Tapping the Dream Tree (24 page)

Poetic justice, I guess, considering that the moths are the ghosts of the drowned victims of the bogles.

Jeck's brothers are out in the middle of this strange melee, but the moths don't seem interested in them. The brothers are trying to help the bogles, but they're not having much luck. Then one of them gives a cry. I look, just in time to see the owl drop out of the sky and tear something from around his neck. The owl rises up again, chased by six blackbirds. From its talons dangles what looks like a necklace. A little bone on a leather thong. I remember seeing it before, when they first captured us. Now I realize it must be Granny Weather's cronebone.

The blackbirds are quick, but they're like gnats compared to the owl. It bulls through them, scattering birds in a cloud of black feathers, dropping to a small window in the tower that's just above ground level. The owl slips the necklace through the bars, then flies away to a perch on a nearby tree, its job done, I guess. The blackbirds hover for a long moment. Then, screaming, they take flight.

No sooner do they go, than the tower cracks in two like a walnut, the great sides crashing down into the fens to send up tidal waves of stagnant water in which bob dead and drowning bogles. I see Jeck and Granny Weather, standing in the wreckage, unharmed. Granny Weather has her arms raised above her head, her eyes glittering with an inner fire.

The hut lurches forward until it's standing above the cracked ruin of the tower. Granny Weather's fiery gaze locks with my own.

“Give me the cloak,” she says.

I toss it down.

She whips it over her shoulders and a great wind comes shrieking out of nowhere, lifting her into the sky. Seconds later, she's gone, in pursuit of the blackbirds.

I don't wait for the hut to kneel on its chicken legs. I jump down from the doorway. I look back up at my weird mount for a moment and tell it thanks before I run over to Jeck. Holding him, I offer up thanks to the moths and owl as well for the fact that he's still alive. Jeck gives me an odd look. I guess even in this fairy-tale world people don't really talk to walking huts and animals all that much.

By the time we've finished hugging, I realize that the hut's gone. I turn to see that it's almost out of sight, lurching its way back across the fens to Granny Weather's cottage. There are dead bogles everywhere, scattered on the little island and amidst the ruins of the tower, tangled up in the reeds, floating in the water. I look at their faces, wondering if Serth is among them. The white moths are dispersing; the owl's already gone. There's just us and the dead and it's all so horribly depressing.

“Let's go home,” I say.

Jeck shakes his head. “Not just yet. We need to see how it ends.”

I look at the carnage around us, but I realize he doesn't mean this. He means his brothers. Or maybe what's going to happen to us.

So we start slogging our way back to Granny Weather's cottage.

“What exactly is a cronebone?” I ask him as we push our way through the sedge and weeds. I've already figured out what a sky-cloak is from how Granny Weather took off into the air once she had it.

He nods. “Among the old goodwives, it was a way to keep their power safe from those who meant them ill. They would cut off a finger or a toe and invest the bone with their magic.”

“That's too gross.”

“It gets worse,” he adds. “The younger they were when they did it, the more powerful the bone became. The story is that Granny Weather was three years old when she cut off her own toe to make hers.”

“She did it to herself?”

“They have to do it themselves. But imagine being that young and knowing so clearly what you wanted. And being willing to do such a thing to gain it.” He looks at me and picks something out of my hair. A twig. An errant leaf. “That's why you have to be so careful in your dealings with her. She is utterly focused and does nothing unless she can benefit from it.”

“But she helped me rescue the moon,” I say.

“Yes, but she requires the moon's light for some of her magics.” He glances my way again, but his gaze slides away from mine. “I'm just saying to be careful around her and think before you speak.”

“What's
that
supposed to mean?”

He gets a pained look and only shakes his head. I get the awful premonition that something really bad is going to happen.

That's another thing I hate about the fairy-tale world. Everything's oblique and anything important can only be approached in riddles. So now I know something's going to happen when we see Granny Weather again, but Jeck can't tell me what, because it's something I have to deal with without coaching or we'll have already lost.

The only thing I can know for sure is that it'll be dangerous.

