Dreams Underfoot

by Charles de Lint

  My chest grew so tight I could barely breathe, and suddenly I could hear the sound of rain in my memory—it was always raining when Sam saw the ghost; it was raining the night he stole her away into the past.

  Ghosts. I was looking at a ghost.

  The woman’s expression was starting to change, the uncertainty turning into nervousness. There was no recognition in her eyes. As she began to step back—in a moment she’d close the door in my face, probably call the cops—I found my voice. I knew what I was going to say—I was going to ask about her grandmother—but all that came out was her name: “Sam.”

  “Yes?” she said. She looked at me a little more carefully. “Do I know you?”

  Jesus, even the name was the same.

  A hundred thoughts were going through my head, but they all spiraled down into one mad hope: this was Sam. We could be together again. Then a child appeared behind the woman. She was a little girl no more than five, blond-haired, blue-eyed, just like her mother—just like her grandmother. Reality came crashing down around me.

  This Sam wasn’t the woman I knew. She was married, she had children, she had a life.

  “I…I knew your grandmother,” I said. “We were…we used to be friends.”

  It sounded so inane to my ears, almost crazy. What would her grandmother—a woman maybe three times my age if she was still alive—have to do with a guy like me?

  The woman’s gaze traveled down to my fiddle case. “Is your name Geordie? Geordie Riddell?”

  I blinked in surprise, then nodded slowly.

  The woman smiled a little sadly, mostly with her eyes.

  “Granny said you’d come by,” she said. “She didn’t know when, but she said you’d come by one day.” She stepped away from the door, shooing her daughter down the hall. “Would you like to come in?”

  “I…uh, sure.”

  She led me into a living room that was furnished in mismatched antiques which, taken all together, shouldn’t have worked, but did. The little girl perched in a Morris chair and watched me curiously as I sat down and set my fiddle case by my feet. Her mother pushed back a stray lock with a mannerism so like Sam’s that my chest tightened up even more.

  “Would you like some coffee or tea?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “I don’t want to intrude. I…” Words escaped me again.

  “You’re not intruding,” she said. She sat down on the couch in front of me, that sad look back in her eyes. “My grandmother died a few years ago—she’d moved to New England in the late seventies, and she died there in her sleep. Because she loved it so much, we buried her there in a small graveyard overlooking the sea.”

  I could see it in my mind as she spoke. I could hear the sound of the waves breaking on the shore below, the spray falling onto the rocks like rain.

  “She and I were very close, a lot closer than I ever felt to my mother.” She gave me a rueful look. “You know how it is.”

  She didn’t seem to be expecting a response, but I nodded anyway.

  “When her estate was settled, most of her personal effects came to me. I…” She paused, then stood up. “Excuse me for a moment, would you?”

  I nodded again. She’d looked sad, talking about Sam. I hoped that bringing it all up hadn’t made her cry.

  The little girl and I sat in silence, looking at each other until her mother returned. She was such a serious kid, her big eyes taking everything in; she sat quietly, not running around or acting up like most kids do when there’s someone new in the house that they can show off to. I didn’t think she was shy; she was just…well, serious.

  Her mother had a package wrapped in brown paper and twine in her hands when she came back. She sat down across from me again and laid the package on the table between us.

  “Granny told me a story once,” she said, “about her first and only real true love. It was an odd story, a kind of ghost story, about how she’d once lived in the future until granddad’s love stole her away from her own time and brought her to his.” She gave me an apologetic smile. “I knew it was just a story because, when I was growing up I’d met people she’d gone to school with, friends from her past before she met granddad. Besides, it was too much like some science fiction story.

  “But it was true, wasn’t it?”

  I could only nod. I didn’t understand how Sam and everything about her except my memories of her could vanish into the past, how she could have a whole new set of memories when she got back there, but I knew it was true.

  I accepted it now, just as Jilly had been trying to get me to do for years. When I looked at Sam’s granddaughter, I saw that she accepted it as well.

  “When her effects were sent to me,” she went on, “I found this package among them. It’s addressed to you.”

  I had seen my name on it, written in a familiar hand. My own hand trembled as I reached over to pick it up.

  “You don’t have to open it now,” she said.

  I was grateful for that.

  “I…I’d better go,” I said and stood up. “Thank you for taking the time to see me.”

  That sad smile was back as she saw me to the door.

  “I’m glad I got the chance to meet you,” she said when I stepped out onto the porch.

  I wasn’t sure I could say the same. She looked so much like Sam, sounded so much like Sam that it hurt.

  “I don’t think we’ll be seeing each other again,” she added.

  No. She had her husband, her family. I had my ghosts.

  “Thanks,” I said again and started off down the walk, fiddle case in one hand, the brown paper package in the other.

  * * *

  I didn’t open the package until I was sitting in the Silenus Gardens in Fitzhenry Park, a place that always made me feel good; I figured I was going to need all the help I could get. Inside there was a book with a short letter. The book I recognized. It was the small J.M. Dent & Sons edition of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that I’d given Sam because I’d known it was one of her favourite stories.

