Dreams Underfoot

by Charles de Lint

  Looking at that slim black hand with its long narrow fingers lying against his dark suit, I marveled again at the sheer depth of his ebony complexion. Even with the bit of a tan I’d picked up busking the last few weeks, I felt absolutely pallid beside him. Then I lifted my gaze to his eyes. If his skin swallowed light, I knew where it went: into his eyes. They were dark, so dark you could barely tell the difference between pupil and cornea, but inside their darkness was a kind of glow—a shine that resonated inside me like the deep hum that comes from my fiddle’s bass strings whenever I play one of those wild Shetland reels in A minor.

  I suppose it’s odd, describing something visual in terms of sound, but right then, right at that moment, I heard the shine of his eyes, singing inside me. And I understood immediately what he’d meant by his gesture.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m feeling a little low.”

  He touched his chest again, but it was a different, lighter gesture this time. I knew what that meant as well.

  “There’s not much anybody can do about it,” I said.

  Except Sam. She could come back. Or maybe if I just knew she’d been real… But that opened a whole other line of thinking that I wasn’t sure I wanted to get into again. I wanted her to have been real, I wanted her to come back, but if I accepted that, I also had to accept that ghosts were real and that the past could sneak up and steal someone from the present, taking them back to a time that had already been and gone.

  Paperjack took his fortune-telling device out of the breast pocket of his jacket and gave me a questioning look. I started to shake my head, but before I could think about what I was doing, I just said, “What the hell,” and let him do his stuff.

  I chose blue from the colours, because that was the closest to how I was feeling; he didn’t have any colours like confused or lost or foolish. I watched his fingers move the paper to spell out the colour, then chose four from the numbers, because that’s how many strings my fiddle has. When his fingers stopped moving the second time, I picked seven for no particular reason at all.

  He folded back the paper flap so I could read my fortune. All it said was: “Swallow the past.”

  I didn’t get it. I thought it’d say something like that Bobby McFerrin song, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” What it did say didn’t make any sense at all.

  “I don’t understand,” I told Paperjack. “What’s it supposed to mean?”

  He just shrugged. Folding up the fortune-teller, he put it back in his pocket.

  Swallow the past. Did that mean I was supposed to forget about it? Or…well, swallow could also mean believe or accept. Was that what he was trying to tell me? Was he echoing Jilly’s argument?

  I thought about that photo in my fiddle case, and then an idea came to me. I don’t know why I’d never thought of it before. I grabbed my fiddle case and stood up.

  “I…” I wanted to thank him, but somehow the words just escaped me. All that came out was, “I’ve gotta run.”

  But I could tell he understood my gratitude. I wasn’t exactly sure what he’d done, except that the little message on his fortune-teller had put together a connection for me that I’d never seen before.

  Fate, I could hear Jilly saying.

  Paperjack smiled and waved me off.

  I followed coincidence away from Paperjack and the riverbank and back up Battersfield Road to the Newford Public Library in Lower Crowsea.

  * * *

  Time does more than erode a riverbank or wear mountains down into tired hills. It takes the edge from our memories as well, overlaying everything with a soft focus so that it all blurs together. What really happened gets all jumbled up with the hopes and dreams we once had and what we wish had really happened. Did you ever run into someone you went to school with—someone you never really hung around with, but just passed in the halls, or had a class with—and they act like you were the best of buddies because that’s how they remember it? For that matter, maybe you were buddies, and it’s you that’s remembering it wrong….

  Starting some solid detective work on what happened to Sam took the blur from my memories and brought her back into focus for me. The concepts of ghosts or people disappearing into the past just got pushed to one side, and all I thought about was Sam and tracking her down—if not the Sam I had known, then the woman she’d become in the past.

  My friend Amy Scallan works at the library. She’s a tall, angular woman with russet hair and long fingers that would have stood her in good stead at a piano keyboard. Instead she took up the Uillean pipes, and we play together in an on-again, off-again band called Johnny Jump Up. Matt Casey, our third member, is the reason we’re not that regular a band.

  Matt’s a brilliant bouzouki and guitar player and a fabulous singer, but he’s not got much in the way of social skills, and he’s way too cynical for my liking. Since he and I don’t really get along well, it makes rehearsals kind of tense at times. On the other hand, I love playing with Amy. She’s the kind of musician who has such a good time playing that you can’t help but enjoy yourself as well. Whenever I think of Amy, the first image that always comes to mind is of her rangy frame folded around her pipes, right elbow moving back and forth on the bellows to fill the bag under her left arm, those long fingers just dancing on the chanter, foot tapping, head bobbing, a grin on her face.

  She always makes sure that the gig goes well, and we have a lot of fun, so it balances out I guess.

  I showed her the picture I had of Sam. There was a street number on the porch’s support pillar to the right of the steps and enough of the house in the picture that I’d be able to match it up to the real thing. If I could find out what street it was on. If the house still existed.

  “This could take forever,” Amy said as she laid the photo down on the desk.

  “I’ve got the time.”

  Amy laughed. “I suppose you do. I don’t know how you do it, Geordie. Everyone else in the world has to bust their buns to make a living, but you just cruise on through.”

