Trader

by Charles de Lint

  “You’re not being fair.”

  Julie sighed. “No. I suppose, I’m not being fair. But then you haven’t been playing fair either, have you?”

  “I’m just so confused.”

  Such an empathic look touched Julie’s features that Lisa was sure she was changing her mind, sure that they’d work this out again. Instead, Julie simply nodded and said, “I know,” then left the apartment.

  Lisa stared numbly at the door as it closed. The faint click as the lock engaged echoed like thunder in her ears. She waited, unable to breathe, waited for Julie to come back in once more, but all she could hear was the other woman’s slow descent down the stairs and she knew that she was being abandoned.

  Again.

  She found it hard to stand and had to walk carefully from the hall to the living room, each step deliberate to maintain her shaky equilibrium. When she reached the sofa, she had to hold on to an arm and slowly lower herself down. She stared numbly at the floor between her feet. There was an incredible pressure behind her eyes, but the tears wouldn’t come. All she could think was that she hated the person who had done this to her—driven Nia away, made her life such a confused mess, now driven Julie away. She wanted to hurt that person, she hated that person, she...

  Finally the tears came.

  She fell to the side and buried her face against the arm of the sofa, her shoulders shaking.

  When had she become this stranger that she now hated so much? How could she have become her?

  She had no answer and that only made the pain worse, the tears come faster.

  8 JILLY COPPERCORN

  Close on midnight, Jilly left her second-floor studio on Yoors Street and walked down Kelly Street into the Rosses. She paused outside the open door of The Harp, listening for a moment to the music of the Celtic band playing on the small stage inside, then made her way around back of the pub. An orange tomcat skittered out of her way, startled by her unexpected presence, and frowned down at her from the metal stairs of the fire escape where it took refuge.

  "Oh, don’t look so cross,” Jilly told him, looking up. "It’s not like you own the alley.”

  The cat’s response was to lick its shoulder and studiously ignore her.

  Jilly smiled and continued down to the waterfront, then turned toward the Kelly Street Bridge. Ducking her head, she pushed through a loose board and stood for a moment in the darkness on the far side of the fence. She could hear the traffic going by on the bridge above, the sound of the Kickaha as its waters slapped against the wooden pilings and stonework of the abandoned dock on its way down to the lake.

  “Guess you think I’m hiding on you,” a voice said from the deeper darkness under the bridge.

  “Course not,” Jilly said. “But you know me. I’m just good at finding things, even when they’re not lost. It’s like—”

  “This gift you have,” Bones finished.

  Jilly’s eyes hadn’t adjusted to the poor light yet, so she felt more than saw his smile.

  “Something like that,” she said.

  She shuffled her way over to where his voice was coming from, feeling her way with her feet until her outstretched hand touched a stone wall. She followed it for a few steps, trailing her fingers along the damp stones, until Bones spoke again.

  “Another step and you’ll be treading on my lap.”

  Jilly looked down. Bones was a vague shape now; mostly she could make out his white T-shirt.

  “I’m really not hiding from you,” he went on.

  Jilly slid down until she was sitting beside him. “I know.”

  “It’s that damn woman—sicced the cops on me. I can’t turn around for stumbling over one of them. They’re all over my face. I’m lucky to be sitting here instead of in some holding cell.”

  “Can’t blame her, though. Nia’s only sixteen. And it looks bad.”

  "I don’t blame her. I blame myself.” Jilly heard something in his voice that she hadn’t heard before. “I’ve never been much of a one for hanging on to regret,” he added after a moment, “but I can’t believe I just let them go. Helped them cross over and everything. What the hell was I thinking?”

  Jilly touched his shoulder and he reached up to hold her hand.

  “You were just trying to help out,” she said.

  Bones laughed humorlessly. “Yeah, that’s me. Always ready to lend a hand. You’d think I’d learn.”

  “You wouldn’t be who you are if you didn’t.”

  “I suppose. And Cassie sure does like that stone crow Nia traded me.”

  “I’m not used to hearing you feeling sorry for yourself,” Jilly said.

  “I’m not used to feeling sorry for myself either. It was a little thing to do, but it messed up a lot of lives. Spiritworld’s like that, but you forget. You get so used to making your own way through it that you forget just how dangerous a place it can be for anybody else.”

  “How’s Cassie taking all of this?” Jilly asked.

  “Getting pretty tired of not seeing me...and of having to hide out when she does. Not that we had all that much on our social calendar anyway, but it wears on you.”

  They fell silent then, listening to the river flow, the traffic overhead. Jilly’s eyes had adjusted enough to the poor lighting that she could make out her companion’s features. He’d lost weight. His face was thinner, with new worry lines.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Bones said. “I look like shit.”

  He took his hand from Jilly’s, rolled himself a cigarette, lit it. When he offered it to Jilly, she shook her head.

  “Take a small hit for the grandfather thunders,” he said. “Tell them you’re here. Offer them a prayer for your friends.”

  “Like they’re going to listen to a white girl?”

