Yarrow

by Charles de Lint

  He paused at the corner of the block, moving into the shadow of the big red-brick house that, unlike his own, was divided into two half-doubles. Using honed senses he reached inside to touch the sleeping minds of its occupants— three on one side, two on the other. The texture of their dreams was coarse, diffused; sufficient to appease his hunger, but like a man given a choice between a gourmet dinner and simple nourishment, satisfying that hunger was not enough. Not when there was a choice.

  Across the street, meeting the point of the V Willard and Bellwood made as they met Cameron, Cat Midhir unknowingly waited for him.

  Her house was sheltered from the street by a tall hedge of gangly cedars and stood farther back from the street than its neighbors on either side. A giant birch on the right of the front lawn and a Dutch elm— one of the few in the city not yet stricken by disease— framed the front of the building. In the backyard a tall pine lifted from behind its roof like a second chimney.

  The house was red brick, with a wooden veranda painted cream-yellow that ran the length of the front. An antique horse-drawn buggy stood forgotten on the left side of the long porch. The other half had been, enclosed with screening. Decorous wooden eaves and gables, and the shutters on the dormer windows, matched the color of the veranda.

  Yet for all the house's charm, there was a certain forsaken quality about it, as though it was a poor country cousin come visiting its more urban relatives. Not so much a sense of disrepair as being worn about the edges. In point of fact the house had once been in a rural setting. Originally part of the Billings Estate, a farm that had sprawled on either side of the Rideau River, the city had grown up around both the house and the estate, swallowing the farmland. The estate still stood on top of the hill across the river, spotlighted every night like a fairy tale palace.

  Lysistratus could not see the Billings Estate from where he stood. What light he did see spilled down from the upper right dormer of Cat's house, and it gave him pause. He didn't need the lit window to know that his prey was still wake. There was a distinct difference between waking and sleeping thoughts. The one he could feed on, the other… The other meant no more to him than the garish packaging of food in a supermarket. Waking thoughts carried dreams, but they were too difficult to pry sustenance from.

  For a long time Lysistratus regarded the house. He began to hum again, "Anitra's Dance" from Grieg's Peer Gynt Suites, while he considered the woman inside. The quality of her dreams was such that they fed more than the gnawing hunger inside him; they fed the soul as well.

  Mankind needed its dreams to keep its sanity. He needed mankind's dreams as sustenance. He took his bulk nourishment from those who didn't dream so true. The dreams of creative beings were more of a delicacy, while her dreams… they coursed through his system like a narcotic. They were rare gems, and he treated them accordingly, being careful not to be too greedy when he fed, lest he irreparably damage the source of his pleasure.

  Before her, the best nourishment was to be found in primitive societies, strong-dreaming aboriginies unsullied by the vacuous glitter of the Western world. But such societies were closed to him. His skin was too pale to pass as one of them, and their shaman, knowing that such parasites existed, had developed harsh and successful methods of dealing with his kind.

  The danger was less in a city like this— its inhabitants would not accept that he existed, except as a titillating fiction, and it was comfortable. He enjoyed its luxuries— theatres, opera, clubs. He took the same pleasure from Wagner as he did from David Bowie, from Bergman as from Lucas. He was safe, so long as he didn't overstay himself.

  He had made a tour of the great cities of Europe and now planned a similar circuit of North America. A year here, a year there. He'd started small— Ottawa with its international flavor yet smalltown atmosphere— but planned to visit all the major cities: New York, Vancouver, L.A., Montreal, Chicago, Toronto, Washington.

  He meant to enjoy himself, even with the one major drawback that the present age had delivered to one such as he:

  Modern men and women moved too quickly. Their lifestyle was filled with too much stimuli, leaving them jaded, too easily satisfied, unable to use their imaginations. He found himself snatching half-formed images from those who dozed on public transportation or in parks and theatres. Where he once took lightly from one, perhaps two, throughout the dark hours, he was forced to feed on five or six now, occasionally killing his victims to harvest enough sustenance from their thin dreams.

