Dreams Underfoot: A Newford Collection

Charles de Lint

1993

ISBN 0-765-30679-4

OCR from pdf version, but not proofread.

Myth, music, and magic, and dreams underfoot .

Welcome to Newford ..

Welcome to the music clubs, the waterfront, the alleyways where ancient myths and magic spill into the modern world. Come meet Jilly, painting wonders in the rough city streets; and Geordie, playing fiddle while he dreams of a ghost; and the Angel of Grasso Street gathering the fey and the wild and the poor and the lost. Gemmins live in abandoned cars, and skells traverse the tunnels below, while mermaids swim in the gray harbor waters and fill the cold night with their song.

Like Mark Helprin’s
Winter’s Tale
and John Crowley’s
Little, Big
,
Dreams Underfoot
is a must-read book not only for fans of urban fantasy but for all those who seek magic in everyday life.

“In de Lint’s capable hands, modern fantasy becomes something other than escapism. It becomes folk song,—the stuff of urban myth.”

—
The Phoenix Gazette

“Charles de Lint shows that, far from being escapism, contemporary fantasy can be the deep mythic literature of our time.”

—The
Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

By Charles de Lint

The Fair in Emain Macha

Forests of the Heart

Greenmantle

Into the Green

The Ivory and the Horn

Jack of Kinrowan

The Little Country

Memory and Dream

Moonheart

Moonlight and Vines

The Onion Girl

Someplace to Be Flying

Spiritwalk

Svaha

Tapping the Dream Tree

Trader

Yarrow

Sources

“Uncle Dobbin’s Parrot Fair” first appeared in
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine,
November 1987.

“Timeskip” first appeared in
Post Mortem,
edited by Paul F. Olson and David B. Silva; St. Martin’s Press, 1989.

“That Explains Poland” first appeared in
Pulphouse, the Hardback Magazine
#2.

“Freewheeling” first appeared in
Pulphouse, the Hardbook Magazine
#6.

“Romano Drom” first appeared in
Pulphouse, the Hardback Magazine
#3.

“The Sacred Fire” first appeared in
Stalkers,
edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg; Dark Harvest, 1989.

“The Stone Drum” was first published by Triskell Press, 1989.

“Winter Was Hard” first appeared in
Pulphouse, the Hardback Maga-zine
#10.

“Paperjack” was first published by Cheap Street, 1991.

“Bridges” first appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fic-tion,
October/November 1992.

“Tallulah” first appeared in
Dead End: City Limits,
edited by Paul F. Olson and David B. Silva; St.

Martin’s Press, 1991.

“Small Deaths” is original to this collection.

“Ghosts of Wind and Shadow” was first published by Triskell Press, 1990.

“Pity the Monsters” first appeared in
The Ultimate Frankenstein,
edited by Byron Preiss; Dell, 1991.

“The Conjure Man” first appeared in
After the King,
edited by Martin H. Greenberg; Tor Books, 1992.

“Our Lady of the Harbour” was first published by Axolotl Press, 1991.

“In the House of My Enemy” is original to this collection.

“The Moon Is Drowning While I Sleep” was first published in
Snow White, Blood Red,
edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling; William Morrow and Co., 1993.

“But for the Grace Go I” first appeared in
Chilled to the Bone,
edited by Robert T. Garcia; Mayfair Games, Inc., 1991.

Acknowledgments

Creative endeavors require inspiration and nurturing, and these stories are no exception. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank a few people who were important to the existence of this collection: First and foremost, my wife MaryAnn, not only for her indefati-gable work as first reader and editor, but also for her part in the genesis of many of the individual stories; Terri Windling, for her ongoing support, both professionally and personally, especially with this cycle of stories, and for providing the collection’s title, which was also the title of her 1992 one-woman art show at the Book Arts Gallery in Tucson, Arizona;

Kris Rusch and Dean Smith of Axolotl Press/Pulphouse Publish-ing, who were always asking for more stories and provided the first home for many of these;

And for all those other editors who gave me the opportunity to take a holiday from longer work to explore Newford’s streets: Bruce Barber, Ellen Datlow, Gardner Dozois, Robert T. Garcia, Ed Gor-man, Martin H. Greenberg, Cara Inks, Paul F. Olson, Jan and George O’Nale, Byron Preiss and David B. Silva.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Uncle Dobbin’s Parrot Fair

The Stone Drum

Time Skip

Freewheeling

That Explains Poland

Romano Drom

The Sacred Fire

Winter Was Hard

Pity The Monsters

Ghosts Of Wind And Shadow

The Conjure Man

Small Deaths

The Moon Is Drowning While I Sleep

In The House Of My Enemy

But For The Grace Go I

Bridges

Our Lady Of The Harbour

Paperjack

Tallulah

Tread softly because you
tread on my dreams.

