Read Online Dreams Underfoot: A Newford Collection by Charles De Lint, John Jude Palencar - Free Book Online Page B

pressed close beside her.
    “Ugly, furtive and sullen,” Meran said. “Perhaps Christy wasn’t so far off in naming them.”
    “They ... they’re real, aren’t they?” Jilly asked in a small voice.
    Meran nodded. “And not at all like the bodachs of my homeland. Bodachs are mischievous and prone to trouble, but not like this. Those creatures were weaned on malevolence.”
    Jilly leaned weakly against the windowsill.
    “What are we going to do?” she asked.
    She scratched at her palm—the itch was worse than ever. Meran caught her hand, pulled it away.
    There was an unhappy look in her eyes when she lifted her gaze from the mark on Jilly’s palm.
    “Where did you get that?” she asked.
    Jilly looked down at her palm. The scab was gone, but the skin was all dark around the puncture wound now—an ugly black dis-coloration that was twice the size of the original scab.
    “I scratched myself,” she said. “Down in Old City.”
    Meran shook her head. “No,” she said. “They’ve marked you.”
    Jilly suddenly felt weak. Skookin were real. Mysterious winds rose to animate trees. And now she was marked?
    She wasn’t even sure what that meant, but she didn’t like the sound of it. Not for a moment.

    Her gaze went to the stone drum where it stood on Meran’s mantel. She didn’t think she’d ever hated an inanimate object so much before.
    “Marked ... me ... ?” she asked.
    “I’ve heard of this before,” Meran said, her voice apologetic. She touched the mark on July’s palm.
    “This is like a ... bounty.”
    “They really want to kill me, don’t they?”
    Jilly was surprised that her voice sounded as calm as it did. In-side she felt as though she was crumbling to little bits all over the place.
    “Skookin are real,” she went on, “and they’re going to tear me up into little pieces—just like they did to the man in Christy’s stupid story.”
    Meran gave her a sympathetic look.
    “We have to go now,” she said. “We have to go and confront them now, before ...”
    “Before what?”
    July’s control over her voice was slipping. Her last word went shrieking up in pitch.
    “Before they send something worse,” Meran said.
    Oh great, Jilly thought as waited for Meran to change into cloth-ing more suitable for the underground trek to Old City. Not only were skookin real, but there were worse things than those pumpkin-head creatures living down there under the city.
    She slouched in one of the chairs by the mantelpiece, her back to the stone drum, and pretended that her nerves weren’t all scraped raw, that she was just over visiting a friend for the evening and everything was just peachy, thank you. Surprisingly, by the time Meran returned, wearing jeans, sturdy walking shoes and a thick woolen shirt under a denim jacket, she did feel better.
    “The bit with the trees,” she asked as she rose from her chair. “Did you do that?”
    Meran shook her head.
    “But the wind likes me,” she said. “Maybe it’s because I play the flute.”
    And maybe it’s because you’re a dryad, Jilly thought, and the wind’s got a thing about oak trees, but she let the thought go unspoken.
    Meran fetched the long, narrow bag that held her flute and slung it over her shoulder.
    “Ready?” she asked.
    “No,” Ply said.
    But she went and took the drum from the mantelpiece and joined Meran by the front door. Meran stuck a flashlight in the pocket of her jacket and handed another to Jilly, who thrust it into the pocket of the coat Meran was lending her. It was at least two sizes too big for her, which suited Jilly just fine.
    Naturally, just to make the night complete, it started to rain before they got halfway down the walkway to McKennitt Street.
    For safety’s sake, city work crews had sealed up all the entrances to Old City in the mid-seventies—all the entrances of which the city was aware, at any rate. The street people of Newford’s back lanes and allies knew of anywhere from a half-dozen to