  “The trick’s having a low overhead,” I said.

  Amy just rolled her eyes. She’d been to my apartment, and there wasn’t much to see: a spare fiddle hanging on the wall with a couple of Jilly’s paintings; some tune books with tattered covers; some changes of clothing; one of those old-fashioned record players that had the turntable and speakers all in one unit, and a few albums leaning against the side of the apple crate it sat on; a couple of bows that desperately needed rehairing; the handful of used paperbacks I’d picked up for the week’s reading from Duffy’s Used Books over on Walker Street; and a little beat-up old cassette machine with a handful of tapes.

  And that was it. I got by.

  I waited at the desk while Amy got the books we needed. She came back with an armload. Most had Newford in the title, but a few also covered that period of time when the city was still called Yoors, after the Dutchman Diederick van Yoors, who first settled the area in the early 1800s. It got changed to Newford back around the turn of the century, so all that’s left now to remind the city of its original founding father is a street name.

  Setting the books down before me on the desk, Amy went off into the stacks to look for some more obscure titles. I didn’t wait for her to get back, but went ahead and started flipping through the first book on the pile, looking carefully at the pictures.

  I started off having a good time. There’s a certain magic in old photos, especially when they’re of the place where you grew up. They cast a spell over you. Dirt roads where now there was pavement, sided by office complexes. The old Brewster Theatre in its heyday—I remembered it as the place where I first saw Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan, and later all-night movie festivals, but the Williamson Street Mall stood there now. Boating parties on the river. Old City Hall—it was a youth hostel these days.

  But my enthusiasm waned with the afternoon. By the time the library closed, I was no closer to getting a street name for the house in Sam’s photo than I had been when I came in. Amy gave me a sym
pathetic “I told you so” look when we separated on the front steps of the library. I just told her I’d see her tomorrow.

  I had something to eat at Kathryn’s Café. I’d gone there hoping to see Jilly, only I’d forgotten it was her night off. I tried calling her when I finished eating, but she was out. So I took my fiddle over to the theatre district and worked the crowds waiting in line for an a hour or so before I headed off for home, my pockets heavy with change.

  That night, just before I fell asleep, I felt like a hole sort of opened in the air above my bed. Lying there, I found myself touring Newford—just floating through its streets. Though the time was the present, there was no colour. Everything appeared in the same sepia tones as in my photo of Sam.

  I don’t remember when I finally did fall asleep.

  * * *

  The next morning I was at the library right when it opened, carrying two cups of takeout coffee in a paper bag, one of which I offered to Amy when I got to her desk. Amy muttered something like, “when owls prowl the day, they shouldn’t look so bloody cheerful about it,” but she accepted the coffee and cleared a corner of her desk so that I could get back to the books.

  In the photo I had of Sam there was just the edge of a bay window visible beside the porch, with fairly unique rounded gingerbread trim running off from either side of its keystone. I’d thought that would be the clue to tracking down the place. It looked almost familiar, but I was no longer sure if that was because I’d actually seen the house at some time, or it was just from looking at the photo so often.

  Unfortunately, those details weren’t helping.

  “You know, there’s no guarantee you’re going to find a picture of the house you’re looking for in those books,” Amy said around mid-morning when she was taking her coffee break. “They didn’t exactly go around taking pictures of everything.”

  I was at the last page of Walks Through Old Crowsea. Closing the book, I set it on the finished pile beside my chair and then leaned back, lacing my fingers behind my head. My shoulders were stiff from sitting hunched over a desk all morning.

  “I know. I’m going to give Jack a call when I’m done here to see if I can borrow his bike this afternoon.”

  “You’re going to pedal all around town looking for this house?”

  “What else can I do?”

  “There’s always the archives at the main library.”

  I nodded, feeling depressed. It had seemed like such a good idea yesterday. It was still a good idea. I just hadn’t realized how long it would take.

  “Or you could go someplace like the Market and show the photo around to some of the older folks. Maybe one of them will remember the place.”

  “I suppose.”

  I picked up the next book, The Architectural Heritage of Old Yoors, and went back to work.

  And there it was, on page thirty-eight. The house. There were three buildings in a row in the photo; the one I’d been looking for was the middle one. I checked the caption: “Grasso Street, circa 1920.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Amy said. I must have made some kind of a noise, because she was looking up at me from her own work. “You found it, didn’t you?” she added.

  “I think so. Have you got a magnifying glass?”

  She passed it over, and I checked out the street number of the middle house. One-forty-two. The same as in my photo.

  Amy took over then. She phoned a friend who worked in the land registry office. He called back a half hour later and gave us the name of the owner in 1912, when my photo had been taken: Edward Dickenson. The house had changed hands a number of times since the Dickensons had sold it in the forties.

  We checked the phone book, but there were over a hundred Dickensons listed, twelve with just an initial “E” and one Ed. None of the addresses were on Grasso Street.

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” Amy said. “It’s been almost eighty years.”

