Charles De Lint - Dreams Underfoot

It was a twenty minute drive from downtown Newford to the Metro Zoo, and another twenty minutes back again. Terry pulled his Toyota over to the curb in front of Lorio’s apartment building on Lee Street in Crowsea. She shared a second floor loft with a traditional musician named Angie Tichell in the old threestory brick building. The loft retained a consistent smell of Chinese food because of the ground floor that specialized in Mainland dishes.

Terry looked back between the bucket seats and studied Lorio for a moment.

“Are you going to be okay?” he asked.

Lorio nodded. “At least they took him in,” she said.

They’d stayed in the Zoo parking lot long enough to be sure of that.

“I’m sure they’ll do the best they can for him.”

“But what if they can’t help him? I mean, he looks like an orangutan, but what if he’s too alien for them to help him?”

Terry had no answer for her. He’d been shocked enough to see the ape with its orangered fur lying there in the alleyway, but when he’d heard it talk ...

“Just what is he?” Jane asked.

Lorio wore a mournful expression. “I don’t know.” She sat there a moment longer, then stepped out of the car. “Thanks for the lift,” she told Terry as he got her guitar out of the back for her. “I’ll see you tomorrow night. You too, Jane,” she added, leaning into the open window on the passenger’s side of the car for a moment.

Jane touched her arm. “You take care of yourself,” she said.

Lorio nodded. She stepped back as the Toyota pulled away and stood watching its taillights until it turned west on McKennitt and was lost from view. Turning, she faced the door to her building and wished her roommate wasn’t away for the weekend. Being on her own in the loft tonight didn’t hold very much appeal.

That’s because you’re scared, she chided herself. Don’t be a baby. Just go to sleep.

She gave the night street one last look. A cab went by, but then the street was quiet again. No pedestrians at this time of night; everybody was sensibly in bed and asleep. The rain had stopped, the streetlights reflected in the puddles that it had left behind. Up and down the street the second floor windows were dark above the soft glow of the litup display windows of the stores on the ground floors.

Everything seemed normal. There wasn’t even a hint that behind the facade there was another world that held talking monkeymen and bizarre dogs that appeared out of nowhere.

Sighing, Lorio squared her shoulders and went upstairs to bed, trying not to think about the weird turn the night had taken. She didn’t have much luck.

She kept seeing that doglike creature and worried about one finding its way into her apartment. Or to the Zoo where Elderee was. Then she worried about Elderee. When she finally nodded off, she fell into a fitful sleep, all too full of disturbing dreams.

At first she was in the alleyway again. For all that it was very real around her, there was a distancing sense, a feeling of dislocation in her being there. As she looked around, the pavement underfoot began to fracture. Cracks went up and down its length, then webbed the sides of the buildings. She started to back away onto Yoors Street when everything shattered like a piece of dropped glass.

Shards of the alley, like images reflected in a broken mirror, whirled and spun around her. When they settled down, drifting slowly around her like feathers after a pillow fight, she found herself on a roadway—more of a farmer’s track, really—that stretched on to either horizon. On both sides of the track were rolling hills dotted with stands of trees.

“A pretty scene,” a voice said from behind her. “Though not for long.”

The man she saw, when she turned around, was a good head taller than her own fivefour. His hair was black, his eyes glittery bright, his mouth an arrogant slash in a pale face. He was dressed all in browns and blacks, his clothing hanging in a poor fit from his toothin frame.

“Who’re—” Lorio began, but the man cut her off.

“This I claim for the Dark, while you—” he shook his head, taking in her hair, her clothes, with a disdainful look “—will be my gift to Mahail.”

He made a motion towards her with his hand and sparks flew from his fingertips. She stumbled as the road dissolved under her and she began to drop through grey space. There was light far below her. In it was a writhing mass of tentacles that reached up for her from a dark heart ofshadow. As she rushed down to meet it, the darkness resolved into a monstrous bloated shape with coaleyes and a gaping maw.

It didn’t take much speculation to realize that this thing had to be Mahail.

“Tell him Dorn sent you!” the palefaced man cried after her.

She dropped like a bullet, straight for Mahail, her mouth open, but the scream dying before it left her throat. The monster’s oozing tentacles snatched her out of the air. They squeezed her, shook her, held her up for inspection to one eye, then the other.

The soul studying her behind those eyes was like something dead. The air was filled with a reek of decay and rot. The tentacles tightened around her chest and lower torso, squeezing the breath from her as they brought her up to the monster’s mouth. Slime covered her, burning and painful where it touched her bare skin. She flailed her arms, slapped at the creature’s rubbery lips. The scream building up in her throat finally broke free, shrill and rattling and—

—it woke her to a tangle of bedclothes that were wrapped around her. Cold sweat covered her from head to toe.

She lay gasping, pushed aside the sheet and blankets, and stared up at the dark ceiling of her bedroom. Her heart beat a wild tattoo. Slowly the fear drained away.

Just a dream, she thought. That was all. Maybe the whole night had been just a dream. But as she finally drifted off again, she remembered Elderee’s warm eyes and the long winding track of a road that went uphill and down, and this time she smiled and her sleep was dreamless.

The next day it all did seem like a dream. She checked the papers, tried the news on both TV and radio, but there was no mention of the Zoo acquiring a mysterious new animal. It wasn’t until she called Terry to confirm that they had taken Elderee to the Zoo that she was willing to believe that she hadn’t gone crazy. Things were weird, sure, but at least she hadn’t totally lost it herself.

She spent the day in a state of anxiety that didn’t go away until she got on stage at the club and No Nuns Here went into their first set. The chopping rhythms of the music, her guitar humming in her hands, her voice soaring over the blast of the instruments, let her escape that feeling of being lost. By the time they got to the last song of the night, she was filled with a crackling energy that let her rip through the song and make it not just a statement, but an anthem.

I hear your whistle when I cross the park, you make me nervous when I walk in the dark, but I won’t listen—I won’t scream, you won’t find me in your magazines

‘cos

I don’t need nobody staring at me, stripping me down with their 1-2-3....

The song ended with a thunderous chord that shook the stage underfoot. She helped pack up the gear once the crowd was gone, but left on her own, not even taking her guitar with her. Terry promised to drop it off on Sunday afternoon, but she only nodded and made her way out onto Yoors Street.

The sidewalks were crowded, overfilled with a strutting array of humanity from the trendy to punks to burnouts, everyone on their own personal course and all of them the same. They made the city come to life, but at the same time they drowned it with postures, and images like costumes. It was all artifice, lacking depth. Lorio turned to look at her own reflection in a store window. She was no different. Any meaning she meant to communicate was lost behind a shuffle of makeup, styling and pose.