Dreams Underfoot n-1

by Charles de Lint

  “Some night, isn’t it?” she said.

  I was still trying to figure her out. I couldn’t place her age. One moment she looked young enough to be a runaway and I waited for the inevitable request for spare change or a place to crash, the next she seemed around my age—late twenties, early thirties—and I didn’t know what she might want. One thing people didn’t do in the city, even in this part of it, was befriend strangers. Not at night. Especially not if you were young and as pretty as she was.

  My lack of a response didn’t seem to faze her in the least.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Christy Riddell,” I said. I hesitated for a moment, then reconciled myself to a conversation.

  “What’s yours?” I added as I closed my notebook, leaving my pen inside it to keep my place.

  “Tallulah.”

  Just that, the one name. Spoken with the brassy confidence of a Cher or a Madonna.

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  Tallulah sounded like it should belong to a ‘20s flapper, not some punky street kid.

  She gave me a smile that lit up her face, banishing the last trace of the harshness I’d seen in her features as she was walking up to the bench.

  “No, really,” she said. “But you can call me Tally.”

  The melody of the ridiculous refrain from that song by—was it Harry Belafonte?—came to mind, something about tallying bananas. “What’re you doing?” she asked.

  “Writing.”

  “I can see that. I meant, what kind of writing?”

  “I write stories,” I told her.

  I waited then for the inevitable questions: Have you ever been published? What name do you write under? Where do you get your ideas? Instead she turned away and looked up at the sky.

  “I knew a poet once,” she said. “He wanted to capture his soul on a piece of paper—really capture it.” She looked back at me. “But of course, you can’t do that, can you? You can try, you can bleed honesty into your art until it feels like you’ve wrung your soul dry, but in the end, all you’ve created is a possible link between minds. An attempt at communication. If a soul can’t be measured, then how can it be captured?”

  I revised my opinion of her age. She might look young, but she spoke with too much experience couched in her words.

  “What happened to him?” I found myself asking. “Did he give up?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. He moved away.” Her gaze left mine and turned skyward once more.

  “When they move away, they leave my life because I can’t follow them.”

  She mesmerized me—right from that first night. I sensed a portent in her casual appearance into my life, though a portent of what, I couldn’t say.

  “Did you ever want to?” I asked her.

  “Want to what?”

  “Follow them.” I remember, even then, how the plurality bothered me. I was jealous and I didn’t even know of what.

  She shook her head. “No. All I ever have is what they leave behind.”

  Her voice seemed to diminish as she spoke. I wanted to reach out and touch her shoulder with my hand, to offer what comfort I could to ease the sudden malaise that appeared to have gripped her, but her moods, I came to learn, were mercurial. She sat up suddenly and stroked Ben until the motor of his purring filled the air with its resonance.

  “Do you always write in places like this?” she asked.

  I nodded. “I like the night; I like the city at night. It doesn’t seem to belong to anyone then. On a good night, it almost seems as if the stories write themselves. It’s almost as though coming out here plugs me directly into the dark heart of the city night and all of its secrets come spilling from my pen.”

  I stopped, suddenly embarrassed by what I’d said. It seemed too personal a disclosure for such short acquaintance. But she just gave me a lowwatt version of her earlier smile.

  “Doesn’t that bother you?” she asked.

  “Does what bother me?”

  “That perhaps what you’re putting down on paper doesn’t belong to you.”

  “Does it ever?” I replied. “Isn’t the very act of creation made up of setting a piece of yourself free?”

  “What happens when there’s no more pieces left?”

  “That’s what makes it special—I don’t think you ever run out of the creative spark. Just doing it, replenishes the well. The more I work, the more ideas come to me. Whether they come from my subconscious or some outside source, isn’t really relevant. What is relevant is what I put into it.”

  “Even when it seems to write itself?”

  “Maybe especially so.”

  I was struck—not then, but later, remembering—by the odd intensity of the conversation. It wasn’t a normal dialogue between strangers. We must have talked for three hours, never about ourselves, our histories, our pasts, but rather about what we were now, creating an intimacy that seemed surreal when I thought back on it the next day. Occasionally, there were lulls in the conversation, but they, too, seemed to add to the sense of bonding, like the comfortable silences that are only possible between good friends.

  I could’ve kept right on talking, straight through the night until dawn, but she rose during one of those lulls.

  “I have to go,” she said, swinging the strap of her carryall onto her shoulder.

  I knew a moment’s panic. I didn’t know her address or her phone number. All I had was her first name.

  “When can I see you again?” I asked.

  “Have you ever been down to those old stone steps under the Kelly Street Bridge?”

  I nodded. They dated back from when the river was used to haul goods from upland, down to the lake. The steps under the bridge were all that was left of an old dock that had serviced the Irishowned inn called The Harp. The dock was long abandoned, but The Harp still stood. It was one of the oldest buildings in the city. Only the solid stone structures of the city’s Dutch founding fathers, like the ones that encircled us, were older.

  “I’ll meet you there tomorrow night,” she said. She took a few steps, then paused, adding, “Why don’t you bring along one of your books?”

