Dreams Underfoot

by Charles de Lint

  “That…” Harriet cleared her throat. “That was the…accident?”

  “Oh, it wasn’t any accident,” Flora said. “And don’t let anyone try to tell you different. His father knew exactly what he was doing when he flung him through that plate glass window.”

  “But…”

  “Of course, the father was too poor to be able to afford medical attention for the boy, so he patched him up on his own.”

  Harriet stared at the monstrous figure with growing horror.

  “This…none of this can be true,” she finally managed.

  “It’s all documented at the institution,” Flora told her. “His father made a full confession before they locked him away. Poor Frank, though. It was too late to do anything to help him by that point, so he ended up being put away as well, for all that his only crime was the misfortune of being born the son of a lunatic.”

  Harriet tore her gaze from Frank’s scarred features and turned to the old woman.

  “How do you know all of this?” she asked.

  “Why, I lived there as well,” Flora said. “Didn’t I tell you?”

  “No. No, you didn’t.”

  Flora shrugged. “It’s old history. Mind you, when you get to be my age, everything’s old history.”

  Harriet wanted to ask why Flora had been in the institution herself, but couldn’t find the courage to do so. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to know. Yet there was something she had no choice but to ask. She hugged her blanket closer around her, no longer even aware of its smell, but the chill that was in her bones didn’t come from the cold.

  “What happens now?” she said.

  “I’m not sure I understand the question,” Flora replied with a sly smile in her eyes that said she understood all too well.

  Harriet pressed forward. “What happens to me?”

  “Well, now,” Flora said. She shot the monster an affectionate look. “Frank wants to start a family.”

  Harriet shook her head. “No,” she said, her voice sounding weak and effectual even to her own ears. “No way.”

  “You don’t exactly have a say in the matter, dear. It’s not as though there’s anyone coming to rescue you—not in this storm. And even if someone did come searching, where would they look? People disappear in this city all of the time. It’s a sad but unavoidable fact in these trying times that we’ve brought upon ourselves.”

  Harriet was still shaking her head.

  “Oh, think of someone else for a change,” the old woman told her. “I know your type. You’re filled with your own self-importance; the whole world revolves around you. It’s a party here, an evening of dancing there, theatre, clubs, cabaret, with never a thought for those less fortunate. What would it hurt you to give a bit of love and affection to a poor, lonely monster?”

  I’ve gone all demented, Harriet thought. All of this—the monster, the lunatic calm of the old woman—none of it was real. None of it could be real.

  “Do you think he likes being this way?” Flora demanded.

  Her voice grew sharp and the monster shifted nervously at the tone her anger, the way a dog might bristle, catching its master’s mood.

  “It’s got nothing to do with me,” Harriet said, surprising herself that she could still find the courage to stand up for herself. “I’m not like you think I am and I had nothing to do with what happened to that—to Frank.”

  “It’s got everything to do with you,” the old woman replied. “It’s got to do with caring and family and good Samaritanism and decency and long, lasting relationships.”

  “You can’t force a person into something like that,” Harriet argued.

  Flora sighed. “Sometimes, in these times, it’s the only way. There’s a sickness abroad in the world, child; your denial of what’s right and true is as much a cause as a symptom.”

  “You’re the one that’s sick!” Harriet cried.

  She bolted for the building’s front doors, praying they weren’t locked. The monster was too far away and moved too slowly to stop her. The old woman was closer and quicker, but in her panic, Harriet found the strength to fling her bodily away. She raced for the glass doors that led out of the foyer and into the storm.

  The wind almost drove her back inside when she finally got a door open, but she pressed against it, through the door and out onto the street. The whirling snow, driven by the mad, capricious wind, soon stole away all sense of direction, but she didn’t dare stop. She plowed through drifts, blinded by the snow, head bent against the howling wind, determined to put as much distance between herself and what she fled.

  Oh God, she thought at one point. My purse was back there. My ID. They know where I live. They can come and get me at home, or at work, anytime they want.

  But mostly she fought the snow and wind. How long she fled through the blizzard, she had no way of knowing. It might have been an hour, it might have been the whole night. She was shaking with cold and fear when she stumbled to the ground one last time and couldn’t get up.

  She lay there, a delicious sense of warmth enveloping her. All she had to do was let go, she realized. Just let go and she could drift away into that dark, warm place that beckoned to her. She rolled over on her side and stared up into the white sky. Snow immediately filmed her face. She rubbed it away with a mittened hand, half frozen with the cold.

  She was ready to let go. She was ready to just give up the struggle, because she was only so strong and she’d given it her all, hadn’t she? She—

  A tall dark figure loomed up suddenly, towering over her. Snow blurred her sight so that it was only a shape, an outline, against the white.

  No, she pleaded. Don’t take me back. I’d rather die than go back.

  As the figure bent down beside her, she found the strength to beat at it with her frozen hands.

  “Easy now,” a kind voice said, blocking her weak blows. “We’ll get you out of here.”

  She stopped trying to fight. It wasn’t the monster, but a policeman. Somehow, in her aimless flight, she’d wandered out of the Tombs.

