Very Best of Charles de Lint, The (24 page)

She never thought of Jeff, except with distance.

Life was subdued. A hiatus between storms. Just thinking of that time, usually brought her a sense of peace, if not completion. So why…remembering now…this time…?

There was a ringing in her ears—sharp and loud, like thunderclaps erupting directly above her. She felt as though she was in an earthquake, her body being violently shaken. Everything felt topsy-turvy. There was no up and no down, just a sense of vertigo and endless spinning, a roar and whorl of shouting and shaking until—

She snapped her eyes open to find Geordie’s worried features peering out at her from the circle that the fur of his parka hood made around his face. He was in the Buick with her, on the front seat beside her. It was his hands on her shoulders, shaking her; his voice that sounded like thunder in the confines of the Buick.

The Buick.

And then she remembered: walking in the Tombs, the storm, climbing into the car, falling asleep….

“Jesus, Jilly,” Geordie was saying. He sat back from her, giving her a bit of space, but the worry hadn’t left his features yet. “You really are nuts, aren’t you? I mean, falling asleep out here. Didn’t you ever hear of hypothermia?”

She could have died, Jilly realized. She could have just slept on here until she froze to death and nobody’d know until the spring thaw, or until some poor homeless bugger crawled in to get out of the wind and found himself sharing space with Jilly, the Amazing Dead Woman.

She shivered, as much from dread as the storm’s chill.

“How…how did you find me?” she asked.

Geordie shrugged. “God only knows. I got worried, the longer you were gone, until finally I couldn’t stand it and had to come looking for you. It was like there was a nagging in the back of my head—sort of a Lassie kind of a thought, you know?”

Jilly had to smile at the analogy.

“Maybe I’m getting psychic—what do you think?” he asked.

“Finding me the way you did, maybe you are,” Jilly said.

She sat up a little straighter, then realized that sometime during her sleep, she had unbuttoned her parka enough to stick a hand in under the coat. She pulled it out and both she and Geordie stared at what she held in her mittened hand.

It was a small violet flower, complete with roots.

“Jilly, where did you…?” Geordie began, but then he shook his head. “Never mind. I don’t want to know.”

But Jilly knew. Tonight was the anniversary, after all. Babe or Frank, or maybe both of them, had come by as well.

If you don’t forget us, we’ll never be gone.

She hadn’t.

And it looked like they hadn’t, either, because who else had left her this flower, and maybe sent Geordie out into the storm to find her? How else could he have lucked upon her the way he had with all those blocks upon blocks of the Tombs that he would have to search?

“Are you going to be okay?” Geordie asked.

Jilly stuck the plant back under her parka and nodded.

“Help me home, would you? I feel a little wobbly.”

“You’ve got it.”

“And Geordie?”

He looked at her, eyebrows raised.

“Thanks for coming out to look for me.”

* * *

It was a long trek back to Jilly’s loft, but this time the wind was helpful, rather than hindering. It rose up at their backs and hurried them along so that it seemed to only take them half the time it should have to return. While Jilly changed, Geordie made great steaming mugs of hot chocolate for both of them. They sat together on the old sofa by the window, Geordie in his usual rumpled sweater and old jeans, Jilly bundled up in two pairs of sweatpants, fingerless gloves and what seemed like a half-dozen shirts and socks.

Jilly told him her story of finding out about the gemmin, and how they went away. When she was done, Geordie just said, “Wow. We should tell Christy about them—he’d put them in one of his books.”

“Yes, we should,” Jilly said. “Maybe if more people knew about them, they wouldn’t be so ready to go away.”

“What about Mr. Hodgers?” Geordie asked. “Do you really think they took him away with them?”

Jilly looked at the newly-potted flower on her windowsill. It stood jauntily in the dirt and looked an awful lot like a drawing in one of her sketchbooks that she hadn’t drawn herself.

“I like to think so,” she said. “I like to think that St. Vincent’s was on the way to wherever they were going.” She gave Geordie a smile, more sweet than bitter. “You couldn’t see it to look at him,” she added, “but Frank had violet eyes, too; he had all kinds of memories stored away in that old head of his—just like Babe did.”

Her own eyes took on a distant look, as though she was looking into the faraway herself, through the gates of dream and beyond the fields we know.

“I like to think they’re getting along just fine,” she said.

The Conjure Man

I do not think it had any friends, or mourners, except myself

and a pair of owls.

—J. R. R. Tolkien, from the introductory note to
Tree and Leaf

You only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when

you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.

—G. K. Chesterton, from
The Man Who Was Thursday

The conjure man rode a red, old-fashioned bicycle with fat tires and only one, fixed gear. A wicker basket in front contained a small mongrel dog that seemed mostly terrier. Behind the seat, tied to the carrier, was a battered brown satchel that hid from prying eyes the sum total of all his worldly possessions.

