Dreams Underfoot

The Stone Drum

It was Jilly Coppercorn who found the stone drum, late one afternoon.

She brought it around to Professor Dapple’s rambling Tudorstyled house in the old quarter of Lower Crowsea that same evening, wrapped up in folds of brown paper and tied with twine. She rapped sharply on the Professor’s door with the little brass lion’s head knocker that always seemed to stare too intently at her, then stepped back as Olaf Goonasekara, Dapple’s odd little housekeeper, flung the door open and glowered out at where she stood on the rickety porch.

“You,” he grumbled.

“Me,” she agreed, amicably. “Is Bramley in?”

“I’ll see,” he replied and shut the door.

Jilly sighed and sat down on one of the two worn rattan chairs that stood to the left of the door, her package bundled on her knee. A black and orange cat regarded her incuriously from the seat of the other chair, then turned to watch the progress of a woman walking her dachshund down the street.

Professor Dapple still taught a few classes at Butler U., but he wasn’t nearly as involved with the curriculum as he had been when Jilly attended the university. There’d been some kind of a scandal—something about a Bishop, some old coins and the daughter of a Tarot reader—but Jilly had never quite got the story straight. The Professor was a jolly fellow—wizened like an old apple, but more active than many who were only half his apparent sixty years of age. He could talk and joke all night, incessantly polishing his wirerimmed spectacles.

What he was doing with someone like Olaf Goonasekara as a housekeeper Jilly didn’t know. It was true that Goon looked comical enough, what with his protruding stomach and puffed cheeks, the halo of unruly hair and his thin little arms and legs, reminding her of nothing so much as a pumpkin with twig limbs, or a monkey. His usual striped trousers, organ grinder’s jacket and the little green and yellow cap he liked to wear, didn’t help. Nor did the fact that he was barely four feet tall and that the Professor claimed he was a goblin and just called him Goon.

It didn’t seem to allow Goon much dignity and Jilly would have understood his grumpiness, if she didn’t know that he himself insisted on being called Goon and his wardrobe was entirely of his own choosing. Bramley hated Goon’s sense of fashion—or rather, his lack thereof.

The door was flung open again and Jilly stood up to find Goon glowering at her once more.

“He’s in,” he said.

Jilly smiled. As if he’d actually had to go in and check.

They both stood there, Jilly on the porch and he in the doorway, until Jilly finally asked, “Can he see me?”

Giving an exaggerated sigh, Goon stepped aside to let her in. “I suppose you’ll want something to drink?” he asked as he followed her to the door of the Professor’s study.

“Tea would be lovely.”

“Hrumph.”

Jilly watched him stalk off, then tapped a knuckle on the study’s door and stepped into the room.

Bramley lifted his gaze from a desk littered with tottering stacks of books and papers and grinned at her from between a gap in the towers of paper.

“I’ve been doing some research since you called,” he said. He poked a finger at a book that Jilly couldn’t see, then began to clean his glasses. “Fascinating stuff “

“And hello to you, too,” Jilly said.

“Yes, of course. Did you know that the Kickaha had legends of a little people long before the Europeans ever settled this area?”

Jilly could never quite get used to Bramley’s habit of starting conversations in the middle. She removed some magazines from a club chair and perched on the edge of its seat, her package clutched to her chest.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” she asked.

Bramley looked surprised. “Why everything. We are still looking into the origins of this artifact of yours, aren’t we?”

Jilly nodded. From her new position of vantage she could make out the book he’d been reading.

Underhill and Deeper Still, a short story collection by Christy Riddell. Riddell made a living of retelling the odd stories that lie just under the skin of any large city. This particular one was a collection of urban legends of Old City and other subterranean fancies—not exactly the factual reference source she’d been hoping for.

Old City was real enough; that was where she’d found the drum this afternoon. But as for the rest of it—albino crocodile subway conductors, schools of dogsized intelligent goldfish in the sewers, mutant rat debating societies and the like ...

Old City was the original heart of Newford. It lay deep underneath the subway tunnels—dropped there in the late eighteen hundreds during the Great Quake. The present city, including its sewers and underground transportation tunnels, had been built above the ruins of the old one. There’d been talk in the early seventies of renovating the ruins as a tourist attraction—as had been done in Seattle—but Old City lay too far underground for easy access. After numerous studies on the project, the city council had decided that it simply wouldn’t be cost efficient.

With that decision, Old City had rapidly gone from a potential tourist attraction to a home for skells—winos, bag ladies and the other homeless. Not to mention, if one was to believe Bramley and Riddell, bands of illmannered goblinlike creatures that Riddell called skookin—a word he’d stolen from old Scots which meant, variously, ugly, furtive and sullen.

Which, Jilly realized once when she thought about it, made it entirely appropriate that Bramley should claim Goon was related to them.

“You’re not going to tell me it’s a skookin artifact, are you?” she asked Bramley now.

“Too soon to say,” he replied. He nodded at her parcel. “Can I see it?”

Jilly got up and brought it over to the desk, where Bramley made a great show of cutting the twine and unwrapping the paper. Jilly couldn’t decide if he was pretending it was the unveiling of a new piece at the museum or his birthday. But then the drum was sitting on the desk, the mica and quartz veins in its stone catching the light from Bramley’s desk lamp in a magical glitter, and she was swallowed up in the wonder of it again.

