The Very Best of Charles De Lint

by Charles de Lint

  I even have a boyfriend in that place, which probably tells you more about my ongoing social status than it does my state of mind.

  Rationally, I know it’s just a continuation of that serial dream. And I’d let it go at that, except it feels so damn real. Every morning when I wake up from the latest installment, my head’s filled with memories of what I’ve done that seem as real as anything I do during the day—sometimes more so.

  But I’m getting off on a tangent. I started off meaning to just introduce myself, and here I am, giving you my life story. What I really wanted to tell you about was Mr. Truepenny.

  The thing you have to understand is that I made him up. He was like one of those invisible childhood friends, except I deliberately created him. We weren’t exactly well-off when I was growing up. When my mother left us, I ended up being one of those latchkey kids. We didn’t live in the best part of town; Upper Foxville is a rough part of the city and it could be a scary place for a little girl who loved art and books and got teased for that love by the other neighbourhood kids who couldn’t even be bothered to learn how to read. When I got home from school, I went straight in and locked the door.

  I’d get supper ready for my dad, but there were always a couple of hours to kill in between my arriving home and when he finished work—longer if he had to work late. We didn’t have a TV, so I read a lot, but we couldn’t afford to buy books. On Saturday mornings, we’d go to the library and I’d take out my limit—five books—which I’d finish by Tuesday, even if I tried to stretch them out.

  To fill the rest of the time, I’d draw on shopping bags or the pads of paper that Dad brought me home from work, but that never seemed to occupy enough hours. So one day I made up Mr. Truepenny.

  I’d daydream about going to his shop. It was the most perfect place that I could imagine: all dark wood and leaded glass, thick carpets and club chairs with carved wooden-based reading lamps strategically placed throughout. The shelves were filled with leather-bound books and folios, and there was a small art gallery in the back.

  The special thing about Mr. Truepenny’s shop was that all its contents only existed within its walls. Shakespeare’s The Storm of Winter. The Chapman’s Tale by Chaucer. The Blissful Stream by William Morris. Steinbeck’s companion collection to The Long Valley, Salinas. North Country Stoic by Emily Brontë.

  None of these books existed, of course, but being the dreamy sort of kid that I was, not only could I daydream of visiting Mr. Truepenny’s shop, but I could actually read these unwritten stories. The gallery in the back of the shop was much the same. There hung works by the masters that saw the light of day only in my imagination. Van Goghs and Monets and Da Vincis. Rossettis and Homers and Cezannes.

  Mr. Truepenny himself was a wonderfully eccentric individual who never once chased me out for being unable to make a purchase. He had a Don Quixote air about him, a sense that he was forever tilting at windmills. He was tall and thin with a thatch of mouse-brown hair and round spectacles, a rumpled tweed suit and a huge briar pipe that he continually fussed with but never actually lit. He always greeted me with genuine affection and seemed disappointed when it was time for me to go.

  My imagination was so vivid that my daydream visits to his shop were as real to me as when my dad took me to the library or the Newford Gallery of Fine Art. But it didn’t last. I grew up, went to Butler University on student loans and the money from far too many menial jobs—“got a life,” as the old saying goes. I made friends, I was so busy, there was no time, no need to visit the shop anymore. Eventually I simply forgot all about it.

  Until I met Janice Petrie.

  Wendy and I were in the Market after a late night at her place the previous evening. I was on my way home, but we’d decided to shop for groceries together before I left. Trying to make up my mind between green beans and a head of broccoli, my gaze lifted above the vegetable stand and met that of a little girl standing nearby with her parents. Her eyes widened with recognition though I’d never seen her before.

  “You’re the woman!” she cried. “You’re the woman who’s evicting Mr. Truepenny. I think it’s a horrible thing to do. You’re a horrible woman!”

  And then she started to cry. Her mother shushed her and apologized to me for the outburst before bustling the little girl away.

  “What was all that about, Sophie?” Wendy asked me.

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  But of course I did. I was just so astonished by the encounter that I didn’t know what to say. I changed the subject and that was the end of it until I got home. I dug out an old cardboard box from the back of my hall closet and rooted about in it until I came up with a folder of drawings I’d done when I still lived with my dad. Near the back I found the ones I was looking for.

  They were studies of Mr. Truepenny and his amazing shop.

  God, I thought, looking at these awkward drawings, pencil on brown grocery bag paper, ballpoint on foolscap. The things we forget.

  I took them out onto my balcony and lay down on the old sofa, studying them, one by one. There was Mr. Truepenny, writing something in his big leather-bound ledger. Here was another of him, holding his cat Dodger, the two of them looking out the leaded glass windows of the shop. There was a view of the main aisle of the shop, leading down to the gallery, the perspective slightly askew, but not half bad considering I was no older when I did them than was the little girl in the Market today.

  How could she have known? I found myself thinking. Mr. Truepenny and his shop was something I’d made up. I couldn’t remember ever telling anyone else about it—not even Jilly. And what did she mean about my evicting him from the shop?