  "But you are safe," he murmured, gazing up to Cat's lighted window. "From death at least."

  He remembered something that the poet Ibycus had said once: "There is no medicine to be found for a life which is fled." Dead, Cat could no longer feed him her true dreams. Dead, her dreams were lost to him forever.

  He ran a hand through his hair, then gave Cat's window a brief salute before turning to go. The leather soles of his shoes made no sound on the pavement as he walked toward Windsor Park.

  Albert Cousins never heard the door to his room open, never saw the slender man with the glittering blue eyes lean over his bed, never felt the stranger lay a hand on either side of his wrinkled face. Albert was dreaming of his wife, of Jean and him driving their old Chevy up the Gatineau, with the boys in the backseat— the one seven, the other six— and a picnic hamper in the trunk.

  A final dream.

  Lysistratus took the old man in the rooming house, took a lifetime of dreams and left behind a body with its motor-workings intact, but no soul to drive it. Standing over his drained victim, Lysistratus watched the body, bereft of its soul, slowly expire. His own body converted the old man's psychic essence into nourishment that would sustain his needs.

  The basic hunger was satiated. But he thought of true dreams and the woman who dreamed them, and knew it was not enough. The simple satisfying of base needs could never be enough.

  In the big house on Cameron where Willard and Bellwood join to form their V, Cat Midhir slept a dreamless sleep. In the morning she would wake with a headache, for on his return from the rooming house, Lysistratus had touched her sleeping mind with his and swallowed the night's dreams. Tomorrow she would sit at her typewriter, as she had every day for the past nine years, but tomorrow morning she would not keep anything that she wrote— if she wrote at all.

  Three months ago she had stopped dreaming. Three months ago the words that had come so easily for so many years simply dried up.

  Tomorrow would be no different.

  Thief of Dreams

  Sorcerers are not the same as other men. Part of their magic is to appear like us.

  —Islamic saying

  4

  Monday Afternoon

  Mick Jennings lay on his back on a dolly, doing a brake job on a Honda Civic. His coveralls were more black than the gray they'd been when he'd first bought them, his hands and forearms were grimy, and he had a greasy streak on his forehead beneath the spikes of his mohawk. He was listening to CHEZ-FM because that was the station Jim had tuned in.

  They were playing Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven"— as they seemed to every three or four hours. Remember progressive rock? Hard to forget it, mate, the way the radio stations still flogged it. Christ, he wished they'd let that song give up the ghost and die the death it probably yearned for. It wasn't as though he hadn't listened to it himself when it first came out— he probably still had a scratched copy of the album hiding somewhere in a milk carton with all his other oldies-but-moldy-goldies. But the song came out in '71. It was eleven years old. What was it going to take to convince the station's programmer that this was the eighties and they should be playing music relevant to now, instead of tired old licks and—

  The ping-ping-ping of someone driving over the signal cord by the pumps set his mind along a new track. Any bets Jim's too busy to get that? he asked himself. He paused in his work and counted to ten. Before he reached six, he heard his boss call out from the office, "Hey, Mick. Can you get that? I'm busy with a customer."

&
nbsp; He rolled out from under the Civic. "Yeah. Sure."

  He scratched his nose, leaving a new smudge behind, and looked ruefully at his hands. Wiping them on his coveralls, he headed out to the pumps.

  "I'll be honest with you," Melissa Robinson said. "The reason I flew up today is because I'm starting to get seriously worried."

  They made an odd couple. In contrast to the sleek, fashionable image that Melissa projected, Cat dressed haphazardly and was slender almost to the point of being skinny, with a heart-shaped face and intense gray-green eyes. Her dark curly hair fell in a tangle across her forehead; she brushed it aside with a quick nervous motion and sighed.

  She'd felt as though she were on trial ever since she and her agent had arrived at Noddy's Place for lunch. But no matter how much Melissa threatened or cajoled, Cat still couldn't produce the new novel for her. It wasn't written yet. The way things were going, it might never get written.