  There was nothing special about the edition, other than its size—it was small enough for her to carry around in her purse, which she did. The inscription I’d written to her was inside, but the book was far more worn than it had been when I’d first given it to her. I didn’t have to open the book to remember that famous quotation from Puck’s final lines:

  * * *

  If we shadows have offended,

  Think but this, and all is mended,

  That you have but slumber’d here,

  While these visions did appear.

  And this weak and idle theme,

  No more yielding but a dream…

  * * *

  But it hadn’t been a dream—not for me, and not for Sam. I set the book down beside me on the stone bench and unfolded the letter. “Dear Geordie,” it said. “I know you’ll read this one day, and I hope you can forgive me for not seeing you in person, but I wanted you to remember me as I was, not as I’ve become. I’ve had a full and mostly happy life; you know my only regret. I can look back on our time together with the wisdom of an old woman now and truly know that all things have their time. Ours was short—too short, my heart—but we did have it.

  “Who was it that said, ‘better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all’? We loved and lost each other, but I would rather cherish the memory than rail against the unfairness. I hope you will do the same.”

  I sat there and cried. I didn’t care about the looks I was getting from people walking by, I just let it all out. Some of my tears were for what I’d lost, some were for Sam and her bravery, and some were for my own stupidity at denying her memory for so long.

  I don’t know how long I sat there like that, holding her letter, but the tears finally dried on my cheeks. I heard the scuff of feet on the path and wasn’t surprised to look up and find Jilly standing in front of me.

  “Oh Geordie, me lad,” she said.

  She sat down at my side and le
aned against me. I can’t tell you how comforting it was to have her there. I handed her the letter and book, and sat quietly while she read the first and looked at the latter. Slowly she folded up the letter and slipped it inside the book.

  “How do you feel now?” she asked finally. “Better or worse?”

  “Both.”

  She raised her eyebrows in a silent question.

  “Well, it’s like what they say funerals are for,” I tried to explain. “It gives you the chance to say goodbye, to settle things, like taking a—” I looked at her and managed to find a small smile “—final turn on a wheel. But I feel depressed about Sam. I know what we had was real, and I know how it felt for me, losing her. But I only had to deal with it for a few years. She carried it for a lifetime.”

  “Still, she carried on.”

  I nodded. “Thank God for that.”

  Neither of us spoke for a while, but then I remembered Paperjack. I told her what I thought had happened last night, then showed her the fortune-telling device that he’d left with me in St. Paul’s. She read my fortune with pursed lips and the start of a wrinkle on her forehead, but didn’t seem particularly surprised by it.

  “What do you think?” I asked her.

  She shrugged. “Everybody makes the same mistake. Fortune-telling doesn’t reveal the future; it mirrors the present. It resonates against what your subconscious already knows and hauls it up out of the darkness so that you can get a good look at it.”

  “I meant about Paperjack.”

  “I think he’s gone—back to wherever it was that he came from.”

  She was beginning to exasperate me in that way that only she could.

  “But who was he?” I asked. “No, better yet, what was he?”

  “I don’t know,” Jilly said. “I just know it’s like your fortune said. It’s the questions we ask, the journey we take to get where we’re going that’s more important than the actual answer. It’s good to have mysteries. It reminds us that there’s more to the world than just making do and having a bit of fun.”

  I sighed, knowing I wasn’t going to get much more sense out of her than that.

  * * *

  It wasn’t until the next day that I made my way alone to Paperjack’s camp in back of the Beaches. All his gear was gone, but the paper stars still hung from the trees. I wondered again about who he was. Some oracular spirit, a kind of guardian angel, drifting around, trying to help people see themselves? Or an old homeless black man with a gift for folding paper? I understood then that my fortune made a certain kind of sense, but I didn’t entirely agree with it.

  In Sam’s case, knowing the answer had brought me peace.

  I took Paperjack’s fortune-teller from my pocket and strung it with a piece of string I’d brought along for that purpose. Then I hung it on the branch of a tree so that it could swing there, in among all those paper stars, and I walked away.

  19

  Talullah

  Nothing is too wonderful to be true.

  —Michael Faraday

  * * *

  For the longest time, I thought she was a ghost, but I know what she is now. She’s come to mean everything to me; like a lifeline, she keeps me connected to reality, to this place and this time, by her very capriciousness.

  I wish I’d never met her.

  That’s a lie, of course, but it comes easily to the tongue. It’s a way to pretend that the ache she left behind in my heart doesn’t hurt.

  She calls herself Tallulah, but I know who she really is. A name can’t begin to encompass the sum of all her parts. But that’s the magic of names, isn’t it? That the complex, contradictory individuals we are can be called up complete and whole in another mind through the simple sorcery of a name. And connected to the complete person we call up in our mind with the alchemy of their name comes all the baggage of memory: times you were together, the music you listened to this morning or that night, conversation and jokes and private moments—all the good and bad times you’ve shared.

