Dreams Underfoot

by Charles de Lint

  To anyone watching him, he must have appeared to be slightly mad. He wandered back and forth across the streets of Ferryside, stopping under trees to look up into their bare branches, hunkering down at the mouths of alleys or alongside hedges, apparently talking to himself. In truth, he was looking for the city’s gossips:

  Magpies and crows, sparrows and pigeons saw everything, but listening to their litanies of the day’s events was like looking something up in an encyclopedia that was merely a confusing heap of loose pages gathered together in a basket. All the information you wanted was there, but finding it would take more hours than there were in a day.

  Cats were little better. They liked to keep most of what they knew to themselves, so what they did offer him was usually cryptic and sometimes even pointedly unhelpful. Cerin couldn’t blame them; they were by nature secretive and like much of Faerie, capricious.

  The most ready to give him a hand were those little sprites commonly known as the flower faeries. They were the little winged spirits of the various trees and bushes, flowers and weeds, that grew tidily in parks and gardens, rioting only in the odd empty lot or wild place, such as the riverbanks that ran down under the Stanton Street Bridge to meet the water. Years ago, Cicely Mary Barker had catalogued any number of them in a loving series of books; more recently the Boston artist, Terri Windling, had taken up the task, specializing in the urban relations of those Barker had already noted.

  It was late in the year for the little folk. Most of them were already tucked away in Faerie, sleeping through the winter, or else too busy with their harvests and other seasonal preoccupations to have paid any attention at all to what went on beyond the task at hand. But a few had seen the young girl who could sometimes see them. Meran’s cousins were the most helpful. Their small pointed faces would regard Cerin gravely from under acorn caps as they pointed this way down one street, or that way down another.

  It took time. The sky grew darker, and then still darker as the clouds thickened with an approaching storm, but slowly and surely, Cerin traced Lesli’s passage over the Stanton Street Bridge all the way across town to Fitzhenry Park. It was just as he reached the bench where she’d been sitting that it began to rain.

  There, from two of the wizened little monkey-like bodachs that lived in the park, he got the tale of how she’d been accosted and taken away.

  “She didn’t want to go, sir,” said the one, adjusting the brim of his little cap against the rain.

  All faerie knew Cerin, but it wasn’t just for his bardic harping that they paid him the respect that they did. He was the husband of the oak king’s daughter, she who could match them trick for trick and then some, and they’d long since learned to treat her, and those under her protection, with a wary deference.

  “No sir, she didn’t,” added the other, “but he led her off all the same.”

  Cerin hunkered down beside the bench so that he wasn’t towering over them.

  “Where did he take her?” he asked.

  The first bodach pointed to where two men were standing by the War Memorial, shoulders hunched against the rain, heads bent together as they spoke. One wore a thin raincoat over a suit; the other was dressed in denim jacket, jeans and cowboy boots. They appeared to be discussing a business transaction.

  “You could ask him for yourself,” the bodach said. “He’s the one all in blue.”

  Cerin’s gaze went to the pair and a hard look came over his features. If Meran had been there, she might have laid a hand on his arm, or spoken a calming word, to bank the dangerous fire that grew behind his eyes. But she was at home, too far away for her quieting influence to be felt.

  The bodachs scampered away as Cerin rose to his feet. By the War Memorial, the two men seemed to come to an agreement and left the park together. Cerin fell in behind them, the rain that slicked the pavement underfoot muffling his footsteps. His fingers twitched at his side, as though striking a harp’s strings.

  From the branches of the tree where they’d taken sanctuary, the bodachs thought they could hear the sound of a harp, its music echoing softly against the rhythm of the rain.

  * * *

  Anna came to once more just as Meran was returning from the kitchen with a pot of herb tea and a pair of mugs. Meran set the mugs and pot down on the table by the sofa and sat down beside Lesli’s mother.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked as she adjusted the cool cloth she’d laid earlier upon Anna’s brow.

  Anna’s gaze flicked from left to right, over Meran’s shoulder and down to the floor, as though tracking invisible presences. Meran tried to shoo away the inquisitive faerie, but it was a useless gesture. In this house, with Anna’s presence to fuel their quenchless curiosity, it was like trying to catch the wind.

  “I’ve made us some tea,” Meran said. “It’ll make you feel better.”

  Anna appeared docile now, her earlier anger fled as though it had never existed. Outside, rain pattered gently against the windowpanes. The face of a nosy hob was pressed against one lower pane, its breath clouding the glass, its large eyes glimmering with their own inner light.

  “Can…can you make them go away?” Anna asked.

  Meran shook her head. “But I can make you forget again.”

  “Forget.” Anna’s voice grew dreamy. “Is that what you did before? You made me forget?”

  “No. You did that on your own. You didn’t want to remember, so you simply forgot.”

  “And you…you didn’t do a thing?”

  “We do have a certain…aura,” Meran admitted, “which accelerates the process. It’s not even something we consciously work at. It just seems to happen when we’re around those who’d rather not remember what they see.”

  “So I’ll forget, but they’ll all still be there?”

  Meran nodded.

  “I just won’t be able to see them?”

