Dreams Underfoot n-1

by Charles de Lint

  As Katrina shrugged, Amy remembered what Katrina’s sisters had said last night.

  Before the first dawn light follows tomorrow night.

  That was tonight. This morning.

  Or foam you’ll be.

  She shivered and looked at Katrina.

  “Tell me what’s going on,” she said. “Please, Katrina. Maybe I can help you.”

  Katrina just shook her head sadly. She mimed driving, hands around the invisible steering wheel again.

  Amy sighed. She put the car in gear and pulled out of the parking lot. Katrina reached towards the radio, eyebrows raised quizzically. When Amy nodded, she turned it on and slowly wound through the stations until she got Newford’s WKPN—FM. It was too early for Zoe B.’s “Nightnoise” show, so they listened to Mariah Carey, the Vaughan Brothers and the like as they followed the highway east.

  Neither of them spoke as they drove; Katrina couldn’t and Amy was just too depressed. She didn’t know what was going on. She just felt as though she’d become trapped in a Greek tragedy. The storyline was already written, everything was predestined to a certain outcome and there was nothing she could do about it. Only Matt could have, if he’d loved Katrina, but she couldn’t even blame him.

  You couldn’t force a person to love somebody.

  She didn’t agree with his need to protect his privacy. Maybe it stopped him from being hurt, but it also stopped him from being alive. But he was right about one thing: he couldn’t be held responsible for who chose to love him.

  They crossed over the Dulfer River just as dawn was starting to pink the eastern horizon. When Amy pulled into the campgrounds, Katrina directed her down a narrow dirt road that led to the park’s boat launch.

  They had the place to themselves. Amy pulled up by the water and killed the engine. The pines stood silent around them when they got out of the car. There was birdsong, but it seemed strangely muted.

  Distant. As though heard through gauze.

  Katrina lifted a hand and touched Amy’s cheek, then walked towards the water. She headed to the left of the launching area where a series of broad flat rocks staircased down into the water. After a moment’s hesitation, Amy followed after. She sat down beside Katrina, who was right by the edge of the water, arms wrapped around her knees.

  “Katrina,” she began. “Please tell me what’s going on. I—”

  She fussed in her purse, looking for pen and paper. She found the former, and pulled out her checkbook to use the back of a check as a writing surface.

  “I want to help,” she said, holding the pen and checkbook out to her companion.

  Katrina regarded her for a long moment, a helpless look in her eyes, but finally she took the proffered items. She began to write on the back of one of the checks, but before she could hand it back to Amy, a wind rose up. The pine trees shivered, needles whispering against each other.

  An electric tingle sparked across every inch of Amy’s skin. The hairs at the nape of her neck prickled and goosebumps traveled up her arms. It was like that moment before a storm broke, when the air is so charged with ions that it seems anything might happen.

  “What ... ?” she began.

  Her voice died in her throat as the air around them thickened. Shapes formed in the air, pale diffused airy shapes, slender and transparent. Their voices were like the sound of the wind in the pines.

  “Come with us,” they said, beckoning to Katrina.

  “Be one with us.”

  “We can give you what you lack.”

  Katrina stared at the misty apparitions for the longest time. Then she let pen and checkbook fall to the rock and stood up, stretching her arms towards the airy figures. Her own body began to lose its definition. She was a spiderweb in the shape of a woman, gossamer, smoke and mist. Her clothing fell from her transparent form to fall into a tangle beside Amy.

  And then she was gone. The wind died. The whisper stilled in the pines.

  Amy stared openmouthed at where Katrina had disappeared. All that lay on the rock were Katrina’s clothes, the pen and the checkbook. Amy reached out towards the clothes. They were damp to the touch.

  Or foam you’ll be.

  Amy looked up into the lightning sky. But Katrina hadn’t just turned to foam, had she? Something had come and taken her away before that happened. If any of this had even been real at all. If she hadn’t just lost it completely.

