Dreams Underfoot

by Charles de Lint

  “How do you know that they’re gemmin, and whatever are gemmin?” she asked.

  Frank tapped the sketchbook. “I know they’re gemmin because they look just like the way my gran described them to me. And didn’t you say they had violet eyes?”

  “But only Babe’s got them.”

  Frank smiled, enjoying himself. “Do you know what violet’s made up of?”

  “Sure. Blue and red.”

  “Which, symbolically, stand for devotion and passion; blended into violet, they’re a symbol of memory.”

  “That still doesn’t explain anything.”

  “Gemmin are the spirits of place, just like hobs are spirits of a house. They’re what make a place feel good and safeguard its positive memories. When they leave, that’s when a place gets a haunted feeling. And then only the bad feelings are left, or no feelings, which is just about the same difference.”

  “So what makes them go?” Jilly asked, remembering what Babe had said earlier.

  “Nasty things happening. In the old days it might be a murder or a battle. Nowadays we can add pollution and the like to that list.”

  “But—”

  “They store memories, you see,” Frank went on. “The one you call Babe is the oldest, so her eyes have turned violet.”

  “So,” Jilly asked with a grin, “Does it make their hair go mauve, too?”

  “Don’t be impudent.”

  They talked some more about the gemmin, going back and forth between, “Were they really?” and “What else could they be?” until it was time for Frank’s supper and Jilly had to go. But first she made him open his Christmas present. His eyes filmed when he saw the tiny painting of his old house that Jilly had done for him. Sitting on the stoop was a younger version of himself with a small faun standing jauntily behind him, elbow resting on his shoulder.

  “Got something in my eye,” he muttered as he brought his sleeve up to his eyes.

  “I just wanted you to have this today because I brought everybody else their presents,” Jilly said, “but I’m coming back on Christmas—we’ll do something fun. I’d come Christmas Eve, but I’ve got to work at the restaurant that night.”

  Frank nodded. His tears were gone, but his eyes were still shiny.

  “The solstice is coming,” he said. “In two days.”

  Jilly nodded, but didn’t say anything.

  “That’s when they’ll be going,” Frank explained. “The gemmin. The moon’ll be full, just like Babe said. Solstices are like May Eve and Halloween—the borders between this world and others are thinnest then.” He gave Jilly a sad smile. “Wouldn’t I love to see them before they go.”

  Jilly thought quickly, but she still couldn’t think of any way she could maneuver him into the Tombs in his chair. She couldn’t even borrow Sue’s car, because the streets there were too choked with rubble and refuse. So she picked up her sketchbook and put it on his lap.

  “Keep this,” she said.

  Then she wheeled him off to the dining room, refusing to listen to his protests that he couldn’t.

  * * *

  A sad smile touched Jilly’s lips as she stood in the storm, remembering. She walked down the alleyway and ran her mittened hand along the windshield of the Buick, dislodging the snow that had gathered there. She tried the door, but it was rusted shut. A back window was open, so she crawled in through it, then clambered into the front seat, which was relatively free of snow.

  It was warmer inside, probably because she was out of the wind. She sat looking out the windshield until the snow covered it again. It was like being in a cocoon, she thought. Protected. A person could almost imagine that the gemmin were still around, not yet ready to leave. And when they did, maybe they’d take her with them….

  A dreamy feeling stole over her and her eyes fluttered, grew heavy, then closed. Outside, the wind continued to howl, driving the snow against the car; inside, Jilly slept, dreaming of the past.

  * * *

  The gemmin were waiting for her the day after she saw Frank, lounging around the abandoned Buick beside the old Clark Building. She wanted to talk to them about what they were and why they were going away and a hundred other things, but somehow she just never got around to any of it. She was too busy laughing at their antics and trying to capture their portraits with the pastels she’d brought that day. Once they all sang a long song that sounded like a cross between a traditional ballad and rap, but was in some foreign language that was both flute-like and gritty. Babe later explained that it was one of their traditional song cycles, a part of their oral tradition that kept alive the histories and genealogies of their people and the places where they lived.

  Gemmin, Jilly thought. Storing memories. And then she was clearheaded long enough to ask if they would come with her to visit Frank.

  Babe shook her head, honest regret in her luminous eyes.

  “It’s too far,” she said.

  “Too far, too far,” the other gemmin chorused.

  “From home,” Babe explained.

  “But,” Jilly began, except she couldn’t find the words for what she wanted to say.

  There were people who just made other people feel good. Just being around them, made you feel better, creative, uplifted, happy. Geordie said that she was like that herself, though Jilly wasn’t so sure of that. She tried to be, but she was subject to the same bad moods as anybody else, the same impatience with stupidity and ignorance, which, parenthetically speaking, were to her mind the prime causes of all the world’s ills.

  The gemmin didn’t seem to have those flaws. Even better, beyond that, there was magic about them. It lay thick in the air, filling your eyes and ears and nose and heart with its wild tang. Jilly desperately wanted Frank to share this with her, but when she tried to explain it to Babe, she just couldn’t seem to make herself understood.

