Tapping the Dream Tree (8 page)

“One room,” she says.

Of course, later I start in to wondering what happens when the monsters think of us again and that involves another visit to Father Sully. This time I bring Christina with me. She's wearing a nice flower print cotton dress, another thrift shop find, but this time it's a winner. We find Sully drinking out of a paper bag in Fitzhenry Park, doing a really lousy job of hiding what he's got in the bag. I ask him what we can do to keep the monsters from coming after us again.

“Live a good life,” he tells us. “Be good people. Keep hateful thoughts out of your heart and mind. The angels will be too busy tempting sinners and following up on old bargains to even think about you again.”

That'll be easy for Christina, I think, but where does it leave me? I'm not the gentlest guy in the world, though lord knows I've been trying. I figure with my luck, I'll have the uglies on my tail within a couple of weeks, though they'll have to wait in line behind the repo man since I just got my car out of hock again.

I feel Christina's fingers twine with mine and turn to look at her.

“I know what you're thinking,” she says.

I never could put anything past her.

“I'll be here to keep you honest,” she tells me.

Sully gives a big amen to that and I nod in agreement. Looks like I've got my own debt to his wingless angels. I just hope they don't try to collect because I don't have what could even remotely be called a decent singing voice.

“Not yet,” she said. Her voice
was measured and calm, calmer than she'd ever thought she'd feel when this time arrived. “Give me a little longer. Just long enough to know who I am.”

But Death had not come to bargain that night and took her away.

“This place is haunted, you know,” the night clerk told him.

Christy stifled a sigh. Normally he was ready to hear anybody's story, especially on this sort of subject, but he was on a book tour for his latest collection, and after today's long round of interviews, signings, drop-in visits to bookstores and the like, all he wanted was some time to himself. A chance to put away the public face. To no longer worry if he'd inadvertently picked his nose and someone had seen and made note. (“While the author's premises are intriguing, his personal habits could certainly stand some improvement.”) He needed to get back to his room and call home, to let Saskia's voice remind him of the real life he led the other fifty or so weeks of the year when he wasn't out promoting himself.

But he felt he owed it to Alan, not to mention his own career, to do what he could to promote his books. Ever since the surprising success Alan's East Side Press had had with Katharine Mully, particularly her posthumous collection
Touch and Go,
the media had taken a serious interest in what Alan liked to call their contemporary myth books, said interest translating into better coverage, more reviews, and increasingly lucrative deals for paperback editions and other subsidiary rights. Alan considered Christy's and Mully's books to perfectly complement each other, rounding out his catalogue, the urban myths and folktales Christy collected telling the “real story” behind the contemporary fairy tales Mully had so effectively brought to life in her fiction.

He approached the various readings and signings with a genuine fondness for the readers who came to the events with their own stories and enthusiasms, and he made the rounds with as much good grace as he could muster toward those media types who sometimes seemed to be less interested in the actual work than they were in filling a few column inches of type, or minutes of airtime. Still, at the end of a long day, it was wearying and hard to maintain the public persona—not so much different from his own, simply more outgoing. Right now he seriously needed some downtime.

But, “Haunted?” he said.

She nodded. “Like in your books. There's a ghost in the hotel.”

Christy could believe it. There'd been a mix-up with his reservations so that when he'd arrived from the airport to drop off his bags, he'd been shunted to this other, smaller hotel down the street. Truth was, he liked it better. It was an older building, its gilded decor no longer the height of fashion, furnishings worn and decidedly frayed in places, but no less charming for that. If there weren't ghosts in a place like this, then they'd certainly drop by for a visit. It was the kind of hotel where bohemians and punks and open-minded businessmen on a budget could all rub shoulders in the lobby. The staff ran the gamut from the elderly man in a burgundy smoking jacket who'd checked him in this morning to the young woman standing on the other side of the counter at the moment. Earlier he'd heard the big band music of Tommy Dorsey drifting from the small office behind the check-in desk; tonight it was the more contemporary sound of Catatonia.

