Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

Isabelle’s old boyfriend, Alan thought. Another ghost from the past. But then he remembered something else: that painting of John that Isabelle had done. What if Isabelle hadn’t painted his portrait?

What if John had come into being because of the painting? A painting which, Alan reminded himself; had also supposedly been destroyed in the fire.

“I haven’t seen him in years,” Alan said, keeping his voice casual. “How’s he doing?”

“Oh, you know Johnny. He never changes. I swear he gets younger while the rest of us grow ungracefully old. But Isabelle didn’t seem at all well. She looked as though she couldn’t stand up without his support. I spotted them coming across the courtyard but before I could get to them to see if I could help, they were out the door and gone.”

Alan hung on to the first part of what Nora had said.

He never changes. I swear he gets younger while the rest of us grow ungracefully old. He never changes. Because he was like Cosette, forever locked into looking how Isabelle had painted him?

“Gone?” Marisa asked.

Nora nodded. “Um-hmm. She got into a car driven by some real punky-looking girl and drove off Here,” she added. “I can show you.”

She led them across her studio, wending a careful way through the scattered piles of watercolors that they all tried to emulate. At the open window, she pointed off down the street.

“They were going north, the last time I—Hey, wait a minute. There’s Johnny now.”

Alan looked down at the street. He recognized John Sweetgrass immediately, as well as his companion.

“He’s with Cosette,” he said, more for Marisa and Rolanda’s benefit than Nora’s.

Rolanda nodded in agreement while Marisa craned to get a better look.

“Well, that’s not the girl who was driving the car,” Nora said from beside him. “She didn’t have that gorgeous head of hair.” She opened the window and leaned out. “Hey, Johnny!” she cried.

John and Cosette lifted their heads. Alan thought John looked irritated at having been noticed, but Cosette smiled happily and waved up at them, recognizing Alan and Rolanda. John gave them a brisk wag of his hand himself, then started to walk on, pausing when Cosette held onto his arm.

“Wait a minute,” Alan called down to them. “I have to talk to you. We’ll be right down.”

But when they reached the street, John was gone. Only Cosette was there, waiting for them.

XII

What are you doing?” John demanded when Cosette tugged on his arm. “They’re friends,” she said.

“Maybe they can help us.”

“Good friends?”

“Well, not really. But Isabelle’s known Alan for ages.”

“And hasn’t spoken to him for years,” John said.

“But—”

“Do you think they’re such good friends that they’d help us kill a well-respected artist like Rushkin?”

John asked. “Just on our say-so?”

“Maybe if we explained things ...” Cosette’s voice trailed off at the withering look John gave her.

“Okay. So maybe it’s not such a good idea.”

“They have their concerns and we have ours,” John said. “By what each of us are, they are mutually exclusive. We have too little common ground, Cosette.”

“That’s not really true.”

John didn’t want to argue anymore. “We should go.”

“But that would be so rude.”

“Fine,” he said, exasperated. “Wait for them. You know where to find me when you’re done.”

Cosette nodded. “I wonder,” she said, before he left. “Should I contact the others—you know, Rosalind and the rest of them still on the island?”

“It wouldn’t hurt,” John told her. “They should have a little forewarning in case we fail.”

“But we’re not going to fail, are we?”

She looked up at him, afraid and hopeful all at once. John wanted to set her mind at ease, but he couldn’t lie to her.

“If we do,” he said, “it won’t be from lack of trying.”

He left her then, heading east and north, aiming for a tenement in the Tombs where Isabelle spoke with Rushkin and prepared to sell her soul. He arrived in the middle of their conversation, finding a perch outside the second-story room where they spoke, sharing the narrow ledge with a grotesque gargoyle that reminded him of Rothwindle, one of Isabelle’s earlier creations who had died in the fire at Wren Island.

“My darling ‘goyle,” he said softly.

It was the name Isabelle had given the painting of Rothwindle. The gargoyle had come across from the before with her own name, just as John had. Come across and lived her life in the shadows of this world until John had let her die. He’d let them all die. Since the night he’d rescued Paddyjack from Rushkin he’d vowed to protect each and every one of Isabelle’s numena, but he’d failed. He hadn’t been there when the fire swept through the farmhouse.

John frowned when he heard Rushkin accuse Isabelle of starting the fire. Isabelle knew what she was about when she called her old mentor the father of lies. But then John found himself thinking of how Isabelle could confuse the truth, even in her own mind—claiming she was mugged when it had actually been Rushkin who’d beaten her. Insisting her friend Kathy had died of an illness in a hospital when she’d committed suicide. What if the mystery of the fire was another of her stories? What if it hadn’t been Rushkin who had set the farm-house ablaze, but Isabelle herself?

Simply considering the possibility made him feel as though he was betraying her, but now that the question had lodged in his mind, he couldn’t shake it. All things considered, hadn’t she betrayed him in how she’d cast him out of her life? Hadn’t she betrayed them all by allowing so many of them to die?

Couldn’t she have saved some of them?

He listened with growing disquiet as Rushkin explained how numena could be given the gift of true life. Another betrayal, he thought, but then shook his head. No, Isabelle hadn’t known ... had she?

He wished now that he’d never come. He didn’t want to consider Isabelle to blame for all the deaths.

Didn’t want to think that she could have given all of them what Cosette called the red crow at so little cost to herself. If they’d been freed from their paintings, none of them would have had to die. How could she not have known? And yet ...

Rushkin was a master of lies, but like all such men, he had to use a certain amount of truth to lend his lies the echo of veracity they required to be believed. So what was lie, what was truth?

No, he told himself. This is exactly what Rushkin wants. To raise so many doubts that you could no longer be sure what was true and what was not. Undoubtedly, he was the cause of Isabelle’s own confusion with the truth. Rushkin’s presence, his voice and the half-truths he wove in among his lies—they were like a virus. How could you do anything but doubt everything you believed in once you’d been infected by him?

That was when he realized what it was that Rushkin was demanding of Isabelle. Doubts were put aside, to be dealt with later if not forgotten. Right now all he wanted to do was burst into the room and kill Rushkin where he lay on his pallet. Squeeze the life out of him the way Rushkin had taken the lives of so many of Isabelle’s creations. But he still wasn’t certain that a maker could die at his hands and there were Rushkin’s own creations to consider—his double and the strange monochrome girl that Cosette had described to him earlier, the one’s gaze more feral than the other.

So he waited. He hugged the wall and willed, with all the potency he could muster, that Isabelle would stand up to her old mentor, rather than fall under his sway once again.