  “The manitou aren’t about color—you know that. It’s all spirit. Mix your breath with the smoke, it makes a prayer. They see the smoke, it gets their attention and then they see the spirit in your breath, listen to you, help you maybe, or show you how you can help yourself.”

  So Jilly took a drag, coughed when she drew too much into her lungs. Eyes watering, she passed the cigarette back to Bones. He held it up in front of his face and blew the smoke out across the water, making the end brighten like a small red eye in the dark, then took a drag himself.

  “So are you going back soon?” Jilly asked.

  “Heading out again tonight.”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out the pebble that Nia had given him. It was too dark for Jilly to see the crow drawn on it with a magic marker, but she knew it was there. Bones had shown it to her before.

  “Trouble is,” Bones went on, “Nia didn’t have this long enough for it to get a real taste of her and I can’t get a handle at all on your friend Zeffy. Makes tracking them hard—hit and miss and I’m coming up miss every time. I think maybe they’re on a different time line—you know, things are rushing like usual for us, but they’re on snail-time. It’s usually the other way around, but it happens sometimes. I’ve put the word out about them, but it’s a big place and I’ve got to be careful who I start in on looking for them. Don’t want to set any hungry spirits on their trail.”

  “What about Max and Johnny?” Jilly asked.

  “Can’t find jack on them either, but they’re not my responsibility.”

  “Wouldn’t they all be together?”

  “Maybe. But I can’t count on it and Zeffy and Nia are my responsibility. Finding them comes first. If they’re together, fine. But I’m not losing sleep over Max and the other guy. I can’t afford to spread myself that thinly.”

  “Take me with you,” Jilly said. “I could...”

  Bones started to shake his head before she could finish.

  “You know I can’t do that,” he said. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “But not for you.”

  “It’s dangerous for anybody, walking there in their own skin, but especially for someone like you. You’re like a magnet for the spirits,
Jilly. Got a light inside you that shines too bright. I’ve told you, I can teach you how to navigate that place, but you’ve got to give me a few years so you can study it properly.”

  “We don’t have years.”

  Bones nodded. “And like I said, time’s relative there. From their point of view, they might have only just arrived. Hard to tell. Takes a lot of study to get it right, find the right path that keeps you moving at the same pace or faster than time’s moving here.”

  “But Sophie just goes there.”

  “Sure she does,” Bones said. “But she doesn’t go in her skin. She dreams her way across—she’d have to, seeing how she shines about as bright as you—and that’s the only way you can go, too, until you learn more.”

  “I don’t have those kind of dreams.”

  Bones smiled. “Maybe you just don’t remember them. That light you carry’s got to have come from somewhere. I don’t know many people shine so bright without having touched a spirit or two along the way.”

  “I guess,” Jilly said. “I only wish I could be the one to decide when it happens. You know, if when I want a piece of magic, I could just step across into it the way you do.”

  “You’ve got to accept your blessings as they come. Most people don’t even get one, and when they do, they ignore it, or explain it away.”

  “I suppose.”

  They fell silent again. Jilly stared across the river, absorbed the slow flow of its current. The traffic overhead was so sporadic that for long moments it was as though the city didn’t exist anymore, as though they’d been displaced into another place where the shadows gathered close around them held spirits, watching.

  “Wish you could come, though,” Bones said suddenly. He ground out his cigarette on the stone beside him and dropped the butt into his pocket. “What with that gift you have for finding things and all.”

  “No way I can hide this too-bright light I’m supposed to be carrying around inside me?”

  “None that I know of. Or at least nothing that doesn’t take time we don’t have.”

  Jilly sighed. “That figures.”

  “Talk to Sophie,” Bones told her. “Practice holding on to your dreams when you wake and deciding where you want to go in them before you sleep. It’ll give you a start and it’s only dangerous if you let it be.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Everything’s got a risk attached to it,” Bones said. “You know that, same as me. People forget, think that cross-world dreaming gives them a license to do anything they want, to anyone they want. They think there’s no payback. But the things you do when you’re over there mean as much as what you do here. Say you kill somebody in a cross-world dream. You’re going to carry that with you into the here and now. It changes you, turns you into someone you weren’t before you did it. And it calls down things you don’t want to know about—hungry things.”

  “That’s what Sophie says.”

  Bones nodded. “Then there’s plain common sense. You know how they say if you die in a dream, you die for real?”

  “But that’s not really true, is it? I mean, not in the spiritworld.”

  “Let’s just say it’s not worth testing.”

  The way he said it made the shadows seem to draw closer and Jilly was glad she wasn’t alone.

  “I’ve dreamed that I was dead,” she said.

  “That’s not the same thing.”

  “I guess you’re right. I’d already be dead when the dream started.” She shivered, remembering one such dream, ghosting through what she’d left behind of her life and no one able to see or hear her. “It was seriously creepy.”

  “But you don’t want to focus on that kind of thing,” Bones told her. “It’s like inviting the hungry spirits to dinner.”

  “You keep calling them hungry.”

  “That’s because they are.”

  “But what are they hungry for?”

  “Pieces of what they can’t have,” Bones said. “Pieces of this world. They hunger for it the same way we hunger for the spiritworld. You know, the way people chase after ghosts, or gods, or anything that can explain why they’re in this world in the first place.”

