The Newford Stories

by Charles de Lint

  “But you’ll try?”

  Against my better judgment, I found myself nodding.

  He did a slow fade and I was left alone in the living room. I sat for a while longer, looking at the place where he’d been sitting, then slid off the coffee table and walked back into the hall. There were two closed doors and two open ones. I knew that one led into the old lady’s bedroom, the other into a bathroom. I went to the first closed door. It opened into a room that was like stepping inside a cake, all frosty pinks and whites, full of dolls and pennants and trophies. Madeline’s room. Closing its door, I continued down the hall and opened the other one.

  Both rooms had the feel of empty places where no one lived. But while Madeline’s room was bright and clean—the bed neatly made, shelves dusted, trophies shined—the boy’s room looked as though the door had been shut on the day he died and no one had opened it until I had just this moment.

  The bedding lay half-on, half-off the box spring, pooling on the floor. There were posters of baseball players and World War II planes on the wall. Decades of dust covered every surface, clustering around the model cars and plastic statues of movie monsters on the bookshelves and windowsill. More planes hung from the ceiling, held in flight by fishing lines strung with cobwebs.

  Unlike the daughter, he truly was forgotten.

  I walked to the desk where a half-finished model lay covered in dust. Books were stacked on the far corner with a school notebook on top. I cleared the dust with a finger and read the handwritten name on the “Property of” line:

  Donald Quinn.

  I thought of bees and drunk drivers, of being remembered and forgotten. I knew enough about humans to know that you couldn’t change their minds. You couldn’t make them remember if they didn’t want to.

  Why had I said I’d help him?

  Among the cousins, a promise was sacred. Now I was committed to an impossible task.

  I closed the door to the boy’s room and left the apartment.

  The night air felt cool and fresh on my skin, and the sporadic sound of traffic was welcome after the unhappy stillness of the apartment. I looked up at its dark windows, then changed my shape. Crow wings took me back to the Rookery on Stanton Street.

  * * *

  I think Raven likes us better when we visit him on our own. The way we explode with foolishness whenever Zia and I are together wears him down—you can see the exasperation in his eyes. He’s so serious that it’s fun to get him going. But I also like meeting with him one-on-one. The best thing is, he never asks me where Zia is. He treats us as individuals.

  “Lucius,” I said the next morning. “Can a person die from a bee sting?”

  I’d come into his library in the Rookery to find him crouched on his knees, peering at the titles of books on a lower shelf. He looked up at my voice, then stood, moving with a dancer’s grace that always surprises people who’ve made assumptions based on his enormous bulk. His bald head gleamed in the sunlight streaming in through the window behind him.

  “What sort of a person?” he asked. “Cousin or human?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  He shrugged. “Humans can die of pretty much anything.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, take tobacco. The smoke builds up tar in their lungs and the next thing you know, they’re dead.”

  “Cousins smoke. Just look at Joe, or Whiskey Jack.”

  “It’s not the same for us.”

  “Well, what about the Kickaha? They smoke.”

  He nodded. “But so long as they keep to ceremonial use, it doesn’t kill them. It only hurts them when they smoke for no reason at all, rather than to respect the sacred directions.”

  “And bee stings?”

  “If you’re allergic—and humans can be allergic to pretty much anything—then, yes. It can kill them. Why do you ask?”

  I shrugged. “I met a boy who died of a bee sting.”

  “A dead boy,” Lucius said slowly, as though waiting for a punch line.

  “I meant to say a ghost.”

  “Ah. Of course.”

  “He’s not very happy.”

  Lucius nodded. “Ghosts rarely are.” He paused a moment, then added, “You didn’t offer to help him, did you?”

  He didn’t wait for my reply. I suppose he could already see it in my face.

  “Oh, Maida,” he said. “Humans can be hard enough to satisfy, but ghosts are almost impossible.”

  “I thought they just needed closure,” I said.

  “Closure for the living and the dead can be two very different things. Does he want revenge on the bee? Because unless it was a cousin, it would be long dead.”

  “No, he just wants to be remembered.”

  Lucius gave a slow shake of his head. “You could be bound to this promise forever.”

  “I know,” I said.

  But it was too late now.

  * * *

  After leaving the Rookery, I flew up into a tree—not one of the old oaks on the property, but one farther down the street where I could get a little privacy as I tried to figure out what to do next. Like most corbae, I think better on a roost or in the air. I knew just trying to talk to Donald’s mother wouldn’t be enough. At some point, I’d have to, but first I thought I’d try to find out more about what exactly had happened to her children.

  That made me cheer up a little because I realized it would be like having a case and looking into the background of it, the way a detective would. I’d be like a private eye in one of those old movies the Aunts liked to watch late at night when everybody else was asleep except for Zia and me. And probably Lucius.

  I decided to start with the deaths and work my way back from them.

  There was no point in trying to find the bee. As Lucius had said, unless it was a cousin, it would be long dead by now, and it didn’t make sense that it would be a cousin. I could look into it, I supposed, but first I’d try to find the driver of the car that had struck Madeline. A bee wouldn’t even be alive after thirty years, anyway. But a human might.

