Here Be Dragons (28 page)

Stanton Street, in other words, is a locus where feral nature and the Faerie domain intersect; it is also touched by the alternative culture. While the Kelledys and Rushkin are domiciled, they are not fully part of the “day people.” The Kelledys do not have regular employment but make money from their gigs and from teaching music. The deformed artist might be extremely successful, but he is a recluse who shuns society. Still, Stanton Street remains a part of the city, cutting through its center. Other wilderness bubbles are left deserted, pushed to the edge of the city, if not physically then at least socially and mentally, and in Newford, with its social/mental focus, that is highly relevant.

One such deserted bubble is the disused All Souls Cemetery, which provides a central setting for “Held Safe by Moonlight and Vines” (1996) and is also briefly described in
The Blue Girl
(2004). In this novel, a ghost likens it to “something out of a Southern Gothic novel, full of dead and dying trees, old-fashioned mausoleums and crypts, with paths of uneven cobblestones winding narrowly between them.”
⁵⁷
It is a scary place, even to a ghost, a place no longer part of society. Here, the trees formerly under cultural control have not grown to the immense size of the Stanton Street oaks; instead they, along with the mausoleums and crypts, underscore that this is a place of death. Only the rosebush by a particular grave has grown wild again (252). The graveyard is a desolate wilderness, but it still links the magical domain to feral nature. The descriptions in “Held Safe by Moonlight and Vines” match that of
The Blue Girl
(including the dead and dying trees and the rosebush
⁵⁸
); but in the short story the domains of wild nature, “night people,” and the magical intersect even more clearly. It is a place where only drug dealers and junkies come, according to the male narrator, Alex. Everyone else, he claims, “likes the idea of making a place gone wild safe again” (116). By “wild,” however, Alex does not simply mean that the nature in the graveyard has gone feral. What scares people, he suggests, is that “a piece of the night” bides there, “thinking about them” (116). Lillie, the female narrator, dismisses any dark, dangerous wildness but suggests a more noticeable intersection with the magical domain. She explains how, when she has spent time in the cemetery, it changes into a different place, a garden, walled
but wild, with a “tangle of bushes and briars, trees [she has] got no name for and vines hanging everywhere” (118). This wild place is the dreamed-up sanctuary for an abused child, a young Alex of several years previously (130), and the notions of time travel and a dreamworld combine with de Lint's pervasive theme of child abuse in this bubble of wilderness.

The popular Fitzhenry Park, Newford's equivalent to New York's Central Park and Toronto's High Park, and one of the most frequently used settings in the Newford stories, is also, counterintuitively, a prominent bubble of wilderness. On the surface, the park seems to be a place of tame nature, or possibly even just a cultural construct. Maisie's description of the park almost exclusively defines it in terms of the social (human) interactions that take place there:

[Fitzhenry Park is] close to the Combat Zone, so you get a fair amount of hookers and even less-reputable types drifting down when they're, let's say, off-shift. But it's also close to the Barrio, so the seedy element is balanced out with mothers walking in pairs and pushing strollers, old women gossiping in tight clusters, old men playing dominoes and checkers on the benches. Plus you get the lunch crowds from the downtown core which faces the west side of the park. (“Waifs” 34)

The impression is of the park as a totally cultural space, an impression common to almost all Newford stories. Like the rest of the city, Fitzhenry Park is a place of social interaction, not of flora. There is a lawn or the odd shrub or tree, insofar as any vegetation is mentioned at all. The major exception to this portrayal occurs in
Trader
, where the park is one of the novel's central settings and the text includes descriptions of more than just a bush or two. When Max Trader, who has woken up in the body of the unpleasant and irresponsible Johnny Devlin, finds himself homeless and penniless, he walks deep into Fitzhenry Park, where there are woods that, like those in the Kellygnow grounds, might be untouched from the days of the first settlers (
Trader
67). Feeling that he has no other option, Max makes the park his home, only to discover that the wooded tracts are much larger than he has previously believed and that quite a few of the city's homeless are squatting there with him (74–77). Like Max, the various point-of-view characters repeatedly draw attention to the wooded areas of the park, often setting it apart from the surrounding city and associating it with the wilderness outside the city. Max is most explicit about this:

