Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

“This’ll be so perfect,” Kathy said as they stood back to admire their handiwork. “When the sun comes up to hit all those streamers, it’s going to look seriously gorgeous.”

Isabelle couldn’t imagine it looking any more magnificent than it already did.

“I hope somebody brought a camera,” Kathy added.

“I saw Meg earlier,” Isabelle assured her when she was finally able to tear her gaze from the light show of the streamers.

Meg Mullally was a photographer friend of theirs who never went anywhere without a camera or two slung over her shoulder. What with Kathy’s surname being Mully, Alan used to kid them that they had to be related somewhere back in the dim corridors of antiquity.

“I know there’s tons of people here tonight,” Jack said as they started back, “and they’re probably all over the place by now, but I can’t shake the feeling that there’s somebody else out here with us as well.”

“What kind of somebody?” Kathy asked, obviously intrigued.

“I don’t know. Somebody old and mysterious.” Isabelle could hear the embarrassment in his voice.

“Maybe ...” He cleared his throat. “Maybe, you know ... not quite human. It’s like I can feel somebody watching me, but whenever I turn around, there’s no one there. No one that I can see, at least. But I can still feel them there, watching me.”

He was sensing her numena, Isabelle realized. Time to change the subject. But before she could, Kathy piped up, her voice pitched low and serious.

“Well, the island is supposed to be haunted,” she said. “Didn’t anyone tell you?”

“Haunted?”

Isabelle gave Kathy a poke with her elbow, but Kathy pretended she didn’t feel it and simply went on.

“It’s like there are ghosts or faeries in the woods,” she said. “We don’t know what. We just know there’s something out there.”

“Yeah, right,” Jack said, and then he laughed, but Isabelle could sense a vague nervousness behind the sound. “You sound like Jilly now.” So much for his tough-guy image, she thought.

“Believe what you like,” Kathy told him.

“So have you ever, you know, seen anything?” Jack asked.

Or maybe he’s just stoned, Isabelle amended. Lord knows with the quantities of alcohol and hallucinogens being consumed tonight people would be liable to see anything. She felt a little stoned herself, rather than drunk, even though all she’d had was a couple of beers in the afternoon and then the mystery punch with her dinner.

“Well, once,” Kathy began, and then she launched into an improbable tale that borrowed as heavily from Hawthorne as it did a tabloid.

Since they’d reached the farmhouse at that point, Isabelle left them to it. She went inside, walking around and talking to people until she found herself in her studio. The bracelet she’d made from Paddyjack’s ribbons drew her attention, pulsing where it hung on the wall with the same energy as the Maypole’s streamers. She looked at it for a long moment, then took it down from the wall and put it on her wrist. She moved her arm back and forth a few times, tracking the afterimages the bracelet left, then finally went back outside again.

She stood on the porch for a long moment, trying to pinpoint exactly what it was she was feeling at the moment. Her senses seemed to have expanded, assuming far more intensity than normal, and it was getting hard to concentrate on any one thing.

Don’t go all stupid now, she told herself and walked over to the far end of the porch to rescue Alan from the attention of Denise Martin. Denise was a second-year drama student at Butler U., a beautiful, lanky eighteen-year-old with flowing blonde hair that was tied back in a French braid tonight. Ever since she’d been introduced to Alan at a party last year she’d had a mad crush on him that wasn’t reciprocated.

“I like her well enough,” Alan had confided to Isabelle and Kathy one afternoon when they were having a picnic in Fitzhenry Park, “but I just can’t relate to her on a romantic level. She’s just so young.

We don’t have anything in common.”

“A seven-year difference in age isn’t exactly a May-December kind of a thing,” Kathy had told him.

“So you go out with her.”

“She’s not exactly my type,” Kathy had said, and they all laughed.

Denise drifted away when Isabelle showed up and put her arm in the crook of Alan’s. As they talked, Isabelle looked across the farmyard to where Kathy and Jack were standing. Kathy was leaning with her back against the clapboard of the farmhouse. Jack was in front of her, one stiff arm supporting his weight against the wall as he leaned in close to talk to her. Kathy looked more bored than uncomfortable, but Isabelle decided to go over to them anyway.

“I think Kathy needs rescuing now,” she said.

She gave Alan a quick peck on the cheek and crossed the farmyard. The walk seemed to take forever. Every single thing her attention happened to fall upon was intimately distracting. When she realized that she’d slowed down so much she was almost motionless, she gave her head a quick shake and purposefully closed the distance between herself and the place where Kathy and Jack were standing.

“Come here,” she told Kathy. “I’ve got somebody I want you to meet.”

Kathy gave Jack a regretful look and happily followed Isabelle back across the farmyard. They paused when they saw Jack head off toward the cove.

“Well, I thought you and Jack were getting quite close there for a while,” Isabelle teased.

“Oh please. Do you know why he and Sophie broke up?”

“Well, I suppose it’s because they don’t really have that much in common,” Isabelle tried.

“Think again. It’s because all he ever wants to do is tattoo you.”

Isabelle laughed. “So what was he going to do for you? A rose on your ankle?”

“Would you believe a dragon on my inner thigh?”

Isabelle laughed even harder.

“Serves you right,” she finally said when she caught her breath. “The way you were going on about faeries and ghosts.”

“But there are mysterious presences on the island, ma belle Izzy.”

“Touche.”

“It’s not like I—”

“Oh wait,” Isabelle broke in. “There’s that guy again.”

Before Kathy could say anything, Isabelle bolted after the figure she’d glimpsed walking off behind the barn. Kathy started to follow, then shook her head and went into the farmhouse to get a beer instead.

“Hey, wait up!” Isabelle called as she rounded the corner of the barn but when she made the turn, no one was there.

Isabelle leaned against the side of the barn, brought up short by a sudden spell of vertigo. She stood there for a long moment, eyes closed, but that only seemed to make things worse. Weird patterns of light played against the backs of her eyelids, making her dizzier than ever. She staggered away from the barn, stumbling through the wild rosebushes until she had to lie down in the grass.

She might have lain there among the shadows of the rosebushes for minutes, or it might have been hours—she had no idea which. Time had ceased to feel linear. She looked up through the crisscrossing branches, thick with buds, into the night sky. The stars tugged at her gaze, trying to pull her up among them, or she was pulling them down to her. She was on the verge of some great discovery, she realized, but she had no idea what it was, what it related to, whether it even had anything to do with her at all.

Was she a participant, or an observer? Did the world center around her, or could it carry on quite easily without her input? Looking up at those stars, feeling the embrace of their light as it enfolded her, she felt both small and large, as though everything mattered and nothing did. When someone crouched down beside her it took years for her to turn her head to see who it was. All she could make out was a dark shape, a vague outline of head and shoulders silhouetted against the stars, the rest of the body lost in the shadows of the rosebushes.