Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

No, Rolanda realized. That wasn’t John, for all that he looked to be an exact twin of Cosette’s friend. These were the other side of the coin that Cosette represented; they were Rushkin’s creatures.

Before she even realized what she was doing, Rolanda was swinging her purse. The blow caught the girl in the stomach, doubling her over. Rolanda snatched the painting from her at the same time that Shauna tackled the man who looked like John. The two of them fell on top of the girl, but she scrambled out from under them, a switchblade open in her hand. Rolanda kicked hard, her sneaker connecting with the girl’s wrist and driving it against the wall. The knife fell from the girl’s suddenly limp fingers.

“Call nine-one-one!” Rolanda cried as another of the Foundation’s workers appeared at the far end of the hall.

“Already did!” Davy called back to her.

He charged forward, jumping on the man’s back just as he was taking a swing at Shauna. Rolanda turned to the girl she’d stopped. The girl looked as though she was readying herself for another attack, but she froze when Rolanda’s attention returned to her.

“You might as well give it up,” Rolanda told her. “You’re not going anywhere now.”

The girl nursed her wrist and gave her a hard look.

“Fuck you,” she said.

And then she vanished. One instant she was crouching in the hallway, snarling at Rolanda, hate spitting from her eyes, the next she was gone with a whuft of displaced air. A half-moment behind her, the other attacker vanished as well, making Davy fall on top of Shauna. All that was left of their presence was the open switchblade lying on the carpet. And the paintings that they’d pulled down from the wall in the Foundation’s waiting room.

“What the hell ... ?” Davy said.

He rolled away from Shauna and got slowly to his feet, eyes going wide as he looked around himself.

Shauna appeared just as confused.

“This has been a seriously weird day,” she said. “First we get that girl materializing in the middle of the waiting room and now this.”

Rolanda nodded slowly.

“What’s going on, Roll?” Shauna wanted to know.

Rolanda was only vaguely paying attention to her coworkers. Instead she was thinking of what had just happened, of the irony of her giving a lecture to Alan and the others about vigilantism and then what she’d just done. She hadn’t even thought about it. Hadn’t tried to talk to the girl—not that she thought talking would have done any good with that one. But she’d just waded in, the thin veneer of being a socially responsible adult disappearing as suddenly as the two thieves had.

“Rolanda?” Shauna said when Rolanda didn’t respond. She stepped closer, a worried look crossing her features. “Did that girl hurt you?”

Rolanda blinked, then slowly shook her head. “No. I’m just—shocked, I guess, at how easily I was willing to forgo trying to negotiate with them and just hit back.”

“Hey, they were asking for it,” Davy said.

“I suppose.”

The wail of an approaching police siren gave them a moment’s pause. The police would be here soon.

“What do we tell them?” Shauna asked, turning to Rolanda. “Do you know what’s going on?”

“I think we should just tell them that we managed to chase the thieves away,” Rolanda said.

She leaned the painting she was still holding against the wall and retrieved the other from where it had fallen. Neither of them seemed the worse for their short misadventure.

“And maybe store these away someplace safe,” she added. At least until she heard that Alan and the others had managed to deal with Rushkin and knew it would be okay to hang them again.

Jesus, she thought. She was already siding with Alan and the others, ready, she realized, to condone the murder of another human being. The knowledge scared her, but she couldn’t make the feeling go away. All she had to do was remember the killing look in that girl’s eyes and think of it being turned on Cosette or some other innocent. What could the police do in a situation such as this?

“Fine,” Shauna said. “That’s what we’ll tell the cops. But you know more than you’re letting on.”

Rolanda chose her words carefully. “If I knew anything that would make what just happened here easier to believe, trust me, I’d tell you.”

There. That wasn’t an actual lie. What Shauna and Davy had just witnessed was unbelievable enough. If she related everything that she knew, it would only seem more unbelievable.

“But what we just saw,” Davy said. “I mean, people can’t just vanish like that ... can they?”

Happily the police arrived at that moment and Rolanda didn’t have to reply. They explained the situation to the two officers and then locked away the paintings in a storeroom in the basement. Rolanda tucked the key into the pocket of her jeans. She could tell that both Shauna and Davy wanted to talk more about what had happened, but once they’d all trooped back upstairs to the Foundation’s offices, business went on and they were soon too swamped with the usual crises to worry about something so exotic as thieves who could vanish. There were children to be fed and clothed, beds to be found for them, social workers and lawyers to contact on their behalf.

For Shauna and Davy, the mystery slipped between the cracks of yet one more hectic day. But Rolanda watched the clock all afternoon, willing Alan to pick up a phone wherever he was and contact her. And then, when the day was done and she’d made her excuses to Shauna and Davy, who wanted to talk about it some more, when she was finally alone and ready to go up to her apartment, she found that all that she could think about were the paintings locked up in the cellar. What if the thieves came back?

What if they were successful this time?

She ended up making herself a thermos of coffee and a couple of sandwiches and took them down to the basement. She went back upstairs to get herself a chair, the cordless roam-phone from Shauna’s office and a baseball bat. Then she sat down and waited. For the phone to ring. For the thieves to return.

For something to happen.

By the time a sudden hammering arose, knuckles rapping on a hollow wooden door, her nerves were completely on edge. She jumped upright, the baseball bat slipping from her hand to bounce off the floor.

She retrieved it quickly and stood with the bat in her hands, staring around the basement in nervous confusion. That was when she realized that the knocking was coming from inside the storeroom.

VI

The farther Cosette led them into the Tombs, the more Alan began to question the wisdom of what they were doing. While it was true that Isabelle was in danger and he wanted to help her, he was growing less and less certain of what it was that he had to offer in terms of help. Never having been in a fight in his life, never having had to use physical force of any kind before, he wasn’t exactly cut out for the role of the hero in a situation such as this. They hadn’t even confronted Rushkin or his creatures yet, and his nerves were already shot from anticipation of what would happen when they did.

“I’m beginning to think Rolanda was right,” he said to Marisa, walking beside him. “Maybe we should have called in the police.”

“But you said it yourself, they’re not going to believe any of this. By the time we could convince them it was real—just saying we ever could, which I doubt—it’d probably be too late.”

“But Rolanda was right when she said that Isabelle being kidnapped would be real enough for them.”

“Well, I hate to bring this up,” Marisa told him, “but at this moment you’re not exactly a model citizen in their eyes, are you? If things got out of control, if anything was to happen to Isabelle before we could help her, they’d probably try to blame both it and Mully’s death on you.”