  “So the spirits aren’t necessarily bad.”

  Bones shook his head. “They’re not good or bad, most of them. They just want a taste of what they think they can’t have—same as us.”

  “And what they can’t have is living here?”

  “Sort of. They can’t have skin—they’ve got to borrow it and most people, they don’t want to give it up. But the spirits visit. They’re around all the time, looking for answers they think we’re hiding from them. It’s just we don’t usually pay attention to them. Focus on them and they get secretive, most of them, and shy away.”

  Jilly felt a shift in the air as he spoke, that sense of being watched from the shadows around them lessening. She glanced at Bones and his teeth flashed with a grin. She couldn’t see those startling eyes of his, but she could imagine them.

  “So,” Bones said. “Anything you can tell me about Zeffy that might make it easier for me to get a handle on her?”

  “You could try offering her a gig. I’ve seen her go right across town for an open stage.”

  “She already owes me a song,” Bones said.

  “Maybe you should use that.”

  He nodded slowly. “Never thought of that. It’s a connection we’ve got, all right. Don’t know if it’s strong enough, but it’s worth a try.”

  “What’ll you do when you find them?” Jilly asked.

  “Bring ’em back.”

  “But what if they haven’t found Max yet and they don’t want to come back?”

  Bones shrugged. “Cross that bridge when I get to it, I suppose.”

  He stood up and brushed off his jeans, then offered Jilly a hand up. “Time I was going,” he said.

  “You won’t change your mind?”

  He shook his head. “Not about taking you now, but not about teaching you either. You find the time, I’ll match it with my own.”

  “Okay.”

  “Careful now,” he said. “Better step back a little. You don’t want to get pulled in after me.”

  Jilly moved away from him, trailing her hand along the stone support of the bridge.

  “You don’t need to chant or something?” she asked.

  “Naw. I only use the chanting and smudge-sticks to help other people focus.”

  Jilly smiled. “And you’re always focused?”

  He returned her smile. “It’s this gift I have,” he said.

  He took a step into the darker shadows beyond and just like that, he was gone.

  “Good luck,” Jilly said, even though she knew he couldn’t hear her.

  She stood quietly, listening to the river. But when the shadows seemed to thicken with watching presences again, she made her way back through the fence and into the alley behind The Harp. The orange tom was waiting for her, perched on the lid of a garbage can.

  “Hey, big fella,” she said.

  He turned his back on her, pretending a sudden interest in the stone wall of the pub. A car went by on the bridge above. She regarded the fence through which she’d just come, felt the shadows quicken on the other side of it, sidling toward her from under the bridge, so she walked to the end of the alleyway. Pausing there, she looked back once more, then went into the pub for a beer before heading home, letting the noise and music dispel the queer mood that had overtaken her.

  She found Geordie sitting in a corner, his fiddle still in its case by his feet as he nursed a draft. Ordering a Guinness at the bar, she took it over to his table and sat down across from him.

  “Hey, fiddle-boy,” she said. “How come you’re not sitting in with the band?”

  Geordie shrugged. “Oh, you know. Don’t really feel like it, I guess.”

  Jilly knew all right. For Geordie it was Tanya, but it was all part and parcel of the same sorry business that had the police looking for B
ones, Bones looking for Zeffy and Nia, Tanya withdrawing from life in general and Geordie in particular...

  “It’s that serious?” she asked.

  “Not for Tanya.”

  “But it is for you.” Jilly didn’t make a question of it.

  “She’s got a big spirit, sitting there inside of her,” he said. “I don’t even have to look at her, just be with her, and it comes slipping over me like a warm, golden glow. The thing is, she doesn’t know it. She’s gotten this bum rap for too long where everybody makes her focus on how she looks instead of who she is.” He paused and such a sad look touched his features that Jilly’s heart went out to him. “I’m proud of her for doing what she’s doing now— getting to know herself instead of accepting the image other people have of her. It’s something she should have done a long time ago, and I guess it’s something she feels she has to do on her own. But I miss her.”

  “I know you do,” Jilly told him. “But she’ll come around.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  Jilly sighed. She took a sip of her Guinness, then struck a pose, hands on hips, foam collected on her upper lip like a mustache.

  “Look at me,” she said. “I’m Charlie Chaplin.”

  “I appreciate what you’re trying to do,” Geordie told her, “but I’m not much in the mood to be cheered up.”

  Jilly pulled a pencil and small sketchbook from her pocket.

  “Who’s trying to cheer you up?” she said, not looking at him now, head bent over the sketchbook, curly hair falling in her face as she furiously scribbled on the paper. “I’m just here to get some sketches for a new series of paintings I’m doing. I plan to call it Grumpy Young Men. Here.” She held up the rough caricature she’d done of him, his jaw drooping Daliesquely down and across the table, where it served as coaster for his beer mug. “See? What do you think?”

  Geordie couldn’t help but crack a small smile. “Okay. You win. I feel all cheered up.”

  “No, you don’t. But if you played a few tunes you might feel a little better.”

  “I suppose.”