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.”
Farrell nodded. Julie was looking, not at him now, but at his coat pocket. She said, “If you put it on the table. Maybe it’ll know we don’t mean it any harm. Maybe it won’t run away.”
She leaned forward as Farrell reached slowly into his pocket, unconsciously spreading her arms to left and right, along the table’s edge. But the moment Farrell’s expression changed she was up and whirling to look in every direction, as she had done on the museum stair. The unicorn was nowhere to be seen. Neither was the cat NMC. The six kittens squirmed and squeaked blindly in their box, trying to suck each other’s paws and ears.
Farrell stammered, “I never felt it—I don’t know how…” and Julie said, “Bathroom, bathroom,” and fled there, leaving him forlornly prowling the studio, with its deep, murky fireplace and antique shadows. He was still at it when she returned, empty-handed as he, and her wide eyes fighting wildness.
Very quietly, she said, “I can’t find the cat. Joe, I’m scared, I can’t find her.”
NMC—theatrical as all cats—chose that moment to saunter grandly between them, purring in throaty hiccups, with the unicorn limp between her jaws. Julie’s gasp of horror, about to become a scream, was choked off by her realization that the creature was completely unharmed. NMC had it by the back of the neck, exactly as she would have carried one of her kittens, and the purple eyes were open and curiously tranquil. The unicorn’s dangling legs—disproportionately long, in the tapestry, for its deerlike body—now seemed to Julie as right as a peach, or the nautilus coil inside each human ear. There was a soft, curling tuft under its chin, less like hair than like feathers, matched by a larger one at the end of its tail. Its hooves and horn had a faint pearl shine, even in the dim light.
Magnificently indifferent to Farrell and Julie’s gaping, NMC promenaded to her box, flowed over the side, and sprawled out facing the kittens, releasing her grip on the unicorn’s scruff as she did so. It lay passively, legs folded under it, as the squalling mites scrimmaged across their mother’s belly. But when Farrell reached cautiously to pick it up, the unicorn’s head whipped around faster than any cat ever dreamed of striking, and the horn scored the side of his right hand. Farrell yelped, and Julie said wonderingly, “It wants to be there. It feels comforted with them.”
“The sweet thing,” Farrell muttered, licking the blood from his hand. The unicorn was shoving its way in among NMC’s kittens now: as Julie and Farrell watched, it gently nudged a foster brother over to a nipple next down from the one it had chosen, took the furry tap daintily into its mouth, and let its eyes drift shut. Farrell said it was purring. Julie heard no sound at all from the thin blue-white throat, but she sat by the box long after Farrell had gone home, watching the unicorn’s flanks rise and fall in the same rhythm as the kittens’ breathing.
Surprisingly, the unicorn appeared perfectly content to remain indefinitely in Julie’s studio apartment, living in an increasingly crowded cardboard box among six growing kittens, who chewed on it and slept on it by turns, as they chewed and slept on one another. NMC, for her part, washed it at least twice as much as she bathed any of the others (“To get rid of that nasty old medieval smell,” Farrell said), and made a distinct point of sleeping herself with one forepaw plopped heavily across its body. The kittens were not yet capable of climbing out of the box—though they spent most of their waking hours in trying—but NMC plainly sensed that her foster child could come and go as easily as she. Yet, unlike its littermates, the unicorn showed no interest in going anywhere at all.
“Something’s wrong,” Farrell said after nearly a week. “It’s not acting properly—it ought to be wild to get out, wild to be off about its unicorn business. Christ, what if I hurt it when I picked it up in the museum?” His face was suddenly cold and pale. “Jewel, I was so careful, I don’t know how I could have hurt it. But I bet that’s it. I bet that’s what’s wrong.”
“No,” she said firmly. “Not you. That rope around its neck, that man with the spear, the look on that idiot woman’s face—there, there’s the hurt, five hundred years of it, five hundred frozen years of capture. Christ, Joe, let it sleep as long as it wants, let it heal.” They were standing together, sometime in the night, looking down at the cat box, and she gripped Farrell’s wrist hard.