  I could think of no rational response. After a while, I just set the drawings aside and tried to forget about it. Exhaustion from the late night before soon had me nodding off and I fell asleep only to find myself, not in my boyfriend’s faerie dream world, but on the streets of Mabon, the made-up city in which I’d put Mr. Truepenny’s Book Emporium and Gallery.

  * * *

  I’m half a block from the shop. The area’s changed. The once-neat cobblestones are thick with grime. Refuse lies everywhere. Most of the storefronts are boarded up, their walls festooned with graffiti. When I reach Mr. Truepenny’s shop, I see a sign in the window that reads, “Closing soon due to lease expiration.”

  Half-dreading what I’ll find, I open the door and hear the familiar little bell tinkle as I step inside. The shop’s dusty and dim, and much smaller than I remember it. The shelves are almost bare. The door leading to the gallery is shut and has a “Closed” sign tacked onto it.

  “Ah, Miss Etoile. It’s been so very long.”

  I turn to find Mr. Truepenny at his usual station behind the front counter. He’s smaller than I remember as well and looks a little shabby now. Hair thinning, tweed suit threadbare and more shapeless than ever.

  “What…what’s happened to the shop?” I ask.

  I’ve forgotten that I’m asleep on the sofa out on my balcony. All I know is this awful feeling I have inside as I look at what’s become of my old childhood haunt.

  “Well, times change,” he says. “The world moves on.”

  “This—is this my doing?”

  His eyebrows rise quizzically.

  “I met this little girl and she said I was evicting you.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Mr. Truepenny says and I can see in his sad eyes that it’s true. “You’ve no more need for me or my wares, so it’s only fair that you let us fade.”

  “But you…that is…well, you’re not real.”

  I feel weird saying this because while I remember now that I’m dreaming, this place is like one of my faerie dreams that feels as real as the waking world.

  “That’s not strictly true,” he tells me. “You did conceive of the city and this shop, but we were drawn to fit the blueprint of your plan from…elsewhere.”

  “What elsewhere?”

  He frowns, brow furrowing as he thinks.

&
nbsp; “I’m not really sure myself,” he tells me.

  “You’re saying I didn’t make you up, I just drew you here from somewhere else?”

  He nods.

  “And now you have to go back?”

  “So it would seem.”

  “And this little girl—how can she know about you?”

  “Once a reputable establishment is open for business, it really can’t deny any customer access, regardless of their age or station in life.”

  “She’s visiting my daydream?” I ask. This is too much to accept, even for a dream.

  Mr. Truepenny shakes his head. “You brought this world into being through your single-minded desire, but now it has a life of its own.”

  “Until I forgot about it.”

  “You had a very strong will,” he says. “You made us so real that we’ve been able to hang on for decades. But now we really have to go.”

  There’s a very twisty sort of logic involved here, I can see. It doesn’t make sense by way of the waking world’s logic, but I think there are different rules in a dreamscape. After all, my faerie boyfriend can turn into a crow.

  “Do you have more customers than that little girl?” I ask.

  “Oh yes. Or at least, we did.” He waves a hand to encompass the shop. “Not much stock left, I’m afraid. That was the first to go.”

  “Why doesn’t their desire keep things running?”

  “Well, they don’t have faerie blood, now do they? They can visit, but they haven’t the magic to bring us across or keep us here.”

  It figures. I think. We’re back to that faerie blood thing again. Jilly would love this.

  I’m about to ask him to explain it all a little more clearly when I get this odd jangling sound in my ears and wake up back on the sofa. My doorbell’s ringing. I go inside the apartment to accept what turns out to be a FedEx package.

  “Can dreams be real?” I ask the courier. “Can we invent something in a dream and have it turn out to be a real place?”

  “Beats me, lady,” he replies, never blinking an eye. “Just sign here.”

  I guess he gets all kinds.

  * * *

  So now I visit Mr. Truepenny’s shop on a regular basis again. The area’s vastly improved. There’s a café nearby where Jeck—that’s my boyfriend that I’ve been telling you about—and I go for tea after we’ve browsed through Mr. Truepenny’s latest wares. Jeck likes this part of Mabon so much that he’s now got an apartment on the same street as the shop. I think I might set up a studio nearby.

  I’ve even run into Janice—the little girl who brought me back here in the first place. She’s forgiven me, of course, now that she knows it was all a misunderstanding, and lets me buy her an ice cream from the soda fountain sometimes before she goes home.

  I’m very accepting of it all—you get that way after a while. The thing that worries me now is, what happens to Mabon when I die? Will the city get run down again and eventually disappear? And what about its residents? There’s all these people here; they’ve got family, friends, lives. I get the feeling it wouldn’t be the same for them if they have to go back to that elsewhere place Mr. Truepenny was so vague about.

  So that’s the reason I’ve written all this down and had it printed up into a little folio by one of Mr. Truepenny’s friends in the waking world. I’m hoping somebody out there’s like me. Someone’s got enough faerie blood to not only visit, but keep the place going. Naturally, not just anyone will do. It has to be the right sort of person, a book-lover, a lover of old places and tradition, as well as the new.

  If you think you’re the person for the position, please send a resumé to me care of Mr. Truepenny’s Book Emporium and Gallery, Mabon. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

  In the House of My Enemy

  We have not inherited the earth from our fathers,

  we are borrowing it from our children.

