Memory and Dream n-5

by Charles de Lint

  “I’m in desperate need of sustenance,” he told John, “but I’ll forgo it if you’ll convince her to finish the piece she’s working on instead.”

  “What’s going on here?” Isabelle demanded, feeling utterly in the dark.

  “That’s my source painting he’s holding,” John said in a flat voice.

  “Have you gone mad? That’s not even close to The Spirit Is Strong.”

  John shook his head. “I took the original from the farmhouse, long before the fire, and had Barbara paint that over it. She was hiding it in the cupboard where she keeps whatever bits and pieces she’s been working on that don’t quite turn out.”

  “Not exactly an original solution,” Rushkin said. “Did you honestly think you were the first to consider it?”

  “How did you know she had it?” John asked.

  Rushkin smiled. “I didn’t. It was no more than a lucky guess.”

  “And she simply gave it to you when you asked for it.”

  “No. She gave it to Bitterweed.”

  Thinking that the doppelganger was John, Isabelle realized.

  “I’ve been most patient, holding it for an occasion such as this,” Rushkin said.

  John gave him an icy smile. “Well, you wasted your patience. I’ll welcome oblivion, if it means I don’t have to share a world with you anymore.”

  “No, John,” Isabelle began. “We can’t ....”

  Her voice trailed off as John turned toward her. The look on his face was a chilling reminder of how he’d regarded her on that snowy night all those years ago, just before he led Paddyjack away into the storm. Cold and unforgiving.

  “You can’t imagine that I’d let another die in my place,” he said.

  “Ah-ah,” Rushkin broke in. “I think the choice has been reserved for Isabelle to make.”

  John faced the old artist once more.

  “Stop me,” he said softly.

  And then he lunged for him, but Rushkin was too quick. The blade of the knife pierced the canvas.

  Before John could reach him, Rushkin cut downward. Halfway between Rushkin and Isabelle, John simply disappeared from sight.

  “No!” Isabelle cried.

  She dropped the painting she held and rushed toward him as well, ready to murder the monster, but the change in Rushkin was immediate. Fueled by the life force he’d stolen from the painting, he stood straighter. His shoulders seemed to broaden and he moved without hesitation. The ruined canvas dropped at his feet and the knife rose to chest level, stopping Isabelle in her tracks.

  “My creatures might not be able to kill you,” he said, “but I am not constricted by whatever it is that binds them.”

  Isabelle’s anguished gaze found the canvas that lay at his feet before tears blinded her. Rushkin pushed her back into the room.

  “Finish it,” he said, indicating the ghostly image that looked up from the unfinished painting she’d dropped, “or the next one to die will be one of your flesh-and-blood friends. Nothing inhibits my creatures from harming them.”

  The door slammed. She heard the lock engage again. And then she was alone once more with her pain and the knowledge that she’d caused yet another death. She dropped slowly to her knees and gathered up the painting that Rushkin had slashed, holding it against her chest.

  Gone. John was gone. She’d grieved for him twice before, first when he walked out of her life, then again when she thought he had died in the fire. This time he was gone for good. She clung to the painting and knelt there, tears streaming, unable to move, unable to think, for her grief. It was a long time before the flood of her despair settled into a hollow ache. Still holding the painting, she slowly rose and stumbled to the worktable. She laid John’s painting gently on its surface. She ran her fingers across the raised relief of Barbara Nichols’s brushstrokes, then had to look away before her grief overcame her again. Blowing her nose in an unused cleaning rag, she stared hopelessly around the confines of her prison, her gaze finally setding on the image of her angel of vengeance.

  By killing John, Rushkin had achieved the exact opposite of what he’d intended by the act. She was no longer afraid. She wanted vengeance now, but it would not involve the creation of more numena. How could she complete this painting, knowing what its fate would be? But she had to do something.

  Rushkin’s awful threat echoed on and on, cutting across the hollow space that John’s death had left inside her.

