“What ... ?” she said.
“Come,” Meran said.
She tucked her flute under her arm and led Jilly towards the dais. “This is your king,” Goon was saying.
He reached down and pulled the limp form up by the finewebbed strings that were attached to the king’s arms and shoulders. The king dangled loosely under his strong grip—a broken marionette. A murmur rose from the crowd of skookin—part ugly, part wondering.
“The king is dead,” Goon said. “He’s been dead for moons. I wondered why Old City was closed to me this past half year, and now I know.”
There was movement at the far end of the park—a fleeing figure. It had been the king’s councilor, Goon told Jilly and Meran later. Some of the skookin made to chase him, but Goon called them back.
“Let him go,” he said. “He won’t return. We have other business at hand.”
Meran had drawn Jilly right up to the foot of the dais and was gently pushing her forward.
“Go on,” she said.
“Is he the king now?” Jilly asked.
Meran smiled and gave her another gentle push.
Jilly looked up. Goon seemed just like he always did when she saw him at Bramley’s—grumpy and out of sorts. Maybe it’s just his face, she told herself, trying to give herself courage. There were people who look grumpy no matter how happy they are. But the thought didn’t help contain her shaking much as she slowly made her way up to where Goon stood.
“You have something of ours,” Goon said.
His voice was grim. Christy’s story lay all too clearly in Jilly’s head. She swallowed dryly.
“Uh, I never meant ...” she began, then simply handed over the drum.
Goon took it reverently, then snatched her other hand before she could draw away. Her palm flared with sharp pain—all the skin, from the base of her hand to the ends of her fingers was black.
The curse, she thought. It’s going to make my hand fall right off. I’m never going to paint again ....
Goon spat on her palm and the pain died as though it had never been. With wondering eyes, Jilly watched the blackness dry up and begin to flake away. Goon gave her hand a shake and the blemish scattered to fall to the ground. Her hand was completely unmarked. “But ... the curse,” she said. “The bounty on my head. What about Christy’s story ... ?”
“Your curse is knowledge,” Goon said.
“But ... ?”
He turned away to face the crowd, drum in hand. As Jilly made her careful descent back to where Meran was waiting for her, Goon tapped his fingers against the head of the drum. An eerie rhythm started up—a real rhythm. When the skookin musicians began to play, they held their instruments properly and called up a sweet stately music to march across the back of the rhythm. It was a rich tapestry of sound, as different from Meran’s solo flute as sunlight is from twilight, but it held its own power. Its own magic.
Goon led the playing with the rhythm he called up from the stone drum, led the music as though he’d always led it.
“He’s really the king, isn’t he?” Jilly whispered to her companion. Meran nodded.
“So then what was he doing working for Bramley?”
“I don’t know,” Meran replied. “I suppose a king—or a king’s son—can do pretty well what he wants just so long as he comes back here once a moon to fulfill his obligation as ruler.”
“Do you think he’ll go back to work for Bramley?”
“I know he will,” Meran replied.
Jilly looked out at the crowd of skookin. They didn’t seem at all threatening anymore. They just looked like little men—comical, with their tubby bodies and round heads and their little broomstick limbs—but men all the same. She listened to the music, felt its trueness and had to ask Meran why it didn’t hurt them.
“Because it’s their truth,” Meran replied.
“But truth’s just truth,” Jilly protested. “Something’s either true or it’s not.”
Meran just put her arm around Dilly’s shoulder. A touch of a smile came to the corners of her mouth.
“It’s time we went home,” she said.
“I got offpretty lightly, didn’t I?” Jilly said as they started back the way they’d come. “I mean, with the curse and all.”
“Knowledge can be a terrible burden,” Meran replied. “It’s what some believe cast Adam and Eve from Eden.”
“But that was a good thing, wasn’t it?”
Meran nodded. “I think so. But it brought pain with it—pain we still feel to this day.”
“I suppose.”
“Come on,” Meran said, as Jilly lagged a little to look back at the park.
Jilly quickened her step, but she carried the scene away with her. Goon and the stone drum. The crowd of skookin. The flickering light of their fires as it cast shadows over the Old City buildings.
And the music played on.
Professor Dapple had listened patiently to the story he’d been told, managing to keep from interrupting through at least half of the telling. Leaning back in his chair when it was done, he took off his glasses and began to needlessly polish them.
“It’s going to be very good,” he said finally.
Christy Riddell grinned from the club chair where he was sitting. “But Jilly’s not going to like it,”
Bramley went on. “You know how she feels about your stories.”
“But she’s the one who told me this one,” Christy said. Bramley rearranged his features to give the impression that he’d known this all along.
“Doesn’t seem like much of a curse,” he said, changing tack.
Christy raised his eyebrows. “What? To know that it’s all real? To have to seriously consider every time she hears about some seemingly preposterous thing, that it might very well be true? To have to keep on guard with what she says so that people won’t think she’s gone off the deep end?”
“Is that how people look at us?” Bramley asked.
“What do you think?” Christy replied with a laugh.
Bramley hrumphed. He fidgeted with the papers on his desk, making more of a mess of them, rather than less.
