Tapping the Dream Tree (10 page)

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 toque, 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 corn field 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 toward 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.

The oaks were
full of crows,
as plentiful as leaves, more of the raucous black-winged birds than Jilly had ever seen together in one place. She kept glancing out the living room window at them, expecting some further marvel, though their enormous gathering was marvel enough all on its own. The leaded panes framed group after group of them in perfect compositions that made her itch to draw them in the sketchbook she hadn't thought to bring along.

“There are an awful lot of crows out there this evening,” she said after her hundredth inspection of them.

“You'll have to forgive her,” the professor told their hosts with a smile. “Sometimes I think she's altogether too concerned with crows and what they're up to. For some people it's the stock market, others it's the weather. It's a fairly new preoccupation, but it does keep her off the streets.”

“As if.”

“Before this it was fruit faeries,” the professor added, leaning forward from the sofa where he was sitting, his tone confidential.

“Wasn't.”

The professor
tched.
“As good as was.”

“Well, we all need a hobby,” Cerin said.

“This is, of course, true,” Jilly allowed, after first sticking out her tongue at the pair of them. “It's so sad that neither of you have one.”

She'd been visiting with Professor Dapple, involved in a long, meandering conversation concerning Kickaha Mountain ballads vis-à-vis their relationship to British folktales, when he suddenly announced that he was due for tea at the Kelledys' that afternoon and did she care to join them? Was the Pope Catholic? Did the moon have wings? Well, one out of two wasn't bad, and of course she had to come.

The Kelledys' rambling house on Stanton Street was a place of endless fascination for her with its old-fashioned architecture, all gables and gingerbread, with climbing vines and curious rooflines. The rooms were full of great solid pieces of furniture that crouched on Persian carpets and the hardwood floors like sleeping animals, not to mention any number of wonderfully bright and mysterious things perched on the shelves and sideboards, on the windowsills and meeting rails, like so many half-hidden lizards and birds. And then there were the oak trees that surrounded the building, a regular forest of them larger and taller than anywhere else in the city, each one of them easily a hundred years old.

The house was magic in her eyes, as much as the couple who inhabited it, and she loved any excuse to come by for a visit. On a very lucky day, Cerin would bring out his harp, Meran her flute, and they would play a haunting, heart-lifting music that Jilly never heard except from them.

“I didn't know fruit had their own faeries,” Meran said. “The trees, yes, but not the individual fruit itself.”

“I wonder if there are such things as acorn faeries,” Cerin said.

“I must ask my father.”

Jilly gave a theatrical sigh. “We're having far too long a conversation about fruit and nuts, and whether or not they have faeries, and not nearly enough about great, huge, cryptic parliaments of crows.”

“It would be a murder, actually,” the professor put in.

“Whatever. I think it's wonderfully mysterious.”

“At this time of the day,” Meran said, “they'd be gathering together to return to their roosts.”

Jilly shook her head. “I'm not so sure. But if that
is
the case, then they've decided to roost in your yard.”

She turned back to look out over the leaf-covered lawn that lay under the trees, planning some witty observation that would make them see just how supremely marvelous it all was, but the words died unborn in her throat as she watched a large, bald-headed Buddha of a man step onto the Kelledys' walk. He was easily the largest human being she'd ever seen—she couldn't guess how many hundreds of pounds he must weigh—but oddly enough he moved with the supple grace of a dancer a fraction his size. His dark suit was obviously expensive and beautifully tailored, and his skin was as black as a raven's wing. As he came up the walk, the crows became agitated and flew around him, filling the air with their hoarse cries—growing so loud that the noise resounded inside the house with the windows closed.

But neither the enormous man, nor the actions of the crows, were what had dried up the words in Jilly's throat. It was the limp figure of a slender man that the dapper Buddha carried in his arms. In sharp contrast, he was poorly dressed for the brisk weather, wearing only a raggedy shirt and jeans so worn they had almost no color left in them. His face and arms were pale as alabaster, even his braided hair was white—yet another striking contrast to the man carrying him. She experienced something familiar, yet strange when she gazed on his features, like taking out a favorite old sweater she hadn't worn in years and feeling at once quite unacquainted with it and affectionately comfortable when she put it on.

“That's no crow,” Cerin said, having stepped up to the window to stand beside Jilly's chair.

Meran joined him, then quickly went to the door to let the new visitor in. The professor rose from the sofa when she ushered the man and his burden into the room, waving a hand toward the seat he'd just quit.

“Put him down here,” he said.

The black man nodded his thanks. Stepping gracefully across the room, he knelt and carefully laid the man out on the sofa.

“It's been a long time, Lucius,” the professor said as the man straightened up. “You look different.”

“I woke up.”

“Just like that?”

Lucius gave him a slow smile. “No. A red-haired storyteller gave me a lecture about responsibility and I realized she was right. It had been far too long since I'd assumed any.”

He turned his attention to the Kelledys then.

“I need a healing,” he said.

There was something formal in the way he spoke the words, the way a subject might speak to his ruler, though there was nothing remotely submissive in his manner.

“There are no debts between us,” Cerin said.

“But now—”

“Nonsense,” Meran told him. “We've never turned away someone in need of help before and we don't mean to start now. But you'll have to tell us how he was injured.”

She knelt down on the floor beside the sofa as she spoke. Reaching out, she touched her middle finger to the center of his brow, then lifted her hand and moved it down his torso, her palm hovering about an inch above him.

“I know little more than you, at this point,” Lucius said.

“Do you at least know who he is?” Cerin asked.

