Tapping the Dream Tree (21 page)

Marley nodded. “Larry wouldn't want a tribute—he'd want this suit to have a life of its own.”

Not to mention an afterlife, Wendy thought, looking at the ghost hanging on the wall.

I leave New Orleans not long after Chief Larry steps down from his leadership of the Wild Eagles. By this time I've got a room in a boarding house and between a couple of part-time jobs, I've been taking night school to get my high school diploma. The diploma gets me into a one-year computer arts program at Butler University, so I make the move. I can't afford my own equipment, but the labs there are really impressive and as a student I can use them whenever I want. I'm in there a lot.

I don't know when I realized I wanted to be an artist. It's not like I grew up always drawing or anything. I guess it came from doing posters advertising gigs for groups that people I knew were in. It was something I liked and was actually good at. Eventually I discovered that I enjoyed collage work the most, which is what drew me to the computer studies. If you've got the material on your hard drive, you can manipulate and play with it forever. And with the quality of printers these days, and if you're using the right kind of inks and paper, every print you run off is archival quality.

But I never make more than one print of a piece.

That's something I learned from Chief Larry and the Wild Eagle practices. Anything really good is always different. Unique. You might start out aiming to copy something, but if it's got any heart, if it's got any real spirit, it'll be something else again when it's done.

It'll be its own thing.

Works for people, too.

It took them the better part of a week and a half to get the costume finished. Finally, Marley lifted it up on its hanger. She looked at Wendy and Jilly, then carried the suit over to the wall where the ghost of Chief Larry's hung. When she hung it up, the ghost didn't so much fade away as fade into the costume they'd made.

For a long moment, none of them spoke. A tingle ran up Wendy's spine and she saw Jilly wearing that contented smile of hers again, the one that always came when some piece of the big mystery underlying the world manifested itself for a moment.

“What are you going to do with it?” Wendy finally asked.

Marley grinned. “What do you think? I'm going to wear it to the Mardi Gras that the Good Serpent Club's putting on.”

“Can we come?” Jilly asked. “We could bang the drums and stuff.”

“You want to join the new tribe?”

“You bet.”

Wendy nodded as well, though she wasn't sure how well she'd do, galivanting around on the street, dancing and banging a drum. She didn't have quite the abandon Jilly did for this sort of thing. “There are no public spectacles,” Jilly liked to say. “There's only fun.”

“What are you going to call your tribe?” Wendy asked.

Marley thought about that for a moment. “I don't know. Maybe the Unforgotten Ones.”

“Keep in mind,” Chief Larry says another time when we're talking about Mardi Gras costumes. “Masking Indian's not about hiding yourself. It's about revealing yourself. It's about remembering the ones who went before and the spirit that's in everything, and honoring both. Your suit's a shield against hurt, but it's also an altar of belief and faith and hope.”

“I'll remember.”

He smiles. “I know the world can be a hard and wicked place and sometimes it's all we can do not to want to just check out and leave it behind. But it's our job—people like you and me who care— to fight those wrongs best we can and offer up a hope of something better. Every time we do a good thing, the spirits smile and the world's that much better. I know it's no big deal. It's not going to change the whole world. But it's a start.

“See, the people watching and laughing and having themselves a party ... it doesn't matter if they understand; it only matters that we do. Because masking Indian's not just a reminder of the good spirits that share the world with us, it's a celebration of them, of us, and how we can all get along if we just make an effort.”

And thanks to Larry, and his ghostly costume, that's something I'm not likely to forget again.

My friend Jilly and I have
this ongoing argument. She says there's magic, right here in this world. With all you've experienced, she asks, how can you pretend otherwise? I'm not the only one who knows you have faerie blood, Sophie, or that the Moon is your mother.

But I tell her there's a big difference between this world and the once upon a time of my dreamlands. Anything can happen in a dream. What you bring back isn't magic, it's experience, and they're not the same thing at all.

It's the last thing I expect, a bogle sitting on the end of my bed, bringing the smell of stagnant water and rotting logs into my room. He's naked, like they usually are in the swamps where I've seen them before, and ugly as phlegm. Gangly limbs, fingers and toes each with an extra joint, and he's hairless, skin black and slick as motor oil. The eyes are too big for the triangular head, Halloween-slit eyes glowing just like there's a hot fire burning behind them. The nose lies flat against his face, like that of a pug dog, and the mouth has way too many pointed teeth in it.

