Very Best of Charles de Lint, The (59 page)

“I know you’re here,” he said, once he’d caught his breath.

“Do you now?”

He turned on his perch to see the spirit bear regarding him from the shadows under the pines.

“Yeah,” he said. “At least I do now.”

He caught a flicker of humour in her eyes, then she padded out over the limestone outcrop that lay between the forest and the dead pine where Old Man Crow waited for her.

“What did you do to me?” he asked. “That last time I was dreaming.”

“I didn’t do anything. I only came to show you.”

“The darkness, yes. It swallowed me whole.”

“I know. I saw.”

“What is it? You said it’s making everything go away and that it’s inside me.”

The spirit bear nodded.

“I don’t understand. Why can’t you tell me plain?”

She studied him for a long moment, then nodded again.

“You’ve become a man dreaming he’s a crow,” she finally said.

“What?”

“You used to be a crow, dreaming he was a man, and your old blood ran strong. But now?” She shrugged. “It’s as though you never lived that long life of yours. You’ve become a five-fingered being, old and at the end of his years.”

“How did this happen?”

Old Man Crow was asking himself as much as the spirit bear, because he could see the weight of truth in her words. He
was
more man than crow, and had been for years. Living like a man, only flying in his dreams.

“Do I need to tell you?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“It can happen to anyone,” she said. “Living too long in that otherworld, walking on two legs, talking, talking, talking.”

“Crows always talk.”

She nodded. “To each other. Not to five-fingered beings. Not and expect to be understood.”

“But some of them have the old blood running in them, thin and dreaming. All it needs is to be wakened.”

“And you can teach them that without living your whole life among them.”

“I see.”

“I’m not your conscience or your mother,” the spirit bear told him. “Your life is yours to spend as you wish.”

He nodded.

“And mostly I don’t concern myself with the whys and wherefores of the corbae clans.”

“I understand.”

But then she smiled. “Except, just as you have that inclination to wake sleeping cousins, I find myself drawn to reminding cousins of who they are—or who they once were.”

“That darkness,” Old Man Crow said. “That was my mortality, wasn’t it?”

She nodded.

“And when you said everything was going away, you meant my perception of it was going away. That’s why I woke in a hospital bed. I was dying.”

She nodded again.

“Am I still dying?”

“We’re all dying, Old Man Crow. Each and every day. It’s the same for cousins as it is for five-fingered beings. But we’re living, too. Sometimes we forget that.”

They didn’t talk for a while. It was quiet here, too, Old Man Crow thought, but it was a natural quiet. A breeze sighing through the pine boughs. The lap of water on the shore.

“It doesn’t mean you need to stop helping people,” the spirit bear said.

Old Man Crow nodded. “But I need to remember who I am, too.”

“You do.”

“So what now?” he asked.

She shrugged. “You could try to be a crow again and only dream of being a man.”

* * *

Ruby was in a cheerful mood as she took the subway back to Lee Street. Old Joey had given her quite a scare there earlier, finding him like that, all sprawled out on the floor of his living room. But she felt better now. Before she’d left the hospital, his doctor had assured her that he wasn’t on death’s bed just yet.

“Your grandfather has the constitution of a horse,” he’d told her.

“Then why did he collapse like that?”

“I don’t know yet. I need to wait until we get the test results back. But as things stand, I’m fairly certain he can be discharged tomorrow morning.”

So there was still a little something to worry about, but right now, she knew he was okay and in good hands, and she finally had a date with Kyle. She turned and checked her reflection in the window, but the glass was so dirty and smudged it was hard to tell what shape her face was in. She took out her compact and used it to reapply her lipstick and dust a little colour onto her cheeks, then it was her stop and she had to get off and hurry down the street.

Freewheeling would have closed about ten minutes ago. What if Kyle wasn’t waiting? What if he thought she’d blown him off?

But then she saw Kyle waiting for her outside the shop, his face lighting up with pleasure when he saw her, and she couldn’t help grinning herself. A moment later she was standing in front of him and suddenly neither of them had anything to say.