It was tubeshaped, standing about a foot high, with a seveninch diameter at the top and five inches at the bottom. The top was smooth as the skin head of a drum. On the sides were what appeared to be the remnants of a bewildering flurry of designs. But what was most marvelous about it was that the stone was hollow. It weighed about the same as a fat hardcover book.

“Listen,” Jilly said and gave the top of the drum a rapa-taptap.

The stone responded with a quiet rhythm that resonated eerily in the study. Unfortunately, Goon chose that moment to arrive in the doorway with a tray laden with tea mugs, tea pot and a platter of his homemade biscuits. At the sound of the drum, the tray fell from his hands. It hit the floor with a crash, spraying tea, milk, sugar, biscuits and bits of crockery every which way.

Jilly turned, her heartbeat doubletiming in her chest, just in time to see an indescribable look cross over Goon’s features. It might have been surprise, it might have been laughter, but it was gone too quickly for her to properly note. He merely stood in the doorway now, his usual glowering look on his face, and all Jilly was left with was a feeling of unaccountable guilt.

“I didn’t mean ...” Jilly began, but her voice trailed off. “Bit of a mess,” Bramley said.

“I’ll get right to it,” Goon said.

His small dark eyes centered their gaze on Jilly for too long a moment, then he turned away to fetch a broom and dustpan. When Jilly turned back to the desk, she found Bramley rubbing his hands together, face pressed close to the stone drum. He looked up at her over his glasses, grinning.

“Did you see?” he said. “Goon recognized it for what it is, straight off. It has to be a skookin artifact.

Didn’t like you meddling around with it either.”

That was hardly the conclusion that Jilly would have come to on her own. It was the sudden and unexpected sound that had more than likely startled Goon—as it might have startled anyone who wasn’t expecting it. That was the reasonable explanation, but she knew well enough that reasonable didn’t necessarily always mean right. When she thought of that look that had passed over Goon’s features, like a trough of surprise or mocking humor between two cresting glowers, she didn’t know what to think, so she let herself get taken away by the Professor’s enthusiasm, because ... well, just what if ... ?

By all of Christy Riddell’s accounts, there wasn’t a better candidate for skookindom than Bramley’s housekeeper.

“What does it mean?” she asked.

Bramley shrugged and began to polish his glasses. Jilly was about to nudge him into making at least the pretense of a theory, but then she realized that the Professor had simply fallen silent because Goon was back to clean up the mess. She waited until Goon had made his retreat with the promise of putting on another pot of tea, before she leaned over Bramley’s desk.

“Well?” she asked.

“Found it in Old City, did you?” he replied.

Jilly nodded.

“You know what they say about skookin treasure ... ?”

They meaning he and Christy, Jilly thought, but she obligingly tried to remember that particular story from Underhill and Deeper Still. She had it after a moment. It was the one called “The Man with the Monkey” and had something to do with a stolen apple that was withered and moldy in Old City but became solid gold when it was brought above ground. At the end of the story, the man who’d stolen it from the skookin was found in little pieces scattered all over Fitzhenry Park ....

Jilly shivered.

“Now I remember why I don’t like to read Christy’s stuff,” she said. “He can be so sweet on one page, and then on the next he’s taking you on a tour through an abattoir.”

“Just like life,” Bramley said.

“Wonderful. So what are you saying?”

“They’ll be wanting it back,” Bramley said.

Jilly woke some time after midnight with the Professor’s words ringing in her ears.

They’ll be wanting it back.

She glanced at the stone drum where it sat on a crate by the window of her Yoors Street loft in Foxville. From where she lay on her Murphy bed, the streetlights coming in the window wove a haloing effect around the stone artifact. The drum glimmered with magic—or at least with a potential for magic.

And there was something else in the air. A humming sound, like barely audible strains of music. The notes seemed disconnected, drifting randomly through the melody like dust motes dancing in a beam of sunlight, but there was still a melody present.

She sat up slowly. Pushing the quilt aside, she padded barefoot across the room. When she reached the drum, the change in perspective made the streetlight halo slide away; the drum’s magic fled. It was just an odd stone artifact once more. She ran her finger along the smoothed indentations that covered the sides of the artifact, but didn’t touch the top. It was still marvelous enough—a hollow stone, a mystery, a puzzle. But ...

She remembered the odd almostbut-notquite music she’d heard when she first woke, and cocked her ear, listening for it. Nothing.

Outside, a light drizzle had wet the pavement, making Yoors Street glisten and sparkle with its sheen.

She knelt down by the windowsill and leaned forward, looking out, feeling lonely. It’d be nice if Geordie were here, even if his brother did write those books that had the Professor so enamoured, but Geordie was out of town this week. Maybe she should get a cat or a dog—just something to keep her company when she got into one of these odd funks—but the problem with pets was that they tied you down. No more gallivanting about whenever and wherever you pleased. Not when the cat needed to be fed. Or the dog had to be walked.

