The Wood Wife by Terri Windling (the false prince TXT) 📕

“It’s from Rilke. Let me find the poem.” Maggie left the room and came back with a volume of the German poet’s work. She read aloud in her lovely, husky voice:

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat

held for it by a row of ancient trees;

you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,

one journeying to heaven, one that falls;

and leave you, not at home in either one,

not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,

not calling to eternity with the passion

of what becomes a star each night, and rises;

and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)

your life, with its immensity and fear,

so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,

it is alternately stone in you and star.

She put down the volume, looking thoughtful.

Dora said softly, “That sounds like Cooper. God, I still miss him. Crankiness and all.”

“But Cooper’s poems are never that clear; he was always so damn clever and oblique…”

“That’s like Anna Naverra. Did you ever notice how the titles of her paintings are always puzzling and mysterious … like the punch line of a good story, without any of the rest?”

Maggie hesitated, then said, “There’s something else I want to show you.”

Dora followed her into Naverra’s studio. The room had been scrubbed and swept; the curtains were gone, and the windows overlooked the back porch and the mesquite wood. Maggie’s computer sat on one long table, with a notebook, a half-drunk cup of coffee, an arrangement of wildflowers in a jar. She seemed to have taken this as her office instead of moving into Cooper’s more spacious one, but she shared it with the dead woman whose art, paints and distinctive presence still crowded the little room.

Maggie showed her a collection of unframed paintings that Dora had never seen before. They were small, like Naverra’s canvases, but painted on thin panels of wood, with dark backgrounds and a rich, diffuse light that made Dora think of old Flemish masters. The paintings were portraits, of a sort. But the figures portrayed were not human ones—or rather, they were part human, and part something else, both beautiful and disturbing. The figures looked like personifications of the desert, root, rock, and thorn.

Dora said, “These almost look like Brian Froud’s paintings, don’t they? Not the same style, but… as though both of them were painting the same creatures, just filtered through a different … perception.”

“Anna’s vision is a darker one,” Maggie pointed out. “As though she’s frightened by what she sees, and yet is still compelled to record it. Look at this. This is the one I wanted to show you.”

The portrait was dark, and so loosely rendered—unlike Naverra’s usual work—that the woman’s features were difficult to see. But Dora could make out her crouched figure, covered with slashes of paint, spiral lines. Like Juan, she thought. At the figure’s feet was a dark oval shape, like an egg carved out of hematite or onyx. She felt her hands shaking and put the painting down, a sick feeling in her stomach.

Maggie picked the painting up and turned it over. Written in Anna Naverra’s neat handwriting was the title: The Night of the Dark Stone, April 16, 1949.

“April sixteenth again,” Dora said. “I don’t understand what any of this means.”

“Neither do I. But I think if we did understand, we’d know why Cooper died. And how. And why his manuscript is missing. And why other things are missing from the house.”

“What other things?”

“Little things. Drafts of poems that I’ve found in Cooper’s files that have since disappeared again. My Celtic knotwork brooch that I left on the dresser. Some stones I put on the night table. Don’t tell me I’m just losing things, Dora. I’m not that absentminded. And even though I lock the door every night, it’s always standing open in the morning.”

Maggie’s voice was even huskier than usual, and her face was looking tense and pale. Whatever was going on here had spooked her, no matter what she said. Dora shivered again. She thought about Juan, who was disappearing almost every night now. She couldn’t believe her husband was actually breaking into their neighbor’s house, but she also couldn’t quite banish the thought. His fascination with the work of Anna Naverra trembled on the edge of obsession.

“Put a new lock on the door,” she said firmly. “If someone has a key, then that will stop them. Maybe you shouldn’t be staying here at all. Maybe you should call the police.”

“And tell them what? Some stones are missing? A manuscript that I can’t prove was ever here? But you’re right about the door. I don’t want to move out of here, so I’m going to have to lock the place up better.” She attempted a grin. “I know this is the point in horror films where you want to shout at the idiot girl in the dark, ‘Well just get out of the bloody house.’ But whatever’s going on, whoever’s coming in, it doesn’t feel … malign to me. Not like those animal tracks did. I know, I’m sounding as crazy now as Cooper. But that’s the way it seems.”

“But you’ll get another lock?”

“I’ll pick one up today when I go downtown for groceries,” she promised. She began to stack the paintings against the wall and said, not looking at Dora, “Do you think it might be Fox coming in? He’s used to having the run of the place.”

Dora shook her head. “He wouldn’t scare you like that.”

Maggie looked at her. “But I’m not scared. I don’t know why, but I’m not.” She paused, framing her next question carefully. “Did Fox ever tell you people used to say that Anna believed in what she was painting? That it was real to her, not symbolic or metaphoric?”

“Well, I heard she went a bit loco out here. The canyon was pretty isolated. And I guess Anna must have been unstable to begin with, considering how she died.”

“But you say Cooper was also superstitious. Do you think he believed in this world of Anna’s too?”

Dora nodded