“That’s what you think,” Julie said aloud. She lifted her right hand and moved it slowly across the tapestry, barely brushing the protective glass. As she did so, she spoke several words in a language that might have been Japanese, and was not. With the last syllable came a curious muffled jolt, like an underwater explosion, that thudded distantly through her body, making her step back and stagger against Farrell. He gripped her shoulders, saying, “Jewel, what the hell are you up to? What did you just do right then?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, and for that moment it was true. She was oddly dizzy, and she could feel a headache coiling in her temples. “I didn’t do anything, what could I do? What do you think I was doing, Joe?”
Farrell turned her to face him, his hands light on her shoulders now, but his dark-blue eyes holding her with an intensity she had rarely seen in all the years they had known each other. He said, “I remember you telling me about your grandmother’s Japanese magic. I remember a night really long ago, and a goddess who came when you called her. It all makes me the tiniest bit uneasy.”
The strange soft shock did not come again; the art students and the tourists went on drifting as drowsily as aquarium fish among the Brueghels; the figures in the tapestry remained exactly where they had posed for five centuries. Julie said, “I haven’t done a damn thing.” Farrell’s eyes did not leave her face. “Not anything that made any difference, anyway,” she said. She turned away and walked quickly across the gallery to examine a very minor Zurbaran too closely.
In time the notepad came back out of her purse, and she again began to copy those scraps and splinters of the Brueghels that held lessons or uses for her. She did not return to the unicorn tapestry. More time passed than she had meant to spend in the museum, and when Farrell appeared beside her she was startled at the stained pallor of the sky outside the high windows. He said, “You better come take a look. That was one hell of a grandmother you had.”
She asked no questions when he took hold of her arm and led her—she could feel the effort it cost him not to drag her—back to the wall of tapestries. She stared at the upper one for a long moment before she permitted herself to understand.
The unicorn was gone. The knight and his squire remained in their places, silver cord hauling nothing forward, lance jabbing cruelly into helpless nothing. The lady went on smiling milkily, offering her flowers to nothingness. There was no change in any of their faces, no indication that the absence of the reason for their existence had been noticed at all. Julie stared and stared and said nothing.
“Let you out of my sight for five minutes,” Farrell said. He was not looking at her, but scanning the floor in every direction. “All right, main thing’s to keep him from getting stepped on. Check the corners—you do that side, I’ll do all this side.” But he was shaking his head even before he finished. “No, the stairs, you hit the stairs. If he gets down those stairs, that’s it, we’ve lost him. Jewel, go!” He had not raised his voice at all, but the last words cracked like pine sap in fire.
Julie gave one last glance at the tapestry, hoping that the unicorn would prove not to be lost after all, but only somehow absurdly overlooked. But not so much as a dangling thread suggested that there had ever been any other figure in the frame. She said vaguely, “I didn’t think it would work, it was just to be doing something,” and sprang for the stairway.
By now the art students had been mostly replaced by nuzzling couples and edgy family groups. Some of them grumbled as Julie pushed down past them without a word of apology; a few others turned to gape when she took up a position on the landing, midway between a lost-contact-lens stoop and a catcher’s crouch, looking from side to side for some miniature scurry, something like a flittering dust-kitten with a tiny blink at its brow…But will it be flesh, or only dyed yarn? And will it grow to full size, now it’s out of the frame? Does it know, does it know it’s free, or is it hiding in my shadow, in a thousand times more danger than when there was a rope around its neck and a virgin grinning at it? Grandma, what have we done?
Closing time, nearly, and full dark outside, and still no trace of the unicorn. Julie’s heart sank lower with each person who clattered past her down the stairs, and each time the lone guard glanced at her, then at Farrell, and then pointedly wiped his snuffly nose. Farrell commandeered her notepad and prowled the floor, ostentatiously scrutinizing the Brueghels when he felt himself being scrutinized, but studying nothing but dim corners and alcoves the rest of the time. The museum lights were flicking on and off, and the guard had actually begun to say, “Five minutes to closing,” when Farrell stopped moving, so suddenly that one foot was actually in the air. Sideways-on to Julie, so that she could not see what he saw, he slowly lowered his foot to the floor; very slowly he turned toward the stair; with the delicacy of a parent maneuvering among Legos, he navigated silently back to her. He was smiling as carefully as though he feared the noise it might make.
“Found it,” he muttered. “Way in behind the coat rack, there’s a water cooler on an open frame. It’s down under there.”
“So what are you doing down here?” Julie demanded. Farrell shushed her frantically with his face and hands. He muttered, “It’s not going anywhere, it’s too scared to move. I need you to distract the guard for a minute. Like in the movies.”
