Dreams Underfoot n-1

by Charles de Lint

  I start to walk across the dark mud to the other side of the rock until I hit a certain vantage point. I stop when I can see that it’s shaped like a big strange coffin and I remember what Granny Weather told me. I look for the candle and I see a tiny light flickering at the very top of the black stone, right where it’s pushed up and snagged among the dangling branches of the dead willow. It’s no brighter than a firefly’s glow, but it burns steady.

  I do what Granny Weather told me and look around myself using my peripheral vision. I don’t see anything at first, but as I slowly turn towards the water, I catch just a hint of a glow in the water. I stop and then I wonder what to do. Is it still going to be there if I turn to face it?

  Eventually, I move sideways towards it, always keeping it in the corner of my eye. The closer I get, the brighter it starts to glow, until I’m standing hip deep in the cold water, the mud sucking at my feet, and it’s all around me, this dim eerie glowing. I look down into the water and I see my own face reflected back at me, but then I realize that it’s not me I’m seeing, it’s the drowned woman, the moon, trapped under the stone.

  I stick my hazel twig down the bodice of my blouse and reach into the water. I have to bend down, the dark water licking at my shoulders and chin and smelling something awful, but I finally touch the woman’s shoulder. Her skin’s warm against my fingers and for some reason that makes me feel braver. I get a grip with one hand on her shoulder, then the other, and give a pull.

  Nothing budges.

  I try some more, moving a little deeper into the water. Finally I plunge my head under and get a really good hold, but she simply won’t move. The rock’s got her pressed down tight, and the willow’s got the rock snagged, and dream or no dream, I’m not some kind of superwoman. I’m only so strong and I have to breathe.

  I come up spluttering and choking on the foul water.

  And then I hear the laughter.

  I look up and there’s these things all around the edge of the pool. Quicks and bogles and small monsters. All eyes and teeth and spindly black limbs and crooked hands with too many joints to the fingers. The tree is full of crows and their cawing adds to the mocking hubbub of sound.

  First got one, now got two, a pair of voices chant. Boil her up in a tiddy stew.

  I’m starting to shiver—not just because I’m scared, which I am, but because the water’s so damn cold. The haunts just keep on laughing and making up these creepy little rhymes that mostly have to do with little stews and barbecues. And then suddenly, they all fall silent and these three figures come swinging down from the willow’s boughs.

  I don’t know where they came from, they’re just there all of a sudden. These aren’t haunts, nor quicks nor bogles. They’re men and they look all too familiar.

  Ask for anything, one of them says, and it will be yours.

  It’s Jeck, I realize. Jeck talking to me, except the voice doesn’t sound right. But it looks just like him.

  All three look like him.

  I remember Granny Weather telling me that Jeck was untrustworthy, but then Jeck told me to trust her. And to trust him. Looking at these three Jecks, I don’t know what to think anymore. My head starts to hurt and I just wish I could wake up.

  You need only tell us what it is you want, one of the Jecks says, and we will give it to you. There should be no enmity between us. The woman is drowned. She is dead. You have come too late. There is nothing you can do for her now. But you can do something for yourself. Let us gift you with your heart’s desire.

  My heart’s desire, I think.

  I tell myself, again, it’s just a dream, but I can’t help the way I start thinking about what I’d ask for if I could really have anything I wanted, anything at all.

  I look down into the water at the drowned woman and I think about my dad. He never liked to talk about my mother. It’s like she was just a dream, he said once.

  And maybe she was, I find myself thinking as my gaze goes down into the water and I study the features of the drowned woman who looks so much like me. Maybe she was the Moon in this world and she came to ours to rejuvenate, but when the time came for her to go back, she didn’t want to leave because she loved me and dad too much. Except she didn’t have a choice.

  So when she returned, she was weaker, instead of stronger like she was supposed to be, because she was so sad. And that’s how the quicks and the bogies trapped her.

  I laugh then. What I’m making up, as I stand here waistdeep in smelly dream water, is the classic abandoned child’s scenario. They always figure that there was just a mixup, that one day their real parents are going to show up and take them away to some place where everything’s magical and loving and perfect.

  I used to feel real guilty about my mother leaving us—that’s something else that happens when you’re just a kid in that kind of a situation. You just automatically feel guilty when something bad happens, like it’s got to be your fault. But I got older. I learned to deal with it. I learned that I was a good person, that it hadn’t been my fault, that my dad was a good person, too, and it wasn’t his fault either.

  I’d still like to know why my mother left us, but I came to understand that whatever the reasons were for her going, they had to do with her, not with us. Just like I know this is only a dream and the drowned woman might look like me, but that’s just something I’m projecting onto her. I want her to be my mother. I want her having abandoned me and dad not to have been her fault either. I want to come to her rescue and bring us all back together again.

  Except it isn’t going to happen. Pretend and real just don’t mix.

  But it’s tempting all the same. It’s tempting to let it all play out. I know the haunts just want me to talk so that they can trap me as well, that they wouldn’t follow through on any promise they made, but this is my dream. I can make them keep to their promise. All I have to do is say what I want.

