The Newford Stories Read online

  …hear that damn song one more time, I’ll kill…

  No, they were thoughts, she realized, stolen from the shoppers in the mall that lay on the other side of the alley’s wall. It was impossible to tell their age or gender except by inference.

  …damn bells…oh, it’s the Sally Ann, doing their annual beg-a-thon…hey, nice rack on her…wonder why a looker like her’s collecting money for losers…

  …doesn’t get me what I want this year, I’ll show him what being miserable is all about…

  Jilly blinked when the voices were suddenly gone again.

  “Now do you see?” her companion said.

  “Those thoughts are taken out of context with the rest of their lives,” Jilly told him. “Just because someone has an ugly thought, it doesn’t make them a bad person.”

  “Oh no?”

  “And being kind oneself does make a difference.”

  “Against the great swell of indifferent unkindnesses that threaten to wash us completely away with the force of a tsunami?”

  “Is this what they meant with the ill will that laid you low?”

  “What who meant?”

  “The crow girls. They’re the ones who found you and brought you to the Kelledys’ house because they couldn’t heal you themselves.”

  A small smile touched his features. “I remember some crow girls I saw once. Their good humour could make yours seem like grumbling, but they carried the capacity for large angers, as well.”

  “Was that when you were a buffalo?”

  “What do you know about buffalo?”

  “You’re supposed to have buffalo blood,” Jilly explained.

  He gave her a slow nod.

  “Those-who-came,” he said. “They slaughtered the buffalo. Then, when the People danced and called the buffalo spirit back, they slaughtered the People, as well. That’s the history I read on the skin of the world—not only here, but everywhere. Blood and pain and hunger and hatred. It’s an old story that has no end. How can a smile, a laugh, a good deed, stand up against the weight of such a history?”

  “I…I guess it can’t,” Jilly said. “But you still have to try.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s all you can do. If you don’t try to stand up against the darkness, it swallows you up.”

  “And if in the end, there is only darkness? If the world is meant to end in darkness?”

  Jilly shook her head. She refused to believe it.

  “How can you deny it?” he asked.

  “It’s just…if there’s only supposed to be darkness, then why were we given light?”

  For a long moment, he sat there, shoulders drooped, staring down at his hands. When he finally looked up, there was something in his eyes that Jilly couldn’t read.

  “Why indeed?” he said softly.

  - 4 -

  When Meran returned to the living room it was to find Jilly slumped across the body of her patient, Professor Dapple standing over the pair of them, hands fluttering nervously in front of him.

  “What’s happened?” she said, quickly crossing the room.

  “I don’t know. One moment she was talking to me, then she leaned over and touched his cheek and she simply collapsed.”

  He moved aside as Meran knelt down by the sofa once more. Before she could study the problem more closely, the roseharp began to play upstairs.

  The professor looked surprised, his gaze lifting to the ceiling.

  “I thought Cerin had gone with Lucius,” he said.

  “He did,” Meran told him. “That’s only his harp playing.”

  The professor regarded her for a long, slow moment.

  “Of course,” he finally said.

  Meran smiled. “It’s nothing to be nervous about. Really. I’m more worried about what’s happened to Jilly.”

  The sofa was wide enough that, with the professor’s help, she was able to lay Jilly out beside the stranger. Whatever had struck Jilly down was as much of a mystery to Meran as the stranger’s original ailment. In her mind she began to run through a list of other healers she could contact to ask for help when there was a sudden commotion at the front door. A moment later the crow girls trooped in with Cerin and Lucius following behind them.

  “Jilly…?” Cerin began.

  Meran briefly explained what little she knew of what had happened since they’d been gone.

  “We can’t help him,” Zia said before anyone else could speak.

  “We tried,” Maida added, “but we weren’t so very useful, were we?”

  Zia shook her head.

  “Not very useful at all,” Maida said.

  “But,” Zia offered, “we could maybe help her.”

  Maida nodded and leaned closer to peer at Jilly. “She’s very pretty, isn’t she? I think we know her.”

  “She’s Geordie’s friend,” Zia said.

  “Oh, yes.” Zia looked at Cerin. “But he plays much nicer music.”

  “Ever so very much more.”

  “It’s for listening to, you see. Not for making you do things.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cerin said. “But we needed to get your attention.”

  “Well, we’re ever so very attentive now,” Maida told him.

  Whereupon the pair of them went very still and fixed Cerin with expectant gazes. He turned helplessly to his wife.

  “How can you help Jilly?” she asked.

  “Jilly,” Maida repeated. “Is that her name?”

  “Silly Jilly.”

  “Willy-nilly.”

  “Up down dilly.”

  “I’m sure making fun of her name’s helpful,” Lucius said.

  “Oh, pooh,” Maida said. “Old Raven never gets a joke.”

  “That’s the trouble with this raven, all right,” Zia agreed.

  “We’ve seen jokes fly right out the window when they see he’s in the room.”

  “About Jilly,” Meran tried again.

  “Well, you see,” Maida said, suddenly serious. “The buffalo man is a piece of the Grace.”

