Charles De Lint - The Ivory and the Horn

"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 revolved 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, other 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 not only to visit, but to 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 résumé to me care of Mr. Truepenny's Book Emporium and Gallery, Mabon. I'll get back to you as soon as I can.

Two pairs of footsteps, leather soles on marble floors. Listening to the sound they made, Dennison felt himself wondering, What was the last thing that Ronnie Egan heard before he died? The squeal of tires on wet pavement? Some hooker or an old wino shouting, "Look out!" Or was there no warning, no warning at all? Just the sudden impact of the car as it hit him and flung his body ten feet in the air before it was smeared up against the plate glass window of the pawn shop?

"You don't have to do this," Stone said as they paused at the door. "One of the neighbors already IDed the body."

"I know."

Looking through the small window, glass reinforced with metal mesh, Dennison watched the morgue attendant approach to let them in. Like the detective at Dennison's side, the attendant was wearing a sidearm. Was the security to keep people out or keep them in? he wondered morbidly.

"So why—" Stone began, then he shook his head. "Never mind."

It wasn't long before they were standing on either side of a metal tray that the attendant had pulled out from the wall at Stone's request. It could easily hold a grown man, twice the 170 pounds Dennison carried on his own six-one frame. The small body laid out upon the metal surface was dwarfed by the expanse of stainless steel that surrounded it.

"His mother's a heavy user," Dennison said. "She peddles her ass to feed the habit. Sometimes she brings the man home— she's got a room at the Claymore. If the guy didn't like having a kid around, she'd get one of the neighbors to look after him. We've had her in twice for putting him outside to play in the middle of the night when she couldn't find anybody to take him in. Trouble is, she always put on such a good show for the judge that we couldn't make the neglect charges stick."

He delivered the brief summary in a monotone. It didn't seem real. Just like Ronnie Egan's dead body didn't seem real. The skin so ashen, the bruises so dark against its pallor.

"I read the file," Stone said.

Dennison looked up from the corpse of the four-year-old boy.

"Did you bring her in?" he asked.

Stone shook his head. "Can't track her down. We've got an APB out on her, but..." He sighed. "Who're we kidding, Chris? Even when we do bring her in, we're not going to be able to find a charge that'll stick. She'll just tell the judge what she's told them before."

Dennison nodded heavily. I'm sorry, Your Honor, but I was asleep and I never even heard him go out. He's a good boy, but he doesn't always listen to his momma. He likes to wander. If Social Services could give her enough to raise him in a decent neighborhood, this kind of thing would never happen...

"I should've tried harder," he said.

"Yeah, like your caseload's any lighter than mine," Stone said. "Where the fuck would you find the time?"

"I still should've..."

Done something, Dennison thought. Made a difference.

Stone nodded to the attendant, who zipped up the heavy plastic bag, then slid the drawer back into the wall. Dennison watched until the drawer closed with a metal click, then finally turned away.

"You're taking this too personally," Stone said.

"It's always personal."

Stone put his arm around Dennison's shoulders and steered him toward the door.

"It gets worse every time something like this happens," Dennison went on. "For every one I help, I lose a dozen. It's like pissing the wind."

"I know," Stone said heavily.

***

The bright daylight stung Dennison's eyes when he stepped outside. He hadn't had breakfast yet, but he had no appetite. His pager beeped, but he didn't bother to check the number he was supposed to call. He just shut off the annoying sound. He couldn't deal with whatever the call was about. Not today. He couldn't face going into the office either, couldn't face all those hopeless faces of people he wanted to help; there just wasn't enough time in a day, enough money in the budget, enough of anything to make a real difference.