Dreams Underfoot

Uncle Dobbin’s Parrot Fair

1

She would see them in the twilight when the wind was right, rolypoly shapes propelled by ocean breezes, turning endover-end along the beach or down the alley behind her house like errant beach balls granted a moment’s freedom. Sometimes they would get caught up against a building or stuck on a curb and then spindly little arms and legs would unfold from their fat bodies until they could push themselves free and go rolling with the wind again. Like flotsam in a river, like tumbleweeds, only brightly colored in primary reds and yellows and blues.

They seemed very solid until the wind died down. Then she would watch them come apart the way morning mist will when the sun burns it away, the bright colors turning to ragged ribbons that tattered smokelike until they were completely gone.

Those were special nights, the evenings that the Balloon Men came.

In the late sixties in HaightAshbury, she talked about them once. Incense lay thick in the air—two cones of jasmine burning on a battered windowsill. There was an old iron bed in the room, up on the third floor of a house that no one lived in except for runaways and street people. The mattress had rustcolored stains on it. The incense covered the room’s musty smell. She’d lived in a form of selfimposed poverty back then, but it was all a part of the Summer of Love.

“I know what you mean, man,” Greg Longman told her. “I’ve seen them.”

He was wearing a dirty white Tshirt with a simple peace symbol on it and scuffed plastic thongs.

Sticking up from the waist of his bellbottomed jeans at a fortyfive degree angle was a descant recorder. His long blonde hair was tied back with an elastic. His features were thin—an asceticlooking face, thin and drawnout from too much time on the streets with too little to eat, or from too much dope.

“They’re like ...” His hands moved as he spoke, trying to convey what he didn’t feel words alone could say—a whole other language, she often thought, watching the long slender fingers weave through the air between them. “... they’re just too much.”

“You’ve really seen them?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah. Except not on the streets. They’re floating high up in the air, y’know, like fat little kites.”

It was such a relief to know that they were real.

“‘Course,” Greg added, “I gotta do a lot of dope to clue in on ’em, man.

Ellen Brady laid her book aside. Leaning back, she flicked off the light behind her and stared out into the night. The memory had come back to her, so clear, so sharp, she could almost smell the incense, see Greg’s hands move between them, little colored afterimage traces following each movement until he had more arms than Kali.

She wondered what had ever happened to the Balloon Men.

Long lightbrown hair hung like a cape to her waist. Her parents were Irish—Munster O’Healys on her mother’s side, and Bradys from Derry on her father’s. There was a touch of Spanish blood in her mother’s side of the family, which gave her skin its warm dark cast. The Bradys were pure Irish and it was from them that she got her bigboned frame. And something else. Her eyes were a clear grey—twilight eyes, her father had liked to tease her, eyes that could see beyond the here and now into somewhere else.

She hadn’t needed drugs to see the Balloon Men.

Shifting in her wicker chair, she looked up and down the beach, but it was late and the wind wasn’t coming in from the ocean. The book on her lap was a comforting weight and had, considering her present state of mind, an even more appropriate title. How to Make the Wind Blow. If only it was a tutor, she thought, instead of just a collection of odd stories.

The author’s name was Christy Riddell, a reedthin Scot with a head full of sudden fancies. His hair was like an unruly hedgerow nest and he was half a head shorter than she, but she could recall dancing with him in a garden one night and she hadn’t had a more suitable partner since. She’d met him while visiting friends in a house out east that was as odd as any flight of his imagination. Long rambling halls connected a bewildering series of rooms, each more fascinating than the next. And the libraries. She’d lived in its libraries.

“When the wind is right,” began the title story, the first story in the book, “the wise man isn’t half so trusted as the fool.”

Ellen could remember when it was still a story that was told without the benefit ofpen and paper. A story that changed each time the words traveled from mouth to ear: There was a gnome, or a gnomish sort of a man, named Long who lived under the pier at the end of Main Street. He had skin brown as dirt, eyes blue as a clear summer sky. He was thin, with a fat tummy and a long crooked nose, and he wore raggedy clothes that he found discarded on the beach and wore until they were threadbare. Sometimes he bundled his tangled hair up under a bright yellow cap. Other times he wove it into many braids festooned with colored beads and the discarded tabs from beer cans that he polished on his sleeve until they were bright and shiny.

Though he’d seem more odd than magical to anyone who happened to spy him out wandering the streets or along the beach, he did have two enchantments.

One was a pig that could see the wind and follow it anywhere. She was pink and fastidiously clean, big enough to ride to market—which Long sometimes did—and she could talk. Not pigtalk, or even pigLatin, but plain English that anyone could understand if they took the time to listen. Her name changed from telling to telling, but by the time Long’s story appeared in the book either she or Christy had settled on Brigwin.

Long’s other enchantment was a piece of plain string with four complicated elfknots tied in it—one to call up a wind from each of the four quarters. North and south. East and west. When he untied a knot, that wind would rise up and he’d ride Brigwin in its wake, sifting through the debris and pickings left behind for treasures or charms, though what Long considered a treasure, another might throw out, and what he might consider a charm, another might see as only an old button or a bit of tangled wool. He had a good business trading his findings to woodwives and witches and the like that he met at the market when midnight was past and gone, ordinary folk were in bed, and the beach towns belonged to those who hid by day, but walked the streets by night.

Ellen carried a piece of string in her pocket, with four complicated knots tied into it, but no matter how often she undid one, she still had to wait for her winds like anyone else. She knew that strings to catch and call up the wind were only real in stories, but she liked thinking that maybe, just once, a bit of magic could tiptoe out of a tale and step into the real world. Until that happened, she had to be content with what writers like Christy put to paper.