Sighing, she started to turn from the window, then paused. A flicker of uneasiness stole up her spine as she looked more closely at what had caught her attention—there, across the street. Time dissolved into a pattern as random as that faint music she’d heard when she woke earlier. Minutes and seconds marched sideways; the hands of the old Coors clock on her wall stood still.

A figure leaned against the wall, there, just to one side of the display window of the Chinese groceteria across the street, a figure as much a patchwork as the disarray in the shop’s window. Pumpkin head under a widebrimmed hat. A larger pumpkin for the body with what looked like straw spilling out from between the buttons of its toosmall jacket. Arms and legs as thin as broom handles. A wide slit for a mouth; eyes like the sharp yellow slits of a jacko’-lantern with a candle burning inside.

A Halloween creature. And not alone.

There was another, there, in the mouth of that alleyway. A third clinging to the wall of the brownstone beside the groceteria. Four more on the rooftop directly across the street—pumpkinheads lined up along the parapet, all in a row.

Skookin, Jilly thought and she shivered with fear, remembering Christy Riddell’s story.

Damn Christy for tracking the story down, and damn the Professor for reminding her ofit. And damn the job that had sent her down into Old City in the first place to take photos for the background of the painting she was currently working on.

Because there shouldn’t be any such thing as skookin. Because ...

She blinked, then rubbed her eyes. Her gaze darted left and right, up and down, raking the street and the faces of buildings across the way.

Nothing.

No pumpkin goblins watching her loft.

The sound of her clock ticking the seconds away was suddenly loud in her ears. A taxi went by on the street below, spraying a fine sheet of water from its wheels. She waited for it to pass, then studied the street again.

There were no skookin.

Ofcourse there wouldn’t be, she told herself, trying to laugh at how she’d let her imagination run away with itself, but she couldn’t muster up even the first hint ofa smile. She looked at the drum, reached a hand towards it, then let her hand fall to her lap, the drum untouched. She turned her attention back to the street, watching it for long moments before she finally had to accept that there was nothing out there, that she had only peopled it with her own night fears.

Pushing herself up from the sill, she returned to bed and lay down again. The palm of her right hand itched a little, right where she’d managed to poke herself on a small nail or wood sliver while she was down in Old City. She scratched her hand and stared up at the ceiling, trying to go to sleep, but not expecting to have much luck. Surprisingly, she drifted off in moments.

And dreamed.

Of Bramley’s study. Except the Professor wasn’t ensconced behind his desk as usual. Instead, he was setting out a serving of tea for her and Goon, who had taken the Professor’s place behind the tottering stacks of papers and books on the desk.

“Skookin,” Goon said, when the Professor had finished serving them their tea and left the room.

“They’ve never existed, of course.”

Jilly nodded in agreement.

“Though in some ways,” Goon went on, “they’ve always existed. In here—” He tapped his temple with a gnarly, very skookinlike finger. “In our imaginations.”

“But—” Jilly began, wanting to tell him how she’d seen skookin, right out there on her very own street tonight, but Goon wasn’t finished.

“And that’s what makes them real,” he said.

His head suddenly looked very much like a pumpkin. He leaned forward, eyes glittering as though a candle was burning there inside his head, flickering in the wind.

“And if they’re real,” he said.

His voice wound down alarmingly, as though it came from the spiraling groove of a spokenword album that someone had slowed by dragging their finger along on the vinyl.

“Then. You’re. In. A. Lot. Of—”

Jilly awoke with a start to find herself backed up against the frame of the head of her bed, her hands worrying and tangling her quilt into knots.

Just a dream. Cast off thoughts, tossed up by her subconscious. Nothing to worry about. Except ...

She could finish the dreamGoon’s statement.

If they were real ...

Never mind being in trouble. If they were real, then she was doomed.

She didn’t get any more sleep that night, and first thing the next morning, she went looking for help.

“Skookin,” Meran said, trying hard not to laugh.

“Oh, I know what it sounds like,” Jilly said, “but what can you do? Christy’s books are Bramley’s pet blind spot and if you listen to him long enough, he’ll have you believing anything.”

“But skookin,” Meran repeated and this time she did giggle. Jilly couldn’t help but laugh with her.

Everything felt very different in the morning light—especially when she had someone to talk it over with whose head wasn’t filled with Christy’s stories.

They were sitting in Kathryn’s Cafe—an hour or so after Jilly had found Meran Kelledy down by the Lake, sitting on the Pier and watching the early morning joggers run across the sand: yuppies from downtown, healthconscious gentry from the Beaches.

It was a short walk up Battersfield Road to where Kathryn’s was nestled in the heart of Lower Crowsea. Like the area itself, with its narrow streets and old stone buildings, the cafe had an old world feel about it—from the dark wood paneling and handcarved chair backs to the small round tables, with checkered tablecloths, fat glass condiment containers and strawwrapped wine bottles used as candleholders. The music piped in over the house sound system was mostly along the lines of Telemann and Vivaldi, Kitaro and old Bob James albums. The waitresses wore creamcolored pinafores over flowerprint dresses.

