Dreams Underfoot: A Newford Collection (30 page)

“I’d think,” he said, “with a spirit so brave as yours, that you’d simply rescue yourself “

Lesli shook her head. “I’m not really brave at all.”

“Braver than you know, fluting here while a darkness stalked you through the storm. My name’s Cerin Kelledy; I’m Meran’s husband and I’ve come to take you home.”

He waited for her to disassemble her flute and stow it away, then offered her a hand up from the floor. As she stood up, he took the knapsack and slung it over his shoulder and led her towards the door. The sound of the harping was very faint now, Lesli realized.

When they walked by the hall, she stopped in the doorway leading to the living room and looked at the two men that were huddled against the far wall, their eyes wild with terror. One was Cutter; the other a business man in suit and raincoat whom she’d never seen before. She hesitated, fingers tightening on Cerin’s hand, as she turned to see what was frightening them so much. There was nothing at all in the spot that their frightened gazes were fixed upon.

“What ... what’s the matter with them?” she asked her compan-ion. “What are they looking at?”

“Night fears,” Cerin replied. “Somehow the darkness that lies in their hearts has given those fears substance and made them real.”

The way he said “somehow” let Lesli know that he’d been responsible for what the two men were undergoing.

“Are they going to die?” she asked.

She didn’t think she was the first girl to fall prey to Cutter so she wasn’t exactly feeling sorry for him at that point.

Cerin shook his head. “But they will always have the
sight.
Unless they change their ways, it will show them only the dark side of Faerie.”

Lesli shivered.

“There are no happy endings,” Cerin told her. “There are no real endings ever—happy or otherwise.

We all have our own stories which are just a part of the one Story that binds both this world and Faerie.

Sometimes we step into each others’ stories—perhaps just for a few minutes, perhaps for years—and then we step out of them again. But all the while, the Story just goes on.”

That day, his explanation only served to confuse her.

From Lesli’s diary, entry dated November 24th:

Nothing turned out the way I thought it would.

Something happened to Mom. Everybody tells me it’s not my fault, but it happened when I ran away, so I can’t help but feel that I’m to blame. Daddy says she had a nervous breakdown and that’s why she’s in the sanitarium. It happened to her before and it had been coming again for a long time. But that’s not the way Mom tells it.

I go by to see her every day after school. Sometimes she’s pretty spaced from the drugs they give her to keep her calm, but on one of her good days, she told me about Granny Nell and the Kelledys and Faerie. She says the world’s just like I said it was in that essay I did for English. Faerie’s real and it didn’t go away; it just got freed from people’s preconceptions of it and now it’s just whatever it wants to be.

And that’s what scares her.

She also thinks the Kelledys are some kind of earth spirits. “I can’t forget this time,” she told me.

“But if you know,” I asked her, “if you believe, then why are you in this place? Maybe I should be in here, too.”

And you know what she told me? “I don’t want to believe in any of it; it just makes me feel sick. But at the same time, I can’t stop knowing it’s all out there: every kind of magic being and nightmare. They’re all real.”

I remember thinking of Cutter and that other guy in his apart-ment and what Cerin said about them.

Did that make my Mom a bad person? I couldn’t believe that.

“But they’re not
supposed
to be real,” Mom said. “That’s what’s got me feeling so crazy. In a sane world, in the world that was the way I’d grown up believing it to be, that
wouldn’t
be real. The Kelledys could fix it so that I’d forget again, but then I’d be back to going through life always feeling like there was something important that I couldn’t remember. And that just leaves you with another kind of craziness—an ache that you can’t explain and it doesn’t ever go away. It’s better this way, and my medicine keeps me from feeling too crazy.”

She looked away then, out the window of her room. I looked, too, and saw the little monkeyman that was crossing the lawn of the sanitarium, pulling a pig behind him. The pig had a load of gear on its back like it was a pack horse.

“Could you ... could you ask the nurse to bring my medicine,” Mom said.

I tried to tell her that all she had to do was accept it, but she wouldn’t listen. She just kept asking for the nurse, so finally I went and got one.

I still think it’s my fault.

I live with the Kelledys now. Daddy was going to send me away to a boarding school, because he felt that he couldn’t be home enough to take care of me. I never really thought about it before, but when he said that, I realized that he didn’t know me at all.

Meran offered to let me live at their place. I moved in on my birthday.

There’s a book in their library—ha! There’s like ten million books in there. But the one I’m thinking of is by a local writer, this guy named Christy Riddell.

In it, he talks about Faerie, how everybody just thinks of them as ghosts of wind and shadow.

“Faerie music is the wind,” he says, “and their movement is the play of shadow cast by moonlight, or starlight, or no light at all. Faerie lives like a ghost beside us, but only the city remembers. But then the city never forgets anything.”

I don’t know if the Kelledys are part of that ghostliness. What I do know is that, seeing how they live for each other, how they care so much about each other, I find myself feeling more hopeful about things.

My parents and I didn’t so much not get along, as lack interest in each other. It got to the point where I figured that’s how everybody was in the world, because I never knew any different.

So I’m trying harder with Mom. I don’t talk about things she doesn’t want to hear, but I don’t stop believing in them either. Like Cerin said, we’re just two threads of the Story. Sometimes we come together for awhile and sometimes we’re apart. And no matter how much one or the other of us might want it to be different, both our stories are true.

But I can’t stop wishing for a happy ending.

The Conjure Man

I do not think it had any friends, or mourners, except myself and a pair of owls.

—
J. R. R. Tolkien, from the Introductory Note to
Tree And Leaf
You only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by
the light of the tree.