  The smile she gave me, before she turned away again, was intox—

  icating. I watched her walk back across the courtyard, disappearing into the narrow mouth of the alleyway from which she’d first come. Her footsteps lingered on, an echoing taptap on the cobblestones, but then that too faded.

  I think it was at that moment that I decided she was a ghost.

  I didn’t get much writing done over the next few weeks. She wouldn’t—she said she couldn’t—see me during the day, but she wouldn’t say why. I’ve got such a head filled with fictions that I honestly thought it was because she was a ghost, or maybe a succubus or a vampire. The sexual attraction was certainly there. If she’d sprouted fangs one night, I’d probably just have bared my neck and let her feed.

  But she didn’t, of course. Given a multiplechoice quiz, in the end I realized the correct answer was none of the above.

  I was also sure that she was at least my own age, if not older. She was widely read and, like myself, had eclectic tastes that ranged from genre fiction to the classics. We talked for hours every night, progressed to walking hand in hand through our favorite parts of the benighted city and finally made love one night in a large, cozy sleeping bag in Fitzhenry Park.

  She took me there on one of what we called our rambles and didn’t say a word, just stripped down in the moonlight and then drew me down into the sweet harbor of her arms. Above us, I heard geese heading south as, later, I drifted into sleep. I remember thinking it was odd to hear them so late at night, but then what wasn’t in the hours I spent with Tally?

  I woke alone in the morning, the subject of some curiosity by a couple of old winos who casually watched me get dressed inside the bag as though they saw this kind of thing every morning.

  Our times together blur in my mind now. It’s hard for me to remember one
night from another. But I have little fetish bundles of memory that stay whole and complete in my mind, the grisgris that collected around her name in my mind, like my nervousness that second night under the Kelly Street Bridge, worried that she wouldn’t show, and three nights later when, after not saying a word about the book of my stories I’d given her when we parted on the old stone steps under the bridge, she told me how much she’d liked them.

  “These are my stories,” she said as she handed the book back to me that night.

  I’d run into possessive readers before, fans who laid claim to my work as their own private domain, who treated the characters in the stories as real people, or thought that I carried all sorts of hidden and secret knowledge in my head, just because of the magic and mystery that appeared in the tales I told. But I’d never had a reaction like Tally’s before.

  “They’re about me,” she said. “They’re your stories, I can taste your presence in every word, but each of them’s a piece of me, too.”

  I told her she could keep the book and the next night, I brought her copies of my other three collections, plus photocopies of the stories that had only appeared in magazines to date. I won’t say it’s because she liked the stories so much, that I came to love her; that would have happened anyway. But her pleasure in them certainly didn’t make me think any the less of her.

  Another night she took a photograph out of her carryall and showed it to me. It was a picture of her, but she looked different, softer, not so much younger as not so tough. She wore her hair differently and had a flower print dress on; she was standing in sunlight.

  “When ... when was this taken?” I asked.

  “In happier times.”

  Call me smallminded that my disappointment should show so plain, but it hurt that what were the happiest nights of my life, weren’t the same for her.

  She noticed my reaction—she was always quick with things like that—and laid a warm hand on mine.

  “It’s not you,” she said. “I love our time together. It’s the rest of my life that’s not so happy.”

  Then be with me all the time, I wanted to tell her, but I already knew from experience that there was no talking about where she went when she left me, what she did, who she was. I was still thinking of ghosts, you see. I was afraid that some taboo lay upon her telling me, that if she spoke about it, if she told me where she was during the day, the spell would break and her spirit would be banished forever like in some hokey Bmovie.

  I wanted more than just the nights, I’ll admit freely to that, but not enough to risk losing what I had. I was like the wife in “Bluebeard,” except I refused to allow my curiosity to turn the key in the forbidden door. I could have followed her, but I didn’t. And not just because I was afraid of her vanishing on me. It was because she trusted me not to.

  We made love three times, all told, every time in that old sleeping bag of hers, each time in a different place, each morning I woke alone. I’d bring back her sleeping bag when we met that night and she’d smile to see its bulk rolled under my arm.

  The morning after the first time, I realized that I was changing; that she was changing me. It wasn’t by anything she said or did, or rather it wasn’t that she was making me change, but that our relationship was stealing away that sense of distancing I had carried with me through my life.

  And she was changing, too. She still wore her jeans and leather jacket most of the time, but sometimes she appeared wearing a short dress under the jacket, warm leggings, small trim shoes instead of her boots. Her face kept its character, but the tension wasn’t so noticeable anymore, the toughness had softened.

  I’d been open with her from the very first night, more open than I’d ever been with friends I’d known for years. And that remained. But now it was starting to spill over to my other relationships. I found my brother and my friends were more comfortable with me, and I with them. None of them knew about Tally; so far as they knew I was still prowling the nocturnal streets of the city in search of inspiration.

  They didn’t know that I wasn’t writing, though Professor Dapple guessed.