Lucius shook his head. “The crow girls found him lying by a Dumpster out behind the Williamson Street Mall. They tried to heal him, but all they could manage was to keep him from slipping further away. Maida said he was laid low by ill will.”

Jilly's ears perked up at the mention of the crow girls. They were the real reason for her current interest in all things corvid, a pair of punky, black-haired young women who seemed to have the ability to change your entire perception of the world simply by stepping into the periphery of your life. Ever since she'd first seen them in a cafe, she kept spotting them in the most unlikely places, hearing the most wonderful stories about them. Whenever she saw a crow now, she'd peer closely at it, wondering if this was one of the pair in avian form.

“That makes it more complicated,” Meran said.

Sitting back on her heels, she glanced at Lucius. He gave her an apologetic look.

“I know he has buffalo blood,” he told her.

“Yes, I see that.”

“What did Maida mean by ill will?” Cerin asked. “He doesn't appear to have any obvious physical injuries.”

Lucius shrugged. “You know how they can be. The more they tried to explain it to me, the less I understood.”

Jilly had her own questions as she listened to them talk, such as why hadn't someone immediately called for an ambulance, or why had this Lucius brought the injured man here, rather than to a hospital? But there was a swaying, eddying sensation in the air, a feeling that the world had turned a step from the one everyone knew and they now had half a foot in some other, perhaps more perilous, realm. She decided to be prudent for a change and listen until she understood better what was going on.

She wasn't the only one puzzled, it seemed.

“We need to know more,” Meran said.

Lucius nodded. “I'll see if I can find them.”

“I'll come with you,” Cerin said.

Lucius hesitated for a long moment, then gave another nod and the two men left the house. Jilly half expected them to fly away, but when she looked out the window she saw them walking under the oaks toward the street like an ordinary, if rather mismatched, pair, Lucius so broad and large that the tall harper at his side appeared slender to the point of skinniness. The crows remained in the trees this time, studying the progress of the two men until they were lost from sight.

“I have some things to fetch,” Meran said. “Remedies to try. Will you watch over our patient until I get back?”

Jilly glanced at the professor.

“Um, sure,” she said.

And then the two of them were alone with the mysteriously stricken man. Laid low by ill will. What did
that
mean?

Jilly pulled a footstool over to the sofa where Meran had been kneeling and sat down. Looking at the man, she found herself wishing for pencil and sketchbook again. He was so handsome, like a figure from a Pre-Raphaelite painting. Except for the braids and raggedy clothes, of course. Then she felt guilty for where her thoughts had taken her. Here was the poor man, half dead on the sofa, and all she could think about was drawing him.

“He doesn't look very happy, does he?” she said.

“Not very.”

“Where do you know Lucius from?”

The professor took off his wire-rimmed glasses and gave them a polish they didn't need before replacing them.

“I can't remember where or when I first met him,” he said. “But it was a long time ago—before the war, certainly. Not long after that he became somewhat of a recluse. At first I'd go visit him at his house—he lives just down the street from here—but then it came to the point where he grew so withdrawn that one might as well have been visiting a sideboard or a chair. Finally I stopped going ‘round.”

“What happened to him, do you think?”

The professor shrugged. “Hard to tell with someone like him.”

“You're being deliberately mysterious, aren't you?”

“Not at all. There just isn't much to say. I know he's related to the crow girls. Their grandfather, or an uncle or something. I never did quite find out which.”

“So that's why all the crows are out there.”

“I doubt it,” the professor said. “He's corbae, all right, but raven not crow.”

Jilly felt a thrill of excitement. A raven uncle, crow girls, the man on the sofa with his buffalo blood. She was in the middle of some magical story for once, rather than on the edges of it, looking in, and her proximity made everything feel bright and clear and very much in focus. Then she felt guilty again because it had taken someone getting hurt to draw her into this story. Considering the unfortunate circumstances, it didn't seem right to be so excited by it.

She turned back to look at the pale man, lying there so still.

“I wonder if he can turn into a buffalo,” she said.

“I believe it's more of a metaphorical designation,” the professor told her, “rather than an actual shapeshifting option.”

Jilly shook her head. She could remember the night in Old Market when she'd first seen the crow girls slip from crow to girl and back again. It wasn't exactly something you forgot, though oddly enough the memory did have a tendency to try to slip away from her. To make sure it didn't, she'd fixed the moment in pigment and hung the finished painting on the wall of her studio as a reminder. “I don't think so,” she said. “I think it's a piece of real magic.” She leaned closer to the man and reached forward to push aside a few long white hairs that had come to lie across his lashes. When she touched him, that swaying, eddying sensation returned, stronger than ever. She had long enough to say, “Oh, my,” then the world slipped away and she was somewhere else entirely.

“I
have
resumed my responsibilities,” Lucius said as the two men walked to his house a few blocks farther down Stanton Street.

Cerin gave him a sidelong glance. “Guilt's a terrible thing, isn't it?”

“What do you mean?”

The harper shrugged. “It makes you question people's motives, even when they're as straightforward as my wanting to help you find a pair of somewhat wayward and certainly mischievous relatives.”

“They can be a handful,” Lucius said. “It's possible we'll find them more quickly with your help.”

Cerin hid a smile. He knew that was about as much of an apology as he'd be getting, but he didn't mind. He hadn't really wanted one. He'd only wanted Lucius to understand that no one was holding him to blame for withdrawing from the world the way he had— at least no one in the Kelledy household was. Responsibility was a sharp-edged sword that sometimes cut too deep, even for an old spirit such as Lucius Portsmouth.