He called them mythistories, those odd little tales of his. They were the ghosts of fancies that he would track down from time to time and trap on paper. Oddities. Some charming, some grotesque. All of them enchanting. Foolishness, he liked to say, offered from one fool to others.

Ellen smiled. Oh, yes. But when the wind is right ...

She’d never talked to Christy about the Balloon Men, but she didn’t doubt that he knew them.

Leaning over the rail of the balcony, two stories above the walkway that ran the length of the beach, Christy’s book held tight in one hand, she wished very hard to see those rolypoly figures one more time.

The ocean beat its rhythm against the sand. A light breeze caught at her hair and twisted it into her face.

When the wind is right.

Something fluttered inside her, like wings unfolding, readying for flight. Rising from her chair, she set the book down on its wicker arm and went inside. Down the stairs and out the front door. She could feel a thrumming between her ears that had to be excitement moving blood more quickly through her veins, though it could have been the echo of a halflost memory—a singing of small deep voices, rising up from diaphragms nestled in fat little bellies.

Perhaps the wind was right, she thought as she stepped out onto the walkway. A quarter moon peeked at her from above the oil rigs far out from the shore. She put her hand in the pocket of her cotton pants and wound the knotted string she found there around one finger. It was late, late for the Balloon Men to be rolling, but she didn’t doubt that there was something waiting to greet her out on the street.

Perhaps only memories. Perhaps a fancy that Christy hadn’t trapped on a page yet.

There was only one way to find out.

2

Peregrin Laurie was as sharpfaced as a weasel—a narrowshoul-dered thin whip of a teenager in jeans and a torn Tshirt. He sat in a doorway, knees up by his chin, a mane of spiked multicolored hair standing straight up from his head in a twoinch Mohawk swath that ran down to the nape of his neck like a lizard’s crest fringes. Wrapping his arms around bruised ribs, he held back tears as each breath he took made his chest burn.

Goddamn beach bums. The bastards had just about killed him and he had no one to blame but himself. Scuffing through a parking lot, he should have taken off when the car pulled up. But no. He had to be the poseur and hold his ground, giving them a long cool look as they came piling drunkenly out of the car. By the time he realized just how many of them there were and what they had planned for him, it was too late to run. He’d had to stand there then, heart hammering in his chest, and hope bravado’d see him through, because there was no way he could handle them all.

They didn’t stop to chat. They just laid into him. He got a few licks in, but he knew it was hopeless.

By the time he hit the pavement, all he could do was curl up into a tight ball and take their drunken kicks, cursing them with each fiery gasp of air he dragged into his lungs.

The booger waited until he was down and hurting before making its appearance. It came out from under the pier that ran by the parking lot, black and greasy, with hot eyes and a mouthful of barracuda teeth. If it hadn’t hurt so much just to breathe, he would have laughed at the way his attackers backed away from the creature, eyes bulging as they rushed to their car. They took off, tires squeal—

ing, but not before the booger took a chunk of metal out of the rear fender with one swipe of a paw.

It came back to look at him—black nightmare head snuffling at him as he lifted his head and wiped the blood from his face, then moving away as he reached out a hand towards it. It smelled like a sewer and looked worse, a squat creature that had to have been scraped out of some monstrous nose, with eyes like hot coals in a smear of a face and a slick wet look to its skin. A booger, plain and simple. Only it was alive, clawed and toothed. Following him around ever since he’d run away ....

His parents were both burnouts from the sixties. They lived in West Hollywood and got more embarrassing the older he became. Take his name. Laurie was bad enough, but Peregrin ... Lifted straight out of that Lord of the Rings book. An okay read, sure, but you don’t use it to name your kid. Maybe he should just be thankful he didn’t get stuck with Frodo or Bilbo. By the time he was old enough to start thinking for himself, he’d picked out his own name and wouldn’t answer to anything but Reece. He’d gotten it out of some book, too, but at least it sounded cool. You needed all the cool you could get with parents like his.

His old man still had hair down to his ass. He wore wireframed glasses and listened to shit on the stereo that sounded as burnedout as he looked. The old lady wasn’t much better. Putting on weight like a whale, hair a frizzy brown, as long as the old man’s, but usually hanging in a braid. Coming home late some nights, the whole house’d have the sweet smell of weed mixed with incense and they’d give him these goofy looks and talk about getting in touch with the cosmos and other spacey shit. When anybody came down on him for the way he looked, or for dropping out of school, all they said was let him do his own thing.

His own thing. Jesus. Give me a break. With that kind of crap to look forward to at home, who wouldn’t take off first chance they got? Though wouldn’t you know it, no sooner did he get free of them than the booger latched onto him, following him around, skulking in the shadows.

At first, Reece never got much of a look at the thing—just glimpses out of the corner of his eyes—and that was more than enough. But sleeping on the beaches and in parks, some nights he’d wake with that sewer smell in his nostrils and catch something slipping out of sight, a dark wet shadow moving close to the ground. After a few weeks, it started to get bolder, sitting on its haunches a halfdozen yards from wherever he was bedding down, the hot coal eyes fixed on him.

Reece didn’t know what it was or what it wanted. Was it looking out for him, or saving him up for its supper? Sometimes he thought, what with all the drugs his parents had done back in the sixties—good times for them, shit for him because he’d been born and that was when his troubles had started—he was sure that all those chemicals had fucked up his genes. Twisted something in his head so that he imagined he had this twofoot high, walking, grunting booger following him around.

Like the old man’d say. Bummer.

