Newford Stories (7 page)

Kaark. Kaark. Tok.

There was no reply.

“They weren’t so happy with this foundling
of theirs,” Lucius said, turning to his companion. “At first I
thought it was because their healing didn’t take, but when I
carried him to your house, I began to understand their
uneasiness.”

He called again, but there was still no
response.

“What do you find so troubling about him?”
Cerin asked.

Though he had an idea. There were people and
places that were like doors to other realms, to the spiritworld and
to worlds deeper and older than that. In their presence, you could
feel the world shift uneasily underfoot, the ties binding you to it
loosening their grip—an unsettling sensation for anyone, but more
so for those who could normally control where they walked.

The still, pale man with his white braids
had been like that.

Lucius said as much, then added, “The
trouble with such doors isn’t so much what they open into, as what
they can close you from.”

Cerin nodded. To be denied access to the
spiritworld would be like losing a sense. One’s hearing, one’s
taste.

“So you don’t think they’ll come,” he
said.

Lucius shrugged. “They can be willful…not so
responsible as some.”

“Let me try.”

“Never let it be said I turned down
someone’s help.”

Cerin smiled. He closed his eyes and reached
back to his home, back to a room on the second floor. A harp stood
there with a rose carved into the wood where curving neck met
forepillar. His fingers twitched at his sides and the sound of that
roseharp was suddenly in the air all around them, a calling-on song
that rose up as though from the ground and spun itself out against
the branches above, then higher still, as though reaching for the
stars.

“A good trick,” Lucius said. “Cousin Brandon
does much the same with his instrument, though in his case, he’s
the only one to hear its tones.”

“Perhaps you’re not listening hard enough,”
Cerin said.

“Perhaps.”

He might have said more, but there came a
rustling in the boughs above them and what appeared to be two small
girls were suddenly there, hanging upside down from the lowest
branch by their hooked knees, laughter crinkling in the corners of
their eyes while they tried to look solemn.

“Oh, that was veryvery mean,” Maida
said.

Zia gave an upside down nod. “Calling us
with magic music.”

“We’d give you a good bang on the ear.”

“Reallyreally we would.”

“Except the music’s so pretty.”

“Ever so truly pretty.”

“And magic, of course.”

Cerin let the harping fall silent.

“We need you to tell us more about the man
you found,” he said.

The crow girls exchanged glances.

“Surely such wise and clever people as you
don’t need help from us,” Maida said.

“That would be all too very silly,” Zia
agreed.

“And yet we do,” Cerin told them. “Will you
help us?”

There was another exchange of glances
between the pair, then they dropped lightly to the ground.

“Are there sweets in your house?” Zia
asked.

“Mountains of them.”

“Oh, good,” Maida said. She gave Lucius a
sad look. “Old Raven never has any sweets for us.”

Zia nodded. “It’s veryvery sad. What kind do
you have?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, come on,” Maida said, taking Cerin’s
hand. “We’d better hurry up and find out.”

Zia nodded, looking a little anxious.
“Before someone else eats them all.”

In this mood, Cerin didn’t know that they’d
get anything useful out of the pair, but at least they’d agreed to
come. He’d let Meran sort out how to handle them once he got them
home.

Zia took his other hand and with the pair of
them tugging on his hands, they started back up Stanton Street.
Lucius took the rear, a smile on his face as the crow girls
chattered away to Cerin about exactly what their favourite sweets
were.

- 3 -

Jilly was no stranger to the impossible, so
she wasn’t as surprised as some might have been to find herself
transported from the Kelledys' living room, full of friendly
shadows and known corners, to an alleyway that could have been
anywhere. Still, she wasn’t entirely immune to the surprise of it
all and couldn’t ignore the vague, unsettled feeling that was
tiptoeing up and down the length of her spine.

