Dreams Underfoot Read online

  Praise for Dreams Underfoot

  This collection of conceptually innovative, thematically simple stories proves again that de Lint is a leading talent in the urban fantasy subgenre.

  —Publishers Weekly

  * * *

  I can never recapture the feeling of first arriving in Newford and meeting the people and seeing the sights as a newcomer. However, part of the beauty of Newford is the sense that it has always been there, that de Lint is a reporter who occasionally files stories from a reality stranger and more beautiful than ours. De Lint also manages to keep each new Newford story fresh and captivating because he is so generous and loving in his depiction of the characters. Yes, there are a group of core characters whose stories recur most often, but a city like Newford has so many intriguing people in it, so many diverse stories to tell, so much pain and triumph to chronicle.

  —Challenging Destiny

  * * *

  Dreams Underfoot is a collection of stories set in Newford, Charles de Lint's mythical city, and its environs, both magical and mundane. I say mythical, but Newford is sometimes more real to me than any other place I've been. The stories in this fat volume are all wonderful… These stories connect in ways that tug at your heart and make you look more deeply for the magic in your own life.

  —Rambles Magazine

  * * *

  If Ottawa-area author Charles de Lint didn't create the contemporary fantasy, he certainly defined it. …writer-musician-artist-folklorist de Lint has lifted our accepted reality and tipped it just enough sideways to show the possibilities that lie beneath the surface… Unlike most fantasy writers who deal with battles between ultimate good and evil, de Lint concentrates on smaller, very personal conflicts. Perhaps this is what makes him accessible to the non-fantasy audience as well as the hard-core fans. Perhaps it's just damned fine writing.

  —Quill & Quire

  * * *

  In de Lint's capable hands, modern fantasy becomes something other than escapism. It becomes folk song, the stuff of urban myth.

  ―The Phoenix Gazette

  * * *

  Charles de Lint shows that, far from being escapism, contemporary fantasy can be the deep mythic literature of our time.

  ―The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

  * * *

  Every story is a winner. With moody pieces offset by airy and magical fantasies, and the occasional glint of an edge just beneath the surface, de Lint does indeed create a mythology all his own.

  —Booklovers

  * * *

  Maybe you find it hard to believe that the dirty, smelly, crowded modern-day city can have any sort of mystique or magic to it, but believe me, there's a lot more than what meets the eye. Legends stalk the slums, ghosts haunt the cobblestoned streets, goblins dwell in the buried part of the city, and nightmares share the roads. The city itself possesses character, spirit, and an identity.

  —Green Man Review

  Dreams Underfoot

  Charles de Lint

  Contents

  Dreams Underfoot

  1. Uncle Dobbin’s Parrot Fair

  2. The Stone Drum

  3. Timeskip

  4. Freewheeling

  5. That Explains Poland

  6. Romano Drom

  7. The Sacred Fire

  8. Winter Was Hard

  9. Pity the Monsters

  10. Ghosts of Wind and Shadow

  11. The Conjure Man

  12. Small Deaths

  13. The Moon Is Drowning While I Sleep

  14. In the House of My Enemy

  15. But for the Grace Go I

  16. Bridges

  17. Our Lady of the Harbour

  18. Paperjack

  19. Talullah

  Mailing list

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments & Copyright notices

  Other Books by Charles de Lint

  Dreams Underfoot

  by

  Charles de Lint

  TRISKELL PRESS

  P.O. Box 9480

  Ottawa, ON

  Canada K1G 3V2

  www.triskellpress.com

  * * *

  Copyright © 1993 Charles de Lint

  Previously published by Tor Books, 1993; reprinted by Orb Books, 2003.

  Cover art: Night by Simeon Solomon (1890)

  Cover design by MaryAnn Harris

  * * *

  eISBN 978-0-920623-82-4

  * * *

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author or publisher except for the use of brief quotations in critical articles or reviews.

  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, businesses, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, actual events or locales is purely coincidental.

  for MaryAnn,

  who lifts dreams high

  1

  Uncle Dobbin’s Parrot Fair

  She would see them in the twilight when the wind was right, roly-poly shapes propelled by ocean breezes, turning end-over-end along the beach or down the alley behind her house, like errant beach balls granted a moment’s freedom. Sometimes they would get caught up against a building or stuck on a curb and then spindly little arms and legs would unfold from their fat bodies until they could push themselves free and go rolling with the wind again. Like flotsam in a river, like tumbleweeds, only brightly coloured in primary reds and yellows and blues.

  They seemed very solid until the wind died down. Then she would watch them come apart the way morning mist will when the sun burns it away, the bright colours turning to ragged ribbons that tattered smoke-like until they were completely gone.

  Those were special nights, the evenings that the Balloon Men came.

