The Valley of Thunder

by Charles de Lint

  Not even if you were offered your heart's desire?

  God help him—was this madness?

  He had listened to George and his friends discuss odd philosophies before, one of which was that this world which they all inhabited was but a dream. When the dreamer woke, all would vanish. Foolishness, of course—mere intellectual diversion. For none of them— neither those arguing for or against the conceit—truly believed it.

  But what if this world was a dream?

  Your heart's desire.

  Impossible. And yet. had his time in the Dungeon seemed less real?

  He pressed his forehead against the glass, closing his eyes. The glass was cool against his skin. Soothing. The scent of cloves was fading, the sharp taste on his tongue almost a memory now.

  "Clive?"

  He opened his eyes at the sound of Annabella's voice. Outside he could see the street once more, the gaslights reflected in wet pools on the cobblestones, the fight fog haloing each lamp post.

  "Clive?"

  He turned to see Annabella standing near the bath, her cheeks still ruddy and glowing. She was wrapped in a towel, and wore nothing else except for her hair combs.

  "Clive, tell me." she said. "What's wrong?"

  He ached to look at her, hated to lie.

  "Nothing."

  "If it's something I've done..."

  He shook his head emphatically. "Never."

  She came to him and laid her hands on his shoulders. Looking down at her, Clive could only wonder at how the most splendid creature on God's own Earth could bear such love for him. What had he ever done to deserve her?

  "You can't hide it from me," Annabella said. "I know you're troubled."

  Clive led her to the bed and sat her down.

  I'm troubled by dreams." he wanted to say as he sat down beside her. "Dreams so real that they leave me questioning which is more real—this life, or the dreams."

  Or. "I fear I'm going mad."

  But instead of speaking, he took her in his arms and kissed her. Gently, gently. They lay back on the bed, and for a time, Clive could forget his fears and worries.

  Their lovemaking was slow and languorous. It swallowed Clive's sense of desperation, balmed his troubled heart. Afterward, while Annabella slept, he leaned up on an elbow and looked at her, marveling at the slight swell of her belly. He laid his hand upon it, caressing the smooth skin, imagining he could feel their daughter move below the skin, for all that it was too early for such movement.

  Did Annabella know? he wondered. Or was it still too soon for her?

  Then the realization came to him that the only reason he thought her pregnant was because he'd learned of it from the lips of his descendant.

  In the impossible Dungeon.

  Madness.

  "I would never knowingly desert you." he told his sleeping lover. "I would always return. If I didn't, it would not be through want of any effort on my part."

  Annabella stirred as he spoke, but didn't wake. Sighing, Clive rose from the bed.

  The wet night beyond the room called to him. He stood naked at the window for a long time, staring out at the darkness, then dressed. He closed the door to Annabella's rooms softly behind him and went out into the night streets, searching. But for what, he couldn't have told.

  Clive wore a cloak against the damp chill that rode the night air, but it crept over him all the same. His boot steps echoed wetly on the cobblestones. He'd forgone a hat, so his hair was plastered, lank and dripping, against his scalp. But he paid no attention to physical discomfort. His mind was far away—sifting through memories of an impossible place that it seemed, by now, he knew better than he Knew London. That he had many months' worth of these memories only bewildered him the more.

  At first he had the streets to himself, but the farther he walked from Plantagenet Court, the rougher his surroundings became. Now there were doxies in the alleyways—weary women, bullied on by their fancy men to earn a last few shillings before they called it a night. Disreputable men stood leaning against the sides of buildings, watching him pass, their gazes measuring him. Beggars accosted him. Street urchins tugged at his cloak.

  He ignored them all.

  He ignored them with a finality that made even the cutpurses consider other options and let him pass by unmolested.

  It wasn't so much the set of his shoulders, nor the military mark to his step. It was his eyes, which regarded them without seeing them. Not because they were below his station, and therefore unworthy of his attention, but because he seemed to them to walk in another world altogether, a world where even they would not tread.