Because that was the thing
about the impossible, wasn’t it? When you did experience it, well,
first of all, hello, it proved to be all too possible, and
secondly, it made you rethink all sorts of things that you’d
blindly agreed to up to this point. Things like the world being
round—was gravity really so clever that it kept people on the
upside down part of the world from falling off into the sky? That
Elvis was dead—if he was, then why did
so
many people still see him? That
UFOs were actually weather balloons or swamp gas—never mind the
improbability of so many balloons going AWOL, how did a swamp get
indigestion in the first place?

So being somewhere she shouldn’t be didn’t
render Jilly helpless, stunned, or much more than curiously
surprised. By looking up at the skyline, she placed herself in an
alleyway behind the Williamson Street Mall, right where the crow
girls had found—

Her gaze dropped to the mound of litter
beside the closest dumpster, and there he was, Meran’s comatose
patient, except here, in this wherever she was, he was sitting on
top of the garbage, knees drawn up to his chin, and regarding her
with a gloomy gaze. She focused on the startling green of his eyes.
Odd, she thought. Weren’t albinos supposed to have red, or at least
pink, eyes?

She waited a moment to give him the
opportunity to speak first. When he didn’t, she cleared her
throat.

“Hello,” she said. “Did you bring me
here?”

He frowned at the question. “I don’t know
you, do I?”

“Well, we haven’t been formally introduced
or anything, and while you weren’t exactly the life of the party
when I first met you, right now we’re sharing the same space
somewhere else, as well as here, which is sort of like us knowing
each other, or at least me knowing you.”

He gave her a confused look.

“Oh, that’s right. You wouldn’t remember,
being unconscious and all. I’m not sure of all the details myself,
but you’re supposed to have been, and I quote, ‘laid low by ill
will,’ and when I went to brush some hair out of your eyes, I found
myself here, with you again, except you’re awake this time. How
were you laid low by this ill will? I’m assuming someone hit you,
which would be ill will-ish enough so far as I can see, but somehow
I think it’s more than that.”

She paused and gave him a rueful smile. “I
guess I’m not doing a very good job with this explanation, am
I?”

“How can you be so cheerful?” he asked
her.

Jilly pulled a battered wooden fruit crate
over to where he was sitting and sat down herself.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“The world is a terrible place,” he said.
“Every day, every moment, its tragedies deepen, the
mean-spiritedness of its inhabitants quickens and escalates until
one can’t imagine a kindness existing anywhere for more than an
instant before being suffocated.”

“Well, it’s not perfect,” Jilly agreed. “But
that doesn’t mean we have to—”

“I can see that you’ve been hurt and
disappointed by it—cruelly so, when you were much younger. Yet here
you sit before me, relatively trusting, certainly cheerful,
optimism bubbling in you like a fountain. How can this be?”

Jilly was about to make some lighthearted
response, speaking without thinking as she did too often, but then
part of what he’d said really registered.

“How would you know what my life was like
when I was a kid?”

He shrugged. “Our histories are written on
our skin—how can you be surprised that I wouldn’t know?”

“It’s not something I’ve ever heard of
before.”

“Perhaps you have to know how to look for
the stories.”

Well, that made a certain kind of sense,
Jilly thought. There were so many hidden things in the world that
only came into focus when you learned how to pay attention to them,
so why not stories on people’s skin?

“So,” she said. “I guess nobody could lie to
you, could they?”

“Why do you think the world depresses me the
way it does?”

“Except it’s not all bad. You can’t tell me
that the only stories people have are bad ones.”

“They certainly outweigh the good.”

“Maybe
you’re
not looking in the right
place.”

“I understand thinking the best of people,”
he said. “Looking for the good in them, rather than the wrongs
they’ve done. But ignoring the wrongs is almost like condoning
them, don’t you think?”

“I don’t ignore them,” Jilly told him. “But
I don’t dwell on them either.”

“Even when you’ve been hurt as much as you
have?”

“Maybe especially because of that,” she
said. “What I try to do is make people feel better. It’s hard to be
mean when you’re smiling, or when a laugh’s building up inside of
you.”

“That’s a child’s view of the world.”