  And then I understand that it’s all real after all. Not real in the sense that I can be physically harmed in this place, but real in that if I make a selfish choice, even if it’s just in a dream, I’ll still have to live with the fact of it when I wake up. It doesn’t matter that I’m dreaming, I’ll still have done it.

  What the bogles are offering is my heart’s desire, if I just leave the Moon to drown. But if I do that, I’m responsible for her death. She might not be real, but it doesn’t change anything at all. It’ll still mean that I’m willing to let someone die, just so I can have my own way.

  I suck on the stone and move it back and forth from one cheek to the other. I reach down into my wet bodice and pluck out the hazel twig from where it got pushed down between my breasts. I lift a hand to my hair and brush it back from my face and then I look at those sham copies of my Jeck Crow and I smile at them.

  My dream, I think. What I say goes.

  I don’t if it’s going to work, but I’m fed up with having everyone else decide what happens in my dream. I turn to the stone and I put my hands upon it, the hazel twig sticking out between the fingers of my right hand, and I give the stone a shove. There’s this great big outcry among the quicks and bogies and haunts as the stone starts to topple over. I look down at the drowned woman and I see her eyes open, I see her smile, but then there’s too much light and I’m blinded.

  When my vision finally clears, I’m alone by the pool. There’s a big fat full moon hanging in the sky, making the fens almost as bright as day. They’ve all fled, the monsters, the quicks and bogles and things.

  The dead willow’s still full of crows, but as soon as I look up, they lift from the tree in an explosion of dark wings, a circling murder, cawing and crying, until they finally go away. The stone’s lying on its side, half in the water, half out.

  And I’m still dreaming.

  I’m standing here, up to my waist in the smelly water, with a hazel twig in my hand and a stone in my mouth, and I stare up at that big full moon until it seems I can feel her light just singing through my veins.

  For a
moment it’s like being back in the barn with Jeck, I’m just on fire, but it’s a different kind of fire, it burns away the darknesses that have gotten lodged in me over the years, just like they get lodged in everybody, and just for that moment, I’m solid light, innocent and newborn, a burning Midsummer fire in the shape of a woman.

  And then I wake up, back home again.

  I lie there in my bed and look out the window, but it’s still the dark of the moon in our world. The streets are quiet outside, there’s a hush over the whole city, and I’m lying here with a hazel twig in my hand, a stone in my mouth, pushed up into one cheek, and a warm burning glow deep inside.

  I sit up and spit the stone out into my hand. I walk over to the window. I’m not in some magical dream now; I’m in the real world. I know the lighted moon glows with light borrowed from the sun. That she’s still out there in the dark of the moon, we just can’t see her tonight because the earth is between her and the sun.

  Or maybe she’s gone into some other world, to replenish her lantern before she begins her nightly trek across the sky once more.

  I feel like I’ve learned something, but I’m not sure what. I’m not sure what any of it means.

  11

  “How can you say that?” Jilly said. “God, Sophie, it’s so obvious. She really was your mother and you really did save her. As for Jeck, he was the bird you rescued in your first dream. Jeck Crow—don’t you get it? One of the bad guys, only you won him over with an act of kindness. It all makes perfect sense.”

  Sophie slowly shook her head. “I suppose I’d like to believe that, too,” she said, “but what we want and what really is aren’t always the same thing.”

  “But what about Jeck? He’ll be waiting for you. And Granny Weather? They both knew you were the Moon’s daughter all along. It all means something.”

  Sophie sighed. She stroked the sleeping cat on her lap, imagining for a moment that it was the soft dark curls of a crow that could be a man, in a land that only existed in her dreams.

  “I guess,” she said, “it means I need a new boyfriend.”

  12

  July’s a real sweetheart, and I love her dearly, but she’s naive in some ways. Or maybe it’s just that she wants to play the ingenue. She’s always so ready to believe anything that anyone tells her, so long as it’s magical.

  Well, I believe in magic, too, but it’s the magic that can turn a caterpillar into a butterfly, the natural wonder and beauty of the world that’s all around me. I can’t believe in some dreamland being real. I can’t believe what Jilly now insists is true: that I’ve got faerie blood, because I’m the daughter of the Moon.

  Though I have to admit that I’d like to.

  I never do get to sleep that night. I prowl around the apartment, drinking coffee to keep me awake.

  I’m afraid to go to sleep, afraid I’ll dream and that it’ll all be real.

  Or maybe that it won’t.

  When it starts to get light, I take a long cold shower, because I’ve been thinking about Jeck again. I guess if my making the wrong decision in a dream would’ve had ramifications in the waking world, then there’s no reason that a rampaging libido shouldn’t carry over as well.

  I get dressed in some old clothes I haven’t worn in years, just to try to recapture a more innocent time. White blouse, faded jeans, and hightops with this smoking jacket overtop that used to belong to my dad. It’s made of burgundy velvet with black satin lapels. A black hat, with a flat top and a bit of a curl to its brim, completes the picture.

  I look in the mirror and I feel like I’m auditioning to be a stage magician’s assistant, but I don’t much care.

