Moonlight and Vines

by Charles de Lint

  “Dance with me,” a voice said from behind her.

  When she turned, he was there. Ellen Wentworth’s forest spirit, horns and goat legs, the hair entwined with feathers, beads and shells. She seemed to fall into his eyes, tumbling down into the deep mystery of them and unable to look away. He was a northern spirit, as much a part of the winter and the hills north of the city as a wolf or a jack pine, but the Mediterranean goatman was there, too, the sense of him growing sharper and clearer, the further she was drawn into his gaze.

  “You . . . I . . .”

  Her throat couldn’t shape the words. Truth was, she had no idea what she was trying to say. Perhaps his name—the name Jilly had given him.

  She let him take her in his warm arms and felt ridiculous in her tatty housecoat, cowboy boots, and jeans. He smelled of pine sap and cedar boughs, and then of something else, a compelling musky scent she couldn’t place, old and dark and secret. His biceps were corded and hard under her hands, but his touch was light, gentle as she remembered the brush of wildflowers to be against her legs when she crossed a summer meadow.

  The music had acquired a rhythm, a slow waltz time. His music. He was dancing with her, but somehow he was still making that music.

  “How . . . ?” she began.

  His smile made her voice falter. The question grew tattered in her head and came apart, drifted away. Magic, she decided. Pure and simple. Visualized. Made real. A piece of impossible, a couldn’t-be, but here it was all the same and what did it matter where it came from, or how it worked?

  He led beautifully, and she was content to let everything else fall away and simply dance with him.

  5

  She woke to find that she’d spent the night sleeping on the landing outside the door that led out onto the roof of her building. She was stiff from having slept on the hard floor, cold from the draft coming in from under the door. But none of that seemed to matter. Deep in her chest she could still feel the rhythm of that mysterious music she’d heard last night, heard while she danced on a hilltop that didn’t exist, danced with a creature that couldn’t possibly exist.

  She remembered one of the things that Angela had said last night.

  Jilly’s always saying that magic’s never what you expect it to be, but it’s often what you need.

  Lord knows she had needed this.

  “Hey, chica. You drink a little too much last night?”

  Mercedes Muñoz, her upstairs neighbor, was standing on the stairs leading up to where Hannah lay. Hand on her hip, Mercedes wore her usual smile, but worry had taken up residence in her dark eyes.

  “You okay?” she added when Hannah didn’t respond.

  Hannah slowly sat up and drew her housecoat close around her throat.

  “I’ve never felt better in my life,” she assured Mercedes. It was true. She didn’t even have a hangover. “For the first time since I’ve moved to this city, I finally feel like I belong.”

  It made no sense. How could it make her feel this way? A dream of dancing with some North American version of a small Greek god, on a hilltop that resembled the hills that rose up behind the farm where she’d grown up. But it had all the same. Maybe it was simply the idea of the experience—wonderful, impossible, exhilarating.

  But she preferred to believe it hadn’t been a dream. That like Angela, she’d met a piece of old-world magic, however improbable it might seem. That the music she was still carrying around inside her had been his. That the experience had been real. Because if something like that could happen, then other dreams could come true as well. She could make it here, on her own, away from the farm. It hadn’t been a mistake to come.

  Mercedes offered her a hand up.

  “And now what?” Mercedes asked. “You going to try sleeping in a cardboard house in some alley next?”

  Hannah smiled. “If that’s what it takes, maybe I will.”

  The Pennymen

  . . . and then there are the pennymen, linked to the trembling aspens, or penny trees, so called because their leaves, when moving in a breeze, seem like so many twinkling coins.

  —Christy Riddell, from Fairy Myths of North America

  1

  It’s a Sunday morning in January and there’s a tree outside my window, full of birds. I’m not exactly sure what kind. They look like starlings with their winter-dark feathers and speckled breasts and heads, but I could be wrong. I’ve never been much good at identifying birds. Pigeon, crow, robin, seagull, sparrow . . . after that, I’m pretty much guessing. But the tree’s a rowan, a mountain ash. I know that because Jilly named it for me when she helped the boy and me first move into this apartment.

  Jilly says they’re also called wicken, or quicken trees, an old name that seems both quaint and evocative to me. She claims they’re a magic tree—real magic, she insists, like faeries dancing on hilltops, Rhine maidens rising up from the river bottom, little hobgoblins scurrying down the street that you might glimpse from the corner of your eye. As if. All I can do when she starts in on that sort of thing is smile and nod and try not to roll my eyes. Jilly’s sweet, but she does take some things way too seriously. I mean, you can have all the romantic notions in the world, but just because you think you feel a tickle of enchantment, like you’re peeking through a loose board in the fence that divides what we know from what could be, doesn’t mean it’s real.

  Magic belongs in stories, it’s that simple. Real life and that kind of story don’t mix.

  Except lying here in bed this morning, pillows propped up on the headboard and looking out the window, for some reason I feel as though I’m in a story. Nothing overly dramatic, mind you. It’s not like I expect spies to come crashing in through the front door, or to find a body in the bathtub when I get up to have a pee. It’s more like an establishing shot in a movie, something glimpsed in passing, a scene to set the mood of what’s to come.

