Tapping the Dream Tree (6 page)

He nods. “But her going over wasn't.”

“I don't get it.”

Robert turns to look at me. “How's she going to get back?”

“Same way she went away—right?”

He answers with a shrug and then I get a bad feeling. It's like what happened with Malicorne and Jake, I realize. Stepped away, right out of the world, and they never came back. The only difference is, they meant to go.

“She won't know what to do,” Robert says softly. “She'll be upset and maybe a little scared, and then he's going to show up, offer to show her the way back.”

I don't have to ask who he's talking about.

“But she'll know better than to bargain with him,” I say.

“We can hope.”

“We've got to be able to do better than that,” I tell him.

“I'm open to suggestions.”

“You could call her back,” I say.

Robert shakes his head. “The devil, he's got himself a guitar, too.”

“I don't know what that means.”

“Think about it,” Robert says. “Whose music is she going to know to follow?”

The stranger laid his guitar case on the grass and opened it up. The instrument he took out was an old Martin D-45 with the pearl inlaid CD MARTIN logo on the headstock—a classic, prewar picker's guitar.

“Don't see many of those anymore,” Staley said.

“They didn't make all that many.” He smiled. “Though I'll tell you, I've never seen me a blue fiddle like you've got, not ever.”

“Got it from my grandma.”

“Well, she had taste. Give me an A, would you?”

Staley ran her bow across the A string of her fiddle and the stranger quickly tuned up to it.

“You ever play any contests?” he asked as he finished tuning.

He ran his pick across the strings, fingering an A minor chord. The guitar had a big rich sound with lots of bottom end.

“I don't believe in contests,” Staley said. “I think they take all the pleasure out of a music.”

“Oh, I didn't mean nothing serious. More like swapping tunes, taking turns till one of you stumps the other player. Just for fun, like.”

Staley shrugged.

“‘Course to make it interesting,” he added, “we could put a small wager on the outcome.”

“What kind of wager would we be talking about here?”

Staley didn't know why she was even asking that, why she hadn't just shut down this idea of a contest right from the get-go. It was like something in the air was turning her head all around.

“I don't know,” he said. “How about if I win, you'll give me a kiss?”

“A kiss?”

He shrugged. “And if you enjoy it, maybe you'll give me something more.”

“And if I win?”

“Well, what's the one thing you'd like most in the world?”

Staley smiled. “Tell you the truth, I don't want for much of anything. I keep my expectations low—makes for a simple life.”

“I'm impressed,” he said. “Most people have a hankering for something they can't have. You know, money, or fame, or a true love. Maybe living forever.”

“Don't see much point in living forever,” Staley told him. “Come a time when everybody you care about would be long gone, but there you'd be, still trudging along on your own.”

“Well, sure. But—”

“And as for money and fame, I think they're pretty much overrated. I don't really need much to be happy and I surely don't need anybody nosing in on my business.”

“So what about a true love?”

“Well, now,” Staley said. “Seems to me true love's something that comes to you, not something you can take or arrange.”

“And if it doesn't?”

“That'd be sad, but you make do. I don't know how other folks get by, but I've got my music. I've got my friends.”

The stranger regarded her with an odd, frustrated look.

“You can't tell me there's nothing you don't have a yearning for,” he said. “Everybody wants for something.”

“You mean for myself, or in general, like for there to be no more hurt in the world or the like?”

“For yourself,” he said.

Staley shook her head. “Nothing I can't wait for it to find me in its own good time.” She put her fiddle up under her chin. “So what do you want to play?”

But the stranger pulled his string strap back over his head and started to put his guitar away.

“What's the matter?” Staley asked. “We don't need some silly contest just to play a few tunes.”

The stranger wouldn't look at her.

“I've kind of lost my appetite for music,” he said, snapping closed the clasps on his case.

He stood up, his gaze finally meeting hers, and she saw something else in those clear blue eyes of his, a dark storm of anger, but a hurting, too. A loneliness that seemed so out of place, given his easygoing manner. A man like him, he should be friends with everyone he met, she'd thought. Except…

“I know who you are,” she said.

She didn't know how she knew, but it came to her, like a gauze slipping from in front of her eyes, like she'd suddenly shucked the dreamy quality of the otherworld and could see true once more.

“You don't look nothing like what I expected,” she added.