—G. K. Chesterton, from The Man Who Was Thursday

The conjure man rode a red, old-fashioned bicycle with fat tires and only one, fixed gear. A wicker basket in front contained a small mongrel dog that seemed mostly terrier. Behind the seat, tied to the carrier, was a battered brown satchel that hid from prying eyes the sum total of all his worldly possessions.

What he had was not much, but he needed little. He was, after all, the conjure man, and what he didn’t have, he could conjure for himself.

He was more stout than slim, with a long grizzled beard and a halo of frizzy grey hair that protruded from under his tall black hat like ivy tangled under an eave. Nesting in the hatband were a posy of dried wildflowers and three feathers: one white, from a swan; one black, from a crow; one brown, from an owl. His jacket was an exhilarating shade of blue, the color of the sky on a perfect summer’s morning.

Under it he wore a shirt that was as green as a fresh-cut lawn. His trousers were brown corduroy, patched with leather and plaid squares; his boots were a deep golden yellow, the color of buttercups past their prime.

His age was a puzzle, somewhere between fifty and seventy. Most people assumed he was one of the homeless—more colorful than most, and certainly more cheerful, but a derelict all the same—so the scent of apples that seemed to follow him was always a surprise, as was the good humor that walked hand in hand with a keen intelli-gence in his bright blue eyes. When he raised his head, hat brim lifting, and he met one’s gaze, the impact of those eyes was a sudden shock, a diamond in the rough.

His name was John Windle, which could mean, if you were one to ascribe meaning to names,

“favored of god” for his given name, while his surname was variously defined as “basket,”

“the red-winged thrush,” or “to lose vigor and strength, to dwindle.” They could all be true, for he led a charmed life; his mind was a treasure trove storing equal amounts of experience, rumor and history; he had a high clear singing voice; and though he wasn’t tall—he stood five-ten in his boots—he had once been a much larger man.

“I was a giant once,” he liked to explain, “when the world was young. But conjuring takes its toll.

Now John’s just an old man, pretty well all used up. Just like the world,” he’d add with a sigh and a nod, bright eyes holding a tired sorrow. “Just like the world.”

There were some things even the conjure man couldn’t fix.

Living in the city, one grew used to its more outlandish characters, eventually noting them in passing with an almost familial affection: The pigeon lady in her faded Laura Ashley dresses with her shopping cart filled with sacks of birdseed and bread crumbs. Paperjack, the old black man with his Chinese fortune-teller and deft origami sculptures. The German cowboy who dressed like an extra from a spaghetti western and made long declamatory speeches in his native language to which no one listened.

And, of course, the conjure man.

Wendy St. James had seen him dozens of times—she lived and worked downtown, which was the conjure man’s principle haunt—but she’d never actually spoken to him until one day in the fall when the trees were just beginning to change into their cheerful autumnal party dresses.

She was sitting on a bench on the Ferryside bank of the Kickaha River, a small, almost waif-like woman in jeans and a white T-shirt, with an unzipped brown leather bomber’s jacket and hightops. In lieu of a purse, she had a small, worn knapsack sitting on the bench beside her and she was bent over a hardcover journal which she spent more time staring at than actually writing in. Her hair was thick and blonde, hanging down past her collar in a grown-out pageboy with a half-inch of dark roots showing. She was chewing on the end of her pen, worrying the plastic for inspiration.

It was a poem that had stopped her in mid-stroll and plunked her down on the bench. It had glimmered and shone in her head until she got out her journal and pen. Then it fled, as impossible to catch as a fading dream. The more she tried to recapture the impulse that had set her wanting to put pen to paper, the less it seemed to have ever existed in the first place. The annoying presence of three teenage boys clowning around on the lawn a half-dozen yards from where she sat didn’t help at all.

She was giving them a dirty stare when she saw one of the boys pick up a stick and throw it into the wheel of the conjure man’s bike as he came riding up on the park path that followed the river. The small dog in the bike’s wicker basket jumped free, but the conjure man himself fell in a tangle of limbs and spinning wheels. The boys took off, laughing, the dog chasing them for a few feet, yapping shrilly, before it hurried back to where its master had fallen.

Wendy had already put down her journal and pen and reached the fallen man by the time the dog got back to its master’s side.

“Are you okay?” Wendy asked the conjure man as she helped him untangle himself from the bike.

She’d taken a fall herself in the summer. The front wheel of her ten-speed struck a pebble, the bike wobbled dangerously and she’d grabbed at the brakes, but her fingers closed over the front ones first, and too hard. The back of the bike went up, flipping her right over the handlebars, and she’d had the worst headache for at least a week afterwards.

The conjure man didn’t answer her immediately. His gaze fol-lowed the escaping boys.

“As you sow,” he muttered.

Following his gaze, Wendy saw the boy who’d thrown the stick trip and go sprawling in the grass.

An odd chill danced up her spine. The boy’s tumble came so quickly on the heels of the conjure man’s words, for a moment it felt to her as though he’d actually caused the boy’s fall.

As you sow, so shall you reap.

She looked back at the conjure man, but he was sitting up now, fingering a tear in his corduroys, which already had a quiltwork of patches on them. He gave her a quick smile that traveled all the way up to his eyes and she found herself thinking of Santa Claus. The little dog pressed its nose up against the conjure man’s hand, pushing it away from the tear. But the tear was gone.

It had just been a fold in the cloth, Wendy realized. That was all.

She helped the conjure man limp to her bench, then went back and got his bike. She righted it and wheeled it over to lean against the back of the bench before sitting down herself The little dog leaped up onto the conjure man’s lap.

“What a cute dog,” Wendy said, giving it a pat. “What’s her name?”

“Ginger,” the conjure man replied as though it was so obvious that he couldn’t understand her having to ask.

Wendy looked at the dog. Ginger’s fur was as grey and grizzled as her master’s beard without a hint of the spice’s strong brown hue.