Charles De Lint - Dreams Underfoot

“There’s not much anybody can do about it,” I said.

Except Sam. She could come back. Or maybe if I just knew she’d been real ... But that opened a whole other line of thinking that I wasn’t sure I wanted to get into again. I wanted her to have been real, I wanted her to come back, but if I accepted that, I also had to accept that ghosts were real and that the past could sneak up and steal someone from the present, taking them back into a time that had already been and gone.

Paperjack took his fortunetelling device out of the breast pocket of his jacket and gave me a questioning look. I started to shake my head, but before I could think about what I was doing, I just said,

“What the hell,” and let him do his stuff

I chose blue from the colors, because that was the closest to how I was feeling; he didn’t have any colors like confused or lost or foolish. I watched his fingers move the paper to spell out the color, then chose four from the numbers, because that’s how many strings my fiddle has. When his fingers stopped moving the second time, I picked seven for no particular reason at all.

He folded back the paper flap so I could read my fortune. All it said was: “Swallow the past.”

I didn’t get it. I thought it’d say something like that Bobby McFerrin song, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” What it did say didn’t make any sense at all.

“I don’t understand,” I told Paperjack. “What’s it supposed to mean?”

He just shrugged. Folding up the fortuneteller, he put it back in his pocket.

Swallow the past. Did that mean I was supposed to forget about it? Or ... well, swallow could also mean believe or accept. Was that what he was trying to tell me? Was he echoing July’s argument?

I thought about that photo in my fiddlecase, and then an idea came to me. I don’t know why I’d never thought of it before. I grabbed my fiddlecase and stood up.

“I ...” I wanted to thank him, but somehow the words just escaped me. All that came out was, “I’ve gotta run.”

But I could tell he understood my gratitude. I wasn’t exactly sure what he’d done, except that that little message on his fortuneteller had put together a connection for me that I’d never seen before.

Fate, I could hear Jilly saying.

Paperjack smiled and waved me off.

I followed coincidence away from Paperjack and the riverbank and back up Battersfield Road to the Newford Public Library in Lower Crowsea.

Time does more than erode a riverbank or wear mountains down into tired hills. It takes the edge from our memories as well, overlaying everything with a soft focus so that it all blurs together. What really happened gets all jumbled up with the hopes and dreams we once had and what we wish had really happened. Did you ever run into someone you went to school with—someone you never really hung around with, but just passed in the halls, or had a class with—and they act like you were the best of buddies, because that’s how they remember it? For that matter, maybe you were buddies, and it’s you that’s remembering it wrong ....

Starting some solid detective work on what happened to Sam took the blur from my memories and brought her back into focus for me. The concepts of ghosts or people disappearing into the past just got pushed to one side, and all I thought about was Sam and tracking her down; if not the Sam I had known, then the woman she’d become in the past.

My friend Amy Scallan works at the library. She’s a tall, angular woman with russet hair and long fingers that would have stood her in good stead at a piano keyboard. Instead she took up the Uillean pipes, and we play together in an onagain, offagain band called Johnny Jump Up. Matt Casey, our third member, is the reason we’re not that regular a band.

Matt’s a brilliant bouzouki and guitar player and a fabulous singer, but he’s not got much in the way of social skills, and he’s way too cynical for my liking. Since he and I don’t really get along well, it makes rehearsals kind of tense at times. On the other hand, I love playing with Amy. She’s the kind of musician who has such a good time playing that you can’t help but enjoy yourself as well. Whenever I think of Amy, the first image that always comes to mind is of her rangy frame folded around her pipes, right elbow moving back and forth on the bellows to fill the bag under her left arm, those long fingers just dancing on the chanter, foot tapping, head bobbing, a grin on her face.

She always makes sure that the gig goes well, and we have a lot of fun, so it balances out I guess.

I showed her the picture I had of Sam. There was a street number on the porch’s support pillar to the right of the steps and enough of the house in the picture that I’d be able to match it up to the real thing. If I could find out what street it was on. If the house still existed.

“This could take forever,” Amy said as she laid the photo down on the desk.

“I’ve got the time.”

Amy laughed. “I suppose you do. I don’t know how you do it, Geordie. Everyone else in the world has to bust their buns to make a living, but you just cruise on through.”

“The trick’s having a low overhead,” I said.

Amy just rolled her eyes. She’d been to my apartment, and there wasn’t much to see: a spare fiddle hanging on the wall with a couple of Dilly’s paintings; some tune books with tattered covers and some changes of clothing; one of those oldfashioned record players that had the turntable and speakers all in one unit and a few albums leaning against the side of the apple crate it sat on; a couple of bows that desperately needed rehairing; the handful of used paperbacks I’d picked up for the week’s reading from Duffy’s Used Books over on Walker Street; and a little beatup old cassette machine with a handful of tapes.

And that was it. I got by.

I waited at the desk while Amy got the books we needed. She came back with an armload. Most had Newford in the title, but a few also covered that period of time when the city was still called Yoors, after the Dutchman Diederick van Yoors, who first settled the area in the early 1800s. It got changed to Newford back around the turn of the century, so all that’s left now to remind the city of its original founding father is a street name.

Setting the books down before me on the desk, Amy went off into the stacks to look for some more obscure titles. I didn’t wait for her to get back, but went ahead and started flipping through the first book on the pile, looking carefully at the pictures.

I started off having a good time. There’s a certain magic in old photos, especially when they’re of the place where you grew up. They cast a spell over you. Dirt roads where now there was pavement, sided by office complexes. The old Brewster Theatre in its heyday—I remembered it as the place where I first saw Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan, and later allnight movie festivals, but the Williamson Street Mall stood there now. Boating parties on the river. Old City Hall—it was a youth hostel these days.

But my enthusiasm waned with the afternoon. By the time the library closed, I was no closer to getting a street name for the house in Sam’s photo than I had been when I came in. Amy gave me a sympathetic “I told you so” look when we separated on the front steps of the library. I just told her I’d see her tomorrow.

I had something to eat at Kathryn’s Cafe. I’d gone there hoping to see Jilly, only I’d forgotten it was her night off. I tried calling her when I’d finished eating, but she was out. So I took my fiddle over to the theatre district and worked the crowds waiting in line there for an a hour or so before I headed off for home, my pockets heavy with change.

That night, just before I fell asleep, I felt like a hole sort of opened in the air above my bed. Lying there, I found myself touring New—