Dreams Underfoot

by Charles de Lint

  Moira shook her head. “Despair I can understand—this place reeks of it. But not Hope.”

  “Hope is what allows the strong to rise above their despair,” Diane said. “It’s what makes them strong. Not blind faith, not the certain knowledge that someone will step in and help them, but the understanding that through their own force of will they cannot merely survive, but succeed. Hope is what tempers that will and gives it the strength to carry on, no matter what odds are ranked against them.”

  “Don’t forget to tell her how too much hope will turn her into a lazy cow,” her brother said.

  Diane sighed, but didn’t ignore him. “It’s true,” she said. “Too much hope can also be harmful. Remember this: neither hope nor despair have power of their own; they can only provide the fuel you will use to prevail or be defeated.”

  “Pop psychology,” Moira muttered.

  Diane smiled. “Yet, like old wives’ tales, it has within it a kernel of truth, or why would it linger?”

  “So what am I doing here?” Moira asked. “I never gave up. I’m still trying.”

  Diane looked at her brother. He shrugged his shoulders.

  “I admit defeat,” he said. “She is yours.”

  Diane shook her head. “No. She is her own. Let her go.”

  Jack turned to Moira, the look of a petulant child marring his strong features before they started to become hazy.

  “You’ll be back,” he said. That dry voice was like a desert wind, its fine sand filling her heart with an aching forlornness. “Hope is sweet, I’ll admit that readily, but once Despair has touched you, you can never be wholly free of its influence.”

  A hot flush ran through Moira. She reeled, dizzy, vision blurring, only half hearing what was being said. Her head was thick with a heavy buzz of pain.

  But Hope is stronger.

  Moira wasn’t sure if she’d actually heard that, the sweet scent of blossoms clearing her heart of Despair’s dust, or if it came from within herself—something she wanted—had to believe. But it overrode Despair’s dry voice. She no longer fought the vertigo, but just let it take her away.

  * * *

  Moira was suddenly aware that she was on her hands and knees, with dirty wood under her. Where…?

  Then she remembered: Walking across the covered bridge. The city. Hope and Despair.

  She sat back on her haunches and looked around herself. She was back in her own world. Back—if she’d ever even gone anywhere in the first place.

  A sudden roaring filled her head. Lights blinded her as a car came rushing up on the far side of the bridge. She remembered Eddie, her fear of some redneck hillbillies, but there was nowhere to run to. The car screeched to a halt on the wood, a door opened. A man stepped out onto the roadway of the bridge and came toward her.

  Backlit by the car’s headbeams, he seemed huge—a monstrous shape. She wanted to bolt. She wanted to scream. She couldn’t seem to move, not even enough to reach into her purse for her switchblade.

  “Jesus!” the stranger said. “Are you okay?”

  He was bent down beside her now, features pulled tight with concern.

  She nodded slowly. “I just…felt dizzy, I guess.”

  “Here. Let me help you up.”

  She allowed him to do that. She let him walk her to his car. He opened up the passenger’s door and she sank gratefully onto the seat. The man looked down to the end of the bridge by which she’d entered it what seemed like a lifetime ago.

  “Did you have some car trouble?” the man asked.

  “You could say that,” she said. “The guy I was with dumped me from his car a few miles back.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  She shook her head. “Just my feelings.”

  “Jesus. What a crappy thing to do.”

  “Yeah. Thanks for stopping.”

  “No problem. Can I give you a lift somewhere?”

  Moira shook her head. “I’m going back to Newford. I think that’s a little far out of your way.”

  “Well, I’m not just going to leave you here by yourself.”

  Before she could protest, he closed the door and went back around to the driver’s side.

  “Don’t worry,” he said as he got behind the wheel. “After what you’ve been through, a guy’d have to be a real heel to—well, you know.”

  Moira had to smile. He actually seemed embarrassed.

  “We’ll just drive to the other side of the bridge and turn around and then—“

  Moira touched his arm. She remembered what had happened the last time she’d tried to go through this bridge.

  “Do me a favour, would you?” she asked. “Could you just back out instead?”

  Her benefactor gave her a funny look, then shrugged. Putting the car into reverse, he started backing up. Moira held her breath until they were back out on the road again. There were pines and cedars pushing up against the verge, stars overhead. No weird city. No bridges.

  She let out her breath.

  “What’s your name?” she asked as he maneuvered the car back and forth on the narrow road until he had its nose pointed toward Newford.

  “John—John Fraser.”

  “My name’s Moira.”

  “My grandmother’s name was Moira,” John said.

  “Really?”

  He nodded.

  He seemed like a nice guy, Moira thought. Not the kind who’d try to pull anything funny.

  The sweet scent of blossoms came to her for just a moment, then it was gone.

  John’s showing up so fortuitously as he had—that had to be Hope’s doing, she decided. Maybe it was a freebie of good luck to make up for her brother’s bad manners. Or maybe it was true: if you had a positive attitude, you had a better chance that things would work out.

  “Thanks,” she said. She wasn’t sure if Hope could hear her, but she wanted to say it all the same.

