Charles De Lint - Dreams Underfoot

“Well, I told you so, dear.”

She had a good job, if not a great one, a lovely little flat that was all her own, a fairly busy social life—that admittedly contained more friends than it did romantic interests—and liked everything about her new home. Except for the weather.

She turned off Yoors Street onto Kelly, navigating more by instinct than vision, and was just starting to congratulate herself on having completed her journey all in one piece, with time to spare, when a tall shape loomed suddenly up out of the whirling snow in front of her. Trying to avoid a collision, she turned the handlebars too quickly—and the wrong way.

Her front wheel hit the curb and she sailed over the handlebars, one more white airborne object defying gravity, except that unlike the lighter snowflakes with which she momentarily shared the sky, her weight brought her immediately down with a jarring impact against a heap of refuse that someone had set out in anticipation of tomorrow’s garbage pickup.

She rose spluttering snow and staggered back towards her bike, disoriented, the suddenness of her accident not yet having sunk in. She knelt beside the bike and stared with dismay at the bent wheel frame. Then she remembered what had caused her to veer in the first place.

Her gaze went to the street, but then traveled up, and up, to the face of the tall shape that stood by the curb. The man was a giant. At fiveone, Harriet wasn’t tall, and perhaps it had something to do with her low perspective, but he seemed to be at least seven feet high. And yet it wasn’t his size that brought the small gasp to her lips.

That face ...

It was set in a squarish head which was itself perched on thick broad shoulders. The big nose was bent, the left eye was slightly higher than the right, the ears were like huge cauliflowers, the hairline high and square. Thick white scars crisscrossed his features, giving the impression that he’d been sewn together by some untalented seamstress who was too deep in her cups to do a proper job. An icon from an old horror movie flashed in Harriet’s mind and she found herself looking for the bolts in the man’s neck before she even knew what she was doing.

Of course they weren’t there, but the size of the man and the way he was just standing there, staring at her, made Harriet unaccountably nervous as though this really was Victor Frankenstein’s creation standing over her in the storm. She stood quickly, wanting to lessen the discrepancy of their heights. The sudden movement woke a wave of dizziness.

“I’m dreadfully sorry,” she meant to say, but the words slurred, turning to mush in her mouth and what came out was, “Redfolly shurry.”

Vertigo jellied her legs and made the street underfoot so wobbly that she couldn’t keep her balance.

The giant took a quick step towards her, huge hands outstretched, as a black wave swept over her and she pitched forward.

Bloody hell, she had time to think. I’m going all faint ....

Water bubbled merrily in the tin can that sat on the Coleman stove’s burner. The old woman leaned forward and dropped in a tea bag, then moved the can from the heat with a mittened hand.

Only two more bags left, she thought.

She held her hands out to the stove and savored the warmth. “I married for money, not love,” she told her companion. “My Henry was not a handsome man.”

The monster gaze focused and tracked down to her face.

“But I grew to love him. Not for his money, nor for the comfort of his home and the safety it offered to a young woman whose future, for all her beauty, looked to take her no further than the tenements in which she was born and bred.”

The monster made a querulous noise, no more than a grunt, but the old woman could hear the question in it. They’d been together for so long that she could read him easily, without his needing to speak.

“It was for his kindness,” she said.

Harriet woke to the cold. Shivering, she sat up to find herself in an unfamiliar room, enwrapped in a nest of blankets that carried a pungent, musty odor in their folds. The room itself appeared to be part of some abandoned building. The walls were unadorned except for their chipped paint and plaster and a cheerful bit of graffiti suggesting that the reader of it do something that Harriet didn’t think was anatomically possible.

There were no furnishings at all. The only light came from a short, fat candle which sat on the windowsill in a puddle of cooled wax. Outside, the wind howled. In the room, in the building itself, all was still. But as she cocked her head to listen, she could just faintly make out a low murmur of conversation. It appeared to be a monologue, for it was simply one voice, droning on.

She remembered her accident and the sevenfoot tall giant as though they were only something she’d experienced in a dream. The vague sense of dislocation she’d felt upon awakening had grown into a dreamy kind of muddled feeling. She was somewhat concerned over her whereabouts, but not in any sort of a pressing way. Her mind seemed to be in a fog.

Getting up, she hesitated for a moment, then wrapped one of the smelly blankets about her shoulders like a shawl against the cold and crossed the room to its one doorway. Stepping outside, she found herself in a hall as disrepaired and empty as the room she’d just quit.

The murmuring voice led her down the length of the hall into what proved to be a foyer. Leaning against the last bit of wall, there where the hallway opened up into the larger space, she studied the odd scene before her.

Seven candles sat in their wax on wooden orange crates that were arranged in a half circle around an old woman. She had her back to the wall, legs tucked up under what appeared to be a halfdozen skirts.

A ratty shawl covered her grey hair and hung down over her shoulders. Her face was a spiderweb of lines, all pinched and thin. Water steamed in a large tin can on a Coleman stove that stood on the floor in front of her. She had another, smaller tin can in her hand filled with, judging by the smell that filled the room, some kind of herbal tea. She was talking softly to no one that Harriet could see.

The old woman looked up just as Harriet was trying to decide how to approach her. The candlelight woke an odd glimmer in the woman’s eyes, a reflective quality that reminded Harriet of a cat’s gaze caught in a car’s headbeams.

“And who are you, dear?” the woman asked.

“I ... my name’s Harriet. Harriet Pierson.” She got the odd feeling that she should curtsy as she introduced herself.

“You may call me Flora,” the old woman said. “My name’s actually Anne Boddeker, but I prefer Flora.”

Harriet nodded absently. Under the muddle of of her thoughts, the first sharp wedge of concern was beginning to surface. She remembered taking a fall from her bike ... had she hit her head?

“What am I doing here?” she asked.

The old woman’s eyes twinkled with humor. “Now how would I know?”

“But ...” The fuzz in Harriet’s head seemed to thicken. She blinked a couple of times and then cleared her throat. “Where are we?” she tried.

“North of Gracie Street,” Flora replied, “in that part of town that, I believe, people your age refer to as Squatland. I’m afraid I don’t know the exact address. Vandals have played havoc with the street signs, as I’m sure you know, but I believe we’re not far from the corner of Flood and MacNeil where I grew up.”

Harriet’s heart sank. She was in the Tombs, an area of Newford that had once been a developer’s bright dream. The old, tired blocks of tenements, office buildings and factories were to be transformed into a yuppie paradise and work had already begun on tearing down the existing structures when a sudden lack of backing had left the developer scrambling for solvency. All that remained now of the bright dream was block upon block of abandoned buildings and rubblestrewn lots generally referred to as the Tombs. It was home to runaways, the homeless, derelicts, bikers, drug addicts and the like who squatted in its buildings.