Charles De Lint - Dreams Underfoot

What the bogles are offering is my heart’s desire, if I just leave the Moon to drown. But if I do that, I’m responsible for her death. She might not be real, but it doesn’t change anything at all. It’ll still mean that I’m willing to let someone die, just so I can have my own way.

I suck on the stone and move it back and forth from one cheek to the other. I reach down into my wet bodice and pluck out the hazel twig from where it got pushed down between my breasts. I lift a hand to my hair and brush it back from my face and then I look at those sham copies of my Jeck Crow and I smile at them.

My dream, I think. What I say goes.

I don’t if it’s going to work, but I’m fed up with having everyone else decide what happens in my dream. I turn to the stone and I put my hands upon it, the hazel twig sticking out between the fingers of my right hand, and I give the stone a shove. There’s this great big outcry among the quicks and bogies and haunts as the stone starts to topple over. I look down at the drowned woman and I see her eyes open, I see her smile, but then there’s too much light and I’m blinded.

When my vision finally clears, I’m alone by the pool. There’s a big fat full moon hanging in the sky, making the fens almost as bright as day. They’ve all fled, the monsters, the quicks and bogles and things.

The dead willow’s still full of crows, but as soon as I look up, they lift from the tree in an explosion of dark wings, a circling murder, cawing and crying, until they finally go away. The stone’s lying on its side, half in the water, half out.

And I’m still dreaming.

I’m standing here, up to my waist in the smelly water, with a hazel twig in my hand and a stone in my mouth, and I stare up at that big full moon until it seems I can feel her light just singing through my veins.

For a moment it’s like being back in the barn with Jeck, I’m just on fire, but it’s a different kind of fire, it burns away the darknesses that have gotten lodged in me over the years, just like they get lodged in everybody, and just for that moment, I’m solid light, innocent and newborn, a burning Midsummer fire in the shape of a woman.

And then I wake up, back home again.

I lie there in my bed and look out the window, but it’s still the dark of the moon in our world. The streets are quiet outside, there’s a hush over the whole city, and I’m lying here with a hazel twig in my hand, a stone in my mouth, pushed up into one cheek, and a warm burning glow deep inside.

I sit up and spit the stone out into my hand. I walk over to the window. I’m not in some magical dream now; I’m in the real world. I know the lighted moon glows with light borrowed from the sun. That she’s still out there in the dark of the moon, we just can’t see her tonight because the earth is between her and the sun.

Or maybe she’s gone into some other world, to replenish her lantern before she begins her nightly trek across the sky once more.

I feel like I’ve learned something, but I’m not sure what. I’m not sure what any of it means.

11

“How can you say that?” Jilly said. “God, Sophie, it’s so obvious. She really was your mother and you really did save her. As for Jeck, he was the bird you rescued in your first dream. Jeck Crow—don’t you get it? One of the bad guys, only you won him over with an act of kindness. It all makes perfect sense.”

Sophie slowly shook her head. “I suppose I’d like to believe that, too,” she said, “but what we want and what really is aren’t always the same thing.”

“But what about Jeck? He’ll be waiting for you. And Granny Weather? They both knew you were the Moon’s daughter all along. It all means something.”

Sophie sighed. She stroked the sleeping cat on her lap, imagining for a moment that it was the soft dark curls of a crow that could be a man, in a land that only existed in her dreams.

“I guess,” she said, “it means I need a new boyfriend.”

12

July’s a real sweetheart, and I love her dearly, but she’s naive in some ways. Or maybe it’s just that she wants to play the ingenue. She’s always so ready to believe anything that anyone tells her, so long as it’s magical.

Well, I believe in magic, too, but it’s the magic that can turn a caterpillar into a butterfly, the natural wonder and beauty of the world that’s all around me. I can’t believe in some dreamland being real. I can’t believe what Jilly now insists is true: that I’ve got faerie blood, because I’m the daughter of the Moon.

Though I have to admit that I’d like to.

I never do get to sleep that night. I prowl around the apartment, drinking coffee to keep me awake.

I’m afraid to go to sleep, afraid I’ll dream and that it’ll all be real.

Or maybe that it won’t.

When it starts to get light, I take a long cold shower, because I’ve been thinking about Jeck again. I guess if my making the wrong decision in a dream would’ve had ramifications in the waking world, then there’s no reason that a rampaging libido shouldn’t carry over as well.

I get dressed in some old clothes I haven’t worn in years, just to try to recapture a more innocent time. White blouse, faded jeans, and hightops with this smoking jacket overtop that used to belong to my dad. It’s made of burgundy velvet with black satin lapels. A black hat, with a flat top and a bit of a curl to its brim, completes the picture.

I look in the mirror and I feel like I’m auditioning to be a stage magician’s assistant, but I don’t much care.

As soon as the hour gets civilized, I head over to Christy Riddell’s house. I’m knocking on his door at nine o’clock, but when he comes to let me in, he’s all sleepyeyed and disheveled and I realize that I should’ve given him another couple of hours. Too late for that now.

I just come right out with it. I tell him that Jilly said he knew all about lucid dreaming and what I want to know is, is any of it real—the place you dream of, the people you meet there?

He stands there in the doorway, blinking like an owl, but I guess he’s used to stranger things, because after a moment he leans against the door jamb and asks me what I know about consensual reality.

It’s where everything that we see around us only exists because we all agree it does, I say.

Well, maybe it’s the same in a dream, he replies. If everyone in the dream agrees that what’s around them is real, then why shouldn’t it be?

I want to ask him about what my dad had to say about dreams trying to escape into the waking world, but I decide I’ve already pushed my luck.

Thanks, I say.

He gives me a funny look. That’s it? he asks.

I’ll explain it some other time, I tell him.

Please do, he says without a whole lot of enthusiasm, then goes back inside.

When I get home, I go and lie down on the old sofa that’s out on my balcony. I close my eyes. I’m still not so sure about any of this, but I figure it can’t hurt to see if Jeck and I can’t find ourselves one of those happilyever-afters with which fairy tales usually end.

Who knows? Maybe I really am the daughter of the Moon. If not here, then someplace.

1

The past scampers like an alleycat through the present, leaving the pawprints of memories scattered helterskelter—here ink is smeared on a page, there lies an old photograph with a chewed corner, elsewhere still, a nest has been made of old newspapers, the headlines running one into the other to make strange declarations. There is no order to what we recall, the wheel of time follows no straight line as it turns in our heads. In the dark attics of our minds, all times mingle, sometimes literally.