The Ivory and the Horn Read online

  I haven’t seen Shirley again. If it hadn’t been for Aunt Hilary telling me about her coming by the house, I’d just think I made the whole thing up.

  I remember what Bones told me about ghosts having their own agendas and how maybe we both had something to give each other. Seeing Shirley was the catalyst for me. I hope I helped her some, too. I remember her telling me once that she came from Rockcastle. I think wherever she was finally heading, Rockcastle was still on the way.

  There isn’t a solution to every problem, but at the very least, you’ve got to try.

  I went back to the squat the day after I was there with Angel, and the bus ticket was gone. Logic tells me that someone found it and cashed it in for a quick fix or a bottle of cheap wine. I’m pretty sure I just imagined the lingered scent of rosehip and licorice, and the button I found on the floor was probably from one of Tommy’s shirts, left behind when we moved.

  But I’d like to think that it was Shirley who picked the ticket up, that this time she got to the depot on time.

  MR. TRUEPENNY’S BOOK EMPORIUM AND GALLERY

  The constellations were consulted

  for advice, but no one understood them.

  —attributed to Elias Canetti

  My name’s Sophie and my friend Jilly says I have faerie blood. Maybe she’s right.

  Faeries are supposed to have problems dealing with modern technology and I certainly have trouble with anything technological. The simplest appliances develop horrendous problems when I’m around. I can’t wear a watch because they start to run backwards, unless they’re digital; then they just flash random numbers as though the watch’s inner workings have taken to measuring fractals instead of time. If I take a subway or bus, it’s sure to be late. Or it’ll have a new driver who takes a wrong turn and we all get lost.

  This actually happened to me once. I got on the number 3 at the Kelly Street Bridge and somehow, instead of going downtown on Lee, we ended up heading north into Foxville.

  I also have strange dreams.

  I used to think they were the place that my art came from, that my subconscious was playing around with images, tossing them up in my sleep before I put them down on canvas or paper. But then a few months ago I had this serial dream that ran on for a half dozen nights in a row, a kind of fairy tale that was either me stepping into faerie, and therefore real within its own parameters—which is what Jilly would like me to believe—or it was just my subconscious making another attempt to deal with the way my mother abandoned my father and me when I was a kid. I don’t really know which I believe anymore, because I still find myself going back to that dream world from time to time and meeting the people I first met there.

  I even have a boyfriend in that place, which probably tells you more about my usual ongoing social status than it does my state of mind.

  Rationally. I know it’s just a continuation of that serial dream. And I’d let it go at that, except it feels so damn real. Every morning when I wake up from the latest installment, my head’s filled with memories of what I’ve done that seem as real as anything I do during the day—sometimes more so.

  But I’m getting off on a tangent. I started off meaning just to introduce myself, and here I am, giving you my life story. What I really wanted to tell you about was Mr. Truepenny.

  The thing you have to understand is that I made him up. He was like one of those invisible childhood friends, except I deliberately created him.

  We weren’t exactly well-off when I was growing up. When my mother left us, I ended up being one of those latchkey kids. We didn’t live in the best part of town; Upper Foxville is a rough part of the city and it could be a scary place for a little girl who loved art and books and got teased for that love by the other neighborhood kids, who couldn’t even be bothered to learn how to read. When I got home from school, I went straight in and locked the door.

  I’d get supper ready for my dad, but there were always a couple of hours to kill in between my arriving home and when he finished work—longer if he had to work late. We didn’t have a TV, so I read a lot, but we couldn’t afford to buy books. On Saturday mornings, we’d go to the library and I’d take out my limit—five books—which I’d finish by Tuesday, even if I tried to stretch them out.

  To fill the rest of the time, I’d draw on shopping bags or the pads of paper that dad brought me home from work, but that never seemed to occupy enough hours. So one day I made up Mr. Truepenny.

