Memory and Dream n-5

by Charles de Lint

  “This isn’t the past.”

  “But ..... Isabelle gazed pointedly at the mirror on the far side of the room, where a reflection of her younger self looked back at her. “Then what is it? Just memory?”

  John shook his head. “We’re in a maker’s dream—just as we were that other winter night all those years ago.”

  “I don’t understand.—What maker?”

  “You. We’re in your dream.”

  Isabelle stared at him. “You’re telling me it isn’t real? That I’ve made this all up?”

  “I don’t know if you actually made it up,” John said, “or if you simply brought us here. But what I do know is that what happens here reflects back into the world we’ve left behind us.”

  Isabelle’s throat was suddenly dry. The exhilaration, the freedom she’d felt when she’d finally taken matters into her own hands and followed in Kathy’s footsteps, had utterly drained away. It had seemed as though there’d been no other choice at the time. Now all she could see was choices. Had it been this way for Kathy as well? First the exhilaration of finally having done it, and then the regret when it was too late?

  “I ... killed myself,” she finished in a small voice.

  “You cut yourself,” John corrected. “Badly. But you’re not dead yet. If you were, we wouldn’t be here.”

  “I’m alive?”

  Isabelle’s relief was immeasurable.

  “For now. We don’t know how badly you’re hurt. And we can’t judge your survival by how long we spend here since time moves differently in a maker’s dream. It’s like fairyland. We could be here for hours while only a moment passes in the world we left.”

  “I see.”

  And she did. Nothing was free. She’d gained the knowledge of a new level of enchantment, but she’d only gained it when she might no longer be able to use it beyond this one last time.

  “Have I always been able to do this?” she asked. “Could I have come here whenever I wanted to?”

  “Ever since you became a maker.”

  “But why didn’t I know?”

  “I thought you did.”

  Isabelle gave him a blank look. “But the only other time I’ve ever done it was almost twenty years ago.”

  “Are you so sure about that?”

  “Of course I’m sure. I’d know, don’t you think?”

  John shrugged. “So you never dream?”

  “Well, of course I dream. It’s just ...”

  Her voice trailed off. Yes, she dreamed. Very vivid dreams, often peopled with the numena she’d brought across from the before. Horrors courtesy of Rushkin for a while, but then later, other, mundane dreams in which she simply interacted with her numena. She just hadn’t been aware of a difference between what she now realized had been maker’s dreams and ordinary ones. And they’d all stopped, after the fire. After she shut herself off from the alchemy that Rushkin had taught her and refused to bring any more numena across.

  “Why did I never dream of you again?” she asked. “Why did I never bring you back into one of those dreams?”

  “I can’t answer that for you,” John said.

  Isabelle nodded slowly. He couldn’t but she could.

  “It’s because I shut you out of my life,” she said. “I wanted you back, but I wanted you on my own terms and I guess some part of me realized that you can’t do that. I would have had to take you as you are, or not at all.”

  “But you didn’t forget me entirely,” John said. “Sometimes a maker’s dreams are prescient, or at least the patterns in them reflect on life and repeat toward certain meanings.” He held up the bracelet of woven cloth that was on his wrist. “Like colored cloth.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s one of the pattern that keeps repeating in your life: the bright clothes that Kathy always wore, Paddyjack’s ribbons from which you made these bracelets, the Maypole dance that was never consummated because of the fire. Even the abstract designs on your canvases that replaced your realistic paintings.”

  “But what does the pattern mean?” Isabelle asked.

  “I can’t answer that for you either, but I do know that if you hadn’t made me this bracelet, you wouldn’t have been able to trust who I was after you’d met Bitterweed. We might never have come here, to this moment. We might never have had the chance to finally put an end to the shadow that’s hung over us for most of our lives.”

  “You’re losing me again,” Isabelle said, but it wasn’t true. She knew exactly what he meant. She simply couldn’t face it.

  “We have to go to his studio,” John said. “Now. Tonight. Here, in this dream. We might never get another chance.”

  “But—”

  “He’s not protected from me here, Isabelle. He told me as much himself.” He bowed his head, staring at the floor. “I carry as much guilt around with me as you do. I could have finished him that night in the snow, but I was too hurt and too full of pride. I chose to turn my back on you. It was your fight, I told myself, not mine, and because of that decision hundreds have died. I won’t let that happen again.”

  Isabelle shook her head. “It wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have known things would turn out the way they did.”

  “But I did know. I had only to look at Rushkin, to know the honors he was capable of committing.”

  “But to just kill a person in cold blood ..”

  John lifted his head to look at her. “He’s not a person. He’s a monster.”

  “I still couldn’t do it,” Isabelle said.

  “I’m not asking you to. I’m the warrior, the hunter. All I’m asking you to do is to accompany me to his studio. There, where his connection to you and this dreaming is strongest, you can call him across and he’ll have no choice but to come.”

  “Think of the dead,” John said. “Think of all those who might yet die at his hand. If you die, all he has to do is find another artist with the potential to be a maker. Your kind are rare, I’ll grant you that, but not so rare that he won’t be able to track down another—Barb, for one.”

