by Paula Guran
Puffing a little, she finally caught up with the boys in the little clearing near the hilltop. Gratefully she let go her various burdens, just in time for Baby to come barreling straight into them as he forward-rolled over to greet her. Everything was sent flying, and a good half of the stuff went rolling off down the hill. She made only the most perfunctory attempts to retrieve it. Instead, she gathered up her son and turned to her husband, watching for his response.
Papa was staring back down the hill at the town they’d left behind. Scotsford lay bathed in the super-radiant glow of a nuclear sunset: across the hushed and lovely suburb pools winked blue, patio barbecues wafted savory smells into the evening air, porch lights glittered against the gathering dusk. From up on the hill you could no longer hear the vague hum of conversations, the hi-fis playing Mantovani; you couldn’t feel the taut thin lines of tension that lay behind it all, like guy ropes braced to hold the big top high.
The big bear looked down at the houses of the humans for the longest time, till the sun was finally down behind the farther hillside. Ruminatively he ran a claw under his collar and tie, ripped them away almost without thinking. Ditched the trilby. And then, with a perfect spontaneity that made Mama Bear forget for a moment all the trials and tribulations down the weeks and months and years—forget the horrors they’d left back in the Scotsford house, even—he pitched seven perfect roll-overs, and stood triumphant at the end, stood tall and proud and bearlike once again. Mama barked her approval, and Baby mimicked his papa; they romped and sported in the clearing, all of them, tearing up the rich loam and pine needles underfoot, cloaking themselves with the stink of nature once more. And then, as the nightbirds cried and the huge yellow moon rose up ahead of them, they lumbered off one by one into the forest and were gone.
Steve Duffy has written/coauthored five collections of weird short stories. Tragic Life Stories, The Five Quarters, The Night Comes On (all from Ash-Tree Press), and his most recent, The Moment of Panic (PS Publishing). His work also appears in a number of anthologies published in the UK and the US. He won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Short Story, was shortlisted for a World Fantasy Award in 2009, and again in 2012.
Charles de Lint invented Newford, a place where myth and magic spill into the “real” modern world; peopled it with the likes of Jilly Coppercorn, Sophie Etoile, Christy Riddell, and many others, all the while crafting stories that weave in and out of it and its environs. If ever there were a place where dreams want to be real, or can even slip into reality, it would be Newford. It’s a natural place for wonder stories.
The Moon Is Drowning While I Sleep
Charles de Lint
If you keep your mind sufficiently open,
people will throw a lot of rubbish into it.
—William A. Orton
1
Once upon a time there was what there was, and if nothing had happened there would be nothing to tell.
2
It was my father who told me that dreams want to be real. When you start to wake up, he said, they hang on and try to slip out into the waking world when you don’t notice. Very strong dreams, he added, can almost do it; they can last for almost half a day, but not much longer.
I asked him if any ever made it. If any of the people our subconscious minds toss up and make real while we’re sleeping had ever actually stolen out into this world from the dream world.
He knew of at least one that had, he said.
He had that kind of lost look in his eyes that made me think of my mother. He always looked like that when he talked about her, which wasn’t often.
Who was it? I asked, hoping he’d dole out another little tidbit about my mother. Is it someone I know?
But he only shook his head. Not really, he told me. It happened a long time ago—before you were born. But I often wondered, he added almost to himself, what did she dream of?
That was a long time ago and I don’t know if he ever found out. If he did, he never told me. But lately I’ve been wondering about it. I think maybe they don’t dream. I think that if they do, they get pulled back into the dream world.
And if we’re not careful, I think they can pull us back with them.
3
“I’ve been having the strangest dreams,” Sophie Etoile said, more as an observation than a conversational opener.
She and Jilly Coppercorn had been enjoying a companionable silence while they sat on the stone river wall in the old part of Lower Crowsea’s Market. The wall is by a small public courtyard, surrounded on three sides by old three-story brick and stone town houses, peaked with mansard roofs, dormer windows thrusting from the walls like hooded eyes with heavy brows. The buildings date back over a hundred years, leaning against each other like old friends too tired to talk, just taking comfort from each other’s presence.
The cobblestoned streets that web out from the courtyard are narrow, too tight a fit for a car, even the small imported makes. They twist and turn, winding in and around the buildings more like back alleys than thoroughfares. If you have any sort of familiarity with the area you can maze your way by those lanes to find still smaller courtyards, hidden and private, and, deeper still, secret gardens.
There are more cats in Old Market than anywhere else in Newford and the air smells different. Though it sits just a few blocks west of some of the city’s principal thoroughfares, you can hardly hear the traffic, and you can’t smell it at all. No exhaust, no refuse, no dead air. Old Market always seems to smell of fresh bread baking, cabbage soups, frying fish, roses and those tart, sharp-tasting apples that make the best strudels.
Sophie and Jilly were bookended by stairs going down to the Kickaha River on either side of them. The streetlamp behind them put a glow on their hair, haloing each with a nimbus of light. Jilly’s hair was darker, all loose tangled curls; Sophie’s was soft auburn, hanging in ringlets.