“But Goon,” he said, finally coming to the heart of what bothered him with what he’d been told. “It’s like some retelling of ‘The King of the Cats,’ isn’t it? Are you really going to put that bit in?”
Christy nodded. “It’s part of the story.”
“I can’t see Goon as a king of anything,” Bramley said. “And if he is a king, then what’s he doing still working for me?”
“Which do you think would be better,” Christy asked. “To be a king below, or a man above?”
Bramley didn’t have an answer for that.
Time Skip
Every time it rains a ghost comes walking.
He goes up by the stately old houses that line Stanton Street, down Henratty Lane to where it leads into the narrow streets and crowded backalleys of Crowsea, and then back up Stanton again in an unvarying routine.
He wears a worn tweed suit—mostly browns and greys with a faint rosy touch of heather. A shapeless cap presses down his brown curls. His features give no true indication of his age, while his eyes are both innocent and wise. His face gleams in the rain, slick and wet as that of a living person. When he reaches the streetlamp in front of the old Hamill estate, he wipes his eyes with a brown hand. Then he fades away.
Samantha Rey knew it was true because she’d seen him. More than once.
She saw him every time it rained.
“So, have you asked her out yet?” Jilly wanted to know.
We were sitting on a park bench, feeding pigeons the leftover crusts from our lunches. Jilly had worked with me at the post office, that Christmas they hired outside staff instead of letting the regular employees work the overtime, and we’d been friends ever since. These days she worked three nights a week as a waitress, while I made what I could busking on the Market with my father’s old Czech fiddle.
Jilly was slender, wi
th a thick tangle of brown hair and pale blue eyes, electric as sapphires. She had a penchant for loose clothing and fingerless gloves when she wasn’t waitressing. There were times, when I met her on the streets in the evening, that I mistook her for a bag lady: skulking in an alleyway, gaze alternating between the sketchbook held in one hand and the faces of the people on the streets as they walked by. She had more sketches of me playing my fiddle than had any right to exist.
“She’s never going to know how you feel until you talk to her about it,” Jilly went on when I didn’t answer.
“I know.”
I’ll make no bones about it: I was putting the make on Sam Rey and had been ever since she’d started to work at Gypsy Records half a year ago. I never much went in for the blonde California beach girl type, but Sam had a look all her own. She had some indefinable quality that went beyond her basic cheerleader appearance. Right. I can hear you already. Rationalizations of the North American libido.
But it was true. I didn’t just want Sam in my bed; I wanted to know we were going to have a future together. I wanted to grow old with her. I wanted to build up a lifetime of shared memories.
About the most Sam knew about all this was that I hung around and talked to her a lot at the record store.
“Look,” Jilly said. “Just because she’s pretty, doesn’t mean she’s having a perfect life or anything.
Most guys look at someone like her and they won’t even approach her because they’re sure she’s got men coming out of her ears. Well, it doesn’t always work that way. For instance—” she touched her breastbone with a narrow hand and smiled “—consider yours truly.”
I looked at her long fingers. Paint had dried under her nails. “You’ve started a new canvas,” I said.
“And you’re changing the subject,” she replied. “Come on, Geordie. What’s the big deal? The most she can say is no.”
“Well, yeah. But ...”
“She intimidates you, doesn’t she?”
I shook my head. “I talk to her all the time.”
“Right. And that’s why I’ve got to listen to your constant mooning over her.” She gave me a sudden considering look, then grinned. “I’ll tell you what, Geordie, me lad. Here’s the bottom line: I’ll give you twentyfour hours to ask her out. If you haven’t got it together by then, I’ll talk to her myself “
“Don’t even joke about it.”
“Twentyfour hours,” Jilly said firmly. She looked at the chocolate-chip cookie in my hand. “Are you eating that?” she added in that certain tone of voice of hers that plainly said, all previous topics of conversation have been dealt with and completed. We are now changing topics.
So we did. But all the while we talked, I thought about going into the record store and asking Sam out, because if I didn’t, Jilly would do it for me. Whatever else she might be, Jilly wasn’t shy. Having her go in to plead my case would be as bad as having my mother do it for me. I’d never been able to show my face in there again.
Gypsy Records is on Williamson Street, one of the city’s main arteries. It begins as Highway 14
outside the city, lined with a sprawl of fast food outlets, malls and warehouses. On its way downtown, it begins to replace the commercial properties with everincreasing handfuls of residential blocks until it reaches the downtown core where shops and lowrise apartments mingle in gossiping crowds.
The store gets its name from John Butler, a short roundbellied man without a smidgen of Romany blood, who began his business out of the back of a handdrawn cart that gypsied its way through the city’s streets for years, always keeping just one step ahead of the municipal licensing board’s agents.
While it carries the usual bestsellers, the lifeblood of its sales are more obscure titles—imports and albums published by independent record labels. Albums, singles and compact discs of punk, traditional folk, jazz, heavy metal and alternative music line its shelves. Barring Sam, most of those who work there would look just as at home in the fashion pages of the most current British alternative fashion magazines.
Sam was wearing a blue cotton dress today, embroidered with silver threads. Her blonde hair was cut in a short shag on the top, hanging down past her shoulders at the back and sides. She was dealing with a defect when I came in. I don’t know if the record in question worked or not, but the man returning it was definitely defective.
