Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

“But it’s so strange,” she went on. “He looks just like the fellow in my painting here.”

“You must not see him again.”

“What?”

Izzy had been so taken with her encounter in the lane earlier, and in subsequently comparing John to her painting, that she hadn’t really been paying much attention to Rushkin since she’d arrived. She looked up now to see him glowering at her. The fear that had been absent when she’d met John returned now, but John wasn’t the cause of it.

“I ... I’m sorry,” Izzy said. “I didn’t mean to be rude.”

And as she spoke, she could hear the last thing John had said to her, the words echoing in her mind: Be careful, Isabelle.— What did he know?

The anger left Rushkin’s face, not without some obvious effort upon his part to calm down. He regarded her now with what was merely a stern expression, but Izzy was unable to relax. She stuck her hands in her pockets to keep them from trembling.

“Do you remember what I told you about angels and monsters?” he asked.

Izzy nodded slowly. “But what’s that got to do with anything?”

“It has to do with everything,” Rushkin replied. “Come, let us sit down.”

He led the way to the windowseat, where Izzy had seen him standing earlier. The bunched knots in Izzy’s neck and shoulders started to ease when she realized that they were only going to talk. She gave the lane a hopeful glance as she sat down, but John was long gone. Although Rushkin noted what she was doing, he made no comment.

“The ancient Hellenes,” he said instead, “believed in the Garden of the Muses as well.”

“The who?” Izzy said, not wanting to break in, but also wanting to make sure she knew what they were talking about. There were often times when the train of Rushkin’s conversation grew so arcane that she was left more confused after they’d talked than before they’d begun.

Rushkin didn’t take offense at the interruption. “The Greeks. They themselves never used the word

‘Greeks.’ That was a Roman invention.”

“Oh.”

“They considered themselves to be descendants of Hellen, the son of Deucalion, the Greek Noah.

When he navigated his ark and landed his passengers on the top of Mount Parnassus, he brought them to the heart of the Garden of the Muses—the home of Apollo. Now one can either take such a story at face value, or consider it a metaphor, but what can’t be denied is that the Hellenes believed that the world abounded in deities, all of whom had their place of origin in this holy garden.”

“Sort of like Eden?” Izzy tried.

Rushkin shook his head. “No one was cast out of this garden. Its inhabitants were free to come and go as they pleased between it and our world. We might call them spirits and the Hellenes believed that they touched upon every facet of our lives. Every country lane and mountain, every river and tree had its own spirit with which we might commune. Every endeavor of man had its patron spirit.”

Although her grasp of classical mythology was undoubtedly not on a par with Rushkin’s, Izzy at least didn’t feel quite so lost. Yet.

“It was through their arts,” Rushkin continued, “they could call these spirits to them. Their presence was considered a great blessing—which we can still see from the stunning display of art that the Hellenes left behind—but those spirits were also responsible for the great wars between the Greeks and the Persians and that which finally decimated their culture, when they went to war with Lacedaemonians—you might know them better as the Spartans.”

Izzy nodded in agreement. She had heard of Sparta, though she’d always been a little fuzzy on the context beyond an adjectival use to describe austere lifestyles.

“Before their downfall,” Rushkin went on, “from artists of great genius to merchants trading in commodities which only happened to be art, theirs was an era of glory; their art, the perfect marriage between inspiration and technique. We have had too few of them in the history of the human race.”

“And ... and this is another?” Izzy asked, wondering if that was what he was leading up to. Living on Waterhouse Street as she did, and from the explosion in all fields of the arts that had begun at the tail end of the sixties, she could easily believe it.

But Rushkin shook his head. “No. I waited forty years to find someone who had the potential to learn and use this gift. It might be another forty years, or even longer, before another could be found. But that will be your concern, not mine.”

“My concern.”

“When the time comes for you to pass on the knowledge I am giving you.”

Izzy wasn’t so sure she was at all interested in teaching anybody anything, but she gave a dutiful, if uncertain, nod of agreement. Rushkin fixed her with a long, considering look before he finally finished up with, “So you see why we must take such great care as to what spirits we invite into this world with our art.”

Now that, Izzy thought, seemed to come right out of left field and all she could do was shake her head. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I don’t see it at all. What do the ancient Greeks or Hellenes or whatever you want to call them—what do their beliefs have to do with us?”

“They made the same covenant with the spirits from beyond that we do,” Rushkin explained. “As the Hellenes did, we connect with those spirits through our art; if they agree with our renderings of them, the art allows them to cross over.”

“You’re talking about real ... what? Ghosts? Spirits?”

“Yes,” Rushkin said patiently. “Angels and monsters. Beings capable of leaving great good in their wake, but also those that may leave great evil.”

“Please don’t take this wrong,” Izzy said. Her nervousness came back and made her mouth go dry.

She had to swallow a couple of times before she went on. “But this is all a little hard to accept, you know?”

“I thought exactly the same thing when it was explained to me.”

“Well, good.”

“But you have felt the spirit growing in some of your paintings, haven’t you?” he went on. “That sense of connecting with something beyond human scope, of reaching into some mysterious beyond—call it the Garden of the Muses, for convenience. I know you have felt yourself reaching into it and returning with something more in hand, some ... power independent of yourself or the painting on your easel.”

“I’ve felt ... something,” Izzy said cautiously.

“Then trust me in this. When I saw that spirit in the flesh, when I saw him accost you in the lane below this window, I knew immediately that he means you harm. How he will harm you, I can’t say. It might occur today, it might occur a year from now, but he means you ill. This I can guarantee.”

“So what are you telling me?”

“You must not allow him in your company.”

“Just like that.”

Rushkin nodded. “And we must destroy your painting. He will not die with it—not immediately—but it is all that ties him to this world. With the painting gone, he will be drawn back to wherever it was that he initially originated and no longer pose a threat.”

Izzy stared at her mentor with openmouthed shock. She thought of her recent dream, the charred and bloodied limbs strewn in between the destruction of her paintings, and started to feel sick.

“You ... you can’t be serious,” she said.

“I am most deadly serious.”

But Izzy was shaking her head. “Absolutely not,” she said. “No way. I will not destroy my work because of some crazy story.”

She was so upset that she didn’t care if Rushkin’s own temper flared or not, but her mentor only nodded, accepting her reaction with a calmness that Izzy found a little eerie.