Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

“You’re too late for any of this to work on me,” Isabelle told him.

“I am completely serious,” Rushkin said. “The first to die will be your friend Alan.”

“I’m serious, too,” Isabelle said.

Rushkin shook his head. “You would make a poor cardplayer, Isabelle. I see the fear written all over your face.”

“Of course I’m scared, but it’s got nothing to do with you. I’m afraid of the unknown. Of what comes next. You think I’m sleeping in that tenement studio, dreaming this, don’t you? But I’m not. I took the utility knife you were so thoughtful to leave on the worktable with the rest of those art supplies and used it to cut my throat.”

Not even conscious of the action, she lifted a hand up under her chin as she spoke and loosely held her throat as though, for all that she was separated by who knew how much time and space, she might somehow be able to stem the blood, close the wound that was killing her in the world she’d left behind.

“This dreamtime’s going to last about as long as it takes me to die,” she finished.

Rushkin stared at her aghast. “You couldn’t have ...”

“Couldn’t have what?” Isabelle countered. “Have had the courage? You can only push people so far, Rushkin. Back in that tenement studio, when I thought you’d killed John, I hit my limit.”

“But he’s not dead.”

“Doesn’t make a whole lot of difference now, does it? I still pulled the blade across my throat.”

That familiar anger woke in Rushkin’s eyes. “You’ve killed us both!” he cried.

“Christ,” Isabelle said, feeling not nearly as brave as she was trying to sound. “I sure hope so.”

The muzzle of his revolver swung away from where it had been pointing at John to center its aim on her. Looking into Rushkin’s enraged features, Isabelle realized that she wasn’t going to have the chance to bleed to death back in the tenement studio.

“No,” Rushkin said in a dark, cold voice that Isabelle knew all too well. “I won’t let you win. I will find those few numena you have hidden from me and I will feed on them. I will find another young artist and teach her to make me more. I will survive. But you won’t live to see me prosper.”

If she had to die now, Isabelle decided, she’d at least make her death worthwhile and try to take him with her.

She gave John a shove to the right and dove for Rushkin. The monster’s gun went off, the thunder of its discharge so loud in the confined space that she went partially deaf. She didn’t hear the bullet fly by her ear, but she swore she could feel the wind of its passage on her cheek.

Because of the ringing in her ears, the second gunshot wasn’t nearly as loud as the first had been, but that made little difference, for the bullet hit its target.

XIX

After almost knocking the key out of the lock in his hurry to get it to turn, Alan finally managed to get the door unlocked. He stepped back and tugged it open with such force that it banged with a loud thump against the wall, its knob knocking a hole in the cracked plaster. Marisa looked up, momentarily startled from her ministrations.

“It’s too late to worry about making noise,” Alan told her.

She nodded. “See if you can find something we can use as a stretcher.”

There was the table he’d used to break through the door, Alan thought, but it was too heavy. Then he remembered the pallet that Rushkin had been lying on. Under all those blankets, it hadn’t looked like it weighed much.

He picked up one of the unused canvases that were scattered across the floor of the room. Wedging a corner under his foot, he tugged up on it sharply until the frame broke. He repeated the action on another corner, then tore the canvas away from the length of wood he was left with. The makeshift club didn’t have a lot of heft to it, but it was better than nothing.

“Hurry!” Marisa called to him.

Alan gave a quick glance to the corner of the room where Marisa was bent over Isabelle’s still form.

Blood seemed to be everywhere. He darted out into the hallway, almost hoping he’d run into Bitterweed or Scara. He wouldn’t hesitate to strike out at them now. Because of them he was seeing the world through a red veil. Wherever he looked, superimposed over whatever his gaze settled upon was an image of the blood that had spilled from Isabelle’s throat and then welled over his own hands and forearms.

Isabelle had cut herself but it might as well have been Rushkin or his numena that had slashed her throat, since they’d driven her to it. For what they had done to Isabelle, for the threat they presented to Marisa and himself, he found himself responding with a savagery he hadn’t known he possessed.

So he was prepared for anything as he moved down the hallway, his club swinging back and forth alongside his thigh—anything, except for what he found in Rushkin’s room. The pallet was empty and neither Rushkin nor his creatures were anywhere to be found.

He felt a certain sense of disappointment as he walked slowly around the room, checking behind the door, under the narrow bed. He wanted a confrontation. He needed to have someone pay for what had happened to Isabelle.

Crouching beside the pallet, he pulled out the paintings he found there. The top one was of John. He might have thought that this was the real version of Isabelle’s The Spirit Is Strong until he realized that the background was different. No, this one belonged to Bitterweed. And under it he found the monochromic painting of Scara.

He stood the two paintings up so that they leaned against the side of the bed and stared at them through the red veil of Isabelle’s blood that he carried inside his eyes. He hesitated briefly, then lashed out with his foot and put it through Bitterweed’s painting. A sound of rushing air filled his ears. He turned to see

Scara snarling at him—not from her painting, but in the flesh. She was slashing out at him with a switchblade, but before she could cut him, he put his foot through her painting as well, falling to the floor as the second abrupt movement threw him off balance.

She screamed—a long, wailing sound that tore all the way through his anger to touch his heart.

No, he wanted to say. I didn’t mean to do this.

But it was too late. She vanished right there before his eyes in a whuft of displaced air, leaving behind only the echoes of her cry.

“Alan!” he heard Marisa shouting at him from down the hall. “Alan! Are you all right?”

He shook his head, trying to clear it.

“I’m okay!” he called back.

But he wasn’t. He felt sick all over again. This time for what he’d done—no matter if the pair had deserved it—as opposed to the wound that Isabelle had inflicted upon herself.

He disentangled the paintings from his feet and stood up. Under the heap of blankets, he discovered that the base of the pallet was an army cot. Grabbing one end, he dragged it down the hall to where he’d left Marisa with Isabelle.

“What happened?” Marisa asked as he pulled it into the room.

Alan briefly explained. He found sympathy in her eyes, but it was for him, for what he’d had to do, not for the two numena he’d so summarily dispatched. Five minutes ago, he realized, he would have felt the same.

“And Rushkin?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Gone.”

Marisa nodded. She looked down at Isabelle.

“Even with that cot to carry her on,” she said, “I don’t know how we’re going to get her out of this place.”

“We don’t have a choice,” Alan said. “If we don’t—”

Before he could finish, Marisa laid her free hand on his arm. “What’s that?” she asked, her voice dropping to a hoarse whisper.