  And then she realized the time, and knew she had to go to work. Art was well and fine to feed the heart and mind, and so was magic, but if she wanted to pay the rent on the loft and have anything to eat next month—never mind the endless drain that art supplies made on her meager budget—she had to go.

  As though sensing her imminent departure, the gemmin bounded around her in an abandoned display of wild monkeyshines, and then vanished like so many will-o’-the-wisps in amongst the snowy rubble of the Tombs, leaving her alone once again.

  The next day was much the same, except that night was the night they were leaving. Babe never made mention of it, but the knowledge hung ever heavier on Jilly as the hours progressed, colouring her enjoyment of their company. The gemmin had washed away most of the residue of her bad breakup with Jeff, and for that Jilly was grateful. She could look on it now with that kind of wistful remembering one held for high school romances, long past and distanced. But in its place they had left a sense of abandonment. They were going, would soon be gone, and the world would be that much the emptier for their departure.

  Jilly tried to find words to express that, but as had happened yesterday when she’d tried to explain Frank’s need, she couldn’t get the first one past her tongue.

  And then again, it was time to go. The gemmin started acting wilder again, dancing and singing around her like a pack of mad imps, but before they could all vanish once more, Jilly caught Babe’s arm. Don’t go, don’t go, she wanted to say, but all that came out was, “I…I don’t…I want…”

  Jilly, normally never at a loss for something to say, sighed with frustration.

  “We won’t be gone forever,” Babe said, understanding Jilly’s unspoken need. She touched a long delicate finger to her temple. “We’ll always be with you in here, in your memories of us, and in here—” she tapped the pocket in Jilly’s coat that held her sketchbook, “—in your pictures. If you don’t forget us, we’ll never be gone.”

  “It…it won’t be the same,” Jilly said.

  Babe smiled sadly. “Nothing is ever the same. That’s why we must go now.”

  She ruffled Jilly’s hair—again
the motion was like one made by a mother, rather than someone who appeared to be a girl only half Jilly’s age—then stepped back. The other gemmin approached and touched her as well—feather-light fingers brushing against her arms, tousling her hair like a breeze—and then they all began their mad dancing and pirouetting like so many scruffy ballerinas.

  Until they were gone.

  Jilly thought she would just stay here, never mind going in to work, but somehow she couldn’t face a second parting. Slowly, she headed south toward Gracie Street and the subway that would take her to work. And oddly enough, though she was sad at their leaving, it wasn’t the kind of sadness that hurt. It was the kind that was like a singing in the soul.

  * * *

  Frank died that night, on the winter solstice, but Jilly didn’t find out until the next day. He died in his sleep, Jilly’s painting propped up on the night table beside him, her sketchbook with her initial rough drawings of the gemmin in it held against his thin chest. On the first blank page after her sketches of the gemmin, in an awkward script that must have taken him hours to write, he’d left her a short note:

  * * *

  “I have to tell you this, Jilly. I never saw any real magic—I just pretended that I did. I only knew it through the stories I got from my gran and from you. But I always believed. That’s why I wrote all those stories when I was younger, because I wanted others to believe. I thought if enough of us did, if we learned to care again about the wild places from which we’d driven the magic away, then maybe it would return.

  “I didn’t think it ever would, but I’m going to open my window tonight and call to them. I’m going to ask them to take me with them when they go. I’m all used up—at least the man I am in this world is—but maybe in another world I’ll have something to give. I hope they’ll give me the chance.

  “The faerie folk used to do that in the old days, you know. That was what a lot of the stories were about—people like us, going away, beyond the fields we know.

  “If they take me, don’t be sad, Jilly. I’ll be waiting for you there.”

  * * *

  The script was almost illegible by the time it got near the end, but Jilly managed to decipher it all. At the very end, he’d just signed the note with an “F” with a small flower drawn beside it. It looked an awful lot like a tiny violet, though maybe that was only because that was what Jilly wanted to see.

  You saw real magic, she thought when she looked up from the sketchbook.

  You were real magic.

  She gazed out the window of his room to where a soft snow was falling in the alley between St. Vincent’s and the building next door. She hoped that on their way to wherever they’d gone, the gemmin had been able to include the tired and lonely spirit of one old man in their company.

  Take care of him, Babe, she thought.

  * * *

  That Christmas was a quiet period in Jilly’s life. She had gone to a church service for the first time since she was a child to attend the memorial service that St. Vincent’s held for Frank. She and Geordie and a few of the staff of the home were the only ones in attendance. She missed Frank and found herself putting him in crowd scenes in the paintings she did over the holidays—Frank in the crowds, and the thin ghostly shapes of gemmin peering out from behind cornices and rooflines and the corners of alleyways.

  Often when she went out on her night walks—after the restaurant was closed, when the city was half asleep—she’d hear a singing in the quiet snow-muffled streets; not an audible singing, something she could hear with her ears, but one that only her heart and spirit could feel. Then she’d wonder if it was the voices of Frank and Babe and the others she heard, singing to her from the faraway, or that of other gemmin, not yet gone.

  She never thought of Jeff, except with distance.

  Life was subdued. A hiatus between storms. Just thinking of that time, usually brought her a sense of peace, if not completion. So why…remembering now…this time…?