  I’d daydream about going to his shop. It was the most perfect place that I could imagine: all dark wood and leaded glass, thick carpets and club chairs with carved wooden-based reading lamps strategically placed throughout. The shelves were filled with leather-bound books and folios, and there was a small art gallery in the back.

  The special thing about Mr. Truepenny’s shop was that all of its contents existed only within its walls. Shakespeare’s The Storm of Winter. The Chapman’s Tale by Chaucer. The Blissful Stream by William Morris. Steinbeck’s companion collection to The Long Valley, Salinas. North Country Stoic by Emily Bronte.

  None of these books existed, of course, but being the dreamy sort of kid that I was, not only could I daydream of visiting Mr. Truepenny’s shop, but I could actually read these unwritten stories. The gallery in the back of the shop was much the same. There hung works by the masters that saw the light of day only in my imagination. Van Goghs and Monets and da Vincis. Rossettis and Homers and Cezannes.

  Mr. Truepenny himself was a wonderfully eccentric individual who never once chased me out for being unable to make a purchase. He had a Don Quixote air about him, a sense that he was forever tilting at windmills. He was tall and thin with a thatch of mouse-brown hair and round spectacles, a rumpled tweed suit and a huge briar pipe that he continually fussed with but never actually lit. He always greeted me with genuine affection and seemed disappointed when it was time for me to go.

  My imagination was so vivid that my daydream visits to his shop were as real to me as when my dad took me to the library or to the Newford Gallery of Fine Art. But it didn’t last. I grew up, went to Butler University on student loans and the money from far too many menial jobs—”got a life,” as the old saying goes. I made friends, I was so busy, there was no time, no need to visit the shop anymore. Eventually I simply forgot all about it.

  Until I met Janice Petrie.

  Wendy and I were in the Market after a late night at her place the previous evening. I was on my way home, but we’d decided to shop for groceries together before I left. Trying to make up my mind between green beans and a head of broccoli, my gaze lifted above the vegetable stand and met that of a little girl standing nearby with her parents. Her eyes widened with recognition though I’d never seen her before.

  “You’re the woman!” she cried. “You’re the woman who’s evicting Mr. Truepenny. I think it’s a horrible thing to do. You’re a horrible woman!”

  And then she started to cry. Her mother shushed her and apologized to me for the outburst before bustling the little girl away.

  “What was all that about, Sophie?” Wendy asked me.

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  But of course I did. I was just so astonished by the encounter that I didn’t know what to say. I changed the subject and that was the end of it until I got home. I dug out an old cardboard box from the back of my hall closet and rooted about in it until I came up with a folder of drawings I’d done when I still lived with my dad. Near the back I found the ones I was looking for.

  They were studies of Mr. Truepenny and his amazing shop.

  God, I thought, looking at these awkward drawings, pencil on brown grocery-bag paper, ballpoint on foolscap. The things we forget.

  I took the drawings out onto my balcony and lay down on the old sofa I kept out there, studying them, one by one. There was Mr. Truepenny, writing something in his big leather-bound ledger. Here was another of him, holding his cat, Dodger, the two of them looking out the leaded glass windows of the shop. There was a view of th
e main aisle of the shop, leading down to the gallery, the perspective slightly askew, but not half bad considering I was no older when I did them than was the little girl in the Market today.

  How could she have known? I found myself thinking. Mr. Truepenny and his shop were something I’d made up. I couldn’t remember ever telling anyone else about them— not even Jilly. And what did she mean about my evicting him from the shop?

  I could think of no rational response. After a while, I just set the drawings aside and tried to forget about it. Exhaustion from the late night before soon had me nodding off, and I fell asleep only to find myself, not in my boyfriend’s faerie dream world, but on the streets of Mabon, the made-up city in which I’d put Mr. Truepenny’s Book Emporium and Gallery.

  I’m half a block from the shop. The area’s changed. The once-neat cobblestones are thick with grime. Refuse lies everywhere. Most of the storefronts are boarded up, their walls festooned with graffiti. When I reach Mr. Truepenny’s shop, I see a sign in the window that reads, CLOSING SOON DUE TO LEASE EXPIRATION.

