Memory and Dream n-5

by Charles de Lint

  The next time she went to the library, she decided, she’d pick up a book on dreaming. Maybe she should just do that now. Dream herself walking over to the Lower Crowsea Public Library and checking out a book. She could dream herself reading it and who knows what her subconscious would make it say. Except, knowing her luck, she’d also dream that the librarian at this time of night—never mind that in the real world the library wasn’t open past nine—was Professor Dapple’s unpleasant manservant. He’d probably hit her on the head with the book, rather than let her take it out.

  She became aware of a sound then, realizing that she’d been hearing it for some time—it just hadn’t registered until now. Tick-tappa-tappa-tick-tick-tappa-tick ...

  It was like the sound of sticks, rhythmically clacking against each other. Simple wooden clappers. It was odd to hear them here, ticking and tapping so clearly in the hush that the snowfall had placed upon the city.

  ... tick-tick-tappa-tick-tappa-tappa ...

  She hesitated for a moment, then followed the strange sound. It led her down the driveway where Kathy had first seen Paddyjack—now that she had read Kathy’s story, the little man would always be Paddyjack to her. The snow was even deeper here, in between the buildings, and she found herself wishing for the snowshoes that she used to wear back home on the island when she went exploring in the winter fields. As it was, she made her slow way down to the end of the driveway to where a ramshackle garage leaned precariously against its neighbor. In the summer it was overhung with grapevines; tonight it was the heavy snowfall that blurred its shape.

  Still following the curious tick-tappa-ticking, she slogged through the narrow path between the two garages and out onto the old carriage lane that lay behind the buildings of Waterhouse Street, separating its properties from the ones on the street one block north. The lane was choked with thigh-high drifts, but Izzy forced her way through them until the lane took her to just behind the building where she and Kathy lived.

  Thinking of the little creature from her painting as she had been earlier, she wasn’t at all surprised to find that it was him making the tick-tappa sound. He was crouched up on the fire escape beside her bedroom window, tapping the knobby twiglike fingers of his right hand against the forearm of his left arm.

  The railings of the fire escape had all been festooned with torn lengths of long narrow strips of cloth that seemed to have been dyed from a palette of bright primary and secondary colors. Red and yellow and blue. Orange and green and violet. Attached to the fire escape, they were like the streamers of some Maypole gone all askew, fluttering and dancing in the wind as if they were actually keeping time to the strange, almost melodic rhythm that Paddyjack was calling up, fingers rap-a-tapping against his arm.

  Tick-tappa-tappa-tick-tick-tappa-tick ...

  Izzy was enchanted—by both the scene and the sound. She felt just as if she’d stepped into some winter fairy tale, courtesy of her own and Kathy’s imaginations, rather than the more traditional ones collected by Lang or Grimm. The little treeskin’s presence seemed all the more precious for being here in the middle of the city, with the snowy winds blowing and the streets all hushed except for the lovely music he woke, fingers on limb.

  ... tick-tick-tappa-tick-tappa-tappa ...

  Now if she could only figure out what he was doing. Though why should he have to be doing anything? she immediately asked herself: Couldn’t what he was doing be as natural as birdsong in the spring, the cicada in summer, the geese flying overhead on a crisp autumn day?

  Granted, she thought. But then why appear outside her bedroom window? Why the ribbons?

  She wondered if he’d talk to her—if he could even talk. Perhaps the only sound he could make was the rhythm he played on his body.

  There was only one way to find out.

  The small metal gate leading into the backyard behind her building was too bogged down in snowdrifts to open properly, so she moved toward the short chainlink fence separating the lane from the yard, planning to climb over it. And then, hands on the metal bar that ran along the top of the fence, she saw him again—the little hooded figure with his crossbow, creeping along the side of the building where the snow was less deep.

  Not this time, she thought, hauling herself over the fence. Her heartbeat went into double-time as she floundered through the snow. She opened her mouth to cry out a warning to Paddyjack, but before she could make a sound, his rescue was taken out of her hands.

  Another figure appeared behind the first, leaping upon the hooded man and wresting the crossbow from his grip. It was John, Izzy realized, as he tossed the crossbow into the deep snow of the backyard.

  The hooded figure threw a punch at him, but John easily deflected the blow. He struck back, dropping the man to his knees.

  The whole scuffle took place in a strange silence. When John had leapt on the hooded man, Paddyjack had left off his tick-tappa-tapping. Now he clambered quickly down the fire escape. The snow didn’t seem to slow either him or John down. It was almost as though they could walk over its surface, they moved with such ease.

  “John!” Izzy cried, when she realized that the two were leaving.

  He turned to look at her and the coldness in his eyes struck a deeper chill in Izzy than might have any amount of wind and snow. He held her gaze for a long moment before he turned away again. Taking Paddyjack by the hand, he led the little treeskin off into the night, leaving Izzy alone in her backyard.

  Alone with the snow and the storm—and the hooded man, who had made it back onto his feet once more. Except his hood had fallen back from his face and now she could see that it was Rushkin standing there by the side of her building. Rushkin with the stiff corpse of a winged cat hanging from his belt.

