Dreams Underfoot n-1 Read online

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 rolypoly 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 halflost 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 sharpfaced as a weasel—a narrowshoul-dered thin whip of a teenager in jeans and a torn Tshirt. He sat in a doorway, knees up by his chin, a mane of spiked multicolored hair standing straight up from his head in a twoinch 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 squeal—

  ing, 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 towards 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 wireframed glasses and listened to shit on the stereo that sounded as burnedout 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.

  His own thing. Jesus. Give me a break. With that kind of crap to look forward to at home, who wouldn’t take off first chance they got? Though wouldn’t you know it, no sooner did he get free of them than the booger latched onto him, following him around, skulking in the shadows.

  At first, Reece never got much of a look at the thing—just glimpses out of the corner of his eyes—and that was more than enough. But sleeping on the beaches and in parks, some nights he’d wake with that sewer smell in his nostrils and catch something slipping out of sight, a dark wet shadow moving close to the ground. After a few weeks, it started to get bolder, sitting on its haunches a halfdozen yards from wherever he was bedding down, the hot coal eyes fixed on him.

  Reece didn’t know what it was or what it wanted. Was it looking out for him, or saving him up for its supper? Sometimes he thought, what with all the drugs his parents had done back in the sixties—good times for them, shit for him because he’d been born and that was when his troubles had started—he was sure that all those chemicals had fucked up his genes. Twisted something in his head so that he imagined he had this twofoot high, walking, grunting booger following him around.

  Like the old man’d say. Bummer.

  Sucker sure seemed real, though.

  Reece held his hurt to himself, ignoring Ellen as she approached. When she stopped in front of him, he gave her a scowl.

  “Are you okay?” she asked, leaning closer to look at him.

  He gave her a withering glance. The long hair and jeans, flowered blouse. Just what he needed.

  Another sixties burnout.

  “Why don’t you just fuck off and die?” he said.

  But Ellen looked past the tough pose to see the blood on his shirt, the bruising on his face that the shadows halfhid, the hurt he was trying so hard to pretend wasn’t there.

  “Where do you live?” she asked.

  “What’s it to you?”

  Ignoring his scowl, she bent down and started to help him to his feet.

  “Aw, fuck—” Reece began, but it was easier on his ribs to stand up than to fight her.

  “Let’s get you cleaned up,” she said.

  “Florence fucking Nightingale,” he muttered, but she merely led him back the way she’d come.

  From under the pier a wet shadow stirred at their departure. Reece’s booger drew back lips that had the rubbery texture of an octopus’

  skin. Row on row of pointed teeth reflected back the light from the streetlights. Hatehot eyes glimmered red. On silent leathery paws, the creature followed the slowmoving pair, grunting softly to itself, claws clicking on the pavement.

  3

  Bramley Dapple was the wizard in “A Week of Saturdays,” the third story in Christy Riddell’s How to Make the Wind Blow. He was a small wizened old man, spry as a kitten, thin as a reed, with features lined and brown as a dried fig. He wore a pair of wirerimmed spectacles without prescription lenses that he polished incessantly, and he loved to talk.

  “It doesn’t matter what they believe,” he was saying to his guest, “so much as what you believe.”

  He paused as the brownskinned goblin who looked after his house came in with a tray of biscuits and tea. His name was Goon, a tallish creature at threefoot-four who wore the garb of an organgrinder’s monkey: striped black and yellow trousers, a red jacket with yellow trim, small black slippers, and a lit
tle green and yellow cap that pushed down an unruly mop of thin dark curly hair. Gangly limbs with a protruding tummy, puffed cheeks, a wide nose, and tiny black eyes added to his monkeylike appearance.

  The wizard’s guest observed Goon’s entrance with a startled look, which pleased Bramley to no end.

  “There,” he said. “Goon proves my point.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “We live in a consensual reality where things exist because we want them to exist. I believe in Goon, Goon believes in Goon, and you, presented with his undeniable presence, tea tray in hand, believe in Goon as well. Yet, if you were to listen to the world at large, Goon is nothing more than a figment of some fevered writer’s imagination—a literary construct, an artistic representation of something that can’t possibly exist in the world as we know it.”