  Think of the dead, Isabelle thought. She turned to look at the door of her bedroom. Kathy was alive somewhere beyond it—either in the living room or in her own bedroom. Sleeping, probably, at this time of night. But maybe still awake, propped up in her bed with the inevitable book or notepad on her lap.

  If she could only see her one last time ...

  “All right,” Isabelle said. “I’ll go with you to the studio and I’ll try to call him to us. But first I’ve got to do one thing.”

  John put his hand on her arm as she started to rise. “This is dreamtime,” he said. “Not the past. Not the reality you remember of how things should be on this night, at this time. You might not find what you’re looking for.”

  “I still have to try,” Isabelle said. “I have to see her. Even if she’s just sleeping. All I want to do is look at her and see her being alive again.”

  John let his hand drop. “I’ll wait for you here,” he said.

  Isabelle stood up. Crossing the bedroom, she paused with her hand on the doorknob.

  “I won’t be long,” she said.

  But in the end, John had to go looking for her.

  XV

  As she waited for Rolanda’s friends to arrive, Rosalind wandered aimlessly through the ground-floor rooms of the Newford Children’s Foundation. On Rolanda’s desk she came upon a small oil painting that she recognized as Cosette’s work. It was crudely rendered—Cosette always seemed to be in such a hurry to get the image down—but powerful all the same. As powerful in its own way as any of Isabelle’s work.

  Rosalind laid down her ever-present book to pick up the painting and study it more closely. She remembered what Cosette had told her about Isabelle. She said we’ve been real all along.

  Just as John had always insisted.

  That she made us real with the love she put into bringing us across.

  Could it be true? Had they spent all these years year
ning to be what they could never be instead of embracing what they were?

  That we’ll never have red crows or dreams, because all we get is the real we have now.

  And was that such a terrible thing? What were blood and dreams anyway but another way of describing aspirations and mortality? She and the others were certainly mortal and they were filled with hopes and ambitions. They had talent. Bajel’s poetry didn’t lack heart. Nor did the sculptures of found objects that Paddyjack constructed high in the trees and barn rafters back on Wren Island. Cosette’s art was rushed, but not without emotive potency.

  And who could truly say that one of them couldn’t become a maker? When one considered how rare the potential for the gift was in human beings, perhaps it wasn’t so odd that none of them had the talent.

  None of them so far. That, she realized, would not make Cosette particularly happy, but it was probably closer to the truth than Cosette’s belief that all it required were dreams and a red crow beating its wings in one’s chest.

  Rosalind set the painting back where she’d found it and retrieved her book. Holding it against her chest, she walked toward the front of the building once more, more troubled than she’d care to let on—even to herself. When she reached the door, she looked out at the city street through the small leaded panes. She’d never liked the city the way that Cosette and John did, didn’t even care to be enclosed by the walls of a building. Give her the solace of the island any day, the wind in her hair and the open sky above.

  Needing to breathe, if only the noisy pollution of a city night, she stepped out onto the porch. Relief from the claustrophobia she’d been feeling was immediate. Relief from the troubling thoughts that had risen was not nearly so easy to achieve.

  Have we really wasted so much of our lives? she couldn’t help but wonder. Could we not at least have tried to live for the moment the way Paddyjack does?

  Out of his company for no more than a few hours and already she missed the little treeskin. She looked across the street, trying to imagine where he was, which building housed his gateway painting, how he was faring in his own guard duty. He’d be unhappy, too, but not for entirely the same reasons.

  His needs were simpler. He’d miss the island and he’d be lonely. And frightened.

  He had every right to be frightened. Her own fear was constant, for all that she’d hidden it so successfully from Cosette and her new friend Rolanda. What she wouldn’t give to have John here with her tonight. Nothing frightened him. Not the fact that they might not be real, not Rushkin or his creatures, nothing. Or was he merely an even better actor than she?

  Rosalind sighed. She turned to go back inside, pausing when she heard a scuffle of footsteps on the sidewalk. Her heart leapt for one moment when the man first stepped into the light. She thought she’d called John to her, simply by thinking of him. But then she saw his companion, recognized her from Cosette’s description, and realized who it was that she faced. Rushkin’s creatures had come.

  Panic reared up in her. She tried to keep her features expressionless, but she couldn’t hide the shock she felt when she looked at John’s doppelganger, this Bitterweed. Prepared though she’d been, it was too much of a jolt to see him in the flesh. The resemblance was beyond uncanny. It was perfect.

  She managed to recover enough before they reached the porch to school her features to regain their impassivity.

  “That’s far enough,” she said.

  They paused there on the walk to look at her. The girl, Scara, regarded her with a feral intensity, but Bitterweed only shook his head, as though regretting what must come.

  “Don’t make this harder on yourself than it already is,” he told her. “What?” she asked. “Dying? It doesn’t seem to me that there’s much to discuss when death is the only option you offer me.”

  “You still have a choice,” Bitterweed told her. “You can die hard or easy.”

  “That’s not worth a reply.”

  “Christ,” his companion said. “Can we cut the crap?”

  She started to move forward, but Bitterweed caught her arm and held her back.

