Dreams Underfoot n-1

by Charles de Lint

  I didn’t open the package until I was sitting in the Silenus Gardens in Fitzhenry Park, a place that always made me feel good; I figured I was going to need all the help I could get. Inside there was a book with a short letter. The book I recognized. It was the small J. M. Dent & Sons edition of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that I’d given Sam because I’d known it was one of her favorite stories.

  There was nothing special about the edition, other than its size—it was small enough for her to carry around in her purse, which she did. The inscription I’d written to her was inside, but the book was far more worn than it had been when I’d first given it to her. I didn’t have to open the book to remember that famous quotation from Puck’s final lines:

  If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but slumber’d here, While these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream ...

  But it hadn’t been a dream—not for me, and not for Sam. I set the book down beside me on the stone bench and unfolded the letter.

  “Dear Geordie,” it said. “I know you’ll read this one day, and I hope you can forgive me for not seeing you in person, but I wanted you to remember me as I was, not as I’ve become. I’ve had a full and mostly happy life; you know my only regret. I can look back on our time together with the wisdom of an old woman now and truly know that all things have their time. Ours was short—too short, my heart—but we did have it.

  “Who was it that said, ‘better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all’? We loved and lost each other, but I would rather cherish the memory than rail against the unfairness. I hope you will do the same.”

  I sat there and cried. I didn’t care about the looks I was getting from people walking by, I just let it all out. Some of my tears were for what I’d lost, some were for Sam and her bravery, and some were for my own stupidity at denying her memory for so long.

  I don’t know how long I sat there like that, holding her letter, but the tears finally dried on my cheeks.

  I heard the scuff of feet on the path and wasn’t surprised to look up and find Jilly standing in front of me.

  “Oh Geordie, me lad,” she said.

  She sat down at my side and leaned against me. I can’t tell you how comforting it was to have her there. I handed her the letter and book and sat quietly while she read the first and looked at the latter.

  Slowly she folded up the letter and slipped it inside the book.

  “How do you feel now?” she asked finally. “Better or worse?”

  “Both.”

  She raised her eyebrows in a silent question.

  “Well, it’s like what they say funerals are for,” I tried to explain. “It gives you the chance to say goodbye, to settle things, like taking a—” I looked at her and managed to find a small smile “—final turn on a wheel. But I feel depressed about Sam. I know what we had was real, and I know how it felt for me, losing her. But I only had to deal with it for a few years. She carried it for a lifetime.”

  “Still, she carried on.”

  I nodded. “Thank god for that.”

  Neither of us spoke for awhile, but then I remembered Paperjack. I told her what I thought had happened last night, then showed her the fortunetelling device that he’d left with me in St. Paul’s. She read my fortune with pursed lips and the start of a wrinkle on her forehead, but didn’t seem particularly surprised by it.

  “What do you think?” I asked her.

  She shrugged. “Everybody makes the same mistake. Fortunetelling doesn’t reveal the future; it mirrors the present. It resonates against what your subconscious already knows and hauls it up out of the darkness so that you can get a good look at it.”

  “I meant about Paperjack.”

  “I think he’s gone—back to wherever it was that he came from.” She was beginning to exasperate me in that way that only she could.

  “But who was he?” I asked. “No, better yet, what was he?”

  “I don’t know,” jilly said. “I just know it’s like your fortune said. It’s the questions we ask, the journey we take to get where we’re going that’s more important than the actual answer. It’s good to have mysteries. It reminds us that there’s more to the world than just making do and having a bit of fun.”

  I sighed, knowing I wasn’t going to get much more sense out of her than that.

  It wasn’t until the next day that I made my way alone to Paperjack’s camp in back of the Beaches.

  All his gear was gone, but the paper stars still hung from the trees. I wondered again about who he was.

  Some oracular spirit, a kind of guardian angel, drifting around, trying to help people see themselves? Or an old homeless black man with a gift for folding paper? I understood then that my fortune made a certain kind of sense, but I didn’t entirely agree with it.

  Still, in Sam’s case, knowing the answer had brought me peace.

  I took Paperjack’s fortuneteller from my pocket and strung it with a piece of string I’d brought along for that purpose. Then I hung it on the branch of a tree so that it could swing there, in among all those paper stars, and I walked away.

  Tallulah

  Nothing is too wonderful to be true.

  —Michael Faraday

  For the longest time, I thought she was a ghost, but I know what she is now. She’s come to mean everything to me; like a lifeline, she keeps me connected to reality, to this place and this time, by her very capriciousness.

  I wish I’d never met her.

  That’s a lie, of course, but it comes easily to the tongue. It’s a way to pretend that the ache she left behind in my heart doesn’t hurt.

  She calls herself Tallulah, but I know who she really is. A name can’t begin to encompass the sum of all her parts. But that’s the magic of names, isn’t it? That the complex, contradictory individuals we are can be called up complete and whole in another mind through the simple sorcery of a name. And connected to the complete person we call up in our mind with the alchemy of their name comes all the baggage of memory: times you were together, the music you listened to this morning or that night, conversation and jokes and private moments—all the good and bad times you’ve shared.