Leaning against the counter, Christy made note of the woman's nametag. Mary, it read.

At first he thought the name didn't really suit her. Mary struck him as a calm name, a little on the conservative side, and the night clerk was anything but, though he had to give her points for trying. She could have been anywhere from nineteen to twenty-nine, her frame more wiry than skinny, her chopped blonde spikes twisted and poking up at random from her brown roots through an odd collection of clips, bobby pins and elastics. Her fashion sense was riot grrl attempting business chic; he could tell she was about as comfortable in the sleek black skirt, white blouse and heels as he was in a tie and jacket—it didn't feel like your own skin so much as some stranger's. Her multiple earrings and the tattoo peeking out from below the sleeve of her blouse, not to mention that mad hair, told another story from the one her clothing offered, revealing part of the subtext of who she really was.

“What sort of ghost, Mary?” he asked.

There was an old smell in this hotel, but he didn't mind. It reminded him of favorite haunts like used book stores and libraries, with an undercurrent that combined rose hip tea, incense, and late night jazz club smoke.

“A sad one,” she said.

“Aren't they all?”

She gave him a surprised look.

“Think about it,” he said. “What else can they be but unhappy? If they weren't unhappy, they wouldn't still be hanging around, would they? They'd continue on.”

“Where to?”

“That's the big question.”

“I suppose.”

She fiddled with something on the desk below the counter, out of Christy's sight. Paper rustled. The monitor of the computer screen added a bluish cast to her features and hair.

“But what about vengeful ghosts?” she asked, gaze remaining on the paperwork.

Christy shrugged. “Vengeful, angry, filled with the need to terrorize others. They're all signs of unhappiness. Of discontent with one's lot in life, or should we say afterlife? Though really, it's the baggage they carry with them that keeps them haunting us.”

“Baggage?”

“Emotional baggage. The kind we all have to deal with. Some of us are better at it than others. You've seen them, sprinting through life with nothing more than a carry-on. But then there are the rest of us, dragging around everything from fat suitcases to great big steamer trunks, loaded down with all the debris of our discontent. Those ones with the trunks, they're the ones who usually stick around when the curtain comes down, certain that if they can just have a little longer, they can straighten up all their affairs.” He smiled. “Doesn't work that way, of course. Alive or dead, there's never enough time to get it all done.”

She lifted her gaze. “You even talk like a writer.”

“I'm just in that mode,” Christy told her. “Too many days talking about myself, going on endlessly about how and why I write what I do, where I find the stories I collect, why they're relevant beyond their simple entertainment value. It gets so that even ordinary conversation comes out in sound bites. I've been at it so much today my brain hasn't shifted back to normal yet.”

“I guess you can't wait to get home.”

Christy nodded. “But I like meeting people. It's just hard with so many at once. You can't connect properly, especially not with those who're expecting some inflated image that they've pulled out of my books and all they get is me. And it gets pretty tiring.”

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm keeping you up, aren't I?”

Christy had long ago realized that, in one way, ghosts and the living were much the same: most of them only needed to have their story be heard to ease their discontent. It didn't necessarily heal them, but it was certainly a part of the healing process.

“I can never sleep after a day like this,” he lied. “So tell me about your ghost.”

She went shy again, looking away.

“Really,” he said. “Share the story with me. I've done nothing but hear myself talk these past few days. Listening to somebody else would be a welcome change.”

That wasn't a lie and perhaps she could tell, because she gave him a small, grateful smile when her gaze returned to him.

“Do you believe in what you write?” she asked after a moment.

That was a familiar question from this and other tours and he didn't have to think about an answer, the rote response immediately springing to mind. He left it unspoken and traded it for a more truthful answer.