  Half-dreading what I’ll find, I open the door and hear the familiar little bell tinkle as I step inside. The shop’s dusty and dim, and much smaller than I remember it. The shelves are almost bare. The door leading to the gallery is shut and has a CLOSED sign tacked onto it.

  “Ah, Miss Etoile. It’s been so very long.”

  I turn to find Mr. Truepenny at his usual station behind the front counter. He’s smaller than I remember as well, and looks a little shabby now. Hair thinning, tweed suit threadbare and more shapeless than ever.

  “What… what’s happened to the shop?” I ask.

  I’ve forgotten that I’m asleep on the sofa out on my balcony. All I know is this awful feeling I have inside as I look at what’s become of my old childhood haunt.

  “Well, times change,” he says. “The world moves on.”

  “This—is this my doing?”

  His eyebrows rise quizzically.

  “I met this little girl and she said I was evicting you.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Mr. Truepenny says, and I can see in his sad eyes that it’s true. “You’ve no more need for me or my wares, so it’s only fair that you let us fade.”

  “But you… that is… well, you’re not real.”

  I feel weird saying this, because while I remember now that I’m dreaming, this place is like one of my faerie dreams that feel as real as the waking world.

  “That’s not strictly true,” he tells me. “You did conceive of the city and this shop, but we were drawn to fit the blueprint of your plan from… elsewhere.”

  “What elsewhere?”

  He frowns, brow furrowing as he thinks.

  “I’m not really sure myself,” he tells me.

  “You’re saying I didn’t make you up, I just drew you here from somewhere else?”

  He nods.

  “And now you have to go back?”

  “So it would seem.”

  “And this little girl—how can she know about you?”

  “Once a reputable establishment is open for business, it really can’t deny any customer access, regardless of their age or station in life.”

  “She’s visiting my daydream?” I ask. This is too much to accept, even for a dream.

  Mr. Truepenny shakes his head. “You brought this world into being through your single-minded desire, but now it has a life of its own.”

  “Until I forgot about it.”

  “You had a very strong will,” he says. “You made us so real that we’ve been able to hang on for decades. But now we really have to go.”

  There’s a very twisty sort of logic involved here, I can see. It doesn’t make sense by way of the waking world’s logic, but I think there are different rules in a dreamscape. After all, my faerie boyfriend can turn into a crow.

  “Do you have more customers, other than that little girl?” I ask.

  “Oh yes. Or at least, we did.” He waves a hand to encompass the shop. “Not much stock left, I’m afraid. That was the first to go.”

  “Why doesn’t their desire keep things running?”

  “Well, they don’t have faerie blood, now do they? They can visit, but they haven’t the magic to bring us across or keep us here.”

  It figures. I think. We’re back to that faerie-blood thing again. Jilly would love this.

  I’m about to ask him to explain it all a little more clearly when I get this odd jangling sound in my ears and wake up back on the sofa. My doorbell’s ringing. I go inside the apartment to accept what turns out to be a FedEx package.

  “Can dreams be real?” I ask the courier. “Can we invent something in a dream and have it turn out to be a real place?”

  “Beats me, lady,” he replies, never blinking an eye. “Just sign here.”

  I guess he gets all kinds.

  So now I visit Mr. Truepenny’s shop on a regular basis again. The area’s vastly improved. There’s a cafe nearby where Jeck—that’s my boyfriend that I’ve been telling you about—and I go for tea after we’ve browsed through Mr. Truepenny’s latest wares. Jeck likes this part of Mabon so much that he’s now got an apartment on the same street as the shop. I think I might set up a studio nearby.

  I’ve even run into Janice—the little girl who brought me back here in the first place. She’s forgiven me, of course, now that she knows it was all a misunderstanding, and lets me buy her an ice cream from the soda fountain sometimes before she goes home.