  Physically, he walked the London streets, but his mind walked in Bedlam.

  Though the fine cut of his clothes tempted them sorely, even the criminals of Seven Dials, Spitalfields, and the like were wary of dealing with a madman. There were easier ways to turn a shilling. So they let him pass unmolested, watching him from the peekholes of their labyrinthine maze of secret apertures, manholes, tunnels, concealed passages, and hidden exits. A tall, well-dressed though hatless gem, wandering their dangerous streets without care, muttering to himself, his own gaze focused on that other world that only Bedlamites could see.

  But one inmate of the criminal slums wasn't leery of him. She staggered from an alleyway to accost him under the dim Tight of a gas lamp. Her hair was wet and tangled, her cheap dress clinging to her body like a second skin. She gazed at him blearily, putting a hand against his chest to stop him from running her down. The impact of his weight against her arm made her weave dizzily before she caught her balance.

  It took Clive a moment to escape the trap of his reveries and focus upon her. When he looked into her grimed features, he wasn't surprised at their familiarity.

  She could have been Annabella.

  Annabella, if fate had treated her worse than it had, reducing her to eking out a wretched existence on the streets, as this poor moll must. Her unsteadiness was due to cither alcohol or opium. Plying her trade in the alleyways gave her her dirty skin and clothes.

  She could have been Annabella.

  Or their descendant. Annabelle.

  Except Annabelle was only a part of the delusion he carried about inside himself. She wasn't real, any more than the Dungeon was.

  "You look like a sporting gent," the prostitute said, slurring her words. "What say we have a bit of fun?"

  She began to hike up her skirt as she spoke, exposing thighs as grimed as her hands and face.

  "Get away from me," Clive told her.

  But there was no force behind his words. It wasn't that he desired her. It was only the resemblance—that terribly uncanny resemblance.

  "Now, don't be talking like that, sport," she said. "You don't want to send Annie back to her bully-boy empty-handed, now, do you? Wouldn't be right."

  She let the hem of her skirt fall, but wet as it was, it still rode high on her thigh. Her hand lifted unsteadily to the neckline of her dress, which she pulled away from her shoulder to reveal a large, discolored bruise.

  "Jack gets mean, y'see, sport. Hurts me, he does, when I don't bring home enough."

  "I don't want—"

  "You all want it," the woman said, cutting him off. "Or why'd you be walking these streets?"

  She caught his arm and began to pull him toward the mouth of the alleyway. Clive shook her hand free.

  "You say your name's Annie?" he asked.

  "Didn't I say it was?"

  "Annabella Leighton, I suppose?-

  She blinked, momentarily confused, then grinned. "I'll be anybody you like, sport."

  Again she reached for him.

  "Get away," Clive said.

  This time he put a hand to her shoulder and gave her a push. She staggered back, losing her balance until she was brought up against a wall. The woman's eyes went hard.

  "You don't want to be treating me rough, sport."

  "You disgust me," Clive told her.

  Lord help him. He knew what was what now.
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  The Dungeon had been no dream.

  Your heart's desire.

  This was the dream. As sweet as he wished, with Annabella and a promotion, or as foul as seeing his lover depicted as some wretched bawdy woman, stooped to making her living as a prostitute.

  Had he stayed in Annabella's rooms, would the dream have maintained itself? Was it by faring abroad, by questioning its validity, that it was unraveling?

  What matter when it was all a lie? Better the torment of the Dungeon—better reality, no matter how painful—than to live his life sedated like some opium smoker, cut adrift from the world as it was by his dreams.

  He sent his gaze skyward. "Do you hear me? She disgusts me! I see through your lies!"

  The woman shook her head. "You're not all there, are you, sport?"

  "Go away."

  Clive wouldn't even look at her. He was waiting for the Dungeonmasters to reveal themselves. For the dream to end. For a gateway to open and send him plunging down to some new level, some new torment.

