Read Online Dreams Underfoot: A Newford Collection by Charles De Lint, John Jude Palencar - Free Book Online

anymore.
    “No,” Meran said. “I suppose not. But—you’re taking the drum back, so why are you so nervous?”
    “The man in Christy’s story returned the apple he stole,” Jilly said, “and you know what happened to him ....”
    “That’s true,” Meran said, frowning.
    “I thought maybe Cerin could ...” Jilly’s voice trailed off.
    A small smile touched Meran’s lips. “Could do what?”
    “Well, this is going to sound even sillier,” Jilly admitted, “but I’ve always pictured him as sort of a wizard type.”
    Meran laughed. “He’d love to hear that. And what about me? Have I acquired wizardly status as well?”
    “Not exactly. You always struck me as being an earth spirit—like you stepped out of an oak tree or something.” Jilly blushed, feeling as though she was making even more of a fool of herself than ever, but now that she’d started, she felt she had to finish. “It’s sort of like he learned magic, while you just are magic.”

    She glanced at her companion, looking for laughter, but Meran was regarding her gravely. And she did look like a dryad, Jilly thought, what with the green streaks in the long, nut-brown ringlets of her hair and her fey sort of Pre-Raphaelite beauty. Her eyes seemed to provide their own light, rather than take it in.
    “Maybe I did step out of a tree one day,” Meran said.
    Jilly could feel her mouth forming a surprised “0,” but then Meran laughed again.
    “But probably I didn’t,” she said. Before Jilly could ask her about that “probably,” Meran went on:
    “We’ll need some sort of protec-tion against them.”
    Jilly made her mind shift gears, from Meran’s origins to the problem at hand.
    “Like holy water or a cross?” she asked.
    Her head filled with the plots of a hundred bad horror films, each of them clamoring for attention.
    “No,” Meran said. “Religious artifacts and trappings require faith—a belief in their potency that the skookin undoubtedly don’t have. The only thing I know for certain that they can’t abide is the truth.”
    “The truth?”
    Meran nodded. “Tell them the truth—even it’s only historical facts and trivia—and they’ll shun you as though you were carrying a plague.”
    “But what about after?” Jilly said. “After we’ve delivered the drum and they come looking for me?
    Do I have to walk around carrying a cassette machine spouting dates and facts for the rest of my life?”
    “I hope not.”
    “But—”
    “Patience,” Meran replied. “Let me think about it for awhile.” Jilly sighed. She regarded her companion curiously as Meran took a sip of her coffee.
    “You really believe in this stuff, don’t you?” she said finally. “Don’t you?”
    Jilly had to think about that for a moment.
    “Last night I was scared,” she said, “and I’m returning the drum because I’d rather be safe than sorry, but I’m still not sure.”
    Meran nodded understandingly, but, “Your coffee’s getting cold,” was all she had to say.
    Meran let Jilly stay with her that night in the rambling old house where she and Cerin lived. Straddling the border between Lower Crowsea and Chinatown, it was a tall, gabled building surrounded by giant oak trees. There was a rounded tower in the front to the right of a long screen-enclosed porch, stables around the back, and a garden along the west side of the house that seemed to have been plucked straight from a postcard of the English countryside.
    Jilly loved this area. The Kelledys’ house was the easternmost of the stately estates that stood, row on row, along McKennitt Street, between Lee and Yoors. Whenever Jilly walked along this part of McKennitt, late at night when the streetcars were tucked away in their downtown station and there was next to no other traffic, she found it easy to imagine that the years had wound back to a bygone age when time moved at a different pace, when Newford’s streets were cobblestoned and the vehicles that traversed them