But if the atmosphere was old world, the clientele were definitely contemporary. Situated so close to Butler U., Kathryn’s had been a favorite haunt of the university’s students since it first opened its doors in the midsixties as a coffee house. Though much had changed from those early days, there was still music played on its small stage on Friday and Saturday nights, as well as poetry recitations on Wednesdays and Sunday morning storytelling sessions.

Jilly and Meran sat by a window, coffee and homemade banana muffins set out on the table in front of them.

“Whatever were you doing down there anyway?” Meran asked. “It’s not exactly the safest place to be wandering about.”

Jilly nodded. The skells in Old City weren’t all thin and wasted. Some were big and meanlooking, capable of anything—not really the sort of people Jilly should be around, because if something went wrong ... well, she was the kind of woman for whom the word petite had been coined. She was small and slender—her tiny size only accentuated by the oversized clothing she tended to wear. Her brown hair was a thick tangle, her eyes the electric blue of sapphires. She was too pretty and too small to be wandering about in places like Old City on her own.

“You know the band, No Nuns Here?” Jilly asked.

Meran nodded.

“I’m doing the cover painting for their first album,” Jilly explained. “They wanted something moody for the background—sort of like the Tombs, but darker and grimmer—and I thought Old City would be the perfect place to get some reference shots.”

“But to go there on your own ...”

Jilly just shrugged. She was known to wander anywhere and everywhere, at any time of the night or day, camera or sketchbook in hand, often both.

Meran shook her head. Like most of Jilly’s friends, she’d long since given up trying to point out the dangers of carrying on the way Jilly did.

“So you found this drum,” she said.

Jilly nodded. She looked down at the little scab on the palm of her hand. It itched like crazy, but she was determined not to open it again by scratching it.

“And now you want to ... ?”

Jilly looked up. “Take it back. Only I’m scared to go there on my own. I thought maybe Cerin would come with me—for moral support, you know?”

“He’s out of town,” Meran said.

Meran and her husband made up the two halves of the Kelledys, a local traditional music duo that played coffee houses, festivals and colleges from one coast to the other. For years now, however, Newford had been their home base.

“He’s teaching another of those harp workshops,” Meran added. Jilly did her best to hide her disappointment.

What she’d told Meran about “moral support” was only partly the reason she’d wanted their help because, more so than either Riddell’s stories or Bramley’s askew theories, the Kelledys were the closest thing to real magic that she could think of in Newford. There was an otherworldly air about the two of them that went beyond the glamour that seemed to always gather around people who became successful in their creative endeavors.

It wasn’t something Jilly could put her finger on. It wasn’t as though they went on and on about this sort of thing at the drop of a hat the way that Bramley did. Nor that they were responsible for anything more mysterious than the enchantment they awoke on stage when they were playing their instruments. It was just there. Something that gave the impression that they were aware of what lay beyond the here and now. That they could see things others couldn’t; knew things that remained secret to anyone else.

Nobody even knew where they had come from; they’d just arrived in Newford a few years ago, speaking with accents that had rapidly vanished, and here they’d pretty well stayed ever since. Jilly had always privately supposed that if there was a place called Faerie, then that was from where they’d come, so when she woke up this morning, deciding she needed magical help, she’d gone looking for one or the other and found Meran. But now ...

“Oh,” she said.

Meran smiled.

“But that doesn’t mean I can’t try to help,” she said.

Jilly sighed. Help with what? she had to ask herself. The more she thought about it, the sillier it all seemed. Skookin. Right. Maybe they held debating contests with Riddell’s mutant rats.

“I think maybe I’m nuts,” she said finally. “I mean, goblins living under the city ... ?”

“I believe in the little people,” Meran said. “We called them bodachs where I come from.”

Jilly just looked at her.

“But you laughed when I talked about them,” she said finally. “I know—and I shouldn’t have. It’s just that whenever I hear that name that Christy’s given them, I can’t help myself. It’s so silly.”

“What I saw last night didn’t feel silly,” Jilly said.

If she’d actually seen anything. By this point—even with Meran’s apparent belief—she wasn’t sure what to think anymore.

“No,” Meran said. “I suppose not. But—you’re taking the drum back, so why are you so nervous?”

“The man in Christy’s story returned the apple he stole,” Jilly said, “and you know what happened to him ....”

“That’s true,” Meran said, frowning.

“I thought maybe Cerin could ...” Jilly’s voice trailed off.

A small smile touched Meran’s lips. “Could do what?”

“Well, this is going to sound even sillier,” Jilly admitted, “but I’ve always pictured him as sort of a wizard type.”

Meran laughed. “He’d love to hear that. And what about me? Have I acquired wizardly status as well?”

“Not exactly. You always struck me as being an earth spirit—like you stepped out of an oak tree or something.” Jilly blushed, feeling as though she was making even more of a fool of herself than ever, but now that she’d started, she felt she had to finish. “It’s sort of like he learned magic, while you just are magic.”

She glanced at her companion, looking for laughter, but Meran was regarding her gravely. And she did look like a dryad, Jilly thought, what with the green streaks in the long, nutbrown ringlets of her hair and her fey sort of PreRaphaelite beauty. Her eyes seemed to provide their own light, rather than take it in.

“Maybe I did step out of a tree one day,” Meran said.