  Or the next one to die will be one of your flesh-and-blood friends.

  Who would he set his numena upon next? Jilly? Alan?

  Slowly she picked up the painting and stumbled back to the easel with it. It wasn’t a matter of courage anymore. Rushkin hadn’t left her any choice at all.

  She swallowed hard. But that wasn’t true, she realized. There was one other choice she’d been left—one Rushkin would never expect her to make. She could follow in Kathy’s footsteps.

  V

  When she walked away from the other three, Rolanda couldn’t help but feel that she had abandoned them—especially Cosette. It was an odd feeling, for it grew from no reasonable source. She knew she was doing the right thing. She definitely drew the line at condoning any sort of criminal activity, and so far as she was concerned, murder topped the list of criminal activities.

  And no one was expecting her to condone it, she reminded herself The guilt she felt was self-imposed. Not one of them had said a thing. She’d taken it on herself.

  By the time she reached the front walk of the Foundation, she’d decided that what she had to do now was to put it all out of her mind. Never having been a brooder, she dealt with problems as they came up. She’d worry about what Alan and his companions were getting themselves into this evening when she would either have heard from them or be forced to call the police. She concentrated instead on her current caseload. There’d be sessions to make up for the time she’d lost this morning, and god knew how many new files piling up on her desk

  A sudden commotion arose from inside the Foundation’s offices as she opened the front door. She recognized Shauna’s voice, uncharacteristically swearing. But before the incongruity could really register, Rolanda was confronted with two figures barreling down the hallway toward her. One of them was Cosette’s friend John. The other was a teenage girl with the pale washedout features and black wardrobe of a neo-Gothic punk. Both were carrying paintings—torn down from the wall of the Foundation’s waiting room. The girl was in the lead. John fended off Shauna with one hand as he followed on the girl’s heels.

  No, Rolanda realized. That wasn’t John, for all that he looked to be an exact twin of Cosette’s friend. These were the other side of the coin that Cosette represented; they were Rushkin’s creatures.

  Before she even realized what she was doing, Rolanda was swinging her purse. The blow caught the girl in the stomach, doubling her over. Rolanda snatched the painting from her at the same time that Shauna tackled the man who looked like John. The two of them fell on top of the girl, but she scrambled out from under them, a switchblade open in her hand. Rolanda kicked hard, her sneaker connecting with the girl’s wrist and driving it against the wall. The knife fell from the girl’s suddenly limp fingers.

  “Call nine-one-one!” Rolanda cried as another of the Foundation’s workers appeared at the far end of the hall.

  “Already did!” Davy called back to her.

  He charged forward, jumping on the man’s back just as he was taking a swing at Shauna. Rolanda turned to the girl she’d stopped. The girl looked as though she was readying herself for another attack, but she froze when Rolanda’s attention returned to her.

  “You might as well give it up,” Rolanda told her. “You’re not going anywhere now.”

  The girl nursed her wrist and gave her a hard look.

  “Fuck you,” she said.

  And then she vanished. One instant she was crouching in the hallway, snarling at Rolanda, hate spitting from her eyes, the next she was gone with a whuft of displaced air.
A half-moment behind her, the other attacker vanished as well, making Davy fall on top of Shauna. All that was left of their presence was the open switchblade lying on the carpet. And the paintings that they’d pulled down from the wall in the Foundation’s waiting room.

  “What the hell ... ?” Davy said.

  He rolled away from Shauna and got slowly to his feet, eyes going wide as he looked around himself.

  Shauna appeared just as confused.

  “This has been a seriously weird day,” she said. “First we get that girl materializing in the middle of the waiting room and now this.”

  Rolanda nodded slowly.

  “What’s going on, Roll?” Shauna wanted to know.

  Rolanda was only vaguely paying attention to her coworkers. Instead she was thinking of what had just happened, of the irony of her giving a lecture to Alan and the others about vigilantism and then what she’d just done. She hadn’t even thought about it. Hadn’t tried to talk to the girl—not that she thought talking would have done any good with that one. But she’d just waded in, the thin veneer of being a socially responsible adult disappearing as suddenly as the two thieves had.

