Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

Finally Isabelle raised her head. She looked down the length of the bed, but the corpse’s shoulders, covered by the comforter, blocked her view. She couldn’t see Kathy’s face from here, but she remembered all too well the emptiness in it, the vitality drained from those solemn grey eyes and once mobile features, the blue of her skin. Isabelle wiped her eyes on a dry part of her sleeve and cleared her throat.

“Rushkin said he could bring her back,” she said after a moment. “I know. I heard him tell you.”

“Could he really do it?”

When John didn’t reply, Isabelle slowly turned to look at him. “It’s possible,” John finally said.

Isabelle nodded. Of course. The deeper she got into all of this the borders between what was possible and what wasn’t seemed to stretch further and further apart.

“As a numena,” she said, filling in what she thought John wasn’t telling her. “As someone that looks like her, but isn’t her.”

John shook his head. “Remember what I told you about this place. Things that happen here reflect back into the world we’ve left behind. Rushkin might well know a way to revive her here and then give her safe passage back. There’s more that we don’t know about than we do.”

“But he’s not God.”

“No,” John agreed. “He’s a far cry from God.” He paused, then added, “Things are true here—that’s something you can’t forget. Whether it’s an echo of the world we’ve temporarily left behind that’s strayed here with us, or something we do that gets reflected back. It’s all true.”

Isabelle pushed herself up from the mattress and stood. She didn’t look at the body on the bed behind her, but faced John instead.

“I think I might hate Rushkin for that offer of his even more than for everything he’s done to me or the others.”

John nodded and she saw that he understood. That he realized how hard it was for her to refuse Rushkin’s bargain. She took a deep breath and wiped her eyes again, then stepped past John into the hallway behind him. She didn’t look back into the room. John regarded the body for a moment, then slowly closed the bedroom door and followed her into the living room of the Waterhouse Street apartment.

Neither of them remarked on the impossibility of that other bedroom being here in this apartment. By now it was all part and parcel of the strangeness that had overtaken them, from Isabelle looking the way she had twenty years ago—right down to her old monochromic black wardrobe—to the juxta-positioning of the normal relationships of space and time.

When they returned to Isabelle’s old bedroom, she opened up the closet to look for warmer clothes.

Black boots. Black parka. Black scarf and gloves. She put the outerwear on mechanically, her attention fixed on some distant, invisible thing that only she could see. John leaned against the wall, watching her dress, concern plain in his eyes.

“Are you going to be all right?” he asked when she was ready to go. Isabelle responded with a tired look that couldn’t begin to encompass the numb, lost feeling that she held inside.

“I don’t think of being ‘all right’ as an option anymore,” she said. “All I want to do now is get through this. I want it over with and finished, once and for all.”

John nodded. “And after?”

“We don’t know that there’s going to be an after, do we?” she replied. Her gaze settled on his, still lost, still weary. John nodded again, then led the way outside.

They used the front door of the apartment this time, descending to street level by the stairs. The cold air hit them with a blast of wind-driven snow when they stepped outside.

“We have to make a stop on the way,” John told her.

“Whatever.”

When they moved off the porch, he paused to brush the snow away from the brick border of the small garden that ran the length of the walkway. He kicked at one of the bricks until the frozen grip of the surrounding dirt was loosened enough for him to pick it up. Isabelle watched him without comment.

On Lee Street, he used the brick to break the window of the door of a pawnshop. Ignoring the klaxon alarm that resulted, he quickly opened the door and stepped inside. He moved purposefully, collecting a handgun and a box of shells from behind the store counter. They were already blocks away by the time they heard the answering wail of a police siren, but neither of them was worried. The wind was erasing their footprints almost as fast as they could make them and they were far enough away that it was unlikely the police would connect them to the robbery and stop them.

“Will that actually do any good?” Isabelle asked as they paused in a doorway so that he could load the gun.

John inserted the last shell, then closed the cylinder. He wiped the snow that had collected on the metal against the inside of his jacket before sticking the handgun into the waistband of his jeans.

“I told you before,” he said. “Rushkin can die here—but only if you bring him into this dreamtime.”

“You said that before, but I don’t know how to do it.”

“Concentrate on him. On his being in the studio. Call to him. But be careful not to give away our intentions.”

For the rest of the way to Stanton Street Isabelle tried to do just that. She ducked her head against the wind and snow and shuffled along at John’s side, trying to disregard the enormity of what they were about to do, to address her attention to one thing at a time. First she’d try to put Rushkin in the coach-house studio, then she’d consider what came next.

She concentrated on Rushkin, but not on the man she remembered studying under. It was impossible to hide the hatred connected to those memories. She focused instead on the artist who had created The Movement of Wings, the painting that had first inspired her to become an artist herself, to stick with it, despite the obstacles in her path. It was easier to do than she’d expected. Even with all the horrible memories she had of Rushkin, she was still able to divorce the man from his art, the darkness from the genius. She could still call up the warmth and affection she had for his work and then, through it, the artist himself.

She was so intent on what she was doing that she didn’t realize that they’d arrived at Stanton Street until John stopped and caught her by the arm. She looked up to find that they were in the laneway leading down to the coach house. Ahead of them, through the falling snow, she could see the warm lights of the studio.

“There’s only the one entrance, right?” John asked.

Isabelle nodded. “You have to go outside by the stairs to get into the down-stairs apartment.”

“Wait here,” John told her.

He slipped away before she could object, moving like a ghost through the blurred curtains of snow.

She watched him circle the building, looking in each ground-floor window. When he started up the stairs, she hurried to join him. He turned, but the look on her face killed any attempt he might have made for her to wait outside.

If she was going to be responsible for what happened here tonight, she’d decided, she was going to be fully responsible. There was no more room in what little life she might still have left to once again let someone else shoulder her obligations. She had to be accountable.

She didn’t have nearly John’s silent grace, but the thick snow on the stairs and the howling wind muffled any noise she made. When they reached the door, John carefully tried the knob. It turned effortlessly under his hand. He looked over his shoulder at her and she nodded to tell him she was ready—at least as ready as anyone could be in a situation such as this. John gave her a look that was meant to be reassuring, to instill confidence, but it wasn’t enough to comfort her. He turned back to the door. Drawing the handgun from the waistband of his jeans, he shouldered the door open and entered fast, crouched low, holding the gun in front of him with both hands and aiming it in a wide sweep across the studio.