“Like in the movies.” She sized up the guard: an over-age rent-a-cop, soft and bored, interested only in getting them out of the museum, locking up and heading for dinner. “Right. I could start taking my clothes off, there’s that. Or I could tell him I’ve lost my little boy, or maybe ask him what he thinks about fifteenth-century Flemish woodcuts. What are you up to now, Joe?”
“Two minutes,” Farrell said. “At the outside. I just don’t want the guy to see me grabbing the thing up. Two minutes and gone.”
“Hey,” Julie said loudly. “Hey, it is not a thing, and you will not grab it.” She did lower her voice then, because the guard was glancing at his watch, whistling fretfully. “Joe, I don’t know if this has sunk in yet, but a unicorn, a real unicorn, has been trapped in that miserable medieval scene for five centuries, and it is now hiding under a damn water cooler in the Bigby Museum in Avicenna, California. Does that begin to register at all?”
“Trouble,” Farrell said. “All that registers is me being in trouble again. Go talk to that man.”
Julie settled on asking with breathy shyness about the museum’s legendary third floor, always closed off to the public and rumored variously to house the secret Masonic works of Rembrandt, Goya’s blasphemous sketches of Black Masses, certain Beardsley illustrations of de Sade, or merely faded pornographic snapshots of assorted Bigby mistresses. The guard’s money was on forgeries: counterfeits donated to the city in exchange for handsome tax exemptions. “Town like this, a town full of art experts, specialists—well, you wouldn’t want anybody looking at that stuff too close. Stands to reason.”
She did not dare look to see what Farrell was doing. The guard was checking his watch again when he appeared beside her, his ancient bomber jacket already on, her coat over his arm. “On our way,” he announced cheerfully; and, to the guard, “Sorry for the delay, we’re out of here.” His free right hand rested, casually but unmoving, on the buttonless flap of his side pocket.
They did not speak on the stairs, nor immediately outside in the autumn twilight. Farrell walked fast, almost pulling her along, until they reached the van. He turned there, his face without expression for a very long moment before he took her hand and brought it to his right coat pocket. Through the cracked leather under her fingers she felt a stillness more vibrant than any struggle could have been: a waiting quiet, making her shiver with a kind of fear and a kind of wonder that she had never known and could not tell apart. She whispered, “Joe, can it—are you sure it can breathe in there?”
“Could it breathe in that damn tapestry?” Farrell’s voice was rough and tense, but he touched Julie’s hand gently. “It’s all right, Jewel. It stood there and looked at me, and sort of watched me picking it up. Let’s get on back to your place and figure out what we do now.”
Julie sat close to him on the way home, her hand firmly on his coat-pocket flap. She could feel the startlingly intense heat of the unicorn against her palm as completely as though there were nothing between them; she could feel the equally astonishing sharpness of the minute horn, and the steady twitch of the five-century-old heart. As intensely as she could, she sent the thought down her arm and through her fingers: we’re going to help you, we’re your friends, we know you, don’t be afraid. Whenever the van hit a bump or a pothole, she quickly pressed her hand under Farrell’s pocket to cushion the legend inside.
Sitting on her
bed, their coats still on and kittens meowling under the sink for their absent mother, she said, “All right, we have to think this through. We can’t keep it, and we can’t just turn it loose in millennial California. What other options do we have?”
“I love it when you talk like a CEO,” Farrell said. Julie glared at him. Farrell said, “Well, I’ll throw this out to the board meeting. Could you and your grandmother possibly put the poor creature back where you got it? That’s what my mother always told me to do.”
“Joe, we can’t!” she cried out. “We can’t put it back into that world, with people capturing it, sticking spears into it for the glory of Christian virginity. I’m not going to do that, I don’t care if I have to take care of it for the rest of my life, I’m not going to do that.”
“You know you can’t take care of it.” Farrell took her hands, turned them over, and placed his own hands lightly on them, palm to palm. “As somebody quite properly reminded me a bit back, it’s a unicorn.”
“Well, we can just set it free.” Her throat felt dry, and she realized that her hands were trembling under his. “We’ll take it to the wildest national park we can get to—national wilderness, better, no roads, people don’t go there—and we’ll turn it loose where it belongs. Unicorns live in the wilderness, it would get on fine. It would be happy.”
“So would the mountain lions,” Farrell said. “And the coyotes and the foxes, and God knows what else. A unicorn the size of a pork chop may be immortal, but that doesn’t mean it’s indigestible. We do have a problem here, Jewel.”
They were silent for a long time, looking at each other. Julie said at last, very quietly, “I had to, Joe. I just never thought it would work, but I had to try.”