Charles De Lint - Dreams Underfoot

Jilly suddenly felt weak. Skookin were real. Mysterious winds rose to animate trees. And now she was marked?

She wasn’t even sure what that meant, but she didn’t like the sound of it. Not for a moment.

Her gaze went to the stone drum where it stood on Meran’s mantel. She didn’t think she’d ever hated an inanimate object so much before.

“Marked ... me ... ?” she asked.

“I’ve heard of this before,” Meran said, her voice apologetic. She touched the mark on July’s palm.

“This is like a ... bounty.”

“They really want to kill me, don’t they?”

Jilly was surprised that her voice sounded as calm as it did. Inside she felt as though she was crumbling to little bits all over the place.

“Skookin are real,” she went on, “and they’re going to tear me up into little pieces—just like they did to the man in Christy’s stupid story.”

Meran gave her a sympathetic look.

“We have to go now,” she said. “We have to go and confront them now, before ...”

“Before what?”

July’s control over her voice was slipping. Her last word went shrieking up in pitch.

“Before they send something worse,” Meran said.

Oh great, Jilly thought as waited for Meran to change into clothing more suitable for the underground trek to Old City. Not only were skookin real, but there were worse things than those pumpkinhead creatures living down there under the city.

She slouched in one of the chairs by the mantelpiece, her back to the stone drum, and pretended that her nerves weren’t all scraped raw, that she was just over visiting a friend for the evening and everything was just peachy, thank you. Surprisingly, by the time Meran returned, wearing jeans, sturdy walking shoes and a thick woolen shirt under a denim jacket, she did feel better.

“The bit with the trees,” she asked as she rose from her chair. “Did you do that?”

Meran shook her head.

“But the wind likes me,” she said. “Maybe it’s because I play the flute.”

And maybe it’s because you’re a dryad, Jilly thought, and the wind’s got a thing about oak trees, but she let the thought go unspoken.

Meran fetched the long, narrow bag that held her flute and slung it over her shoulder.

“Ready?” she asked.

“No,” Ply said.

But she went and took the drum from the mantelpiece and joined Meran by the front door. Meran stuck a flashlight in the pocket of her jacket and handed another to Jilly, who thrust it into the pocket of the coat Meran was lending her. It was at least two sizes too big for her, which suited Jilly just fine.

Naturally, just to make the night complete, it started to rain before they got halfway down the walkway to McKennitt Street.

For safety’s sake, city work crews had sealed up all the entrances to Old City in the midseventies—all the entrances of which the city was aware, at any rate. The street people of Newford’s back lanes and allies knew of anywhere from a halfdozen to twenty others that could still be used, the number depending only on who was doing the bragging. The entrance to which Jilly led Meran was the most commonly known and used—a steel maintenance door that was situated two hundred yards or so down the east tracks of the Grasso Street subway station.

The door led into the city’s sewer maintenance tunnels, but had long since been abandoned. Skells had broken the locking mechanism and the door stood continually ajar. Inside, time and weathering had worn down a connecting wall between the maintenance tunnels and what had once been the top floor of one of Old City’s proud skyscrapers—an office complex that had towered some four stories above the city’s streets before the quake dropped it into its present subterranean setting.

It was a good fifteen minute walk from the Kelledys’ house to the Grasso Street station and Jilly plodded miserably through the rain at Meran’s side for every block of it. Her sneakers were soaked and her hair plastered against her scalp. She carried the stone drum tucked under one arm and was very tempted to simply pitch it in front of a bus.

“This is crazy,” Jilly said. “We’re just giving ourselves up to them.”

Meran shook her head. “No. We’re confronting them of our own free will—there’s a difference.”

“That’s just semantics. There won’t be a difference in the results.”

“That’s where you’re wrong.”

They both turned at the sound of a new voice to find Goon standing in the doorway of a closed antique shop. His eyes glittered oddly in the poor light, reminding Jilly all too much of the skookin, and he didn’t seem to be the least bit wet.

“What are you doing here?” Jilly demanded.

“You must always confront your fears,” Goon said as though she hadn’t spoke. “Then skulking monsters become merely unfamiliar shadows, thrown by a tree bough. Whispering voices are just the wind. The wild flare of panic is merely a burst of emotion, not a terror spell cast by some evil witch.”

Meran nodded. “That’s what Cerin would say. And that’s what I mean to do. Confront them with a truth so bright that they won’t dare come near us again.”

Jilly held up her hand. The discoloration was spreading. It had grown from its pinprick inception, first to the size of a dime, now to that of a silver dollar.

“What about this?” she asked.

“There’s always a price for meddling,” Goon agreed. “Sometimes it’s the simple curse of knowledge.”

“There’s always a price,” Meran agreed.

Everybody always seemed to know more than she did these days, Jilly thought unhappily.

“You still haven’t told me what you’re doing here,” she told Goon. “Skulking about and following us.”

Goon smiled. “It seems to me, that you came upon me.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I have my own business in Old City tonight,” he said. “And since we all have the same destination in mind, I thought perhaps you would appreciate the company.”

Everything was wrong about this, Jilly thought. Goon was never nice to her. Goon was never nice to anyone.

“Yeah, well, you can just—” she began.

Meran laid a hand on Jilly’s arm. “It’s bad luck to turn away help when it’s freely offered.”

“But you don’t know what he’s like,” Jilly said.

“Olaf and I have met before,” Meran said.

Jilly caught the grimace on Goon’s face at the use of his given name. It made him seem more himself, which, while not exactly comforting, was at least familiar. Then she looked at Meran. She thought of the wind outside the musician’s house, driving away the skookin, the mystery that cloaked her which ran even deeper, perhaps, than that which Goon wore so easily ....

“Sometimes you just have to trust in people,” Meran said, as though reading Jilly’s mind.

Jilly sighed. She rubbed her itchy palm against her thigh, shifted the drum into a more comfortable position.

“Okay,” she said. “So what’re we waiting for?”

The few times Jilly had come down to Old City, she’d been cautious, perhaps even a little nervous, but never frightened. Tonight was different. It was always dark in Old City, but the darkness had never seemed so ... so watchful before. There were always odd little sounds, but they had never seemed so furtive. Even with her companions—maybe because of them, she thought, thinking mostly of Goon—she felt very much alone in the eerie darkness.

Goon didn’t appear to need the wobbly light of their flashlights to see his way and though he seemed content enough to simply follow them, Jilly couldn’t shake the feeling that he was actually leading the way.

They were soon in a part of the subterranean city that she’d never seen before.