I lie back again, stare at the sky, the stars, feel the warm length of the dog pressed up against my side. The city seems impossibly far away. I can't hear it, can't see it except for a hint of its glow refracted in the boughs of the trees. We could be on a camping trip, up in the mountains behind the city, or out along the lake in cottage country. (85)

Forced into the domain of the homeless and the magical, Max's perception also shifts as regards the natural domain; he now sees wilderness where he previously saw only controlled nature. The tame nature has shifted into wilderness in Max's mind, and the park has become a natural rather than a cultural space. The impression that the city is “impossibly far away,” that Max could be outside the city rather than in its center, is emphasized, linking the wilderness in Fitzhenry Park with the external wilderness. A similar dissociation between park and city is experienced by the strip dancer Nita as she follows a (possibly) suicidal vampire into the park. “They could have been a thousand miles away, a thousand years away from this time and place,” Nita ponders, echoing Max's sensation of being “impossibly far away” in a forest predating the first (European) settlers.
⁵⁹

The dominant impression is of Fitzhenry Park as a city location, however, where nature is tame, under culture's control—something that is not the case with the other subjugated domains. Through numerous stories, it is made clear that the homeless are not the only “night people” to be found in Fitzhenry Park. The location is apparently well suited to criminal activity—from reasonably mild offenses, such as tagging and unlicensed vending, to teenage gang confrontations and murder. Runaway Lesli is nearly recruited by one pimp and then kidnapped by another (“Ghosts” 204–6). Buskers and fortune tellers work the crowds. In the controlled natural environment of the park, hegemonic culture has lost control, not of nature but of the subjugated domain of alternative culture. Similarly, several stories link the park to the third subjugated domain, that of magic.

Fitzhenry Park is a center of magic in the midst of city culture.
Widdershins
mentions how fairies need to “replenish” themselves from wild nature, which they call “the green and the wild” (
Widdershins
40); and one of the novel's main plot threads concerns the animosity that has arisen between the fairies and the animal people who refuse them access to “the green and the wild” outside the cities. When the two parties are in need of a common ground for a meeting, the obvious choice is Fitzhenry
Park because, as the Faerie queen's captain explains, it is “in the city, so we have access to it, but there's enough of the wild and the green in its borders for the green-brees [animal people] to feel comfortable” (
Widdershins
365). The explanation makes the connection between the magical domain and wild nature perfectly clear, and even if it is not as explicit as in
Trader
, it illustrates how the park is not all tame nature. Other stories similarly describe how the magical and natural domains intersect in Fitzhenry Park, mainly through the variety of magical beings that live in or frequent the park. Bodachs, a kind of Celtic Faerie creature, help identify the pimp who has taken Lesli (“Ghosts” 211–12); gemmin, genii loci that safeguard a place's happy memories, have been seen dancing there (“Winter” 161–62); and the park is a haunt for Bones, a recurrent character and an animal person. He and his girlfriend Cassie can be found there telling fortunes; but it is also in the park that Bones imparts knowledge of the magical domain to Max, and it is from the park that he sends Max's friends to the Otherworld (
Trader
137, 245, 252 et passim).

An intriguing example of how the three subjugated domains overlap in Fitzhenry Park is provided through the part of the park called Silenus Gardens:

Deeper in the park, centered around a series of statues depicting a satyr lipping a syrinx and three dancing dryads, was a small hilltop surrounded by cherry trees in full blossom. The area […] had been funded by a rich Crowsea patron of the arts in honor of the poet Joshua Stanhold. The benches here were marble—the same stone as the statues—and the air was sweet with the heady scent of the blossoms.
⁶⁰

