Very Best of Charles de Lint, The (48 page)

Raul shrugs. “I can do that, but—”

“I’m not saying this for me,” I tell him. “I’m saying it for you.”

I guess he sees something in my face, a piece of how serious this is, because he swallows hard and nods. Then I’m out the door, walking fast, pulse working overtime. There’s a sick feeling in my gut and the skin between my shoulderblades is prickling like someone’s got a rifle site aimed at my back.

Except the kind of boys the Couteaus hire like to work close, like to see the pain. I’m almost at the end of the alley, thinking I’m home free, except suddenly he’s there in front of me, like he stepped out of nowhere, knife in hand.

I have long enough to register his fish cold eyes, the freak’s grin that splits his face, then the knife punches into my stomach. He pulls it up, tearing through my chest, and I go down. It happens so fast that the pain follows afterwards, like thunder trailing a lightning bolt.

And everything goes black.

* * *

Only maybe I didn’t go out the back door, where I knew he could be waiting. Maybe I grabbed my jacket and bolted through the restaurant, out the front, and lost myself in the lunchtime crowd. But I know he’s out there, looking for me, and I don’t have anywhere to go. I never had much of a stake and what I did have is long gone. Why do you think I’m washing dishes for a living?

So I go to ground with the skells, trade my clean jacket for some wino’s smelly coat, a couple of bucks buys me a tuque, I don’t want to know where it’s been. I rub dirt on my face and hands and I hide there in plain sight, same block as the restaurant, sprawled on the pavement, begging for spare change, waiting for the night to come so I can go looking for this wheel of Sammy’s.

The afternoon takes a long slow stroll through what’s left of the day, but I’m not impatient. Why should I be? I’m just some harmless drunk, got an early start on the day’s inebriation. Time doesn’t mean anything to me anymore, except for how much of it stretches between bottles. Play this kind of thing right and you start to believe it yourself.

I’m into my role, so much so that when I see the guy, I stay calm. He’s got to be the shooter the Couteaus sent, tall, sharp dresser, whistling a Doc Cheatham tune and walking loose, but the dead eyes give him away. He’s looking everywhere but at me. That’s the thing about the homeless. They’re either invisible, or a nuisance you have to ignore. I ask him for some spare change, but I don’t even register for him, his gaze slides right on by.

I watch him make a slow pass by the restaurant, hands in his pockets. He stops, turns back to read the menu, goes in. I start to worry then. Not for me, but for Raul. I’m long past letting anyone else get hurt because of me. But the shooter’s back out a moment later. He takes a casual look down my side of the street, then ambles off the other way and I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. So much for staying in character.

It takes me a little longer to settle back into my role, but it’s an effort well-spent, for here he comes walking by again. Lee Street’s not exactly the French Quarter—even in the middle of the day Bourbon Street’s a lively place—but there’s enough going on that he doesn’t seem out of place, wandering here and there, window shopping, stopping to buy a cappuccino from a cart at the end of the block, a soft pretzel from another. He finishes them slowly on a bench near the restaurant, one of those iron and wood improvements that the merchants’ association put in a few years ago.

He doesn’t give up his watch until it gets dark, the stores start to close down, the restaurants are in the middle of their dinner trade. I stay where I am when he leaves. It’s a long time until midnight and I might as well wait here as wander the streets. I give it until eleven-thirty before I shuffle off, heading across town to Flood Street. By the time I reach the alley behind the Sovereign Building, it’s a little past midnight.

I’m not sure I even expected it to be there again. Maybe, if I’m to believe Sammy, in some other world I come here and find nothing. But as I step around the corner into the alley, everything shifts and sways. I walk into a thick mist that opens up a little after a few paces, but never quite clears. The Ferris wheel’s here, but it’s farther away than I expected.

I’m standing in a field of corn stubble, the sky immense above me, the sound of crickets filling the air, a full moon hanging up at the top of the sky. A long way across the cornfield I can see a darkened carnival, the midway closed, all the rides shut down. The Ferris wheel rears above it, a black shadow that blocks the stars with its shape. I pause for a long time, taking it all in, not sure any of this is real, unable to deny that it’s here in front of me all the same. Finally I start walking once more, across the field, past the darkened booths, dry dirt scuffling underfoot. It’s quiet here, hushed like a graveyard, the way it feels in your mind when you’re stepping in between the gravestones.

