Ivory and the Horn by Charles De Lint Read Free Book Online Page B

serial dream that ran on for a half dozen nights in a row, a kind of fairy tale that was either me stepping into faerie, and therefore real within its own parameters—which is what Jilly would like me to believe—or it was just my subconscious making another attempt to deal with the way my mother abandoned my father and me when I was a kid. I don’t really know which I believe anymore, because I still find myself going back to that dream world from time to time and meeting the people I first met there.
    I even have a boyfriend in that place, which probably tells you more about my usual ongoing social status than it does my state of mind.
    Rationally. I know it’s just a continuation of that serial dream. And I’d let it go at that, except it feels so damn real. Every morning when I wake up from the latest installment, my head’s filled with memories of what I’ve done that seem as real as anything I do during the day—sometimes more so.
    But I’m getting off on a tangent. I started off meaning just to introduce myself, and here I am, giving you my life story. What I really wanted to tell you about was Mr. Truepenny.
    The thing you have to understand is that I made him up. He was like one of those invisible childhood friends, except I deliberately created him.
    We weren’t exactly well-off when I was growing up. When my mother left us, I ended up being one of those latchkey kids. We didn’t live in the best part of town; Upper Foxville is a rough part of the city and it could be a scary place for a little girl who loved art and books and got teased for that love by the other neighborhood kids, who couldn’t even be bothered to learn how to read. When I got home from school, I went straight in and locked the door.
    I’d get supper ready for my dad, but there were always a couple of hours to kill in between my arriving home and when he finished work—longer if he had to work late. We didn’t have a TV, so I read a lot, but we couldn’t afford to buy books. On Saturday mornings, we’d go to the library and I’d take out my limit—five books—which I’d finish by Tuesday, even if I tried to stretch them out.
    To fill the rest of the time, I’d draw on shopping bags or the pads of paper that dad brought me home from work, but that never seemed to occupy enough hours. So one day I made up Mr. Truepenny.
    I’d daydream about going to his shop. It was the most perfect place that I could imagine: all dark wood and leaded glass, thick carpets and club chairs with carved wooden-based reading lamps strategically placed throughout. The shelves were filled with leather-bound books and folios, and there was a small art gallery in the back.
    The special thing about Mr. Truepenny’s shop was that all of its contents existed only within its walls. Shakespeare’s The Storm of Winter. The Chapman’s Tale by Chaucer. The Blissful Stream by William Morris. Steinbeck’s companion collection to The Long Valley, Salinas. North Country Stoic by Emily Bronte.
    None of these books existed, of course, but being the dreamy sort of kid that I was, not only could I daydream of visiting Mr. Truepenny’s shop, but I could actually read these unwritten stories. The gallery in the back of the shop was much the same. There hung works by the masters that saw the light of day only in my imagination. Van Goghs and Monets and da Vincis. Rossettis and Homers and Cezannes.
    Mr. Truepenny himself was a wonderfully eccentric individual who never once chased me out for being unable to make a purchase. He had a Don Quixote air about him, a sense that he was forever tilting at windmills. He was tall and thin with a thatch of mouse-brown hair and round spectacles, a rumpled tweed suit and a huge briar pipe that he continually fussed with but never actually lit. He always greeted me with genuine affection and seemed disappointed when it was time for me to go.
    My imagination was so vivid that my daydream visits to his shop were as real to me as when