What he had was not much, but he needed little. He was, after all, the conjure man, and what he didn’t have, he could conjure for himself.

He was more stout than slim, with a long grizzled beard and a halo of frizzy grey hair that protruded from under his tall black hat like ivy tangled under an eave. Nesting in the hatband were a posy of dried wildflowers and three feathers: one white, from a swan; one black, from a crow; one brown, from an owl. His jacket was an exhilarating shade of blue, the colour of the sky on a perfect summer’s morning. Under it he wore a shirt that was as green as a fresh-cut lawn. His trousers were brown corduroy, patched with leather and plaid squares; his boots were a deep golden yellow, the colour of buttercups past their prime.

His age was a puzzle, somewhere between fifty and seventy. Most people assumed he was one of the homeless—more colourful than most, and certainly more cheerful, but a derelict all the same—so the scent of apples that seemed to follow him was always a surprise, as was the good humour that walked hand in hand with a keen intelligence in his bright blue eyes. When he raised his head, that brim lifting, and he met one’s gaze, the impact of those eyes was a sudden shock, a diamond in the rough.

His name was John Windle, which could mean, if you were one to ascribe meaning to names, “favoured of God” for his given name, while his surname was variously defined as “basket,” “the red-winged thrush,” or “to lose vigour and strength, to dwindle.” They could all be true, for he led a charmed life; his mind was a treasure trove storing equal amounts of experience, rumour and history; he had a high clear singing voice; and though he wasn’t tall—he stood five-ten in his boots—he had once been a much larger man.

“I was a giant once,” he liked to explain, “when the world was young. But conjuring takes its toll. Now John’s just an old man, pretty well all used up. Just like the world,” he’d add with a sigh and a nod, bright eyes holding a tired sorrow. “Just like the world.”

There were some things even the conjure man couldn’t fix.

* * *

Living in the city, one grew used to its more outlandish characters, eventually noting them in passing with an almost familial affection: The pigeon lady in her faded Laura Ashley dresses with her shopping cart filled with sacks of birdseed and bread crumbs. Paperjack, the old black man with his Chinese fortune-teller and deft origami sculptures. The German cowboy who dressed like an extra from a spaghetti western and made long declamatory speeches in his native language to which no one listened.

And, of course, the conjure man.

Wendy St. James had seen him dozens of times—she lived and worked downtown, which was the conjure man’s principal haunt—but she’d never actually spoken to him until one day in the fall when the trees were just beginning to change into their cheerful autumnal party dresses.

She was sitting on a bench on the Ferryside bank of the Kickaha River, a small, almost waif-like woman in jeans and a white T-shirt, with an unzipped brown leather bomber’s jacket and hightops. In lieu of a purse, she had a small, worn knapsack sitting on the bench beside her and she was bent over a hardcover journal which she spent more time staring at than actually writing in. Her hair was thick and blond, hanging down past her collar in a grown-out pageboy with a half-inch of dark roots showing. She was chewing on the end of her pen, worrying the plastic for inspiration.

It was a poem that had stopped her in mid-stroll and plunked her down on the bench. It had glimmered and shone in her head until she got out her journal and pen. Then it fled, as impossible to catch as a fading dream. The more she tried to recapture the impulse that had set her wanting to put pen to paper, the less it seemed to have ever existed in the first place. The annoying presence of three teenage boys clowning around on the lawn a half-dozen yards from where she sat didn’t help at all.

She was giving them a dirty stare when she saw one of the boys pick up a stick and throw it into the wheel of the conjure man’s bike as he came riding up on the park path that followed the river. The small dog in the bike’s wicker basket jumped free, but the conjure man himself fell in a tangle of limbs and spinning wheels. The boys took off, laughing, the dog chasing them for a few feet, yapping shrilly, before it hurried back to where its master had fallen.

Wendy had already put down her journal and pen and reached the fallen man by the time the dog got back to its master’s side.

“Are you okay?” Wendy asked the conjure man as she helped him untangle himself from the bike.

She’d taken a fall herself in the summer. The front wheel of her ten-speed struck a pebble, the bike wobbled dangerously and she’d grabbed at the brakes, but her fingers closed over the front ones first, and too hard. The back of the bike went up, flipping her right over the handlebars and she’d had the worst headache for at least a week afterwards.

The conjure man didn’t answer her immediately. His gaze followed the escaping boys.

“As you sow,” he muttered.

Following his gaze, Wendy saw the boy who’d thrown the stick trip and go sprawling in the grass. An odd chill danced up her spine. The boy’s tumble came so quickly on the heels of the conjure man’s words, for a moment it felt to her as though he’d actually caused the boy’s fall.

As you sow, so shall you reap.