“I knew right away,” she said. “As soon as I saw it, I knew it wasn’t just a religious allegory, a piece of a composition. I mean, yes, it was that too, but it was real, I could tell. Grandma could tell.” NMC, awakened by their voices, looked up at them, yawning blissfully, round orange eyes glowing with secrets and self-satisfaction. Julie said, “There’s nothing wrong with it that being out of that damn tapestry won’t cure. Trust me, I was an art major.”
“Shouldn’t it be having something beside cat milk?” Farrell wondered. “I always figured unicorns lived on honey and—I don’t know. Lilies, morning dew. Tule fog.”
Julie shook her head against his shoulder. “Serenity,” she said. Her voice was very low. “I think they live on serenity, and you can’t get much more serene than that cat. Let’s go to bed.”
“Us? Us old guys?” Farrell was playing absently with her black hair, fanning his fingers out through it, tugging very gently. “You think we’ll remember how it’s done?”
“Don’t get cute,” she said, harshly enough to surprise them both. “Don’t get cute, Farrell, don’t get all charming. Just come to bed and hold me, and keep me company, and keep your mouth shut for a little while. You think you can manage that?”
“Yes, Jewel,” Farrell said. “It doesn’t use the litter box, did you notice?”
Julie dreamed of the unicorn that night. It had grown to full size and was trying to come into her bedroom, but couldn’t quite fit through the door. She was frightened at first, when the great creature began to heave its prisoned shoulders, making the old house shudder around her until the roof rained shingles, and the stars came through. But in time it grew quiet, and other dreams tumbled between her and it as she slept with Farrell’s arm over her, just as the unicorn slept with NMC.
In the morning, both of them late for work, unscrambling tangled clothing and exhuming a fossilized toothbrush of Farrell’s (“All right, so I forgot to throw it out, so big deal!”), they nearly overlooked the unicorn altogether. It was
standing—tapestry-size once again—at the foot of Julie’s bed, regarding her out of eyes more violet than purple in the early light. She noticed for the first time that the pupils were horizontal, like those of a goat. NMC crouched in the doorway, switching her tail and calling plaintively for her strange foundling, but the unicorn had no heed for anyone but Julie. It lowered its head and stamped a mini-forefoot, and for all that the foot came down in a bright puddle of underwear it still made a sound like a bell ringing under the sea. Farrell and Julie, flurried as they were, stood very still.
The unicorn stamped a second time. Its eyes were growing brighter, passing from deep lavender through lilac, to blazing amethyst. Julie could not meet them. She whispered, “What is it? What do you want?”
Her only answer was a barely audible silver cry and the glint of the fierce little horn as the unicorn’s ears slanted back against its head. Behind her Farrell, socks in hand, undershirt on backwards, murmured, “Critter wants to tell you something. Like Lassie.”
“Shut up, Farrell,” she snapped at him; then, to the unicorn, “Please, I don’t understand. Please.”
The unicorn raised its forefoot, as though about to stamp again. Instead, it trotted past the bed to the rickety little dressing table that Farrell had helped Julie put together very long ago, in another country. Barely the height of the lowest drawer, it looked imperiously back at them over its white shoulder before it turned, reared and stretched up as far as it could, like NMC setting herself for a luxurious, scarifying scratch. Farrell said, “The mirror.”
“Shut up!” Julie said again; and then, “What?”
“The Cluny tapestries. La Dame à la Licorne. Unicorns like to look at themselves. Your hand mirror’s up there.”
Julie stared at him for only a moment. She moved quickly to the dressing table, grabbed the mirror and crouched down close beside the unicorn. It shied briefly, but immediately after fell to gazing intently into the cracked, speckled glass with a curious air almost of puzzlement, as though it could not quite recognize itself. Julie wedged the mirror upright against the drawer-pull; then she rose and nudged Farrell, and the two of them hurriedly finished dressing, gulping boiled coffee while the unicorn remained where it was, seemingly oblivious of everything but its own image. When they left for work, Julie looked back anxiously, but Farrell said, “Let it be, don’t worry, it’ll stay where it is. I took Comparative Mythology, I know these things.”