Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

And who could truly say that one of them couldn’t become a maker? When one considered how rare the potential for the gift was in human beings, perhaps it wasn’t so odd that none of them had the talent.

None of them so far. That, she realized, would not make Cosette particularly happy, but it was probably closer to the truth than Cosette’s belief that all it required were dreams and a red crow beating its wings in one’s chest.

Rosalind set the painting back where she’d found it and retrieved her book. Holding it against her chest, she walked toward the front of the building once more, more troubled than she’d care to let on—even to herself. When she reached the door, she looked out at the city street through the small leaded panes. She’d never liked the city the way that Cosette and John did, didn’t even care to be enclosed by the walls of a building. Give her the solace of the island any day, the wind in her hair and the open sky above.

Needing to breathe, if only the noisy pollution of a city night, she stepped out onto the porch. Relief from the claustrophobia she’d been feeling was immediate. Relief from the troubling thoughts that had risen was not nearly so easy to achieve.

Have we really wasted so much of our lives? she couldn’t help but wonder. Could we not at least have tried to live for the moment the way Paddyjack does?

Out of his company for no more than a few hours and already she missed the little treeskin. She looked across the street, trying to imagine where he was, which building housed his gateway painting, how he was faring in his own guard duty. He’d be unhappy, too, but not for entirely the same reasons.

His needs were simpler. He’d miss the island and he’d be lonely. And frightened.

He had every right to be frightened. Her own fear was constant, for all that she’d hidden it so successfully from Cosette and her new friend Rolanda. What she wouldn’t give to have John here with her tonight. Nothing frightened him. Not the fact that they might not be real, not Rushkin or his creatures, nothing. Or was he merely an even better actor than she?

Rosalind sighed. She turned to go back inside, pausing when she heard a scuffle of footsteps on the sidewalk. Her heart leapt for one moment when the man first stepped into the light. She thought she’d called John to her, simply by thinking of him. But then she saw his companion, recognized her from Cosette’s description, and realized who it was that she faced. Rushkin’s creatures had come.

Panic reared up in her. She tried to keep her features expressionless, but she couldn’t hide the shock she felt when she looked at John’s doppelganger, this Bitterweed. Prepared though she’d been, it was too much of a jolt to see him in the flesh. The resemblance was beyond uncanny. It was perfect.

She managed to recover enough before they reached the porch to school her features to regain their impassivity.

“That’s far enough,” she said.

They paused there on the walk to look at her. The girl, Scara, regarded her with a feral intensity, but Bitterweed only shook his head, as though regretting what must come.

“Don’t make this harder on yourself than it already is,” he told her. “What?” she asked. “Dying? It doesn’t seem to me that there’s much to discuss when death is the only option you offer me.”

“You still have a choice,” Bitterweed told her. “You can die hard or easy.”

“That’s not worth a reply.”

“Christ,” his companion said. “Can we cut the crap?”

She started to move forward, but Bitterweed caught her arm and held her back.

“Now, Scara,” he said, reproachfully. “We can at least be polite about this.”

He looked to Rosalind and gave her a shrug as if to say, What can you do? He was trying to be charming, she realized, the way John might have, but he couldn’t pull it off the way John would have. The gesture only made him seem more pathetic to her.

“At least she’s honest,” she told the doppelganger.

“Who gives a shit what you think?” Scara said. She turned to Bitterweed. “What’re you screwing around for? Look at her. She’s all by herself and she’s not about to stop us.”

It was hard to be brave, Rosalind understood then. She’d often felt impatient with Isabelle for not standing up to Rushkin, but confronted now with the reality of her own terror, she saw how courage could so easily slip away, leaving you with nothing to hold but your fear.

“The only thing that really pisses me off,” Scara went on as though Rosalind weren’t even there, “is how that black bitch took off and left her on her own. I wanted a piece of her.”

“Why dontcha try taking a piece outta one of us, homegirl?” a new voice asked.

Neither Rosalind nor Rushkin’s creatures had heard the newcomers arrive. Rosalind felt a surge of hope that was quickly dashed as a half-dozen figures moved into the light. These were supposed to be her protectors? she thought. What had Rolanda been thinking of? The oldest couldn’t have been more than fifteen. But then she realized that while they might look like children, they were as feral in their own way as Bitterweed’s young companion.

They were dressed simply in T-shirts and hooded sweatshirts, baggy shorts and hightops. Their faces ranged from cherubic to acne-scarred. They could have stepped directly from a schoolyard recess. It was the weapons and the casual way they carried them that made Rosalind look twice. Two carried handguns that appeared massive in their small hands. One had a baseball bat with the points of a dozen long nails sticking out along its head. Two others had chains. The only one that appeared unarmed was in the front. He looked about thirteen and had an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth that he lit after snapping a flame off a match with his thumbnail.

“See,” he said after he exhaled a drag, “the thing is, this little piece of nowhere’s part of our turf tonight an’ it’d give me a real come if a couple of homes like you’d decide you wanted to take it from us.” He looked slowly from Bitterweed to Scara. “Whaddaya say, you wanna start some shit with us?”

XVI

It wasn’t the bedroom in the apartment on Waterhouse Street that Isabelle found when she opened the door to Kathy’s room, but the bedroom on Gracie Street in which Kathy had died. Kathy lay stretched across the bed, half-covered by a comforter, but she wasn’t sleeping.

She should have listened to John, Isabelle realized, and spared herself this. But now it was too late.

Now all she could do was make her numbed way through the doorway and step into another piece of the past.

Everything was the same as it had been when Isabelle had entered this same bedroom on that awful morning all those years ago. The pill bottles scattered on the hooked rug beside the bed. Kathy stretched out, her face gone an awful blue, lying there so still, not moving, not moving at all when Isabelle had called out her name, not moving when Isabelle had tried to shake the stiff body that had once housed her best friend’s soul.

And now Kathy was dead again.

Isabelle got as far as the end of the bed before she slowly sank down to the floor, arms cradled on the mattress, face pressed into the crook of one elbow. She had no idea how long she knelt there, the tears streaming down her cheeks and into the fabric of her shirtsleeve. She didn’t call Kathy’s name as she had on that other morning. She didn’t go around to the side of the bed and touch the stiff shoulder.

She heard John enter, but she couldn’t turn around to look at him. She couldn’t even lift her head.

John remained in the doorway. He didn’t speak. He was so silent at first that she couldn’t even hear him breathe. There was only the sound of the floorboards creaking as he occasionally shifted his weight from one foot to the other.