Dreams Underfoot n-1

by Charles de Lint

  Why was she doing this? She had to be nuts.

  The moan came a third time then and she saw what she took to be a small man lying in some refuse.

  “Oh, jeez.” She moved forward, fear forgotten. “Are you okay?”

  She laid her guitar case down and knelt beside the figure, but when she reached out a hand to his shoulder, she touched fur instead of clothing. Muscles moved under her fingers—weakly, but enough to tell her that it wasn’t a fur coat. She snatched back her hand as a broad face turned towards her.

  She froze, looking into that face. The first thing she thought of were the orangutans in the Metro Zoo.

  The features had a simian cast with their closeset eyes, broad overhanging brow and protruding lower jaw. Reddish fur surrounded the face—the same fur that covered the creature’s body.

  It had to be a costume, she thought. Except it was too real. She began to back away.

  “Help ... me ....”

  This couldn’t be real.

  “When they track me down again ... this time ... they will ... they will kill me ....”

  The gaze that met her own was cloudy with pain, but it wasn’t an animal’s. Intelligence lay in its depth, behind the pain. But this wasn’t a man wearing a costume either.

  “Who will?” she asked at last.

  For the first time, the gaze appeared to really focus on her. “You ... you’re a Gypsy,” the creature said. “Sarishan, Romani chi.”

  Lorio shook her head, unable to accept what she was hearing. “The blood’s awfully thin,” she said finally. “And I don’t speak Romany.”

  Though she knew it to hear it and remembered the odd word. The last person to speak it in her presence had been her uncle Palko, but that was a long time ago now.

  “You are strangely garbed,” the creature said, “but I know a Gypsy when I see one.”

  Strangely garbed? Well, it all depended, Lorio thought.

  Her long curly hair was dyed a black too deep to be natural and grew from a threeinch swatch down the center of her head. Light brown stubble grew on either side of the mohawk where the sides of her head had been shaved. She wore a brown leather bomber’s jacket over a bright red and black Forties dress, net stockings, and her running shoes. A strand of plastic pearls hung around her neck.

  Six earrings, from a rhinestone stud to threaded beads, hung from her right ear. In her left lobe was a stud in the shape of an Anarchy symbol.

  “My mother was a Gypsy,” she said, “but my father—”

  She shook her head. What was she doing? Arguing with a ragged bundle of orange fur did not make much bloody sense.

  “Your people know the roads,” the creature said. “The roads ofthis world and those roads beyond that bind the balance. You ... you can help me. Take my place. The hound caught me before—before I could complete my journey. The boundaries grow thin ... frail. You must—’’

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lorio said. “God, I don’t even know what you are.”

  “My name is Elderee and this time Mahail’s hound did its job too well. It will be back ... once it scents my weakness ....” He coughed and Lorio stared at the blood speckling the handlike paw that went up to his mouth.

  “Look, you shouldn’t be talking. You need a doctor.”

  Right. Maybe a vet would be more like it. She started to take off her jacket to lay it over him, but Elderee reached out and touched her arm.

  “You need only walk it,” he said. “That’s all it takes. Walk it with intent. An old straight track ...

  there for those who know to see it. Like a Gypsy road—un Romano drom. It will take you home.”

  “How do you know where I live?”

  And why, she asked herself, am I taking this all so calmly? Probably because any minute she expected Steven Spielberg to step out and say, “Cut! That’s a take.”

  “Not where you live—but home. Where all roads meet. Jacca calls it Lankelly—because of the sacred grove in the heart of the valley—but I just think of it as the Wood.”

  Lorio shook her head. “This is a joke, right? You’re just wearing a ... a costume, right? A really good one.”

  “No, I—”

  “Sure. It’s almost Halloween. You were at a party and you got mugged. The Gypsy bit was a good guess. I can handle this—no problem. Now we’ve got to get you to a hospital.”

  “Too ... too late ....1)

  “Jeez, don’t fade out on me now. I can ...”

