Moonlight & Vines (52 page)

It starts while I'm lying in bed, watching the starlings gorge on rowan berries.

Eliza Casey loved a winter's day such as this. Clouds of fat, lazy snow drifting down, the sounds of the city muffled by the ever-deepening white blanket—footsteps, traffic, sirens, all. She didn't mind being bundled up like a roly-poly teddy bear as she trundled down the snowy streets, nor that it was her turn to open the gallery this Sunday morning. Not when it entailed her getting up early and out into this weather.

Too much of winter in the city involved dirty slush and bitter cold, frayed tempers and complaints about the wind chill, the icy pavement, the perceived interminable length of the season. A snowfall like this, early in the morning when she pretty much had the streets to herself, was like a gift, a whisper of quiet magic. A piece of enchanted time stolen from the regular whirl and spin of the world in which it felt as though anything could happen.

She was humming happily to herself by the time she reached the gallery. A gust of wind rocked the store sign as she went up the steps, dropping a clump of snow on her head and making her laugh even as some of it went sliding down the back of her neck. She swept the porch and steps, then went inside and stomped the snow from her boots in the hall. By the time she'd put the cash float in the register and made a cup of tea, another inch or so of snow had already accumulated on the porch. Since she wasn't opening for another twenty minutes, she decided to wait until then before sweeping again. First she'd have her tea.

Her studio at the back of the store tempted her, but she resolutely ignored its lure. Carrying her tea mug around the gallery with her, she busied herself with dusting, straightening the prints and postcards in their racks, tidying and restocking the art supplies that provided the gallery with its main bread and butter. By the time she was done, it was a few minutes before opening.

She put her parka back on and went out into the hall. It was as she was reaching for the broom where it was leaning up in the corner by the door that she noticed the coppery glint of a penny lying on the floor. The old rhyme went through her mind:

Find a penny, pick it up, and all the day you'll have good luck
.

She bent down, fingers stretched out to pluck it up from the hardwood floor, then jumped back as the penny made a turtle-like transformation from coin into a tiny man. Legs, arms, and a head popped out from a
suddenly plump little body and he scurried off, quick as a cockroach. Hardly able to believe what her own two eyes were showing her, she watched as he sped toward a crack between the baseboard and the floor, squeezed in through the narrow opening, and was gone.

Slowly she sat down on the floor, gaze locked on where he'd disappeared.

“Oh my,” she said, unaware that she was speaking aloud.

She looked up and down the length of the hall, wishing there was someone with her to confirm what she'd just seen. It was like something out of Mary Norton's
The Borrowers
, or one of William Dunthorn's Smalls come to life. But she was alone with the impossibility of the experience and already the rational part of her mind was reshuffling the memory of what she'd seen, explaining it away.

It hadn't been a penny in the first place, so of course it hadn't turned into a little man. It was only a bug that she'd startled. A beetle, though it wasn't summer. A cockroach, though they'd never had them in the building before.

Except . . . except . . .

She could so clearly call up the round swell of the little man's tummy and his spindly limbs. The tiny startled gaze that had met her own before he had scooted away.

“Oh, my,” she said again.

It's not that I don't want to believe; it's that I can't.

I'm as romantically inclined as the next person and can fully appreciate the notion of faeries dancing in some moonlit glade, or dwarves laboring over their silver and gold jewelry in some hidden kingdom, deep underground. Really, I can. But I also believe it's important to differentiate between fact and fiction—to keep one's daydreams separate from the realities of day-to-day life. It's when you mix the two that the trouble starts. Trust me. Living the first seventeen years of my life with a seriously schizophrenic mother, I know all about this.

So I subscribe to the scientific contention that nothing is proven until it can be shown to be repeatable. It makes perfect sense to me that anything that only happens once should be considered anecdotal, and therefore worthless from a scientific point of view. If faeries live at the bottom of the garden, they should always be observable. Even if you have to
stand on one foot during the second night of the full moon, with a pomegranate in your pocket and your head cocked a certain way. Every time you complete the specifications, you should see them.