  “What are you doing out here?” the policeman said.

  Monster, she wanted to say. There’s a monster. It attacked me. But all that came out from her frozen lips was, “Muh…tacked me….”

  “First we’ll get you out of this weather,” he told her, “then we’ll deal with the man who assaulted you.”

  The hours that followed passed in a blur. She was in a hospital, being treated for frostbite. A detective interviewed her, calmly, patiently sifting through her mumbled replies for a description of what had happened to her, until finally she was left alone.

  At one point she came out of her dozing state and thought she saw two policemen standing at the end of her bed. She wasn’t sure if they were actually present or not, but like Agatha Christie characters, gathered at the denouement of one of the great mystery writer’s stories, their conversation conveniently filled in some details concerning her captors of which she hadn’t been aware.

  “Maybe it was before your time,” one of the policemen was saying, “but that description she gave fits.”

  “No, I remember,” the other replied. “They were residents in the Zeb’s criminal ward and Cross killed their shrink during a power failure.”

  The first officer nodded. “I don’t know which of them was worse: Cross with that monstrous face, or Boddeker.”

  “Poisoned her whole family, didn’t she?”

  “Yeah, but I remember seeing what Cross did to the shrink—just about tore the poor bastard in two.”

  “I heard that it was Boddeker who put him up to it. The poor geek doesn’t have a mind of his own.”

  Vaguely, as though observing the action from a vast distance, Harriet could sense the first officer looking in her direction.

  “She’s lucky she’s still alive,” he added, looking back at his companion.

  In the days that followed, researching old newspapers at the library, Harriet found out that all the two men had
said, or she’d dreamed they had said, was true, but she couldn’t absorb any of it at the moment. For now she just drifted away once more, entering a troubled sleep that was plagued with dreams of ghosts and monsters. The latter wore masks to hide the horror inside them, and they were the worst of all.

  She woke much later, desperately needing to pee. It was still dark in her room. Outside she could hear the wind howling.

  She fumbled her way into the bathroom and did her business, then stared into the mirror after she’d flushed. There was barely enough light for the mirror to show her reflection. What looked back at her from the glass was a ghostly face that she almost didn’t recognize.

  “Monsters,” she said softly, not sure if what she felt was pity or fear, not sure if she recognized one in herself, or if it was just the old woman’s lunatic calm still pointing an accusing finger.

  She stared at that spectral reflection for a very long time before she finally went back to bed.

  * * *

  “We’ll find you another,” the old woman said.

  Her tea had gone cold but she was too tired to relight the stove and make herself another cup. Her hand were folded on her lap, her gaze fixed on the tin can of cold water that still sat on the stove. A film of ice was forming on the water.

  “You’ll see,” she added. “We’ll find another, but this time we’ll put her together ourselves, just the way your father did with you. We’ll take a bit from one and a bit from another and we’ll make you the perfect mate, just see if we don’t. I always was a fair hand with a needle and thread, you know—a necessary quality for a wife in my time. Of course, everything’s different now, everything’s changed. Sometimes I wonder why we bother to go on….”

  The monster stared out the window to where the snow still fell, quietly now, the blizzard having moved on, leaving only this calm memory of storm winds in its wake. He gave no indication that he was listening to the old woman, but she went on talking all the same.

  10

  Ghosts of Wind and Shadow

  There may be great and undreamed of possibilities awaiting mankind; but because of our line of descent there are also queer limitations.

  —Clarence Day, from This Simian World

  * * *

  Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, from two to four, Meran Kelledy gave flute lessons at the Old Firehall on Lee Street, which served as Lower Crowsea’s community centre. A small room in the basement was set aside for her at those times. The rest of the week it served as an office for the editor of The Crowsea Times, the monthly community newspaper.

  The room always had a bit of a damp smell about it. The walls were bare except for two old posters: one sponsored a community rummage sale, now long past; the other was an advertisement for a Jilly Coppercorn one-woman show at The Green Man Gallery featuring a reproduction of the firehall that had been taken from the artist’s In Lower Crowsea series of street scenes. It, too, was long out of date.

  Much of the room was taken up by a sturdy oak desk. A computer sat on its broad surface, always surrounded by a clutter of manuscripts waiting to be put on disk, spot art, advertisements, sheets of Lettraset, glue sticks, pens, pencils, scratch pads and the like. Its printer was relegated to an apple crate on the floor. A large cork board in easy reach of the desk held a bewildering array of pinned-up slips of paper with almost indecipherable notes and appointments jotted on them. Post-its laureled the frame of the corkboard and the sides of the computer like festive yellow decorations. A battered metal filing cabinet held back-issues of the newspaper. On top of it was a vase with dried flowers—not so much an arrangement as a forgotten bouquet. One week of the month, the entire desk was covered with the current issue in progress, in its various stages of layout.