  * * *

  Most people know there are two worlds: the one Raven made and the otherworld, where dreams and spirits live. But there’s another world that separates the two: the between. Thin as a veil in some places, wide as the widest sea in others. When you know the way, it’s easy to slip from one to another, and that’s what I do when I find myself standing in front of the locked door of Michael Clark’s house. It’s how Zia and I always get into places.

  Slip into the between, take a step, then slip right back into Raven’s world. It’s as though you passed right through the door, except what you really did was take another, slightly more roundabout route.

  I didn’t like it in Clark’s house when I got there that evening. There was an air of…unpleasantness about the place. I don’t mean that it smelled bad, though there was a faint smell of mustiness and old body odour in the air. It was more that this was a place where not a lot of happiness had ever lived. Because places hold on to strong emotions just the way people do. The man who doesn’t forgive? The house he lives in doesn’t either. The house full of happy, laughing children? You can feel its smile envelop you when you step through the door.

  Clark’s name had been in that last clipping in the old lady’s scrapbook. When I looked it up in the telephone book, I found three listings for Michael Clark. The first two belonged to people much too young to be the man I was looking for, but this house…I knew as soon as I slipped inside that I was in the right place.

  The front hall was messy with a few months’ worth of flyers and old newspapers piled up against the walls, the kitchen garbage overflowing with take-out food containers and pizza boxes, the sink full of dirty mugs and other dishes. But there weren’t any empty liquor bottles or beer cases full of empties.

  I found Clark sitting on the sofa in his living room, watching the TV with the sound off. As with the rest of the place, this room was also a mess. Coming into it was like ste
pping onto a beach where the tide had left behind a busy debris of more food containers, newspapers, magazines, dirty clothes. A solitary, long-dead plant stood withered and dry in its pot on the windowsill.

  Clark looked up when I came in and didn’t even seem surprised to see me. That happens almost as often as it doesn’t. Zia and I can walk into someone’s kitchen while they’re having breakfast, and all they do is take down a couple of more bowls from the cupboard and push the cereal box over to us. Or they’ll simply move over a little to give us room on the sofa they’re sitting on.

  In Clark’s case, he might have thought that I was another one of those personal demons he was obviously wrestling with on a regular basis.

  I didn’t bother with any small talk.

  “It’s not like they made it out to be,” the man said, when I asked him about the night his car had struck Madeline. “I didn’t try to kill her. And I wasn’t drunk. I’d had a few beers, but I wasn’t drunk. She just stepped out from behind a van, right in front of my car. She didn’t even look. It was like she wanted to die.”

  “I’ve heard people do that,” I said. “It seems so odd.”

  “I suppose. But there are times I can understand all too well. I lost everything because of that night. My business. My family. And that girl lost her life. I took her life.”

  There was more of that. A lot more.

  When I realized I wasn’t learning anything here except how to get depressed, I left him, still talking, only to himself. I looked up at the night sky, then took wing and headed for the scene of the accident that Michael Clark kept so fresh in his mind.

  Between my ghost boy’s mother and Michael Clark, I was beginning to see that the dead weren’t the only ones haunted by the past.

  * * *

  The place where Madeline had died didn’t look much different from any other part of the inner city. It had been so long since the accident, how could there be any sign that it had ever happened? But I thought, if her brother’s ghost was still haunting the bedroom where he’d died, then perhaps she hadn’t gone on yet either.

  I walked along the sidewalk and down an alleyway, calling. “Hello, hello! Hello, hello!”

  I did it, over and over again, until a man wrenched open one of the windows overlooking the alley. I looked up into his angry features, though with the light of the window behind him, he was more just a shadow face.

  “It’s three o’clock in the morning!” he yelled. “Are you going to shut up, or do I have to come down there and shut you up?”

  “You’ll have to come down,” I called back, “because I can’t stop.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “I need to find a dead girl. Have you seen her?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

  His head disappeared back into the apartment and he slammed the window shut. I went back to calling for Madeline until I heard footsteps behind me. I turned, warm with success, but it was only the grumpy man from the window. He stood in the mouth of the alley, peering down its length to where I stood.

  He was older than I’d thought when I’d seen him earlier—late fifties, early sixties—and though he carried more weight than he probably should, he seemed fit. If nothing else, he smelled good, which meant he at least ate well. I hate the smell of people who only eat fast food. All that grease from the deep-frying just seems to ooze out of their pores.

  “What’s this about a dead girl?” he asked.

  I pointed to the street behind him. “She got hit by a drunk driver just out there.”

  “You’re not answering my question.”

  “I just want to talk to her,” I told him. “To see how she feels.”

  “You just said she was dead. I don’t think she’s feeling much of anything anymore.”

  “Okay. How her ghost feels.”

  He studied me for a long moment, then that thing happened that’s always happening around Zia and me: He just took me at my word.