  I suppose it was because he always read my manuscripts before I sent them off. We had the same interests in the odd and the curious—it was what had drawn us together long before Jilly became his student, before he retired from the university. Everybody still thought of him as the Professor; it was hard not to.

  He was a tiny wizened man with a shock of frizzy white hair and gasses who delighted in long conversations conducted over tea, or if the hour was appropriate, a good Irish whisky. At least once every couple of weeks the two of us would sit in his cozy study, he reading one of my stories while I read his latest article before it was sent off to some journal or other. When the third visit went by in which I didn’t have a manuscript in hand, he finally broached the subject. “You seem happy these days, Christy.”

  “I am.”

  He’d smiled. “So is it true what they say—an artist must suffer to produce good work?”

  I hadn’t quite caught on yet to what he was about.

  “Neither of us believe that,” I said.

  “Then you must be in love.”

  1,

  .

  I didn’t know what to say. An awful sinking feeling had settled in my stomach at his words. Lord knew, he was right, but for some reason, just as I knew I shouldn’t follow Tally when she left me after our midnight trysts, I had this superstitious dread that if the world discovered our secret, she would no longer be a part of my life.

  “There’s nothing wrong with being in love,” he said, mistaking my hesitation for embarrassment.

  “It’s not that,” I began, knowing I had nowhere to go except a lie and I couldn’t lie to the Professor.

  “Never fear,” he said. “You’re allowed your privacy—and welcome to it, I might add. At my age, any relating of your escapades would simply make me jealous. But I worry about your writing.”

  “I haven’t stopped,” I told him. And then I had it. “I’ve been thinking of writing a novel.”

  That wasn’t a lie. I was always thinking of writing a novel; I just doubted that I ever would. My creative process could easily work within the perimeters of short fiction, even a connected series of stories such as The Red Crow had turned out to be, but a novel was too massive an undertaking for me to understand, little say attempt. I had to have the whole of it in my head and to do so with anything much longer than a short novella was far too daunting a process for me to begin. I had discovered, to my disappointment because I did actually want to make the attempt, that the longer a piece of mine was, the less ... substance it came to have. It was as though the sheer volume of a novel’s wordage would somehow dissipate the strengths my work had to date.

  My friends who did write novels told me I was just being a chickenshit; but then they had trouble with short fiction and avoided it like the plague. It was my firm belief that one should stick with what worked, though maybe that was just a way of rationalizing a failure.

  “What sort of a novel?” the Professor asked, intrigued since he knew my feelings on the subject.

  I gave what I hoped was a casual shrug.

  “That’s what I’m still trying to decide,” I said, and then turned the conversation to other concerns.

  But I was nervous leaving the Professor’s house, as though the little I had said was enough to turn the key in the door that led into the hidden room I shouldn’t enter. I sensed a weakening of the dam that kept the mystery of our trysts deep and safe. I feared for the floodgate opening and the rush of reality that would tear my ghostly lover away from me.

  But as I’ve already said, she wasn’t a ghost. No, something far stranger hid behind her facade of pixie face and tousled hair.

  I’ve wondered before, and still do, how much of what happens to us we bring upon ourselves. Did my odd superstition concerning Tally drive her away, or was she already leaving before I ever said as much as I did to the Professor? Or was it mere c
oincidence that she said goodbye that same night?

  I think of the carryall she’d had on her shoulder the first time we met and have wondered since if she wasn’t already on her way then.

  Perhaps I had only interrupted a journey already begun.

  “You know, don’t you?” she said when I saw her that night. Did synchronicity reach so far that we would part that night in that same courtyard by the river where we had first met? “You know I have to go,” she added when I said nothing. I nodded. I did. What I didn’t know was

  “Why?” I asked.

  Her features seemed harder again—like they had been that first night. The softness that had grown as our relationship had was more memory than fact, her features seemed to be cut to the bone once more.

  Only her eyes still held a touch of warmth, as did her smile. A tough veneer masked the rest of her.

  “It’s because of how the city is used,” she said. “It’s because of hatred and spite and bigotry; it’s because of homelessness and drugs and crime; it’s because the green quiet places are so few while the dark terrors multiply; it’s because what’s old and comfortable and rounded must make way for what’s new and sharp and brittle; it’s because a mean spirit grips its streets and that meanness cuts inside me like a knife.

  “It’s changing me, Christy, and I don’t want you to see what I will become. You wouldn’t recognize me and I wouldn’t want you to. “That’s why I have to go.”

  When she said go, I knew she meant she was leaving me, not the city.

  “But—”

  “You’ve helped me keep it all at bay, truly you have, but it’s not enough. Neither of us have enough strength to hold that mean spirit at bay forever. What we have was stolen from the darkness. But it won’t let us steal any more.”

  I started to speak, but she just laid her fingers across my lips. I saw that her sleeping bag was stuffed under the bench. She pulled it out and unrolled it on the cobblestones. I thought of the dark windows of the town houses looking into the courtyard. There could be a hundred gazes watching as she gently pulled me down onto the sleeping bag, but I didn’t care.