Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

“I didn’t,” Izzy said.

“No,” Kathy said. “This lion girl was definitely real and not human.”

But Izzy was still shaking her head. “What I mean is, she’s not one of mine.”

“But you’re the only one who makes these creatures,” Kathy said. “You’re forgetting Rushkin.”

Except, Izzy added to herself, he wasn’t supposed to be able to bring them across anymore—at least that was what he’d told her before he’d disappeared. “That’s right,” Kathy said. “He must be back.”

A faint buzzing hummed in Izzy’s ears, making her feel light-headed. Hard on its heels she got an odd sensation that was like, but was not quite, nausea. It started in the pit of her stomach and ascended into her chest, tightening all the muscles as it rose.

“I guess he must be,” she said slowly.

She couldn’t begin to explain the feeling of anxiety that filled her at the realization that her mentor had returned—not to Kathy, not even to herself.

XIII

February 1978

The only mail that ever arrived at the coach-house studio was flyers or junk mail addressed to

“occupant.” Izzy simply threw it all out. But a week after the day that Kathy told her about seeing the lion-girl numena by the Grasso Street subway station, Izzy spied her own name on an envelope just as she was about to toss the morning’s offerings into the wastepaper basket. She tugged it out of the handful of flyers and recognized Rushkin’s handwriting immediately. As she was about to open the envelope, the last few lines from the note he’d sent to her just before he’d disappeared returned to her.

I can’t say how long I will be, but I promise to contact you before I return so that, should you wish, you will not have to see me. If this should be the case, I will understand. My behavior has been unforgivable.

And then she could see what she’d let herself forget. She saw it as clearly as though she’d physically stepped back through the years, to that winter night, the snowstorm in her dream that echoed the storm outside her bedroom, and there was the hooded figure, Rushkin, the bolt from his crossbow piercing the body of her winged cat ...

And then there was John’s voice, playing like a soundtrack to that awful scene: He feeds on us, Izzy.

I don’t know how, but it has something to do with the way he destroys the paintings that call us over.

And then mixed into that already disturbing stew of memories was a disjointed recollection of how she’d been assaulted in the lane outside the studio, the faces of her assailants all wearing Rushkin’s features again, instead of those from the mug books she’d gone through at the precinct.

Her fingers found the tattered bracelet of woven cloth that she still wore on her wrist. She looked around the studio at the paintings of her numena—the ones she hadn’t put up for sale yet, the ones she never would and the new ones that she was still working on. She had the sudden urge to hide them all.

To call Alan and ask him to meet her downstairs with his car so that she could stack the paintings on its backseat and he could ferry them away. Her and the paintings. Out of Rushkin’s sight. Away from the possibility of his discovering that they even existed in the first place. Away to safety. Oh, why had she ever let anyone convince her that he wasn’t dangerous?

She forced herself to calm down and take a few steadying breaths.

Lighten up, she told herself. You don’t even know what the letter says.

But she did and she knew she wasn’t wrong. The lion-girl numena Kathy had seen was a harbinger of what this letter was about to tell her. She could feel Rushkin’s return in the rough texture of the envelope that rubbed against the pads of her fingers, in the ink that spelled out her name and the studio’s address.

Slowly she worked a finger under the flap, tore the envelope open and pulled out a single sheet of thick paper the color of old parchment. Unfolding it, she read: Isabelle,

I hope this finds you well and productive. I will be returning to my studio in Newford on February 17th. You are, of course, welcome to stay on and share the space with me, but I will understand your reluctance to do so should you choose to seek other arrangements.

In any event, no matter what you decide, I hope you will still allow us the opportunity at some point to exchange a few words and catch up on each other’s news.

Yours, in anticipation, Vincent

Izzy read the letter through twice before laying it down on the table beside the easel that held her paints and palette. She tried to think of what the date was, but her mind was a blank. She went downstairs, planning to call Kathy to ask her, when her gaze fell upon the Perry’s Diner calendar that she’d tacked up there in December. Her finger tracked across the dates to settle on the sixteenth.

Rushkin would be here tomorrow.

Her earlier panic returned. This time she did call Alan and arranged to have him come by at midafternoon to help her transport her work back to the Waterhouse Street apartment. The rest of the morning she spent taking her paintings down from the walls and stacking them by the door, bundling up her sketches and value studies into manageable packages, dusting, sweeping, scrubbing the floor—especially around her easel—and generally acting and feeling like a teenager who’d had a huge open house while her parents were out of town for the weekend and was still madly trying to clean up while their ETA drew ever closer.

She was standing at the worktable with a cardboard box, trying to decide what brushes, paints and other art supplies she could honestly consider her own, when she heard Alan knock at the door.

Sweeping her arm across the top of the table, she dumped everything she hadn’t been able to make her mind up about into the box on top of what she had decided was hers and hurried to let Alan in.

One of the things Izzy liked best about Alan was how he never seemed to feel obliged to question the inherent chaos that represented the lives of so many of his friends. Instead of trying to make sense of what often even they couldn’t rationalize, he simply went with the flow, listened when they wanted him to, or could, explain, and was generally there for them when they needed him, absent when they needed to be alone.

“This is a lot of stuff;” he said as he surveyed everything Izzy felt she had to bring with her. “I think it’s going to take a couple of trips.”

“That’s okay. Just so long as we can get it all away this afternoon. Rushkin’s back, you see, or at least he will be here by tomorrow, so it’s all got to go.”

Alan regarded her for a moment. “I thought he was letting you use the studio.”

“He is. He was. I still could, it’s just that—oh, it’s too complicated to explain, Alan.”

Alan smiled. “So what do you want to take first?”

The move took three trips all told, because only so many canvases could fit in the back of the car at a time, but they were finished well before six. Once everything was safely stowed away in her bedroom, Izzy fetched them both a beer from the fridge.

“I love this piece,” Alan said, picking up a small oil pastel portrait. “She sort of reminds me of Kathy.”

“It’s the red hair,” Izzy said.

Alan laughed. “Izzy, almost all the women you paint have red hair.”

“This is true. And I have no idea why.”

“Maybe it’s because Kathy has red hair,” Alan said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” Alan told her. “It’s just that a lot of artists tend to use their own features, or those of their friends, because they know them so well. I thought you were doing the same.”