  I’m very accepting of it all—you get that way after a while. The thing that worries me now is, what happens to Mabon when I die? Will the city get run down again and eventually disappear? And what about its residents? There’s all these people here; they’ve got family, friends, lives. I get the feeling it wouldn’t be the same for them if they have to go back to that elsewhere place Mr. Truepenny was so vague about.

  So that’s the reason I’ve written all this down and had it printed up into a little folio by one of Mr. Truepenny’s friends in the waking world. I’m hoping somebody out there’s like me. Someone’s got enough faerie blood not only to visit, but to keep the place going. Naturally, not just anyone will do. It has to be the right sort of person, a book lover, a lover of old places and tradition, as well as the new.

  If you think you’re the person for the position, please send a resume to me care of Mr. Truepenny’s Book Emporium and Gallery, Mabon. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

  THE FOREST IS CRYING

  There are seven million homeless children on the streets of Brazil

  Are vanishing trees being reborn as unwanted children?

  —Gary Snyder, from The Practice of the Wild

  The real problem is, people think life

  is a ladder, and it’s really a wheel

  —Pat Cadigan, from “Johnny Come Home”

  Two pairs of footsteps, leather soles on marble floors. Listening to the sound they made, Dennison felt himself wondering, What was the last thing that Ronnie Egan heard before he died? The squeal of tires on wet pavement? Some hooker or an old wino shouting, “Look out!” Or was there no warning, no warning at all? Just the sudden impact of the car as it hit him and flung his body ten feet in the air before it was smeared up against the plate glass window of the pawn shop?

  “You don’t have to do this,” Stone said as they paused at the door. “One of the neighbors already IDed the body.”

  “I know.”

  Looking through the small window, glass reinforced with metal mesh, Dennison watched the morgue attendant approach to let them in. Like the detective at Dennison’s side, the attendant was wearing a sidearm. Was the security to keep people out or keep them in? he wondered morbidly.

  “So why—” Stone began, then he shook his head. “Never mind.”

  It wasn’t long before they were standing on either side of a metal tray that the attendant had pulled out from the wall at Stone’s request. It could easily hold a grown man, twice the 170 pounds Dennison car
ried on his own six-one frame. The small body laid out upon the metal surface was dwarfed by the expanse of stainless steel that surrounded it.

  “His mother’s a heavy user,” Dennison said. “She peddles her ass to feed the habit. Sometimes she brings the man home—she’s got a room at the Claymore. If the guy didn’t like having a kid around, she’d get one of the neighbors to look after him. We’ve had her in twice for putting him outside to play in the middle of the night when she couldn’t find anybody to take him in. Trouble is, she always put on such a good show for the judge that we couldn’t make the neglect charges stick.”

  He delivered the brief summary in a monotone. It didn’t seem real. Just like Ronnie Egan’s dead body didn’t seem real. The skin so ashen, the bruises so dark against its pallor.

  “I read the file,” Stone said.

  Dennison looked up from the corpse of the four-year-old boy.

  “Did you bring her in?” he asked.

  Stone shook his head. “Can’t track her down. We’ve got an APB out on her, but …”He sighed. “Who’re we kidding, Chris? Even when we do bring her in, we’re not going to be able to find a charge that’ll stick. She’ll just tell the judge what she’s told them before.”

  Dennison nodded heavily. I’m sorry, Your Honor, but I was asleep and I never even heard him go out. He’s a good boy, but he doesn’t always listen to his momma. He likes to wander. If Social Services could give, her enough to raise him in a decent neighborhood, this kind of thing would never happen.____

  “I should’ve tried harder,” he said.

  “Yeah, like your caseload’s any lighter than mine,” Stone said. “Where the fuck would you find the time?”

  “I still should’ve…”

  Done something, Dennison thought. Made a difference.

  Stone nodded to the attendant, who zipped up the heavy plastic bag, then slid the drawer back into the wall. Dennison watched until the drawer closed with a metal click, then finally turned away.