Jilly could feel her mouth forming a surprised “0,” but then Meran laughed again.

“But probably I didn’t,” she said. Before Jilly could ask her about that “probably,” Meran went on:

“We’ll need some sort of protection against them.”

Jilly made her mind shift gears, from Meran’s origins to the problem at hand.

“Like holy water or a cross?” she asked.

Her head filled with the plots of a hundred bad horror films, each of them clamoring for attention.

“No,” Meran said. “Religious artifacts and trappings require faith—a belief in their potency that the skookin undoubtedly don’t have. The only thing I know for certain that they can’t abide is the truth.”

“The truth?”

Meran nodded. “Tell them the truth—even it’s only historical facts and trivia—and they’ll shun you as though you were carrying a plague.”

“But what about after?” Jilly said. “After we’ve delivered the drum and they come looking for me?

Do I have to walk around carrying a cassette machine spouting dates and facts for the rest of my life?”

“I hope not.”

“But—”

“Patience,” Meran replied. “Let me think about it for awhile.” Jilly sighed. She regarded her companion curiously as Meran took a sip of her coffee.

“You really believe in this stuff, don’t you?” she said finally. “Don’t you?”

Jilly had to think about that for a moment.

“Last night I was scared,” she said, “and I’m returning the drum because I’d rather be safe than sorry, but I’m still not sure.”

Meran nodded understandingly, but, “Your coffee’s getting cold,” was all she had to say.

Meran let Jilly stay with her that night in the rambling old house where she and Cerin lived. Straddling the border between Lower Crowsea and Chinatown, it was a tall, gabled building surrounded by giant oak trees. There was a rounded tower in the front to the right of a long screenenclosed porch, stables around the back, and a garden along the west side of the house that seemed to have been plucked straight from a postcard of the English countryside.

Jilly loved this area. The Kelledys’ house was the easternmost of the stately estates that stood, row on row, along McKennitt Street, between Lee and Yoors. Whenever Jilly walked along this part of McKennitt, late at night when the streetcars were tucked away in their downtown station and there was next to no other traffic, she found it easy to imagine that the years had wound back to a bygone age when time moved at a different pace, when Newford’s streets were cobblestoned and the vehicles that traversed them were horsedrawn, rather than horsepowered.

“You’ll wear a hole in the glass if you keep staring through it so intently.”

Jilly started. She turned long enough to acknowledge her hostess’s presence, then her gaze was dragged back to the window, to the shadows cast by the oaks as twilight stretched them across the lawn, to the long low wall that bordered the lawn, to the street beyond.

Still no skookin. Did that mean they didn’t exist, or that they hadn’t come out yet? Or maybe they just hadn’t tracked her here to the Kelledys’ house.

She started again as Meran laid a hand on her shoulder and gently turned her from the window.

“Who knows what you’ll call to us, staring so,” Meran said.

Her voice held the same light tone as it had when she’d made her earlier comment, but this time a certain sense of caution lay behind the words.

“If they come, I want to see them,” Jilly said.

Meran nodded. “I understand. But remember this: the night’s a magical time. The moon rules her hours, not the sun.”

“What does that mean?”

“The moon likes secrets,” Meran said. “And secret things. She lets mysteries bleed into her shadows and leaves us to ask whether they originated from otherworlds, or from our own imaginations.”

“You’re beginning to sound like Bramley,” Jilly said. “Or Christy.”

“Remember your Shakespeare,” Meran said. “‘This fellow’s wise enough to play the fool.’ Did you ever think that perhaps their studied eccentricity protects them from sharper ridicule?”

“You mean all those things Christy writes about are true?”

“ I didn’t say that.”

Jilly shook her head. “No. But you’re talking in riddles just like a wizard out of some fairy tale. I never understood why they couldn’t talk plainly.”

“That’s because some things can only be approached from the side. Secretively. Peripherally.”

Whatever Jilly was about to say next, died stillborn. She pointed out the window to where the lawn was almost swallowed by shadows.

“Do ...” She swallowed thickly, then tried again. “Do you see them?”

They were out there, flitting between the wall that bordered the Kelledys’ property and those tall oaks that stood closer to the house. Shadow shapes. Fat, pumpkinbodied and twiglimbed. There were more of them than there’d been last night. And they were bolder. Creeping right up towards the house.

Threats burning in their candleflicker eyes. Wide mouths open in jacko’-lantern grins, revealing rows of pointed teeth.

One came sidling right up to the window, its face monstrous at such close proximity. Jilly couldn’t move, couldn’t even breathe. She remembered what Meran had said earlier they can’t abide the truth

—but she couldn’t frame a sentence, never mind a word, and her mind was filled with only a wild unreasoning panic. The creature reached out a hand towards the glass, clawed fingers extended. Jilly could feel a scream building up, deep inside her. In a moment that hand would come crashing through the window, shattering glass, clawing at her throat. And she couldn’t move. All she could do was stare, stare as the claws reached for the glass, stare as it drew back to

Something fell between the creature and the house—a swooping, shapeless thing. The creature danced back, saw that it was only the bough of one of the oak trees and was about to begin its approach once more, but the cries of its companions distracted it. Not until it turned its horrible gaze from her, did Jilly feel able to lift her own head.