Sucker sure seemed real, though.

Reece held his hurt to himself, ignoring Ellen as she approached. When she stopped in front of him, he gave her a scowl.

“Are you okay?” she asked, leaning closer to look at him.

He gave her a withering glance. The long hair and jeans, flowered blouse. Just what he needed.

Another sixties burnout.

“Why don’t you just fuck off and die?” he said.

But Ellen looked past the tough pose to see the blood on his shirt, the bruising on his face that the shadows halfhid, the hurt he was trying so hard to pretend wasn’t there.

“Where do you live?” she asked.

“What’s it to you?”

Ignoring his scowl, she bent down and started to help him to his feet.

“Aw, fuck—” Reece began, but it was easier on his ribs to stand up than to fight her.

“Let’s get you cleaned up,” she said.

“Florence fucking Nightingale,” he muttered, but she merely led him back the way she’d come.

From under the pier a wet shadow stirred at their departure. Reece’s booger drew back lips that had the rubbery texture of an octopus’

skin. Row on row of pointed teeth reflected back the light from the streetlights. Hatehot eyes glimmered red. On silent leathery paws, the creature followed the slowmoving pair, grunting softly to itself, claws clicking on the pavement.

3

Bramley Dapple was the wizard in “A Week of Saturdays,” the third story in Christy Riddell’s How to Make the Wind Blow. He was a small wizened old man, spry as a kitten, thin as a reed, with features lined and brown as a dried fig. He wore a pair of wirerimmed spectacles without prescription lenses that he polished incessantly, and he loved to talk.

“It doesn’t matter what they believe,” he was saying to his guest, “so much as what you believe.”

He paused as the brownskinned goblin who looked after his house came in with a tray of biscuits and tea. His name was Goon, a tallish creature at threefoot-four who wore the garb of an organgrinder’s monkey: striped black and yellow trousers, a red jacket with yellow trim, small black slippers, and a little green and yellow cap that pushed down an unruly mop of thin dark curly hair. Gangly limbs with a protruding tummy, puffed cheeks, a wide nose, and tiny black eyes added to his monkeylike appearance.

The wizard’s guest observed Goon’s entrance with a startled look, which pleased Bramley to no end.

“There,” he said. “Goon proves my point.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“We live in a consensual reality where things exist because we want them to exist. I believe in Goon, Goon believes in Goon, and you, presented with his undeniable presence, tea tray in hand, believe in Goon as well. Yet, if you were to listen to the world at large, Goon is nothing more than a figment of some fevered writer’s imagination—a literary construct, an artistic representation of something that can’t possibly exist in the world as we know it.”

Goon gave Bramley a sour look, but the wizard’s guest leaned forward, hand outstretched, and brushed the goblin’s shoulder with a featherlight touch. Slowly she leaned back into the big armchair, cushions so comfortable they seemed to embrace her as she settled against them.

“So ... anything we can imagine can exist?” she asked finally. Goon turned his sour look on her now.

She was a student at the university where the wizard taught; third year, majoring in fine arts, and she had the look of an artist about her. There were old paint stains on her jeans and under her fingernails.

Her hair was a thick tangle of brown hair, more unruly than Goon’s curls. She had a smudge of a nose and thin puckering lips, workman’s boots that stood by the door with a history of scuffs and stains written into their leather, thick woolen socks with a hole in the left heel, and one shirttail that had escaped the waist of her jeans. But her eyes were a pale, pale blue, clear and alert, for all the casualness of her attire.

Her name was Jilly Coppercorn.

Bramley shook his head. “It’s not imagining. It’s knowing that it exists—without one smidgen of doubt.”

“Yes, but someone had to think him up for him to ...” She hesitated as Goon’s scowl deepened.

“That is ...”

Bramley continued to shake his head. “There is some semblance of order to things,” he admitted, “for if the world was simply everyone’s different conceptual universe mixed up together, we’d have nothing but chaos. It all relies on will, you see—to observe the changes, at any rate. Or the differences. The anomalies. Like Goon—oh, do stop scowling,” he added to the goblin.

“The world as we have it,” he went on to Jilly, “is here mostly because of habit. We’ve all agreed that certain things exist—we’re taught as impressionable infants that this is a table and this is what it looks like, that’s a tree out the window there, a dog looks and sounds just so. At the same time we’re informed that Goon and his like don’t exist, so we don’t—or can’t—see them.”

“They’re not made up?” Jilly asked.

This was too much for Goon. He set the tray down and gave her leg a pinch. Jilly jumped away from him, trying to back deeper into the chair as the goblin grinned, revealing two rows of decidedly nastylooking teeth.

“Rather impolite,” Bramley said, “but I suppose you do get the point?”

Jilly nodded quickly. Still grinning, Goon set about pouring their teas.

“So,” Jilly asked, “how can someone ... how can I see things as they really are?”

“Well, it’s not that simple,” the wizard told her. “First you have to know what it is that you’re looking for—before you can find it, you see.”

Ellen closed the book and leaned back in her own chair, thinking about that, about Balloon Men, about the young man lying in her bed. To know what you were looking for. Was that why when she went out hoping to find Balloon Men, she’d come home with Reece?

She got up and went to the bedroom door to look in at him. After much protesting, he’d finally let her clean his hurts and put him to bed. Claiming to be not the least bit hungry, he’d polished of a whole tin of soup and the better part of the loaf of sourdough bread that she had just bought that afternoon. Then, of course, he wasn’t tired at all and promptly fell asleep the moment his head touched the pillow.