  “Rolanda?” Shauna said when Rolanda didn’t respond. She stepped closer, a worried look crossing her features. “Did that girl hurt you?”

  Rolanda blinked, then slowly shook her head. “No. I’m just—shocked, I guess, at how easily I was willing to forgo trying to negotiate with them and just hit back.”

  “Hey, they were asking for it,” Davy said.

  “I suppose.”

  The wail of an approaching police siren gave them a moment’s pause. The police would be here soon.

  “What do we tell them?” Shauna asked, turning to Rolanda. “Do you know what’s going on?”

  “I think we should just tell them that we managed to chase the thieves away,” Rolanda said.

  She leaned the painting she was still holding against the wall and retrieved the other from where it had fallen. Neither of them seemed the worse for their short misadventure.

  “And maybe store these away someplace safe,” she added. At least until she heard that Alan and the others had managed to deal with Rushkin and knew it would be okay to hang them again.

  Jesus, she thought. She was already siding with Alan and the others, ready, she realized, to condone the murder of another human being. The knowledge scared her, but she couldn’t make the feeling go away. All she had to do was remember the killing look in that girl’s eyes and think of it being turned on Cosette or some other innocent. What could the police do in a situation such as this?

  “Fine,” Shauna said. “That’s what we’ll tell the cops. But you know more than you’re letting on.”

  Rolanda chose her words carefully. “If I knew anything that would make what just happened here easier to believe, trust me, I’d tell you.”

  There. That wasn’t an actual lie. What Shauna and Davy had just witnessed was unbelievable enough. If she related everything that she knew, it would only seem more unbelievable.

  “But what we just saw,” Davy said. “I mean, people can’t just vanish like that ... can they?”

  Happily the police arrived at that moment and Rolanda didn’t have to reply. They explained the situation to the two officers and then locked away the paintings in a storeroom in the basement. Rolanda tucked the key into the pocket of her jeans. She could tell that both Shauna and Davy wanted to talk more about what had happened, but once they’d all trooped back upstairs to the Foundation’s offices, business went on and they were soon too swamped with the usual crises to worry about something so exotic as thieves who could vanish. There were children to be fed and clothed, beds to be found for them, social workers and lawyers to contact on their behalf.

  For Shauna and Davy, the mystery slipped between the cracks of yet one more hectic day. But Rolanda watched the clock all afternoon, willing Alan to pick up a phone wherever he was and contact her. And then, when the day was done and she’d made her excuses to Shauna and Davy, who wanted to talk about it some more, when she was finally alone and ready to go up to her apartment, she found that all that she could think about were the paintings locked up in the cellar. What if the thieves came back?

  What if they were successful this time?

  She ended up making herself a thermos of coffee and a couple of sandwiches and took them down to the basement. She went back upstairs to get herself a chair, the cordless roam-phone from Shauna’s office and a baseball bat. Then she sat down and waited. For the phone to ring. For the thieves to return.

  For something to happen.

  By the time a sudden hammering arose, knuckles rapping on a hollow wooden door, her nerves were completely on edge. She jumped upright, the baseball bat slipping from her hand to bounce off the floor.

  She retrieved it quickly and stood with the bat in her hands, staring around the basement in nervous confusion. That was when she realized that the knocking was coming from inside the storeroom.

  VI

  The farther Cosette led them into the Tombs, the more Alan began to question the wisdom of what they were doing. While it was true that Isabelle was in danger and he wanted to help her, he was growing less and less certain of what it was that he had to offer in terms of help. Never having been in a fight in his life, never having had to use physical force of any kind before, he wasn’t exactly cut out for the role of the hero in a situation such as this. They hadn’t even confronted Rushkin or his creatures yet, and his nerves were already shot from anticipation of what would happen when they did.