I thought I was going to sleep. I guess maybe I am asleep and this time the dreamlands have taken me back into my own bedroom where this little nightmare is waiting for me. For some reason I don't feel as scared as I know I should be, though that doesn't stop me from checking out the shadows in the corners of my room to see how many little friends the bogle might have brought with him. He seems to be alone, so now I start looking for something to hit him with if he gets out of line.

“Sophie.”

There's something in the sibilant tone of his voice that jumps my gaze back to him. Not innocence—these things wouldn't know innocence if it jumped up and bit them—but a sense that, whatever he's doing here, he doesn't mean me any harm. So I decide to hear him out, though I'm not saying I actually trust him. Quicks and haunts and bogles. You can't trust any of the little monsters.

“What's your name?” I ask.

I sit up, pulling the bedclothes along with me as I do. I'm wearing an oversize T-shirt as a nightie, but it doesn't feel like enough on its own. The hot coals of his gaze make me feel like I'm wearing nothing at all.

“You can call me Serth,” he says after a moment's hesitation.

Not his name, I assume, but it's all I'm going to get so it'll have to do.

“So what do you want, Serth?”

“There's trouble in the fens,” he tells me.

“What's that got to do with me?”

“You helped Granny Weather when we tried to drown the moon,” he says.

I give a reluctant nod. It seems a long time ago, in another life.

“Now we need your help to stop her,” he says.

I can't imagine a less likely scenario and tell him so.

His eyes blaze. “Even if I tell you that she's eating our children?”

And that would be bad, how? I think. Gross, certainly, but bad? Less bogle children means less bogle adults leading the unwary into the fens and drowning them.

I don't say anything, but he can read it in my face.

“Every time she eats one of us,” he says, “a piece of the night goes away.”

“And why is this my problem?”

“Without night, there's no day.” He holds up a hand to stop me from interrupting. “Time will come to a halt.”

“And?”

He glares at me. “Our world will dissolve. And once it does, the sickness will move on, spreading across the dreamlands. Eventually, even into your precious Mabon. And let me tell you, the more worlds that fall, the harder the sickness will be to defeat.”

I shake my head. “Why are you coming to me? There are hundreds of you ...” I bite my tongue before saying “little monsters.” I pretend I had to clear my throat. “You people,” I finish.

“You're the only one she trusts.”

“And what makes that useful?” I ask.

“You can get close to her and slip a knife in between her ribs before she even suspects you mean her ill.”

Somehow I doubt that, Granny Weather being who and what she is. But I've no interest in finding out anyhow.

“It's not going to happen,” I tell him.

He nods. “We'll see what song you sing when the death she wakes comes creeping down Mabon's streets.”

“Oh, please,” I say. “This whole thing sounds like some stupid comic book.”

He looks like one, too. Not the kind I grew up with—
Archie, Little Lulu
—but the kind they make nowadays where the heroes are dark and creepy and you can't tell them from the bad guys.

He glares at me. “You'll see,” he says.

And then he's gone.

I'm not sure if I blinked, or woke up, but I'm alone in my room now and I appear to be awake. No bogles, though the smell of him seems to linger the way bad smells do.

I let the bedclothes fall and sit up straighter. I owe Granny Weather too much to ever think of betraying her, but I suppose I'll have to go talk to her now.

This is how it works.

I go to sleep and the next thing I know, I'm in the dreamlands. I'm still asleep, here in my apartment, my body stretched out in bed or curled up on the old sofa out on my balcony, but I'm somewhere else at the same time, transported to a place that feels just as physical and real. I've been doing it for years. It started out as daydreaming when I was a kid, then I forgot about it for the longest time until I got pulled into a dream that wouldn't let me go. After that… well, I don't know what made the difference, but now I go there every night, to Mabon, to the dreamlands.

Christy calls it serial dreaming, where every time you fall asleep you pick up where you left off in last night's dream, but it's more than that. What, exactly, I have no idea. I'm so used to it, I don't even think it's strange anymore. Even my friends accept it as a matter of course, which maybe tells you more about them than me.

It's funny, but Jilly, who's never even been here, has the best name for where I go. She calls it the cathedral world, because everything feels taller and bigger and brighter here. It's not that it is, only that it feels that way. It's like there's a singing inside you—in your chest, your head, your heart—and it fills you up like nothing else ever has. Only being in love comes close.