  —Native American saying

  1

  The past scampers like an alleycat through the present, leaving the paw prints of memories scattered helter-skelter—here ink is smeared on a page, there lies an old photograph with a chewed corner, elsewhere still, a nest has been made of old newspapers, the headlines running one into the other to make strange declarations. There is no order to what we recall, the wheel of time follows no straight line as it turns in our heads. In the dark attics of our minds, all times mingle, sometimes literally.

  I get so confused. I’ve been so many people; some I didn’t like at all. I wonder that anyone could. Victim, hooker, junkie, liar, thief. But without them, I wouldn’t be who I am today. I’m no one special, but I like who I am, lost childhood and all.

  Did I have to be all those people to become the person I am today? Are they still living inside me, hiding in some dark corner of my mind, waiting for me to slip and stumble and fall and give them life again?

  I tell myself not to remember, but that’s wrong, too. Not remembering makes them stronger.

  2

  The morning sun came in through the window of Jilly’s loft, playing across the features of her guest. The girl was still asleep on the Murphy bed, sheets all tangled around her skinny limbs, pulled tight and smooth over the rounded swell of her abdomen. Sleep had gentled her features. Her hair clouded the pillow around her head. The soft morning sunlight gave her a Madonna quality, a nimbus of Botticelli purity that the harsher light of the later day would steal away once she woke.

  She was fifteen years old. And eight months pregnant.

  Jilly sat in the windowseat, feet propped up on the sill, sketchpad on her lap. She caught the scene in charcoal, smudging the lines with the pad of her middle finger to soften them. On the fire escape outside, a stray cat climbed up the last few metal steps until it was level with where she was sitting and gave a plaintive meow.

  Jilly had been expecting the black and white tabby. She reached under her knees and picked up a small plastic margarine container filled with dried kibbles which she set down on the fire escape in front of the cat. As the tabby contentedly crunched its breakfast, Jilly returned to her portrait.

  “My name’s Annie,” her guest had told her last night when she stopped Jilly on Yoors Street just a few blocks south of the loft. “Could you spare some change? I really need to get some decent food. It’s not so much for me…”

  She put her hand on the swell of her stomach as she spoke. Jilly had looked at her, taking in the stringy hair, the ragged clothes, the unhealthy colour of her complexion, the too-thin body that seemed barely capable of sustaining the girl herself, little say nourishing the child she carried.

  “Are you all on your own?” Jilly asked.

  The girl nodded.

  Jilly put her arm around the girl’s shoulder and steered her back to the loft. She let her take a shower while she cooked a meal, gave her a clean smock to wear, and tried not to be patronizing while she did it all.

  The girl had lost enough dignity as it was and Jilly knew that dignity was almost as hard to recover as innocence. She knew all too well.

  3

  Stolen Childhood, by Sophie Etoile. Copperplate engraving. Five Coyotes Singing Studio, Newford, 1988.

  A child in a ragged dress stands in front of a ramshackle farmhouse. In one hand she holds a doll—a stick with a ball stuck in one end and a skirt on the other. She wears a lost expression, holding the doll as though she doesn’t quite know what to do with it.

  A shadowed figure stands behind the screen door, watching her.

  * * *

  I guess I was around three years old when my oldest brother started molesting me. That’d make him eleven. He used to touch me down between my legs while my parents were out drinking or sobering up down in the kitchen. I tried to fight him off, but I didn’t really know that what he was doing was wrong—even when he started to put his cock inside me.

  I was eight when my mother walked in on one of his rapes and you know what she did? She walked right out again until my brother was finished and
we both had our clothes on again. She waited until he’d left the room, then she came back in and started screaming at me.

  “You little slut! Why are you doing this to your own brother?”

  Like it was my fault. Like I wanted him to rape me. Like the three-year-old I was when he started molesting me had any idea about what he was doing. I think my other brothers knew what was going on all along, but they never said anything about it—they didn’t want to break that macho code-of-honour bullshit. My little sister was just born, too young to know anything. When my dad found out about it, he beat the crap out of my brother, but in some ways it just got worse after that.

  My brother didn’t molest me anymore, but he’d glare at me all the time, like he was going to pay me back for the beating he got soon as he got a chance. My mother and my other brothers, every time I’d come into a room, they’d all just stop talking and look at me like I was some kind of bug.

  I think at first my dad wanted to do something to help me, but in the end he really wasn’t any better than my mother. I could see it in his eyes: he blamed me for it, too. He kept me at a distance, never came close to me anymore, never let me feel like I was normal.

  He’s the one who had me see a psychiatrist. I’d have to go and sit in his office all alone, just a little kid in this big leather chair. The psychiatrist would lean across his desk, all smiles and smarmy understanding, and try to get me to talk, but I never told him a thing. I didn’t trust him. I’d already learned that I couldn’t trust men. Couldn’t trust women either, thanks to my mother. Her idea of working things out was to send me to confession, like the same God who let my brother rape me was now going to make everything okay so long as I owned up to seducing him in the first place.