just adjusted my microphone, laid out my fiddle and whistles on a small table to one side, and then kicked my heels while Amy fussed with her pipes and the complicated tangle of electronics that she used to amplify them.

I’ve heard it said that all Uillean pipers are a little crazy—that they have to be to play an instrument that looks more like what you’d find in the back of a plumber’s truck than an instrument—but I think of them as perfectionists. Every one I’ve ever met spends more time fiddling with their reeds and adjusting the tuning of their various chanters, drones and regulators than would seem humanly possible.

Amy’s no exception. After awhile I left her there on the stage, with her red hair falling in her face as she poked and prodded at a new reed she’d made for one of her drones, and wandered into the back where the Kelledys were making their own preparations for the show which consisted of drinking tea and looking beatific. At least that’s the way I always think of the two of them. I don’t think I’ve ever met calmer people.

Jilly likes to think of them as mysterious, attributing all kinds of fairy-tale traits to them. Meran, she’s convinced, with the green highlights in her nut-brown hair and her wise brown eyes, is definitely dryad material—the spirit of an oak tree come to life—while Cerin is some sort of wizard figure, a combination of adept and bard.

I think the idea amuses them and they play it up to Jilly. Nothing you can put your finger on, but they seem to get a kick out of spinning a mysterious air about themselves whenever she’s around.

I’m far more practical than Jilly—actually, just about anybody’s more practical than Jilly, God bless her, but that’s another story. I think if you find yourself using the word magic to describe the Kelledys, what you’re really talking about is their musical talent. They may seem preternaturally calm off-stage, but as soon as they begin to play, that calmness is transformed into a bonfire of energy. There’s enchantment then, burning on stage, but it comes from their instrumental skill.

“Geordie,” Meran said after I’d paced back and forth for a few minutes. “You look a little edgy. Have some tea.”

I had to smile. If the Kelledys had originated from some mysterious elsewhere, then I’d lean more towards them having come from a fiddle tune than Jilly’s fairy tales. “When sick is it tea you want?” I said, quoting the title of an old Irish jig that we all knew in common.

Meran returned my smile. “It can’t hurt. Here,” she added, rummaging around in a bag that was lying by her chair. “Let me see if I have something that’ll ease your nervousness.”

“I’m not nervous.”

“No, of course not,” Cerin put in. “Geordie just likes to pace, don’t you?”

He was smiling as he spoke, but without a hint of Christy’s sometimes annoying demeanor.

“No, really. It's just . . .

“Just what?” Meran asked as my voice trailed off.

Well, here was the perfect opportunity to put Jilly’s theories to the test, I decided. If the Kelledys were in fact as fey as she made them out to be, then they’d be able to explain this business with the bones, wouldn’t they?

So I told them about the fat woman and her bones and what I’d found in her squat. They listened with far more reasonableness than I would have if someone had been telling the story to me—especially when I went on to explain the weird feeling I’d been getting from the whole business.

“It’s giving me the creeps,” I said, finishing up, “and I can’t even say why.”

“La Huesera”, Cerin said when I was done.

Meran nodded. “The Bone Woman,” she said, translating it for me. “It does sound like her.”

“So you know her. ”

“No,” Meran said. “It just reminds us of a story we heard when we were playing in Phoenix a few years ago. There was a young Apache man opening for us and he and I started comparing flutes. We got on to one of the Native courting flutes which used to be made from human bone and somehow from there he started telling me about a legend they have in the Southwest about this old fat woman who wanders through the mountains and arroyos, collecting bones from the desert that she brings back to her cave.”

“What does she collect them for?”

“To preserve the things that are in danger of being lost to the world,” Cerin said.

“I don’t get it.”

“I’m not sure of the exact details,” Cerin went on, “but it had something to do with the spirits of endangered species.”

“Giving them a new life,” Meran said.

“Or a second chance.”

“But there’s no desert around here,” I said. “What would this Bone Woman being doing up here?”

Meran smiled. “I remember John saying that she’s been seen as often riding shotgun in an eighteen-wheeler as walking down a dry wash.”

“And besides,” Cerin added. “Any place is a desert when there’s more going on underground than on the surface.”

That described Newford perfectly. And who lived a more hidden life than the street people? They were right in front of us every day, but most people didn’t even see them anymore. And who was more deserving of a second chance than someone like Elbe who’d never even gotten a fair first chance?

“Too many of us live desert lives,” Cerin said, and I knew just what he meant.

The gig went well. I was a little bemused, but I didn’t make any major mistakes. Amy complained that her regulators had sounded too buzzy in the monitors, but that was just Amy. They’d sounded great to me, their counterpointing chords giving the tunes a real punch whenever they came in.

