Tapping the Dream Tree by Charles De Lint Read Free Book Online Page B

Staley wanted to ask, but decided to leave well enough alone. She gave her surroundings a last look, then started up fiddling again, playing herself back into the green of summer where she’d left her friends.
    Robert’s pretty impressed when Staley just steps out of that invisible door, calm as you please. We heard the fiddling first. It sounded like it was coming from someplace on the far side of forever, but getting closer by the moment, and then there she was, standing barefoot in the grass, smiling at us. Robert’s even more impressed when she tells us about how she handled the devil.
    After putting her fiddle away, she boils up some water on a Coleman stove and makes us up a pot of herbal tea. We take it out through the woods in porcelain mugs, heading up to the top of the field overlooking the county road. The car’s still there. The sun’s going down now, putting on quite a show, and the tea’s better than I thought it would be. Got mint in it, some kind of fruit.
    â€œSo how do I stop this from happening again?” Staley asks.
    â€œFigure out what your music’s all about,” Robert tells her. “And take responsibility for it. Dig deep and find what’s hiding behind the trees—you know, in the shadows where you can’t exactly see things, you can only sense them—and always pay attention. It’s up to you what you let out into the light.”
    â€œIs that what you do?”
    Robert nodded. “ ‘Course it’s different for me, because we’re different people. My music’s about enduring. Perseverance. That’s all the blues is ever about.”
    â€œWhat about hope?”
    Robert smiled. “What do you think keeps perseverance alive?”
    â€œAmen,” I say.
    After a moment, Staley smiles. We all clink our porcelain mugs together and drink a toast to that.

Wingless Angels
    Christina’s not particularly happy and I don’t blame her. If it wasn’t for me, we wouldn’t be hiding behind this Dumpster in back of the Harbor Ritz, trying not to breathe while these freaks keep getting closer and closer to where we’re pressed up against the wall, pressed up so tight the bricks are leaving imprints on our skin. The sound of approaching footsteps is faint but distinct, hard leather brushing the concrete. I thought everybody did rubber-soled shoes these days, but what do I know?
    Of course Christina’s got to take some of the heat for this—if it wasn’t for her, we wouldn’t have been out on the streets tonight, sticking our noses in where they don’t belong. But I’m the one who didn’t take any of this seriously. Turns out my idea of how the world works is so off-base I’ve put a serious crimp into the question of our continued well-being. But, really. Life’s complicated enough without adding monsters to the equation. Or whatever these things are.
    One thing I know, they’re ugly as sin. I pulled a couple of stretches in county, back in my impressionable youth, and, trust me, I know ugly, but correctional services never locked up anything like this. They smell like a sewer, great hulking creatures that remind me of neither rodents nor reptiles so much as something in between. Greasy-haired, with long narrow faces. Eyes like slits, lit by some inner hunger. Muscles corded and bulging under the thin fabric of their cheap suits, yet they move as delicately as ballerinas, a murderous
bourrée
in perfect demi-pointe.
    There’s five or six of them—I never stopped to take an exact head count—and they’re strong. Scary strong. Earlier tonight, I saw one of them pull apart the iron railings of a fence the way you or I might tear cardboard, and I swear, from the way those long noses of theirs keep twitching, they’re tracking us by smell.
    â€œOh, man,” Christina breathes in my ear. “If they—”
    I put a finger across her lips, but