Dreams Underfoot: A Newford Collection (21 page)

They’re freaks ....

Crazy things.

They live on the fire that makes us human.

Words that seemed to well up out of some great pain he was carrying around inside him.

They’re not human ... they just
look
like us ....

A thump on her balcony had her jumping nervously out of her chair until she realized that it was just the paperboy tossing up today’s newspaper. She didn’t want to look at what
The Daily Journal
had to say, but couldn’t seem to stop herself from going out to get it. She took the paper back inside and spread it out on her lap.

Naturally enough, the story had made the front page. There was a picture of her, looking washed out and stunned. A shot of the corpse being taking away in a body bag. A head and shoulders shot of Nicky

...

She stopped, her pulse doubling its tempo as the headline under Nicky’s picture sank in.

“KILLER FOUND DEAD IN CELL-POLICE BAFFLED.”

“No,” she said.

They know about me.

She pushed the paper away from her until it fell to the floor. But Nicky’s picture continued to look up at her from where the paper lay.

They’ve been hunting me.

None of what he’d told her could be true. It had just been the pitiful ravings of a very disturbed man.

I wouldn’t last the night
in
a cell. The freaks’d be on me so fast ...

But she’d known him once—a long time ago—and he’d been as normal as anybody then. Still, people changed ....

She picked up the paper and quickly scanned the story, looking for a reasonable explanation to put to rest the irrational fears that were reawakening her panic. But the police knew nothing. Nobody knew a thing.

“I suppose that at this point, only Nicky Straw knows what really happened,” the police spokesman was quoted as saying.

Nicky and you, a small worried voice said in the back of Luann’s mind.

She shook her head, unwilling to accept it.

They’re drawn to the ones whose fires burn the brightest.

She looked to her window. Beyond its smudged panes, the night was gathering. Soon it would be dark. Soon it would be night. Light showed a long way in the dark; a bright light would show further.

The ones whose fires burn the brightest ... like yours does.

“It ... it wasn’t true,” she said, her voice ringing hollowly in the room. “None of it. Tell me it wasn’t true, Nicky.”

But Nicky was dead.

She let the paper fall again and rose to her feet, drifting across the room to the window like a ghost.

She just didn’t seem to feel connected to anything anymore.

It seemed oddly quiet on the street below. Less traffic than usual—both vehicular and pedestrian.

There was a figure standing in front of the bookstore across the street, back to the window display, leaning against the glass. He seemed to be looking up at her window, but it was hard to tell because the brim of his hat cast a shadow on his face.

Once they’re on to you, you can’t shake them.

That man in the park. His face. Shifting. The skin seeming too loose.

They’ll keep after you until they bleed you dry.

It wasn’t real.

She turned from the window and shivered, hugging her arms around herself as she remembered what Nicky had said when he’d left the apartment last night.

What if
I’m
right?

She couldn’t accept that. She looked back across the street, but the figure was gone. She listened for a footstep on the narrow, winding stairwell that led up to her balcony. Waited for the move-ment of a shadow across the window.

Winter Was Hard

I pretty much try to stay in a constant state of confusion just because of the expression it
leaves on my face.

—Johnny Depp

It was the coldest December since they’d first started keeping rec-ords at the turn of the century, though warmer, Jilly thought, than it must have been in the ice ages of the Pleistocene. The veracity of that extraneous bit of trivia gave her small comfort, for it did nothing to lessen the impact of the night’s bitter weather. The wind shrieked through the tunnel-like streets created by the abandoned buildings of the Tombs, carrying with it a deep, arctic chill. It spun the granular snow into dervishing whirligigs that made it almost impos-sible to see at times and packed drifts up against the sides of the buildings and derelict cars.

Jilly felt like a little kid, bundled up in her boots and parka, with longjohns under her jeans, a woolen cap pushing down her unruly curls and a long scarf wrapped about fifty times around her neck and face, cocooning her so completely that only her eyes peered out through a narrow slit. Turtle-like, she hunched her shoulders, trying to make her neck disappear into her parka, and stuffed her mittened hands deep in its pockets.