She shook her head, looking at him now. His rainbow Mohawk made it look as though she’d brought some hybrid creature into her home—part rooster, part boy, it lay in her bed snoring softly, hardly real. But definitely not a Balloon Man, she thought, looking at his thin torso under the sheets.

About to turn away, something at the window caught her eye. Frozen in place, she saw a doglike face peering back at her from the other side of the pane—which was patently impossible since the bedroom was on the second floor and there was nothing to stand on outside that window. But impossible or not, that doglike face with its coalred eyes and a fierce grin of glimmering teeth was there all the same.

She stared at it, feeling sick as the moments ticked by. Hunger burned in those eyes. Anger.

Unbridled hate. She couldn’t move, not until it finally disappeared—sliding from sight, physically escaping rather than vanishing the way a hallucination should.

She leaned weakly against the doorjamb, a faint buzzing in her head. Not until she’d caught her breath did she go to the window, but of course there was nothing there. Consensual reality, Christy’s wizard had called it. Things that exist because we want them to exist. But she knew that not even in a nightmare would she consider giving life to that monstrous head she’d seen staring back in at her from the night beyond her window.

Her gaze went to the sleeping boy in her bed. All that anger burning up inside him. Had she caught a glimpse of something that he’d given life to?

Ellen, she told herself as she backed out of the room, you’re making entirely too much out of nothing.

Except something had certainly seemed to be there. There was absolutely no question in her mind that something had been out there.

In the living room she looked down at Christy’s book. Bramley Dapple’s words skittered through her mind, chased by a feeling of ... of strangeness that she couldn’t shake. The wind, the night, finding Reece in that doorway. And now that thing in the window.

She went and poured herself a brandy before making her bed on the sofa, studiously avoiding looking at the windows. She knew she was being silly—she had to have imagined it—but there was a feeling in the air tonight, a sense of being on the edge of something vast and grey. One false step, and she’d plunge down into it. A void. A nightmare.

It took a second brandy before she fell asleep.

Outside, Reece’s booger snuffled around the walls of the house, crawling up the side of the building from time to time to peer into this or that window. Something kept it from entering—some disturbance in the air that was like a wind, but not a wind at the same time. When it finally retreated, it was with the knowledge in what passed for its mind that time itself was the key. Hours and minutes would unlock whatever kept it presently at bay.

Barracuda teeth gleamed as the creature grinned. It could wait. Not long, but it could wait.

4

Ellen woke the next morning, stiff from a night spent on the sofa, and wondered what in God’s name had possessed her to bring Reece home. Though on reflection, she realized, the whole night had proceeded with a certain surreal quality of which Reece had only been a small part. Rereading Christy’s book. That horrific face at the window. And the Balloon Men—she hadn’t thought of them in years.

Swinging her feet to the floor, she went out onto her balcony. There was a light fog hazing the air.

Boogieboarders were riding the waves close by the pier—only a handful of them now, but in an hour or so their numbers would have multiplied beyond count. Raking machines were cleaning the beach, their dull roar vying with the pounding of the tide. Men with metal detectors were patiently sifting through the debris the machines left behind before the trucks came to haul it away. Near the tide’s edge a man was jogging backwards across the sand, sharply silhouetted against the ocean.

Nothing out of the ordinary. But returning inside she couldn’t shake the feeling that there was someone in her head, something flying darkwinged across her inner terrain like a crow. When she went to wash up, she found its crow eyes staring back at her from the mirror. Wild eyes.

Shivering, she finished up quickly. By the time Reece woke she was sitting outside on the balcony in a sweatshirt and shorts, nursing a mug of coffee. The odd feeling of being possessed had mostly gone away and the night just past took on the fading quality of halfremembered dreams.

She looked up at his appearance, smiling at the way a night’s sleep had rearranged the lizard crest fringes of his Mohawk. Some of it was pressed flat against his skull. Elsewhere, multicolored tufts stood up at bizarre angles. His mouth was a sullen slash in a field of short beard stubble, but his eyes still had a sleepy look to them, softening his features.

“You do this a lot?” he asked, slouching into the other wicker chair on the balcony.

“What? Drink coffee in the morning?”

“Pick up strays.”

“You looked like you needed help.”

Reece nodded. “Right. We’re all brothers and sisters on starship earth. I kinda figured you for a bleeding heart.”

His harsh tone soured Ellen’s humour. She felt the something that had watched her from the bathroom mirror flutter inside her and her thoughts returned to the previous night. Christy’s wizard talking. Things exist because we want them to exist.

“After you fell asleep,” she said, “I thought I saw something peering in through the bedroom window

....”

Her voice trailed off when she realized that she didn’t quite know where she was going with that line of thought. But Reece sat up from his slouch, suddenly alert.

“What kind of something?” he asked.

Ellen tried to laugh it off “A monster,” she said with a smile. “Redeyed and all teeth.” She shrugged.

“I was just having one of those nights.”

“You saw it?” Reece demanded sharply enough to make Ellen sit up straighter as well.

“Well, I thought I saw something, but it was patently impossible so ...” Again her voice trailed off.

Reece had sunk back into his chair and was staring off towards the ocean. “What ... what was it?” Ellen asked.

“I call it a booger,” he replied. “I don’t know what the hell it is, but it’s been following me ever since I took off from my parents’ place ....”

The stories in Christy’s book weren’t all charming. There was one near the end called “Raw Eggs”

about a man who had a Ghostbusterslike creature living in his fridge that fed on raw eggs. It pierced the shells with a needlefine tooth, then sucked out the contents, leaving rows of empty eggshells behind.