  I wanted to run by that block on Grasso where the house was—I’d passed it I don’t know how many times, and never paid much attention to it or any of its neighbours—but I needed more background on the Dickensons first. Amy showed me how to run the microfiche, and soon I was going through back issues of The Newford Star and The Daily Journal, concentrating on the local news sections and the gossip columns.

  The first photo of Edward Dickenson that came up was in The Daily Journal, the June 21, 1913, issue. He was standing with the Dean of Butler University at some opening ceremony. I compared him to the people with Sam in my photo and found him standing behind her to her left.

  Now that I was on the right track, I began to work in a kind of frenzy. I whipped through the microfiche, making notes of every mention of the Dickensons. Edward turned out to have been a stockbroker, one of the few who didn’t lose his shirt in subsequent market crashes. Back then the money lived in Lower Crowsea, mostly on McKennitt, Grasso, and Stanton Streets. Edward made the papers about once a month—business deals, society galas, fundraising events, political dinners, and the like. It wasn’t until I hit the October 29, 1915, issue of The Newford Star that I had the wind knocked out of my sails.

  It was the picture that got to me: Sam and a man who was no stranger. I’d seen him before. He was the ghost that had stepped out of the past and stolen her away. Under the photo was a caption announcing the engagement of Thomas Edward Dickenson, son of the well-known local businessman, to Samantha Rey.

  In the picture of Sam that I had, Dickenson wasn’t there with the rest of the people—he’d probably taken it. But here he was. Real. With Sam. I couldn’t ignore it.

  Back then they didn’t have the technology to make a photograph lie.

  There was a weird buzzing in my ears as that picture burned its imprint onto my retinas. It was hard to breathe, and my T-shirt suddenly felt too tight.

  I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but I knew it wasn’t this. I suppose I thought I’d track down the people in the picture and find out that the woman who looked like Sam was actually named Gertrude something-or-other, and she’d lived her whole life with that family. I didn’t expect to find Sam. I didn’t expect the ghost to have been real.

  I was in a daze as I put away the microfiche and shut down the machine.

  “Geordie?” Amy asked as I walked by her desk. “Are you okay?”

  I remember nodding and muttering something about needing a break. I picked up my fiddle and headed for the front door. The next thing I remember is standing in front of the address on Grasso Street and looking at the Dickensons’ house.

  I had no idea who owned it now; I hadn’t been paying much attention to Amy after she told me that the Dickensons had sold it. Someone had renovated it fairly recently, so it didn’t look at all the same as in the photos, but under its trendy additions, I could see the lines of the old house.

  I sat down on the curb with my fiddle case across my knees and just stared at the building. The buzzing was back in my head. My shirt still felt too tight.

  I didn’t know what to do anymore, so I just sat there, trying to make sense out of what couldn’t be reasoned away. I no longer had any doubt that Sam had been real, or that a ghost had stolen her away. The feeling of loss came back all over again, as if it had happened just now, not three years ago. And what scared me was, if she and the ghost were real, then what else might be?

  I closed my eyes, and headlines of supermarket tabloids flashed across my eyes, a strobing flicker of bizarre images and words. That was the world Jilly lived in—one in which anything was possible. I didn’t know if I could handle living in that kind of world. I needed rules and boundaries. Patterns.

  It was a long time before I got up and headed for Kathryn’s Café.

  * * *

  The first thing Jilly asked when I got in the door was, “Have you seen Paperjack?”

  It took me a few moments to push back the clamor of my own thoughts to register what she’d asked. Finally, I just shook my head.

  “He wasn’t at St. Paul’s t
oday,” Jilly went on, “and he’s always there, rain or shine, winter or summer. I didn’t think he was looking well yesterday, and now…”

  I tuned her out and took a seat at an empty table before I could fall down. That feeling of dislocation that had started up in me when I first saw Sam’s photo in the microfiche kept coming and going in waves. It was cresting right now, and I found it hard to just sit in the chair, let alone listen to what Jilly was saying. I tuned her back in when the spaciness finally started to recede.

  “…heart attack, who would he call? He can’t speak.”

  “I saw him yesterday,” I said, surprised that my voice sounded so calm. “Around mid-afternoon. He seemed fine.”

  “He did?”

  I nodded. “He was down by the Pier, sitting on the riverbank, feeding the ducks. He read my fortune.”

  “He did?”

  “You’re beginning to sound like a broken record, Jilly.”

  For some reason, I was starting to feel better. That sense of being on the verge of a panic attack faded and then disappeared completely. Jilly pulled up a chair and leaned across the table, elbows propped up, chin cupped in her hands.

  “So tell me,” she said. “What made you do it? What was your fortune?”

  I told her everything that had happened since I had seen Paperjack. That sense of dislocation came and went again a few times while I talked, but mostly I was holding firm.

  “Holy shit!” Jilly said when I was done.

  She put her hand to her mouth and looked quickly around, but none of the customers seemed to have noticed. She reached a hand across the table and caught one of mine.

  “So now you believe?” she asked.

  “I don’t have a whole lot of choice, do I?”

  “What are you going to do?”

  I shrugged. “What’s to do? I found out what I needed to know—now I’ve got to learn to live with it and all the other baggage that comes with it.”