  She heard weeping and lowered her gaze to the surface of the lake. There were four women’s heads there, bobbing in the unruly water. Their hair was short, cropped close to their heads, untidily, as though cut with garden shears or a knife. Their eyes were red with tears. Each could have been Katrina’s twin.

  Seeing her gaze upon them, they sank beneath the waves, one by one, and then Amy was alone again. She swallowed thickly, then picked up her checkbook to read what Katrina had written before what could only have been angels came to take her away:

  “Is this what having a soul means, to know such bittersweet pain? But still, I cherish the time I had.

  Those who live forever, who have no stake in the dance of death’s inevitable approach, can never understand the sanctity of life.”

  It sounded stiff, like a quote, but then Amy realized she’d never heard how Katrina would speak, not the cadence of her voice, nor its timbre, nor her diction.

  And now she never would.

  The next day, Matt found Amy where her brother Pete said she was going. She was by the statue of the little mermaid on Wolf Island, just sitting on a bench and staring out at the lake. She looked haggard from a lack of sleep.

  “What happened to you last night?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “I decided to go for a drive.”

  Matt nodded as though he understood, though he didn’t pretend to have a clue. The complexities that made up people’s personalities were forever a mystery to him.

  He sat down beside her.

  “Have you seen Katrina?” he asked. “I went by Lucia’s place looking for her, but she was acting all weird—” not unusual for Lucia, he added to himself “—and told me I should ask you.”

  “She’s gone,” Amy said. “Maybe back into the lake, maybe into the sky. I’m not really sure.”

  Matt just looked at her. “Come again?” he said finally.

  So Amy told him about it all, of what she’d seen two nights ago by the old L & N sawmill, of what had happened last night.

  “It’s like in that legend about the little mermaid,” she said as she finished up. She glanced at the statue beside them. “The real legend—not what you’d find in some kid’s picturebook.”

  Matt shook his head. “‘The Little Mermaid’ isn’t a legend,” he said. “It’s just a story, made up by Hans Christian Andersen, like The Emperor’s New Clothes’ and ‘The Ugly Duckling.’ They sure as hell aren’t real.”

  “I’m just telling you what I saw.”

  “Jesus, Amy. Will you listen to yourself?”

  When she turned to face him, he saw real anguish in her features. “I can’t help it,” she said. “It really happened.”

  Matt started to argue, but then he shook his head. He didn’t know what had gotten into Amy to go on like this. He expected this kind of thing from Geordie’s brother who made his living gussying up fantastical stories from nothing, but Amy?

  “It looks like her, doesn’t it?” Amy said.

  Matt followed her gaze to the statue. He remembered the last time he’d been on the island, the night when he’d walked out on Katrina, when everything had looked like her. He got up from the bench and stepped closer. The statue’s bronze features gleamed in the sunlight.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I guess it does.”

  Then he walked away.

  He was pissed off with Amy for going on the way she had and brooded about her stupid story all the way back to the city. He had a copy of the Andersen Fairy Tales at home. When he got back to his apartment, he took it down from the shelf and read the story again.

&
nbsp; “Aw, shit,” he said as he closed the book.

  It was just a story. Katrina would turn up. They’d all share a laugh at how Amy was having him on.

  But Katrina didn’t turn up. Not that day, nor the next, nor by the end of the week. She’d vanished from his life as mysteriously as she’d come into it.

  That’s why I don’t want to get involved with people, he wanted to tell Amy. Because they just walk out of your life if you don’t do what they want you to do.

  No way it had happened as Amy had said it did. But he found himself wondering about what it would be like to be without a soul, wondering if he even had one.

  Friday of that week, he found himself back on the island, standing by the statue once again. There were a couple of tattered silk flowers on the stone at its base. He stared at the mermaid’s features for a long time, then he went home and started to phone the members of Marrowbones.

  “Well, I kind of thought this was coming,” Amy said when he called to tell her that he was breaking up the band, “except I thought it’d be Johnny or Nicky quitting.”