Granny Weather's waiting for us by her cottage. She's disheveled and there's a wild light in her eyes. Hanging from her belt are six dead blackbirds. I glance at Jeck, but although he seems tense, I don't think it has anything to do with the fate of his brothers.

Think before I speak, he told me. I also know about the old reporter's trick, how if you keep silent the other person will feel obliged to fill that silence with something, but I have a couple of questions that are nagging at me.

“Why did the candle have to be stolen?” I ask.

Granny weather shrugs. “Unlike the Christ man himself, the churches aren't as free with his magics.”

“So the magic had to be stolen?”

She nods. I wonder what she'd think if she knew that I replaced the candle I stole with a new one that I'd paid for. It didn't seem to hurt the magic.

“And the last time I was here,” I go on. “Why did you need me to rescue the moon? It seems to me you could have just done it yourself.”

“The moon can be a fickle mistress,” Granny Weather says. “It needed someone of her own bloodline to pull her free.”

So we're back to faerie blood and Jilly's assertion that the moon was really my mother, straying into the waking world long enough to give birth to me before the fairy-tale world called her back again. I remember the face of the moon woman, sleeping there under the fen water. She had my face. But I still don't buy it. Maybe things like that can happen in the dreamlands, but not in the waking world.

“Still, we're not here to talk of old business,” Granny Weather says. “I am in your debt for your rescuing of me today, and I always pay my debts. What would you ask of me?”

I feel Jeck stiffen at my side, but I don't need a warning here. I've already been through this the last time, when his brothers promised me anything in exchange for letting the moon drown. The one thing you don't do in the fairy-tale world is serve yourself. There's some moral code underlying the structure of the world, just like there is in fairy tales, and a sure way to get yourself in trouble here is to be greedy.

“Think of it as a gift,” I tell her. “Freely given.”

There's a long moment of silence.

Granny Weather smiles and I can't tell if she's hiding her annoyance, or if it's that I've managed to earn her respect.

“Don't come back till the next time,” she says.

No sooner does she speak the last word, than we're back in our apartment in Mabon once more. The only reminder of where we've been is the stink of the fens that rises from our clothes.

I look at Jeck. “So what just happened?”

“You put yourself on equal terms with her,” he said. “Because you asked for nothing in return, she's now duty-bound to leave you and anyone under your protection untouched by her magics.”

“And if we hadn't?”

“We'd be hanging from her belt along with my brothers.”

“So it was a good thing.”

“A very good thing,” he says with a smile

I take his hand. “Come on,” I tell him. “We need a long, hot shower.”

Jilly loves these stories about the dreamlands. We're sitting on the old sofa out on my balcony, sharing a bottle of wine while I tell her this latest one. The window's open behind us and the nouveau flamenco playing on the stereo inside is drifting out to us. Because Jilly is here, the old mangy stray torn who lives in the alley below has actually come up onto the balcony by way of the fire escape and is letting Jilly pat him. I've been feeding him for months, but though he eats the kibbles I put out for him, we don't actually have a relationship beyond that. But then I'm not Jilly. Strays naturally gravitate to her.

“You're so lucky,” she says. “Having these adventures and all.”

I don't know if lucky is quite the right word. I wouldn't want to lose Mabon, but my times in the other dreamlands are never comfortable. Even though I can come back any time, simply by waking up, I don't usually remember that when I'm there. The dangers feel too real and I'm always changed when I get back. The experiences linger and become part of who I am, and that's a little disconcerting to say the least when you consider where they've taken place.

“I don't feel lucky,” I tell her.

“The loaves,” she says, her voice filled with sympathy.

I nod. It's not as though I've simply forgotten something. The absence of those memories are like dark holes that have been bored into my heart and they won't go away. Instead, the more time that passes since I lost them, the more I feel their absence. It's as though the rest of my memories are pulling away from these dark holes, magnifying their presence.

“I try to forget what I've gone and lost,” I say, “but that just seems to make me focus on them more. It's like a heartache that gets worse instead of better.”

