Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

But she knew the reason before she even asked herself the question. No matter what Rushkin had done, she’d always believed that there were some things he held sacred. Some things he would never soil with a lie. If she couldn’t believe that, she didn’t know what to believe anymore.

She was bound to those errant spirits that had come across from their otherwhere. That much was real. Their lives still touched hers as though she were the center of a spider’s web and each fine outgoing strand was connected to one of them. She could close her eyes and see them. But if it wasn’t her art that made the connection, then what was?

II

The two red-haired women sat on a rococo burgundy chesterfield in the middle of a small glade surrounded by old birch trees. The glade had all the appearance of a living room, with the birches for walls, the sky for ceiling and the forest floor, mostly covered with an Oriental rug, underfoot. Though a breeze blew across the fields beyond the glade, inside the air was still. Inclement weather never intruded.

Lanterns hung from the white boughs above, unlit now since sunlight streamed into the glade, providing ample illumination. Standing across from the chesterfield were a pair of mismatched club chairs with a cedar chest set in between them to serve as a table. Beside the older woman was an empty bookcase with leaded glass panes, its one book presently lying open on her lap.

The older woman carried herself with a stately grace. She appeared to be in her early thirties, a striking figure in her long grey gown, rust underskirt and her thick red hair. She might have stepped from a Waterhouse painting, the Lady of Shalott, trailing her hand in a lilied river; Miranda watching a ship sink off her father’s island.

Her companion had half her years, was gangly where she was all slender curves, scruffy where she was so neatly groomed, but the resemblance between the two was such that they might easily have been sisters, or mother and daughter. If the younger girl’s hair was a bird’s nest of tangles, her choice of clothing torn blue jeans and an oversized woolen sweater spotted with burrs and prickly seeds, it was simply because she was endlessly active. She had no time to comb her hair or mend her clothes when there was so much to do.

But she was quiet now, sitting beside the older woman, the two of them unable to look away from the indistinct figures that gamboled about in the field just beyond the birch walls of their curiously situated room. The red-brown shapes romping about in the grass caught the bright sunlight and pulled it deep into their coloring until they appeared to glow from within.

“Look at them, Rosalind,” the younger woman said. “They’re so new. They must still remember what it was like in the before.”

Rosalind shook her head. “There’s not enough of them here to allow them memory. They’ll be gone in another hour.”

Cosette nodded glumly. She could see that one or two of them already were becoming less distinct.

The distant hills could be seen through an arm or a torso, flashes of lake appeared through hair that was turning to a soft, red-brown mist.

“What do you remember of before?” she asked, turning her head from the meadow to her companion.

It was an old question, but one she never grew tired of asking.

“There was story,” Rosalind said. Her voice was thoughtful, full of remembering. Of trying to remember. “Stories. And one of them was mine.”

Cosette was never sure if she actually remembered that there’d been stories, or if it was only from Rosalind having told her of them so often. What she did know was that she carried an ache inside her, that she’d lost something coming from before to here.

“We miss our dreams,” Rosalind had explained once. “We have no blood, so we cannot dream.”

“But Isabelle dreams,” Cosette had protested.

“Isabelle has the red crow inside her.”

Sometimes Cosette would run madly across the fields, dangerously close to the cliffs, run and run until finally she fell exhausted to the turfy ground. Then she’d lie with her hair tangled in grass and roots and weeds and stare up into the sky, looking for a russet speck against the blue, red wings beating like the drumming of a pulse.

Red crow, red crow, fly inside me, she’d sing in her husky voice.

But she could still prick her finger with a thorn and the red crow wouldn’t fly from the cut. She couldn’t bleed—not red blood, not green fairy-tale blood, not any blood at all.

And she couldn’t dream.

Sleep wasn’t necessary for her kind, but when she did close her eyes to seek it, there was only the vast darkness lying there in her mind until she woke again. When she slept, she went into an empty place and came back neither refreshed nor touched by the mythic threads of story that the red crow brought to others when they slept.

“It’s because we’re not real,” she’d whispered once, shaken with the enormity of the thought that they were only loaned their lives, that their existence depended on the capriciousness of another’s will, rather than how every other person lived, following the red crow’s wheel as it slowly turned from birth to death.

But Rosalind had quickly shaken her head in reply. Taking Cosette in her arms, she’d rocked the younger woman against her breast.

“We are real,” she’d said, a fierceness in her voice that Cosette had never heard before. “Don’t ever believe differently.”

It had to be true.

We are real.

She took Rosalind’s hand now and repeated it to herself like a charm. Her gaze was held and trapped by the red-brown shapes frolicking in the sun beyond the birch glade.

We are real.

Not like them. They’ll fade and go away, back into the before, but we’ll remain because we’re real.

Even if we can’t dream.

“Isabelle’s going back to the city, you know,” she told Rosalind. “She’s going to paint like she did before.”

She never looked away from the dancing shapes. Many were fainter now, their outlines vague, certain limbs almost completely washed away. They were becoming patterns of red-brown mist, rather than holding to true shapes as the sun and the dreams of this world burned them away.

“I know,” Rosalind said.

“I’m going to follow her.” Cosette finally looked away, turning her attention back to her companion.

“This time I’m going to learn how she reaches into the before and brings us back.”

“We’ve always known how she does it,” Rosalind said. “She paints.”

“I can paint.”

“Yes, but she dreams, so it’s not the same.”

Cosette sighed at the truth of it. It wasn’t the same at all.

“I’m still going to follow her,” she said.

“And then?” Rosalind asked.

“I’m going to reach into the before myself and bring back a red crow for each of us.”

“If only you could,” Rosalind murmured, the trace of a poignant smile touching the corners of her mouth. “It would be like in the story—one for memory and one for dream.”

“But none for the man who has no soul.”

Rosalind nodded again.

“Never for him,” she agreed.

The man who had no soul was only a dark figure in Cosette’s mind, an image of menace, lacking any detail. Thinking of him now stole all the warmth from the sunlight. Cosette shivered and drew closer to her companion. She hadn’t actually ever met him, only observed him from a distance, but she would never forget the emptiness that lay behind his eyes, the dark hollow of who he truly was that he could cloak so efficiently with his false charm and gaiety.

“You mustn’t tell the others,” she said. “That I’m going, I mean.”