  "The people at McClelland and Stewart are making nervous noises," Melissa continued. "Dana phoned me twice last week as it is." She leaned across the table. "Can you at least give me an outline to take back to them?"

  "I don't use outlines— you know that. I get a theme and then just go ahead—"

  "Intuitively. I do know. What's the theme, then? Have you settled on a title yet? Have you got anything I can give them?"

  Cat had been putting off this discussion for two months— exactly one month after she'd stopped writing and realized she was blocked. She knew she should simply level with Melissa— Lord knew, Melissa deserved that much courtesy. It was just that if she did level with her…

  There were a couple of questions Cat hated being asked. The first was how to pronounce her name— "Kate-lynn Meere," she'd explained wearily ever since grade school. The second was, "Where do you get your ideas?"

  It was easy enough to brush the latter off with a pat answer, except she always felt a little dishonest doing so. She didn't like being untruthful, but she didn't want to talk about her night-visiting either, didn't want to get labeled as a weirdo and see her name blaring from the front cover of The Enquirer in every supermarket: AUTHOR CLAIMS NOVELS ARE GHOSTWRITTEN BY REAL GHOSTS!

  She felt guilty enough using those ideas as the basis for her writing as it was. The only way she'd managed to come to terms with it was by convincing herself that since the ghosts came to her in dreams, they must be dredged up from her own subconscious. Ipso facto, the stories were her creations.

  Oh, really? Then why did she feel like she'd been deserted by her best friend?

  Because she had been.

  Her writing troubles were almost secondary to the loss of her dreams and the subsequent disappearance of the Other-world and its inhabitants. They'd come night-visiting for as long as she could remember. As gnomes, they frustrated her with their wild antics. As elves, they had awed her with their unearthly beauty. And antlered Mynfel, with her night-deep eyes and resonant silences…

  They had convinced her she was losing her mind, had in fact lost it long ago, then helped her rationalize away that same madness. They were her conspirators and her conscience, her freedom and her confinement. But mostly, through a lifetime of never feeling close, really close, to anyone, they had been her friends.

  And now they were gone.

  She could understand Mynfel's absence. The horned lady came seldom as it was. But the others… Lovely Mabwen with her silvery hair and doe-soft eyes. The poet-bard Kothlen who spoke of Myrddin and ancient kings from firsthand experience. What had become of them? And the gnomes? It had seemed that they were always around, in dreams or not, playing tricks about the house, tangling her already curly hair into elf knots, singing and joking. Especially Tiddy Mun, with his puckish grin and gentle nature.

  "Cat? Have you heard a word I've said?"

  Melissa was regarding her quizzically. Cat felt trapped, and wished she'd taken her own advice— never accept money for anything that wasn't written yet. Except she'd needed the money then, what with a mortgage payment coming up and the bank account balanced at zero.

  She had a third of a novel sitting beside her typewriter. It had a tide— The Moon in a Silver Cup,— characters, theme, the first few meanderings of a typical Midhir plot, but nothing else. Kothlen had started the story four months ago when she was still dreaming. Kothlen had started it, but never come back to continue it. She knew she could write something to finish it off, only it wouldn't ring true, and if it didn't ring true, she didn't want it published.

  She took a deep breath and gathered her nerve. Melissa was a friend— one of the few she had outside of the Other-world— but that didn't make what Cat had to say any easier. It was more than admitting failure; it was as though she'd suddenly developed a weakness in her character, was a failure as a person as well as a writer.

  "I'm blocked," she said at last. "I haven't written a word worth keeping in three months."

  Melissa said nothing for a long while. The silence intimidated Cat, and she moved restlessly in her chair.

  "It's not like I haven't been trying," she said into that silence. "It's just not working."

  "Why didn't you say something sooner? We're supposed to deliver the manuscript in November. That gives us only three months and—"

  "I know how long I've got to the deadline. It seems like mat's all I can think of— that deadline looming up, getting closer and closer. I have visions of them sending men in pinstriped suits to get back their advance."

