Charles De Lint - Dreams Underfoot

“You have something of ours,” Goon said.

His voice was grim. Christy’s story lay all too clearly in Jilly’s head. She swallowed dryly.

“Uh, I never meant ...” she began, then simply handed over the drum.

Goon took it reverently, then snatched her other hand before she could draw away. Her palm flared with sharp pain—all the skin, from the base of her hand to the ends of her fingers was black.

The curse, she thought. It’s going to make my hand fall right off. I’m never going to paint again ....

Goon spat on her palm and the pain died as though it had never been. With wondering eyes, Jilly watched the blackness dry up and begin to flake away. Goon gave her hand a shake and the blemish scattered to fall to the ground. Her hand was completely unmarked. “But ... the curse,” she said. “The bounty on my head. What about Christy’s story ... ?”

“Your curse is knowledge,” Goon said.

“But ... ?”

He turned away to face the crowd, drum in hand. As Jilly made her careful descent back to where Meran was waiting for her, Goon tapped his fingers against the head of the drum. An eerie rhythm started up—a real rhythm. When the skookin musicians began to play, they held their instruments properly and called up a sweet stately music to march across the back of the rhythm. It was a rich tapestry of sound, as different from Meran’s solo flute as sunlight is from twilight, but it held its own power. Its own magic.

Goon led the playing with the rhythm he called up from the stone drum, led the music as though he’d always led it.

“He’s really the king, isn’t he?” Jilly whispered to her companion. Meran nodded.

“So then what was he doing working for Bramley?”

“I don’t know,” Meran replied. “I suppose a king—or a king’s son—can do pretty well what he wants just so long as he comes back here once a moon to fulfill his obligation as ruler.”

“Do you think he’ll go back to work for Bramley?”

“I know he will,” Meran replied.

Jilly looked out at the crowd of skookin. They didn’t seem at all threatening anymore. They just looked like little men—comical, with their tubby bodies and round heads and their little broomstick limbs—but men all the same. She listened to the music, felt its trueness and had to ask Meran why it didn’t hurt them.

“Because it’s their truth,” Meran replied.

“But truth’s just truth,” Jilly protested. “Something’s either true or it’s not.”

Meran just put her arm around Dilly’s shoulder. A touch of a smile came to the corners of her mouth.

“It’s time we went home,” she said.

“I got offpretty lightly, didn’t I?” Jilly said as they started back the way they’d come. “I mean, with the curse and all.”

“Knowledge can be a terrible burden,” Meran replied. “It’s what some believe cast Adam and Eve from Eden.”

“But that was a good thing, wasn’t it?”

Meran nodded. “I think so. But it brought pain with it—pain we still feel to this day.”

“I suppose.”

“Come on,” Meran said, as Jilly lagged a little to look back at the park.

Jilly quickened her step, but she carried the scene away with her. Goon and the stone drum. The crowd of skookin. The flickering light of their fires as it cast shadows over the Old City buildings.

And the music played on.

Professor Dapple had listened patiently to the story he’d been told, managing to keep from interrupting through at least half of the telling. Leaning back in his chair when it was done, he took off his glasses and began to needlessly polish them.

“It’s going to be very good,” he said finally.

Christy Riddell grinned from the club chair where he was sitting. “But Jilly’s not going to like it,”

Bramley went on. “You know how she feels about your stories.”

“But she’s the one who told me this one,” Christy said. Bramley rearranged his features to give the impression that he’d known this all along.

“Doesn’t seem like much of a curse,” he said, changing tack.

Christy raised his eyebrows. “What? To know that it’s all real? To have to seriously consider every time she hears about some seemingly preposterous thing, that it might very well be true? To have to keep on guard with what she says so that people won’t think she’s gone off the deep end?”

“Is that how people look at us?” Bramley asked.

“What do you think?” Christy replied with a laugh.

Bramley hrumphed. He fidgeted with the papers on his desk, making more of a mess of them, rather than less.

“But Goon,” he said, finally coming to the heart of what bothered him with what he’d been told. “It’s like some retelling of ‘The King of the Cats,’ isn’t it? Are you really going to put that bit in?”

Christy nodded. “It’s part of the story.”

“I can’t see Goon as a king of anything,” Bramley said. “And if he is a king, then what’s he doing still working for me?”

“Which do you think would be better,” Christy asked. “To be a king below, or a man above?”

Bramley didn’t have an answer for that.

Every time it rains a ghost comes walking.

He goes up by the stately old houses that line Stanton Street, down Henratty Lane to where it leads into the narrow streets and crowded backalleys of Crowsea, and then back up Stanton again in an unvarying routine.

He wears a worn tweed suit—mostly browns and greys with a faint rosy touch of heather. A shapeless cap presses down his brown curls. His features give no true indication of his age, while his eyes are both innocent and wise. His face gleams in the rain, slick and wet as that of a living person. When he reaches the streetlamp in front of the old Hamill estate, he wipes his eyes with a brown hand. Then he fades away.

Samantha Rey knew it was true because she’d seen him. More than once.

She saw him every time it rained.

“So, have you asked her out yet?” Jilly wanted to know.

We were sitting on a park bench, feeding pigeons the leftover crusts from our lunches. Jilly had worked with me at the post office, that Christmas they hired outside staff instead of letting the regular employees work the overtime, and we’d been friends ever since. These days she worked three nights a week as a waitress, while I made what I could busking on the Market with my father’s old Czech fiddle.

Jilly was slender, with a thick tangle of brown hair and pale blue eyes, electric as sapphires. She had a penchant for loose clothing and fingerless gloves when she wasn’t waitressing. There were times, when I met her on the streets in the evening, that I mistook her for a bag lady: skulking in an alleyway, gaze alternating between the sketchbook held in one hand and the faces of the people on the streets as they walked by. She had more sketches of me playing my fiddle than had any right to exist.

“She’s never going to know how you feel until you talk to her about it,” Jilly went on when I didn’t answer.

“I know.”

I’ll make no bones about it: I was putting the make on Sam Rey and had been ever since she’d started to work at Gypsy Records half a year ago. I never much went in for the blonde California beach girl type, but Sam had a look all her own. She had some indefinable quality that went beyond her basic cheerleader appearance. Right. I can hear you already. Rationalizations of the North American libido.

But it was true. I didn’t just want Sam in my bed; I wanted to know we were going to have a future together. I wanted to grow old with her. I wanted to build up a lifetime of shared memories.

About the most Sam knew about all this was that I hung around and talked to her a lot at the record store.