Reece didn’t have the time to appreciate the contact of her skin against his. He wanted to say, this is what you were looking for, lady, but things weren’t so cut and dried now. Ellen wasn’t some nameless cipher anymore—just a part of a crowd that he could sneer at—and she wasn’t just something he had the hots for either. She was a person, just like him. An individual. Someone he could actually relate to.
“Can—can’t you stop it?” Ellen cried.
The booger was getting close now. Its sewer reek was strong enough to drown out the salty tang of the ocean. It was like something had died there on the beach and was now getting up and coming for them.
Stop it? Reece thought. Maybe the thing had been created out of his frustrated anger, the way Ellen’s friend made out it could happen in that book of his, but Reece knew as sure as shit that he didn’t control the booger.
Another wave came down upon them and Reece pushed at the sand so that it pulled them partway out from the shore on its way back out. Getting to his knees in the rimy water, he got in front of Ellen so that he was between her and the booger. Could the sucker swim?
The booger hesitated at the water’s edge. It lifted its paws fastidiously from the wet sand like a cat crossing a damp lawn and relief went through Reece. When another wave came in, the booger backstepped quickly out of its reach.
Ellen was leaning against him, face near his as she peered over his shoulder.
“It can’t handle the water,” Reece said. He turned his face to hers when she didn’t say anything. Her clear eyes were open wide, gaze fixed on the booger. “Ellen ... ?” he began.
“I can’t believe that it’s really there,” she said finally in a small voice.
“But you’re the one—you said ...” He drew a little away from her so that he could see her better.
“I know what I said,” Ellen replied. She hugged herself, trembling at the stir of dark wings inside her.
“It’s just ... I wanted to believe, but ... wanting to and having it be real ...” There was a pressure in the center of her chest now, like something inside pushing to get out. “I ...”
The pain lanced sharp and sudden. She heard Reece gasp. Looking down, she saw what he had seen, a bird’s head poking gossamer from between her breasts. It was a dark smudge against the white of her swimsuit, not one of Uncle Dobbin’s parrots, but a crow’s head, with eyes like the pair she’d seen looking back at her from the mirror. Her own magic, leaving her because she didn’t believe. Because she couldn’t believe, but
It didn’t make sense. She’d always believed. And now, with Reece’s booger standing there on the shore, how could she help but believe?
The booger howled then, as though to underscore her thoughts. She looked to the shore and saw it stepping into the waves, crying out at the pain of the salt water on its flesh, but determined to get at them.
To get at her. Reece’s magic, given life. While her own magic ... She pressed at the halfformed crow coming from her chest, trying to force it back in.
“I believe, I believe,” she muttered through clenched teeth. But just like Uncle Dobbin’s assistant in Christy’s story, she could feel that swelling ache of loss rise up in her. She turned despairing eyes to Reece.
She didn’t need a light to see the horror in his eyes—horror at the booger’s approach, at the crow’s head sticking out of her chest. But he didn’t draw away from her. Instead, he reached out and caught hold of her shoulders.
“Stop fighting it!” he cried.
“But—”
He shot a glance shoreward. They were bracing themselves against the waves, but a large swell had just caught the booger and sent it howling back to shore in a tumble of limbs.
“It was your needing proof,” he said. “Your needing to see the booger, to know that it’s real—that’s what’s making you lose it. Stop trying so hard.”
But she knew he was right. She pulled free of him and looked towards the shore where the booger was struggling to its feet. The creature made rattling sounds deep in its throat as it started out for them again. It was hard, hard to do, but she let her hands fall free. The pain in her chest was a fire, the aching loss building to a crescendo. But she closed herself to it, closed her eyes, willed herself to stand relaxed.
Instead of fighting, she remembered. Balloon Men spinning down the beach. Christy’s gnome, riding his pig along the pier. Bramley Dapple’s advice. Goon pinching Jilly Coppercorn’s leg. The thing that fed on eggs and eyeballs and, yes, Reece’s booger too. Uncle Dobbin and his parrots and Non Wert watching her magic fly free. And always the Balloon Men, tumbling endover-end, across the beach, or down the alleyway behind her house ....