So anyway, Mabon's easy for me to reach—I kind of founded the city, though a lot of other people's dreams have built it up since—but the fairy-tale world where Granny Weather and the bogles live, that's a whole other thing. I've never gone there on my own. Granny Weather's the one who first brought me there, when she showed me how to defeat the bogles and rescue the moon.

Granny Weather. She's wizened and small, shoulders hunched over and everything about her seems dry as kindling: fingers, hair, limbs. You think she's so helpless until you look into her eyes. There you find all the mysteries of the world lying thick and dark and you realize she's much more than what she seems to be. Powerful and earthy. Formidable. The proverbial goodwife, living in her cottage, deep in an enchanted forest.

Could she be eating bogle babies? The thought brings the taste of bile to my throat. I can't imagine it. But I suppose anything's possible and if she really has taken on the role of the wicked witch in some bogle version of “Hansel and Gretel,” then she must have a good reason for it. More likely, the bogle who came into my bedroom was lying. I'll only find out the truth by asking her.

At least I know a way to get to her cottage. My boyfriend Jeck originally came from that same fairy-tale world. Oh, I know what you're thinking. How pathetic can it be when your boyfriend only exists in the dreamlands. But it works for us. It's complicated, but it works.

“This is not a good idea,” Jeck says. “The fens are dangerous.”

We're slouched at an outdoor table in front of Johnny Brews, the coffee shop that's just down the block from the apartment we share in Mabon. Jeck's looking drop-dead gorgeous as usual, my handsome boyfriend that I can only be with in dreamland. His eyes are like no one else's I know, deep violet with long moody lashes, and his hair is as iridescent and black as a crow's wing. I reach out and brush the cowlick back from his brow.

“I know,” I tell him. “And this whole business doesn't make much sense either. What makes them think I'd help them hurt Granny Weather? And that stupid story about her eating bogle babies ...”

He gets a bit of a funny look, then.

“What?” I say. “What?”

“Maybe you don't know her as well as you think you do.”

“I don't really know her at all. I only met her that one time.”

He nods.

“You're not telling me she
does
eat bogle babies?”

“I just don't think it's a good idea to get involved,” Jeck says.

“Except the bogle said it could affect things everywhere—in all the dreamlands.”

Jeck sighs. “Bogles are also liars.”

This was certainly true.

“And besides,” he adds. “What does playing the hero ever get a person?”

“It got me you.”

“Ah …”

And then he doesn't know what to say.

“So will you take me?” I ask. “Or at least show me the way?”

“That was never in question,” he tells me.

The trick to magic is that it lies in between. In between what? It almost doesn't matter. It just has to be in between. Not blue or yellow, but green. Not sun or moon, but the light of dusk. Not river or land, but the bridge that spans the water.

So after we pay for our coffees, Jeck takes me by the hand and leads me into the alleyway that runs alongside of Johnny Brews—a narrow little lane with brick buildings rising tall on either side. A place between, you see. You can find them anywhere.

I don't notice exactly how he calls the traveling magic up, but one moment we're walking with cobblestones underfoot and the next there's damp dirt. The smell of the fens rises up around us and the city is gone. Still in the dreamlands, I know, but true dreaming's not as arbitrary as the regular kind. It takes intent and a strong will to readily move from one world to another.

Which is another way of saying, it takes magic.

We've arrived on higher ground in a grove of gnarled crack willows, boughs reaching up for the night stars, the fens around us. The grove lies about halfway between Granny Weather's cottage and the bogles' nest deep in the swamp, a lonely place. I turn to Jeck, but before I can speak, a heavy rope net drops from the boughs above and knocks us both to the ground. I can hear sibilant snickering as we try to untangle ourselves. The effort's wasted as our captors pull the net in tight, pinning us against each other, our limbs trapped between our bodies.

They're bogles, of course. Dozens of the ugly little monsters. I stare up at them from where we lie on the ground, wondering if my night visitor Serth is among them, but it's impossible to tell, they all look too much alike. Then it no longer matters. Three men, each of whom could be Jeck's twin brother, come stepping out from under the drooping boughs of the willows. I can't tell them apart, except that one of them has a small bone hanging from a thong around his neck.