—W. B. Yeats, from “He wishes for the cloths of heaven”

The book you hold is neither a novel nor a simple gathering of short stories. Rather, it is a cycle of urban myths and dreams, of passions and sorrows, romance and farce woven together to create a tapestry of interconnected dramas, interconnected lives—the kind of magic to be found at the heart of any city, among any tightly knit commu-nity of friends. If the imaginary city of Newford is more mythic, more mysterious than the cities you have known, that may be only because you’ve not seen them through Charles de Lint’s eyes, through the twilight dreams he weaves out of language and music. Here he spreads these dreams before us and bids us, in the words of Yeats’s poem, to
tread softly,
for urban magic is fleeting and shy .. . and its touch is a transformation.

Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, James Hillman, Louise-Marie von Franz and others have written eloquently and extensively about the importance of myth in our modern society, the need for tales rich in archetypal images to give coherence to fragmented modern lives. “Using archetypes and symbolic language,” writes folklore scholar and author Jane Yolen, “[fantasy tales] externalize for the listener conflicts and situations that cannot be spoken of or explained or as yet analyzed. They give substance to dreams .. . [and] lead us to the understanding of the deepest longings and most daring visions of humankind. The images from the ancients speak to us in modern tongue though we may not always grasp the ‘meanings’ consciously. Like dreams, the meanings slip away, leaving us shaken into new awarenesses. We are moved by them, even when—or perhaps
be-cause—we
do not understand them on a conscious level. They are penumbral, partially lit, and it is the dark side that has the most power. So when the modern mythmaker, the writer of literary fairy tales, dares to touch the old magic and try to make it work in new ways, it must be done with the surest of touches.”

De Lint is one of those writers who mine this vein with a deft, sure touch. Readers new to his distinctive brand of “urban fantasy” might find his mix of ancient folklore motifs and contemporary urban characters somewhat startling—for ours is a society that loves to separate and classify, putting “fantasy”

fiction on a shelf far away from books of “realistic” or “mainstream” fiction (despite the fact that the mainstream shelves include works of modern fantasy by foreign authors such as Calvino, Allende and Garcia Marquez). While American book distributors and critics continue to build up genre walls, writers like de Lint are quietly laboring to take them down again, brick by brick, story by story. Forget the labels. Forget the assumptions you make when you think
of fantasy,
or even
short story collections.

And then you will be able to fully enter the en-chanted streets de Lint has created.

We enter Newford via the more familiar streets of Los Angeles, via the tales of Newford author Christy Riddell; and then de Lint leads us on to Newford itself, a North American city that might exist anywhere or nowhere, thousands of miles away or just past the next exit on the Interstate. Like any city, Newford has its posh districts, its slums, its day-life and night-life and the twilight between; but most of all it’s the street people, the downtown people, that de Lint wants us to meet: the buskers and artists, punkers and gypsies, street walkers and wizards and runaway kids, people for whom magic is not just a supernatural visitation but a manifestation of the soul’s deepest longings and a bright spark of hope lodged within a desper-ate heart. The greatest magic on the streets of Newford is the magic of community, of friendship and love, support and compassion—for these are the larger themes de Lint uses the bright symbols of folklore to address.

In Newford,
creation
is the supreme act of magic, whether that creation be a painting, a fiddle tune or a poem, an AIDS clinic or battered children’s shelter, or one’s own family and a harmonious way of life. By these acts we create magic in our own lives; by these acts, large and small, we reinvent the world.

For de Lint, these acts are transformed into stories to nurture the growth of his Tree of Tales, which contains the collective stories of the world:

“The Tree of Tales,” says de Lint’s Conjure Man, “is an act of magic, an act of faith. Its existence becomes an affirmation of the power that the human spirit can have over its own destiny. The stories are just stories—they entertain, they make one laugh or cry—but if they have any worth they carry with them a deeper resonance that remains long after the final page is turned ....”

The interconnected stories of the Newford cycle are a particularly lovely new limb on that ancient tree, and one that shall grow and flower beyond the pages of this single book as de Lint continues to explore Newford’s myriad streets.

In his own city of Ottawa, in Canada, Charles de Lint is a novelist, a poet, a fiddler, a flute-player, a painter, a critic and folklore scholar; but most of all he is a magician: the kind who makes magic with his multi-disciplined creativity, with the tools of myth, folklore and fantasy. “I think those of us who write fantasy,” said fellow author Susan Cooper in her Newbery Award acceptance speech, “are dedi-cated to making impossible things seem likely, making dreams seem real. We are somewhere between the Abstract and Impressionist painters. Our writing is haunted by those parts of our experience which we do not understand, or even consciously remember. And if you, child or adult, are drawn to our work, your response comes from that same shadowy land .... I have been attempting defini-tions, but I am never really comfortable when writing about ‘fan-tasy.’ The label is so limiting. It seems to me that every work of art is a fantasy, every book or play, painting or piece of music, every-thing that is made, by craft and talent, out of somebody’s imagina-tion. We have all dreamed, and recorded our dreams as best we could.”