  “I don’t remember anybody dying around here,” he said. “At least not recently.”

  “It was thirty years ago.”

  “Thirty years ago…”

  I could see his mind turning inward, rolling back the years. He gave me a slow nod.

  “I do remember now,” he said. “I haven’t thought about it in a long time.” He turned from me and looked out at the street. “This was a good neighbourhood, and it still is, but it was different back then. We didn’t know about things so much. People drank and drove because they didn’t know any better. A policeman might pull you over, but then if it looked like you could drive, he’d give you a warning and tell you to be careful getting home.”

  He nodded and his gaze came back to me. “I remember seeing the guy that killed that poor girl. He didn’t seem that drunk, but he was sure shook up bad.”

  “But you didn’t see the accident itself?”

  He shook his head. “We heard it—my Emily and me. She’s gone now.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “I mean she’s dead. The cancer took her. Lung cancer. See, that’s another of those things. Emily never smoked, but she worked for thirty years in a diner. It was all that secondhand smoke that killed her. But we didn’t know about secondhand smoke back then.”

  I didn’t know quite what to say, so I didn’t say anything. I don’t think he even noticed.

  “Now they’re putting hormones in our food,” he said, “and putting God knows what kind of animal genes into our corn and tomatoes and all. Who knows what that’ll mean for us, ten, twenty years down the road?”

  “Something bad?” I tried.

  “Well, it won’t be good,” he said. “It never is.” He looked down the alley behind me. “Are you going to keep yelling for this ghost to come talk to you?”

  “I guess not. I don’t think she’s here anymore.”

  “Good,” he said. “I may not work anymore, but I still like to get my sleep.” He started to turn, then added, “Good luck with whatever it is you’re trying to do.”

  And then he did leave and walked back down the street.

  I watched him step into the doorway of his apartment, listened to the door hiss shut behind him. A car went by on the street. I went back into the alley and looked around, but I didn’t call out because I knew now that nobody was going to hear me. Nobody dead, anyway.

  I felt useless as I started back to the mouth of the alley. This had been a stupid idea and I still had to help the dead boy, but I didn’t know how, or where to begin. I felt like I didn’t know anything.

  “What are you doing?” someone asked.

  I looked up to see Zia sitting on the metal fire escape above me.

  “I’m investigating.”

  “Whatever for?”

  I shrugged. “It’s like I’m a detective.”

  “More like you’re nosy.”

  I couldn’t help but smile, because it was true. But it wasn’t a big smile, and it didn’t last long.

  “That, too,” I said.

  “Can I help?”

  I thought of how that could go, of how quickly we’d dissolve into silliness and then forget what it was we were supposed to be doing.

  “I’ll be veryvery useful,” she said, as though reading my mind. “You’ll be in charge and I’ll be your Girl Thursday.”

  “I think it’s Girl Friday.”

  “I don’t think so. Today’s Thursday. Tomorrow I can be Girl Friday.”

  I gave her another shrug. “It doesn’t matter. It turns out I’m a terrible detective.”

  She slid down the banister and plonked herself on the bottom step.

  “Tell me about it,” she said.

  “It started out when I went looking for you and your store, but then I got distracted…”

  * * *

  “And now I feel like I’m forgetting what it’s like to be happy,” I said, finishing up. “It’s like that stupid ghost boy stole all my happiness away, and now, ever since I talked to him, all I meet are unhapp
y people with very good reasons to be unhappy, and that makes me wonder, how could I ever have been happy? And what is being happy, anyway?”

  Zia gave a glum nod. “I think it might be catching, because now I’m feeling the same way.”

  “You see? That’s just what I mean. Why is it so easy to spread sadness and so hard to spread happiness?”

  “I guess,” Zia said, “because there’s so much more sadness.”

  “Or maybe,” I said, “it’s that there’s so much of it that nobody can do anything about.”

  “But we can do something about this, can’t we?”

  “What could we possibly do?

  “Make the mother remember.”

  I shook my head. “Humans are very good at not remembering,” I said. “It might be impossible for her to remember him now. She might not even remember him when she’s dead herself and her whole life goes by in front of her eyes.”

  “Supposedly.”

  “Well, yes. If you’re going to get precise, nobody knows if that’s what really happens. But if it did, she probably wouldn’t remember.”

  “And you can’t just kill her to find out,” Zia said.

  “Of course not.” I sighed. “So what am I going to do? I promised Donald I’d help him, but there’s nothing I can do.”

  “I have an idea,” Zia said, a mischievous gleam in her eye.

  “This is serious—” I began, but she laid a finger across my lips.

  “I know. So we’re going to be serious. But we’re also going to make her remember.”

  “How?”

  Zia grinned. “That’s easy.”

  She stood up and slapped a hand against her chest.

  “I,” she announced, “am going to be a ghost.”

  I had a bad feeling, but nevertheless, I let her lead me back to the apartment that Donald’s mother was haunting as much as he was, and she wasn’t even dead.