“Yeah, well, you've had your fun. Now let me be.”

But something her grandmother had told her once came back to her. “I tell you,” she'd said. “If I was ever to meet the devil, I'd kill him with kindness. That's the one thing old Lucifer can't stand.”

Staley grinned, remembering.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “Don't go off all mad.”

The devil glared at her.

“Or at least let me give you that kiss before you go.”

He actually backed away from her at that.

“What?” Staley asked. “Suddenly you don't fancy me anymore?”

“You put up a good front,” he said. “I didn't make you for such an accomplished liar.”

Staley shook her head. “I never lied to you. I really am happy with things the way they are. And anything I don't have, I don't mind waiting on.”

The devil spat on the grass at her feet, turned once around, and was gone, vanishing with a small
whuft
of displaced air.

That's your best parting shot? Staley wanted to ask, but decided to leave well enough alone. She gave her surroundings a last look, then started up fiddling again, playing herself back into the green of summer where she'd left her friends.

Robert's pretty impressed when Staley just steps out of that invisible door, calm as you please. We heard the fiddling first. It sounded like it was coming from someplace on the far side of forever, but getting closer by the moment, and then there she was, standing barefoot in the grass, smiling at us. Robert's even more impressed when she tells us about how she handled the devil.

After putting her fiddle away, she boils up some water on a Coleman stove and makes us up a pot of herbal tea. We take it out through the woods in porcelain mugs, heading up to the top of the field overlooking the county road. The car's still there. The sun's going down now, putting on quite a show, and the tea's better than I thought it would be. Got mint in it, some kind of fruit.

“So how do I stop this from happening again?” Staley asks.

“Figure out what your music's all about,” Robert tells her. “And take responsibility for it. Dig deep and find what's hiding behind the trees—you know, in the shadows where you can't exactly see things, you can only sense them—and always pay attention. It's up to you what you let out into the light.”

“Is that what you do?”

Robert nodded. “ ‘Course it's different for me, because we're different people. My music's about enduring. Perseverance. That's all the blues is ever about.”

“What about hope?”

Robert smiled. “What do you think keeps perseverance alive?”

“Amen,” I say.

After a moment, Staley smiles. We all clink our porcelain mugs together and drink a toast to that.

Christina's not particularly happy and I
don't blame her. If it wasn't for me, we wouldn't be hiding behind this Dumpster in back of the Harbor Ritz, trying not to breathe while these freaks keep getting closer and closer to where we're pressed up against the wall, pressed up so tight the bricks are leaving imprints on our skin. The sound of approaching footsteps is faint but distinct, hard leather brushing the concrete. I thought everybody did rubber-soled shoes these days, but what do I know?

Of course Christina's got to take some of the heat for this—if it wasn't for her, we wouldn't have been out on the streets tonight, sticking our noses in where they don't belong. But I'm the one who didn't take any of this seriously. Turns out my idea of how the world works is so off-base I've put a serious crimp into the question of our continued well-being. But, really. Life's complicated enough without adding monsters to the equation. Or whatever these things are.

One thing I know, they're ugly as sin. I pulled a couple of stretches in county, back in my impressionable youth, and, trust me, I know ugly, but correctional services never locked up anything like this. They smell like a sewer, great hulking creatures that remind me of neither rodents nor reptiles so much as something in between. Greasy-haired, with long narrow faces. Eyes like slits, lit by some inner hunger. Muscles corded and bulging under the thin fabric of their cheap suits, yet they move as delicately as ballerinas, a murderous
bourrée
in perfect demi-pointe.

There's five or six of them—I never stopped to take an exact head count—and they're strong. Scary strong. Earlier tonight, I saw one of them pull apart the iron railings of a fence the way you or I might tear cardboard, and I swear, from the way those long noses of theirs keep twitching, they're tracking us by smell.

“Oh, man,” Christina breathes in my ear. “If they—”

I put a finger across her lips, but it's too late. The footsteps stop.

It starts with a roll of undeveloped film, nothing special, Kodak 100, black and orange metal canister with plastic at either end, we've all seen them a hundred times before. Baxter and I are leaving a Williamson Street diner when I spy it in the gutter, peeking out from behind a fast food wrapper, like it's shy, or embarrassed to be seen in such company. Trash offends me, and since there's a waste container provided by the city conveniently close at hand, I pick them both up. The wrapper goes directly into the trash can, but I hesitate with the film canister.