  “You’re welcome,” John said from beside her.

  Moira glanced at him, then smiled.

  “Yeah,” she said. “You, too.”

  His puzzled look made her smile widen.

  “What’s so funny?” he asked.

  She just shrugged and settled back into her seat. “It’s a long weird story and you wouldn’t believe me anyway.”

  “Try me.”

  “Maybe some other time,” she said.

  “I might just hold you to that,” he said.

  Moira surprised herself with the hope that maybe he would.

  17

  Our Lady of the Harbour

  People don’t behave the way they should; they behave the way they do.

  —Jim Beaubien & Karen Caesar

  * * *

  She sat on her rock, looking out over the lake, her back to the city that reared up behind her in a bewildering array of towers and lights. A half-mile of water separated her island from Newford, but on a night such as this, with the moon high and the water still as glass, the city might as well have been on the other side of the planet.

  Tonight an essence of Marchen prevailed in the darkened groves and on the moonlit lawns of the island.

  For uncounted years before Diederick van Yoors first settled the area in the early part of the nineteenth century, the native Kickaha called the island Myeengun. By the turn of the century, it had become the playground of Newford’s wealthy, its bright facade first beginning to lose its luster with the Great Depression when wealthy landowners could no longer keep up their summer homes; by the end of the Second World War, it was an eyesore. It wasn’t turned into a park until the late 1950s. Today most people knew it only by the anglicized translation of its Kickaha name: Wolf Island.

  Matt Casey always thought of it as her island.

  The cast bronze statue he regarded had originally stood in the garden of an expatriate Danish businessman’s summer home, a faithful reproduction of the well-known figure that haunted the waterfront of the Dane’s native Copenhagen. When the city expropriated the man’s land for the park, he w
as generous enough to donate the statue, and so she sat now on the island, as she had for fifty years, looking out over the lake, motionless, always looking, the moonlight gleaming on her bronze features and slender form.

  The sharp blast of a warning horn signaling the last ferry back to the city cut through the night’s contemplative mood. Matt turned to look to the far side of the island where the ferry was docked. As he watched, the lights on the park’s winding paths winked out, followed by those in the island’s restaurant and the other buildings near the dock. The horn gave one last blast. Five minutes later, the ferry lurched away from the dock and began its final journey of the day back to Newford’s harbour.

  Now, except for a pair of security guards who, Matt knew, would spend the night watching TV and sleeping in the park’s offices above the souvenir store, he had the island to himself. He turned back to look at the statue. It was still silent, still motionless, still watching the unfathomable waters of the lake.

  He’d been here one afternoon and watched a bag lady feeding gulls with bits of bread that she probably should have kept for herself. The gulls here were all overfed. When the bread was all gone, she’d walked up to the statue.

  “Our Lady of the Harbour,” she’d said. “Bless me.”

  Then she’d made the sign of the cross, as though she was a Catholic stepping forward into the nave of her church. From one of her bulging shopping bags, she took out a small plastic flower and laid it on the stone by the statue’s feet, then turned and walked away.

  The flower was long gone, plucked by one of the cleaning crews, no doubt, but the memory remained.

  Matt moved closer to the statue, so close that he could have laid his palm against the cool metal of her flesh.

  “Lady,” he began, but he couldn’t go on.

  * * *

  Matt Casey wasn’t an easy man to like. He lived for one thing, and that was his music. About the only social intercourse he had was with the members of the various bands he had played in over the years, and even that was spotty. Nobody he ever played with seemed willing to just concentrate on the music; they always wanted to hang out together as though they were all friends, as though they were in some kind of social club.

  Music took the place of people in his life. It was his friend and his lover, his confidant and his voice, his gossip and his comfort.

  It was almost always so.

  From his earliest years he suffered from an acute sense of xenophobia: everyone was a stranger to him. All were foreigners to the observer captured in the flesh, blood and bone of his body. It was not something he understood in the sense that one might be aware of a problem one had; it was just the way he was. He could trust no one, perhaps because he had never learned to trust himself.

  His fellow musicians thought of him as cold, aloof, cynical—descriptions that were completely at odds with the sensitivity of his singing and the warmth that lay at the heart of his music. The men he played with sometimes thought that all he needed was a friend, but his rebuffs to even the most casual overtures of friendship always cured such notions. The women he played with sometimes thought that all he needed was a lover, but though he slept with a few, the distance he maintained eventually cooled the ardor of even the most persistent.

  Always, in the end, there was only the music. To all else, he was an outsider.

  He grew up in the suburbs north of the city’s center, part of a caring family. He had an older brother and two younger sisters, each of them outgoing and popular in their own way. Standing out in such contrast to them, even at an early age, his parents had sent him to a seemingly endless series of child specialists and psychologists, but no one could get through except for his music teachers—first in the school orchestra, then the private tutors that his parents were only too happy to provide for him.

  They saw a future in music for him, but not the one he chose. They saw him studying music at a university, taken under the wing of some master, whenever he finally settled on a chosen instrument, eventually playing concert halls, touring the world with famous orchestras. Instead he left home at sixteen. He turned his back on formal studies, but not on learning, and played in the streets. He traveled all over North America, then to Europe and the Middle East, finally returning home to busk on Newford’s streets and play in her clubs.