  So if this is a movie, here’s what the audience would see: It’s a blustery day, the sky thick with fat snow that blurs the world outside the glass panes. Against a backdrop of a Crowsea street, there are the birds and the tree, or more properly the stand of trees, since the rowans are growing in a bunch, trunks no thicker than my forearms. The berries are orange, not the bright orange of autumn. They’re a deeper color this time of year, but they still stand out against the white snow, the dark lines of the branches, and those birds. Tiny splashes of color. The ground under the tree is littered with them, though the snow’s covering them up now.

  I can’t hear the starlings through the glass. They’re probably not making any noise. Too busy chowing down on the berries and keeping their perches as the wind makes the branches sway wildly in sudden snowy gusts. I should get up, but I don’t want to lose this moment. I want to lie here and let it stretch out as far as it can go.

  I wish the boy were home. I’d ask her to bring me some tea, only she’s off working at the gallery this morning. Commerce stops for no one, not even on Sunday anymore.

  Have I confused you? Sorry. I started calling Eliza “the boy” after she got her hair cut. The longest she lets it grow anymore is about the length of my pinky finger. It used to fall to the middle of her back like mine still does and then we really looked like the sisters some people think we are.

  The boy and I aren’t really a couple, like we don’t sleep together or anything, but we’re closer than friends and don’t date, which tends to confuse people when they first meet us and try to fit us into an appropriate mental pigeonhole. Sorry, I don’t have one that really works any better myself. You could call us soul mates, I guess, though that’s not much clearer, is it?

  We met when we were both going through a particularly rough time. Neither of us had friends or family or any kind of support system to fall back on. We were solitary sadnesses until we literally bumped into each other at a La-La-La Human Steps performance and acquired each other. I can’t explain it, but things just clicked between us, right there in the foyer of the Standish, and we’ve been pretty much in
separable ever since.

  The boy’s the creative one. Long before we met, she was always drawing and painting and making something out of nothing—an amazing ability if you ask me. Forget fairy-tale stuff; that’s the only real magic we’re going to find in this world. The creative impulse, and the way that people can connect—you know, we might be separate islands of muscle, bone, and flesh, but something in our souls is still able to bridge that impossible gap.

  Okay, that’s two magics. So sue me.

  It’s through the boy that we got involved with the Crowsea arts crowd and met Jilly, Sophie, and the others. Me? Well, when I was younger, the only thing I was any good at was being a troublemaker. These days my claim to fame is that I’ve cleaned up my act and don’t cause problems for people anymore.

  The boy and I opened the gallery about a year and a half ago, now. The Bone Circus Gallery—don’t ask where we got the name. It was just there waiting for us when we decided this was what we wanted to do. We have a different artist showcased every month as well as a general selection of miscellaneous artists’ work, postcards, posters, and prints. We carry art supplies, too, and the boy has a studio in back. The art supplies really pay the rent some months, plus it’s a way for the boy to get a deep discount on the stuff she needs for her own work.

  So life’s been treating us well. Maybe we’re not rich, and the boy’s not famous—yet—but we pay the bills. Better still, she gets to work at what she loves and I’ve discovered that not only do I like running this little shop and gallery of ours, but I’m good at it, too. It’s the first time I’ve ever been good at anything.

  Of course the way the world works is, you don’t ever get too comfortable with what you’ve got, because if you do, something’ll come along to pull the rug out from under you. In our case, it’s how the boy got co-opted into this fairyland of Jilly’s.

  It starts while I’m lying in bed, watching the starlings gorge on rowan berries.

  2

  Eliza Casey loved a winter’s day such as this. Clouds of fat, lazy snow drifting down, the sounds of the city muffled by the ever-deepening white blanket—footsteps, traffic, sirens, all. She didn’t mind being bundled up like a roly-poly teddy bear as she trundled down the snowy streets, nor that it was her turn to open the gallery this Sunday morning. Not when it entailed her getting up early and out into this weather.

  Too much of winter in the city involved dirty slush and bitter cold, frayed tempers and complaints about the wind chill, the icy pavement, the perceived interminable length of the season. A snowfall like this, early in the morning when she pretty much had the streets to herself, was like a gift, a whisper of quiet magic. A piece of enchanted time stolen from the regular whirl and spin of the world in which it felt as though anything could happen.

  She was humming happily to herself by the time she reached the gallery. A gust of wind rocked the store sign as she went up the steps, dropping a clump of snow on her head and making her laugh even as some of it went sliding down the back of her neck. She swept the porch and steps, then went inside and stomped the snow from her boots in the hall. By the time she’d put the cash float in the register and made a cup of tea, another inch or so of snow had already accumulated on the porch. Since she wasn’t opening for another twenty minutes, she decided to wait until then before sweeping again. First she’d have her tea.

  Her studio at the back of the store tempted her, but she resolutely ignored its lure. Carrying her tea mug around the gallery with her, she busied herself with dusting, straightening the prints and postcards in their racks, tidying and restocking the art supplies that provided the gallery with its main bread and butter. By the time she was done, it was a few minutes before opening.