When the man got tired of replacing his eggs, the creature crawled out of the fridge one night, driven forth by hunger, and fed on the eyes of the man’s family.

The man had always had a fear of going blind. He died at the end of the story, and the creature moved on to another household, more hungry than ever ....

Reece laid aside Christy Riddell’s book and went looking for Ellen. He found her sitting on the beach, a big, loose Tshirt covering her bikini, her bare legs tucked under her. She was staring out to sea, past the waves breaking on the shore, past the swimmers, bodysurfers and kids riding their boogieboards, past the oil rigs to the horizon hidden in a haze in the faroff distance. He got a lot of weird stares as he scuffed his way across the sand to finally sit down beside her.

“They’re just stories in that book, right?” he said finally. “You tell me.”

“Look. The booger it’s—Christ, I don’t know what it is. But it can’t be real.”

Ellen shrugged. “I was up getting some milk at John’s earlier,” she said, “and I overheard a couple of kids talking about some friends of theirs. Seems they were having some fun in the parking lot last night with a punker when something came at them from under the pier and tore off part of their bumper.”

“Yeah, but—”

Ellen turned from the distant view to look at him. Her eyes held endless vistas in them and she felt the flutter of wings in her mind.

“I want to know how you did it,” she said. “How you brought it to life.”

“Look, lady. I don’t—”

“It doesn’t have to be a horror,” she said fiercely. “It can be something good, too.” She thought of the gnome that lived under the pier in Christy’s story and her own Balloon Men. “I want to be able to see them again.”

Their gazes locked. Reece saw a darkness behind Ellen’s clear grey eyes, some wildness that reminded him of his booger in its intensity.

“I’d tell you if I knew,” he said finally.

Ellen continued to study him, then slowly turned to look back across the waves. “Will it come to you tonight?” she asked.

“I don’t kn—” Reece began, but Ellen turned to him again. At the look in her eyes, he nodded.

“Yeah,” he said then. “I guess it will.”

“I want to be there when it does,” she said.

Because if it was real, then it could all be real. If she could see the booger, if she could understand what animated it, if she could learn to really see and, as Christy’s wizard had taught Jilly Coppercorn, know what she was looking for herself, then she could bring her own touch of wonder into the world.

Her own magic.

She gripped Reece’s arm. “Promise me you won’t take off until I’ve had a chance to see it.”

She had to be weirdedout, Reece thought. She didn’t have the same kind of screws loose that his parents did, but she was gone all the same. Only, that book she’d had him read ... it made a weird kind of sense. If you were going to accept that kind of shit as being possible, it might just work the way that book said it did. Weird, yeah. But when he thought of the booger itself ...

“Promise me,” she repeated.

He disengaged her fingers from his arm. “Sure,” he said. “I got nowhere to go anyway.”

5

They ate at The Green Pepper that night, a Mexican restaurant on Main Street. Reece studied his companion across the table, reevaluating his earlier impressions of her. Her hair was up in a loose bun now and she wore a silky creamcolored blouse above a slim dark skirt. Mentally she was definitely a bit weird, but not a burnout like his parents. She looked like the kind of customer who shopped in the trendy galleries and boutiques on Melrose Avenue where his old lady worked, back home in West Hollywood.

Half the people in the restaurant were probably wondering what the hell she was doing sitting here with a scuzz like him.

Ellen looked up and caught his gaze. A smile touched her lips. “The cook must be in a good mood,”

she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I’ve heard that the worse mood he’s in, the hotter he makes his sauces.”

Reece tried to give her back a smile, but his heart wasn’t in it. He wanted a beer, but they wouldn’t serve him here because he was underage. He found himself wishing Ellen wasn’t so much older than him, that he didn’t look like such a freak sitting here with her. For the first time since he’d done his hair, he was embarrassed about the way he looked. He wanted to enjoy just sitting here with her instead of knowing that everyone was looking at him like he was some kind of geek.

“You okay?” Ellen asked.

“Yeah. Sure. Great food.”

He pushed the remainder of his rice around on the plate with his fork. Yeah, he had no problems.

Just no place to go, no place to fit in. Body aching from last night’s beating. Woman sitting there across from him, looking tasty, but she was too old for him and there was something in her eyes that scared him a little. Not to mention a nightmare booger dogging his footsteps. Sure. Things were just rocking, mama.

He stole another glance at her, but she was looking away, out to the darkening street, wine glass raised to her mouth.

“That book your friend wrote,” he said.

Her gaze shifted to his face and she put her glass down.

“It doesn’t have anything like my booger in it,” Reece continued. “I mean it’s got some ugly stuff, but nothing just like the booger.”

“No,” Ellen replied. “But it’s got to work the same way. We can see it because we believe it’s there.”

“So was it always there and we’re just aware of it now? Or does it exist because we believe in it? Is it something that came out of us—out of me?”

“Like Uncle Dobbin’s birds, you mean?”

Reece nodded, unaware of the flutter of dark wings that Ellen felt stir inside her.

“I don’t know,” she said softly.

“Uncle Dobbin’s Parrot Fair” was the last story in Christy Riddell’s book, the title coming from the name of the pet shop that Timothy James Dobbin owned in Santa Ana. It was a gathering place for every kind of bird, tame as well as wild. There were finches in cages and parrots with the run of the shop, not to mention everything from sparrows to crows and gulls crowding around outside.

In the story, T. J. Dobbin was a retired sailor with an interest in nineteenthcentury poets, an old bearded tar with grizzled red hair and beetling brows who wore baggy blue cotton trousers and a white Tshirt as he worked in his store, cleaning the bird cages, feeding the parakeets, teaching the parrots words. Everybody called him Uncle Dobbin.