Jilly shook her head. “A child lives in the
now, and they’re usually pretty self-absorbed. Which is what can
make them unaware of other people’s feelings at times.”

“I meant simplistic.”

Jilly wouldn’t accept that, either. “I’m
aware of what’s wrong. I just try to balance it with something
good. I know I can’t solve every problem in the world, but if I try
to help the ones I come upon as I go along, I think it makes a
difference. And you know, most people aren’t really bad. They’re
just kind of thoughtless at times.”

“How can you believe that? Listen to them
and then tell me again how they’re really kind at heart.”

Jilly’s head suddenly filled with
conversation.

…
why do I have to buy anything for that
old bag, anyway…

…
hello, can’t we leave the kids at home
for one afternoon…the miserable, squalling monsters…

…
hear that damn song one more time, I’ll
kill…

No, they were thoughts, she realized, stolen
from the shoppers in the mall that lay on the other side of the
alley’s wall. It was impossible to tell their age or gender except
by inference.

…
damn bells…oh, it’s the Sally Ann, doing
their annual beg-a-thon…hey, nice rack on her…wonder why a looker
like her’s collecting money for losers…

…
doesn’t get me what I want this year,
I’ll show him what being miserable is all about…

Jilly blinked when the voices were suddenly
gone again.

“Now do you see?” her companion said.

“Those thoughts are taken out of context
with the rest of their lives,” Jilly told him. “Just because
someone has an ugly thought, it doesn’t make them a bad
person.”

“Oh no?”

“And being kind oneself does make a
difference.”

“Against the great swell of indifferent
unkindnesses that threaten to wash us completely away with the
force of a tsunami?”

“Is this what they meant with the ill will
that laid you low?”

“What who meant?”

“The crow girls. They’re the ones who found
you and brought you to the Kelledys’ house because they couldn’t
heal you themselves.”

A small smile touched his features. “I
remember some crow girls I saw once. Their good humour could make
yours seem like grumbling, but they carried the capacity for large
angers, as well.”

“Was that when you were a buffalo?”

“What do you know about buffalo?”

“You’re supposed to have buffalo blood,”
Jilly explained.

He gave her a slow nod.

“Those-who-came,” he said. “They slaughtered
the buffalo. Then, when the People danced and called the buffalo
spirit back, they slaughtered the People, as well. That’s the
history I read on the skin of the world—not only here, but
everywhere. Blood and pain and hunger and hatred. It’s an old story
that has no end. How can a smile, a laugh, a good deed, stand up
against the weight of such a history?”

“I…I guess it can’t,” Jilly said. “But you
still have to try.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s all you can do. If you don’t
try to stand up against the darkness, it swallows you up.”

“And if in the end, there is only darkness?
If the world is meant to end in darkness?”

Jilly shook her head. She refused to believe
it.

“How can you deny it?” he asked.

“It’s just…if there’s only supposed to be
darkness, then why were we given light?”

For a long moment, he sat there, shoulders
drooped, staring down at his hands. When he finally looked up,
there was something in his eyes that Jilly couldn’t read.

“Why indeed?” he said softly.

- 4 -

When Meran returned to the living room it
was to find Jilly slumped across the body of her patient, Professor
Dapple standing over the pair of them, hands fluttering nervously
in front of him.

“What’s happened?” she said, quickly
crossing the room.

“I don’t know. One moment she was talking to
me, then she leaned over and touched his cheek and she simply
collapsed.”

He moved aside as Meran knelt down by the
sofa once more. Before she could study the problem more closely,
the roseharp began to play upstairs.

The professor looked surprised, his gaze
lifting to the ceiling.

“I thought Cerin had gone with Lucius,” he
said.

“He did,” Meran told him. “That’s only his
harp playing.”

The professor regarded her for a long, slow
moment.

“Of course,” he finally said.

Meran smiled. “It’s nothing to be nervous
about. Really. I’m more worried about what’s happened to
Jilly.”