The Kelledys’ set was pure magic. Amy and I watched them from the stage wings and felt higher as they took their final bow than we had when the applause had been directed at us.

I begged off getting together with them after the show, regretfully pleading tiredness. I was tired, but leaving the theatre, I headed for an abandoned factory in the Tombs instead of home. When I got up on the roof of the building, the moon was full. It looked like a saucer of buttery gold, bathing everything in a warm yellow light. I heard a soft voice on the far side of the roof near the Bone Woman's squat. It wasn’t exactly singing, but not chanting either. A murmuring, sliding sound that raised the hairs at the nape of my neck.

I walked a little nearer, staying in the shadows of the cornices, until I could see the Bone Woman. I paused then, laying my fiddlecase quietly on the roof and sliding down so that I was sitting with my back against the cornice.

The Bone Woman had one of her skeleton sculptures set out in front of her and she was singing over it. The dog shape was complete now, all the bones wired in place and gleaming in the moonlight. I couldn’t make out the words of her song. Either there were none, or she was using a language I’d never heard before. As I watched, she stood, raising her arms up above the wired skeleton, and her voice grew louder.

The scene was peaceful—soothing, in the same way that the Kelledys’ company could be—but eerie as well. The Bone Woman’s voice had the cadence of one of the medicine chants I’d heard at a powwow up on the Kickaha Reservation—the same nasal tones and ringing quality. But that powwow hadn’t prepared me for what came next.

At first I wasn’t sure that I was really seeing it. The empty spaces between the skeleton’s bones seemed to gather volume and fill out, as though flesh were forming on the bones. Then there was fur, highlit by the moonlight, and I couldn’t deny it any more. I saw a bewhiskered muzzle lift skyward, ears twitch, a tail curl up, thickhaired and strong. The powerful chest began to move rhythmically, at first in time to the Bone Woman’s song, then breathing of its own accord.

The Bone Woman hadn’t been making dogs in her squat, I realized as I watched the miraculous change occur. She’d been making wolves.

The newly-animated creature’s eyes snapped open and it leapt up, running to the edge of the roof. There it stood with its forelegs on the cornice. Arching its neck, the wolf pointed its nose at the moon and howled.

I sat there, already stunned, but the transformation still wasn’t complete. As the wolf howled, it began to change again. Fur to human skin. Lupine shape, to that of a young woman. Howl to merry laughter. And as she turned, I recognized her features.

“Ellie,” I breathed.

She still had the same horsey-features, the same skinny body, all bones and angles, but she was beautiful. She blazed with the fire of a spirit that had never been hurt, never been abused, never been degraded. She gave me a radiant smile and then leapt from the edge of the roof.

I held my breath, but she didn’t fall. She walked out across the city’s skyline, out across the urban desert of rooftops and chimneys, off and away, running now, laughter trailing behind her until she was swallowed by the horizon.

I stared out at the night sky long after she had disappeared, then slowly stood up and walked across the roof to where the Bone Woman was sitting outside the door of her squat. She tracked my approach, but there was neither welcome nor dismissal in those small dark eyes. It was like the first time I’d come up to her; as far as she was concerned, I wasn’t there at all.

“How did you do that?” I asked.

She looked through, past me.

“Can you teach me that song? I want to help, too.”

Still no response.

“Why won’t you talk to me?”

Finally her gaze focused on me.

“You don’t have their need,” she said.

Her voice was thick with an accent I couldn’t place. Once again, she ignored me. The pinpoints of black that passed for eyes in that round moon face looked away into a place where I didn’t belong.

Finally, I did the only thing left for me to do. I collected my fiddlecase and went on home.

Some things haven’t changed. Elbe’s still living on the streets and I still share my lunch with her when I’m down in her part of town. There’s nothing the Bone Woman can do to change what this life has done to the Elbe Spinks of the world.

But what I saw that night gives me hope for the next turn of the wheel. I know now that no matter how downtrodden someone like Elbe might be, at least somewhere a piece of her is running free. Somewhere that wild and innocent part of her spirit is being preserved with those of the wolf and the rattlesnake and all the other creatures whose spirit-bones La Huesera collects from the desert—deserts natural, and of our own making.

Spirit-bones. Collected and preserved, nurtured in the belly of the Bone Woman’s song, until we learn to welcome them upon their terms, rather than our own.

The idea of La Huesera comes from the folklore of the American Southwest. My thanks to Clarissa Pinkola Estes for making me aware of the tale.