He had a sixteenyear-old assistant named Nori Wert who helped out on weekends. She had short blonde hair and a deep tan that she started working on as soon as school was out. To set it off she invariably wore white shorts and a tanktop. The only thing she liked better than the beach was the birds in Uncle Dobbin’s shop, and that was because she knew their secret.

She didn’t find out about them right away. It took a year or so of coming in and hanging around the shop and then another three weekends of working there before she finally approached Uncle Dobbin with what had been bothering her.

“I’ve been wondering,” she said as she sat down on the edge of his cluttered desk at the back of the store. She fingered the world globe beside the blotter and gave it a desultory spin.

Uncle Dobbin raised his brow questioningly and continued to fill his pipe.

“It’s the birds,” she said. “We never sell any—at least not since I’ve started working here. People come in and they look around, but no one asks the price of anything, no one ever buys anything. I guess you could do most of your business during the week, but then why did you hire me?”

Uncle Dobbin looked down into the bowl of his pipe to make sure the tobacco was tamped properly. “Because you like birds,” he said before he lit a match. Smoke wreathed up towards the ceiling. A bright green parrot gave a squawk from where it was roosting nearby and turned its back on them.

“But you don’t sell any of them, do you?” Being curious, she’d poked through his file cabinet to look at invoices and sales receipts to find that all he ever bought was birdfood and cages and the like, and he never sold a thing. At least no sales were recorded.

“Can’t sell them.”

“Why not?”

“They’re not mine to sell.”

Nori sighed. “Then whose are they?”

“Better you should ask what are they.”

“Okay,” Nori said, giving him an odd look. “I’ll bite. What are they?”

“Magic.”

Nori studied him for a moment and he returned her gaze steadily, giving no indication that he was teasing her. He puffed on his pipe, a serious look in his eyes, then took the pipe stem from his mouth.

Setting the pipe carefully on the desk so that it wouldn’t tip over, he leaned forward in his chair.

“People have magic,” he said, “but most of them don’t want it, or don’t believe in it, or did once, but then forgot. So I take that magic and make it into birds until they want it back, or someone else can use it.”

“Magic.”

“That’s right.”

“Not birds.”

Uncle Dobbin nodded.

“That’s crazy,” Nori said.

“Is it?”

He got up stiffly from his chair and stood in front of her with his hands outstretched towards her chest. Nori shrank back from him, figuring he’d flaked out and was going to cop a quick feel, but his hands paused just a few inches from her breasts. She felt a sudden pain inside—like a stitch in her side from running too hard, only it was deep in her chest. Right in her lungs. She looked down, eyes widening as a beak appeared poking out of her chest, followed by a parrot’s head, its body and wings.

It was like one of the holograms at the Haunted House in Disneyland, for she could see right through it, then it grew solid once it was fully emerged. The pain stopped as the bird fluttered free, but she felt an empty aching inside. Uncle Dobbin caught the bird, and soothed it with a practiced touch, before letting it fly free. Numbly, Nori watched it wing across the store and settle down near the front window where it began to preen its feathers. The sense of loss inside grew stronger.

“That ... it was in me ... I ...”

Uncle Dobbin made his way back to his chair and sat down, picking up his pipe once more.

“Magic,” he said before he lit it.

“My ... my magic ... ?”

Uncle Dobbin nodded. “But not anymore. You didn’t believe.”

“But I didn’t know!” she wailed.

“You got to earn it back now,” Uncle Dobbin told her. “The side cages need cleaning.”

Nori pressed her hands against her chest, then wrapped her arms around herself in a tight hug as though that would somehow ease the empty feeling inside her.

“Eearn it?” she said in a small voice, her gaze going from his face to the parrot that had come out of her chest and was now sitting by the front window. “By ... by working here?”

Uncle Dobbin shook his head. “You already work here and I pay you for that, don’t I?”

“But then how ... ?”

“You’ve got to earn its trust. You’ve got to learn to believe in it again.”

Ellen shook her head softly. Learn to believe, she thought. I’ve always believed. But maybe never hard enough. She glanced at her companion, then out to the street. It was almost completely dark now.

“Let’s go walk on the beach,” she said.

Reece nodded, following her outside after she’d paid the bill. The lemony smell of eucalyptus trees was strong in the air for a moment, then the stronger scent of the ocean winds stole it away.

6

They had the beach to themselves, though the pier was busy with strollers and people fishing. At the beach end of the long wooden structure, kids were hanging out, fooling around with bikes and skateboards. The soft boom of the tide drowned out the music of their ghetto blasters. The wind was cool with a salt tang as it came in from over the waves. In the distance, the oil rigs were lit up like Christmas trees.

Ellen took off her shoes. Carrying them in her tote bag, she walked in the wet sand by the water’s edge. A raised lip of the beach hid the shorefront houses from their view as they walked south to the rocky spit that marked the beginning of the Naval Weapons Station.

“It’s nice out here,” Reece said finally. They hadn’t spoken since leaving the restaurant.

Ellen nodded. “A lot different from L.A.”

“Two different worlds.”

Ellen gave him a considering glance. Ever since this afternoon, the sullen tone had left his voice. She listened now as he spoke of his parents and how he couldn’t find a place for himself either in their world, nor that of his peers.

“You’re pretty down on the sixties,” she said when he was done.

Reece shrugged. He was barefoot now, too, the waves coming up to lick the bottom of his jeans where the two of them stood at the water’s edge.

“They had some good ideas—people like my parents,” he said, “but the way they want things to go

... that only works if everyone agrees to live that way.”

