Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

To her, Waterhouse Street was the beau ideal to which the rest of society should aspire; and perhaps that was why, when the harsh reality of the outside world did intrude to leave its mark upon their lives, Izzy always took it as a personal betrayal.

VIII

The most awful thing’s happened,” Kathy said as she tossed her coat onto the empty seat and slid into the booth beside Izzy.

They were meeting for dinner in Perry’s Diner at the corner of Lee and Waterhouse, a favorite hangout for the neighborhood because not only was the food good, it was cheap. Izzy had been drawing the people at the bus stop outside the window while she waited for Kathy to arrive, practicing three-quarter profiles. She set her sketch pad aside at Kathy’s arrival.

“What?” she asked.

“Do you remember Rochelle—Peter’s girlfriend?”

Izzy nodded. “Sure. She’s promised to model for me when she gets some spare time. I think she has the most amazing bone structure.”

“Yeah, well, some other people weren’t quite so artistically inclined in their appreciation of her bod.”

“What are you talking about?”

“She was beaten and raped, Izzy. Three guys pulled her into a car while she waiting for the number sixteen by Butler Green. They dumped her back there early this morning—just rolled her out of the car and left her lying on the pavement.”

“Oh my god. Poor Rochelle ....”

“It just makes me sick to think that there are people like that in the world,” Kathy said. She pulled a paper napkin from its holder and methodically began to shred it.

“Have the police been able to—”

“The police! Don’t make me laugh. What they put her through ...” Kathy looked away, out the window, but not before Izzy saw the tears brimming in her roommate’s eyes. Kathy cleared her throat.

“They might as well have been in on it for all the compassion they showed her. Jilly was at the hospital when they were questioning her and she was furious, so that should tell you something.”

Izzy nodded. Jilly simply didn’t get angry—or at least not so as Izzy had ever seen. She could be passionate, but it was as though she didn’t have a temper to lose in the first place.

“What about Jilly’s friend?” Izzy asked. “That guy she knows on the police force—Leonard, or Larry something. Couldn’t he do anything?”

“Lou. He’s going to look into it for her, but he’s only a sergeant and there’s nothing he can really do about the way the other cops treated Rochelle. It was like a big joke to them. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Lou told Jilly that if they ever do pick these guys up, their lawyer’s going to treat Rochelle even worse once they get into court. Jilly says Rochelle is devastated; she just wishes she’d never reported it in the first place.”

“But that’s so wrong.”

“No,” Kathy said. “It’s evil—that’s what it is.” The little heap of torn paper on the table in front of her grew as she started on another napkin. “What’s really scary is that this kind of thing’s going on all the time. I guess it doesn’t really hit home until it happens to someone you know.”

“It doesn’t always seem so real until you can put a face to the victim,” Izzy agreed.

“Pathetic, isn’t it? We’re letting these sick freaks take over the world, Izzy. Sometimes I think they’re already starting to outnumber us.” She let the last pieces of shredded napkin fall from her fingers. “Maybe Lovecraft was right.”

“Who?”

“He was this writer back in the thirties who used to write about these vast alien presences that haunt the edges of our world, trying to get back in. They exert this influence on us to make us act like shits and try to convince us to open these cosmic gates through which they can come back. The closer we get to their return, the worse the world gets.” She gave Izzy a sad look. “Sometimes I think they’re due back any day now.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Probably. But something’s gone wrong with the world, don’t you think? Every year we lose a little more ground to the bad guys. Five years ago, you didn’t have to worry about waiting for a bus at Butler Green. You could walk through most parts of the city, day or night, and not have to worry; now that’s unthinkable. We’ve loosed something evil in the world—maybe not you or me, personally, but if we don’t fight the problem, then we’re as much a part of it.”

“I don’t know if I can believe in evil existing of and by itself,” Izzy said. “It seems to be that everybody’s made up of a mix of good and bad and what sets us apart are the decisions we make as to which we’ll be.”

“So you can see something good in a child abuser? Or these guys that attacked Rochelle? You could forgive people like that?”

Izzy shook her head. “No. No, I couldn’t.”

“Me neither,” Kathy said glumly. “Rochelle’s only allowed visitors in the afternoons. You want to come see her with me tomorrow?”

“I’ve only got one class,” Izzy said. “I’ll be finished by four.”

Kathy pushed her little heap of torn paper aside and picked up a menu. She looked at it for a moment, then shut it again.

“I don’t have any appetite,” she said. “I can’t eat because my stomach’s all in knots, just thinking about what happened to Rochelle.”

Izzy closed her own menu. She tried to imagine what Rochelle had gone through last night, how she’d be feeling today, and felt sick herself. “Let’s just go home,” she said.

That night Izzy’s dreams were particularly bad. When she entered Rushkin’s studio, there were dead people strewn in among the ruin of her artwork, the subjects of her paintings given physical form and then cut and burned with the same methodical brutality that had been employed to destroy her art. She woke before dawn, weeping into her pillow, and couldn’t fall asleep again. By seven o’clock, she was dressed and out the door, heading for the studio, where everything was as unchanged as it had been when she left except that she could tell from the canvas on Rushkin’s easel that he’d continued working long after she’d left the coach house the previous thy.

Yesterday, he had barely sketched in his main subject; today, a completed painting was drying on the easel.

IX

Your friend is quite correct,” Rushkin said when Izzy brought up the idea of pure evil and pure good later in the morning. “And that is why you and I must proceed with such care in our endeavors. We are haunted by angels and monsters, Isabelle. We call them to us with our art—from the great beyond, perhaps, or from within ourselves, from some inner realm that we all share and visit only in our dreams and through our art, I’m not sure which. But they do exist. They can manifest.”

Izzy gave a nervous laugh. “Don’t act so serious about it. You’re starting to give me the creeps.”

“Good. For this is a serious business. Evil is on the ascendant in these times. What we create, what we bring forth, counteracts it, but we must be very careful. The very act of creating an angel opens the door for the monsters as well.”

“But we’re just ... just painting pictures.”

“Most of the time, yes,” Rushkin agreed. He laid down his brush and joined her where she was taking a break. She was lazing in the windowseat that over-looked the lane running by the coach house and pulled her legs up to her chest to give him room to sit. “But we aspire to more,” Rushkin added. “We aspire to great works in which the world may revel and find solace. Those works tap into that alchemical secret I wish to share with you, but the formula is so precise, one’s will and intent must be so focused, that without the vocabulary we are building up between us, I would never be able to teach it to you.”