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    Where Desert Spirits Crowd the Night
    Where Desert Spirits Crowd the Night
    Where Desert Spirits Crowd the Night
    Ebook65 pages1 hour

    Where Desert Spirits Crowd the Night

    By Charles de Lint

    4.5/5

    ()

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    About this ebook

    A charming novella about one of Newford’s best-loved characters: artist and dreamer Sophie Etoile. Lured by mystical Native American flute-player Kokopelli, Sophie opens a door in her dreams only to find herself in the wild Sonoran desert, her way back vanished. In her quest to return she gets sidetracked by Coyote, up to his usual mischief. A poignant tale touching on loss, hope and community.

    First published in Worlds of Fantasy and Horror #2, Fall, 1994. Cover art by Stephanie Lostimolo.

    Charles de Lint is the modern master of urban fantasy. Folktale, myth, fairy tale, dreams, urban legend—all of it adds up to pure magic in de Lint's vivid, original world. No one does it better.
    — Alice Hoffman

    Charles de Lint writes like a magician. He draws out the strange inside our own world, weaving stories that feel more real than we are when we read them. He is, simply put, the best.
    — Holly Black

    De Lint is probably the finest contemporary author of fantasy
    – Booklist, American Library Association
    Unlike most fantasy writers who deal with battles between ultimate good and evil, de Lint concentrates on smaller, very personal conflicts. Perhaps this is what makes him accessible to the non-fantasy audience as well as the hard-core fans. Perhaps it’s just damned fine writing.
    – Quill & Quire
    De Lint’s evocative images, both ordinary and fantastic, jolt the imagination.
    – Publishers Weekly
    It is hard to imagine urban fantasy done with greater skill
    – Booklist, American Library Association

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCharles de Lint
    Release dateJan 18, 2015
    ISBN9780920623466
    Where Desert Spirits Crowd the Night
    Author

    Charles de Lint

    Charles de Lint and his wife, the artist MaryAnn Harris, live in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. His evocative novels, including Moonheart, Forests of the Heart, and The Onion Girl, have earned him a devoted following and critical acclaim as a master of contemporary magical fiction in the manner of storytellers like John Crowley, Jonathan Carroll, Alice Hoffman, Ray Bradbury, and Isabel Allende.

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    • 5/5
      Sophie Etoile, is an artist and a dreamer whose dreams take her into the the otherworlds--or one particular otherworld, Mabon, where among other charms is found the bookstore run by Mr. Truepenny, and where she meets her good friend, Jeck Crow. Or at least, that's where her dreams usually take her.One night, she hears flute music, and steps out the back door of the bookstore, expecting to find herself in the alley behind the store. Instead, she's in the desert of the American southwest--and the bookstore, and the door back into it, are gone.What, or rather who, she meets here are spirits of the southwestern desert, except for Nokomis, also called Grandmother, a spirit of the Kickaha tribe that lives much further east, in the area of the city of Newford, where Sophie lives. Nokomis tells her she can't get out of this dreamworld until she finds the reason that she's here, and than only Coyote or Kokopelli, another spirit who plays the medicine flute, can help her.She goes walking through the desert, and meets Coyote, and when he can't help directly, asks him to help her find Kokopelli. This leads to walking through the desert with Coyote, who can be charming and fun, but also very frustrating. Sophie just wants out of this dreamplace, and when she wakes up in her own bed in the morning, she's relieved.The following night, she's back in the desert.Meanwhile, in the waking world, she's had a show, and met Max, a gay man grieving his recent deceased partner. They become friends, and she learns about his late partner, Peter, and about Max's own art, in the form of sculpture. She comes to suspect that one of the partners is not ready to let the other go, and she's trapped in a dreamworld meant for Max.Or maybe she's not.This is a gentle, thoughtful novella, about recognizing and embracing your own truth.Recommended.I bought this book.

    Book preview

    Where Desert Spirits Crowd the Night - Charles de Lint

    Where Desert Spirits Crowd the Night

    by

    Charles de Lint

    Copyright © 1994 by Charles de Lint

    Smashwords Edition, License Notes:

    This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

    for MaryAnn

    If your mind is attuned to beauty, you find beauty in everything.

    —Jean Cooke, in an interview in The Artist’s and Illustrator’s Magazine, April 1993

    All I ask of you

    Is that you remember me

    As loving you

    —traditional Sufi song

    Each of us owes God a death.

    —attributed to Humphrey Osmond

    1

    Sophie didn’t attend the funeral. She hadn’t met Max yet, couldn’t have known that his lover had died. On the afternoon that Max stood at Peter’s graveside under a far too cheerful sky, she was in her studio in Old Market, preparing for a new show. It wasn’t until the opening, two months later, that they met.

    But even then, Coyote was watching.

    2

    There is a door in my dreams that opens into a desert…

    where the light is like a wash of whiskey over my vision;

    where the colour of the earth ranges through a spectrum of dusty browns cut with pale ochre tones and siennas;

    where distant peaks jut blue-grey from the tide of hills washing up against the ragged line the mountains make at the horizon, peaks that are shadowed now as the sun sets in a geranium and violet glory behind me;

    where the tall saguaro rise like sleepy green giants from the desert floor, waving lazy arms to no one in particular, with barrel cacti crouching in their shadows like smaller, shorter cousins;

    where clusters of prickly pear and cholla offer a thorny embrace and the landscape is clouded with mesquite and palo verde and smoke trees, their leaves so tiny they don’t seem to grow from the gnarly branches as to have been dusted upon them;

    where a hawk hangs in the sky high above me, a dark silhouette against the ever deepening blue, gliding effortlessly on outspread wings;

    where a lizard darts into a tight crevice, its movement so quick, it only registers in the corner of my eye;

    where an owl the size of my palm peers at me from the safety of its hole in a towering saguaro;

    where a rattlesnake gives me one warning rattle, then fixes me with its hypnotic stare, poised to strike long after I have backed away;

    where the sound of a medicine flute, breathy and soft as a secret, rises up from an arroyo, and for one moment I see the shadow of a hunchbacked man and his instrument cast upon the far wall of the gully, before the night takes the sight away, if not the sound;

    where the sky, even at night, overwhelms me with its immensity;

    where the stillness seems complete…

    except for the resonance of my heartbeat, which twins the distant drum of a stag’s hooves upon the dry, hard ground;

    except for the incessant soughing cries of the ground-doves that feed in the brushy vegetation all around me;

    except for the low sound of the flute, which first brought me here.

    The sweet scent of a mesquite fire in the middle of a dry wash draws me down from the higher ridges. The ground-doves break like quail with a rushing thrum of their wings as I make my way near. A figure is there by the fire, sitting motionless, head bent in shadow. I stand just beyond the circle of light, uncertain, uneasy. But finally I step forward. I sit across the fire from the figure. In the distance, I can still hear the sound of the flute. My silent companion gives neither it nor my presence any acknowledgment, but I can be patient, too.

    And anyway, I’ve nowhere else to go.

    3

    Given her way in the matter, Sophie would never attend one of her own openings. She was so organized and tidy that she never really thought that she looked like the typical image of what an artist should be, and she always felt awkward trying to make nice with the gallery’s clients. It wasn’t that she didn’t like people, or even that she wasn’t prone to involved conversations. She simply felt uncomfortable around strangers, especially when she was supposed to be promoting herself and her work.

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