  It was not a room that appeared conducive to music, despite the presence of two small music stands taken from their storage spot behind the filing cabinet and set out in the open space between the desk and door, along with a pair of straight-backed wooden chairs salvaged twice a week from a closet down the hall. But music has its own enchantment, and the first few notes of an old tune are all that it requires to transform any site into a place of magic, even if that location is no more than a windowless office cubicle in the Old Firehall’s basement.

  Meran taught an old style of flute-playing. Her instrument of choice was that enduring cousin of the silver transverse orchestral flute: a simpler wooden instrument, side-blown as well, though it lacked a lip plate to help direct the airstream; keyless, with only six holes. It was popularly referred to as an Irish flute since it was used for the playing of traditional Irish and Scottish dance music and the plaintive slow airs native to those same countries, but it had relatives in most countries of the world as well as in baroque orchestras.

  In one form or another, it was one of the first implements created by ancient people to give voice to the mysteries that words cannot encompass, but that they had a need to express. Only the drum was older.

  With her last student of the day just out the door, Meran began the ritual of cleaning her instrument in preparation to packing it away and going home herself. She separated the flute into its three parts, swabbing dry the inside of each piece with a piece of soft cotton attached to a flute-rod. As she was putting instrument in its case, she realized that there was a woman standing in the doorway, a hesitant presence, reluctant to disturb the ritual until Meran was ready to notice her.

  “Mrs. Batterberry,” Meran said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were there.”

  The mother of her last student was in her late thirties, a striking, well-dressed woman whose attractiveness was undermined by an obvious lack of self-esteem.

  “I hope I’m not intruding…?”

  “Not at all; I’m just packing up. Please have a seat.”

  Meran indicated the second chair, which Mrs. Batterberry’s daughter had so recently vacated. The woman walked gingerly into the room and perched on the edge of the chair, handbag clutched in both hands. She looked for all the world like a bird ready at any moment to erupt into flight and be gone.

  “How can I help you, Mrs. Batterberry?” Meran asked.

  “Please, call me Anna.”

  “Anna it is.”

  Meran waited expectantly.

  “I…it’s about Lesli,” Mrs. Batterberry finally began.

  Meran nodded encouragingly. “She’s doing very well. I think she has a real gift.”

  “Here, perhaps, but…well, look at this.”

  Drawing a handful of folded papers from her handbag, she passed them over to Meran. There were about five sheets of neat, closely-written lines of what appeared to be a school essay. Meran recognized the handwriting as Lesli’s. She read the teacher’s remarks, written in red ink at the top of the first page—”Well written and imaginative, but the next time, please stick to the assigned topic”—then quickly scanned through the pages. The last two paragraphs bore rereading:

  “The old gods and their magics did not dwindle away into murky memories of brownies and little fairies more at home in a Disney cartoon; rather, they changed. The coming of Christ and Christians actually freed them. They were no longer bound to people’s expectations, but could now become anything that they could imagine themselves to be.

  “They are still here, walking among us. We just don’t recognize them anymore.”

  Meran looked up from the paper. “It’s quite evocative.”

  “The essay was supposed to be on one of the ethnic minorities of Newford,” Mrs. Batterberry said.

  “Then, to a believer in Faerie,” Meran said with a smile, “Lesli’s essay would seem most apropos.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mrs. Batterberry said, “but I can’t find any humour in this situation. This—” she indicated the essay “—it just makes me uncomfortable.”

  “No, I’m the one who’s sorry,” Meran said. “I didn’t mean to make light of your worries, but I’m also afraid that I don’t understand them.”

  Mrs. Batterberry lo
oked more uncomfortable than ever. “It…it just seems so obvious. She must be involved with the occult, or drugs. Perhaps both.”

  “Just because of this essay?” Meran asked. She only just managed to keep the incredulity from her voice.

  “Fairies and magic are all she ever talks about—or did talk about, I should say. We don’t seem to have much luck communicating anymore.”

  Mrs. Batterberry fell silent then. Meran looked down at the essay, reading more of it as she waited for Lesli’s mother to go on. After a few moments, she looked up to find Mrs. Batterberry regarding her hopefully.

  Meran cleared her throat. “I’m not exactly sure why it is that you’ve come to me,” she said finally.

  “I was hoping you’d talk to her—to Lesli. She adores you. I’m sure she’d listen to you.”

  “And tell her what?”

  “That this sort of thinking—” Mrs. Batterberry waved a hand in the general direction of the essay that Meran was holding “—is wrong.”

  “I’m not sure that I can—”

  Before Meran could complete her sentence with “do that,” Mrs. Batterberry reached over and gripped her hand.

  “Please,” the woman said. “I don’t know where else to turn. She’s going to be sixteen in a few days. Legally, she can live on her own then and I’m afraid she’s just going to leave home if we can’t get this settled. I won’t have drugs or…or occult things in my house. But I…” Her eyes were suddenly brimming with unshed tears. “I don’t want to lose her….”

  She drew back. From her handbag she fished out a handkerchief, which she used to dab at her eyes.

  Meran sighed. “All right,” she said. “Lesli has another lesson with me on Thursday—a make-up one for having missed one last week. I’ll talk to her then, but I can’t promise you anything.”