“Then don't,” Jilly says. “Don't try to forget them,” she adds at my confused look. “They were taken away by magic, right? So use your own magic to deal with the loss.”

“How many times do I have to tell you? I don't have faerie blood. There's no magic in me.”

She only smiles. “I meant your art.”

And then I understand. The art of creating something out of nothing is an act of magic. It's not only something born out of joy and love, but also out of our hurts and sorrows. And while it may not be a cure for the emotions that can assail us, it does allow us to step past the barrage of helpless sensation into other, less numbing, perspectives where it's possible to find a breathing space, and perhaps even some emotional balance.

So I get up and go into my studio, right then and there, leaving Jilly out on the balcony with the cat.

For a long moment I stand in the doorway, taking in the scent of turps and paint, then I step through, soft-soled shoes scuffing on the hardwood floor. I don't even think about what I'm doing as I squeeze paint onto my palette, put a new canvas on my easel, grab a handful of brushes. I start to lay in a loose, unformed background and I get a picture in my head of what I'm painting, a combination of my lost memories, the three of them tangled and interwoven like vines among the thorns and red berries of a hawthorn hedge.

Already, with every stroke of the brush, I can feel my anxieties lose some of their immediacy. The dark holes are still there, but I'm no longer so panicked that I think they're going to swallow me whole.

Jilly's right. It is magic, set free from the dreamlands by our imagination. Any act of creation is, from the fine arts to building a mudpie or a cat's cradle.

And if that's faerie blood, then we've all got its potential somewhere inside us, just waiting for us to call it up. Don't ever let anyone tell you different.

For the longest time I had
no idea why I killed Michael Hill.

I had nothing against him. Didn't know his history, for sure. Didn't know he was reaching for a sawed-off shotgun under the counter when I shot him.

It started out plain and simple, the way complicated things usually do. A gas bar out on Highway 14, north of the city, late at night, going on three
A.M.
Forget midnight. That's the real witching hour. Mine anyway. The highway was empty, like it usually is; a long gray ribbon that starts down by the lake as a city street then heads off into the hills until it finally trickles out into a dirt road. I've been up and down its length a thousand times that time of night. Until the commuters start showing up around six, you can count the headlights you pass on one hand. Come the witching hour, pretty much all the drunks are home in bed, sleeping it off, or piled up in a ditch somewhere.

That night I stopped for gas, filled the tank with a stolen credit card, then went inside, like I wanted to buy some smokes. Hands in the pockets of my jacket. The clerk behind the counter was in his late teens, no more than a kid, really.

His eyes went big when I pulled out the .38. He handed over the money like I told him and I stuffed it in the inside pocket of my jacket. Halfway out the door, I had this brief flash of vertigo. I guess that's what made me turn. He was starting to bend down below the counter and I lifted my .38.1 fired once. The bullet lifted him off his feet and smashed him back against the candy and cigarette display that covered the wall behind him. He went down in a spray of blood, chocolate bars, chip bags and cigarette packages.

I stood there in the doorway, half deaf from the gunshot, watching him twitch. Watching until he was still.

There was no surveillance camera. Nobody out on the highway to note my stolen car, this crapBuick with a set of plates lifted from somebody else's vehicle. The kid was dead—I didn't need a coroner to tell me that—and nothing could help him now.

But I walked back across the room anyway. Laying the gun on the glass counter, I picked up the phone. I dialed 911, told the dispatcher what had gone down, then I went out and sat on a chair by the pumps and waited for the sirens to reach me.

It was only at the trial that it all came out. How he had the sawed-off under the counter and was going for it. How he had all these souvenirs in his duffel bag. How DNA linked him to at least a half-dozen unsolved murders.

The court-appointed lawyer played it up big and I came out smelling pretty good for a two-bit hustler looking to face the chair. They ended up calling it manslaughter. I didn't walk, but the ten years I pulled felt like a Cakewalk when you size it up against the death penalty.

Only the whole time this was going on, I still know what I did. I'd no idea about the gun under the counter, or all this other freak business the kid was into. I just turned and shot him and, the way I see it, I don't deserve clemency.

But I don't say anything.

