Dreams Underfoot: A Newford Collection (27 page)

“What about Anna Batterberry herself?” he asked. “Does she remember anything?”

Meran shook her head. “I don’t think she even realizes that we’ve met before, that she changed but we never did. She’s like most people; if it doesn’t make sense, she’d rather convince herself that it simply never happened.”

Cerin turned from the window to regard his wife.

“Perhaps the solution would be to remind her, then,” he said. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.

It’d probably do more harm than good. She’s just not the right sort of person ...”

Meran sighed again.

“But she could have been,” Cerin said.

“Oh yes,” Meran said, remembering. “She could have been. But it’s too late for her now.”

Cerin shook his head. “It’s never too late.”

From Lesli’s diary, addendum to the entry dated October 12th:

I hate living in this house! I just hate it! How could she do this to me? It’s bad enough that she never lets me so much as breathe without standing there behind me to determine that I’m not making a vulgar display of myself in the process, but this really isn’t fair.

I suppose you’re wondering what I’m talking about. Well, re-member that essay I did on ethnic minorities for Mr. Allen? Mom got her hands on it and it’s convinced her that I’ve turned into a Satan-worshipping drug fiend. The worst thing is that she gave it to Meran and now Meran’s supposed to “have a talk with me to set me straight” on Thursday.

I just hate this. She had no right to do that. And how am I supposed to go to my lesson now? It’s so embarrassing. Not to mention disappointing. I thought Meran would understand. I never thought she’d take Mom’s side—not on something like this.

Meran’s always seemed so special. It’s not just that she wears all those funky clothes and doesn’t talk down to me and looks just like one of those Pre-Raphaelite women, except that she’s got those really neat green streaks in her hair. She’s just a great person. She makes playing music seem so effortlessly magical and she’s got all these really great stories about the origins of the tunes. When she talks about things like where “The Gold Ring” came from, it’s like she really believes it was the faeries that gave that piper the tune in exchange for the lost ring he returned to them. The way she tells it, it’s like she was there when it happened.

I feel like I’ve always known her. From the first time I saw her, I felt like I was meeting an old friend.

Sometimes I think that she’s magic herself—a kind of oak-tree faerie princess who’s just spending a few years living in the Fields We Know before she goes back home to the magic place where she really lives.

Why would someone like that involve themselves in my mother’s crusade against Faerie?

I guess I was just being naive. She’s probably no different from Mom or Mr. Allen and everybody else who doesn’t believe. Well, I’m not going to any more stupid flute lessons, that’s for sure.

I hate living here. Anything’d be better.

Oh, why couldn’t I just have been stolen by the faeries when I was a baby? Then I’d
be
there and there’d just be some changeling living here in my place. Mom could turn
it
into a good little robot instead.

Because that’s all she wants. She doesn’t want a daughter who can think on her own, but a boring, closed-minded junior model of herself. She should have gotten a dog instead of having a kid. Dogs are easy to train and they like being led around on a leash.

I wish Granny Nell was still alive. She would never, ever have tried to tell me that I had to grow up and stop imagining things. Everything seemed magic when she was around. It was like she was magic—just like Meran. Sometimes when Meran’s playing her flute, I almost feel as though Granny Nell’s sitting there with us, just listening to the music with that sad wise smile of hers.

I know I was only five when she died, but lots of the time she seems more real to me than any of my relatives that are still alive. If she was still alive, I could be living with her right now and every-thing’d be really great.

Jeez, I miss her.

Anna Batterberry was in an anxious state when she pulled up in front of the Kelledy house on McKennitt Street. She checked the street number that hung beside the wrought-iron gate where the walkway met the sidewalk and compared it against the address she’d hurriedly scribbled down on a scrap of paper before leaving home. When she was sure that they were the same, she slipped out of the car and approached the gate.

Walking up to the house, the sound of her heels was loud on the walkway’s flagstones. She frowned at the thick carpet of fallen oak leaves that covered the lawn. The Kelledys had better hurry in cleaning them up, she thought. The city work crews would only be collecting leaves for one more week and they had to be neatly bagged and sitting at the curb for them to do so. It was a shame that such a pretty estate wasn’t treated better.

When she reached the porch, she spent a disorienting moment trying to find a doorbell, then realized that there was only the small brass door knocker in the middle of the door. It was shaped like a Cornish piskie.

The sight of it gave her a queer feeling. Where had she seen that before? In one of Lesli’s books, she supposed.

Lesli.

At the thought of her daughter, she quickly reached for the knocker, but the door swung open before she could use it. Lesli’s flute teacher stood in the open doorway and regarded her with a puzzled look.

“Anna,” Meran said, her voice betraying her surprise. “Whatever are you—”

“It’s Lesli,” Anna said, interrupting. “She’s ... she ...”

Her voice trailed off as what she could see of the house’s interior behind Meran registered. A strange dissonance built up in her mind at the sight of the long hallway, paneled in dark wood, the thick Oriental carpet on the hardwood floor, the old photographs and prints that hung from the walls. It was when she focused on the burnished metal umbrella stand, which was, itself, in the shape of a partially-opened umbrella, and the sidetable on which stood a cast-iron, grinning gargoyle bereft of its roof gutter home, that the curious sense of familiarity she felt delved deep into the secret recesses of her mind and connected with a swell of long-forgotten memories.

She put out a hand against the doorjamb to steady herself as the flood rose up inside her. She saw her mother-in-law standing in that hallway with a kind of glow around her head. She was older than she’d been when Anna had married Peter, years older, her body wreathed in a golden Botticelli nimbus, that beatific smile on her lips, Meran Kelledy standing beside her, the two of them sharing some private joke, and all around them ... presences seemed to slip and slide across one’s vision.

No, she told herself. None of that was real. Not the golden glow, nor the flickering twig-thin figures that teased the mind from the corner of the eye.