In the half-dark beyond the lamp’s murky light, their small figures could almost be taken for each other, but when the light touched their features, Jilly could be seen to have the quick, clever features of a Rack-ham pixie, while Sophie’s were softer, as though rendered by Rossetti or Burne-Jones. Though similarly dressed with paint-stained smocks over loose T-shirts and baggy cotton pants, Sophie still managed to look tidy, while Jilly could never seem to help a slight tendency toward scruffiness. She was the only one of the two with paint in her hair.
“What sort of dreams?” Jilly asked her friend.
It was almost four o’clock in the morning. The narrow streets of Old Market lay empty and still about them, except for the odd prowling cat, and cats can be like the hint of a whisper when they want, ghosting and silent, invisible presences. The two women had been working at Sophie’s studio on a joint painting, a collaboration that was going to combine Jilly’s precise, delicate work with Sophie’s current penchant for bright flaring colors and loosely rendered figures. Neither was sure the experiment would work, but they’d been enjoying themselves immensely, so it really didn’t matter.
“Well, they’re sort of serial,” Sophie said. “You know, where you keep dreaming about the same place, the same people, the same events, except each night you’re a little further along in the story.”
Jilly gave her an envious look. “I’ve always wanted to have that kind of dream. Christy’s had them. I think he told me that it’s called lucid dreaming.”
“They’re anything but lucid,” Sophie said. “If you ask me, they’re downright strange.”
“No, no. It just means that you know you’re dreaming, when you’re dreaming, and have some kind of control over what happens in the dream.”
Sophie laughed. “I wish.”
4
I’m wearing a long pleated skirt and one of those white cotton peasant blouses that’s cut way too low in the bodice. I don’t know why. I hate that kind of bodice. I keep feeling like I’m going to fall out whenever I bend over. Definitely designed by a man. Wendy likes to wear that kind of thing from time to t
ime, but it’s not for me.
Nor is going barefoot. Especially not here. I’m standing on a path, but it’s muddy underfoot, all squishy between my toes. It’s sort of nice in some ways, but I keep getting the feeling that something’s going to sidle up to me, under the mud, and brush against my foot, so I don’t want to move, but I don’t want to just stand here, either.
Everywhere I look it’s all marsh. Low flat fens, with just the odd crack willow or alder trailing raggedy vines the way you see Spanish moss in pictures of the Everglades, but this definitely isn’t Florida. It feels more Englishy, if that makes sense.
I know if I step off the path I’ll be in muck up to my knees.
I can see a dim kind of light off in the distance, way off the path. I’m attracted to it, the way any light in the darkness seems to call out, welcoming you, but I don’t want to brave the deeper mud or the pools of still water that glimmer in the starlight.
It’s all mud and reeds, cattails, bulrushes and swamp grass and I just want to be back home in bed, but I can’t wake up. There’s a funny smell in the air, a mix of things rotting and stagnant water. I feel like there’s something horrible in the shadows under those strange, overhung trees—especially the willows, the tall sharp leaves of sedge and water plantain growing thick around their trunks. It’s like there are eyes watching me from all sides, dark misshapen heads floating frog-like in the water, only the eyes showing, staring. Quicks and bogles and dark things.
I hear something move in the tangle bulrushes and bur reeds just a few feet away. My heart’s in my throat, but I move a little closer to see that it’s only a bird caught in some kind of net.
Hush, I tell it and move closer.
The bird gets frantic when I put my hand on the netting. It starts to peck at my fingers, but I keep talking softly to it until it finally settles down. The net’s a mess of knots and tangles, and I can’t work too quickly because I don’t want to hurt the bird.
You should leave him be, a voice says, and I turn to find an old woman standing on the path beside me. I don’t know where she came from. Every time I lift one of my feet it makes this creepy sucking sound, but I never even heard her approach.
She looks like the wizened old crone in that painting Jilly did for Geordie when he got onto this kick of learning fiddle tunes with the word “hag” in the title: “The Hag in the Kiln.”
“Old Hag You Have Killed Me.”
“The Hag With the Money” and god knows how many more.
Just like in the painting, she’s wizened and small and bent over and . . . dry. Like kindling, like the pages of an old book. Like she’s almost all used up. Hair thin, body thinner. But then you look into her eyes and they’re so alive it makes you feel a little dizzy.
Helping such as he will only bring you grief, she says.
I tell her that I can’t just leave it.
She looks at me for a long moment, then shrugs. So be it, she says.
I wait a moment, but she doesn’t seem to have anything else to say, so I go back to freeing the bird. But now, where a moment ago the netting was a hopeless tangle, it just seems to unknot itself as soon as I lay my hand on it. I’m careful when I put my fingers around the bird and pull it free. I get it out of the tangle and then toss it up in the air. It circles above me, once, twice, three times, cawing. Then it flies away.
It’s not safe here, the old lady says then.
I’d forgotten all about her. I get back onto the path, my legs smeared with smelly, dark mud.
What do you mean? I ask her.
When the Moon still walked the sky, she says, why it was safe then. The dark things didn’t like her light and fair fell over themselves to get away when she shone. But they’re bold now, tricked and trapped her, they have, and no one’s safe. Not you, not me. Best we were away.