  Tally’s name conjures up more than just that for me. When the grisgris of the memories that hold her stir in my mind, she guides me through the city’s night like a totem does a shaman through Dreamtime. Everything familiar is changed; what she shows me goes under the skin, right to the marrow of the bone. I see a building and I know not only its shape and form, but its history. I can hear its breathing, I can almost read its thoughts.

  It’s the same for a street or a park, an abandoned car or some secret garden hidden behind a wall, a late night cafe or an empty lot. Each one has its story, its secret history, and Tally taught me how to read each one of them. Where once I guessed at those stories, chasing rumors of them like they were errant fireflies, now I know.

  I’m not as good with people. Neither of us are. Tally, at least, has an excuse. But me ...

  I wish I’d never met her.

  My brother Geordie is a busker—a street musician. He plays his fiddle on street corners or along the queues in the theatre district and makes a kind of magic with his music that words just can’t describe.

  Listening to him play is like stepping into an old Irish or Scottish fairy tale. The slow airs call up haunted moors and lonely coastlines; the jigs and reels wake a fire in the soul that burns with the awesome wonder of bright stars on a cold night, or the familiar warmth of red coals glimmering in a friendly hearth.

  The funny thing is, he’s one of the most pragmatic people I know. For all the enchantment he can call up out of that old Czech fiddle of his, I’m the one with the fey streak in our family.

  As far as I’m concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary. I’ve got such an open mind that Geordie says I’ve got a hole in it,
but I’ve been that way for as long as I can remember. It’s not so much that I’m gullible—though I’ve been called that and less charitable things in my time; it’s more that I’m willing to just suspend my disbelief until whatever I’m considering has been thoroughly debunked to my satisfaction.

  I first started collecting oddities and curiosities as I heard about them when I was in my teens, filling page after page of spiralbound notebooks with little notes and jottings—neat inky scratches on the paper, each entry opening worlds of possibility for me whenever I reread them. I liked things to do with the city the best because that seemed the last place in the world where the delicate wonders that are magic should exist.

  Truth to tell, a lot of what showed up in those notebooks leaned towards a darker side of the coin, but even that darkness had a light in it for me because it still stretched the realms of what was into a thousand variable whatmight-be’s. That was the real magic for me: the possibility that we only have to draw aside a veil to find the world a far more strange and wondrous place than its mundaneness allowed it could be.

  It was my girlfriend back then—Katie Deren—who first con—

  vinced me to use my notebooks as the basis for stories. Katie was about as odd a bird as I was in those days. We’d sit around with the music of obscure groups like the Incredible String Band or Dr.

  Strangely Strange playing on the turntable and literally talk away whole nights about anything and everything. She had the strangest way of looking at things; everything had a soul for her, be it the majestic old oak tree that stood in her parents’ back yard, or the old black iron kettle that she kept filled with dried weeds on the sill of her bedroom window.

  We drifted apart, the way it happens with a lot of relationships at that age, but I kept the gift she’d woken in me: the stories.

  I never expected to become a writer, but then I had no real expectations whatsoever as to what I was going to be when I “grew up.” Sometimes I think I never did—grow up that is.

  But I did get older. And I found I could make a living with my stories. I called them urban legends—independently of Jan Harold Brunvand, who also makes a living collecting them. But he approaches them as a folklorist, cataloguing and comparing them, while I retell them in stories that I sell to magazines and then recycle into book collections.

  I don’t feel we’re in any kind of competition with each other, but then I feel that way about all writers. There are as many stories to be told as there are people to tell them about; only the meanspirited would consider there to be a competition at all. And Brunvand does such a wonderful job.

  The first time I read his The Vanishing Hitchhiker, I was completely smitten with his work and, like the hundreds of other correspondents Brunvand has, made a point of sending him items I thought he could use for his future books.

  But I never wrote to him about Tally.

  I do my writing at night—the later the better. I don’t work in a study or an office and I don’t use a typewriter or computer, at least not for my first drafts. What I like to do is go out into the night and just set up shop wherever it feels right: a park bench, the counter of some allnight diner, the stoop of St.

  Paul’s Cathedral, the doorway of a closed junk shop on Grasso Street.

  I still keep notebooks, but they’re hardcover ones now. I write my stories in them as well. And though the stories owe their ex—

  istence to the urban legends that give them their quirky spin, what they’re really about is people: what makes them happy or sad. My themes are simple. They’re about love and loss, honor and the responsibilities of friendship. And wonder ... always wonder. As complex as people are individually, their drives are universal.

  I’ve been told—so often I almost believe it myself—that I’ve got a real understanding of people.

  However strange the situations my characters find themselves in, the characters themselves seem very real to my readers. That makes me feel good, naturally enough, but I don’t understand it because I don’t feel that I know people very well at all.

  I’m just not good with them.