  There was a ringing in her ears—sharp and loud, like thunderclaps erupting directly above her. She felt as though she was in an earthquake, her body being violently shaken. Everything felt topsy-turvy. There was no up and no down, just a sense of vertigo and endless spinning, a roar and whorl of shouting and shaking until—

  She snapped her eyes open to find Geordie’s worried features peering out at her from the circle that the fur of his parka hood made around his face. He was in the Buick with her, on the front seat beside her. It was his hands on her shoulders, shaking her; his voice that sounded like thunder in the confines of the Buick.

  The Buick.

  And then she remembered: walking in the Tombs, the storm, climbing into the car, falling asleep….

  “Jesus, Jilly,” Geordie was saying. He sat back from her, giving her a bit of space, but the worry hadn’t left his features yet. “You really are nuts, aren’t you? I mean, falling asleep out here. Didn’t you ever hear of hypothermia?”

  She could have died, Jilly realized. She could have just slept on here until she froze to death and nobody’d know until the spring thaw, or until some poor homeless bugger crawled in to get out of the wind and found himself sharing space with Jilly, the Amazing Dead Woman.

  She shivered, as much from dread as the storm’s chill.

  “How…how did you find me?” she asked.

  Geordie shrugged. “God only knows. I got worried, the longer you were gone, until finally I couldn’t stand it and had to come looking for you. It was like there was a nagging in the back of my head—sort of a Lassie kind of a thought, you know?”

  Jilly had to smile at the analogy.

  “Maybe I’m getting psychic—what do you think?” he asked.

  “Finding me the way you did, maybe you are,” Jilly said.

  She sat up a little straighter, then realized that sometime during her sleep, she had unbuttoned her parka enough to stick a hand in under the coat. She pulled it out and both she and Geordie stared at what she held.

  It was a small violet flower, complete with roots.

  “Jilly, where did you…?” Geordie began, but then he shook his head. “Never mind. I don’t want to know.”

  But Jilly knew. Tonight was the anniversary, after all. Babe or Frank, or maybe both of them, had come by as well.

  If you don’t forget us, we’ll never be gone.

  She hadn’t.

  And it looked like they hadn’t, either, because who else had left her this flower, and maybe sent Geordie out into the storm to find her? How else could he have lucked upon her the way he had, with all those blocks upon blocks of the Tombs that he would have to search?

  “Are you going to be okay?” Geordie asked.

  Jilly stuck the plant back under her parka and nodded.

  “Help me home, would you? I feel a little wobbly.”

  “You’ve got it.”

  “And Geordie?”

  He looked at her, eyebrows raised.

  “Thanks for coming out to look for me.”

  * * *

  It was a long trek back to Jilly’s loft, but this time the wind was helpful, rather than hindering. It rose up at their backs and hurried them along so that it seemed to only take them half the time it should have to return. While Jilly changed, Geordie made great steaming mugs of hot chocolate for both of them. They sat together on the old sofa by the window, Geordie in his usual rumpled sweater and old jeans, Jilly bundled up in two pairs of sweatpants, fingerless gloves and what seemed like a half-dozen shirts and socks.

  Jilly told him her story of finding out about the gemmin, and how they went away. When she was done, Geordie just said, “Wow. We should tell Christy about them—he’d put them in one of his books.”

  “Yes, we should,” Jilly said. “Maybe if more people knew about them, they wouldn’t be so ready to go away.”

  “What about Mr. Hodgers?” Geordie asked. “Do you really think they took him away with them?”

  Jilly looked at the newly potted flower on her w
indowsill. It stood jauntily in the dirt and looked an awful lot like a drawing in one of her sketchbooks that she hadn’t drawn herself.

  “I like to think so,” she said. “I like to think that St. Vincent’s was on the way to wherever they were going.” She gave Geordie a smile, more sweet than bitter. “You couldn’t see it to look at him,” she added, “but Frank had violet eyes, too; he had all kinds of memories stored away in that old head of his, just like Babe did.”

  Her own eyes took on a distant look, as though she was looking into the faraway herself, through the gates of dream and beyond the fields we know.

  “I like to think they’re getting along just fine,” she said.

  9

  Pity the Monsters

  We are standing in the storm of our own being.

  —Michael Ventura

  * * *

  “I was a beauty once,” the old woman said. “The neighbourhood boys were forever standing outside my parents’ home, hoping for a word, a smile, a kiss, as though somehow my unearned beauty gave me an intrinsic worth that far overshadowed Emma’s cleverness with her schoolwork, or Betsy’s gift for music. It always seemed unfair to me. My value was based on an accident of birth; theirs was earned.”

  The monster made no reply.

  “I would have given anything to be clever or to have had some artistic ability,” the old woman added. “Those are assets with which a body can grow old.”

  She drew her tattery shawl closer, hunching her thin shoulders against the cold. Her gaze went to her companion. The monster was looking at the blank expanse of wall above her head, eyes unfocused, scars almost invisible in the dim light.

  “Yes, well,” she said. “I suppose we all have our own cross to bear. At least I have good memories to go with the bad.”