  “I’m beginning to think Rolanda was right,” he said to Marisa, walking beside him. “Maybe we should have called in the police.”

  “But you said it yourself, they’re not going to believe any of this. By the time we could convince them it was real—just saying we ever could, which I doubt—it’d probably be too late.”

  “But Rolanda was right when she said that Isabelle being kidnapped would be real enough for them.”

  “Well, I hate to bring this up,” Marisa told him, “but at this moment you’re not exactly a model citizen in their eyes, are you? If things got out of control, if anything was to happen to Isabelle before we could help her, they’d probably try to blame both it and Mully’s death on you.”

  “I don’t really care about that at the moment,” Alan said. “I just want Isabelle to be okay.”

  “That’s why we’re here.”

  Alan nodded. “But what can we do?”

  Marisa gave his arm a reassuring squeeze. “Whatever we have to.”

  Up ahead of them, Cosette came to an abrupt halt at what had once been a crosswalk. The painted markings on the pavement were almost erased by the weather, but two unraveling strands of wire still held the crosswalk lights aloft. The hulking bulk of an overturned city bus was rusting in the middle of the intersection, its surface a bewildering array of graffiti ranging from gang signs to slogans and crude art.

  Piled up against the bus were the remains of a couple of cars that had obviously been driven into the toppled vehicle by joyriders and then abandoned.

  Cosette darted across the intersection and hunkered down behind one of the cars. When Alan and Marisa joined her, she pointed to a run-down tenement building that stood a little way down the block on the far side of the street.

  “That’s it,” she said. “Isabelle’s in there.”

  The nondescript building took on an ominous look in Alan’s mind once Cosette spoke. The street in front of it was relatively clear of rubble and abandoned cars. It must have been an office building of some sort, Alan decided. Perhaps a bank. Along its second-floor ledge he could see a row of gargoyles—or at least the remains of their bases. Only one of the stone statues was still standing. Like the bus, like almost every surface that could hold paint in the area, its walls were festooned with graffiti.

  “Where’s John?” Alan asked.

  Cosette closed her eyes. Cocking her head, she seemed to be listening to some
thing, but Alan couldn’t figure out what. All he could hear was the traffic a few blocks over on Williamson Street where it cut through the Tombs, the vehicles all speeding along that stretch of the thoroughfare. No one in their right mind stopped their car in the Tombs. They especially didn’t go wandering about on foot the way he and his companions were.

  Closer he could hear the sound of the wind, blowing down the deserted streets, occasionally bringing them a snatch of music from the boom box of one of the area’s squatters. They’d seen very few people since first entering this wasteland of empty lots and abandoned buildings. Those they had were all the kinds of people that Alan would normally cross a street to avoid. They always had an attitude. But here, on their home turf, the inhabitants of the Tombs seemed content to ignore them. Watching and waiting, perhaps, to see what had brought them here.

  “I can’t find him,” Cosette said, looking alarmed. “Usually I can almost see him in my head—not clearly, the way I can always see Isabelle, but I can sort of feel where he is.”

  “Do you feel him now?”

  “No,” Cosette said. “I can’t feel him at all.”

  “But Isabelle’s inside?”

  When Cosette nodded, Alan glanced at Marisa.

  “We’re not going to do any good hiding out here,” Marisa said.

  Like they were going to do so much good inside, Alan thought. Then he sighed. He studied the ground around them, looking for something he could use as a weapon, although use was perhaps too strong a word. Something he could hold to give him courage. He wasn’t sure that he was actually capable of hitting someone, little say murdering Rushkin the way Cosette wanted him to.

  He got up and edged away from the car they were hiding behind to peer into the open trunk of the other vehicle. There he found a rusting tire iron. Picking it up, he turned to his companions, holding the tire iron awkwardly in his hand. When he returned to where the others were waiting for him, Cosette regarded his makeshift weapon with approval but he saw sympathy in Marisa’s eyes. Alan swallowed thickly.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.”