Charles De Lint: Dreams Underfoot

It took a second brandy before she fell asleep.

Outside, Reece’s booger snuffled around the walls of the house, crawling up the side of the building from time to time to peer into this or that window. Something kept it from entering—some disturbance in the air that was like a wind, but not a wind at the same time. When it finally retreated, it was with the knowledge in what passed for its mind that time itself was the key. Hours and minutes would unlock whatever kept it presently at bay.

Barracuda teeth gleamed as the creature grinned. It could wait. Not long, but it could wait.

4

Ellen woke the next morning, stiff from a night spent on the sofa, and wondered what in God’s name had possessed her to bring Reece home. Though on reflection, she realized, the whole night had proceeded with a certain surreal quality of which Reece had only been a small part. Rereading Christy’s book. That horrific face at the window. And the Balloon Men—she hadn’t thought of them in years.

Swinging her feet to the floor, she went out onto her balcony. There was a light fog hazing the air.

Boogieboarders were riding the waves close by the pier—only a handful of them now, but in an hour or so their numbers would have multiplied beyond count. Raking machines were cleaning the beach, their dull roar vying with the pounding of the tide. Men with metal detectors were patiently sifting through the debris the machines left behind before the trucks came to haul it away. Near the tide’s edge a man was jogging backwards across the sand, sharply silhouetted against the ocean.

Nothing out of the ordinary. But returning inside she couldn’t shake the feeling that there was someone in her head, something flying darkwinged across her inner terrain like a crow. When she went to wash up, she found its crow eyes staring back at her from the mirror. Wild eyes.

Shivering, she finished up quickly. By the time Reece woke she was sitting outside on the balcony in a sweatshirt and shorts, nursing a mug of coffee. The odd feeling of being possessed had mostly gone away and the night just past took on the fading quality of halfremembered dreams.

She looked up at his appearance, smiling at the way a night’s sleep had rearranged the lizard crest fringes of his Mohawk. Some of it was pressed flat against his skull. Elsewhere, multicolored tufts stood up at bizarre angles. His mouth was a sullen slash in a field of short beard stubble, but his eyes still had a sleepy look to them, softening his features.

“You do this a lot?” he asked, slouching into the other wicker chair on the balcony.

“What? Drink coffee in the morning?”

“Pick up strays.”

“You looked like you needed help.”

Reece nodded. “Right. We’re all brothers and sisters on starship earth. I kinda figured you for a bleeding heart.”

His harsh tone soured Ellen’s humour. She felt the something that had watched her from the bathroom mirror flutter inside her and her thoughts returned to the previous night. Christy’s wizard talking. Things exist because we want them to exist.

“After you fell asleep,” she said, “I thought I saw something peering in through the bedroom window

....”

Her voice trailed off when she realized that she didn’t quite know where she was going with that line of thought. But Reece sat up from his slouch, suddenly alert.

“What kind of something?” he asked.

Ellen tried to laugh it off “A monster,” she said with a smile. “Redeyed and all teeth.” She shrugged.

“I was just having one of those nights.”

“You saw it?” Reece demanded sharply enough to make Ellen sit up straighter as well.

“Well, I thought I saw something, but it was patently impossible so ...” Again her voice trailed off.

Reece had sunk back into his chair and was staring off towards the ocean. “What ... what was it?” Ellen asked.

“I call it a booger,” he replied. “I don’t know what the hell it is, but it’s been following me ever since I took off from my parents’ place ....”

The stories in Christy’s book weren’t all charming. There was one near the end called “Raw Eggs”

about a man who had a Ghostbusterslike creature living in his fridge that fed on raw eggs. It pierced the shells with a needlefine tooth, then sucked out the contents, leaving rows of empty eggshells behind.

When the man got tired of replacing his eggs, the creature crawled out of the fridge one night, driven forth by hunger, and fed on the eyes of the man’s family.

The man had always had a fear of going blind. He died at the end of the story, and the creature moved on to another household, more hungry than ever ....

Reece laid aside Christy Riddell’s book and went looking for Ellen. He found her sitting on the beach, a big, loose Tshirt covering her bikini, her bare legs tucked under her. She was staring out to sea, past the waves breaking on the shore, past the swimmers, bodysurfers and kids riding their boogieboards, past the oil rigs to the horizon hidden in a haze in the faroff distance. He got a lot of weird stares as he scuffed his way across the sand to finally sit down beside her.

“They’re just stories in that book, right?” he said finally. “You tell me.”

“Look. The booger it’s—Christ, I don’t know what it is. But it can’t be real.”

Ellen shrugged. “I was up getting some milk at John’s earlier,” she said, “and I overheard a couple of kids talking about some friends of theirs. Seems they were having some fun in the parking lot last night with a punker when something came at them from under the pier and tore off part of their bumper.”

“Yeah, but—”

Ellen turned from the distant view to look at him. Her eyes held endless vistas in them and she felt the flutter of wings in her mind.

“I want to know how you did it,” she said. “How you brought it to life.”

“Look, lady. I don’t—”

“It doesn’t have to be a horror,” she said fiercely. “It can be something good, too.” She thought of the gnome that lived under the pier in Christy’s story and her own Balloon Men. “I want to be able to see them again.”

Their gazes locked. Reece saw a darkness behind Ellen’s clear grey eyes, some wildness that reminded him of his booger in its intensity.

“I’d tell you if I knew,” he said finally.

Ellen continued to study him, then slowly turned to look back across the waves. “Will it come to you tonight?” she asked.

“I don’t kn—” Reece began, but Ellen turned to him again. At the look in her eyes, he nodded.

“Yeah,” he said then. “I guess it will.”

“I want to be there when it does,” she said.

Because if it was real, then it could all be real. If she could see the booger, if she could understand what animated it, if she could learn to really see and, as Christy’s wizard had taught Jilly Coppercorn, know what she was looking for herself, then she could bring her own touch of wonder into the world.

Her own magic.

She gripped Reece’s arm. “Promise me you won’t take off until I’ve had a chance to see it.”

She had to be weirdedout, Reece thought. She didn’t have the same kind of screws loose that his parents did, but she was gone all the same. Only, that book she’d had him read ... it made a weird kind of sense. If you were going to accept that kind of shit as being possible, it might just work the way that book said it did. Weird, yeah. But when he thought of the booger itself ...

“Promise me,” she repeated.

He disengaged her fingers from his arm. “Sure,” he said. “I got nowhere to go anyway.”

5

They ate at The Green Pepper that night, a Mexican restaurant on Main Street. Reece studied his companion across the table, reevaluating his earlier impressions of her. Her hair was up in a loose bun now and she wore a silky creamcolored blouse above a slim dark skirt. Mentally she was definitely a bit weird, but not a burnout like his parents. She looked like the kind of customer who shopped in the trendy galleries and boutiques on Melrose Avenue where his old lady worked, back home in West Hollywood.