“That doesn’t invalidate the things they believe in.”

“No. But what we’ve got to deal with is the real world and you’ve got to take what you need if you want to survive in it.” Ellen sighed. “I suppose.”

She looked back across the beach, but they were still alone. No one else out for a late walk across the sand. No booger. No Balloon Men. But something fluttered inside her, darkwinged. A longing as plain as what she heard in Reece’s voice, though she was looking for magic and he was just looking for a way to fit in.

Hefting her tote bag, she tossed it onto the sand, out of the waves’ reach. Reece gave her a curious look, then averted his gaze as she stepped out of her skirt.

“It’s okay,” she said, amused at his sudden sense of propriety. “I’m wearing my swimsuit.”

By the time he turned back, her blouse and skirt had joined her tote bag on the beach and she was shaking loose her hair. “Coming in?” she asked.

Reece simply stood and watched the sway of her hips as she headed for the water. Her swimsuit was white. In the poor light it was as though she wasn’t wearing anything—the swimsuit looked like untanned skin. She dove cleanly into a wave, head bobbing up pale in the dark water when she surfaced.

“C’mon!” she called to him. “The water’s fine, once you get in.”

Reece hesitated. He’d wanted to go in this afternoon, but hadn’t had the nerve to bare his white skinny limbs in front of a beach full of serious tanners. Well, there was no one to see him now, he thought as he stripped down to his underwear.

The water hit him like a cold fist when he dove in after her and he came up gasping with shock. His body tingled, every pore stung alert. Ellen drifted further out, riding the waves easily. As he waded out to join her, a swell rose up and tumbled him back to shore in a spill of floundering arms and legs that scraped him against the sand.

“Either go under or over them,” Ellen advised him as he started back out.

He wasn’t much of a swimmer, but the water wasn’t too deep except when a big wave came. He went under the next one and came up spluttering, but pleased with himself for not getting thrown up against the beach again.

“I love swimming at night,” Ellen said as they drifted together.

Reece nodded. The water was surprisingly warm, too, once you were in it. You could lose all sense of time out here, just floating with the swells.

“You do this a lot?” he asked.

Ellen shook her head. “It’s not that good an idea to do this alone. If the undertow got you, it’d pull you right out and no one would know.”

Reece laid his head back in the water and looked up at the sky. Though they were less than an hour by the freeway out of downtown L.A., the sky was completely different here. It didn’t have that glow from Godknows-howmany millions of lights. The stars seemed closer, too, or maybe it was that the sky seemed deeper.

He glanced over at Ellen. Their reason for being out here was forgotten. He wished he had the nerve to just sort of sidle up to her and put his arms around her, hold her close. She’d feel all slippery, but she’d feel good.

He paddled a little bit towards her, riding a swell up and then down again. The wave turned him slightly away from her. When he glanced back, he saw her staring wideeyed at the shore. His gaze followed hers and then that cold he’d felt when he first entered the water returned in a numbing rush.

The booger was here.

It came snuffling over a rise in the beach, a squat dark shadow in the sand, greasy and slick as it beelined for their clothing. When it reached Ellen’s tote bag, it buried its face in her skirt and blouse, then proceeded to rip them to shreds. Ellen’s fingers caught his arm in a frightened grip. A wave came up, lifting his feet from the bottom. He kicked out frantically, afraid he was going to drown with her holding on to him like that, but the wave tossed them both in towards the shore.

The booger looked up, baring its barracuda teeth. The red coals of its eyes burned right into them both, pinning them there on the wet sand where the wave had left them. Leaving the ruin of Ellen’s belongings in torn shreds, it moved slowly towards them.

“ReReece,” Ellen said. She was pressed close to him, shivering.

Reece didn’t have the time to appreciate the contact of her skin against his. He wanted to say, this is what you were looking for, lady, but things weren’t so cut and dried now. Ellen wasn’t some nameless cipher anymore—just a part of a crowd that he could sneer at—and she wasn’t just something he had the hots for either. She was a person, just like him. An individual. Someone he could actually relate to.

“Can—can’t you stop it?” Ellen cried.

The booger was getting close now. Its sewer reek was strong enough to drown out the salty tang of the ocean. It was like something had died there on the beach and was now getting up and coming for them.

Stop it? Reece thought. Maybe the thing had been created out of his frustrated anger, the way Ellen’s friend made out it could happen in that book of his, but Reece knew as sure as shit that he didn’t control the booger.

Another wave came down upon them and Reece pushed at the sand so that it pulled them partway out from the shore on its way back out. Getting to his knees in the rimy water, he got in front of Ellen so that he was between her and the booger. Could the sucker swim?

The booger hesitated at the water’s edge. It lifted its paws fastidiously from the wet sand like a cat crossing a damp lawn and relief went through Reece. When another wave came in, the booger backstepped quickly out of its reach.

Ellen was leaning against him, face near his as she peered over his shoulder.

“It can’t handle the water,” Reece said. He turned his face to hers when she didn’t say anything. Her clear eyes were open wide, gaze fixed on the booger. “Ellen ... ?” he began.

“I can’t believe that it’s really there,” she said finally in a small voice.

“But you’re the one—you said ...” He drew a little away from her so that he could see her better.

“I know what I said,” Ellen replied. She hugged herself, trembling at the stir of dark wings inside her.

“It’s just ... I wanted to believe, but ... wanting to and having it be real ...” There was a pressure in the center of her chest now, like something inside pushing to get out. “I ...”