  Her voice trailed off as she realized that the man in the monkey suit was looking behind her. She turned just in time to see a doglike creature materialize out of nowhere. It came with a whufft of displaced air, bringing an unpleasant reek in its wake. Crouching on powerful legs, it looked like a cross between a hyena and a wolf, except for the protruding canines that Lorio had only seen in zoological texts on extinct species such as the sabertoothed tiger.

  “Flee!” Elderee croaked. “You can’t hope to face a polrech ....”

  His warning came too late. With a rumbling growl that came from deep in its chest, the creature charged. Lorio didn’t even stop to think of what she was doing. She just hoisted her guitar case and swung it in a flailing arc as hard as she could. The end of the case holding the body of her guitar struck the creature with such force that it snapped the beast’s neck with an audible crack.

  Lorio lost her hold on the case and it flew from her hands to land in a skidding crash well beyond the polrech that had dropped in its tracks. She stared at the dying creature, numb with fright. Adrenaline roared through her, bringing a buzz to her ears.

  Saliva dripped from the creature’s open mouth. The pavement of the alley smoked at its acidic touch.

  A pair of red fiery eyes glared at her. Taloned paws twitched, trying to reach her. When the light died in the creature’s eyes, its ‘shape wavered, then came apart, drifting away like smoke. A spark or two, like coals in a dying fire, hissed on the pavement, then there was nothing except for the small hole where the creature’s saliva had pooled.

  Lorio hugged herself to keep from shaking. Slowly she turned to look at her companion, but he lay very still now.

  “Uh ... Elderee?” she tried.

  She moved forward, keeping half an eye on the alley behind her in case there were more of the hounds coming. Gingerly she touched Elderee. His eyes flickered open and something sparked between them, leaving Lorio momentarily dizzy. When her gaze cleared, she saw that the lifelight was fading in his eyes now.

  He had been holding his left arm across his lower torso. It fell free, revealing a gaping wound. Blood had matted in the fur around it. A queasy feeling started up in Lorio’s stomach, but she forced it down.

  She tried to be calm. Something weird was going on—no doubt about that—but first things first.

  “You must ...” Elderee began in a weak voice.

  “Uhuh,” Lorio interrupted. “You listen to me. You’re hurt. I don’t know what you are and I can’t take you to a regular hospital, but you look enough like a ... like an orangutan that the Zoo might take you in and hopefully patch you up. Now what I want you to do is keep your mouth shut and pretend you’re an animal, okay? Otherwise they’ll probably dissect you, just to see what makes you tick. We’ll figure out how to get you out of the Zoo again when that problem comes up.”

  “But ...”

  “Take it easy. I’m going to get us a ride.”

  Without letting him reply, she bolted from the alleyway and ran down Yoors Street. She didn’t know how she was going to explain this to Terry—she wasn’t sure she could explain it to herself—but that didn’t matter. First she had to get Elderee to a place where his injury could be treated. Everything else had to wait until then. The Fan loomed up on her left and she charged into the restaurant, ignoring the stares she was getting as she pushed her way to Terry and Jane’s table.

  “Lorio!” Terry said, looking up with a smile. “So you changed your—”

  “No time to talk, Terry
. I’m taking you up on that offer of a ride—only I need it right away.”

  “What’s the big—”

  “We’re talking desperate here, Terry. Please?”

  The bass player of No Nuns Here exchanged a glance with his girlfriend. Jane shrugged, so he dumped a handful of bills on the table and hurried out of the restaurant with her, trying to catch up to Lorio who was already running back to the alleyway where she’d left her monkeyman.

  It was a twenty minute drive from downtown Newford to the Metro Zoo, and another twenty minutes back again. Terry pulled his Toyota over to the curb in front of Lorio’s apartment building on Lee Street in Crowsea. She shared a second floor loft with a traditional musician named Angie Tichell in the old threestory brick building. The loft retained a consistent smell of Chinese food because of the ground floor that specialized in Mainland dishes.

  Terry looked back between the bucket seats and studied Lorio for a moment.

  “Are you going to be okay?” he asked.

