Charles De Lint - Dreams Underfoot

If they were real ...

Never mind being in trouble. If they were real, then she was doomed.

She didn’t get any more sleep that night, and first thing the next morning, she went looking for help.

“Skookin,” Meran said, trying hard not to laugh.

“Oh, I know what it sounds like,” Jilly said, “but what can you do? Christy’s books are Bramley’s pet blind spot and if you listen to him long enough, he’ll have you believing anything.”

“But skookin,” Meran repeated and this time she did giggle. Jilly couldn’t help but laugh with her.

Everything felt very different in the morning light—especially when she had someone to talk it over with whose head wasn’t filled with Christy’s stories.

They were sitting in Kathryn’s Cafe—an hour or so after Jilly had found Meran Kelledy down by the Lake, sitting on the Pier and watching the early morning joggers run across the sand: yuppies from downtown, healthconscious gentry from the Beaches.

It was a short walk up Battersfield Road to where Kathryn’s was nestled in the heart of Lower Crowsea. Like the area itself, with its narrow streets and old stone buildings, the cafe had an old world feel about it—from the dark wood paneling and handcarved chair backs to the small round tables, with checkered tablecloths, fat glass condiment containers and strawwrapped wine bottles used as candleholders. The music piped in over the house sound system was mostly along the lines of Telemann and Vivaldi, Kitaro and old Bob James albums. The waitresses wore creamcolored pinafores over flowerprint dresses.

But if the atmosphere was old world, the clientele were definitely contemporary. Situated so close to Butler U., Kathryn’s had been a favorite haunt of the university’s students since it first opened its doors in the midsixties as a coffee house. Though much had changed from those early days, there was still music played on its small stage on Friday and Saturday nights, as well as poetry recitations on Wednesdays and Sunday morning storytelling sessions.

Jilly and Meran sat by a window, coffee and homemade banana muffins set out on the table in front of them.

“Whatever were you doing down there anyway?” Meran asked. “It’s not exactly the safest place to be wandering about.”

Jilly nodded. The skells in Old City weren’t all thin and wasted. Some were big and meanlooking, capable of anything—not really the sort of people Jilly should be around, because if something went wrong ... well, she was the kind of woman for whom the word petite had been coined. She was small and slender—her tiny size only accentuated by the oversized clothing she tended to wear. Her brown hair was a thick tangle, her eyes the electric blue of sapphires. She was too pretty and too small to be wandering about in places like Old City on her own.

“You know the band, No Nuns Here?” Jilly asked.

Meran nodded.

“I’m doing the cover painting for their first album,” Jilly explained. “They wanted something moody for the background—sort of like the Tombs, but darker and grimmer—and I thought Old City would be the perfect place to get some reference shots.”

“But to go there on your own ...”

Jilly just shrugged. She was known to wander anywhere and everywhere, at any time of the night or day, camera or sketchbook in hand, often both.

Meran shook her head. Like most of Jilly’s friends, she’d long since given up trying to point out the dangers of carrying on the way Jilly did.

“So you found this drum,” she said.

Jilly nodded. She looked down at the little scab on the palm of her hand. It itched like crazy, but she was determined not to open it again by scratching it.

“And now you want to ... ?”

Jilly looked up. “Take it back. Only I’m scared to go there on my own. I thought maybe Cerin would come with me—for moral support, you know?”

“He’s out of town,” Meran said.

Meran and her husband made up the two halves of the Kelledys, a local traditional music duo that played coffee houses, festivals and colleges from one coast to the other. For years now, however, Newford had been their home base.

“He’s teaching another of those harp workshops,” Meran added. Jilly did her best to hide her disappointment.

What she’d told Meran about “moral support” was only partly the reason she’d wanted their help because, more so than either Riddell’s stories or Bramley’s askew theories, the Kelledys were the closest thing to real magic that she could think of in Newford. There was an otherworldly air about the two of them that went beyond the glamour that seemed to always gather around people who became successful in their creative endeavors.

It wasn’t something Jilly could put her finger on. It wasn’t as though they went on and on about this sort of thing at the drop of a hat the way that Bramley did. Nor that they were responsible for anything more mysterious than the enchantment they awoke on stage when they were playing their instruments. It was just there. Something that gave the impression that they were aware of what lay beyond the here and now. That they could see things others couldn’t; knew things that remained secret to anyone else.

Nobody even knew where they had come from; they’d just arrived in Newford a few years ago, speaking with accents that had rapidly vanished, and here they’d pretty well stayed ever since. Jilly had always privately supposed that if there was a place called Faerie, then that was from where they’d come, so when she woke up this morning, deciding she needed magical help, she’d gone looking for one or the other and found Meran. But now ...

“Oh,” she said.

Meran smiled.

“But that doesn’t mean I can’t try to help,” she said.

Jilly sighed. Help with what? she had to ask herself. The more she thought about it, the sillier it all seemed. Skookin. Right. Maybe they held debating contests with Riddell’s mutant rats.

“I think maybe I’m nuts,” she said finally. “I mean, goblins living under the city ... ?”

“I believe in the little people,” Meran said. “We called them bodachs where I come from.”

Jilly just looked at her.

“But you laughed when I talked about them,” she said finally. “I know—and I shouldn’t have. It’s just that whenever I hear that name that Christy’s given them, I can’t help myself. It’s so silly.”

“What I saw last night didn’t feel silly,” Jilly said.

If she’d actually seen anything. By this point—even with Meran’s apparent belief—she wasn’t sure what to think anymore.

“No,” Meran said. “I suppose not. But—you’re taking the drum back, so why are you so nervous?”

“The man in Christy’s story returned the apple he stole,” Jilly said, “and you know what happened to him ....”

“That’s true,” Meran said, frowning.

“I thought maybe Cerin could ...” Jilly’s voice trailed off.

A small smile touched Meran’s lips. “Could do what?”

“Well, this is going to sound even sillier,” Jilly admitted, “but I’ve always pictured him as sort of a wizard type.”

Meran laughed. “He’d love to hear that. And what about me? Have I acquired wizardly status as well?”

“Not exactly. You always struck me as being an earth spirit—like you stepped out of an oak tree or something.” Jilly blushed, feeling as though she was making even more of a fool of herself than ever, but now that she’d started, she felt she had to finish. “It’s sort of like he learned magic, while you just are magic.”

She glanced at her companion, looking for laughter, but Meran was regarding her gravely. And she did look like a dryad, Jilly thought, what with the green streaks in the long, nutbrown ringlets of her hair and her fey sort of PreRaphaelite beauty. Her eyes seemed to provide their own light, rather than take it in.