And the pain eased. The ache loosened, faded.
“Jesus,” she heard Reece say softly.
She opened her eyes and looked to where he was looking. The booger had turned from the sea and was fleeing as a crowd of Balloon Men came bouncing down the shore, great round rolypoly shapes, turning endover-end, laughing and giggling, a chorus of small deep voices. There was salt in her eyes and it wasn’t from the ocean’s brine. Her tears ran down her cheeks and she felt herself grinning like a fool.
The Balloon Men chased Reece’s booger up one end of the beach and then back the other way until the creature finally made a stand.
Howling, it waited for them to come, but before the first bouncing round shape reached it, the booger began to fade away.
Ellen turned to Reece and knew he had tears in his own eyes, but the good feeling was too strong for him to do anything but grin right back at her. The booger had died with the last of his anger. She reached out a hand to him and he took it in one of his own. Joined so, they made their way to the shore where they were surrounded by riotous Balloon Men until the bouncing shapes finally faded and then there were just the two of them standing there.
Ellen’s heart beat fast. When Reece let go her hand, she touched her chest and felt a stir of dark wings inside her, only they were settling in now, no longer striving to fly free. The wind came in from the ocean still, but it wasn’t the same wind that the Balloon Men rode.
“I guess it’s not all bullshit,” Reece said softly.
Ellen glanced at him.
He smiled as he explained. “Helping each other—getting along instead of fighting. Feels kind of good, you know?”
Ellen nodded. Her hand fell from her chest as the dark wings finally stilled.
“Your friend’s story didn’t say anything about crows,” Reece said.
“Maybe we’ve all got different birds inside—different magics.” She looked out across the waves to where the oil rigs lit the horizon.
“There’s a flock of wild parrots up around Santa Ana,” Reece said.
“I’ve heard there’s one up around San Pedro, too.”
“Do you think ... ?” Reece began, but he let his words trail off. The waves came in and wet their feet.
“I don’t know,” Ellen said. She looked over at her shredded clothes. “Come on. Let’s get back to my place and warm up.”
Reece laid his jacket over her shoulders. He put on his Tshirt and jeans, then helped her gather up what was left of her belongings.
“I didn’t mean for this to happen,” he said, bundling up the torn blouse and skirt. He looked up to where she was standing over him. “But I couldn’t control the booger.”
“Maybe we’re not supposed to.”
“But something like the booger ...”
She gave his Mohawk a friendly ruffle. “I think it just means that we’ve got to be careful about what kind of vibes we put out.”
Reece grimaced at her use of the word, but he nodded.
“It’s either that,” Ellen added, “or we let the magic fly free.”
The same feathery stirring of wings that she felt moved in Reece. They both knew that that was something neither of them was likely to give up.
In Uncle Dobbin’s Parrot Fair, Nori Wert turned away from the pair of cages that she’d been making ready.
“I guess we won’t be needing these,” she said.
Uncle Dobbin looked up from a slim collection of Victorian poetry and nodded. “You’re learning fast,” he said. He stuck the stem of his pipe in his mouth and fished about in his pocket for a match.
“Maybe there’s hope for you yet.”
Nori felt her own magic stir inside her, back where it should be, but she didn’t say anything to him in case she had to go away, now that the lesson was learned. She was too happy here. Next to catching some rays, there wasn’t anywhere she’d rather be.
The Stone Drum
There is no question that there is an unseen world. The problem is how far is it from midtown and how late is it open?
— Attributed to Woody Allen
It was Jilly Coppercorn who found the stone drum, late one afternoon.
She brought it around to Professor Dapple’s rambling Tudorstyled house in the old quarter of Lower Crowsea that same evening, wrapped up in folds of brown paper and tied with twine. She rapped sharply on the Professor’s door with the little brass lion’s head knocker that always seemed to stare too intently at her, then stepped back as Olaf Goonasekara, Dapple’s odd little housekeeper, flung the door open and glowered out at where she stood on the rickety porch.