  "Now don't be—"

  "I've got a royalty payment from Yarthkin coming at the end of this month. I was planning to live on that money over the whiter, but I suppose I could give them that and get a job or something."

  Melissa shook her head. "We'll get an extension on the deadline. That won't be a problem. What's more important is getting you back on track."

  "It won't work, Melissa."

  "It just feels like it won't work. Everybody runs into these kinds of things."

  "You don't understand," Cat tried to explain. "They're gone."

  "They…?"

  "Ah…" Now was not the time to start blathering about ghosts and night visits. But she had to say something. "I… I get my inspiration from dreams, and I've stopped dreaming."

  Worry lines creased Melissa's brow. "You're a craftsperson, Cat," she said. "Writing's a craft, just like any other creative activity. You have to stay in practice. We both know there's more hard work involved in writing than any mystique."

  "But I have to have something to write in the first place."

  "Have you started anything?"

  "I've started a million things, and they're all shit."

  She wasn't going to mention the manuscript sitting beside her typewriter. Melissa would expect her to finish it, and she couldn't. Not without Kothlen, because it was Kothlen's story. Only he was gone. All the ghosts were gone.

  "What you need is a change of environment," Melissa said. "You have to get away for a while. When was the last time you took a vacation?"

  "I'm not sure. I was down in Vermont for a weekend last spring."

  "You need more time away than that. Ottawa's a very pretty city, but there's something about it that leaves a gray film on your mind, don't you think? Too many civil servants all in one place."

  "That's a typical Torontonian attitude."

  Melissa smiled. "I still think you have to get away from this city for a while and scrape the fog from your mind. Do you have someplace you can go? Friends that live out of town, or even out of the country?"

  "Correspondents in the States. A couple in Europe. But I can't just drop in on them."

  "Why not?"

  Cat shrugged.

  "I'd invite you to stay with me, but knowing you, I don't think you'd find Toronto all that conducive either."

  "I'll think about it," Cat said. "About going away. I'm just not all that sure it's the right answer. The problem's in here." She tapped her head. "This is where it's empty. Going someplace else isn't going to change that."

/>   "Don't be so sure. Something you writers tend to forget is that you need outside stimuli to get those creative juices flowing."

  A small smile tugged at Cat's lips. "The voice of experience?" she asked.

  Melissa shook her head. "Those that can't, teach," she replied.

  As the waitress in Noddy's was bringing Cat and Melissa then lunch, Peter Band was just finishing up a stock check on the Del Rey backlist and wondering if he'd ever be able to keep Piers Anthony's Xanth series in stock. The damned books sold so fast, and what with Ogre, Ogre due in October and a sixth in the series to be released in January, he might have to call the store the House of Del Rey if the sales kept up.

  Twenty-two blocks north on Bank Street, between Gloucester and Lisgar, Rick Kirby was in his own store, trying to sell a computer to Henri Cuiscard, who owned the shoe store down the block, and wishing he had a pert little salesgirl working for him so that he could just sit back and watch her work while he collected the loot. Not that Captain Computer was actually out of the red yet, as Stella liked to remind him whenever he brought the idea up. Didn't matter to her that it'd boost sales.

  "Twenty-five sixty-five?" Henri asked him.

  "Well, I could sell you something cheaper," Rick told him, "but if you're looking for efficiency…"

  Just buy the sucker, he thought as he went through his spiel for the third time that day to the same customer. Henri Cuiscard nodded sagely, looking from the baffling— as far as he was concerned— array of hardware to his brochure and back again. He clutched the brochure as though it would impart comprehension simply by his holding it.

  "These… ah… floppy disks," he began again. "How do they work?"

  "It's very simple," Rick replied, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice. "They're like a phonograph record, except instead of one long spiral groove, they have a number of magnetic rings to store the data. This one can hold up to 576,000 characters. You insert it here and…"