It takes me a long time to reach the wheel. The sign’s still there above the entrance, “Crowded After Hours,” but the seats are all empty. The spokes of the wheel and the immense frame holding it seem to be made of enormous bones, the remains of behemoths and monsters. The crosspieces are carved with roses, the paint flaked and peeling where it isn’t faded. Vines grow up and around the entire structure and its massive wooden base appears to be half-covered with a clutter of fallen leaves.

No, I realize. Not leaves, but masks. Hundreds of them, some half-buried in the dirt, or covered by the vines that grow everywhere like kudzu, their painted features flaked and faded like the roses. But others seem to be almost brand new, so new the paint looks like it’d be tacky to the touch. Old or new, they run the gamut of human expression. Smiling, laughing, weeping, angry…

I start to move a little closer to have a better look at them, when a man suddenly leans out of the ticket booth. My pulse jumps into overtime.

“Ticket, please,” he says.

I blink, looking at him, an old black man in a top hat, teeth gleaming in the moonlight.

“I don’t have a ticket,” I tell him.

“You need a ticket,” he says.

“Where can I buy one?”

He laughs. “Not that kind of ticket, Spyboy.”

Before I can ask him what he means, how he knows my name, the mists come flowing back, thick and impenetrable for a long moment. When they clear once more, I’m back in the alleyway. Or maybe I never left. The whole experience sits inside my head like a dream.

I look up to the roof of the Sovereign Building, remembering how it was last night. The door Sammy led me through is right here in front of me. I don’t even hesitate, but open it up and start climbing the stairs. When I get out onto the roof, I walk across the gravel once more to where Sammy and I stood last night. The mists are back and I can see the wheel again through them, turning slowly, all the seats filled. I watch for a long time until the harlequin and the man with the blue moon for a head come into sight. The blue moon looks at me and lifts a hand.

There’s something in that hand, a small slip of paper or cardboard. I step closer to the edge of the roof and see it’s a ticket. I’m so caught up in the presence of the wheel and what the blue moon’s holding, that the footsteps on the gravel behind me don’t really register until someone calls my name.

“Spyboy.”

I don’t need to hear the French accent to know who it is. I turn to find the shooter standing there. He either doesn’t see the wheel, or he’s only got eyes for me.

“I have a message for you,” he says. “From Madame Couteau.”

I see the pistol in his hand, hanging by his side. As he starts to lift it, I turn and jump, launching myself towards the seat where the blue moon Sammy is holding my ticket.

And all those possibilities open up into new worlds.

Maybe I just hit the pavement below.

Maybe I take a bullet, still hit the pavement, but I’m dead before the impact.

Maybe I reached the wheel, hands slipping on the bone joints, my scrabbling feet finding purchase, allowing me to climb up into my seat, my face falling off like a mask to reveal another face underneath, made up like a harlequin.

A carnival Spyboy.

Or maybe I never went to the Beanery that night, didn’t meet Sammy, turned in early and went to work the next day.

They’re all possible. Maybe somewhere, they’re all true.

I sit there in the gently swaying seat and look out over a darkened carnival, out past the fields of corn stubble, into the mists where anything can happen, everything is true. I remember what Sammy told me last night, though it seems like an eternity ago.

You’re thinking of the outside,
he told me.
Concentrate on all the journeys you can take inside.

I have, I had, a thousand thousand lives out there. Past, present, future, they’re all happening at the same time in my head. This world, all the other worlds that are born every time I made a choice, all these lives that I can journey through inside my head.

I guess what I can’t figure out is, which one is really mine. Either I’m living one of those lives and dreaming this, or I’m here and those lives belong to someone else, someone I once was, someone I could have been.

I sit there beside the blue moon Sammy, the ticket he gave me held in my hand, and I think about it as the wheel takes our seat up, all the way to where the stars are whispering and the Ferris wheel kisses the sky.