  Goon gave Bramley a sour look, but the wizard’s guest leaned forward, hand outstretched, and brushed the goblin’s shoulder with a featherlight touch. Slowly she leaned back into the big armchair, cushions so comfortable they seemed to embrace her as she settled against them.

  “So ... anything we can imagine can exist?” she asked finally. Goon turned his sour look on her now.

  She was a student at the university where the wizard taught; third year, majoring in fine arts, and she had the look of an artist about her. There were old paint stains on her jeans and under her fingernails.

  Her hair was a thick tangle of brown hair, more unruly than Goon’s curls. She had a smudge of a nose and thin puckering lips, workman’s boots that stood by the door with a history of scuffs and stains written into their leather, thick woolen socks with a hole in the left heel, and one shirttail that had escaped the waist of her jeans. But her eyes were a pale, pale blue, clear and alert, for all the casualness of her attire.

  Her name was Jilly Coppercorn.

  Bramley shook his head. “It’s not imagining. It’s knowing that it exists—without one smidgen of doubt.”

  “Yes, but someone had to think him up for him to ...” She hesitated as Goon’s scowl deepened.

  “That is ...”

  Bramley continued to shake his head. “There is some semblance of order to things,” he admitted, “for if the world was simply everyone’s different conceptual universe mixed up together, we’d have nothing but chaos. It all relies on will, you see—to observe the changes, at any rate. Or the differences. The anomalies. Like Goon—oh, do stop scowling,” he added to the goblin.

  “The world as we have it,” he went on to Jilly, “is here mostly because of habit. We’ve all agreed that certain things exist—we’re taught as impressionable infants that this is a table and this is what it looks like, that’s a tree out the window there, a dog looks and sounds just so. At the same time we’re informed that Goon and his like don’t exist, so we don’t—or can’t—see them.”

  “They’re not made up?” Jilly asked.

  This was too much for Goon. He set the tray down and gave her leg a pinch. Jilly jumped away from him, trying to back deeper into the chair as the goblin grinned, revealing two rows of decidedly nastylooking teeth.

  “Rather impolite,” Bramley said, “but I suppose you do get the point?”

  Jilly nodded quickly. Still grinning, Goon set about pouring their teas.

  “So,” Jilly asked, “how can someone ... how can I see things as they really are?”

  “Well, it’s not that simple,” the wizard told her. “First you have to know what it is that you’re looking for—before you can find it, you see.”

  Ellen closed the book and leaned back in her own chair, thinking about that, about Balloon Men, about the young man lying in her bed. To know what you were looking for. Was that why when she went out hoping to find Balloon Men, she’d come home with Reece?

  She got up and went to the bedroom door to look in at him. After much protesting, he’d finally let her clean his hurts and put him to bed. Claiming to be not the least bit hungry, he’d polished of a whole tin of soup and the better part of the loaf of sourdough bread that she had just bought that afternoon. Then, of course, he wasn’t tired at all and promptly fell asleep the moment his head touched the pillow.

  She shook her head, looking at him now. His rainbow Mohawk made it look as though she’d brought some hybrid creature into her home—part rooster, part boy, it lay in her bed snoring softly, hardly real. But definitely not a Balloon Man, she thought, looking at his thin torso under the sheets.

  About to turn away, something at the window caught her eye. Frozen in place, she saw a doglike face peering back at her from the other side of the pane—which was patently impossible since the bedroom was on the second floor and there was nothing to stand on outside that window. But impossible or not, that doglike face with its coalred eyes and a fierce grin of glimmering teeth was there all the same.

  She stared at it, feeling sick as the moments ticked by. Hunger burned in those eyes. Anger.

  Unbridled hate. She couldn’t move, not until it finally disappeared—sliding from sight, physically escaping rather than vanishing the way a hallucination should.

  She leaned weakly against the doorjamb, a faint buzzing in her head. Not until she’d caught her breath did she go to the window, but of course there was nothing there. Consensual reality, Christy’s wizard had called it. Things that exist because we want them to exist. But she knew that not even in a nightmare would she consider giving life to that monstrous head she’d seen staring back in at her from the night beyond her window.