“The problem with that,” Jilly said when we were talking about it a while ago, “is that
everything
happens only once.”

“You're being too literal,” I told her.

“Maybe you're not being literal enough.”

I shook my head. “No. I just think it's important to be grounded, that's all. To know that if I drop something, gravity will do its thing. That if I open the door to my room, I won't find some forgotten ruin of Atlantis there instead of my bed and dresser. I couldn't live in a world where anything can happen.”

“That's not what it's about. It's about staying open to the possibility that there's more to the world than what most of us have agreed is there to be seen. Just because something can't be measured and weighed in a laboratory doesn't mean it doesn't exist.”

“I don't know,” I said. “Sounds like a pretty good guideline to me.”

But Jilly shook her head. “If you're going to be like that, what makes it any less of a leap in faith to believe in something that you need a microscope or other special equipment to see? Who's to say how much your observations are being manipulated by electronics and doodads?”

“Now you're just being silly.”

Jilly smiled. “Depends on your point of view. Lots of people would say I was only being practical.”

“Right. The same people who didn't believe in elephants at the turn of the century because they'd never seen one themselves.”

“It's the same difference with an otherworldly being,” Jilly said. “Just because you've never seen one, doesn't mean they don't exist.”

I refuse to accept that. Accepting that would only lead to craziness and I've had enough of that to last me a lifetime. My mother spent more time with her imaginary companions, arguing and fighting and crying, than she did with us kids. There's no way I'm even cracking the door on the possibility of that happening to me.

It was a long moment before Eliza finally stood up again. Mechanically, she took the broom, went outside and swept the porch and steps once
more, then returned to the gallery. She hung her parka in the closet and sat down behind the cash counter, started to reach for the phone, then thought better of it. What would she say? Sarah would think she'd gone mad. But she felt she had to tell someone.

Picking up a pencil, she turned over one of the flyers advertising a Zeffy Lacerda concert at the YoMan next weekend and made a sketch of what she'd seen. Thought she'd seen. The tiny man with his round moon of a body and twig-thin arms and the little startled eyes. She drew him changing from penny to little man. Another of him looking up at her. Another of him squeezing in through the crack between the baseboard and floor, fat little rear end sticking out and legs wiggling furiously.

No, she thought, looking at her drawings. Sarah definitely wouldn't believe that she'd seen this little man. No one would. She hardly believed it herself. Truth was, the whole experience had left her feeling vaguely nervous and unsettled. It was as though the floor had suddenly gone spongy underfoot, as though the whole world had become malleable, capable of stretching in ways it shouldn't be able to. It was hard to trust that anything was the way it seemed to be. She found herself looking around the shop, constantly imagining movement in the corner of her eye. She grew increasingly more tense with the pressure of feeling that at any moment the unknown and previously unseen was about to manifest again.

But at the same time she was filled with a giddy exhilaration, a kind of heady, senseless good humor that stretched a grin on her lips and made her feel that everything she looked at she was seeing for the first time. The art hanging from the walls was vibrant, the colors almost pulsing. The spiraling grain in the room's wooden trim, window frames, and wainscotting pulled at her gaze, drawing it down into its twists and turns. The smell of the turps and solvents from her studio behind her had never had such a presence and bite before. It wasn't so much unpleasant as so very immediate.

This, she realized suddenly, was what Jilly meant when she talked about the epiphany of experiencing magic, howsoever small a piece of the mystery you stumbled upon. It redefined everything. It wasn't a scary thing, in and of itself; it only felt scary at first because it was so surprising.

She smiled. That's who she could call, she thought. She laid her pencil down and reached for the phone, but before she could dial, she heard the front door open and someone stamping their feet in the hall. When she looked up, it was to find Jilly standing in the doorway. Jilly gave her a
wave, then shook the snow from her tangled hair, brushed it from her parka.