But she thought of Joey—the scare he’d given her, the advice he was always passing on to her along with his stories. How nobody ever got anything they wanted if they didn’t take a chance.

She felt good, so she was just going to tell Kyle she did. She wasn’t going to go all clingy and weird on him, but she wasn’t going to play games, either.

“I’m so glad we’re getting together like this outside of work,” she said.

“Me, too. Like I said, I’ve…you know…been wanting to ask you out….”

She smiled. “Does this suddenly feel weird to you, too? I mean, I’ve been serving you lunch for weeks at the diner, but now all of a sudden, here we are, and it’s a whole new ball game.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “Are you a sports fan?”

“Um, not so much.”

“Me, either.”

He took her arm. “Let’s go find a restaurant and have another waitress bring us dinner. What are you in the mood for?”

“I don’t know—what do you like?”

“Everything, pretty much. Danny—one of the guys I work with—says there’s a new Vietnamese soup place just south of McKennitt. We could give it a try. He’s says the food’s good and cheap.”

“That sounds wonderful. I’m on a bit of a budget. I’m saving up for a new guitar.”

“You play guitar?”

“Mmm. When I’m playing it’s like the whole world’s gone perfect—even when I’m flubbing my chords or forget the words or something.”

“I used to play mandolin in a band,” he said. “Before I moved to the city….”

And just like that, they were deep in conversation and it stayed like that all the way to the restaurant and through dinner. The food was great, and the company was better, but as they were waiting for their bill, something reminded Ruby of Joey, lying there in his hospital bed, alone. Maybe it was the old black man she saw walking by the window of the restaurant. Maybe it was because Kyle had mentioned liking her tattoo, telling her it reminded him of this old song his band used to play, which turned out to be the same song that Joey had taught her when she first started taking lessons from him. Maybe it was because, even with the doctor’s reassurances, she couldn’t quite shake the worry that had settled in her chest this afternoon when she’d opened the door to Joey’s apartment and found him lying there, so still.

“Is everything okay?” Kyle asked.

“What? Oh, sorry. I was just thinking of Joey—one of the regulars at the diner. But he’s also a friend of mine and he had a…I don’t know quite what today. But I ended up having to take him to the hospital and they’re keeping him overnight for observation.”

“Would I know him?”

“Probably.”

Kyle nodded as she started to describe Joey.

“He’s got those eyes that seem to see everything.”

“That’s Joey, all right.”

She went on to tell him about how she’d found him that afternoon, how he was teaching her all these old songs, how she just liked him because he made the day seem better whenever he came into the diner.

“What time are visiting hours over?” Kyle asked.

“Nine, I think.”

He looked at his watch. “There’s still time. We could stop in and see him, if you like.”

“Really?”

He nodded. “It’s good to take care of the people that mean something to us.”

“I just checked in on him,” the nurse said when they arrived at the nurse’s station, “and he was still sleeping. But you could sit with him for a while if you like. Visiting hours are over at nine.”

Ruby nodded. “I know. Thank you.”

She led Kyle off down the hall to Joey’s room before the nurse could ask who he was. But when they got to the room, Joey’s bed was empty. There were men asleep on the other three beds, but none of them were him. He hadn’t changed beds. The bathroom door was open, so they could see there was no one in there.

“This is weird,” Ruby said.

She went back to the nurse’s station with Kyle to check that she had the right room.

“He’s still in 318, dear.”

Ruby started to feel panicky again—the way she had while she was waiting for the ambulance this afternoon.

“Not anymore, he’s not,” she said.

The nurse gave her a puzzled look. “But I was just in his room, and no one’s come down the hall since.”

She led the way back to 318, but Joey was still gone. When she hurried off to get help, Ruby walked over to the bed. She had the oddest feeling that while Joey wasn’t dead, she wasn’t going to see him again.

“What’s that?” Kyle asked.

He pointed to the pillow. A long black feather lay there.

A crow’s feather, Ruby thought. She touched the magpie on her arm and could almost hear Joey’s voice in her head.

Magpie and crow. We’re both corbae—I’ve told you that before.

