Dreams Underfoot: A Newford Collection (2 page)

In these pages, de Lint has recorded dreams: Jilly Coppercorn’s and Geordie’s, Sophie’s and Christy’s, Tallulah’s and the dreams of Newford itself. There are dreams underfoot here, some fragile as spiders’ webs, others solid as asphalt and brick-cobbled streets. As you walk into the heart of the city of Newford, remember: tread warily. Tread softly.

—Terri Windling (
Co-editor of “The Year’s Best Fantasy” annual collection
) Weaver’s Cottage, Devon, 1992

Uncle Dobbin’s Parrot Fair

1

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 them-selves free and go rolling with the wind again. Like flotsam in a river, like tumbleweeds, only brightly colored 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 colors 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 an 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-colored stains on it. The incense covered the room’s musty smell. She’d lived in a form of self-imposed 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 re-corder. His long blonde hair was tied back with an elastic. His features were thin—an ascetic-looking face, thin and 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 colored 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 in a house out east 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 ofpen 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 thread-bare. Sometimes he bundled his tangled hair up under a bright yellow cap. Other times he wove it into many braids festooned with colored 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 hap-pened 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 clean, 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, ordi-nary 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 walk-way 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-shoul-dered 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-colored 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, be-cause 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 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.

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 half-dozen 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 chemi-cals had fucked up his genes. Twisted something in his head so that he imagined he had this two-foot high, walking, grunting booger following him around.