It didn’t help. The wind bit through it all as though unhindered, and she just grew colder with each step she took as she plodded on through the deepening drifts. The work crews were already out with their carnival of flashing blue and amber lights, removing the snow on Gracie Street and Williamson, but here in the Tombs it would just lie where it fell until the spring melt. The only signs of humanity were the odd little trails that the derelicts and other inhabitants of the Tombs made as they went about their business, but even those were being swallowed by the storm.

Only fools or those who had no choice were out tonight. Jilly thought she should be counted among the latter, though Geordie had called her the former when she’d left the loft earlier in the evening.

“This is just craziness, Jilly,” he’d said. “Look at the bloody weather.”

“I’ve got to go. It’s important.”

“To you and the penguins, but nobody else.”

Still, she’d had to come. It was the eve of the solstice, one year exactly since the gemmin went away, and she didn’t feel as though she had any choice in the matter. She was driven to walk the Tombs tonight, never mind the storm. What sent her out from the warm comfort of her loft was like what Professor Dapple said they used to call a gear in the old days—something you just had to do.

So she left Geordie sitting on her Murphy bed, playing his new Copeland whistle, surrounded by finished and unfinished canvases and the rest of the clutter that her motley collection of possessions had created in the loft, and went out into the storm.

She didn’t pause until she reached the mouth of the alley that ran along the south side of the old Clark Building. There, under the suspicious gaze of the building’s snow-swept gargoyles, she hunched her back against the storm and pulled her scarf down a little, widen-ing the eye-slit so that she could have a clearer look down the length of the alley. She could almost see Babe, leaning casually against the side of the old Buick that was still sitting there, dressed in her raggedy T-shirt, black body stocking and raincoat, Doc Martin’s dark against the snow that lay underfoot. She could almost hear the high husky voices of the other gemmin, chanting an eerie version of a rap song that had been popular at the time.

She could almost

But no. She blinked as the wind shifted, blinding her with snow. She saw only snow, heard only the wind. But in her memory ...

By night they nested in one of those abandoned cars that could be found on any street or alley of the Tombs—a handful of gangly teenagers burrowed under blankets, burlap sacks and tattered jackets, bodies snugly fit into holes that seemed to have been chewed from the ragged upholstery. This morning they had built a fire in the trunk of the Buick, scavenging fuel from the buildings, and one of them was cooking their breakfast on the heated metal of its hood.

Babe was the oldest. She looked about seventeen—it was some-thing in the way she carried herself—but otherwise had the same thin androgynous body as her companions. The other gemmin all had dark complexions and feminine features, but none of them had Babe’s short mauve hair, nor her luminous violet eyes. The hair coloring of the others ran more to various shades of henna red; their eyes were mostly the same electric blue that Jilly’s were.

That December had been as unnaturally warm as this one was cold, but Babe’s open raincoat with the thin T-shirt and body stocking underneath still made Jilly pause with concern. There was such a thing as carrying fashion too far, she thought—had they never heard of pneumonia?—but then Babe lifted her head, her large violet eyes fixing their gaze as curiously on Jilly as Jilly’s did on her. Concern fell by the wayside, shifting into a sense of frustration as Jilly realized that all she had in the pocket of her coat that day was a stub of charcoal and her sketchbook instead of the oils and canvas which was the only medium that could really do justice in capturing the startling picture Babe and her companions made.

For long moments none of them spoke. Babe watched her, a half-smile teasing one corner of her mouth. Behind her, the cook stood motionless, a makeshift spatula held negligently in a delicate hand.

Eggs and bacon sizzled on the trunk hood in front of her, filling the air with their unmistakable aroma. The other gemmin peered up over the dash of the Buick, supporting their narrow chins on their folded arms.