“It sounds like there’s a radio broadcast right in the middle of the song,” he was saying as he tapped the cover of the Pink Floyd album on the counter between them.
“It’s supposed to be there,” Sam explained. “It’s part of the song.” The tone of her voice told me that this conversation was going into its twelfth round or so.
“Well, I don’t like it,” the man told her. “When I buy an album of music, I expect to get just music on it.”
“You still can’t return it.”
I worked in a record shop one Christmas—two years before the post office job. The best defect I got was from someone returning an inconcert album by Marcel Marceau. Each side had thirty minutes of silence, with applause at the end—I kid you not.
I browsed through the Celtic records while I waited for Sam to finish with her customer. I couldn’t afford any of them, but I liked to see what was new. Blasting out of the store’s speakers was the new Beastie Boys album. It sounded like a cross between heavy metal and bad rap and was about as appealing as being hit by a car. You couldn’t deny its energy, though.
By the time Sam was free I’d located five records I would have bought in more flush times. Leaving them in the bin, I drifted over to the front cash just as the Beastie Boys’ last cut ended. Sam replaced them with a tape of New Age piano music.
“What’s the new Oyster Band like?” I asked.
Sam smiled. “It’s terrific. My favorite cut’s ‘The Old Dance.’ It’s sort of an allegory based on Adam and Eve and the serpent that’s got a great hook in the chorus. Telfer’s fiddling just sort of skips ahead, pulling the rest of the song along.”
That’s what I like about alternative record stores like Gypsy’s—the people working in them actually know something about what they’re selling.
“Have you got an open copy?” I asked.
She nodded and turned to the bin of opened records behind her to find it. With her back to me, I couldn’t get lost in those deep blue eyes of hers. I seized my opportunity and plunged ahead.
“Areyouworkingtonight—wouldyouliketogooutwithmesomewhere?”
I’d meant to be cool about it, except the words all blurred together as they left my throat. I could feel the flush start up the back of my neck as she turned and looked back at me with those baby blues.
“Say what?” she asked.
Before my throat closed up on me completely, I tried again, keeping it short. “Do you want to go out with me tonight?”
Standing there with the Oyster Band album in her hand, I thought she’d never looked better.
Especially when she said, “I thought you’d never ask.”
I put in a couple of hours of busking that afternoon, down in Crowsea’s Market, the fiddle humming under my chin to the jingling rhythm of the coins that passersby threw into the case lying open in front of me. I came away with twentysix dollars and change—not the best of days, but enough to buy a halfway decent dinner and a few beers.
I picked up Sam after she finished work and we ate at The Monkey Woman’s Nest, a Mexican restaurant on Williamson just a couple of blocks down from Gypsy’s. I still don’t know how the place got its name. Ernestina Verdad, the Mexican woman who owns the place, looks like a showgirl and not one of her waitresses is even vaguely simian in appearance.
It started to rain as we were finishing our second beer, turning Williamson Street slick with neon reflections. Sam got a funny look on her face as she watched the rain through the window. Then she turned to me.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” she asked.
The serious look in her eyes stopped the halfas
sed joke that two beers brewed in the carbonated swirl of my mind. I never could hold my alcohol. I wasn’t drunk, but I had a buzz on.
“I don’t think so,” I said carefully. “At least I’ve never seriously stopped to think about it.”
“Come on,” she said, getting up from the table. “I want to show you something.”
I let her lead me out into the rain, though I didn’t let her pay anything towards the meal. Tonight was my treat. Next time I’d be happy to let her do the honors.
“Every time it rains,” she said, “a ghost comes walking down my street ....”
She told me the story as we walked down into Crowsea. The rain was light and I was enjoying it, swinging my fiddle case in my right hand, Sam hanging onto my left as though she’d always walked there.
I felt like I was on top of the world, listening to her talk, feeling the pressure of her arm, the bump of her hip against mine.
She had an apartment on the third floor of an old brick and frame building on Stanton Street. It had a front porch that ran the length of the house, dormer windows—two in the front and back, one on each side—and a sloped mansard roof. We stood on the porch, out of the rain, which was coming down harder now. An orange and white tom was sleeping on the cushion of a white wicker chair by the door.
He twitched a torn ear as we shared his shelter, but didn’t bother to open his eyes. I could smell the mint that was growing up alongside the porch steps, sharp in the wet air.
Sam pointed down the street to where the yellow glare of a streetlamp glistened on the rainslicked cobblestone walk that led to the Hamill estate. The Hamill house itself was separated from the street by a low wall and a dark expanse of lawn, bordered by the spreading boughs of huge oak trees.
“Watch the street,” she said. “Just under the streetlight.”
I looked, but I didn’t see anything. The wind gusted suddenly, driving the rain in hard sheets along Stanton Street, and for a moment we lost all visibility. When it cleared, he was standing there, Sam’s ghost, just like she’d told me. As he started down the street, Sam gave my arm a tug. I stowed my fiddle case under the tom’s wicker chair, and we followed the ghost down Henratty Lane.
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