  The woman put fingers to her lips and whistled shrilly.

  "Deny me a fair wage, will you?" she said as Clive looked to her once more.

  Before he could reply, there was more movement in the alleyway. A broad-shouldered man stepped out into the arc of light cast by the gas lamp. His hair was slicked to his head, from both the drizzle and grease. He wore a tattered mockery of a gentleman's suit. His feet were bare.

  "Bit of trouble, is it?" he said softly.

  And this will be Jack, Clive thought. Her fancy man. The bully-boy who sent her out to peddle her body on the streets, while he collected the money afterward. And if she wasn't quick enough, or didn't earn enough, he'd beat her.

  "Denying my girl a living wage, are you?" the man went on.

  Clive shook his head.

  So this was the way it was to be. The dream played out; the game continued until it ceased to amuse the Dungeonmasters and they cleaned the board to begin anew with a new set of playing pieces. And new stakes.

  "You mistake me," Clive told the man as he took a step toward him.

  "No mistake, mate. There's money owed and you'll pay—one way or another."

  Clive shook his head. "I meant, you mistake me for a fool and a coward. I am neither."

  "Two quick steps brought him face to face with Jack. As the man started to raise his hands. Clive struck aside his defenses and hit him. The smack of his fist against the man's jaw sent pain shooting up his hand. But it was a satisfying pain.

  Perhaps he'd been manipulated into this situation, but he was damned if he'd fall victim to it.

  He let loose with a flurry of blows, and a moment later, the prostitute's Jack lay on the cobblestones, curled into a ball. Blood leaked from his mouth. He had at least one or two broken ribs.

  "Do you see what I meant about your mistake?" Clive asked him, conversationally.

  The woman threw herself at him then, but all it required was a shove to throw her off balance and she, too, fell to the cobblestones beside her fancy man.

  Again he turned his attention from them and gazed skyward.

  Well?" he cried. "What have you in store for me now?"

  There was no reply.

  What if he was wrong? he thought. What if there was no Dungeon—if this was the real world?

  What if he were mad?

  No. He knew it to be a lie.

  Your heart's desire.

  The dream offered him his heart's desire—there was no denying that—but it was still a lie.

  Forgive me, Annabella, he thought. But I can't live the lie.

  "Answer me!" he shouted.

  Ignored by him. the prostitute and her fancy man dragged themselves away, into the alleyway, where they were lost in the darkness.

  "Damn you!" Clive cried. "I will not live this lie!"

  And then it came to him—a wavering of his vision, the scent of cloves, the sharp taste of anise in his mouth.

  The London slum surrounding him tore apart, as paper might be shredded in a storm. The fog came roiling up at his feet, swallowing him. He lost the sense of cobblestones underfoot, and once again he floated in a dark limbo.

  His mind's eye filled with an image of Annabella as she had been when he'd left her, asleep in her bed—the perfection of her limbs, the angelic sweetness of her features, smooth and worry-free as she slept.

  Lost again.

  Stolen from him.

  "Damn you!" he cried once more. "Show yourselves to me!"

  Four

  There was no way for Clive to judge how long he floated in the darkness. It might only have been a few moments, it might have been as long as an hour, but without reference points—with only the darkness that surrounded him and the confused turmoil that ruled his mind by which to gauge the passage of time—he couldn't even begin to make an educated guess.

  It felt like forever.

  He had cursed his unseen tormentors long and hard, and with surprising innovation, but received no reply. He had attempted to propel himself through the darkness. but while he could move his limbs, the air was thick about him, and his hands and feet could find no purchase. Finally, voice still, floating in the dark like one dead, he lay passively and waited.

  And more time passed.

  Interminable minutes ticked away, each lengthened far beyond any reasonable proportion. Clive felt himself begin to drift away—away from his present situation, away from the womblike dark, out of himself.

