Charles De Lint - Dreams Underfoot

“Follow them.” I remember, even then, how the plurality bothered me. I was jealous and I didn’t even know of what.

She shook her head. “No. All I ever have is what they leave behind.”

Her voice seemed to diminish as she spoke. I wanted to reach out and touch her shoulder with my hand, to offer what comfort I could to ease the sudden malaise that appeared to have gripped her, but her moods, I came to learn, were mercurial. She sat up suddenly and stroked Ben until the motor of his purring filled the air with its resonance.

“Do you always write in places like this?” she asked.

I nodded. “I like the night; I like the city at night. It doesn’t seem to belong to anyone then. On a good night, it almost seems as if the stories write themselves. It’s almost as though coming out here plugs me directly into the dark heart of the city night and all of its secrets come spilling from my pen.”

I stopped, suddenly embarrassed by what I’d said. It seemed too personal a disclosure for such short acquaintance. But she just gave me a lowwatt version of her earlier smile.

“Doesn’t that bother you?” she asked.

“Does what bother me?”

“That perhaps what you’re putting down on paper doesn’t belong to you.”

“Does it ever?” I replied. “Isn’t the very act of creation made up of setting a piece of yourself free?”

“What happens when there’s no more pieces left?”

“That’s what makes it special—I don’t think you ever run out of the creative spark. Just doing it, replenishes the well. The more I work, the more ideas come to me. Whether they come from my subconscious or some outside source, isn’t really relevant. What is relevant is what I put into it.”

“Even when it seems to write itself?”

“Maybe especially so.”

I was struck—not then, but later, remembering—by the odd intensity of the conversation. It wasn’t a normal dialogue between strangers. We must have talked for three hours, never about ourselves, our histories, our pasts, but rather about what we were now, creating an intimacy that seemed surreal when I thought back on it the next day. Occasionally, there were lulls in the conversation, but they, too, seemed to add to the sense of bonding, like the comfortable silences that are only possible between good friends.

I could’ve kept right on talking, straight through the night until dawn, but she rose during one of those lulls.

“I have to go,” she said, swinging the strap of her carryall onto her shoulder.

I knew a moment’s panic. I didn’t know her address or her phone number. All I had was her first name.

“When can I see you again?” I asked.

“Have you ever been down to those old stone steps under the Kelly Street Bridge?”

I nodded. They dated back from when the river was used to haul goods from upland, down to the lake. The steps under the bridge were all that was left of an old dock that had serviced the Irishowned inn called The Harp. The dock was long abandoned, but The Harp still stood. It was one of the oldest buildings in the city. Only the solid stone structures of the city’s Dutch founding fathers, like the ones that encircled us, were older.

“I’ll meet you there tomorrow night,” she said. She took a few steps, then paused, adding, “Why don’t you bring along one of your books?”

The smile she gave me, before she turned away again, was intox—

icating. I watched her walk back across the courtyard, disappearing into the narrow mouth of the alleyway from which she’d first come. Her footsteps lingered on, an echoing taptap on the cobblestones, but then that too faded.

I think it was at that moment that I decided she was a ghost.

I didn’t get much writing done over the next few weeks. She wouldn’t—she said she couldn’t—see me during the day, but she wouldn’t say why. I’ve got such a head filled with fictions that I honestly thought it was because she was a ghost, or maybe a succubus or a vampire. The sexual attraction was certainly there. If she’d sprouted fangs one night, I’d probably just have bared my neck and let her feed.

But she didn’t, of course. Given a multiplechoice quiz, in the end I realized the correct answer was none of the above.

I was also sure that she was at least my own age, if not older. She was widely read and, like myself, had eclectic tastes that ranged from genre fiction to the classics. We talked for hours every night, progressed to walking hand in hand through our favorite parts of the benighted city and finally made love one night in a large, cozy sleeping bag in Fitzhenry Park.

She took me there on one of what we called our rambles and didn’t say a word, just stripped down in the moonlight and then drew me down into the sweet harbor of her arms. Above us, I heard geese heading south as, later, I drifted into sleep. I remember thinking it was odd to hear them so late at night, but then what wasn’t in the hours I spent with Tally?

I woke alone in the morning, the subject of some curiosity by a couple of old winos who casually watched me get dressed inside the bag as though they saw this kind of thing every morning.

Our times together blur in my mind now. It’s hard for me to remember one night from another. But I have little fetish bundles of memory that stay whole and complete in my mind, the grisgris that collected around her name in my mind, like my nervousness that second night under the Kelly Street Bridge, worried that she wouldn’t show, and three nights later when, after not saying a word about the book of my stories I’d given her when we parted on the old stone steps under the bridge, she told me how much she’d liked them.

“These are my stories,” she said as she handed the book back to me that night.

I’d run into possessive readers before, fans who laid claim to my work as their own private domain, who treated the characters in the stories as real people, or thought that I carried all sorts of hidden and secret knowledge in my head, just because of the magic and mystery that appeared in the tales I told. But I’d never had a reaction like Tally’s before.

“They’re about me,” she said. “They’re your stories, I can taste your presence in every word, but each of them’s a piece of me, too.”

I told her she could keep the book and the next night, I brought her copies of my other three collections, plus photocopies of the stories that had only appeared in magazines to date. I won’t say it’s because she liked the stories so much, that I came to love her; that would have happened anyway. But her pleasure in them certainly didn’t make me think any the less of her.

Another night she took a photograph out of her carryall and showed it to me. It was a picture of her, but she looked different, softer, not so much younger as not so tough. She wore her hair differently and had a flower print dress on; she was standing in sunlight.

“When ... when was this taken?” I asked.

“In happier times.”

Call me smallminded that my disappointment should show so plain, but it hurt that what were the happiest nights of my life, weren’t the same for her.

She noticed my reaction—she was always quick with things like that—and laid a warm hand on mine.

“It’s not you,” she said. “I love our time together. It’s the rest of my life that’s not so happy.”

Then be with me all the time, I wanted to tell her, but I already knew from experience that there was no talking about where she went when she left me, what she did, who she was. I was still thinking of ghosts, you see. I was afraid that some taboo lay upon her telling me, that if she spoke about it, if she told me where she was during the day, the spell would break and her spirit would be banished forever like in some hokey Bmovie.