  She was sitting in the windowseat of her apartment’s bay window, back against one side, feet propped up against the other. She was feeling better than she had when she’d seen him on Sunday, but there was still a strangeness inside her. A lost feeling, a sense of the world having shifted underfoot and the rules being all changed.

  “So what’re you going to do?” she added when he didn’t respond.

  “Hit the road for awhile.”

  “Gigging, or just traveling?”

  “Little of both, I guess.”

  There was another long pause and Amy wondered if he was waiting for her to ask if she could come.

  But she was really over him now. Had been for a long time. She wasn’t looking to be anybody’s psychiatrist, or mother. Or matchmaker.

  “Well, see you then,” he said.

  “Bon voyage,” Amy said.

  She cradled the phone. She thought of how he had talked with her the other night up at Hartnett’s Point, opening up, actually relating to her. And now ... She realized that the whole business with Katrina had just wound him up tighter than ever before.

  Well, somebody else was going to have to work on those walls and she knew who it had to be. A guy named Matt Casey.

  She looked out the window again.

  “Good luck,” she said.

  Matt was gone for a year. When he came back, the first place he went to was Wolf Island. He stood out by the statue for a long time, not saying anything, just trying to sort out why he was here. He didn’t have much luck, not that year, nor each subsequent year that he came. Finally, almost a decade after Katrina was gone—walked out of his life, turned into a puddle of lake water, went sailing through the air with angels, whatever—he decided to stay overnight, as though being alone in the dark would reveal something that was hidden from the day.

  “Lady,” he said, standing in front of the statue, drowned in the thick silence of the night.

  He hadn’t brought an offering for the statue—Our Lady of the Harbour, as the baglady had called her. He was just here, looking for something that remained forever out of reach. He wasn’t trying to understand Katrina or the story that Amy had told of her. Not anymore.

  “Why am I so empty inside?” he asked.

  “I can’t believe you’re going to play with him again,” Lucia said when Amy told her about her new band, Johnny Jump Up.

  Amy shrugged. “It’ll just be the three of us—Geordie’s going to be playing fiddle.”

  “But he hasn’t changed at all. He’s still so—cold.”

  “Not on stage.”

  “I suppose not,” Lucia said. “I guess all he’s got going for him is his music.”

  Amy nodded sadly.

  “I know,” she said.

  Paperjack

  If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

  —Derek Bok

  Churches aren’t havens of spiritual enlightenment; they enclose the spirit. The way Jilly explains it, organizing Mystery tends to undermine its essence. I’m not so sure I agree, but then I don’t really know enough about it. When it comes to things that can’t be logically explained, I take a step back and leave them to Jilly or my brother Christy—they thrive on that kind of thing. If I had to describe myself as belonging to any church or mystical order, it’d be one devoted to secular humanism. My concerns are for real people and the here and now; the possible existence of God, faeries, or some metaphysical Otherworld just doesn’t fit into my worldview.

  Except ...

  You knew there’d be an “except,” didn’t you, or else why would I be writing this down?

  It’s not like I don’t have anything to say. I’m all for creative expression, but my medium’s music. I’m not an artist like Jilly, or a writer like Christy. But the kinds of things that have been happening to me can’t really be expressed in a fiddle tune—no, that’s not entirely true. I can express them, but the medium is such I can’t be assured that, when I’m playing, listeners hear what I mean them to hear.

  That’s how it works with instrumental music, and it’s probably why the best of it is so enduring: the listener takes away whatever he or she wants from it. Say the composer was trying to tell us about the aftermath of some great battle. When we hear it, the music might speak to us of a parent we’ve lost, a friend’s struggle with some debilitating disease, a doe standing at the edge of a forest at twilight, or any of a thousand other unrelated things.

