Charles De Lint - Dreams Underfoot

Maybe, she thought, maybe magic can rescue me ....

She dug out her flute from her knapsack and quickly put the pieces together. Turning back to the window, she sat on her haunches and tried to start up a tune, but to no avail. She was still too nervous, her chest felt too tight, and she couldn’t get the air to come up properly from her diaphragm.

She brought the flute down from her lip and laid it across her knees. Trying not to think of the locked door, of why it was locked and who would be coming through it, she steadied her breathing.

In, slowly now, hold it, let it out, slowly. And again.

She pretended she was with Meran, just the two of them in the basement of the Old Firehall. There.

She could almost hear the tune that Meran was playing, except it sounded more like the belllike tones of a harp than the breathy timbre of a wooden flute. But still, it was there for her to follow, a path marked out on a roadmap of music.

Lifting the flute back up to her lip, she blew again, a narrow channel of air going down into the mouth hole at an angle, all her fingers down, the low D note ringing in the empty room, a deep rich sound, resonant and full. She played it again, then caught the music she heard, that particular path laid out on the roadmap of all tunes that are or yet could be, and followed where it led.

It was easier to do than she would have thought possible, easier than at all those lessons with Meran.

The music she followed seemed to allow her instrument to almost play itself. And as the tune woke from her flute, she fixed her gaze on the rain falling just outside the window where a flicker of color appeared, a spin of movement.

Please, she thought. Oh please ...

And then it was there, hummingbird wings vibrating in the rain, sending incandescent sprays of water arcing away from their movement; the tiny naked upper torso, the lower wrapped in tiny leaves and vines; the dark hair gathered wetly against her miniature cheeks and neck; the eyes, tiny and timeless, watching her as she watched back and all the while, the music played.

Help me, she thought to that little hovering figure. Won’t you please She had been oblivious to anything but the music and the tiny faerie outside in the rain. She hadn’t heard the footsteps on the stairs, nor heard them crossing the apartment. But she heard the door open.

The tune faltered, the faerie flickered out of sight as though it had never been there. She brought the flute down from her lip and turned, her heart drumming wildly in her chest, but she refused to be scared.

That’s all guys like Cutter wanted. They wanted to see you scared of them. They wanted to be in control.

But no more.

I’m not going to go without a fight, she thought. I’ll break my flute over his stupid head. I’ll ...

The stranger standing in the doorway brought her train of thought to a scurrying halt. And then she realized that the harping she’d heard, the tune that had led her flute to join it, had grown in volume, rather than diminished.

“Who ... who are you?” she asked.

Her hands had begun to perspire, making her flute slippery and hard to hold. The stranger had longer hair than Cutter. It was drawn back in a braid that hung down one side of his head and dangled halfway down his chest. He had a full beard and wore clothes that, though they were simple jeans, shirt and jacket, seemed to have a timeless cut to them, as though they could have been worn at any point in history and not seemed out of place. Meran dressed like that as well, she realized.

But it was his eyes that held her—not their startling brightness, but the fire that seemed to flicker in their depths, a rhythmic movement that seemed to keep time to the harping she heard.

“Have you come to ... rescue me?” she found herself asking before the stranger had time to reply to her first question.

“I’d think,” he said, “with a spirit so brave as yours, that you’d simply rescue yourself “

Lesli shook her head. “I’m not really brave at all.”

“Braver than you know, fluting here while a darkness stalked you through the storm. My name’s Cerin Kelledy; I’m Meran’s husband and I’ve come to take you home.”

He waited for her to disassemble her flute and stow it away, then offered her a hand up from the floor. As she stood up, he took the knapsack and slung it over his shoulder and led her towards the door. The sound of the harping was very faint now, Lesli realized.

When they walked by the hall, she stopped in the doorway leading to the living room and looked at the two men that were huddled against the far wall, their eyes wild with terror. One was Cutter; the other a business man in suit and raincoat whom she’d never seen before. She hesitated, fingers tightening on Cerin’s hand, as she turned to see what was frightening them so much. There was nothing at all in the spot that their frightened gazes were fixed upon.

“What ... what’s the matter with them?” she asked her companion. “What are they looking at?”

“Night fears,” Cerin replied. “Somehow the darkness that lies in their hearts has given those fears substance and made them real.”

The way he said “somehow” let Lesli know that he’d been responsible for what the two men were undergoing.

“Are they going to die?” she asked.

She didn’t think she was the first girl to fall prey to Cutter so she wasn’t exactly feeling sorry for him at that point.

Cerin shook his head. “But they will always have the sight. Unless they change their ways, it will show them only the dark side of Faerie.”

Lesli shivered.

“There are no happy endings,” Cerin told her. “There are no real endings ever—happy or otherwise.

We all have our own stories which are just a part of the one Story that binds both this world and Faerie.

Sometimes we step into each others’ stories—perhaps just for a few minutes, perhaps for years—and then we step out of them again. But all the while, the Story just goes on.”

That day, his explanation only served to confuse her.

From Lesli’s diary, entry dated November 24th:

Nothing turned out the way I thought it would.

Something happened to Mom. Everybody tells me it’s not my fault, but it happened when I ran away, so I can’t help but feel that I’m to blame. Daddy says she had a nervous breakdown and that’s why she’s in the sanitarium. It happened to her before and it had been coming again for a long time. But that’s not the way Mom tells it.

I go by to see her every day after school. Sometimes she’s pretty spaced from the drugs they give her to keep her calm, but on one of her good days, she told me about Granny Nell and the Kelledys and Faerie. She says the world’s just like I said it was in that essay I did for English. Faerie’s real and it didn’t go away; it just got freed from people’s preconceptions of it and now it’s just whatever it wants to be.

And that’s what scares her.

She also thinks the Kelledys are some kind of earth spirits. “I can’t forget this time,” she told me.

“But if you know,” I asked her, “if you believe, then why are you in this place? Maybe I should be in here, too.”

And you know what she told me? “I don’t want to believe in any of it; it just makes me feel sick. But at the same time, I can’t stop knowing it’s all out there: every kind of magic being and nightmare. They’re all real.”

I remember thinking of Cutter and that other guy in his apartment and what Cerin said about them.

Did that make my Mom a bad person? I couldn’t believe that.

“But they’re not supposed to be real,” Mom said. “That’s what’s got me feeling so crazy. In a sane world, in the world that was the way I’d grown up believing it to be, that wouldn’t be real. The Kelledys could fix it so that I’d forget again, but then I’d be back to going through life always feeling like there was something important that I couldn’t remember. And that just leaves you with another kind of craziness—an ache that you can’t explain and it doesn’t ever go away. It’s better this way, and my medicine keeps me from feeling too crazy.”