  * * *

  In the late sixties in Haight Ashbury, she talked about them once. Incense lay thick in the air—two cones of jasmine burning on a battered windowsill. There was on old iron bed in the room, up on the third floor of a house that no one lived in except for runaways and street people. The mattress had rust-coloured stains on it. The incense covered the room’s musty smell. She’d lived in a form self-imposed of poverty back then, but it was all a part of the Summer of Love.

  “I know what you mean, man,” Greg Longman told her. “I’ve seen them.”

  He was wearing a dirty white T-shirt with a simple peace symbol on it and scuffed plastic thongs. Sticking up from the waist of his bell-bottomed jeans at a forty-five degree angle was a descant recorder. His long blond hair was tied back with an elastic. His features were thin, an aesthetic-looking face, drawn-out from too much time on the streets with too little to eat, or from too much dope.

  “They’re like…” His hands moved as he spoke, trying to convey what he didn’t feel words alone could say—a whole other language, she often thought, watching the long slender fingers weave through the air between them. “…they’re just too much.”

  “You’ve really seen them?” she asked.

  “Oh, yeah. Except not on the streets. They’re floating high up in the air, y’know, like fat little kites.”

  It was such a relief to know that they were real.

  “’Course,” Greg added, “I gotta do a lot of dope to clue in on ’em, man.”

  * * *

  Ellen Brady laid her book aside. Leaning back, she flicked off the light behind her and stared out into the night. The memory had come back to her, so clear, so sharp, she could almost smell the incense, see Greg’s hands move between them, little coloured after-image traces following each movement until he had more arms than
Kali.

  She wondered what had ever happened to the Balloon Men.

  Long light-brown hair hung like a cape to her waist. Her parents were Irish—Munster O’Healys on her mother’s side, and Bradys from Derry on her father’s. There was a touch of Spanish blood in her mother’s side of the family, which gave her skin its warm dark cast. The Bradys were pure Irish and it was from them that she got her big-boned frame. And something else. Her eyes were a clear grey—twilight eyes, her father had liked to tease her, eyes that could see beyond the here and now into somewhere else.

  She hadn’t needed drugs to see the Balloon Men.

  Shifting in her wicker chair, she looked up and down the beach, but it was late and the wind wasn’t coming in from the ocean. The book on her lap was a comforting weight and had, considering her present state of mind, an even more appropriate title. How To Make the Wind Blow. If only it was a tutor, she thought, instead of just a collection of odd stories.

  The author’s name was Christy Riddell, a reed-thin Scot with a head full of sudden fancies. His hair was like an unruly hedgerow nest and he was half a head shorter than she, but she could recall dancing with him in a garden one night and she hadn’t had a more suitable partner since. She’d met him while visiting friends out east in a house that was as odd as any flight of his imagination. Long rambling halls connected a bewildering series of rooms, each more fascinating than the next. And the libraries. She’d lived in its libraries.

  “When the wind is right,” began the title story, the first story in the book, “the wise man isn’t half so trusted as the fool.”

  Ellen could remember when it was still a story that was told without the benefit of pen and paper. A story that changed each time the words traveled from mouth to ear.

  * * *

  There was a gnome, or a gnomish sort of a man, named Long who lived under the pier at the end of Main Street. He had skin brown as dirt, eyes blue as a clear summer sky. He was thin, with a fat tummy and a long crooked nose, and he wore raggedy clothes that he found discarded on the beach and wore until they were threadbare. Sometimes he bundled his tangled hair up under a bright yellow cap. Other times he wove it into many braids festooned with coloured beads and the discarded tabs from beer cans that he polished on his sleeve until they were bright and shiny.

  Though he’d seem more odd than magical to anyone who happened to spy him out wandering the streets or along the beach, he did have two enchantments.

  One was a pig that could see the wind and follow it anywhere. She was pink and fastidiously cleanly, big enough to ride to market—which Long sometimes did—and she could talk. Not pig-talk, or even pig-Latin, but plain English that anyone could understand if they took the time to listen. Her name changed from telling to telling, but by the time Long’s story appeared in the book, either she or Christy had settled on Brigwin.

  Long’s other enchantment was a piece of plain string with four complicated elf-knots tied in it—one to call up a wind from each of the four quarters. North and south. East and west. When he untied a knot, that wind would rise up and he’d ride Brigwin in its wake, sifting through the debris and pickings left behind for treasures or charms, though what Long considered a treasure, another might throw out, and what he might consider a charm, another might see as only an old button or a bit of tangled wool. He had a good business trading his findings to woodwives and witches and the like that he met at the market when midnight was past and gone, ordinary folk were in bed, and the beach towns belonged to those who hid by day, but walked the streets by night.

