The Snowmelt River (The Three Powers) by Frank P. Ryan Read Free Book Online

buh-buh-blues stuh-stories.”
    Alan shook his head, playing dumb. “But you still haven’t told me what makes a song into a dream?”
    “Dreams are private.”
    “That says nothing.”
    “You can’t explain ‘private.’ Private is private.”
    “I give up with this guy!”
    Kate and Mo eyed each other, also broadly smiling. Kate shoved Alan out of the dairy. “Leave the poor idiot to his dreams.”
    Mo followed Kate and Alan out into the sunshine. Mark hardly noticed the fact they had gone. In dreams, the first thing you lose track of is time. And the next things you lose track of are your worries and cares.
    It was many hours later before he came out of the dairy, looking exhausted but exhilarated. He just slid down the wall and sat on the grass. Mo, who was leaning with her back to the pear tree, looked at him. Marktook his harmonica from his pocket and, without a word, he began to play his own interpretation of the blues track “Ain’t No Sunshine.”
    Mo danced.
    Kate and Alan just watched, transfixed. Brother and sister appeared lost in a world of their own. Mo’s eyes were closed, her movements as delicate and natural as the flight of a butterfly.
    When Mark stopped playing Kate clapped her hands.
    Even Alan laughed with amazement. “What the heck was that?”
    Kate murmured, “I think we just caught sight of a dream.”
    Mo said, “He cuh-cuh-cuh-can remember any kind of muh-muh-music, like a-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh . . . like an in-suh-sane Muh-Muh-Mozart!”
    All four friends dissolved into laughter.
    Paint-spattered, in gaps between working, they talked and bantered as if they didn’t have a care in the world. All the while they kept clear of the real stuff, like fate—or how life just doesn’t even pretend to be fair. The bad stuff, the stuff you just couldn’t bear to talk about, they left to brood on its own outside of the den.
    From time to time, over the following days, Padraig would appear with a moth or a butterfly cupped in the cradle of his hands, exotic creatures that none ofthem had ever seen before. He’d let them go for Mo to watch them take flight. She’d squeal with delight, like a child half her age, watching their zigzag progress until they disappeared. Then she’d capture the images in her notebook. Other times it was beetles, myriad different shapes, sparkling with rainbow iridescence. Or the skulls of tiny animals. Or collections of feathers. Other times they would arrive in the morning to find a collection of crystals waiting for them, or a piece of amber containing the stem of a tiny plant, or a single petal of a flower, or an insect entombed within it. Mo’s eyes would sparkle with every new piece of what Mark called her “weirdiana.” She would study and draw them before adding them to her altars to nature, placed at strategic points around the perimeter of the den.
    It was a little eerie. As if Padraig knew exactly what would interest Mo. Kate, sitting on the grass outside the dairy, couldn’t suppress her curiosity. The three of them, other than Mo, were cooling off outside, with the hot noon sun hammering down on the leaves of the old pear tree over them. “What’s really going on, Mark? Do you think they’re communicating, or what?”
    “I don’t have a clue.”
    Kate looked down at a lodestone she had picked up from one of Mo’s altars. It felt as heavy as lead. She showed it to Alan. “Honestly! It’s as if they’re on some common wavelength.”
    Alan shrugged. “I warned you guys, Grandad’s superstitious.”
    “Yes,” she murmured, “but you never really explained what you meant.”
    Alan lifted up his brown bangs and Kate saw the triangular stork-beak birthmark. “Grandad even thinks this is a sign—something that marks me out as different.”
    Kate chuckled at Padraig’s eccentric ideas. “Has it ever given you some strange ability? Like some sixth sense?”
    “All it’s ever brought me is an avalanche of dragon’s piss right down on my