  It was as though, freed of the sensory input normally provided by his body, his spirit was determined to go traveling of its own accord, like some witch's fetch riding the midnight winds when its mistress lies sleeping; as though his spirit had decided that, if its physical shell could not be shifted, it would simply leave the body behind.

  So Clive drifted past his anger and frustration, past memory, away into a quiet, hidden place where peacefulness wrapped him in a dark shawl of comfort and he could simply be. Slowly, sight returned, but whether what he viewed came from external stimuli or was drawn up from his own mind, he no longer cared.

  He was an invisible presence in an intricately laid out garden, flower beds and hedgerows all forming complex patterns about him. He floated like pollen, his vision encompassing a full three hundred and sixty degrees about him. As his sense of smell returned, the scents of the garden's blossoms arose about him, sweet and heady. A fruity taste came to him. The air was filled with quiet sounds—the soughing of a soft breeze and the murmur of insects.

  But all was not well in his haven. He could sense, just beyond the periphery of his vision, an invisible blight. Pain lay there, and desolation.

  The world he'd left behind.

  The message was plain.

  This acreage was his. Here he could remain in safety, freed from the madness that had taken charge of his life beyond this garden's borders. But if he strayed, if he allowed himself to explore beyond these confines, then it would all return once more.

  The pain.

  The madness.

  No need for that warning. Clive thought dreamily. He was done with struggling. Done with it all. With the bedlamite Dungeon. With the lies that infested it like some cancerous disease. He would remain here, where he could be content.

  Go back.

  The voice didn't really register at first.

  Clive. You must return.

  He could see in all directions at once in this garden of his, but could spy no source for that voice.

  It must be a ghost, he thought. Some errant presence, imperceptible to the eye.

  Leave me, he told it, shaping the words in his mind, for he was only an invisible presence himself in this place. I'm done with their games.

  You must go back, came the voice's monotonous response.

  Clive recognized it now. Looking at the maze of this garden, at its patterned network of flower beds and hedges, he wondered how it could have taken him so long to do so. It was the secret voice from his childhood.

  Are you a par
t of the conspiracy? Clive asked. Do its roots stretch so deeply into my past?

  The tone of his voice was conversational, as though he were only mildly curious.

  They have drugged you, the voice responded, while they decide your fate. How can you allow them to treat you in this manner?

  If he'd had a body, Clive would have shrugged.

  I have no choice, he replied. They do with me as they will—whether I protest or not.

  You are a Folliot, the voice said, and a Folliot never gives in. You've said as much yourself.

  But they change the rules each time I turn about, Clive said, beginning to show some interest in the argument, despite himself. They wield godlike powers, while all I can do is stumble through their damned Dungeon like some bug.

  Is it really so different in the world from which they stole you? the voice asked. Isn't it the measure of how a man struggles that marks his north?

  Yes, but—

  Shall this be your epitaph: "He tried hard, until the struggle grew too difficult, then he simply gave up"?

  Easily said, but—

  True worth is never easily gained.

  Who are you?

  There was a long pause, then once again, the voice repeated its initial command.

  Go back.

  The words cut through Clive's peace, echoing on and on inside him until his haven began to unravel. The garden surrounding him wavered in his sight. The hidden voice drowned out the soothing breeze and the hum of the insects. The scents of the blossoms became spoiled and the fruity taste lost its sweetness, grew tart, then bitter.

  Go back.

  To what? Clive demanded. To more of the same? To the endless spin of their damned games?

  No. Return instead to be the man that they cannot bow—the man who will not give in, no matter what they do to him. Return as a Folliot.

  And go mad.

  Madness is relative.

  It's madness or death—that's all that lies in wait for me in their damned Dungeon.

  You are too strong to fall prey to madness.

  And if I die? What use was it all then?

  At least you'll die a man.

  There was that, Clive realized. Put in such terms, it could not be denied. For he truly believed that it wasn't so much what a man accomplished, as what—in all good faith, and to the best of his abilities—he attempted.