“You,” he grumbled.
“Me,” she agreed, amicably. “Is Bramley in?”
“I’ll see,” he replied and shut the door.
Jilly sighed and sat down on one of the two worn rattan chairs that stood to the left of the door, her package bundled on her knee. A black and orange cat regarded her incuriously from the seat of the other chair, then turned to watch the progress of a woman walking her dachshund down the street.
Professor Dapple still taught a few classes at Butler U., but he wasn’t nearly as involved with the curriculum as he had been when Jilly attended the university. There’d been some kind of a scandal—something about a Bishop, some old coins and the daughter of a Tarot reader—but Jilly had never quite got the story straight. The Professor was a jolly fellow—wizened like an old apple, but more active than many who were only half his apparent sixty years of age. He could talk and joke all night, incessantly polishing his wirerimmed spectacles.
What he was doing with someone like Olaf Goonasekara as a housekeeper Jilly didn’t know. It was true that Goon looked comical enough, what with his protruding stomach and puffed cheeks, the halo of unruly hair and his thin little arms and legs, reminding her of nothing so much as a pumpkin with twig limbs, or a monkey. His usual striped trousers, organ grinder’s jacket and the little green and yellow cap he liked to wear, didn’t help. Nor did the fact that he was barely four feet tall and that the Professor claimed he was a goblin and just called him Goon.
It didn’t seem to allow Goon much dignity and Jilly would have understood his grumpiness, if she didn’t know that he himself insisted on being called Goon and his wardrobe was entirely of his own choosing. Bramley hated Goon’s sense of fashion—or rather, his lack thereof.
The door was flung open again and Jilly stood up to find Goon glowering at her once more.
“He’s in,” he said.
Jilly smiled. As if he’d actually had to go in and check.
They both stood there, Jilly on the porch and he in the doorway, until Jilly finally asked, “Can he see me?”
Giving an exaggerated sigh, Goon stepped aside to let her in. “I suppose you’ll want something to drink?” he asked as he followed her to the door of the Professor’s study.
“Tea would be lovely.”
“Hrumph.”
Jilly watched him stalk off, then tapped a knuckle on the study’s door and stepped into the room.
Bramley lifted his gaze from a desk littered with tottering stacks of books and papers and grinned at her from between a gap in the towers of paper.
“I’ve been doing some research since you called,” he said. He poked a finger at a book that Jilly couldn’t see, then began to clean his glasses. “Fascinating stuff “
“And hello to you, too,” Jilly said.
“Yes, of course. Did you know that the Kickaha had legends of a little people long before the Europeans ever settled this area?”
Jilly could never quite get used to Bramley’s habit of starting conversations in the middle. She removed some magazines from a club chair and perched on the edge of its seat, her package clutched to her chest.
“What’s that got to do with anything?” she asked.
Bramley looked surprised. “Why everything. We are still looking into the origins of this artifact of yours, aren’t we?”
Jilly nodded. From her new position of vantage she could make out the book he’d been reading.
Underhill and Deeper Still, a short story collection by Christy Riddell. Riddell made a living of retelling the odd stories that lie just under the skin of any large city. This particular one was a collection of urban legends of Old City and other subterranean fancies—not exactly the factual reference source she’d been hoping for.
Old City was real enough; that was where she’d found the drum this afternoon. But as for the rest of it—albino crocodile subway conductors, schools of dogsized intelligent goldfish in the sewers, mutant rat debating societies and the like ...
Old City was the original heart of Newford. It lay deep underneath the subway tunnels—dropped there in the late eighteen hundreds during the Great Quake. The present city, including its sewers and underground transportation tunnels, had been built above the ruins of the old one. There’d been talk in the early seventies of renovating the ruins as a tourist attraction—as had been done in Seattle—but Old City lay too far underground for easy access. After numerous studies on the project, the city council had decided that it simply wouldn’t be cost efficient.
