Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

Isabelle’s throat was suddenly dry. The exhilaration, the freedom she’d felt when she’d finally taken matters into her own hands and followed in Kathy’s footsteps, had utterly drained away. It had seemed as though there’d been no other choice at the time. Now all she could see was choices. Had it been this way for Kathy as well? First the exhilaration of finally having done it, and then the regret when it was too late?

“I ... killed myself,” she finished in a small voice.

“You cut yourself,” John corrected. “Badly. But you’re not dead yet. If you were, we wouldn’t be here.”

“I’m alive?”

Isabelle’s relief was immeasurable.

“For now. We don’t know how badly you’re hurt. And we can’t judge your survival by how long we spend here since time moves differently in a maker’s dream. It’s like fairyland. We could be here for hours while only a moment passes in the world we left.”

“I see.”

And she did. Nothing was free. She’d gained the knowledge of a new level of enchantment, but she’d only gained it when she might no longer be able to use it beyond this one last time.

“Have I always been able to do this?” she asked. “Could I have come here whenever I wanted to?”

“Ever since you became a maker.”

“But why didn’t I know?”

“I thought you did.”

Isabelle gave him a blank look. “But the only other time I’ve ever done it was almost twenty years ago.”

“Are you so sure about that?”

“Of course I’m sure. I’d know, don’t you think?”

John shrugged. “So you never dream?”

“Well, of course I dream. It’s just ...”

Her voice trailed off. Yes, she dreamed. Very vivid dreams, often peopled with the numena she’d brought across from the before. Horrors courtesy of Rushkin for a while, but then later, other, mundane dreams in which she simply interacted with her numena. She just hadn’t been aware of a difference between what she now realized had been maker’s dreams and ordinary ones. And they’d all stopped, after the fire. After she shut herself off from the alchemy that Rushkin had taught her and refused to bring any more numena across.

“Why did I never dream of you again?” she asked. “Why did I never bring you back into one of those dreams?”

“I can’t answer that for you,” John said.

Isabelle nodded slowly. He couldn’t but she could.

“It’s because I shut you out of my life,” she said. “I wanted you back, but I wanted you on my own terms and I guess some part of me realized that you can’t do that. I would have had to take you as you are, or not at all.”

“But you didn’t forget me entirely,” John said. “Sometimes a maker’s dreams are prescient, or at least the patterns in them reflect on life and repeat toward certain meanings.” He held up the bracelet of woven cloth that was on his wrist. “Like colored cloth.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s one of the pattern that keeps repeating in your life: the bright clothes that Kathy always wore, Paddyjack’s ribbons from which you made these bracelets, the Maypole dance that was never consummated because of the fire. Even the abstract designs on your canvases that replaced your realistic paintings.”

“But what does the pattern mean?” Isabelle asked.

“I can’t answer that for you either, but I do know that if you hadn’t made me this bracelet, you wouldn’t have been able to trust who I was after you’d met Bitterweed. We might never have come here, to this moment. We might never have had the chance to finally put an end to the shadow that’s hung over us for most of our lives.”

“You’re losing me again,” Isabelle said, but it wasn’t true. She knew exactly what he meant. She simply couldn’t face it.

“We have to go to his studio,” John said. “Now. Tonight. Here, in this dream. We might never get another chance.”

“But—”

“He’s not protected from me here, Isabelle. He told me as much himself.” He bowed his head, staring at the floor. “I carry as much guilt around with me as you do. I could have finished him that night in the snow, but I was too hurt and too full of pride. I chose to turn my back on you. It was your fight, I told myself, not mine, and because of that decision hundreds have died. I won’t let that happen again.”

Isabelle shook her head. “It wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have known things would turn out the way they did.”

“But I did know. I had only to look at Rushkin, to know the honors he was capable of committing.”

“But to just kill a person in cold blood ..”

John lifted his head to look at her. “He’s not a person. He’s a monster.”

“I still couldn’t do it,” Isabelle said.

“I’m not asking you to. I’m the warrior, the hunter. All I’m asking you to do is to accompany me to his studio. There, where his connection to you and this dreaming is strongest, you can call him across and he’ll have no choice but to come.”

“Think of the dead,” John said. “Think of all those who might yet die at his hand. If you die, all he has to do is find another artist with the potential to be a maker. Your kind are rare, I’ll grant you that, but not so rare that he won’t be able to track down another—Barb, for one.”

Think of the dead, Isabelle thought. She turned to look at the door of her bedroom. Kathy was alive somewhere beyond it—either in the living room or in her own bedroom. Sleeping, probably, at this time of night. But maybe still awake, propped up in her bed with the inevitable book or notepad on her lap.

If she could only see her one last time ...

“All right,” Isabelle said. “I’ll go with you to the studio and I’ll try to call him to us. But first I’ve got to do one thing.”

John put his hand on her arm as she started to rise. “This is dreamtime,” he said. “Not the past. Not the reality you remember of how things should be on this night, at this time. You might not find what you’re looking for.”

“I still have to try,” Isabelle said. “I have to see her. Even if she’s just sleeping. All I want to do is look at her and see her being alive again.”

John let his hand drop. “I’ll wait for you here,” he said.

Isabelle stood up. Crossing the bedroom, she paused with her hand on the doorknob.

“I won’t be long,” she said.

But in the end, John had to go looking for her.

XV

As she waited for Rolanda’s friends to arrive, Rosalind wandered aimlessly through the ground-floor rooms of the Newford Children’s Foundation. On Rolanda’s desk she came upon a small oil painting that she recognized as Cosette’s work. It was crudely rendered—Cosette always seemed to be in such a hurry to get the image down—but powerful all the same. As powerful in its own way as any of Isabelle’s work.

Rosalind laid down her ever-present book to pick up the painting and study it more closely. She remembered what Cosette had told her about Isabelle. She said we’ve been real all along.

Just as John had always insisted.

That she made us real with the love she put into bringing us across.

Could it be true? Had they spent all these years yearning to be what they could never be instead of embracing what they were?

That we’ll never have red crows or dreams, because all we get is the real we have now.

And was that such a terrible thing? What were blood and dreams anyway but another way of describing aspirations and mortality? She and the others were certainly mortal and they were filled with hopes and ambitions. They had talent. Bajel’s poetry didn’t lack heart. Nor did the sculptures of found objects that Paddyjack constructed high in the trees and barn rafters back on Wren Island. Cosette’s art was rushed, but not without emotive potency.