  She put her parka back on and went out into the hall. It was as she was reaching for the broom where it was leaning up in the corner by the door that she noticed the coppery glint of a penny lying on the floor. The old rhyme went through her mind:

  Find a penny, pick it up, and all the day you’ll have good luck.

  She bent down, fingers stretched out to pluck it up from the hardwood floor, then jumped back as the penny made a turtle-like transformation from coin into a tiny man. Legs, arms, and a head popped out from a suddenly plump little body and he scurried off, quick as a cockroach. Hardly able to believe what her own two eyes were showing her, she watched as he sped toward a crack between the baseboard and the floor, squeezed in through the narrow opening, and was gone.

  Slowly she sat down on the floor, gaze locked on where he’d disappeared.

  “Oh my,” she said, unaware that she was speaking aloud.

  She looked up and down the length of the hall, wishing there was someone with her to confirm what she’d just seen. It was like something out of Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, or one of William Dunthorn’s Smalls come to life. But she was alone with the impossibility of the experience and already the rational part of her mind was reshuffling the memory of what she’d seen, explaining it away.

  It hadn’t been a penny in the first place, so of course it hadn’t turned into a little man. It was only a bug that she’d startled. A beetle, though it wasn’t summer. A cockroach, though they’d never had them in the building before.

  Except . . . except . . .

  She could so clearly call up the round swell of the little man’s tummy and his spindly limbs. The tiny startled gaze that had met her own before he had scooted away.

  “Oh, my,” she said again.

  3

  It’s not that I don’t want to believe; it’s that I can’t.

  I’m as romantically inclined as the next person and can fully appreciate the notion of faeries dancing in some moonlit glade, or dwarves laboring over their silver and gold jewelry in some hidden kingdom, deep underground. Really, I can. But I also believe it’s important to differentiate between fact and fiction—to keep one’s daydreams separate from the realities of day-to-day life. It’s when you mix the two that the trouble starts. Trust me. Living the first seventeen years of my life with a seriously schizophrenic mother, I know all about this.

  So I subscribe to the scientific contention that nothing is proven until it can be shown to be repeatable. It makes perfect sense to me that anything that only happens once should be considered anecdotal, and therefore worthless from a scientific point of view. If faeries live at the bottom of the garden, they should always be observable. Even if you have to stand on one foot during the second night of the full moon, with a pomegranate in your pocket and your head cocked a certain way. Every time you complete the specifications, you should see them.

  “The problem with that,” Jilly said when we were talking about it a while ago, “is that everything happens only once.”

  “You’re being too literal,” I told her.

  “Maybe you’re not being literal enough.”

  I shook my head. “No. I just think it’s important to be grounded, that’s all. To know that if I drop something, gravity will do its thing. That if I open the door to my room, I won’t find some forgotten ruin of Atlantis there instead of my bed and dresser. I couldn’t live in a world where anything can happen.”

  “That’s not what it’s about. It’s about staying open to the possibility that there’s more to the world than what most of us have agreed is there to be seen. Just because something can’t be measured and weighed in a laboratory doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Sounds like a pretty good guideline to me.”

  But Jilly shook her head. “If you’re going to be like that, what makes it any less of a leap in faith to believe in something that you need a microscope or other special equipment to see? Who’s to say how much your observations are being manipulated by electronics and doodads?”

  “Now you’re just being silly.”

  Jilly smiled. “Depends on your point of view. Lots of people would say I was only being practical.”

  “Right. The same people who didn’t believe in elephants a
t the turn of the century because they’d never seen one themselves.”

  “It’s the same difference with an otherworldly being,” Jilly said. “Just because you’ve never seen one, doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”

  I refuse to accept that. Accepting that would only lead to craziness and I’ve had enough of that to last me a lifetime. My mother spent more time with her imaginary companions, arguing and fighting and crying, than she did with us kids. There’s no way I’m even cracking the door on the possibility of that happening to me.

  4

  It was a long moment before Eliza finally stood up again. Mechanically, she took the broom, went outside and swept the porch and steps once more, then returned to the gallery. She hung her parka in the closet and sat down behind the cash counter, started to reach for the phone, then thought better of it. What would she say? Sarah would think she’d gone mad. But she felt she had to tell someone.

  Picking up a pencil, she turned over one of the flyers advertising a Zeffy Lacerda concert at the YoMan next weekend and made a sketch of what she’d seen. Thought she’d seen. The tiny man with his round moon of a body and twig-thin arms and the little startled eyes. She drew him changing from penny to little man. Another of him looking up at her. Another of him squeezing in through the crack between the baseboard and floor, fat little rear end sticking out and legs wiggling furiously.

  No, she thought, looking at her drawings. Sarah definitely wouldn’t believe that she’d seen this little man. No one would. She hardly believed it herself. Truth was, the whole experience had left her feeling vaguely nervous and unsettled. It was as though the floor had suddenly gone spongy underfoot, as though the whole world had become malleable, capable of stretching in ways it shouldn’t be able to. It was hard to trust that anything was the way it seemed to be. She found herself looking around the shop, constantly imagining movement in the corner of her eye. She grew increasingly more tense with the pressure of feeling that at any moment the unknown and previously unseen was about to manifest again.