“Whatcha got there?” Baxter asks.

I hold it up between my forefinger and thumb to show him. “Nothing. Some garbage.”

“You should get it developed.”

I shrug. “What for?”

But I stick it in my pocket all the same and then promptly forget about it until a week or so later when I'm looking for a phone number I jotted down on the back of somebody's old business card. Organization isn't one of my strong points. I have an electronic organizer which'd be really useful if I could ever get it together to actually input some information. As it is, it only serves as a glorified calculator, though I did manage to set the time and date when I bought it.

Anyway, I'm looking for this number, trying to remember what I was wearing that day and going through the pockets of pretty much anything I've had on over the past couple of weeks, when I come across the film canister. I put it aside while I continue my search, finally tracking the card down in the jumble on my dresser top where I dump the detritus that hangs out with the lint in my pockets. I make the call, then have another look at the film canister. What the hell. I run it by Kiko's Kwick Print where my friend Christina works.

Last week, she was a blonde. Today she's got a kind of raggedy pageboy, black and shiny as a crow's feather. It suits her better than the long blonde hair did. Brings out the character in her eyes, big and warm as a summer's day, an appealing mix of blues and greens and hazel browns. But she's wearing the frumpiest dress, one of those old-fashioned belted affairs that looks more like a housecoat, white with faded yellow polka dots and it's not closing properly in the front, showing way too much cleavage. Christina does all her shopping in the thrift stores, but the day she bought this dress she wasn't rolling sevens. ‘Course I don't tell her that.

“I didn't even know you had a camera,” she says as she writes out my order.

“I don't.”

I'm finding the dress distracting.

“My face is up here,” she says.

“Sorry. It's just…”

“Are you coming on to me?”

She's teasing, but I catch something unfamiliar in her manner, like she wouldn't mind if I was. We've been friends a long time, but not like that. I hit on her when we first met, but she was going with some guy and it's not something I ever really think about anymore. Whenever one of us doesn't have a commitment, the other one does. You know the scene.

“Depends,” I tell her. “Are you seeing anyone?”

I'm trying to remember her last boyfriend. Dan? Don?

“Depends,” she gives me right back. “Do you want me to be?”

There's a long heartbeat of silence that swells there in between us, a moment that could go either way. In the end, we put it on hold, something to consider. Christina smiles.

“So where'd you get the film?” she asks.

“I found it on the street and I guess curiosity just got the better of me today.”

Her smile gets a little wider, more knowing.

“Yeah,” she says. “Like that's never happened before.”

I can't help it. I'm like the cat that's just got to know everything.

She hands me my claim ticket.

“Maybe I'll call you sometime,” I say. “We could go for dinner, take in a show or something.”

“Maybe I'll call you.”

And she does, a few hours later, but she hasn't got cozying up on her mind.

“Sammy,” she says. There's an odd quality to her voice. It takes me a few moments to realize it's anxiety. “These pictures …”

“What about them?”

“They—I can't explain over the phone. You have to see them.”

I understand what she means when I swing by Kiko's a little later. It's the date stamps on the photos. They start off normal enough, last month, last week, but then they head off into the future, the red numbers marking off days and times that haven't happened yet.

“Must've been a defective camera,” I say.

I never have understood the need some people have to document the exact moment they took each shot.

Christina shakes her head. “Look at the pictures.”

I'd been flipping through them, a catalogue of some boring tourist's mementos of their trip to the big city, but stopped looking at the actual images when I twigged to the screw-up with the date stamps. Now I return my attention to the pictures.

It takes me a moment to see what she means because you don't spot them at first. They aren't pretty when you do. Ugly monster-men, slinking around in the shadows. Kind of an
X-Files
take on finding Waldo. Like the shot of St. Paul's, long view including the rose window and bell tower. Pay attention and you see the freak standing back there where darkness pools in the cathedral's arches. Once you twig to their presence in one, you can pick them out in each of the others, doing their creepy thing. I wonder who's filming a bad B-movie in town this week when I get to the last couple of shots on the roll.

This is sick stuff. There's a group of the freaks in these, a couple holding down some guy while the others do things to him I wouldn't wish on my worst enemies, and some of them seriously deserve it. Like the guy who keeps repoing my car.