  “It’ll be like it was before,” Meran said.

  “I…I don’t think I like that….”

  Her voice slurred. Meran leaned forward with a worried expression. Anna seemed to regard her through blurring vision.

  “I think I’m going…away…now….” she said.

  Her eyelids fluttered, then her head lolled to one side and she lay still. Meran called Anna’s name and gave her a little shake, but there was no response. She put two fingers to Anna’s throat and found her pulse. It was regular and strong, but try though she did, Meran couldn’t rouse the woman.

  Rising from the sofa, she went into the kitchen to phone for an ambulance. As she was dialing the number, she heard Cerin’s harp begin to play by itself up in his study on the second floor.

  * * *

  Lesli’s tears lasted until she thought she saw something moving in the rain on the other side of the window. It was a flicker of movement and colour, just above the outside windowsill, as though a pigeon had come in for a wet landing, but it had moved with far more grace and deftness than any pigeon she’d ever seen. And that memory of colour was all wrong, too. It hadn’t been the blue/white/grey of a pigeon; it had been more like a butterfly—

  doubtful, she thought, in the rain and this time of year

  —or a hummingbird—

  even more doubtful

  —but then she remembered what the music had woken at her last flute lesson. She rubbed at her eyes with her sleeve to remove the blur of her tears and looked more closely into the rain. Face-on, she couldn’t see anything, but as soon as she turned her head, there it was again, she could see it out of the corner of her eye, a dancing dervish of colour and movement that flickered out of her line of sight as soon as she concentrated on it.

  After a few moments, she turned from the window. She gave the door a considering look and listened hard, but there was still no sound of Cutter’s return.

  Maybe, she thought, maybe magic can rescue me….

  She dug out her flute from her knapsack and quickly put the pieces together. Turning back to the window, she sat on her haunches and tried to s
tart up a tune, to no avail. She was still too nervous, her chest felt too tight, and she couldn’t get the air to come up properly from her diaphragm.

  She brought the flute down from her lip and laid it across her knees. Trying not to think of the locked door, of why it was locked and who would be coming through it, she steadied her breathing.

  In, slowly now, hold it, let it out, slowly. And again.

  She pretended she was with Meran, just the two of them in the basement of the Old Firehall. There. She could almost hear the tune that Meran was playing, except it sounded more like the bell-like tones of a harp than the breathy timbre of a wooden flute. But still, it was there for her to follow, a path marked out on a roadmap of music.

  Lifting the flute back up to her lip, she blew again, a narrow channel of air going down into the mouth hole at an angle, all her fingers down, the low D note ringing in the empty room, a deep rich sound, resonant and full. She played it again, then caught the music she heard, that particular path laid out on the roadmap of all tunes that are or yet could be, and followed where it led.

  It was easier to play than she would have thought possible, easier than at all those lessons with Meran. The music she followed seemed to allow her instrument to almost play itself. And as the tune woke from her flute, she fixed her gaze on the rain falling just outside the window where a flicker of colour appeared, a spin of movement.

  Please, she thought. Oh please…

  And then it was there, hummingbird wings vibrating in the rain, sending incandescent sprays of water arcing away from their movement; the tiny naked upper torso, the lower wrapped in tiny leaves and vines; the dark hair gathered wetly against her miniature cheeks and neck; the eyes, tiny and timeless, watching her as she watched back and all the while, the music played.

  Help me, she thought to that little hovering figure. Won’t you please—

  She had been oblivious to anything but the music and the tiny faerie outside in the rain. She hadn’t heard the footsteps on the stairs, nor heard them crossing the apartment. But she heard the door open.

  The tune faltered, the faerie flickered out of sight as though it had never been there. She brought the flute down from her lip and turned, her heart drumming wildly in her chest, but she refused to be scared. That’s all guys like Cutter wanted. They wanted to see you scared of them. They wanted to be in control. But no more.

  I’m not going to go without a fight, she thought. I’ll break my flute over his stupid head. I’ll…

  The stranger standing in the doorway brought her train of thought to a scurrying halt. And then she realized that the harping she’d heard, the tune that had led her flute to join it, had grown in volume, rather than diminished.

  “Who…who are you?” she asked.

  Her hands had begun to perspire, making her flute slippery and hard to hold. The stranger had longer hair than Cutter. It was drawn back in a braid that hung down one side of his head and dangled halfway down his chest. He had a full beard and wore clothes that, though they were simple jeans, shirt and jacket, seemed to have a timeless cut to them, as though they could have been worn at any point in history and not seemed out of place. Meran dressed like that as well, she realized.

  But it was his eyes that held her—not their startling brightness, but the fire that seemed to flicker in their depths, a rhythmic movement that seemed to keep time to the harping she heard.

  “Have you come to…rescue me?” she found herself asking before the stranger had time to reply to her first question.

  “I’d think,” he said, “with a spirit so brave as yours, that you’d simply rescue yourself.”

  Lesli shook her head. “I’m not really brave at all.”

  “Braver than you know, fluting here while a darkness stalked you through the storm. My name’s Cerin Kelledy; I’m Meran’s husband and I’ve come to take you home.”