  Still the outsider—more so, perhaps, rather than less.

  It wasn’t that he was unfriendly; he simply remained uninvolved, animated only in the presence of other musicians, and then only to discuss the esoterics of obscure lyrics and tunes and instruments, or to play. He never thought of himself as lonely, just alone; never considered himself to be a social misfit or an outcast from the company of his fellow men, just an observer of the social dance to which most men and women knew the steps, rather than one who would join them on the dance floor.

  An outsider.

  A gifted genius, undoubtedly, as any who heard him play would affirm, but an outsider all the same.

  It was almost always so.

  * * *

  In the late seventies, the current band was Marrowbones and they had a weekend gig at a folk club in Lower Crowsea called Feeney’s Kitchen—a popular hangout for those Butler University students who shunned disco and punk as well as the New Wave. The line-up was Matt on his usual bouzouki and guitar and handling the vocals, Nicky Doyle on fiddle, Johnny Ryan on tenor banjo, doubling on his classic Gibson mandocello for song accompaniments, and Matt’s longtime musical associate Amy Scallan on Uillean pipes and whistles.

  They’d been playing together for a year and a half now and the band had developed a big, tight sound that had recently brought in offers for them to tour the college and festival circuits right across the country.

  But it’d never happen, Amy thought as she buckled on her pipes in preparation for the selection of reels with which they were going to end the first set of the evening.

  The same thing was going to happen that always happened. It was already starting. She’d had to listen to Nicky and Johnny going on about Matt earlier this afternoon when the three of them had gotten together to jam with a couple of other friends at The Harp. They couldn’t deal with the dichotomy of Matt offstage and on. Fronting the band, Matt projected the charming image of a friendly and outgoing man that you couldn’t help but want to get to know; offstage he was taciturn and withdrawn, uninterested in anything that didn’t deal with the music.

  But that was Matt, she’d tried to explain. You couldn’t find a better singer or musician to play with and he had a knack for giving even the simplest piece a knockout arrangement. Nobody said you had to like him.

  But Nicky had only shaken his head, brown curls bobbing. “Your man’s taking all the craic from playing in a band.”

  Johnny nodded in agreement. “It’s just not fun anymore. He’ll barely pass the time of day with you, but on stage he’s all bloody smiles and jokes. I don’t know how you put up with him.”

  Amy hadn’t been able to come up with an explanation then, and looking across the stage now to where Matt was raising his eyebrows to ask if she was ready, then winking when she nodded back that she was, she couldn’t explain it any better. She’d just learned over the years that what they shared was the music—and the music was very good; if she wanted more, she had to look for it elsewhere.

  She’d come to terms with it where most people wouldn’t, or couldn’t, but then there was very little in the world that ever fazed her.

  Matt started a G-drone on his bouzouki. He leaned close to the mike, just a touch of a welcoming smile tugging the corner of his mouth as a handful of dancers, anticipating what was to come, stepped onto the tiny wooden dance floor in front of the stage. Amy gave him a handful of bars to lock in the tempo, then launched into the first high popping notes of “The Road West,” the opening salvo in this set of reels.

  She and Matt played the tune through twice on their own and room on the dance floor grew to such a premium that the dancers could do little more than jig in o
ne spot. Their elbows and knees could barely jostle against one another.

  It wasn’t quite a sea of bobbing heads, Amy thought, looking down from the stage. More like a small lake, or even a puddle.

  The analogy made her smile. She kicked in her pipe drones as the fiddle and tenor banjo joined in on “The Glen Allen.” It was halfway through that second tune that she became aware of the young woman dancing directly in front of Matt’s microphone.

  She was small and slender, with hair that seemed to be made of spun gold and eyes such a deep blue that they glittered like sapphires in the light spilling from the stage. Her features reminded Amy of a fox—pointed and tight like a Rackham sprite, but no less attractive for all that.

  The other dancers gave way like reeds before a wind, drawing back to allow her the room to swirl the skirt of her unbelted flowered dress, her tiny feet scissoring intricate steps in their black Chinese slippers. Her movements were at once sensual and innocent. Amy’s first impression was that the young woman was a professional dancer, but as she watched more closely, she realized that the girl’s fluidity and grace were more an inherent talent than a studied skill.

  The dancer’s gaze caught and held on Matt, no matter how her steps turned her about, her attention fixed and steady as though he had bewitched her, while Matt, to Amy’s surprise, seemed just as entranced. When they kicked into “Sheehan’s Reel,” the third and final tune of the set, she almost thought Matt was going to leave the stage to dance with the girl.

  “Again!” Matt cried out as they neared the usual end of the tune.

  Amy didn’t mind. She pumped the bellows of her pipes, long fingers dancing on the chanter, more than happy to play the piece all night if the dancer could keep up. But the tune unwound to its end, they ended with a flourish, and suddenly it was all over. The dance floor cleared, the girl was swallowed by the crowd.