The Very Best of Charles De Lint

by Charles de Lint

  She wished that she’d never said anything to Anna, because now she felt trapped into having to do it.

  “Hey, Kyle,” she said as she set the water and menu on the table in front of him.

  Okay, that was good. Inane. Innocuous. But at least she hadn’t choked yet.

  He smiled up at her. “Busy morning?” he asked, then he dropped his gaze.

  “No more than usual.”

  He put his hand on the closed menu and slid it across the tabletop in her direction.

  “I know what I want,” he said. “A grilled cheese and tomato sandwich and a side salad.”

  “Coming right up,” she told him, but then she continued to stand at his table.

  “Is…um…is everything okay?” he asked.

  Ruby took a breath, then blurted, “Do you want to go out for dinner or something sometime?”

  “I…”

  “It’s okay if you don’t want to, or you have a girlfriend—what am I saying? Of course you must have a girlfriend.”

  Oh, god. She was babbling.

  “I don’t have a girlfriend,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  “And I’d like that.”

  “You would? I mean, good. That’s good.”

  “How about tonight?” he asked.

  “Tonight would be great.” She picked up the menu. “I…you don’t think it was weird of me…to…you know?”

  He shook his head. “I’ve been trying to get my own nerve up for weeks.”

  “You were?”

  He nodded. “But I was sure you had a boyfriend.”

  She smiled. “I don’t. I’ll go put your order in.”

  She was sure she floated back to the counter.

  “Girl,” Anna said, “with that silly grin on your face I don’t even have to ask how it went.”

  “He wanted to ask me out. But he was too shy.”

  “Do you want me to come along—just to make sure you two remember you’re on a date and actually talk to each other?”

  Ruby stuck out her tongue and went over to the kitchen window to place Kyle’s order.

  * * *

  Joey thought he’d have a nap before Ruby came over. He tuned up his guitar so that it would be ready and leaned it against the side of the couch. Then he stretched out and put a hand over his eyes. He never had trouble either falling asleep, or waking when he wanted to, and it was no different this afternoon.

  * * *

  Old Man Crow had him a thought and so, when he crossed over to the otherworld this time, he flew on black wings. He didn’t go to the pine woods, but stayed in the city, right here in the otherworld where night had already fallen. Time didn’t always quite match up between one world to another.

  He perched on a lamppost and watched the night people go about their business. Cab drivers and clubbers, dealers and police patrols, people walking their dogs and the homeless setting up their cardboard shelters along McKennitt Street.

  But then, between one moment and the next, suddenly there were no more people and everything went silent. Still, still. Deep still. This wasn’t the quiet of late night, because it didn’t matter how late it got, the city never slept. There was always a hum in the air—electricity in the wires, a footstep, just the sound of people breathing.

  Tonight, there was nothing. There were still cars on the streets, but they were empty now, their doors ajar—just like the spirit bear had shown him last night. He’d been watching carefully, but he never saw the people abandon them.

  Then finally, he heard a sound. There came a soft pad of paws on the pavement, and looking up, he saw her, walking in between the stopped cars. The spirit bear, wearing her fur skin now and walking on all fours.

  He’d wondered if she would come, and if she did, what shape she’d wear to meet an old crow in his black feathers.

  He fluttered down from the lamppost and landed on one of the parked cars, talons gripping the open door frame. The spirit bear stopped beside him.

  “Look,” she said and pointed upward with her snout.

  Old Man Crow looked up and saw what she meant. The tops of the buildings weren’t there anymore. Ten, fifteen stories up, they just kind of faded away.

  “You need to stop it,” she told him.

  “Stop what? What’s going on here?”

  “Everything’s going away. The people, the city.”

  “No disrespect,” he said, “but since when do you care what the five-fingered beings do?”

  “I don’t. But you do.”

  “What’s causing it?” he asked.

  “Something up there,” she said, her snout pointing up again. “And something in you.”

  “In me?”

  “Go look.”

  She pointed a third time, up into the dark night sky that was swallowing the buildings.

  Something wasn’t right here—Old Man Crow knew that. He could feel it all the way down to the marrow of his old bones. And maybe the spirit bear wasn’t so far off the mark, because what he felt in his bones was the same dark that enveloped the sky.

  So he stretched those black wings of his and lifted from the car door. Up he flew, one story, three stories, and then he was in the darkness. It didn’t matter which way he looked, up, down, either side. It was all dark.

  His chest felt tight, and then something happened to his left wing. It went all numb and he couldn’t make it work anymore. He started falling. He tried to break the fall with his right wing, but all that did was put him in a spiral, going around and around, down and down….

  * * *

  Joey awoke to a light so bright it blinded him, so he closed his eyes again.

  “Joey?” a familiar voice asked.

  He couldn’t quite place it. The voice was out of context. He was out of context in whatever this place was.

  Place.

  He realized he was lying on something soft. It felt like a bed.

  “Joey?”

