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

heartbeat double-timing 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 candi-date for skookin-dom 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 some-thing 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 per-spective made the streetlight halo slide away; the drum’s magic fled. It was just an odd stone artifact once more. She