Trapped her? I repeat like an echo. The moon?
She nods.
Where?
She points to the light I saw earlier, far out in the fens.
They’ve drowned her under the Black Snag, she says. I will show you.
She takes my hand before I realize what she’s doing and pulls me through the rushes and reeds, the mud squishing awfully under my bare feet, but it doesn’t seem to bother her at all. She stops when we’re at the edge of some open water.
Watch now, she says.
She takes something from the pocket of her apron and tosses it into the water. It’s a small stone, a pebble or something, and it enters the water without a sound, without making a ripple. Then the water starts to glow and a picture forms in the dim flickering light. It’s as if we have a bird’s-eye view of the fens for a moment, then the focus comes in sharp on the edge of a big still pool, sentried by a huge dead willow. I don’t know how I know it, because the light’s still poor, but the mud’s black around its shore. It almost swallows the pale, wan glow coming up from out of the water.
Drowning, the old woman says. The moon is drowning.
I look down at the image that’s formed on the surface and I see a woman floating there. Her hair’s all spread out from her, drifting in the water like lily roots. There’s a great big stone on top of her torso so she’s only visible from the breasts up. Her shoulders are slightly sloped, neck slender, with a swan’s curve, but not so long. Her face is in repose, as though she’s sleeping, but she’s under water, so I know she’s dead.
She looks like me.
I turn to the old woman, but before I can say anything, there’s movement all around us. Shadows pull away from trees, rise from the stagnant pools, change from vague blotches of darkness into moving shapes, limbed and headed, pale eyes glowing with menace. The old woman pulls me back onto the path.
Wake quick! she cries.
She pinches my arm—hard, sharp. It really hurts. And then I’m sitting up in my bed.
5
“And did you have a bruise on your arm from where she pinched you?” Jilly asked.
Sophie shook her head and smiled. Trust Jilly. Who else was always looking for the magic in a situation?
“Of course not,” she said. “It was just a dream.”
“But . . .”
“Wait,” Sophie said. “There’s more.”
Something suddenly hopped onto the wall between them and they both started, until they realized it was only a cat.
“Silly puss,” Sophie said as it walked toward her and began to butt its head against her arm. She gave it a pat.
6
The next night I’m standing by my window, looking out at the street, when I hear movement behind me. I turn and it isn’t my apartment any more. It looks like the inside of an old barn, heaped up with straw in a big, tidy pile against one wall. There’s a lit lantern swinging from a low rafter beam, a dusty but pleasant smell in the air, a cow or maybe a horse making some kind of nickering sound in a stall at the far end.
And there’s a guy standing there in the lantern light, a half dozen feet away from me, not doing anything, just looking at me. He’s drop-down gorgeous. Not too thin, not too muscle-bound. A friendly, open face with a wide smile and eyes to kill for—long moody lashes, and the eyes are the color of violets. His hair’s thick and dark, long in the back with a cowlick hanging down over his brow that I just want to reach out and brush back.
I’m sorry, he says. I didn’t mean to startle you.
That’s okay, I tell him.
And it is. I think maybe I’m already getting used to all the to-and-froing.
He smiles. My name’s Jeck Crow, he says.
I don’t know why, but all of a sudden I’m feeling a little weak in the knees. Ah, who am I kidding? I know why.
What are you doing here? he asks.
I tell him I was standing in my apartment, looking for the moon, but then I remembered that I’d just seen the last quarter a few nights ago and I wouldn’t be able to see it tonight.
He nods. She’s drowning, he says, and then I remember the old woman from last night.
I look out t
he window and see the fens are out there. It’s dark and creepy and I can’t see the distant glow of the woman drowned in the pool from here the way I could last night. I shiver and Jeck comes over all concerned. He’s picked up a blanket that was hanging from one of the support beams and lays it across my shoulders. He leaves his arm there, to keep it in place, and I don’t mind. I just sort of lean into him, like we’ve always been together. It’s weird. I’m feeling drowsy and safe and incredibly aroused, all at the same time.
He looks out the window with me, his hip against mine, the press of his arm on my shoulder a comfortable weight, his body radiating heat.
It used to be, he says, that she would walk every night until she grew so weak that her light was almost failing. Then she would leave the world to go to another, into Faerie, it’s said, or at least to a place where the darkness doesn’t hide quicks and bogles, and there she would rejuvenate herself for her return. We would have three nights of darkness, when evil owned the night, but then we’d see the glow of her lantern approaching and the haunts would flee her light and we could visit with one another again when the day’s work was done.
He leans his head against mine, his voice going dreamy.
I remember my mam saying once, how the Moon lived another life in those three days. How time moves differently in Faerie so that what was a day for us, might be a month for her in that place. He pauses, then adds, I wonder if they miss her in that other world.
I don’t know what to say. But then I realize it’s not the kind of conversation in which I have to say anything.
He turns to me, head lowering until we’re looking straight into each other’s eyes. I get lost in the violet, and suddenly I’m in his arms and we’re kissing. He guides me, step by sweet step, backward toward that heap of straw. We’ve got the blanket under us and this time I’m glad I’m wearing the long skirt and peasant blouse again, because they come off so easily.