She stared at the oaks. A sudden wind had sprung up, lashing the boughs about so that the tall trees appeared to be giants, flailing about their manylimbed arms like monstrous, agitated octopi. The creatures in the yard scattered and in moments they were gone—each and every one of them. The wind died down; the animated giants became just oak trees once more.

Jilly turned slowly from the window to find Meran 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 discoloration 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. Inside 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 clothing more suitable for the underground trek to Old City. Not only were skookin real, but there were worse things than those pumpkinhead 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 midseventies—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 halfdozen to twenty others that could still be used, the number depending only on who was doing the bragging. The entrance to which Jilly led Meran was the most commonly known and used—a steel maintenance door that was situated two hundred yards or so down the east tracks of the Grasso Street subway station.

The door led into the city’s sewer maintenance tunnels, but had long since been abandoned. Skells had broken the locking mechanism and the door stood continually ajar. Inside, time and weathering had worn down a connecting wall between the maintenance tunnels and what had once been the top floor of one of Old City’s proud skyscrapers—an office complex that had towered some four stories above the city’s streets before the quake dropped it into its present subterranean setting.

It was a good fifteen minute walk from the Kelledys’ house to the Grasso Street station and Jilly plodded miserably through the rain at Meran’s side for every block of it. Her sneakers were soaked and her hair plastered against her scalp. She carried the stone drum tucked under one arm and was very tempted to simply pitch it in front of a bus.

“This is crazy,” Jilly said. “We’re just giving ourselves up to them.”

Meran shook her head. “No. We’re confronting them of our own free will—there’s a difference.”

“That’s just semantics. There won’t be a difference in the results.”

“That’s where you’re wrong.”

They both turned at the sound of a new voice to find Goon standing in the doorway of a closed antique shop. His eyes glittered oddly in the poor light, reminding Jilly all too much of the skookin, and he didn’t seem to be the least bit wet.

“What are you doing here?” Jilly demanded.

“You must always confront your fears,” Goon said as though she hadn’t spoke. “Then skulking monsters become merely unfamiliar shadows, thrown by a tree bough. Whispering voices are just the wind. The wild flare of panic is merely a burst of emotion, not a terror spell cast by some evil witch.”

Meran nodded. “That’s what Cerin would say. And that’s what I mean to do. Confront them with a truth so bright that they won’t dare come near us again.”

Jilly held up her hand. The discoloration was spreading. It had grown from its pinprick inception, first to the size of a dime, now to that of a silver dollar.

“What about this?” she asked.

“There’s always a price for meddling,” Goon agreed. “Sometimes it’s the simple curse of knowledge.”

“There’s always a price,” Meran agreed.

Everybody always seemed to know more than she did these days, Jilly thought unhappily.

“You still haven’t told me what you’re doing here,” she told Goon. “Skulking about and following us.”

Goon smiled. “It seems to me, that you came upon me.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I have my own business in Old City tonight,” he said. “And since we all have the same destination in mind, I thought perhaps you would appreciate the company.”

Everything was wrong about this, Jilly thought. Goon was never nice to her. Goon was never nice to anyone.

“Yeah, well, you can just—” she began.

Meran laid a hand on Jilly’s arm. “It’s bad luck to turn away help when it’s freely offered.”

“But you don’t know what he’s like,” Jilly said.

“Olaf and I have met before,” Meran said.

Jilly caught the grimace on Goon’s face at the use of his given name. It made him seem more himself, which, while not exactly comforting, was at least familiar. Then she looked at Meran. She thought of the wind outside the musician’s house, driving away the skookin, the mystery that cloaked her which ran even deeper, perhaps, than that which Goon wore so easily ....

“Sometimes you just have to trust in people,” Meran said, as though reading Jilly’s mind.

Jilly sighed. She rubbed her itchy palm against her thigh, shifted the drum into a more comfortable position.

“Okay,” she said. “So what’re we waiting for?”

The few times Jilly had come down to Old City, she’d been cautious, perhaps even a little nervous, but never frightened. Tonight was different. It was always dark in Old City, but the darkness had never seemed so ... so watchful before. There were always odd little sounds, but they had never seemed so furtive. Even with her companions—maybe because of them, she thought, thinking mostly of Goon—she felt very much alone in the eerie darkness.

Goon didn’t appear to need the wobbly light of their flashlights to see his way and though he seemed content enough to simply follow them, Jilly couldn’t shake the feeling that he was actually leading the way.

They were soon in a part of the subterranean city that she’d never seen before.

There was less dust and dirt here. No litter, nor the remains of the skells’ fires. No broken bottles, nor the piles of newspapers and ratty blanketing that served the skells as bedding. The buildings seemed in better repair. The air had a clean, dry smell to it, rather than the close, musty reek of refuse and human wastes that it carried closer to the entrance.

And there were no people.

From when they’d first stepped through the steel door in Grasso Street Station’s east tunnel, she hadn’t seen a bag lady or wino or any kind of skell, and that in itself was odd because they were always down here. But there was something sharing the darkness with them. Something watched them, marked their progress, followed with a barely discernible pad of sly footsteps in their wake and on either side.