She looked back at the conjure man, but he was sitting up now, fingering a tear in his corduroys which already had a quiltwork of patches on them. He gave her a quick smile that traveled all the way up to his eyes and she found herself thinking of Santa Claus. The little dog pressed its nose up against the conjure man’s hand, pushing it away from the tear. But the tear was gone.

It had just been a fold in the cloth, Wendy realized. That was all.

She helped the conjure man limp to her bench, then went back and got his bike. She righted it and wheeled it over to lean against the back of the bench before sitting down herself. The little dog leaped up onto the conjure man’s lap.

“What a cute dog,” Wendy said, giving it a pat. “What’s her name?”

“Ginger,” the conjure man replied as though it was so obvious that he couldn’t understand her having to ask.

Wendy looked at the dog. Ginger’s fur was as grey and grizzled as her master’s beard without a hint of the spice’s strong brown hue.

“But she’s not at all brown,” Wendy found herself saying.

The conjure man shook his head. “It’s what she’s made of—she’s a gingerbread dog. Here.” He plucked a hair from Ginger’s back which made the dog start and give him a sour look. He offered the hair to Wendy. “Taste it.”

Wendy grimaced. “I don’t think so.”

“Suit yourself,” the conjure man said. He shrugged and popped the hair into his own mouth, chewing it with relish.

Oh boy, Wendy thought. She had a live one on her hands.

“Where do you think ginger comes from?” the conjure man asked her.

“What, do you mean your dog?”

“No, the spice.”

Wendy shrugged. “I don’t know. Some kind of plant, I suppose.”

“And that’s where you’re wrong. They shave gingerbread dogs like our Ginger here and grind up the hair until all that’s left is a powder that’s ever so fine. Then they leave it out in the hot sun for a day and half—which is where it gets its brownish colour.”

Wendy only just stopped herself from rolling her eyes. It was time to extract herself from this encounter, she realized. Well past the time. She’d done her bit to make sure he was all right and since the conjure man didn’t seem any worse for the wear from his fall—

“Hey!” she said as he picked up her journal and started to leaf through it. “That’s personal.”

He fended off her reaching hand with his own and continued to look through it.

“Poetry,” he said. “And lovely verses they are, too.”

“Please…”

“Ever had any published?”

Wendy let her hand drop and leaned back against the bench with a sigh.

“Two collections,” she said, adding, “and a few sales to some of the literary magazines.”

Although, she corrected herself, “sales” was perhaps a misnomer since most of the magazines only paid in copies. And while she did have two collections in print, they were published by the East Street Press, a small local publisher, which meant the bookstores of Newford were probably the only places in the world where either of her books could be found.

“Romantic, but with a very optimistic flavour,” the conjure man remarked as he continued to look through her journal where all her false starts and incomplete drafts were laid out for him to see. “None of that
Sturm und drang
of the earlier romantic era and more like Yeats’s twilight or, what did Chesterton call it?
Mooreeffoc
—that queerness that comes when familiar things are seen from a new angle.”

Wendy couldn’t believe she was having this conversation. What was he? A renegade English professor living on the street like some hedgerow philosopher of old? It seemed absurd to be sitting here, listening to his discourse.

The conjure man turned to give her a charming smile. “Because that’s our hope for the future, isn’t it? That the imagination reaches beyond the present to glimpse not so much a sense of meaning in what lies all around us, but to let us simply see it in the first place?”

“I…I don’t know what to say,” Wendy replied.

Ginger had fallen asleep on his lap. He closed her journal and regarded her for a long moment, eyes impossibly blue and bright under the brim of his odd hat.

“John has something he wants to show you,” he said.

Wendy blinked. “John?” she asked, looking around.

The conjure man tapped his chest. “John Windle is what those who know my name call me.”

“Oh.”

She found it odd how his speech shifted from that of a learned man to a much simpler idiom, even referring to himself in the third person. But then, if she stopped to consider it, everything about him was odd.

“What kind of something?” Wendy asked cautiously.

“It’s not far.”

Wendy looked at her watch. Her shift started at four, which was still a couple of hours away, so there was plenty of time. But she was fairly certain that interesting though her companion was, he wasn’t at all the sort of person with whom she wanted to involve herself any more than she already had. The dichotomy between the nonsense and substance that peppered his conversation made her uncomfortable.

It wasn’t so much that she thought him dangerous. She just felt as though she was walking on boggy ground that might at any minute dissolve into quicksand with a wrong turn. Despite hardly knowing him at all, she was already sure that listening to him would be full of the potential for wrong turns.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I don’t have the time.”

“It’s something that I think only you can, if not understand, then at least appreciate.”

“I’m sure it’s fascinating, whatever it is, but—”

“Come along, then,” he said.

He handed her back her journal and stood up, dislodging Ginger who leapt to the ground with a sharp yap of protest. Scooping the dog up, he returned her to the wicker basket that hung from his handlebars, then wheeled the bike in front of the bench where he stood waiting for Wendy.