From this description, the gardens seem to be a case of tame nature, under the control of culture's hegemony. There is a link between Silenus Gardens and the magical domain, however. In
The Dreaming Place
(1990), Cassie tells a friend how she feels hidden away from the world there, and how no one has ever been mugged or hurt in that part of the park. “There's magic places in the world,” she continues, “places where I figure whoever's in charge […] decided that there was only going to be good vibes and this is one of them.” She finishes by adding that Newford is lucky to have two such places, the other being an “old house in Lower Crowsea” (
Dreaming Place
24). The gardens thus combine the notions of magic, nature, and art, not only through their statues, the dedication to a poet, and Cassie's observation that the place is magic, but also through the association to the “old house on Lower Crowsea.” It is not clear from
the context in
The Dreaming Place
, but the house she refers to is the Kelledy residence, another location where art (in this case, music), magic, and nature meet. It is a place to feel safe and happy.

Where Silenus Gardens is a magic place of good feelings, the largest bubble of wilderness is, at least superficially, quite the opposite. Nowhere in Newford does the intersection of the three subjugated domains become as obvious as in the Tombs, the haunt of runaway children, street people, and drug addicts as well as a wide range of beings from the magical domain. The Tombs is part of a large area originally intended for gentrification, but the investors pulled out, leaving “a mess of empty buildings and rubble-strewn lots.”
⁶¹
Maisie acknowledges that Fitzhenry Park might give some people a sensation of countryside, but to her it is the Tombs that is “just like a wilderness”: it is “like a piece of the city gone feral, the wild reclaiming its own,” a reversal of the tamed greenery of the park (“Waifs” 15–16). Although the Tombs is “about as far from the green harbor of Fitzhenry Park as you could get in Newford,”
⁶²
both the blight and the park suggest a connection between culture and wilderness. In the park, wild nature predates city culture, whereas the Tombs was once under cultural control—part of the city—but has now turned into wilderness. There are also connections between the two bubbles in the magic domain. While there are gemmin in the Tombs as well, they are forced to leave because of the area's negative memories (“Winter” 162); but other fairies live there, like the bogans that nearly start a war between fairies and animal people in
Widdershins
, and even though they work in Fitzhenry Park, Bones and Carrie have their squat in the Tombs.

There are also several notional links between this area of feral nature within the city and the wilderness outside Newford. In the winter, the snow is left undisturbed on the ground until it melts in the spring, something common only outside cities (“Winter” 153). The area has derived its name from serving as the dumping ground for old car wrecks (“That Explains” 109), and cars are not the only things people dump there. Packs of feral dogs once thrown from passing cars hunt at the Tombs; the reader is told how unwanted dogs are “returned to nature” in the same way both in the Tombs and in the countryside. Even the descriptions of the Tombs link it to the wilderness outside. Not only is the area frequently referred to as a
wilderness
or
jungle
; unlike the rest of the city, the physical architecture in this part of Newford tends to be more fully described. Streets, dilapidated buildings, squats, even empty lots are described as having a physical presence that is just as important as the people there. The same
applies to the wilderness outside the city—its physical locales are described in detail. The Tombs is a bubble of wilderness, of feral nature, within the city's culture.

This scene of urban blight attracts the more sinister inhabitants of the magical domain, such as the monstrous couple who kidnap Harriet in “Pity the Monster” (1991) and the murderous Rushkin and his equally malicious numena in
Memory and Dream
. The dark spirit in
From a Whisper to a Scream
is particularly associated with the Tombs: it is there that the pedophile Teddy Bird is killed, only to return from the grave driven by the need to sexually abuse his daughter. A voodoo priest attempts to exorcise Bird's spirit at a crossroads among the deserted lots, and it is in one of the derelict houses that the final confrontation between the spectral Bird and his daughter takes place. Among the benevolent spirits from the Tombs can be found the ghosts encountered in “Waifs and Strays” (1993) and “Dead Man's Shoes” (1993), and numerous other representatives of the magical domain appear among the “night people” there in a great many of the stories. The resulting portrayal is not one of bleak slum but of true wilderness, with predators as well as prey, a place of great variety that contains good as well as evil and beauty as well as ugliness.