Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

“But you ... you said you were teaching me how to do that.”

Izzy felt a little odd as she spoke. She didn’t believe, but she felt cheated at the same time to learn that this calling up of spirits was no longer possible.

“I was,” Rushkin said. “I am. I still will. You see, I can remember how I did it, but I have lost the ability to do so. Lost the gift. But you have not. It lies strong inside you. So I was copying those pieces of yours in hopes of building a bridge to that other place to see if I could regain what I had lost by seeing how you did it.

“And?” Izzy asked, forgetting for the moment how she felt about the whole idea. “Did it work?”

Rushkin shook his head. “No. All that resulted was exact duplicates of your work. After each attempt, I destroyed them.”

Izzy frowned, thinking this all through. “So the painting can call up spirits—spirits that can physically manifest in our world.”

“Yes.”

“And do they become real, then?”

“What do you mean?”

“Once they’re here in our world,” Izzy asked. “Are they real like you and me?”

“They become real, but not like you or I,” Rushkin told her. “There remains a bond in them to that place from which they originated so that they always carry a piece of otherness inside. They might seem like you or I, but they don’t have our needs. They require neither food, nor sleep. They don’t dream.

And because they can’t dream, they are unable to create.”

“And it’s just people that come across?” Izzy asked.

“Beings,” Rushkin said. “Yes. However, they won’t necessarily seem like people. They have the same source as legend and myth, Isabelle. When the ancients first made their paintings and sculptures of marvelous beings—dryads and satyrs, angels and dragons—they were not rendering things they had seen. Rather they were bringing them into being. Not all of them, of course. Only those artists with the gift. The others were working from observation, but what they observed was what the gifted had first brought across.”

“What about the tree in Smither’s Oak? You said it had spirit. Did it come across as well?”

Rushkin’s shoulders lifted and fell helplessly. “I don’t know. Perhaps. I have never been aware of such a crossing, but it seems possible. Of course, such a spirit would have no mobility. It would be forced to remain at whatever spot it crossed over.”

“And what you were saying earlier,” Izzy asked. “You weren’t just talking about painting. You made it sound like music or writing could build a bridge as well.”

“It seems logical and so I’ve been told, but I know only how to use the gift through my painting. My understanding of it has always been limited in that sense.”

What got to Izzy the most was Rushkin’s sincerity. He took such impossible concepts and damned if he didn’t make them seem plausible.

“You really believe in this stuff, don’t you?” she asked.

“Without question,” he replied. “Though as I told you before, I was as skeptical when my mentor told me of them, as you are listening to me.”

XVIII

It was while Izzy was riding home on the bus that the fatigue hit her hard. She’d been burning adrenaline all the way to the studio and through her confrontation with Rushkin, so angry that she hadn’t even had time to feel scared. After his explanation, her energy deflated. Her head spun from the emotional roller coaster she’d just been on and she felt so weak it was all she could do to sit upright in her seat. But the events of the day continued to turn over and over in her mind.

She would have cheerfully killed Rushkin, she realized. That easily. And over what? Paintings. It was true that she’d invested an incredible amount of herself in each one, but paintings could always be redone. When she likened what might have been her loss to what had happened to Rochelle, there was really no comparison at all. What had been stolen from Rochelle could never be recovered.

Izzy thought she understood Kathy’s argument better now, seeing it from the other side of the coin as it were. And as for what had happened to Rochelle’s attackers ... She didn’t necessarily agree any more than she had earlier, but it was easier to empathize with the killers now.

Killers.

Or killer?

She knew now why John had deflected her question earlier in the evening by handing her that piece of charred canvas he’d found behind the studio. He had done so to make her understand what true anger meant. Justified anger. Had he been involved in the deaths of Rochelle’s attackers? At this moment she thought it was more to the point to ask, was he even real?

Rushkin’s arguments were so seductive that, impossible though they had to be, she had left the coach house halfway convinced that spirits could be called up through certain art, through the concentration and focus one held while working on a piece. Rushkin had never lied to her before. Why should he begin now? And why with something so bizarre?

If that process Rushkin described was real ...

She had painted John before she’d ever met him. John never seemed to eat. He never seemed to sleep. He never spoke of dreams. He remained as much an enigma to her now as he’d been when they’d first met. It could simply be the way he was. But if Rushkin was to be believed, the mystery she always sensed surrounding John might not be inborn, or self-produced; it might have its source in that piece of otherness that he’d brought with him when her painting had called him up from that other place.

The whole idea was crazy, but she knew now that she had to explore it or she’d really feel she’d gone mad. Imagine if it was real and she turned her back upon it.

She would go to July’s studio, away from Rushkin’s influence, and deliberately attempt to call up a being from that so-called otherworld. Not a man like John who, because he had the appearance of a normal person, could as easily be a product of either world, but a being for which there would be no question that its place of origin was utterly alien. And then she would wait and see. If it would come to her. Here. In this world.

You’re mad, she told herself as she got off at her stop and walked down Waterhouse to the apartment. Well and truly. Except she knew she had to make the attempt. Because, what if ... ?

She wouldn’t think of it anymore. She was tired enough as it was without exhausting herself further worrying over it. Tomorrow she would just do it. Start a painting. And then see what, if anything, it called to her.

As she was making her way down the block, she saw that John was waiting for her, sitting on the stoop of her building. She thought the spectre of the day’s suspicions would rise again at the sight of him, but either she was too worn out, or the decision she’d made to conduct her own experiment put everything else on hold until that one question was resolved.

“How did it go?” John asked, rising to his feet at her approach. She felt as though she could just melt into the hug he gave her. “Are you okay?” he added.

Izzy nodded against his shoulder. “It wasn’t my painting you found,” she told him. When they sat down together on the steps, she leaned against him, appreciating the support as much as the contact. “It was a copy of it that Rushkin had done,” she went on to explain. “He destroyed it so that people wouldn’t think I was copying from him, even though it was the other way around.”

“Why would he want to copy your work?”

Izzy sat up straighter and turned to look at him. “Because he thinks I’m magic,” she said, smiling.

“Remember? He’s lost his magic and he thought he might be able to recover it by doing a painting the way I do it. Or at least that’s what he says.”