The drum seemed warm against the skin of her hand. The blemish on her other palm prickled with itchiness. Her shoulder muscles were stiff with tension.

“Not far now,” Goon said softly and Jilly suddenly understood what it meant to jump out of one’s skin.

The beam of her flashlight made a wild arc across the faces of the buildings on either side of her as she started. Her heartbeat jumped into second gear.

“What do you see?” Meran asked, her voice calm.

The beam of her flashlight turned towards Goon and he pointed ahead.

“Turn off your flashlights,” he said.

Oh sure, Jilly thought. Easy for you to say.

But she did so a moment after Meran had. The sudden darkness was so abrupt that Ply thought she’d gone blind. But then she realized that it wasn’t as black as it should be. Looking ahead to where Goon had pointed, she could see a faint glow seeping onto the street ahead of them. It was a little less than a half block away, the source of the light hidden behind the squatting bulk of a halftumbled-down building.

“What could it ... ?” Jilly started to say, but then the sounds began, and the rest of her words dried up in her throat.

It was supposed to be music, she realized after a few moments, but there was no discernible rhythm and while the sounds were blown or rasped or plucked from instruments, they searched in vain for a melody.

“It begins,” Goon said.

He took the lead, hurrying them up to the corner of the street.

“What does?” Jilly wanted to know.

“The king appears—as he must once a moon. It’s that or lose his throne.”

Jilly wanted to know what he was talking about—better yet, how he knew what he was talking about—but she didn’t have a chance. The discordant notmusic scraped and squealed to a kind of crescendo. Suddenly they were surrounded by the capering forms of dozens of skookin that bumped them, thin long fingers tugging at their clothing. Jilly shrieked at the first touch. One of them tried to snatch the drum from her grip. She regained control of her nerves at the same time as she pulled the artifact free from the grasping fingers.

“1789,” she said. “That’s when the Bastille was stormed and the French Revolution began. Uh, 1807, slave trade was abolished in the British Empire. 1776, the Declaration of Independence was signed.”

The skookin backed away from her, as did the others, hissing and spitting. The notmusic continued, but its tones were softened.

“Let me see,” Jilly went on. “Uh, 1981, the Argentines invade—I can’t keep this up, Meran—the Falklands. 1715 ... that was the year of the first Jacobite uprising.”

She’d always been good with historical trivia—having a head for dates—but the more she concentrated on them right now, the further they seemed to slip away. The skookin were regarding her with malevolence, just waiting for her to falter.

“1978,” she said. “Sandy Denny died, falling down some stairs ....”

She’d got that one from Geordie. The skookin took another step back and she stepped towards them, into the light, her eyes widening with shock. There was a small park there, vegetation dead, trees leafless and skeletal, shadows dancing from the light cast by a fire at either end of the open space. And it was teeming with skookin.

There seemed to be hundreds of the creatures. She could see some of the musicians who were making that awful din—holding their instruments as though they’d never played them before. They were gathered in a semicircle around a dais made from slabs of pavement and building rubble. Standing on it was the weirdest looking skookin she’d seen yet. He was kind of withered and stood stiffly. His eyes flashed with a kind of dead, cold light. He had the grimmest look about him that she’d seen on any of them yet.

There was no way her little bits of history were going to be enough to keep back this crew. She turned to look at her companions. She couldn’t see Goon, but Meran was tugging her flute free from its carrying bag.

What good was that going to do? Jilly wondered.

“It’s another kind of truth,” Meran said as she brought the instrument up to her lips.

The flute’s clear tones echoed breathily along the street, cutting through the jangle of notmusic like a glass knife through muddy water. Jilly held her breath. The music was so beautiful. The skookin cowered where they stood. Their cacophonic noisemaking faltered, then fell silent.

No one moved.

For long moments, there was just the clear sound of Meran’s flute, breathing a slow plaintive air that echoed and sang down the street, winding from one end of the park to the other.

Another kind of truth, Jilly remembered Meran saying just before she began to play. That’s exactly what this music was, she realized. A kind of truth.

The fluteplaying finally came to an achingly sweet finale and a hush fell in Old City. And then there was movement. Goon stepped from behind Jilly and walked through the still crowd of skookin to the dais where their king stood. He clambered up over the rubble until he was beside the king. He pulled a large clasp knife from the pocket of his coat. As he opened the blade, the skookin king made a jerky motion to get away, but Goon’s knife hand moved too quickly.

He slashed and cut.

Now he’s bloody done it, Jilly thought as the skookin king tumbled to the stones. But then she realized that Goon hadn’t cut the king. He’d cut the air above the king. He’d cut the—her sudden realization only confused her more—strings holding him?

“What ... ?” she said.

“Come,” Meran said.

She tucked her flute under her arm and led Jilly towards the dais. “This is your king,” Goon was saying.

He reached down and pulled the limp form up by the finewebbed strings that were attached to the king’s arms and shoulders. The king dangled loosely under his strong grip—a broken marionette. A murmur rose from the crowd of skookin—part ugly, part wondering.