  Her gaze went to the sleeping boy in her bed. All that anger burning up inside him. Had she caught a glimpse of something that he’d given life to?

  Ellen, she told herself as she backed out of the room, you’re making entirely too much out of nothing.

  Except something had certainly seemed to be there. There was absolutely no question in her mind that something had been out there.

  In the living room she looked down at Christy’s book. Bramley Dapple’s words skittered through her mind, chased by a feeling of ... of strangeness that she couldn’t shake. The wind, the night, finding Reece in that doorway. And now that thing in the window.

  She went and poured herself a brandy before making her bed on the sofa, studiously avoiding looking at the windows. She knew she was being silly—she had to have imagined it—but there was a feeling in the air tonight, a sense of being on the edge of something vast and grey. One false step, and she’d plunge down into it. A void. A nightmare.

  It took a second brandy before she fell asleep.

  Outside, Reece’s booger snuffled around the walls of the house, crawling up the side of the building from time to time to peer into this or that window. Something kept it from entering—some disturbance in the air that was like a wind, but not a wind at the same time. When it finally retreated, it was with the knowledge in what passed for its mind that time itself was the key. Hours and minutes would unlock whatever kept it presently at bay.

  Barracuda teeth gleamed as the creature grinned. It could wait. Not long, but it could wait.

  4

  Ellen woke the next morning, stiff from a night spent on the sofa, and wondered what in God’s name had possessed her to bring Reece home. Though on reflection, she realized, the whole night had proceeded with a certain surreal quality of which Reece had only been a small part. Rereading Christy’s book. That horrific face at the window. And the Balloon Men—she hadn’t thought of them in years.

  Swinging her feet to the floor, she went out onto her balcony. There was a light fog hazing the air.

  Boogieboarders were riding the waves close by the pier—only a handful of them now, but in an hour or so their numbers would have multiplied beyond count. Raking machines were cleaning the beach, their dull roar vying with the pounding of the tide. Men with metal detectors were patiently sifting through the debris the machines left behind before the trucks came to haul it away. Near the tide’s edge a man was jogging backwards across the sand, sharply silhouetted against the ocean.<
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  Nothing out of the ordinary. But returning inside she couldn’t shake the feeling that there was someone in her head, something flying darkwinged across her inner terrain like a crow. When she went to wash up, she found its crow eyes staring back at her from the mirror. Wild eyes.

  Shivering, she finished up quickly. By the time Reece woke she was sitting outside on the balcony in a sweatshirt and shorts, nursing a mug of coffee. The odd feeling of being possessed had mostly gone away and the night just past took on the fading quality of halfremembered dreams.

  She looked up at his appearance, smiling at the way a night’s sleep had rearranged the lizard crest fringes of his Mohawk. Some of it was pressed flat against his skull. Elsewhere, multicolored tufts stood up at bizarre angles. His mouth was a sullen slash in a field of short beard stubble, but his eyes still had a sleepy look to them, softening his features.

  “You do this a lot?” he asked, slouching into the other wicker chair on the balcony.

  “What? Drink coffee in the morning?”

  “Pick up strays.”

  “You looked like you needed help.”

  Reece nodded. “Right. We’re all brothers and sisters on starship earth. I kinda figured you for a bleeding heart.”

  His harsh tone soured Ellen’s humour. She felt the something that had watched her from the bathroom mirror flutter inside her and her thoughts returned to the previous night. Christy’s wizard talking. Things exist because we want them to exist.

  “After you fell asleep,” she said, “I thought I saw something peering in through the bedroom window

  ....”

  Her voice trailed off when she realized that she didn’t quite know where she was going with that line of thought. But Reece sat up from his slouch, suddenly alert.

  “What kind of something?” he asked.

  Ellen tried to laugh it off “A monster,” she said with a smile. “Redeyed and all teeth.” She shrugged.

  “I was just having one of those nights.”

  “You saw it?” Reece demanded sharply enough to make Ellen sit up straighter as well.