Sisters

One: Appoline

1

It’s not like on that TV show, you know where the cute blond cheerleader type stakes all these vampires and they blow away into dust? For one thing, they don’t disappear into dust, which would be way more convenient. Outside of life in televisionland, when you stake one, you’ve got this great big dead corpse to deal with, which is not fun. Beheading works, too, but that’s just way too gross for me and you’ve still got to find some place to stash both a head and a body.

The trick is to not turn your victim in the first place—you know, drain all their blood so that they rise again. When that happens, you have to clean up after yourself, because a vamp is forever, and do you really want these losers you’ve been feeding on hanging around until the end of time? I don’t think so.

The show gets a lot of other things wrong, too, but then most of the movies and books do. Vamps don’t have a problem with mirrors (unless they’re ugly and don’t want to look at themselves, I suppose), crosses (unless they’ve got issues with Christianity), or garlic (except who likes to smell it on anybody’s breath?). They don’t have demons riding around inside them (unless they’ve got some kind of satanic inner child), they can’t turn into bats or rats or wolves or mist (I mean, just look at the physics involved, right?) and sunlight doesn’t bother them. No spontaneous combustion—they just run the same risk of skin cancer as anybody else.

I figure if the people writing the books and making the movies actually do have any firsthand experience with vampires, they’re sugarcoating the information so that people don’t freak out. If you’re going to accept that they exist in the first place, it’s much more comforting to believe that you’re safe in the daylight, or that a cross or a fistful of garlic will keep them at bay.

About the only thing they do get right is that it takes a vamp to make a vamp. You do have to die from the bite and then rise again three days later. It’s as easy as that. It’s also the best time to kill a vamp—they’re kind of like ragdolls, all loose and muddy-brained, for the first few hours.

Oh, and you do have to invite us into your house. If it’s a public place, we can go in the same as anyone else.

What’s that? No, that wasn’t a slip of the tongue. I’m one, too. So while I like the TV show as much as the next person, and I know it’s fiction, blond cheerleader types still make me twitch a little.

2

Appoline Smith was raking yellow maple leaves into a pile on the front lawn when the old four-door sedan came to a stop at the curb. She looked up to find the driver staring at her. She didn’t recognize him. He was just some old guy in his thirties who’d been watching way too many old
Miami Vice
reruns. His look—the dark hair slicked back, silk shirt opened to show off a big gold chain, fancy shades—was so been there it was prehistoric. The pair of dusty red-and-white velour dice hanging from the mirror did nothing to enhance his image.

“Why don’t you just take a picture?” she asked him.

“Nobody likes a lippy kid,” he said.

“Yeah, nobody likes a pervert either.”

“I’m not some perv’.”

“Oh really? What do you call a guy cruising a nice neighbourhood like this with his tongue hanging out whenever he sees some teenage girl?”

“I’m looking for A. Smith.”

“Well, you found one.”

“I mean, the initial ‘A,’ then ‘Smith.’”

“You found that, too. So why don’t you check it off on your life list and keep on driving.”

The birder reference went right over his head. All things considered, she supposed most things would go over his head.

“I got something for you,” he said.

He reached over to the passenger’s side of the car’s bench seat, then turned back to her and offered her an envelope. She supposed it had been white once. Looking at the dirt and a couple of greasy fingerprints smeared on it, she made no move to take it. The guy looked at her for a long moment, then shrugged and tossed it onto the lawn.

“Don’t call the cops,” he said and drove away.

As if they didn’t have better things to do than chase after some guy in a car making pathetic attempts to flirt with girls he happened to spy as he drove around. He was one of just too many guys she’d met, thinking he was Lothario when he was just a loser.

She waited until he’d driven down the block and turned the corner before she stepped closer to look at the envelope he’d left on the lawn.

Okay, she thought, when she saw that it actually had “A. Smith” and the name of her street written on it. So maybe it wasn’t random. Maybe he was only stalking her.

She picked up the envelope, holding it distastefully between two fingers.