  Lorio nodded. “At least they took him in,” she said.

  They’d stayed in the Zoo parking lot long enough to be sure of that.

  “I’m sure they’ll do the best they can for him.”

  “But what if they can’t help him? I mean, he looks like an orangutan, but what if he’s too alien for them to help him?”

  Terry had no answer for her. He’d been shocked enough to see the ape with its orangered fur lying there in the alleyway, but when he’d heard it talk ...

  “Just what is he?” Jane asked.

  Lorio wore a mournful expression. “I don’t know.” She sat there a moment longer, then stepped out of the car. “Thanks for the lift,” she told Terry as he got her guitar out of the back for her. “I’ll see you tomorrow night. You too, Jane,” she added, leaning into the open window on the passenger’s side of the car for a moment.

  Jane touched her arm. “You take care of yourself,” she said.

  Lorio nodded. She stepped back as the Toyota pulled away and stood watching its taillights until it turned west on McKennitt and was lost from view. Turning, she faced the door to her building and wished her roommate wasn’t away for the weekend. Being on her own in the loft tonight didn’t hold very much appeal.

  That’s because you’re scared, she chided herself. Don’t be a baby. Just go to sleep.

  She gave the night street one last look. A cab went by, but then the street was quiet again. No pedestrians at this time of night; everybody was sensibly in bed and asleep. The rain had stopped, the streetlights reflected in the puddles that it had left behind. Up and down the street the second floor windows were dark above the soft glow of the litup display windows of the stores on the ground floors.

  Everything seemed normal. There wasn’t even a hint that behind the facade there was another world that held talking monkeymen and bizarre dogs that appeared out of nowhere.

  Sighing, Lorio squared her shoulders and went upstairs to bed, trying not to think about the weird turn the night had taken. She didn’t have much luck.

  She kept seeing that doglike creature and worried about one finding its way into her apartment. Or to the Zoo where Elderee was. Then she worried about Elderee. When she finally nodded off, she fell into a fitful sleep, all too full of disturbing dreams.

  At first she was in the alleyway again. For all that it was very real around her, there was a distancing sense, a feeling of dislocation in her being there. As she looked around, the pavement underfoot began to fracture. Cracks went up and down its length, then webbed the sides of the buildings. She started to back away onto Yoors Street when everything shattered like a piece of dropped glass.

  Shards of the alley, like images reflected in a broken mirror, whirled and spun around her. When they settled down, drifting slowly around her like feathers after a pillow fight, she found herself on a roadway—more of a farmer’s track, really—that stretched on to either horizon. On both sides of the track were rolling hills dotted with stands of trees.

  “A pretty scene,” a voice said from behind her. “Though not for long.”

  The man she saw, when she turned around, was a good head taller than her own fivefour. His hair was black, his eyes glittery bright, his mouth an arrogant slash in a pale face. He was dressed all in browns and blacks, his clothing hanging in a poor fit from his toothin frame.

  “Who’re—” Lorio began, but the man cut her off.

  “This I claim for the Dark, while you—” he shook his head, taking in her hair, her clothes, with a disdainful look “—will be my gift to Mahail.”

  He made a motion towards her with his hand and sparks flew from his fingertips. She stumbled as the road dissolved under her and she began to drop through grey space. There was light far below her. In it was a writhing mass of tentacles that reached up for her from a dark heart ofshadow. As she rushed down to meet it, the darkness resolved into a monstrous bloated shape with coaleyes and a gaping maw.

  It didn’t take much speculation to realize that this thing had to be Mahail.

  “Tell him Dorn sent you!” the palefaced man cried after her.

  She dropped like a bullet, straight for Mahail, her mouth open, but the scream dying before it left her throat. The monster’s oozing tentacles snatched her out of the air. They squeezed her, shook her, held her up for inspection to one eye, then the other.