  Rushkin glowering at her with all the fury of one of his towering rages distorting his features. When he started for her, Izzy scrambled backward in the snow, trying to get away, but her legs were all entangled and she—

  —woke in her bed with the sheets all wound about her legs, her breath coming in sharp, sudden gasps. The T-shirt she was wearing clung damply to her skin. She stared wild-eyed about her bedroom, expecting Rushkin to come lurching out of the shadows at any moment, crossbow in hand. But there was no one waiting for her in the darkness—only her painting of John.

  She looked at it and her chest went tight. Just a dream, she told herself, as she had earlier, when she was dreaming that she was out wandering on snowy Lee Street. But the look in John’s eyes before he left with Paddyjack remained imprinted in her memory. The coldness of it. And behind that coldness, the hurt, the ache that twinned her own, all wrapped around with an unfamiliar anger that she’d never seen in him before.

  I put that there, she thought before remembering again that it was only a dream. But it had all seemed so very real.

  Izzy slowly disentangled her legs from the sheets, then wrapped them around her as she began to shiver. She pulled the sheets free from the end of her mattress and got up, trailing them behind her as she made her way to the window. She went to look at the night and the snow outside her window, to tear her gaze away from the painting at the foot of her mattress and all the hurt that looking at it called up in her.

  She wasn’t expecting the ribbons to actually be there—dozens of bright, colored ribbons, narrow streamers of torn cloth fluttering in the wind.

  She stared at them for a long time before she finally turned back to her bedroom. Dropping the sheets, she put on her jeans and a sweater, two pairs of socks, another sweater. Her fingers fumbled with the latch at the window, got it open. She gasped at the blast of cold air that burst in. Her face and hair were white in moments as a cloud of twisting snow was blown over her. Brushing the snow from her face with the back of her hand, she clambered out the window, socked feet sinking into the deep snow.

  She looked out at the backyard, but there was no sign of her passage through the snow—just as there was no sign of Paddyjack’s presence in the snow that lay so thick on the fire escape. There
were only the ribbons. She untied them, one by one, stuffing them into the pockets of her jeans until she’d collected them all. Only then did she return to her bedroom and shut the window on the storm.

  After changing into dry clothes, she took the ribbons and laid them out on her mattress. She hesitated for a moment, looking at her painting of John. His expression seemed to have changed from the one she’d painted to one of recrimination. Shivering again, she put the painting back into the closet and turned on a light. She blinked in the sudden glare until her eyes adjusted to the brightness.

  All these ribbons.

  She fingered each one, rearranged them on her mattress in varying patterns, let them dry. After a while she began to weave them into bracelets, just like the ones she’d made in summers on the island using scraps of leather and cloth, sometimes vines or the long stems of grasses and weeds. When she’d used all the ribbons up she had three cloth bracelets lying on her mattress in place of the scattering of torn cloth. She stared at them, unsure as to why she’d felt compelled to do what she’d just done, then put one on. The other two she stored away in her backpack, stuffing them deep down under her sketchbook, paint box, pencils and the other art supplies that she toted around with her.

  It was only then, turning the bracelet around and around on her wrist, that she tried to work out exactly what had happened tonight. What was the dream and what was real? Beyond the ribbons, was any of it real? Rushkin hunting her creations with a crossbow, the winged cat hanging dead from his belt.

  John standing up to him. He and Paddyjack fleeing into the night. And she herself, both sleeping in her bed and out there in the storm. She couldn’t have been doing both. It had to be one or the other. Since she’d woken in her own bed, it had all been a dream.

  Except for the ribbons.

  She fell asleep without making any sense of it at all. Fell asleep with the light on, banishing shadows, and the fingers of her left hand hooked under the cloth bracelet she wore on her right wrist. She slept fitfully, waking before her alarm clock sounded, but at least she didn’t dream again that night.

  VII

  The ribbon bracelets Izzy had made the night before were still there in the morning, one on her wrist, the two others at the bottom of her backpack. She took them out and studied them in the morning light, sitting up on her windowsill, turning them round and round between her fingers. The interweaving of the brightly colored ribbons created a muted kaleidoscope effect, a pleasing, random pattern that was all the more enchanting when she held them up against the view outside her window, the colors standing out in bright counterpoint to the panorama of white snow that the storm had left behind the night before.

  After a while she took the best two of the three and put them into an envelope. She wrote “For Paddyjack and John” on the outside. Braving the cold, she opened her window just wide enough so that she could lean out and tie the envelope to the railing of the fire escape. She closed the window and eyed her offering, shivering from her brief encounter with the weather. It seemed to have dropped another dozen degrees now that the storm had moved on.

  She still wasn’t sure about the ribbons—if they meant that last night’s dream had been a true experience, with the ribbons’ appearance serving as surety, or if the dream had simply been a warning to her from her subconscious concerning the fragility of her creations’ existence in this world and finding the ribbons on her fire escape had been no more than one of those odd moments of synchronicity that carried only as much weight as one was willing to invest in them.