“It depends on the source,” he usually said. “I know for certain that the world's a strange and mysterious place with more in it than most of us will ever see or experience, so I can't immediately dismiss elements that are out of the ordinary simply because I haven't experienced them. But by the same token, I also don't immediately accept every odd and unusual occurrence when it's presented to me because the world's also filled with a lot of weird people with very active imaginations. The trouble is, unless you experience what they have, it's difficult to come to any definitive conclusion. I will say that, for all my predilection toward the whimsical and surreal, empirical evidence makes a strong argument.”

What he said to Mary was, “Yes. It might not necessarily be true for me, or for you, but if it's in one of my books, it's there because it's true for someone.”

“I don't understand,” she said. “Things are either true or they're not.”

“I think it's more a matter of perception. Just because ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the world has decided that something like a ghost or fairy spirit can't exist, doesn't mean they're right.”

“Do you really believe that?”

He nodded.

“That's not what you said on the TV interview this morning.”

Christy smiled. “You watch that show?”

“Only for the how-to segments.”

“But a pumpkin carving contest aimed at speed rather than quality?”

She laughed. “Come on. Don't tell me you didn't think it was funny.”

“This is true. …”

Christy had had a hard time keeping a straight face while sitting in the green room and watching that segment on the monitor. Between the host and the three guest pumpkin carvers, they'd made such a mess that it was only through the director's clever manipulation of camera angles that his own interview hadn't appeared to be filmed in the disaster zone it had been. There'd been pulp and seeds everywhere, squishing underfoot wherever you stepped, and he was still surprised that no one had been hurt with all those flashing knives. He'd left the studio with the smell of pumpkin pulp lingering in his nose for hours afterwards.

“So why do you say what you do when you're being interviewed?” she asked. “I mean, if you really believe in this stuff …”

“I don't want to be dismissed as a crackpot,” he told her, “because then they'll also dismiss the stories out of hand. This way, if I allow them to see that I have my own healthy skepticism, the stories get to stand on their own. We can talk about them, ad nauseum, but in the end, the words will remain. The stories will be there and taken more for their own merit, rather than being the product of some obviously deluded individual.”

“Do you really think they get a fair shake because of that?”

“A fairer shake,” Christy said.

She smiled. “You still talk like an author, you know.”

“And you still haven't told me about your ghost.”

She hesitated a moment longer, twisting her finger around one of the escaped locks of her short hair. The movement brought a stronger waft of rose hips to him and he realized it was her perfume, not tea he'd smelled earlier. From the office behind her, the CD player changed discs and Ednaswap began singing about a safety net.

“Well, the way I heard it,” Mary said, “she was the daughter of the hotel's owner. Really talented and artistic, but unfocused. She could have been a painter or a poet. A singer, a dancer, a writer, a photographer. She was good at everything she tried and she tried a lot of different things.”

“But?” Christy prompted when Mary fell silent.

“Her father wanted her to work in the hotel. She was all the family he had and he refused to let her go out into the world and ruin her life trying to make a living with anything so chancy. She could have just taken off, I suppose, but it was a different time. A teenage girl didn't do that in those days. Or maybe she simply wasn't brave enough. So she tried to be both. Dutiful daughter, working with her father in the family business, and the free spirit who wanted to create and experience and never settle down. But it didn't—couldn't—work.”

“I knew it was going to be a sad story,” Christy murmured.

“It gets sadder.”

He nodded. “They usually do.”

“One day,” Mary went on, “she couldn't deal with it anymore, so she killed off the free spirit inside her. She called up an image of Death in her mind, you know, scythe, black hood and all—not too imaginative, but then she was trying to kill her imagination, wasn't she? So cowled Death came at her bidding and cut the free spirit out of her soul and together they buried the poor little dead thing—figuratively, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Over time she pretty much forgot about that spirit lying somewhere, buried deep in her memory, and the odd thing is, she did come to feel better. There was no resentment toward her father or the hotel. When she did think of that girl, she remembered her as someone she'd once known, rather than someone she'd once been. But the funny thing is—the
ghostly
thing—is that from time to time guests will see that free spirit roaming through the halls.”