  As soon as the hour gets civilized, I head over to Christy Riddell’s house. I’m knocking on his door at nine o’clock, but when he comes to let me in, he’s all sleepyeyed and disheveled and I realize that I should’ve given him another couple of hours. Too late for that now.

  I just come right out with it. I tell him that Jilly said he knew all about lucid dreaming and what I want to know is, is any of it real—the place you dream of, the people you meet there?

  He stands there in the doorway, blinking like an owl, but I guess he’s used to stranger things, because after a moment he leans against the door jamb and asks me what I know about consensual reality.

  It’s where everything that we see around us only exists because we all agree it does, I say.

  Well, maybe it’s the same in a dream, he replies. If everyone in the dream agrees that what’s around them is real, then why shouldn’t it be?

  I want to ask him about what my dad had to say about dreams trying to escape into the waking world, but I decide I’ve already pushed my luck.

  Thanks, I say.

  He gives me a funny look. That’s it? he asks.

  I’ll explain it some other time, I tell him.

  Please do, he says without a whole lot of enthusiasm, then goes back inside.

  When I get home, I go and lie down on the old sofa that’s out on my balcony. I close my eyes. I’m still not so sure about any of this, but I figure it can’t hurt to see if Jeck and I can’t find ourselves one of those happilyever-afters with which fairy tales usually end.

  Who knows? Maybe I really am the daughter of the Moon. If not here, then someplace.

  In The House Of My Enemy

  We have not inherited the earth from our fathers, we are borrowing it from our children.

  — Native American saying

  1

  The past scampers like an alleycat through the present, leaving the pawprints of memories scattered helterskelter—here ink is smeared on a page, there lies an old photograph with a chewed corner, elsewhere still, a nest has been made of old newspapers, the headlines running one into the other to make strange declarations. There is no order to what we recall, the wheel of time follows no straight line as it turns in our heads. In the dark attics of our minds, all times mingle, sometimes literally.

  I get so confused. I’ve been so many people; some I didn’t like at all. I wonder that anyone could.

  Victim, hooker, junkie, liar, thief But without them, I wouldn’t be who I am today. I’m no one special, but I like who I am, lost childhood and all.

  Did I have to be all those people to become the person I am today? Are they still living inside me, hiding in some dark corner of my mind, waiting for me to slip and stumble and fall and give them life again?

  I tell myself not to remember, but that’s wrong, too. Not remembering makes them stronger.

  2

  The morning sun came in through the window of Jilly Coppercorn’s loft, playing across the features of her guest. The girl was still asleep on the Murphy bed, sheets all tangled around her skinny limbs, pulled tight and smooth over the rounded swell of her abdomen. Sleep had gentled her features. Her hair clouded the pillow around her head. The soft morning sunlight gave her a Madonna quality, a nimbus ofBotticelli purity that the harsher light of the later day would steal away once she woke.

  She was fifteen years old. And eight months pregnant.

  Jilly sat in the windowseat, feet propped up on the sill, sketchpad on her lap. She caught the scene in charcoal, smudging the lines with the pad of her middle finger to soften them. On the fire escape outside, a stray cat climbed up the last few metal steps until it was level with where she was sitting and gave a plaintive meow.

  Jilly had been expecting the black and white tabby. She reached under her knees and picked up a small plastic margarine container filled with dried kibbles, which she set down on the fire escape in front of the cat. As the tabby contentedly crunched its breakfast, Jilly returned to her portrait.

  “My name’s Annie,” her guest had told her last night when she stopped Jilly on Yoors Street just a few blocks south of the loft. “Could you spare some change? I really need to get some decent food. It’s not so much for me ....”

  She put her hand on the swell of her stomach as she spoke. Jilly had looked at her, taking in the stringy hair,
the ragged clothes, the unhealthy color of her complexion, the toothin body that seemed barely capable of sustaining the girl herself, little say nourishing the child she carried.

  “Are you all on your own?” Jilly asked.

  The girl nodded.

  Jilly put her arm around the girl’s shoulder and steered her back to the loft. She let her take a shower while she cooked a meal, gave her a clean smock to wear, and tried not to be patronizing while she did it all.

  The girl had lost enough dignity as it was and Jilly knew that dignity was almost as hard to recover as innocence. She knew all too well.

  3

  Stolen Childhood, by Sophie Etoile. Copperplate engraving. Five Coyotes Singing Studio, Newford, 1988.

  A child in a ragged dress stands in front of a ramshackle farmhouse. In one hand she holds a doll—a stick with a ball stuck in one end and a skirt on the other. She wears a lost expression, holding the doll as though she doesn’t quite know what to do with it.

  A shadowed figure stands behind the screen door, watching her.

  I guess I was around three years old when my oldest brother started molesting me. That’d make him eleven. He used to touch me down between my legs while my parents were out drinking or sobering up down in the kitchen. I tried to fight him off, but I didn’t really know that what he was doing was wrong—even when he started to put his cock inside me.

  I was eight when my mother walked in on one of his rapes and you know what she did? She walked right out again until my brother was finished and we both had our clothes on again. She waited until he’d left the room, then she came back in and started screaming at me.