  And really. Couldn’t anyone have tied them to the fire escape? She hadn’t looked out her window last night—not when she got home, not when she went to bed, not until after she’d had the dream. They could have been there all the time. For all she knew, Kathy could have put them there. Lord knew, Kathy could get some quirky ideas—get them, and follow up on them.

  It was possible, Izzy supposed, but then all she had to do was close her eyes and she would hear the tick-tappa-tapping of Paddyjack’s fingers on his forearm, could see him sitting there on the fire escape in the falling snow, with the ribbons fluttering all around him, their wind-driven dance perfectly synchronized to the rhythm he was calling up. And then she remembered the silence, fast-forwarding her memory through Rushkin’s attack, until the image that finally lay in her mind was of Paddyjack and John, walking hand in hand, down the lane, over the snow, away ....

  Izzy shook her head. No, she didn’t want to remember that, because then she’d see again the coldness in John’s eyes.

  Sighing, she refastened the remaining bracelet back onto her wrist and left her seat by the window.

  Kathy wasn’t up yet, so she had a quick breakfast of dry cereal and black coffee—she had to remember to buy some milk on the way home today—collected her backpack and left the apartment. Even bundled up as she was, the cold hit her like a shock when she stepped outside. She tried to adjust to the chill by shoveling the walk, but by the time she had walked halfway to Professor Dapple’s house, the cold had crept in under her coat and seeped through her boots and mittens. She was completely chilled when she finally arrived at the Grumbling Greenhouse Studio.

  She felt a twinge of guilt as she unlocked the door. She was actually due at Rushkin’s place this morning, but first she had to see for herself that the paintings were still safe. She couldn’t seem to escape that question John had asked her in the park.

  Do you still have those dreams you told me about?

  The one she’d had last night was far different from the dreams of fire she’d been having the previous year, or the more recent ones of someone looking for her, but it had still involved danger to her creations.

  She was certain the paintings were safe. How could they be anything else but? No one knew about them except for her and Kathy—and of course, Jilly. But she still had to see them for herself No one was up yet at the professor’s, but Izzy was too cold to shovel his walks as well. Let Olaf do that—it would give him something concrete to grumble about. She kicked away at the drift that was piled up against the studio door until she could get it open, then slipped inside and savored the warmth.

  The windows were all patterned with frost and she took a moment to admire them before she got up the courage to take her paintings out from under the table where she had stored them. They were still there, all three of them, not one of them damaged. She lined them up in a row on the lower canvas holder of her easel, just as she’d done the night she finished Rattle and Wings, and stood back to look at them. It was only then that she saw that something was wrong.

  Paddyjack was fine, but her fanciful ladybug with its tiny human face and the winged cat had undergone a significant change since the last time she’d looked at them. Both paintings had lost the vitality she remembered them having. The main figures seemed to blend into the background now, and all the highlights and contrasts that had made them come alive were gone, diminishing their sense of presence.

  The colors had gone from vibrant to muddy and even the compositions themselves seemed to suffer.

  She wished now that she had shown them to someone else before. It was too easy to believe that she simply hadn’t gotten them right in the first place, despite her memory to the contrary. But paintings didn’t lose their vitality just like that. Oils didn’t lose their vibrancy and become dulled in such a way over the passage of a couple of months.

  An image flashed in her mind: the small hooded figure with his crossbow. Firing. The quarrel striking the winged cat where it was perched on the fire escape and driving it back against the wall with the force of its impact ....

  Just a dream, she told herself.

  But her fingers strayed to the bracelet on her wrist.

  No, she thought. Even if Rushkin were responsible, even if he had been out there in the storm last night, hunting down her creations, how could she have dreamed about it happening? She wasn’t clairvoyant—not even close. Except ... bringing her creations over in the first place,
that was an act of magic all in itself. If that was possible, then why not something else? If the borders of reality were going to tear, why should they tear along some tidy little perforation? This was possible now, but this was still impossible—everything neatly contained within its own particular box, changed, perhaps, but still safe, still contained.

  If only she had someone to help her understand the perimeters of this new world she found herself in, someone to show her which parts she could still count on and which had changed. But the only person she’d had was John, and she’d driven him away. Even though his conversations could be so ambiguous, she still felt certain that he meant her no harm. There was no one else she could trust—no one with the necessary knowledge. In the magical borderland she now found herself in there was only John. John and Rushkin.

  She saw the crossbow quarrel again, the flash of its feathers before it plunged into the winged cat’s chest ....

  It was just a dream, she told herself; as though repetition would make it true. The paintings in front of her seemed to say otherwise, but she didn’t know what to think anymore. Rushkin was the one who had shown her how to bring her creations across from the otherworld in the first place. Why should he mean them harm? Why should he mean her harm?

  In the end, she realized she had no one else to whom she could turn. She left her paintings on the easel and locked up the studio, trudging off through the cold and the snow to the coach house, where Rushkin would be waiting for her. He’d be angry, yes, but only because she was late, she told herself. He wasn’t her enemy. He might be John’s, but Rushkin had taught her too much, he had too much light inside himself that he was willing to share with her, for Izzy to be able to consider him her enemy as well.