But she’d thought she’d seen them. Once. More than once. Many times. Whenever she was with Helen Batterberry ...

Walking in her mother-in-law’s garden and hearing music, turn-ing the corner of the house to see a trio of what she first took to be children, then realized were midgets, playing fiddle and flute and drum, the figures slipping away as they approached, winking out of existence, the music fading, but its echoes lingering on. In the mind. In memory. In dreams.

“Faerie,” her mother-in-law explained to her, matter-of-factly. Lesli as a toddler, playing with her invisible friends that could actually be
seen
when Helen Batterberry was in the room. No. None of that was possible.

That was when she and Peter were going through a rough period in their marriage. Those sights, those strange ethereal beings, music played on absent instruments, they were all part and parcel of what she later realized had been a nervous breakdown. Her analyst had agreed.

But they’d seemed so real.

In the hospital room where her mother-in-law lay dying, her bed a clutter of strange creatures, tiny wizened men, small perfect women, all of them flickering in and out of sight, the wonder of their presences, the music of their voices, Lesli sitting wide-eyed by the bed as the courts of Faerie came to bid farewell to an old friend.

“Say you’re going to live forever,” Leslie had said to her grand-mother.

“I will,” the old woman replied. “But you have to remember me. You have to promise never to close your awareness to the Other-world around you. If you do that, I’ll never be far.”

All nonsense.

But there in the hospital room, with the scratchy sound of the IVAC pump, the clean white walls, the incessant beep of the heart monitor, the antiseptic sting in the air, Anna could only shake her head.

“None ... none of this is real ....” she said.

Her mother-in-law turned her head to look at her, an infinite sadness in her dark eyes.

“Maybe not for you,” she said sadly, “but for those who will see, it will always be there.”

And later, with Lesli at home, when just she and Peter were there, she remembered Meran coming into that hospital room, Meran and her husband, neither of them having aged since the first time Anna had seen them at her mother-in-law’s house, years, oh now years ago. The four of them were there when Helen Batterberry died. She and Peter had bent their heads over the body at the moment of death, but the other two, the unaging musicians who claimed Faerie more silently, but as surely and subtly as ever Helen Batterberry had, stood at the window and watched the twilight grow across the hospital lawn as though they could see the old woman’s spirit walk-ing off into the night.

They didn’t come to the funeral.

They

She tried to push the memories aside, just as she had when the events had first occurred, but the flood was too strong. And worse, she knew they were true memories. Not the clouded rantings of a stressful mind suffering a mild breakdown.

Meran was speaking to her, but Anna couldn’t hear what she was saying. She heard a vague, disturbing music that seemed to come from the ground underfoot. Small figures seemed to caper and dance in the corner of her eye, humming and buzzing like summer bees. Vertigo gripped her and she could feel herself falling. She realized that Meran was stepping forward to catch her, but by then the darkness had grown too seductive and she simply let herself fall into its welcoming depths.

From Lesli’s diary, entry dated October 13th:

I’ve well and truly done it. I got up this morning and instead of my school books, I packed my flute and some clothes and you, of course, in my knapsack; and then I just left. I couldn’t live there anymore. I just couldn’t.

Nobody’s going to miss me. Daddy’s never home anyway and Mom won’t be looking for me—she’ll be looking for her idea of me and that person doesn’t exist. The city’s so big that they’ll never find me.

I was kind of worried about where I was going to stay tonight, especially with the sky getting more and more overcast all day long, but I met this really neat girl in Fitzhenry Park this morning. Her name’s Susan and even though she’s just a year older than me, she lives with this guy in an apartment in Chinatown. She’s gone to ask him if I can stay with them for a couple of days. His name’s Paul. Susan says he’s in his late twenties, but he doesn’t act at all like an old guy. He’s really neat and treats her like she’s an adult, not a kid. She’s his
girlfriend!

I’m sitting in the park waiting for her to come back as I write this. I hope she doesn’t take too long because there’s some weird-looking people around here. This one guy sitting over by the War Memorial keeps giving me the eye like he’s going to hit on me or something. He really gives me the creeps. He’s got this kind of dark aura that flickers around him so I know he’s bad news.

I know it’s only been one morning since I left home, but I already feel different. It’s like I was dragging around this huge weight and all of a sudden it’s gone. I feel light as a feather. Of course, we all know what that weight. was: neuro-mother.

Once I get settled in at Susan and Paul’s, I’m going to go look for a job. Susan says Paul can get me some fake ID so that I can work in a club or something and make some real money. That’s what Susan does. She said that there’s been times when she’s made fifty bucks in tips in just one night!

I’ve never met anyone like her before. It’s hard to believe she’s almost my age. When I compare the girls at school to her, they just seem like a bunch of kids. Susan dresses so cool, like she just stepped out of an MTV video. She’s got short funky black hair, a leather jacket and jeans so tight I don’t know how she gets into them. Her T-shirt’s got this really cool picture of a Brian Froud faery on it that I’d never seen before.

When I asked her if she believes in Faerie, she just gave me this big grin and said, “I’ll tell you, Lesli, I’ll believe in anything that makes me feel good.”

I think I’m going to like living with her.

When Anna Batterberry regained consciousness, it was to find her-self inside that disturbingly familiar house. She lay on a soft, over-stuffed sofa, surrounded by the crouching presences of far more pieces of comfortable-looking furniture than the room was really meant to hold. The room simply had a too-full look about it, aided and abetted by a bewildering array of knickknacks that ranged from dozens of tiny porcelain miniatures on the mantle, each depicting some anthropomorphized woodland creature play-ing a harp or a fiddle or a flute, to a life-sized fabric mach& sculp-ture of a grizzly-bear in top hat and tails that reared up in one corner of the room.