  “And we can’t help the Grace—she has to help herself.”

  Maida nodded. “But Jilly—”

  Zia giggled, then quickly put a hand over her mouth.

  “—only needs to be shown the way back to her being all of one piece again,” Maida finished.

  “You mean her spirit has gone somewhere?” Cerin asked.

  “Duh.”

  “How can we bring her back?” Meran asked.

  The crow girls looked at Cerin.

  “Well,” Zia said. “If you know her calling-on song as well as you do ours, that would maybe work.”

  “I’ll get the roseharp,” Cerin said, standing up.

  “Now he needs it in hand,” Lucius said.

  Cerin started to frame a reply, but then he looked at Meran and left the room.

  “We were promised sweets,” Maida said.

  Zia nodded. “The actual promise was that there’d be mountains of them.”

  “Do you mind if we finish up here first?” Meran asked.

  “Oh, no,” Maida said. “We love to wait.”

  Zia gave Meran a bright smile. “Honestly.”

  “Anticipation is so much better than being attentive.”

  “Though they’re much the same, in some ways.”

  “Because they both involve waiting, you see,” Maida explained, her smile as bright as her companion’s.

  Meran stifled a sigh and returned their smile. She’d forgotten how maddening the crow girls could be. Normally she enjoyed bantering with their tricksy kind, but at the moment she was too worried about Jilly to join the fun. And then there was the stranger whose appearance had started it all. They hadn’t even begun to deal with him.

  When Cerin returned with the roseharp, he sat down on a footstool and drew the instrument onto his lap.

  “Play something Jilly,” Maida suggested.

  “Did you say silly?” Zia asked. “Because that’s not being serious at a
ll, you know, making jokes about very serious things.”

  “I didn’t say silly.”

  “I think maybe you did.”

  Cerin ignored the pair of them and turned to his wife. “I might not be able to bring her back,” he said. “Because of him. Because of the doors he can close.”

  “I know,” Meran said. “You can only try.”

  - 5 -

  “I think I know now what the crow girls meant,” Jilly said.

  The buffalo man raised his eyebrows questioningly.

  “About this ill will business,” Jilly explained. “Every ugly thought or bad deed you come into contact with steals away a piece of your vitality, doesn’t it? It’s like erosion. The pieces keep falling away until finally you get so worn away that you slip into a kind of coma.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Has this happened before?”

  He nodded.

  “So what happens next?”

  “I die.”

  Jilly stared at him, not sure she’d heard him right.

  “You…die.”

  He nodded. “And then I come back and the cycle begins all over again.”

  Neither of them spoke for a long moment then. It was quiet in the alley where they sat, but Jilly could hear the traffic go by down the block where the alley opened on to the street. There was a repetitive pattern to the sound: bus, bus, a car horn, a number of vehicles in a group, then the buses again.

  “I guess what I don’t understand,” Jilly finally said, “is why all the good things in the world don’t balance it out—you know, recharge your vitality.”

  “They’re completely overshadowed,” he said.

  Jilly shook her head. “I don’t believe that. I know there are awful things in the world, but I also know there’s more that’s good.”

  “Then why am I so weak right now, in this, your season of goodwill?”

  “I think it’s because you don’t let the good in anymore. You don’t trust there to be any good left, so you’ve put up these protective walls that keep it out.”

  “And the bad? Why does it continue to affect me?”

  “Because you concentrate on it,” Jilly said. “And by doing that, you let it get in. It’s like you’re doing the exact opposite to what you should be doing.”

  “If only it could be so simple.”

  “But it is,” she said. “In the end, it always comes down to small, simple things because that’s the way the world really works. We’re the ones who make it so complicated. I mean, think about it. If everybody really and truly treated each other the way they’d want to be treated, all the problems of the world would be solved. Nobody would starve, because nobody’d want to go hungry themselves. Nobody would steal, or kill, or hurt each other, because they wouldn’t want that to happen to themselves.”

  “So what stops them from doing so?” he asked.

  “Trust. Or rather a lack of it. Too many people don’t trust the other person to treat them right, so they just dig in, accumulating stuff, thinking only of themselves or their own small group—you know, family, company, community, whatever. A tribal thing.” She hesitated a moment, then added, “And that’s what’s holding you back, too. You don’t trust the good to outweigh the bad.”

  “I don’t know that I even can.”

  “No one can help you with that,” Jilly told him. “That’s something that can only come from inside you.”

  He gave her a slow nod. “Maybe I will try harder, the next time.”

  “What next time? What’s wrong with right now?”

  He held out his arms. “If you could read the history written on my skin, you would not need to ask that question.”

  Jilly pushed up her sleeves and held out her own arms.

  “Look,” she said. “You read what I went through as a kid. I’m no better or stronger or braver than you are. But I am determined to leave things a little better than they were before I got here. That’s what gets me through. And I have to admit there’s a certain selfishness involved. You see, I want to live in that better world. I know it’s not going to happen unless we all clean up our act and I know I can’t make anybody else do that. But I’ll be damned if I don’t do it myself. You know, like a Kickaha friend of mine says, ‘live large and walk in Beauty.’”