  He opened his eyes again, squinting so that the bright light wouldn’t hurt them. Ruby’s face filled his vision, then he couldn’t see again, but that was because she’d bent over him to give him a hug.

  “Thank god you’re back,” she said.

  “Back…”

  But then he remembered. Crossing over. The spirit bear. The darkness that had just swallowed him….

  “What…happened?” he asked.

  Ruby sat up and he could see where he was. In a hospital room. One of four beds. Ruby was on a chair beside his.

  “I came by your apartment for my lesson,” she said, “and found you just lying there, sprawled out on the floor in the middle of your living room, so I called 9-1-1.”

  “I was flying….”

  “Yeah, well, and then I guess you must have fallen down. I told them at the nurse’s station that I’m your granddaughter so that they’d let me sit with you.”

  “We are kin.”

  Ruby smiled. And he knew what she was thinking. Right, the old black man and the little punky white girl.

  “How do you figure that?” she asked.

  He lifted his arm and touched the sleeve that covered her tattoo.

  “Magpie and crow. We’re both corbae—I’ve told you that before.”

  She smiled again. “You’ve told me a lot of things, Joey.”

  “But you never believed any of them.”

  He could see that now and he felt like a fool. He’d thought they had a connection. That she could see their kinship. Why else would she have so much time for an old man? Why else would she want to learn the old songs? Now he realized she’d just been feeling sorry for him. It was charity, not kinship.

  The only thing he had left to hold on to was that her love of the music had been real. You couldn’t hide a thing like that.

  “I like your stories,” she said.

  “They’re not just stories.”

  “I know they’re not—for you. But it’s not the same for me.”

  “Did you ever wonder why I keep telling the
m to you?” he asked.

  “Because you like to.”

  He shook his head. “I’m trying to wake the cousin blood that’s sleeping deep inside you. It still remembers, even if you don’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why’d you get that magpie tattoo?”

  She looked surprised.

  “Humour me,” he said.

  “I guess I just wanted to.”

  “But why a magpie?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve always liked them.” She gave him a small smile, almost as though she was apologizing. “I feel connected to them. Like in that song you taught me.”

  She sang softly:

  Magpie, magpie in a piney tree

  singing, true love, won’t you come to me

  long black tail and snow white breast

  she’s the one I love the best

  Joey nodded. He sighed and closed his eyes.

  “Well, I did what I could,” he said.

  “Joey.”

  He kept his eyes closed. It happened, he thought. Sometimes it just didn’t take. Sometimes the old blood just wanted to stay hidden. It was nobody’s fault.

  “Don’t be like that.” He felt her hand on his arm. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m just so glad you’re going to be all right.”

  He looked at her again.

  “The doctor said he doesn’t think it was a stroke, but he’s still waiting for some tests to come back.”

  “Tests?”

  “You were unconscious for ages, Joey.”

  He nodded. The darkness had taken him away. He remembered that. His wing had gone numb and he’d gone spiraling down and down.

  “He thinks you might have just fainted—though at your age that’s serious enough, because they don’t know why you did.”

  “Cousins don’t get sick—not the way the five-fingered beings do.”

  She gave him a puzzled look, then nodded.

  “Right,” she said. “Except something happened to you. So they’re keeping you for observation.”

  “There’s nothing to observe. Just an old man with too many stories and not enough sense.”

  “Oh, Joey. I didn’t mean to—”

  “Let’s just talk about something else. Did you ask that boy out?”

  That was the perfect thing to distract her.

  “He said yes!” she told him. “We’re going to—oh, God.” She looked at her watch. “I’m supposed to meet him when he gets off work.”

  “Then go.”

  “No, I can’t just leave you.”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “I’m in a hospital. They know how to look after people here. You should go and then, if I’m still here tomorrow, you can tell me all about it.”

  She didn’t leave readily, but he finally convinced her. She leaned over and kissed his brow before she stood up.

  “You’re sure,” she began again.

  He gave her a bright smile. “I’m sure. Go, go. I need to get some rest anyway. I’ve had too much excitement today as it is.”

  “I’ll come by when my shift’s done tomorrow. I’ll probably be able to take you back home.”

  He nodded. “Bring me a coffee when you come, would you? I can just imagine what they’ll have here.”

  “I will.”

  He closed his eyes when she left.

  * * *

  So Old Man Crow crossed over again, black wings cutting the air between the worlds. This time he didn’t wait for the spirit bear to find him, but went looking for her by that hidden lake, high in the mountains, fed by a glacier. Spirit Lake.

  He flew above the pine woods, heading north through the dreamlands, up and up into the mountains. He left the tree line behind as the air grew thin and he had to work hard to keep aloft up there because there weren’t many winds to ride. But there wasn’t that darkness, either, the enveloping black that had swallowed him in the city, so he counted himself lucky.

  Finally, he sailed through a pass and came down into that long green valley where Spirit Lake dreams like a jewel in a wild bower of tamarack and pine. He let his wings rest as he glided down to it in a long spiral that let him see all parts of the shore. He settled on the branch of a dead pine tree overlooking the north part of the lake.