The pain lanced sharp and sudden. She heard Reece gasp. Looking down, she saw what he had seen, a bird’s head poking gossamer from between her breasts. It was a dark smudge against the white of her swimsuit, not one of Uncle Dobbin’s parrots, but a crow’s head, with eyes like the pair she’d seen looking back at her from the mirror. Her own magic, leaving her because she didn’t believe. Because she couldn’t believe, but

It didn’t make sense. She’d always believed. And now, with Reece’s booger standing there on the shore, how could she help but believe?

The booger howled then, as though to underscore her thoughts. She looked to the shore and saw it stepping into the waves, crying out at the pain of the salt water on its flesh, but determined to get at them.

To get at her. Reece’s magic, given life. While her own magic ... She pressed at the halfformed crow coming from her chest, trying to force it back in.

“I believe, I believe,” she muttered through clenched teeth. But just like Uncle Dobbin’s assistant in Christy’s story, she could feel that swelling ache of loss rise up in her. She turned despairing eyes to Reece.

She didn’t need a light to see the horror in his eyes—horror at the booger’s approach, at the crow’s head sticking out of her chest. But he didn’t draw away from her. Instead, he reached out and caught hold of her shoulders.

“Stop fighting it!” he cried.

“But—”

He shot a glance shoreward. They were bracing themselves against the waves, but a large swell had just caught the booger and sent it howling back to shore in a tumble of limbs.

“It was your needing proof,” he said. “Your needing to see the booger, to know that it’s real—that’s what’s making you lose it. Stop trying so hard.”

But she knew he was right. She pulled free of him and looked towards the shore where the booger was struggling to its feet. The creature made rattling sounds deep in its throat as it started out for them again. It was hard, hard to do, but she let her hands fall free. The pain in her chest was a fire, the aching loss building to a crescendo. But she closed herself to it, closed her eyes, willed herself to stand relaxed.

Instead of fighting, she remembered. Balloon Men spinning down the beach. Christy’s gnome, riding his pig along the pier. Bramley Dapple’s advice. Goon pinching Jilly Coppercorn’s leg. The thing that fed on eggs and eyeballs and, yes, Reece’s booger too. Uncle Dobbin and his parrots and Non Wert watching her magic fly free. And always the Balloon Men, tumbling endover-end, across the beach, or down the alleyway behind her house ....

And the pain eased. The ache loosened, faded.

“Jesus,” she heard Reece say softly.

She opened her eyes and looked to where he was looking. The booger had turned from the sea and was fleeing as a crowd of Balloon Men came bouncing down the shore, great round rolypoly shapes, turning endover-end, laughing and giggling, a chorus of small deep voices. There was salt in her eyes and it wasn’t from the ocean’s brine. Her tears ran down her cheeks and she felt herself grinning like a fool.

The Balloon Men chased Reece’s booger up one end of the beach and then back the other way until the creature finally made a stand.

Howling, it waited for them to come, but before the first bouncing round shape reached it, the booger began to fade away.

Ellen turned to Reece and knew he had tears in his own eyes, but the good feeling was too strong for him to do anything but grin right back at her. The booger had died with the last of his anger. She reached out a hand to him and he took it in one of his own. Joined so, they made their way to the shore where they were surrounded by riotous Balloon Men until the bouncing shapes finally faded and then there were just the two of them standing there.

Ellen’s heart beat fast. When Reece let go her hand, she touched her chest and felt a stir of dark wings inside her, only they were settling in now, no longer striving to fly free. The wind came in from the ocean still, but it wasn’t the same wind that the Balloon Men rode.

“I guess it’s not all bullshit,” Reece said softly.

Ellen glanced at him.

He smiled as he explained. “Helping each other—getting along instead of fighting. Feels kind of good, you know?”

Ellen nodded. Her hand fell from her chest as the dark wings finally stilled.

“Your friend’s story didn’t say anything about crows,” Reece said.

“Maybe we’ve all got different birds inside—different magics.” She looked out across the waves to where the oil rigs lit the horizon.

“There’s a flock of wild parrots up around Santa Ana,” Reece said.

“I’ve heard there’s one up around San Pedro, too.”

“Do you think ... ?” Reece began, but he let his words trail off. The waves came in and wet their feet.

“I don’t know,” Ellen said. She looked over at her shredded clothes. “Come on. Let’s get back to my place and warm up.”

Reece laid his jacket over her shoulders. He put on his Tshirt and jeans, then helped her gather up what was left of her belongings.

“I didn’t mean for this to happen,” he said, bundling up the torn blouse and skirt. He looked up to where she was standing over him. “But I couldn’t control the booger.”

“Maybe we’re not supposed to.”

“But something like the booger ...”

She gave his Mohawk a friendly ruffle. “I think it just means that we’ve got to be careful about what kind of vibes we put out.”

Reece grimaced at her use of the word, but he nodded.

“It’s either that,” Ellen added, “or we let the magic fly free.”

The same feathery stirring of wings that she felt moved in Reece. They both knew that that was something neither of them was likely to give up.

In Uncle Dobbin’s Parrot Fair, Nori Wert turned away from the pair of cages that she’d been making ready.

“I guess we won’t be needing these,” she said.

Uncle Dobbin looked up from a slim collection of Victorian poetry and nodded. “You’re learning fast,” he said. He stuck the stem of his pipe in his mouth and fished about in his pocket for a match.

“Maybe there’s hope for you yet.”

Nori felt her own magic stir inside her, back where it should be, but she didn’t say anything to him in case she had to go away, now that the lesson was learned. She was too happy here. Next to catching some rays, there wasn’t anywhere she’d rather be.