Ivory and the Horn by Charles De Lint

afternoons, I often drive out of town, up Highway 14. Just before I get into the mountains proper, I pull off into the parking lot of a derelict motel called The Wishing Well. The pavement’s all frost-buckled and there are weeds growing up through the cracks, refuse everywhere, but I still like the place. Maybe because it’s so forsaken. So abandoned. Just the way I feel half the time.
    The motel’s all boarded up now, though I’m sure the local kids use it for parties. There are empty cans and broken beer bottles all over the place, fighting for space with discarded junk food packaging and used condoms. The rooms are set out in a horseshoe, the ends pointing back into the woods, embracing what’s left of the motel’s pool. Half the boards have been torn off the windows and all of the units have been broken into, their doors hanging ajar, some torn right off their hinges.
    The pool has a little miniature marsh at the bottom of it— mud and stagnant water, cattails and reeds and a scum of algae covering about two feet of water. I’ve seen minnows in the spring—god knows how they got there—frogs, every kind of water bug you can imagine. And let’s not forget the trash. There’s even a box spring in the deep end with all the beer cans and broken glass.
    The lawn between the pool and the forest has long since been reclaimed by the wilderness. The grass and weeds grow thigh-high and the flowerbeds have mostly been overtaken by dandelions and clover. The forest has sent a carpet of young trees out into the field, from six inches tall to twenty feet. Seen from the air, they would blur the once-distinct boundary between forest and lawn.
    The reason I come here is for the motel’s namesake. There really is a wishing well, out on the lawn, closer to the forest than the motel itself. The well must have been pretty once, with its fieldstone hp, the shingled roof on wooden supports, the bucket hanging down from its cast iron crank, three wrought-iron benches set facing the well and a flower garden all around.
    The shingles have all pretty much blown off now; the bucket’s completely disappeared—either bagged by some souvenir-hunter, or it’s at the bottom of the well. The garden’s rosebushes have taken over everything, twining around the wooden roof supports and covering the benches like Sleeping Beauty’s thorn thicket. The first time I wandered out in back of the motel, I didn’t even know the well was here, the roses had so completely overgrown it. But I found a way to worm through and by now I’ve worn a little path. I hardly ever get nicked by a thorn.
    The fieldstone sides of the well are crumbling and I suppose they’re not very safe, but every time I come, I sit on that short stone wall anyway and look down into the dark shaft below. It’s so quiet here. The bulk of the motel blocks the sound of traffic from the highway and there’s not another building for at least two miles in either direction.
    Usually I sit there a while and just let the quiet settle inside me. Then I take out a penny—a lucky penny that I’ve found on the street during the week, of course, head side facing up—and I drop it into the darkness.
    It takes a long time to hear the tiny splash. I figure dropping a penny in every week or so as I do, I’ll be an old lady and I still won’t have made a noticeable difference in the water level. But that’s not why I’m here. I’m not here to make a wish either. I just need a place to go, I need—
    A confessor, I guess. I’m a lapsed Catholic, but I still carry my burdens of worry and guilt. What I’ve got to talk about, I don’t think a priest wants to hear. What does a priest know or care about secular concerns? All they want to talk about is God. All they want to hear is a tidy list of sins so that they can prescribe their penances and get on to the next customer.
    Here I don’t have to worry about God or Hail Marys or what the invisible face behind the screen is really