“We have to do something,” Christina says. “Report them to the police.”

I shake my head. “And say what? We're talking big time con job here. I mean, check them out. These guys don't even look human.”

“I think that's supposed to be the point.”

“What? That there are monsters hiding among us?”

I do a Vincent Price impression, stentorian tone and all, but Christina ignores it.

“I don't know about monsters,” she says. “But guys running around in costumes killing people is serious business.” She hesitates a beat, then adds, “They are costumes, right?”

“Well, I'll tell you this. They're not real boogie men.”

The pictures put a lie to that, but we both know what they can do with special effects in the movies these days.

“Except,” I add, reluctantly, “who takes pictures of a murder and then leaves the undeveloped film around for anyone to find? And if someone was taken apart the way they did that guy, it'd be in all the papers.”

“What if it hasn't happened yet?” she says.

She puts her finger on the date stamp of the last one. It's a week away. Okay, six days, if you want to get anal about it.

I shake my head. “Come on.”

“But what if?” she says. “You hear about weird stuff like this all the time.”

“Only in the tabloids and on TV,” I say. “Real life's got a whole other take on something like this.”

“But—”

“We don't even know who these people are supposed to be.”

“We should try to find out. If it can save somebody's life …”

I want to repeat, nobody's in danger, this whole thing is a bad joke, but she looks so upset and serious I figure the least I can do is go through the motions and check it out. Give her a little peace of mind.

“I know some people who claim to have the inside track on this sort of thing,” I tell her. “You know, the weird and the wooly. I'll see what they can tell me.”

“You think I'm nuts.”

I smile. “But not dangerously so.”

I bundle up the photos and negatives and stick them back into their envelope.

“How much do I owe you?” I ask.

“It's on the house.”

“Thanks.”

She's still looking upset. She also needs another button at the top of that dress.

“You know,” I tell her, lifting my gaze to those eyes of hers. “When I first heard your voice, I thought you were calling to ask me out.”

I can tell that helps ease the bad way she's feeling.

“I guess this must be my lucky dress,” she says.

“So you busy tonight?”

She nods. “But I'm free tomorrow. Anything in particular you'd like me to wear?”

Point for her.

“Surprise me,” I tell her.

And she does.

When I come by to pick her up the next night, she meets me at her door in this slinky black vinyl affair that's clinging to everything that it's not pushing into a more interesting shape.

“You like?” she asks.

I'm not going to tell her I feel we should be going to some seriously hip club where they probably wouldn't even let us in instead of this little Italian restaurant over in Crowsea where I've made reservations. I'd prefer her in jeans and a blouse, but I have to admit there's something fascinating about what she's wearing. How often do you actually see anyone poured into a dress like this outside of a fashion spread?

“I picked it up as a joke,” she says. “I just wanted to see that look on your face, but now I feel like an idiot.”

“I like,” I assure her.

She puts on a jacket over the shiny vinyl and we head off for the restaurant in her car. I hoofed it to her apartment since my own wheels got repoed again this afternoon. Story of my life. I don't mean to fall behind on my payments, but that's the downside of walking the straight and narrow. These days I do legwork for a couple of lawyers, take on a few odd jobs on the side, all legit. It leaves me scrambling some weeks, but it sure beats doing time. Hell, pretty much anything beats doing time.

“Did you have any luck with your friends?” Christina asks after the waitress has brought us our drinks.

“Yes and no,” I say, and then I tell her about my day.

Newford's got more than its fair shake of the gullible, not to mention the usual cadre of psychics and charlatans waiting on the sidelines to relieve them of their hard-earned cash. Sometimes it seems that no matter where you turn you're hearing about seances and oracular readings, spiritual this and mystical that, not to mention whole shelves devoted to books and magazines on the same topics in the local B & N, revealing mysteries, explaining the unknown, half of them laying it all out so you can do it yourself, in the privacy of your own home, a little quality time spent with the ghosts and the goddesses. There must be something in the water here because sometimes it seems that people in this city will believe any damn thing.

But at least most of the ones I know who're into the weird and the wacky also know when to leave the hoodoo at home. In other words, they can make like normal people when need be. It's only when they're open for business that they put on the spooky voices and do their mystical thing.