“The king is dead,” Goon said. “He’s been dead for moons. I wondered why Old City was closed to me this past half year, and now I know.”

There was movement at the far end of the park—a fleeing figure. It had been the king’s councilor, Goon told Jilly and Meran later. Some of the skookin made to chase him, but Goon called them back.

“Let him go,” he said. “He won’t return. We have other business at hand.”

Meran had drawn Jilly right up to the foot of the dais and was gently pushing her forward.

“Go on,” she said.

“Is he the king now?” Jilly asked.

Meran smiled and gave her another gentle push.

Jilly looked up. Goon seemed just like he always did when she saw him at Bramley’s—grumpy and out of sorts. Maybe it’s just his face, she told herself, trying to give herself courage. There were people who look grumpy no matter how happy they are. But the thought didn’t help contain her shaking much as she slowly made her way up to where Goon stood.

“You have something of ours,” Goon said.

His voice was grim. Christy’s story lay all too clearly in Jilly’s head. She swallowed dryly.

“Uh, I never meant ...” she began, then simply handed over the drum.

Goon took it reverently, then snatched her other hand before she could draw away. Her palm flared with sharp pain—all the skin, from the base of her hand to the ends of her fingers was black.

The curse, she thought. It’s going to make my hand fall right off. I’m never going to paint again ....

Goon spat on her palm and the pain died as though it had never been. With wondering eyes, Jilly watched the blackness dry up and begin to flake away. Goon gave her hand a shake and the blemish scattered to fall to the ground. Her hand was completely unmarked. “But ... the curse,” she said. “The bounty on my head. What about Christy’s story ... ?”

“Your curse is knowledge,” Goon said.

“But ... ?”

He turned away to face the crowd, drum in hand. As Jilly made her careful descent back to where Meran was waiting for her, Goon tapped his fingers against the head of the drum. An eerie rhythm started up—a real rhythm. When the skookin musicians began to play, they held their instruments properly and called up a sweet stately music to march across the back of the rhythm. It was a rich tapestry of sound, as different from Meran’s solo flute as sunlight is from twilight, but it held its own power. Its own magic.

Goon led the playing with the rhythm he called up from the stone drum, led the music as though he’d always led it.

“He’s really the king, isn’t he?” Jilly whispered to her companion. Meran nodded.

“So then what was he doing working for Bramley?”

“I don’t know,” Meran replied. “I suppose a king—or a king’s son—can do pretty well what he wants just so long as he comes back here once a moon to fulfill his obligation as ruler.”

“Do you think he’ll go back to work for Bramley?”

“I know he will,” Meran replied.

Jilly looked out at the crowd of skookin. They didn’t seem at all threatening anymore. They just looked like little men—comical, with their tubby bodies and round heads and their little broomstick limbs—but men all the same. She listened to the music, felt its trueness and had to ask Meran why it didn’t hurt them.

“Because it’s their truth,” Meran replied.

“But truth’s just truth,” Jilly protested. “Something’s either true or it’s not.”

Meran just put her arm around Dilly’s shoulder. A touch of a smile came to the corners of her mouth.

“It’s time we went home,” she said.

“I got offpretty lightly, didn’t I?” Jilly said as they started back the way they’d come. “I mean, with the curse and all.”

“Knowledge can be a terrible burden,” Meran replied. “It’s what some believe cast Adam and Eve from Eden.”

“But that was a good thing, wasn’t it?”

Meran nodded. “I think so. But it brought pain with it—pain we still feel to this day.”

“I suppose.”

“Come on,” Meran said, as Jilly lagged a little to look back at the park.

Jilly quickened her step, but she carried the scene away with her. Goon and the stone drum. The crowd of skookin. The flickering light of their fires as it cast shadows over the Old City buildings.

And the music played on.

Professor Dapple had listened patiently to the story he’d been told, managing to keep from interrupting through at least half of the telling. Leaning back in his chair when it was done, he took off his glasses and began to needlessly polish them.

“It’s going to be very good,” he said finally.

Christy Riddell grinned from the club chair where he was sitting. “But Jilly’s not going to like it,”

Bramley went on. “You know how she feels about your stories.”

“But she’s the one who told me this one,” Christy said. Bramley rearranged his features to give the impression that he’d known this all along.

“Doesn’t seem like much of a curse,” he said, changing tack.

Christy raised his eyebrows. “What? To know that it’s all real? To have to seriously consider every time she hears about some seemingly preposterous thing, that it might very well be true? To have to keep on guard with what she says so that people won’t think she’s gone off the deep end?”

“Is that how people look at us?” Bramley asked.

“What do you think?” Christy replied with a laugh.

Bramley hrumphed. He fidgeted with the papers on his desk, making more of a mess of them, rather than less.

“But Goon,” he said, finally coming to the heart of what bothered him with what he’d been told. “It’s like some retelling of ‘The King of the Cats,’ isn’t it? Are you really going to put that bit in?”

Christy nodded. “It’s part of the story.”

“I can’t see Goon as a king of anything,” Bramley said. “And if he is a king, then what’s he doing still working for me?”

“Which do you think would be better,” Christy asked. “To be a king below, or a man above?”

Bramley didn’t have an answer for that.