  “I know you’re here,” he said, once he’d caught his breath.

  “Do you now?”

  He turned on his perch to see the spirit bear regarding him from the shadows under the pines.

  “Yeah,” he said. “At least I do now.”

  He caught a flicker of humour in her eyes, then she padded out over the limestone outcrop that lay between the forest and the dead pine where Old Man Crow waited for her.

  “What did you do to me?” he asked. “That last time I was dreaming.”

  “I didn’t do anything. I only came to show you.”

  “The darkness, yes. It swallowed me whole.”

  “I know. I saw.”

  “What is it? You said it’s making everything go away and that it’s inside me.”

  The spirit bear nodded.

  “I don’t understand. Why can’t you tell me plain?”

  She studied him for a long moment, then nodded again.

  “You’ve become a man dreaming he’s a crow,” she finally said.

  “What?”

  “You used to be a crow, dreaming he was a man, and your old blood ran strong. But now?” She shrugged. “It’s as though you never lived that long life of yours. You’ve become a five-fingered being, old and at the end of his years.”

  “How did this happen?”

  Old Man Crow was asking himself as much as the spirit bear, because he could see the weight of truth in her words. He was more man than crow, and had been for years. Living like a man, only flying in his dreams.

  “Do I need to tell you?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  “It can happen to anyone,” she said. “Living too long in that otherworld, walking on two legs, talking, talking, talking.”

  “Crows always talk.”

  She nodded. “To each other. Not to five-fingered beings. Not and expect to be understood.”

  “But some of them have the old blood running in them, thin and dreaming. All it needs is to be wakened.”

  “And you can teach them that without living your whole life among them.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m not your conscience or your mother,” the spirit bear told him. “Your life is yours to spend as you wish.”

  He nodded.

  “And mostly I don’t concern myself with the whys and wherefores of the corbae clans.”

  “I understand.”

  But then she smiled. “Except, just as you have that inclination to wake sleeping cousins, I find myself drawn to reminding cousins of who they are—or who they once were.”

  “That darkness,” Old Man Crow said. “That was my mortality, wasn’t it?”

  She nodded.

  “And when you said everything was going away, you meant my perception of it was going away. That’s why I woke in a hospital bed. I was dying.”

  She nodded again.

  “Am I still dying?”

  “We’re all dying, Old Man Crow. Each and every day. It’s the same for cousins as it is for five-fingered beings. But we’re living, too. Sometimes we forget that.”

  They didn’t talk for a while. It was quiet here, too, Old Man Crow thought, but it was a natural quiet. A breeze sighing through the pine boughs. The lap of water on the shore.

  “It doesn’t mean you need to stop helping people,” the spirit bear said.

  Old Man Crow nodded. “But I need to remember who I am, too.”

  “You do.”

  “So what now?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “You could try to be a crow again and only dream of being a man.”

  * * *

  Ruby was in a cheerful mood as she took the subway back to Lee Street. Old Joey had given her quite a scare there earlier, find
ing him like that, all sprawled out on the floor of his living room. But she felt better now. Before she’d left the hospital, his doctor had assured her that he wasn’t on death’s bed just yet.

  “Your grandfather has the constitution of a horse,” he’d told her.

  “Then why did he collapse like that?”

  “I don’t know yet. I need to wait until we get the test results back. But as things stand, I’m fairly certain he can be discharged tomorrow morning.”

  So there was still a little something to worry about, but right now, she knew he was okay and in good hands, and she finally had a date with Kyle. She turned and checked her reflection in the window, but the glass was so dirty and smudged it was hard to tell what shape her face was in. She took out her compact and used it to reapply her lipstick and dust a little colour onto her cheeks, then it was her stop and she had to get off and hurry down the street.

  Freewheeling would have closed about ten minutes ago. What if Kyle wasn’t waiting? What if he thought she’d blown him off?

  But then she saw Kyle waiting for her outside the shop, his face lighting up with pleasure when he saw her, and she couldn’t help grinning herself. A moment later she was standing in front of him and suddenly neither of them had anything to say.

  But she thought of Joey—the scare he’d given her, the advice he was always passing on to her along with his stories. How nobody ever got anything they wanted if they didn’t take a chance.

  She felt good, so she was just going to tell Kyle she did. She wasn’t going to go all clingy and weird on him, but she wasn’t going to play games, either.

  “I’m so glad we’re getting together like this outside of work,” she said.

  “Me, too. Like I said, I’ve…you know…been wanting to ask you out….”

  She smiled. “Does this suddenly feel weird to you, too? I mean, I’ve been serving you lunch for weeks at the diner, but now all of a sudden, here we are, and it’s a whole new ball game.”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “Are you a sports fan?”

  “Um, not so much.”

  “Me, either.”

  He took her arm. “Let’s go find a restaurant and have another waitress bring us dinner. What are you in the mood for?”