  The soul studying her behind those eyes was like something dead. The air was filled with a reek of decay and rot. The tentacles tightened around her chest and lower torso, squeezing the breath from her as they brought her up to the monster’s mouth. Slime covered her, burning and painful where it touched her bare skin. She flailed her arms, slapped at the creature’s rubbery lips. The scream building up in her throat finally broke free, shrill and rattling and—

  —it woke her to a tangle of bedclothes that were wrapped around her. Cold sweat covered her from head to toe.

  She lay gasping, pushed aside the sheet and blankets, and stared up at the dark ceiling of her bedroom. Her heart beat a wild tattoo. Slowly the fear drained away.

  Just a dream, she thought. That was all. Maybe the whole night had been just a dream. But as she finally drifted off again, she remembered Elderee’s warm eyes and the long winding track of a road that went uphill and down, and this time she smiled and her sleep was dreamless.

  The next day it all did seem like a dream. She checked the papers, tried the news on both TV and radio, but there was no mention of the Zoo acquiring a mysterious new animal. It wasn’t until she called Terry to confirm that they had taken Elderee to the Zoo that she was willing to believe that she hadn’t gone crazy. Things were weird, sure, but at least she hadn’t totally lost it herself.

  She spent the day in a state of anxiety that didn’t go away until she got on stage at the club and No Nuns Here went into their first set. The chopping rhythms of the music, her guitar humming in her hands, her voice soaring over the blast of the instruments, let her escape that feeling of being lost. By the time they got to the last song of the night, she was filled with a crackling energy that let her rip through the song and make it not just a statement, but an anthem.

  I hear your whistle when I cross the park, you make me nervous when I walk in the dark, but I won’t listen—I won’t scream, you won’t find me in your magazines

  ‘cos

  I don’t need nobody staring at me, stripping me down with their 1-2-3....

  The song ended with a thunderous chord that shook the stage underfoot. She helped pack up the gear once the crowd was gone, but left on her own, not even taking her guitar with her. Terry promised to drop it off on Sunday afternoon, but she only nodded and made her way out onto Yoors Street.

  The sidewalks were crowded, overfilled with a strutting array of humanity from the trendy to punks to burnouts, everyone on their own personal course and all of them the same. They made the city come to life, but at the same time they drowned it with postures, and images like costumes. It was all artifice, lacking dep
th. Lorio turned to look at her own reflection in a store window. She was no different. Any meaning she meant to communicate was lost behind a shuffle of makeup, styling and pose.

  Mahail fed on hearts, she thought, not knowing where the thought had come from. He fed on them and left the shells to walk around just like we walk around.

  She turned from the window and made her way through the people to the alley where she’d found Elderee. Without a pause, she turned into it and walked straight to its end. There she stopped and looked back at the sidewalk she’d just left. Cars flickered by on the street beyond it. On the sidewalk itself, every size and shape of Yoors Street poseur walked by the mouth of the alley, leaving echoing spills of conversation or laughter in their wake. But here it was quiet, like a world apart. Here it was ... different.

  Your people know the roads ....

  You need only walk it ... with intent ....

  She sighed. Maybe the Rom of old had known hidden roads, but nobody had taken the time to show her any—not even Palko. Besides, her Gypsy blood was thin, a matter of chance rather than upbringing, and these days there were as many Gypsies in business suits as there were those following the old ways.

  Gypsy magic was just something the Rom used to baffle the Gaje, the nonGypsies. Magic itself was just parlor tricks. Except ...

  She remembered the polrech, appearing out of nowhere, dissolving into smoke when she’d killed it.

  And Elderee ... like an orangutan, only he could talk.

  Magic.

  She moved closer to one side of the alley, studying the brick wall of the building there. This alleyway was the last place in the world that she would ever expect to find a marvel. The grime and the dirt, the plastic garbage bags torn open in their corners, the refuse heaped against the walls—this wasn’t the stuff of magic. Magic was Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Cat Midhir’s Borderlands. This was ... She ran a hand down the side of the wall and looked at the smudge it left on her fingers. This was an armpit of the real world.

  Turning, she faced the mouth of the alley again, only to find a tall figure standing there, watching her.