  Realistic art like Jilly does—or at least it’s realistically rendered; her subject matter’s right out of some urban update of those Andrew Lang colorcoded fairy tale books that most of us read when we were kids—and the collections of urban legends and stories that my brother writes don’t have that same leeway. What goes down on the canvas or on paper, no matter how skillfully drawn or written, doesn’t allow for much in the way of an alternate interpretation.

  So that’s why I’m writing this down: to lay it all out in black and white where maybe I can understand it myself.

  For the past week, every afternoon after busking up by the Williamson Street Mall for the lunchtime crowds, I’ve packed up my fiddle case and headed across town to come here to St. Paul’s Cathedral.

  Once I get here, I sit on the steps about halfway up, take out this notebook, and try to write. The trouble is, I haven’t been able to figure out where to start.

  I like it out here on the steps. I’ve played inside the cathedral—just once, for a friend’s wedding. The wedding was okay, but I remember coming in on my own to test the acoustics an hour or so before the rehearsal; ever since then I’ve been a little unsure about how Jilly views this kind of place. My fiddling didn’t feel enclosed. Instead the walls seemed to open the music right up; the cathedral gave the reel I was playing a stately grace—a spiritual grace—that it had never held for me before. I suppose it had more to do with the architect’s design than the presence of God, still I could’ve played there all night only But I’m rambling again. I’ve filled a couple of pages now, which is more than I’ve done all week, except after just rereading what I’ve written so far, I don’t know if any of it’s relevant.

  Maybe I should just tell you about Paperjack. I don’t know that it starts with him exactly, but it’s probably as good a place as any to begin.

  It was a glorious day, made all the more precious because the weather had been so weird that spring.

  One day I’d be bundled up in a jacket and scarf, cloth cap on my head, with fingerless gloves to keep the cold from my finger joints while I was out busking, the next I’d be in a Tshirt, breaking into a sweat just thinking about standing out on some street corner to play tunes.

  There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, the sun was halfway home from noon to the western horizon, and Jilly and I were just soaking up the rays on the steps of St. Paul’s. I was slouched on the steps, leaning on one elbow, my fiddlecase propped up beside me, wishing I had worn shorts
because my jeans felt like leaden weights on my legs. Sitting beside me, perched like a cat about to pounce on something terribly interesting that only it could see, Jilly was her usual scruffy self. There were flecks of paint on her loose cotton pants and her shortsleeved blouse, more under her fingernails, and still more halflost in the tangles of her hair. She turned to look at me, her face miraculously untouched by her morning’s work, and gave me one of her patented smiles.

  “Did you ever wonder where he’s from?” Jilly asked.

  That was one of her favorite phrases: “Did you ever wonder ... ?” It could take you from considering if and when fish slept, or why people look up when they’re thinking, to more arcane questions about ghosts, little people living behind wallboards, and the like. And she loved guessing about people’s origins. Sometimes when I was busking she’d tag along and sit by the wall at my back, sketching the people who were listening to me play. Invariably, she’d come up behind me and whisper in my ear—usually when I was in the middle of a complicated tune that needed all my attention—something along the lines of, “The guy in the polyester suit? Ten to one he rides a big chopper on the weekends, complete with a jean vest.”

  So I was used to it.

  Today she wasn’t picking out some nameless stranger from a crowd. Instead her attention was on Paperjack, sitting on the steps far enough below us that he couldn’t hear what we were saying.

  Paperjack had the darkest skin I’d ever seen on a man—an amazing ebony that seemed to swallow light. He was in his midsixties, I’d guess, short corkscrew hair all gone grey. The dark suits he wore were threadbare and out of fashion, but always clean. Under his suit jacket he usually wore a white Tshirt that flashed so brightly in the sun it almost hurt your eyes—just like his teeth did when he gave you that lopsided grin of his.

  Nobody knew his real name and he never talked. I don’t know if he was mute, or if he just didn’t have anything to say, but the only sounds I ever heard him make were a chuckle or a laugh. People started calling him Paperjack because he worked an origami gig on the streets.