  I think it comes from being that odd bird when I was growing up. I was distanced from the concerns of my peers, I just couldn’t get into so many of the things that they felt was important. The fault was partly the other kids—if you’re different, you’re fair game. You know how it can be. There are three kinds of kids: the ones that are the odd birds, the ones that pissed on them, and the ones that watched it happen.

  It was partly my fault, too, because I ostracized them as much as they did me. I was always out of step; I didn’t really care about belonging to this gang or that clique. A few years earlier and I’d have been a beatnik, a few years later, a hippie. I got into drugs before they were cool; found out they were messing up my head and got out of them when everybody else starting dropping acid and MDA and who knows what all.

  What it boiled down to was that I had a lot of acquaintances, but very few friends. And even with the friends I did have, I always felt one step removed from the relationship, as though I was observing what was going on, taking notes, rather than just being there.

  That hasn’t changed much as I’ve grown older.

  How that—let’s call it aloofness, for lack of a better word—translated into this socalled gift for characterization in my fiction, I can’t tell you. Maybe I put so much into the stories, I had nothing left over for real life. Maybe it’s because each one of us, no matter how many or how close our connections to other people, remains in the end, irrevocably on his or her own, solitary islands separated by expanses of the world’s sea, and I’m just more aware of it than others. Maybe I’m just missing the necessary circuit in my brain.

  Tally changed all of that.

  I wouldn’t have thought it, the first time I saw her.

  There’s a section of the Market in Lower Crowsea, where it backs onto the Kickaha River, that’s got a kind of Old World magic about it. The roads are too narrow for normal vehicular traffic, so most people go through on bicycles or by foot. The buildings lean close to each other over the cobblestoned streets that twist and wind in a confusion that not even the city’s mapmakers have been able to unravel to anyone’s satisfaction.

  There are old shops back in there and some of them still have signage in Dutch dating back a hundred years. There are buildings tenanted by generations of the same families, little courtyards, secret gardens, any number of slyeyed cats, old men playing dominoes and checkers and their gossiping wives, small gales of shrieking children by day, mysterious eddies of silence by night. It’s a wonderful place, completely untouched by the yuppie renovation projects that took over the rest of the Market.

  Right down by the river there’s a public courtyard surrounded on all sides by threestory brick and stone town houses with mansard roofs and dormer windows. Late at night, the only manmade sound comes from the odd bit of traffic on the McKennitt Street Bridge a block or so south, the only light comes from the single streedamp under which stands a bench made of cast iron and wooden slats. Not a light shines from the windows of the buildings that enclose it. When you sit on that bench, the river murmurs at your back and the streetlamp encloses you in a comforting embrace of warm yellow light.

  It’s one of my favorite places to write. I’ll sit there with my notebook propped up on my lap and scribble away for hours, my only companion, more often than not, a tatteredeared tom sleeping on the bench beside me. I think he lives in one of the houses, though he could be a stray. He’s there most times I come—not waiting for me. I’ll sit down and start to work and after a halfhour or so he’ll come sauntering out of the shadows, stopping a halfdozen times to lick this shoulder, that hind leg, before finally settling down beside me like he’s been there all night.

  He doesn’t much care to be patted, but I’m usually too busy to pay that much attention to him anyway. Still, I enjoy his company. I’d miss him if he stopped coming.

  I’ve wonder about his name sometim
es. You know that old story where they talk about a cat having three names? There’s the one we give them, the one they use among themselves and then the secret one that only they know.

  I just call him Ben; I don’t know what he calls himself. He could be the King of the Cats, for all I know.

  He was sleeping on the bench beside me the night she showed up. He saw her first. Or maybe he heard her.

  It was early autumn, a brisk night that followed one of those perfect crisp autumn days—clear skies, the sunshine bright on the turning leaves, a smell in the air of a change coming, the wheel of the seasons turning. I was bundled up in a flannel jacket and wore halfgloves to keep my hands from getting too cold as I wrote.

  I looked up when Ben stirred beside me, fur bristling, sliteyed gaze focused on the narrow mouth of an alleyway that cut like a tunnel through the town houses on the north side of the courtyard. I followed his gaze in time to see her step from the shadows.

  She reminded me of Geordie’s friend Jilly, the artist. She had the same slender frame and tangled hair, the same pixie face and wardrobe that made her look like she did all her clothes buying at a thrift shop. But she had a harder look than Jilly, a toughness that was reflected in the sharp lines that modified her features and in her gear: battered leather jacket, jeans stuffed into lowheeled black cowboy boots, hands in her pockets, a kind of leather carryall hanging by its strap from her shoulder.

  She had a loose, confident gait as she crossed the courtyard, boot heels clicking on the cobblestones.

  The warm light from the streetlamp softened her features a little.

  Beside me, Ben turned around a couple of times, a slow chase of his tail that had no enthusiasm to it, and settled back into sleep. She sat down on the bench, the cat between us, and dropped her carryall at her feet. Then she leaned back against the bench, legs stretched out in front of her, hands back in the pockets of her jeans, head turned to look at me.