  “Now, Scara,” he said, reproachfully. “We can at least be polite about this.”

  He looked to Rosalind and gave her a shrug as if to say, What can you do? He was trying to be charming, she realized, the way John might have, but he couldn’t pull it off the way John would have. The gesture only made him seem more pathetic to her.

  “At least she’s honest,” she told the doppelganger.

  “Who gives a shit what you think?” Scara said. She turned to Bitterweed. “What’re you screwing around for? Look at her. She’s all by herself and she’s not about to stop us.”

  It was hard to be brave, Rosalind understood then. She’d often felt impatient with Isabelle for not standing up to Rushkin, but confronted now with the reality of her own terror, she saw how courage could so easily slip away, leaving you with nothing to hold but your fear.

  “The only thing that really pisses me off,” Scara went on as though Rosalind weren’t even there, “is how that black bitch took off and left her on her own. I wanted a piece of her.”

  “Why dontcha try taking a piece outta one of us, homegirl?” a new voice asked.

  Neither Rosalind nor Rushkin’s creatures had heard the newcomers arrive. Rosalind felt a surge of hope that was quickly dashed as a half-dozen figures moved into the light. These were supposed to be her protectors? she thought. What had Rolanda been thinking of? The oldest couldn’t have been more than fifteen. But then she realized that while they might look like children, they were as feral in their own way as Bitterweed’s young companion.

  They were dressed simply in T-shirts and hooded sweatshirts, baggy shorts and hightops. Their faces ranged from cherubic to acne-scarred. They could have stepped directly from a schoolyard recess. It was the weapons and the casual way they carried them that made Rosalind look twice. Two carried handguns that appeared massive in their small hands. One had a baseball bat with the points of a dozen long nails sticking out along its head. Two others had chains. The only one that appeared unarmed was in the front. He looked about thirteen and had an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth that he lit after snapping a flame off a match with his thumbnail.

  “See,” he said after he exhaled a drag, “the thing is, this little piece of nowhere’s part of our turf tonight an’ it’d give me a real come if a couple of homes like you’d decide you wanted to take it from us.” He looked slowly from Bitterweed to Scara. “Whaddaya say, you wanna start some shit with us?”

  XVI

  It wasn’t the bedroom in the apartment on Waterhouse Street that Isabelle found when she opened the door to Kathy’s room, but the bedroom on Gracie Street in which Kathy had died. Kathy lay stretched across the bed, half-covered by a comforter, but she wasn’t sleeping.

  She should have listened to John, Isabelle realized, and spared herself this. But now it was too late.

  Now all she could do was make her numbed way through the doorway and step into another piece of the past.

  Everything was the same as it had been when Isabelle had entered this same bedroom on that awful morning all those years ago. The pill bottles scattered on the hooked rug beside the bed. Kathy stretched out, her face gone an awful blue, lying there so still, not moving, not moving at all when Isabelle had called out her name, not moving when Isabelle had tried to shake the stiff body that had once housed her best friend’s soul.

  And now Kathy was dead again.

  Isabelle got as far as the end of the bed before she slowly sank down to the floor, arms cradled on the mattress, face pressed into the crook of one elbow. She had no idea how long she knelt there, the tears streaming down her cheeks and into the fabric of her shirtsleeve. She didn’t call Kathy’s name as she had on that other morning. She didn’t go around to the side of the bed and touch the stiff shoulder.

  She heard John enter, but she couldn’t turn around to look at him. She couldn’t even lift her hea
d.

  John remained in the doorway. He didn’t speak. He was so silent at first that she couldn’t even hear him breathe. There was only the sound of the floorboards creaking as he occasionally shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

  Finally Isabelle raised her head. She looked down the length of the bed, but the corpse’s shoulders, covered by the comforter, blocked her view. She couldn’t see Kathy’s face from here, but she remembered all too well the emptiness in it, the vitality drained from those solemn grey eyes and once mobile features, the blue of her skin. Isabelle wiped her eyes on a dry part of her sleeve and cleared her throat.

  “Rushkin said he could bring her back,” she said after a moment. “I know. I heard him tell you.”

  “Could he really do it?”

  When John didn’t reply, Isabelle slowly turned to look at him. “It’s possible,” John finally said.

  Isabelle nodded. Of course. The deeper she got into all of this the borders between what was possible and what wasn’t seemed to stretch further and further apart.

  “As a numena,” she said, filling in what she thought John wasn’t telling her. “As someone that looks like her, but isn’t her.”

  John shook his head. “Remember what I told you about this place. Things that happen here reflect back into the world we’ve left behind. Rushkin might well know a way to revive her here and then give her safe passage back. There’s more that we don’t know about than we do.”

  “But he’s not God.”

  “No,” John agreed. “He’s a far cry from God.” He paused, then added, “Things are true here—that’s something you can’t forget. Whether it’s an echo of the world we’ve temporarily left behind that’s strayed here with us, or something we do that gets reflected back. It’s all true.”

  Isabelle pushed herself up from the mattress and stood. She didn’t look at the body on the bed behind her, but faced John instead.

  “I think I might hate Rushkin for that offer of his even more than for everything he’s done to me or the others.”