  * * *

  Ellen carried a piece of string in her pocket, with four complicated knots tied into it, but no matter how often she undid one, she still had to wait for her winds like anyone else. She knew that strings to catch and call up the wind were only real in stories, but she liked thinking that maybe, just once, a bit of magic could tiptoe out of a tale and step into the real world. Until that happened, she had to be content with what writers like Christy put to paper.

  He called them mythistories, those odd little tales of his. They were the ghosts of fancies that he would track down from time to time and trap on paper. Oddities. Some charming, some grotesque. All of them enchanting. Foolishness, he liked to say, offered from one fool to others.

  Ellen smiled. Oh, yes. But when the wind is right…

  She’d never talked to Christy about the Balloon Men, but she didn’t doubt that he knew them.

  Leaning over the rail of the balcony, two stories above the walkway that ran the length of the beach, Christy’s book held tight in one hand, she wished very hard to see those roly-poly figures one more time. The ocean beat its rhythm against the sand. A light breeze caught at her hair and twisted it into her face.

  When the wind is right.

  Something fluttered inside her, like wings unfolding, readying for flight. Rising from her chair, she set the book down on its wicker arm and went inside. Down the stairs and out the front door. She could feel a thrumming between her ears that had to be excitement moving blood more quickly through her veins, though it could have been the echo of a half-lost memory—a singing of small deep voices, rising up from diaphragms nestled in fat little bellies.

  Perhaps the wind was right, she thought as she stepped out onto the walkway. A quarter moon peeked at her from above the oil rigs far out from the shore. She put her hand in the pocket of her cotton pants and wound the knotted string she found there around one finger. It was late, late for the Balloon Men to be rolling, but she didn’t doubt that there was something waiting to greet her out on the street. Perhaps only memories. Perhaps a fancy that Christy hadn’t trapped on a page yet.

  There was only one way to find out.

  * * *

  2

  * * *

  Peregrin Laurie was as sharp-faced as a weasel—a narrow-shouldered thin whip of a teenager in jeans and a torn T-shirt. He sat in a doorway, knees up by his chin, a mane of spiked multi-coloured hair standing straight up from his head in a two-inch Mohawk swath that ran down to the nape of his neck like a lizard’s crest fringes. Wrapping his arms around bruised ribs, he held back tears as each breath he took made his chest burn.

  Goddamn beach bums. The bastards had just about killed him and he had no one to blame but himself. Scuffing through a parking lot, he should have taken off when the car pulled up. But no. He had to be the poseur and hold his ground, giving them a long cool look as they came piling drunkenly out of the car. By the time he realized just how many of them there were and what they had planned for him, it was too late to run. He’d had to stand there then, heart hammering in his chest, and hope bravado’d see him through, because there was no way he could handle them all.

  They didn’t stop to chat. They just laid into him. He got a few licks in, but he knew it was hopeless. By the time he hit the pavement, all he could do was curl up into a tight ball and take their drunken kicks, cursing them with each fiery gasp of air he dragged into his lungs.

  The booger waited until he was down and hurting before making its appearance. It came out from under the pier that ran by the parking lot, black and greasy, with hot eyes and a mouthful of barracuda teeth. If it hadn’t hurt so much just to breathe, he would have laughed at the way his attackers backed away from the creature, eyes bulging as they rushed to their car. They took off, tires squealing, but not before the booger took a chunk of metal out of the rear fender with one swipe of a paw.

  It came back to look at him, black nightmare head snuffling at him as he lifted his head and wiped the blood from his face, then moving away as he reached out a hand toward it. It smelled like a sewer and looked worse, a squat creature that had to have been scraped out of some monstrous nose, with eyes like hot coals in a smear of a face and a slick wet look to its skin. A booger, plain and simple. Only it was alive, clawed and toothed. Following him around ever since he’d run away….

  * * *

  His parents were both burnouts from the sixties. They lived in West Hollywood
and got more embarrassing the older he became. Take his name. Laurie was bad enough, but Peregrin… Lifted straight out of that Lord of the Rings book. An okay read, sure, but you don’t use it to name your kid. Maybe he should just be thankful he didn’t get stuck with Frodo or Bilbo. By the time he was old enough to start thinking for himself, he’d picked out his own name and wouldn’t answer to anything but Reece. He’d gotten it out of some book, too, but at least it sounded cool. You needed all the cool you could get with parents like his.

  His old man still had hair down to his ass. He wore wire-framed glasses and listened to shit on the stereo that sounded as burned-out as he looked. The old lady wasn’t much better. Putting on weight like a whale, hair a frizzy brown, as long as the old man’s, but usually hanging in a braid. Coming home late some nights, the whole house’d have the sweet smell of weed mixed with incense and they’d give him these goofy looks and talk about getting in touch with the cosmos and other spacey shit. When anybody came down on him for the way he looked, or for dropping out of school, all they said was let him do his own thing.