  He waited for her to disassemble her flute and stow it away, then offered her a hand up from the floor. As she stood up, he took the knapsack and slung it over his shoulder and led her toward the door. The sound of the harping was very faint now, Lesli realized.

  When they walked by the hall, she stopped in the doorway leading to the living room and looked at the two men who were huddled against the far wall, their eyes wild with terror. One was Cutter; the other a business man in suit and raincoat, whom she’d never seen before. She hesitated, fingers tightening on Cerin’s hand, as she turned to see what was scaring them so much. There was nothing at all in the spot that their frightened gazes were fixed upon.

  “What…what’s the matter with them?” she asked her companion. “What are they looking at?”

  “Night fears,” Cerin replied. “Somehow the darkness that lies in their hearts has given those fears substance and made them real.”

  The way he said “somehow” let Lesli know that he’d been responsible for what the two men were undergoing.

  “Are they going to die?” she asked.

  She didn’t think she was the first girl to fall prey to Cutter, so she wasn’t exactly feeling sorry for him at that point.

  Cerin shook his head. “But they will always have the sight. Unless they change their ways, it will show them only the dark side of Faerie.”

  Lesli shivered.

  “There are no happy endings,” Cerin told her. “There are no real endings ever—happy or otherwise. We all have our own stories, which are just a part of the one Story that binds both this world and Faerie. Sometimes we step into each others’ stories—perhaps just for a few minutes, perhaps for years—and then we step out of them again. But all the while, the Story just goes on.”

  That day, his explanation only served to confuse her.

  * * *

  From Lesli’s diary, entry dated November 24th:

  Nothing turned out the way I thought it would.

  Something happened to Mom. Everybody tells me it’s not my fault, but it happened when I ran away, so I can’t help but feel that I’m to blame. Daddy says she had a nervous breakdown and that’s why she’s in the sanitarium. It happened to her before and it had been coming again for a long time. But that’s not the way Mom tells it.

  I go by to see her every day after school. Sometimes she’s pretty spaced from the drugs they give her to keep her calm, but on one of her good days, she told me about Granny Nell and the Kelledys and Faerie. She says the world’s just like I said it was in that essay I did for English. Faerie’s real and it didn’t go away; it just got freed from people’s preconceptions of it and now it’s just whatever it wants to be.

  And that’s what scares her.

  She also thinks the Kelledys are some kind of earth spirits.

  “I can’t forget this time,” she told me.

  “But if you know,” I asked her, “if you believe, then why are you in this place? Maybe I should be in here, too.”

  And you know what she told me? “I don’t want to believe in any of it; it just makes me feel sick. But at the same time, I can’t stop knowing it’s all out there: every kind of magic being and nightmare. They’re all real.”

  I remember thinking of Cutter and that other guy in his apartment and what Cerin said about them. Did that make my Mom a bad person? I couldn’t believe that.

  “But they’re not supposed to be real,” Mom said. “That’s what’s got me feeling so crazy. In a sane world, in the world that I grew up believing in, that wouldn’t be real. The Kelledys could fix it so that I’d forget again, but then I’d be back to going through life always feeling like there was something important that I couldn’t remember. And that just leaves you with another kind of craziness—an ache that you can’t explain and it doesn’t ever go away. It’s better this way, and my medicine keeps me from feeling too crazy.”

  She looked away then, out the window of her room. I looked, too, and saw the little monkey-man that was crossing the lawn of the sanitarium, pulling a pig behind him. The pig had a load of gear on its back like it was a packhorse.

&nb
sp; “Could you…could you ask the nurse to bring my medicine,” Mom said.

  I tried to tell her that all she had to do was accept it, but she wouldn’t listen. She just kept asking for the nurse, so finally I went and got one.

  I still think it’s my fault.

  * * *

  I live with the Kelledys now. Daddy was going to send me away to a boarding school because he felt that he couldn’t be home enough to take care of me. I never really thought about it before, but when he said that, I realized that he didn’t know me at all.

  Meran offered to let me live at their place. I moved in on my birthday.

  There’s a book in their library—ha! There’s like ten million books in there. But the one I’m thinking of is by a local writer, this guy named Christy Riddell.

  In it, he talks about Faerie, how everybody just thinks of them as ghosts of wind and shadow.

  “Faerie music is the wind,” he says, “and their movement is the play of shadow cast by moonlight, or starlight, or no light at all. Faerie lives like a ghost beside us, but only the city remembers. But then, the city never forgets anything.”

  I don’t know if the Kelledys are part of that ghostliness. What I do know is that, seeing how they live for each other, how they care so much about each other, I find myself feeling more hopeful about things. My parents and I didn’t so much not get along, as lack interest in each other. It got to the point where I figured that’s how everybody was in the world because I never knew any different.

  So I’m trying harder with Mom. I don’t talk about things she doesn’t want to hear, but I don’t stop believing in them, either. Like Cerin said, we’re just two threads of the Story. Sometimes we come together for a while and sometimes we’re apart. And no matter how much one or the other of us might want it to be different, both our stories are true.

  But I can’t stop wishing for a happy ending.