I tried once, just to my lawyer, this fresh-faced kid not much older than the one I shot. Earnest. Bright. Wants to do the right thing.

He held up his hand when I started to speak, didn't want to hear anymore. Didn't put me on the stand—he didn't have to. When he plea-bargained murder one down to manslaughter, the only formality left was the sentencing.

I read in the papers how the kin of the victims—the ones Hill did in—were calling me a hero. Story got so twisted around, I might have come to believe it myself, but I know what I did. So did his sister. I saw her sitting there in the courtroom, studying me, something dark and unreadable in her eyes. She was like one of those old places you can stumble upon in the piney wood hills. You step into a meadow, or underneath one of those touch-the-sky pines, and the hair stands up at the nape of your neck. A chill crawls across your skin, even though it's high summer. You're not scared, but you know you've touched something bigger than you. Strayed into a piece of some old, dark mystery that was here long before we crawled up out of the mud and took to standing around on our hind legs.

She's just a slip of a girl, but she was like those places all the same, like something big and impossible you can't explain. Don't ask how I knew, I just did.

So when she shows up in my cell, one night around that old witching hour of mine, I don't even ask how she got here. I feel myself fall into her eyes and that's when I have this memory that I've seen her before, not just in the courtroom, but someplace else. I just can't remember when or where. It's like she's been inside me, walking around in my head.

She stands there watching as I make a rope of my sheets, tie it around my neck. I put my chair on my cot and get the other end knotted up around the bars of my window. Taking hold of the bars, I push the chair and cot away with my feet. Then I let myself go. It's not a long drop, but it's enough to do the job.

I expect the darkness. Welcome it when it comes.

What I don't expect is to open my eyes again.

We're in the hills above the prison, standing under the pines looking down on the exercise yards and the stone walls, topped with barbed wire. There's a thin cover of snow on the ground, but no footprints leading to where we're standing. I guess we've been standing here a time, but I don't remember how we left the prison. I don't remember walking here.

All I remember is the snap of my neck and the hot embrace of the darkness back in my cell.

I turn to look at Michael Hill's sister.

There's not a whole lot of family resemblance, at least not between her and the picture of Hill they kept running in the paper. I can't really remember his face from the filling station, either. Just the thundering echo of the gunshot. The blood and all those candy bars and cigarette packages tumbling down on his twitching body.

She's short and dark-haired. Got a face like a child's—big head, large eyes, the small nose and mouth set close to her chin—but a body like a woman. Not like some showgirl, but mature. It makes for an unsettling contrast, like she's not quite one thing or the other.

“I don't know your name,” I find myself saying.

“But you know who I am.”

I nod. “Michael Hill's sister.”

“According to the papers.” Before I can say anything, she adds, “But then they've got their own take on things, don't they? They thought you were a hero.”

“I'm no hero.”

“Oh, hell. I know that. But I'm thinking you might still be useful.”

“Who are you?” I ask. “How did you …”

The prison cell seems like a long time ago. When I let myself fall…

“How did we get here?”

Her smile makes me uncomfortable. “And what do I want with you?” she says.

“That, too, I guess.”

It's around then I realize I'm dreaming. What else could it be?

“You're not dreaming,” she says, like she can read my mind. “You're dead.”

“But—?”

“Shh,” she says. “You're talking too much.”

She lifts her hand and everything goes black again.

The next time I open my eyes we're sitting in a junked Chevy out in front of some brick tenements. I figure we're down in the city now. Upper Foxville, maybe. Or the Rosses. I don't have a watch, but I know it's that time again. Three
A.M.
I can always feel the witching hour when it comes.

“You don't know why you killed him, do you?” she says.

I shake my head. “Not really.”

“I do.”

I wait for her to explain. For a long time she doesn't say anything and we just sit there, staring out the cracked windshield. I haven't seen a car go by since we got here, but I can hear a distant siren through the broken window on my side of the car.

“I made you do it,” she says finally.

I give her a blank look.

“It's complicated,” she tells me. “I'm one of the girls he killed.”