All Jilly could do was look back. A kind of vertigo licked at the edges of her mind, making her feel as though she’d just stepped into one of her own paintings—the ones that made up her last show, an urban faerie series: twelve enormous canvases, all in oils, one for each month, each depicting a different kind of mythological being transposed from its traditional folkloric rural surroundings onto a cityscape.

Her vague dizziness wasn’t caused by the promise of magic that seemed to decorate the moment with a sparkling sense of impossible possibilities as surely as the bacon filled the air with its come-hither smell. It was rather the unexpectedness of coming across a moment like this—in the Tombs, of all places, where winos and junkies were the norm.

It took her awhile to collect her thoughts.

“Interesting stove you’ve got there,” she said finally.

Babe’s brow furrowed for a moment, then cleared as a radiant smile first lifted the corners of her mouth, then put an infectious humor into those amazing eyes of hers.

“Interesting, yes,” she said. Her voice had an accent Jilly couldn’t place and an odd tonality that was at once both husky and high-pitched. “But we—” she frowned prettily, searching for what she wanted to say “—make do.”

It was obvious to Jilly that English wasn’t her first language. It was also obvious, the more Jilly looked, that while the girl and her companions weren’t at all properly dressed for the weather, it really didn’t seem to bother them. Even with the fire in the trunk of the Buick, and mild winter or not, they should still have been shivering, but she couldn’t spot one goosebump.

“And you’re not cold?” she asked.

“Cold is ... ?” Babe began, frowning again, but before Jilly could elaborate, that dazzling smile returned. “No, we have comfort. Cold is no trouble for us. We like the winter; we like any weather.”

Jilly couldn’t help but laugh.

“I suppose you’re all snow elves,” she said, “so the cold doesn’t bother you?”

“Not elves—but we are good neighbors. Would you like some breakfast?”

A year and three days later, the memory of that first meeting brought a touch of warmth to Jilly where she stood shivering in the mouth of the alleyway. Gemmin. She’d always liked the taste of words and that one had sounded just right for Babe and her companions. It reminded Jilly of gummy bears, thick cotton quilts and the sound that the bass strings of Geordie’s fiddle made when he was playing a fast reel. It reminded her of tiny bunches of fresh violets, touched with dew, that still couldn’t hope to match the incandescent hue of Babe’s eyes.

She had met the gemmin at a perfect time. She was in need of something warm and happy just then, being on the wrong end of a three-month relationship with a guy who, throughout the time they’d been together, turned out to have been married all along. He wouldn’t leave his wife, and Jilly had no taste to be someone’s-anyone’s—mistress, all of which had been discussed in increasingly raised voices in The Monkey Woman’s Nest the last time she saw him. She’d been mortified when she realized that a whole restaurant full of people had been listening to their breaking-up argument, but unrepentant.

She missed Jeff—missed him desperately—but refused to listen to any of the subsequent phonecalls or answer any of the letters that had deluged her loft over the next couple of weeks, explaining how they could “work things out.” She wasn’t interested in working things out. It wasn’t just the fact that he had a wife, but that he’d kept it from her. The thing she kept asking her friend Sue was: having been with him for all that time, how could she not have
known?

So she wasn’t a happy camper, traipsing aimlessly through the Tombs that day. Her normally high-spirited view of the world was overhung with gloominess and there was a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach that just wouldn’t go away.

Until she met Babe and her friends.

Gemmin wasn’t a name that they used; they had no name for themselves. It was Frank Hodgers who told Jilly what they were.

Breakfast with the gemmin on that long gone morning was ... odd. Jilly sat behind the driver’s wheel of the Buick, with the door propped open and her feet dangling outside. Babe sat on a steel drum set a few feet from the car, facing her. Four of the other gemmin were crowded in the back seat; the fifth was beside Jilly in the front, her back against the passenger’s door. The eggs were tasty, flavored with herbs that Jilly couldn’t recognize; the tea had a similarly odd tang about it. The bacon was fried to a perfect crisp. The toast was actually muffins, neatly sliced in two and toasted on coat hangers rebent into new shapes for that purpose.