  Tally’s name conjures up more than just that for me. When the gris-gris of the memories that hold her stir in my mind, she guides me through the city’s night like a totem does a shaman through Dreamtime. Everything familiar is changed; what she shows me goes under the skin, right to the marrow of the bone. I see a building and I know not only its shape and form, but its history. I can hear its breathing, I can almost read its thoughts.

  It’s the same for a street or a park, an abandoned car or some secret garden hidden behind a wall, a late night cafe or an empty lot. Each one has its story, its secret history, and Tally taught me how to read each one of them. Where once I guessed at those stories, chasing rumours of them like they were errant fireflies, now I know.

  I’m not as good with people. Neither of us are. Tally, at least, has an excuse. But me…

  I wish I’d never met her.

  * * *

  My brother Geordie is a busker—a street musician. He plays his fiddle on street corners or along the queues in the theatre district and makes a kind of magic with his music that words just can’t describe. Listening to him play is like stepping into an old Irish or Scottish fairy tale. The slow airs call up haunted moors and lonely coastlines; the jigs and reels wake a fire in the soul that burns with the awesome wonder of bright stars on a cold night, or the familiar warmth of red coals glimmering in a friendly hearth.

  The funny thing is, he’s one of the most pragmatic people I know. For all the enchantment he can call up out of that old Hungarian fiddle of his, I’m the one with the fey streak in our family.

  As far as I’m concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary. I’ve got such an open mind that Geordie says I’ve got a hole in it, but I’ve been that way for as long as I can remember. It’s not so much that I’m gullible—though I’ve been called that and less charitable things in my time; it’s more that I’m willing to just suspend my disbelief until whatever I’m considering has been thoroughly debunked to my satisfaction.

  I first started collecting oddities and curiosities as I heard about them when I was in my teens, filling page after page of spiral-bound notebooks with little notes and jottings—neat inky scratches on the paper, each entry opening worlds of possibility for me whenever I reread them. I liked things to do with the city the best because that seemed the last place in the world where the delicate wonders that are magic should exist.

  Truth to tell, a lot of what showed up in those notebooks leaned toward a darker side of the coin, but even that darkness had a light in it for me because it still stretched the realms of what was into a thousand variable what-might-be’s. That was the real magic for me: the possibility that we only have to draw aside a veil to find the world a far more strange and wondrous place than its mundaneness allowed it could be.

  It was my girlfriend back then—Katie Deren—who first convinced me to use my notebooks as the basis for stories. Katie was about as odd a bird as I was in those days. We’d sit around with the music of obscure groups like the Incredible String Band or Dr. Strangely Strange playing on the turntable and literally talk away whole nights about anything and everything. She had the strangest way of looking at things; everything had a soul for her, be it the majestic old oak tree that stood in her parents’ back yard, or the old black iron kettle that she kept filled with dried weeds on the sill of her bedroom window.

  We drifted apart, the way it happens with a lot of relationships at that age, but I kept the gift she’d woken in me: the stories.

  I never expected to become a writer, but then I had no real expectations whatsoever as to what I was going to be when I “grew up.” Sometimes I think I never did—grow up, that is.

  But I did get older. And I found I could make a living with my stories. I called them urban legends—independently of Jan Harold Brunvand who also makes a living collecting them. But he approaches them as a folklorist, cataloguing and comparing them, while I retell them
in stories that I sell to magazines and then recycle into book collections.

  I don’t feel we’re in any kind of competition with each other, but then I feel that way about all writers. There are as many stories to be told as there are people to tell them about; only the mean-spirited would consider there to be a competition at all. And Brunvand does such a wonderful job. The first time I read his The Vanishing Hitchhiker, I was completely smitten with his work and, like the hundreds of other correspondents Brunvand has, made a point of sending him items I thought he could use for his future books.

  But I never wrote to him about Tally.

  * * *

  I do my writing at night—the later the better. I don’t work in a study or an office and I don’t use a typewriter or computer, at least not for my first drafts. What I like to do is go out into the night and just set up shop wherever it feels right: a park bench, the counter of some all-night diner, the stoop of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the doorway of a closed junk shop on Grasso Street.

  I still keep notebooks, but they’re hardcover ones now. I write my stories in them as well. And though the stories owe their existence to the urban legends that give them their quirky spin, what they’re really about is people: what makes them happy or sad. My themes are simple. They’re about love and loss, honour and the responsibilities of friendship. And wonder…always wonder. As complex as people are individually, their drives are universal.

  I’ve been told—so often I almost believe it myself—that I’ve got a real understanding of people. However strange the situations my characters find themselves in, the characters themselves seem very real to my readers. That makes me feel good, naturally enough, but I don’t understand it because I don’t feel that I know people very well at all.