“Oh, good,” she said, removing her mittens. “You are open. I wasn't sure when I saw the closed sign in the window, but I could see that the steps had been swept so I thought I'd give it a try anyway.”

Eliza blinked in surprise. “I can't believe you're here.”

“Oh, come on. The weather's not that bad. In fact, I rather like this kind of a snowfall. Pooh on the winter grinches, I say.”

“No, I mean I was just about to call you.”

“With the most tremendous good news, I hope.”

“Well, I . . .”

But by that point Jilly was standing by the counter and looking down at Eliza's sketches. Her eyes, already a startling blue, sparkled even brighter with merriment.

“Pennymen!” she said. “Oh, aren't they just the best?”

“You know what he is?”

Jilly gave her a puzzled look. “You don't? But they're your drawings.”

“No. I mean, they are, but I've never heard of a pennyman before. I just thought . . . I just saw one a few moments ago . . . out in the hall . . . and . . .”

Her voice trailed off.

Jilly smiled. “And now you don't know what to make of it at all.”

You didn't have to spend much time with Jilly for the conversation to turn to things not quite of this world. She claimed an intimate knowledge with the curious magical beings that populated many of her paintings, a point of view that frustrated die-hard realists such as Sarah at the same time as it enchanted those like Eliza who would love to believe, couldn't quite, but definitely leaned in that direction under the spell of Jilly's stories and firm belief. Or at least Eliza did so for the duration of the story.

“I guess that's pretty much it,” Eliza admitted.

Jilly took off her parka and dropped it on the floor, then settled down in the extra chair that they kept behind the counter for visitors.

“Well,” she said, “pennymen are very lucky. Christy wrote about them in one of his books.”

She cocked an eyebrow, but Eliza had to shake her head. Christy Riddell was a friend of Jilly's, a local author considered to be quite the expert on urban folklore and myths. Eliza had lost count of how many books he'd written.

“I guess I haven't read that one,” she said.

Jilly nodded. “Who can keep up with the man?” She scrunched her brow for a moment, thinking, then went on. “Anyway, the pennymen are all tied up with penny folklore. They start their lives in the branches of the penny trees.”

Eliza gave her a blank look.

“Which is another name for trembling aspens,” Jilly told her.

“Their leaves
do
look like coins,” Eliza said. “The way they move in a breeze.”

“Exactly. Except the pennymen are a coppery color—skin, hair, clothes, and all—and sort of turtlelike, since they can draw in their limbs and head and lie flat on the ground, looking exactly like a coin. Seeing one is like picking up the penny for luck. When they live in your house, they project a . . . I suppose you could call it an aura that promotes thriftiness and honesty.”

Eliza smiled. “As in pennywise?”

“You've got it. And then there's that business with ‘a penny for your thoughts.' Supposedly, every time that's offered, the pennymen acquire those thoughts and add them to what Christy calls ‘the long memory'—the history of a people, or a family, or a city, or a social circle; a kind of connective stream of thoughts and memories that define the collective. A non-monetary wealth of song and poetry, stories and gossip, that we can access through dreams.”

“Really?”

Jilly shrugged. “That's what Christy says—though they have to take a liking to you first. The problem is, they can also be mischievous little buggers if they decide you need to be taken down a notch or two. Not malicious, but definitely . . .” She looked for the word she wanted. “Vexing.”

“But they're so small—what could they do?”

“Being small doesn't necessarily mean they can't be a bother. They can be very good at hiding your keys, or the pen you were sure you put down, right there, just a moment ago. Maybe they'll switch all the auto-dial numbers on your phone. Or wet your postage stamps so they're all stuck together when you go to use them. Little things.”

Jilly looked down at Eliza's sketches again.

“I've never seen one myself,” she said, “but you've drawn them exactly the way I imagined they'd look from Christy's descriptions.”