Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

“Tell him no, Isabelle,” he whispered, his voice pitched so low that not even the stone gargoyle squatting a half-dozen feet away could have heard him. “Deny him, once and for all.”

XIII

Isabelle didn’t honestly believe that Rushkin could bring Kathy back. She was a naïf when it came to his magics, to what could and could not be done, but not so innocent as to believe that the dead could be raised, unchanged and whole. The creation of numena almost made sense. If you accepted that there was an otherworld, then it stood to reason that there could be pathways leading from it to this world. Didn’t Jilly always say that a hundred centuries of myths and fairy tales had to be based upon something?

But the dead didn’t return, unchanged and forgiving. Not even folktales pretended differently. She knew that. She knew it, but still her heart broke when she finally looked up to meet Rushkin’s gaze and shook her head.

“I can’t do it,” she said. “I won’t do it.”

He gave her a look that she knew so well—he was the teacher again, disappointed in his pupil—only this time she didn’t buy into that role.

“Not now,” he said finally. “But you will.”

“You can’t make me.”

Rushkin only smiled. “A handful of your numena still wander loose. Bitterweed and Scara will find the paintings that brought them across. And then you will have to make a choice: sacrifice them, or paint others for me.”

Isabelle shook her head.

“It makes no difference to me,” Rushkin told her. “But I will survive. Make no mistake about that, ma belle Izzy.”

There was honey dripping from his voice as he used Kathy’s endearment, but all Isabelle could do was shudder. From where she lounged against the wall, Scara tittered.

“Take her away,” Rushkin said.

Isabelle cringed and pulled out of Bitterweed’s grip on her shoulder. “Don’t touch me,” she told him.

After giving Rushkin a questioning glance, Bitterweed stood back from her. Isabelle rose under her own steam and let him guide her back out into the foul-smelling hallway. She stared down at her feet as he led her a half-dozen paces to another door.

“In here,” Bitterweed said.

She hesitated at the doorway, gaze taking in the easel and art supplies laid out upon a long wooden table. Brushes and palette knives. Tubes of paint and rags for cleaning up. Linseed oil and turpentine. A palette and beside it, a stack of primed canvases. A white cotton smock hung over the back of the room’s one wooden chair. The only windows were set high in the wall, casting a northern light down into that part of the room where the easel stood. There was already a canvas standing in the easel.

Isabelle turned to her captor. “I told him I wouldn’t do it,” she said. Bitterweed shrugged. It was a familiar body gesture of John’s, but John never put the insolence into it that Rushkin’s creature did.

Oh, John.

“God, he named you well, didn’t he,” she said.

“Rushkin didn’t name me,” Bitterweed replied. “I chose my own name.” Isabelle was intrigued despite herself “Why would you choose to give yourself a name in mockery of someone else’s?”

“Bitterweed is my name.”

“Just that. A surname. No given name.”

“There has to be someone to give you a given name,” Bitterweed said. Isabelle sighed. “You know he doesn’t own you, don’t you? You don’t have to echo his evil.”

Bitterweed smiled. “We’re not evil, Isabelle Copley. We’re no different from anyone else. We just want to survive.”

“But at what cost?”

“Don’t talk to me about cost. Look at you. You’re young and beautiful and why not, considering on how many of us you gorged yourself.”

“I did not set that fire. I would never—”

But Bitterweed wasn’t interested in continuing the conversation any longer. Before she could protest, he shoved her into the room and slammed the door behind her. It took her a moment to catch her balance. She heard a lock engage, then his receding footsteps. Then silence.

She leaned against the table and bowed her head. Nobody knew where she was. Nobody knew Rushkin had returned. Nobody would even think to consider that he would have kidnapped her. She was utterly and entirely on her own—not the way she was on Wren Island, cloistered from the world, but helpless. Even on his deathbed, Rushkin had so easily returned their relationship to how it had been. Even now, he was in control.

After a long moment, she sat down on the chair and stared at the blank canvas set up on the easel.

She didn’t doubt that Rushkin’s creatures would track down the paintings of her existing numena. The two at the Foundation would take no great detective work at all. The creatures would acquire them and Rushkin would feed upon them and she’d still be trapped here. Nothing would be changed except that two more people, whose existence in this world were her responsibility, would be dead.

Unless, she thought, staring at the canvas. Unless ..

She rose abruptly from the chair and strode to the end of the table. Without giving herself the time to change her mind, she started picking up tubes of paint and squeezing their pigment out onto the palette.

She didn’t bother to be careful. She didn’t put on the smock. She didn’t bother to put the tops back onto the tubes, but tossed them onto the table when she was done with them, one after the other. Once she had a half-dozen colors on the palette, she opened the can of turpentine and stuck the brush into its narrow mouth. She mixed a thin wash on the palette as she stood in front of the canvas and tried to clear her mind before she began work on a sketchy underpainting.

She knew she had to work fast. There’d be no time to let the paint dry, no time for finesse or precision. But then she was used to working under adverse conditions. Not lately, not for years. But she hadn’t forgotten. Izzy was long gone from her life, but what Izzy had known, what she’d learned and how she’d made do when money and supplies were scarce and time ran against her—all of that was still inside Isabelle. Her memories were something that no one could take away.

Memories.

Standing in the garden and watching the farmhouse as it was engulfed in flames. Seeing the first frail body stumble out to fall charred at her feet. And then the others. All the others ...

Tears blurred her vision, making it hard to see what she was doing, but she carried on all the same.

“I did not start that fire,” she whispered to the ghostly image taking shape on the canvas. “I did not.”

I

Newford, June 1975

Although the snow was long gone and there was not a soul in sight, Izzy was still nervous the first time she walked down the lane off Stanton Street that led to Rushkin’s studio in the old coach house. She thought being here would re-awaken memories of the mugging, but the only piece of the past that arose in her mind was a more immediate memory from a few weeks ago when she’d finally gone down to the police station to look at their mug books. She’d dutifully scanned page after page of criminal faces, but none looked familiar. The whole exercise seemed pointless, especially after the detective told her how most such attacks never saw an arrest in the first place, little say were brought to trial.

“It’s especially frustrating in a case of random violence such as your own,” the detective went on.