  “You are very…persuasive.”

  Jilly grinned. “It’s just this gift I have.”

  She stood up and offered him a hand.

  “So what do you say, buffalo man? You want to give this life another shot?”

  He allowed her to help him up to his feet.

  “There’s a problem,” he said.

  “No, no, no. Ignore the negatives, if only for now.”

  “You don’t understand. The door that brought us here—it only opens one way.”

  “What door?”

  “My old life was finished and I was on my way to the new. All of this—” He made a motion with his hand to encompass everything around them. “—is only a memory.”

  “Whose memory?” Jilly asked, getting a bad feeling.

  “Mine. The memory of a dying man.”

  She smiled brightly. “So live. I thought we’d already been through this earlier.”

  “I would. You’ve convinced me enough of that. Only there’s no way back.”

  “There’s always a way back…isn’t there?”

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

  “Oh, great. I get to be in a magical adventure, only it turns out to be like a train on a one-way track and we left the happy ending station miles back.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She took his hand and gave it a squeeze. “Me too.”

  - 6 -

  “Nothing’s happening,” Maida said.

  Zia peered at the two still bodies on the sofa. She gave Jilly a gentle poke with her finger.

  “She’s still veryvery far away,” she agreed.

  Cerin sighed and let his fingers fall from the strings of the roseharp. The music echoed on for a few moments, then all was still.

  “I tried to put all the things she loves into the calling-on,” he said. “Painting and friendship and crows and whimsy, but it’s not working. Wherever she’s gone, it’s farther than I can reach.”

  “How did it happen anyway?” the professor asked. “All she did was touch him. Meran did the same and she wasn’t taken away.”

  “Jilly’s too open and trusting,” Meran said. “She didn’t think to guard herself from the man’s spirit. When we fall away into death, most of us will grab hold of anything we can to stay our fall. That’s what happened to her—he grabbed her and held on hard.”

  “He’s dying?”

  Meran glanced at the professor and nodded.

  “I should never have brought him here,” Lucius said.

  “You couldn’t have known.”

  “It’s our fault,” Zia said.

  Maida nodded glumly. “Oh, we’re the most miserably bad girls, we are.”

  “Let’s worry about whose fault it was some other time,” Meran said. “Right now I want to concentrate on where he could have taken her.”

  “I’ve never died,” Lucius said, “so I can’t say where a dying man would draw another’s soul, but I’ve withdrawn from the world…”

  “And?” Meran prompted him.

  “I went into my own mind. I lived in my memories. I didn’t remember. I lived in them.”

  “So if we knew who he was,” Cerin said. “Then perhaps we could—”

  “We don’t need to know who he is,” Meran broke in. “All we need to know is what he was thinking.”

  “Would the proverbial life flashing before one’s eyes be relevant here?” the professor asked. “Because that could touch on anything.”

  “We need something more specific,” Cerin said.

  Meran nodded. “Such as…where the crow girls found him. Wouldn’t he be thinking of his surroundings at some point?”

  “It’s still a one-way
door,” Cerin pointed out.

  “But if we can open it even a crack…” Lucius said.

  Cerin smiled. “Then maybe we can pull them out before it closes on us again.”

  “We can do that,” Maida said.

  Zia nodded. “We’re very good at opening things.”

  “Even better when there’s sweets inside.”

  Zia rapped on the man’s head with a knuckle.

  “Hello, hello in there,” she said. “Can you hear me?”

  “Zia!” Lucius said.

  “Well, how else am I supposed to get his attention?”

  “Hold on,” Meran said. “Perhaps we’re going about this all wrong. Instead of concentrating on the door he is, we should be concentrating on the door Jilly is.”

  “Oh, good idea,” Maida said.

  The crow girls immediately turned their attention to Jilly. They leaned close, one on either side, and began whispering in her ears.

  - 7 -

  “So I guess this is sort of like a recording,” Jilly said, “except instead of being on pause, we’re in a tape loop.”

  Which was why the traffic noise she heard was so repetitive. Being part of his memory, it, too, was in a loop.

  “You have such an interesting way of looking at things,” the buffalo man said.

  “No, humour me in this. We’re in a loop of your memory, right? Well, what’s to stop you from thinking of something else? Or concentrating and getting us past the loop?”

  “To what purpose?”

  “To whatever comes next.”

  “We know what comes next,” he said.

  “No. You assume we do. The last thing you seem to remember is lying here in this alleyway. You must have passed out at that point, which is the loop we’re in. Except I showed up and you’re conscious and we’ve been talking—none of this is memory. We’re already somewhere else than your memory. So what’s to stop you from taking us further?”

  “I have no memory beyond the point where I closed my eyes.”

  But Jilly was on a roll.

  “Of course not,” she said. “So we’ll have to use our imaginations.”

  “And imagine what?”

  “Well, crows would be good for starters. The crow girls would have been flying above, and then they noticed you and…” She paused, cocking her head. “Listen. Can you hear that?”