And then there was this curious sensation in her chest, as though something was stretching inside her. And she heard…she heard…

“That’s weird,” Kyle said from beside her, his voice soft. “Did you hear that?”

Ruby turned to him. “What did it sound like?”

“Like wings.”

Ruby nodded. That’s what she’d heard, too. It had been
just
like the sound of flapping that you could sometimes hear when there was a lull in the city’s general hubbub and a large bird flew overhead.

A pigeon or a gull. A crow.

Or a magpie.

She picked up the black feather and took Kyle’s hand.

“What about your friend?” he asked as she pulled him towards the door.

“I think he’s already gone.”

“But—”

“Shh,” she said. “Did you hear it again?”

Kyle nodded and looked up, as though he expected to see a bird, here in the hospital. But Ruby had felt the stirring begin in her chest once more and knew where the sound was really coming from.

“I guess all those stories he was always telling me were true,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

She let go of his hand and slipped hers into the crook of his arm.

“I’ll tell you on the way,” she said.

“On the way to where?”

She shrugged and smiled.

“To wherever it is we find ourselves going,” she said.

The Fields Beyond the Fields

I just see my life better in ink.

—Jewel Kilcher, from an interview on MuchMusic, 1997

Saskia is sleeping, but I can’t. I sit up at my rolltop desk, writing. It’s late, closer to dawn than midnight, but I’m not tired. Writing can be good for keeping sleep at bay. It also helps me make sense of things where simply thinking about them can’t. It’s too easy to get distracted by a wayward digression when the ink’s not holding the thoughts to paper. By focusing on the page, I can step outside myself and look at the puzzle with a clearer eye.

Earlier this evening Saskia and I were talking about magic and wonder, about how it can come and go in your life, or more particularly, how it comes and goes in my life. That’s the side of me that people don’t get to see when all they can access is the published page. I’m as often a skeptic as a believer. I’m not the one who experiences those oddities that appear in the stories; I’m the one who chronicles the mystery of them, trying to make sense out what they can impart about us, our world, our preconceptions of how things should be.

The trouble is, mostly life seems to be exactly what it is. I can’t find the hidden card waiting to be played because it seems too apparent that the whole hand is already laid out on the table. What you see is what you get, thanks, and do come again.

I want there to be more.

Even my friends assume I’m the knowledgeable expert who writes the books. None of them knows how much of a hypocrite I really am. I listen well and I know exactly what to say to keep the narrative flowing. I can accept everything that’s happened to them—the oddest and most absurd stories they tell me don’t make me blink an eye—but all the while there’s a small voice chanting in the back of my head.

As if, as if, as if…

I wasn’t always like this, but I’m good at hiding how I’ve changed, from those around me, as well as from myself.

But Saskia knows me too well.

“You used to live with a simple acceptance of the hidden world,” she said when the conversation finally turned into a circle and there was nothing new to add. “You used to live with magic and mystery, but now you only write about it.”

I didn’t know how to reply.

I wanted to tell her that it’s easy to believe in magic when you’re young. Anything you couldn’t explain was magic then. It didn’t matter if it was science or a fairy tale. Electricity and elves were both infinitely mysterious and equally possible—elves probably more so. It didn’t seem particularly odd to believe that actors lived inside your TV set. That there was a repertory company inside the radio, producing its chorus of voices and music. That a fat, bearded man lived at the North Pole and kept tabs on your behaviour.

I wanted to tell her that I used to believe she was born in a forest that only exists inside the nexus of a connection of computers, entangled with one another where they meet on the World Wide Web. A wordwood that appears in pixels on the screen, but has another, deeper existence somewhere out there in the mystery that exists concurrent to the Internet, the way religion exists in the gathering of like minds.

But not believing in any of it now, I wasn’t sure that I ever had.

The problem is that even when you have firsthand experience with a piece of magic, it immediately begins to slip away. Whether it’s a part of the enchantment, or some inexplicable defense mechanism that’s been wired into us either by society or genetics, it doesn’t make any difference. The magic still slips away, sliding like a melted icicle along the slick surface of our memories.