With that decision, Old City had rapidly gone from a potential tourist attraction to a home for skells—winos, bag ladies and the other homeless. Not to mention, if one was to believe Bramley and Riddell, bands of illmannered goblinlike creatures that Riddell called skookin—a word he’d stolen from old Scots which meant, variously, ugly, furtive and sullen.
Which, Jilly realized once when she thought about it, made it entirely appropriate that Bramley should claim Goon was related to them.
“You’re not going to tell me it’s a skookin artifact, are you?” she asked Bramley now.
“Too soon to say,” he replied. He nodded at her parcel. “Can I see it?”
Jilly got up and brought it over to the desk, where Bramley made a great show of cutting the twine and unwrapping the paper. Jilly couldn’t decide if he was pretending it was the unveiling of a new piece at the museum or his birthday. But then the drum was sitting on the desk, the mica and quartz veins in its stone catching the light from Bramley’s desk lamp in a magical glitter, and she was swallowed up in the wonder of it again.
It was tubeshaped, standing about a foot high, with a seveninch diameter at the top and five inches at the bottom. The top was smooth as the skin head of a drum. On the sides were what appeared to be the remnants of a bewildering flurry of designs. But what was most marvelous about it was that the stone was hollow. It weighed about the same as a fat hardcover book.
“Listen,” Jilly said and gave the top of the drum a rapa-taptap.
The stone responded with a quiet rhythm that resonated eerily in the study. Unfortunately, Goon chose that moment to arrive in the doorway with a tray laden with tea mugs, tea pot and a platter of his homemade biscuits. At the sound of the drum, the tray fell from his hands. It hit the floor with a crash, spraying tea, milk, sugar, biscuits and bits of crockery every which way.
Jilly turned, her heartbeat doubletiming in her chest, just in time to see an indescribable look cross over Goon’s features. It might have been surprise, it might have been laughter, but it was gone too quickly for her to properly note. He merely stood in the doorway now, his usual glowering look on his face, and all Jilly was left with was a feeling of unaccountable guilt.
<
br /> “I didn’t mean ...” Jilly began, but her voice trailed off. “Bit of a mess,” Bramley said.
“I’ll get right to it,” Goon said.
His small dark eyes centered their gaze on Jilly for too long a moment, then he turned away to fetch a broom and dustpan. When Jilly turned back to the desk, she found Bramley rubbing his hands together, face pressed close to the stone drum. He looked up at her over his glasses, grinning.
“Did you see?” he said. “Goon recognized it for what it is, straight off. It has to be a skookin artifact.
Didn’t like you meddling around with it either.”
That was hardly the conclusion that Jilly would have come to on her own. It was the sudden and unexpected sound that had more than likely startled Goon—as it might have startled anyone who wasn’t expecting it. That was the reasonable explanation, but she knew well enough that reasonable didn’t necessarily always mean right. When she thought of that look that had passed over Goon’s features, like a trough of surprise or mocking humor between two cresting glowers, she didn’t know what to think, so she let herself get taken away by the Professor’s enthusiasm, because ... well, just what if ... ?
By all of Christy Riddell’s accounts, there wasn’t a better candidate for skookindom than Bramley’s housekeeper.
“What does it mean?” she asked.
Bramley shrugged and began to polish his glasses. Jilly was about to nudge him into making at least the pretense of a theory, but then she realized that the Professor had simply fallen silent because Goon was back to clean up the mess. She waited until Goon had made his retreat with the promise of putting on another pot of tea, before she leaned over Bramley’s desk.
“Well?” she asked.
“Found it in Old City, did you?” he replied.
Jilly nodded.
“You know what they say about skookin treasure ... ?”
They meaning he and Christy, Jilly thought, but she obligingly tried to remember that particular story from Underhill and Deeper Still. She had it after a moment. It was the one called “The Man with the Monkey” and had something to do with a stolen apple that was withered and moldy in Old City but became solid gold when it was brought above ground. At the end of the story, the man who’d stolen it from the skookin was found in little pieces scattered all over Fitzhenry Park ....
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