“Wait a minute. I thought you were his sister. That's what the papers said.”

She shrugs. “People see what they want to see. You notice nobody tried to interview me?”

I hadn't thought about that, but now it did seem odd.

“So what's your name?” I ask.

“Judy,” she says. “Judy Moore.”

“And you're telling me … what? That you're a ghost?”

“I don't know what I am. I'm just something that carried on. I wasn't the first girl they killed, but I think maybe I died the hardest. Maybe that's why I'm still here while the others got to go on.”

“What do you mean ‘they'? No one said anything about his having any partners.”

“Partner,” she says. “As in singular. Her name's Susan Green.”

“He had a woman helping him?”

“Why's that so hard to believe? You think we're all victims?”

“No. I just...”

She shakes her head. “She's counting on guys like you. If she ever gets caught, you know? She'll be all sweet-faced and ‘who me?' and no one's going to think she could hurt a flea.”

I let that sink in and have to admit she's probably right. Show a bit of cleavage, flash us some leg, and most of us will stop using our brains.

“Hill was the one who got to play with us,” she goes on, “and he cleaned up the messes when they were done. But Green was the one who collected us for him. She's the one that did all the cutting.”

The simple way she tells it is all the more chilling for her voice being so matter-of-fact.

“I'm sorry,” I say.

“Why? You didn't do anything.”

“Yeah, but no one deserves to die like that.”

“Stop it,” she says. “I might start to think you have a heart.”

She starts to lift her hand, but I remember what happened the last time she did that. Everything went black.

I catch her hand. Her gaze locks onto mine and for a long time I'm fighting the dark mystery I see in her eyes. Finally she lets her hand drop.

“You said you made me kill him,” I say. “But I've never seen you before.”

“Are you sure?”

I shake my head slowly.

“I was one of the first they killed,” she tells me, “so I've been around awhile. I've had time to think. To find things out. People can see us, but not all the time, and not necessarily when we want them to. I didn't plan to be seen in the courtroom. That just happened.”

“Why were you there?”

“I wanted to see what happened to you.”

The way she says it I hear an intellectual curiosity, nothing to make me think she cared. No surprises there.

“Mostly we just drift through life,” she goes on. “Seeing people, but not seen. And we can't touch them. So I guess we are like ghosts, or phantoms of some kind. But if we can find someone who's empty enough, we can borrow them for a time. To get things done.”

“What do you mean by ‘empty'?”

She shrugs. “Like you. You don't care about yourself or anybody else. Nobody cares about you.”

I could have protested, but what would be the point? Because she's right. My whole life has pretty much been going through the motions, running on empty, though it wasn't always like that. I can remember when I cared about things. That stopped around the time I was four or five.

My parents weren't at my sentencing, but I didn't expect them. I thought maybe my brothers might show, but the only person there for me was my lawyer, and that was because the court had appointed him. I know he didn't like me. I didn't hold it against him. I don't much like myself.

“So you borrowed me to kill Michael Hill?” I say, still trying to get around the idea.

She nods.

“And now you're going to do the same for this Green woman.”

“I would,” she says. “But I can't. You only get the one shot at riding somebody, and I used it up on you. I would've had you kill her too, but you went and got yourself put in prison.”

“So you … what?”

I flash back on my cell. Twisting the sheets, making the rope out of them. Letting go of the bars.

“So you had me kill myself?” I say.

“Oh, don't look at me like that,” she tells me. “We don't even know each other and you're acting like I betrayed you or something.”

I shake my head. “But maybe you betrayed your humanity.”

“Get with the program. I'm not human. I'm dead. And so are you.”

“And the point of me being dead?” I ask. “I'm guessing you didn't just want some company.”

“I can't ride anybody else.”

“Yeah, you already told me that.”

She doesn't say anything. Just looks at me with those mystery eyes.

I give my head another shake when I get it.

“Oh no,” I tell her. “I'm not killing anybody else for you.”

“Even though she deserves it? Even though they'll probably never catch her and she'll just find somebody else to play her sick little games with her? Do you want the blood of more innocent victims on your hands?”