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.
Time Skip
Every time it rains a ghost comes walking.
He goes up by the stately old houses that line Stanton Street, down Henratty Lane to where it leads into the narrow streets and crowded backalleys of Crowsea, and then back up Stanton again in an unvarying routine.
He wears a worn tweed suit—mostly browns and greys with a faint rosy touch of heather. A shapeless cap presses down his brown curls. His features give no true indication of his age, while his eyes are both innocent and wise. His face gleams in the rain, slick and wet as that of a living person. When he reaches the streetlamp in front of the old Hamill estate, he wipes his eyes with a brown hand. Then he fades away.
Samantha Rey knew it was true because she’d seen him. More than once.
She saw him every time it rained.
“So, have you asked her out yet?” Jilly wanted to know.
We were sitting on a park bench, feeding pigeons the leftover crusts from our lunches. Jilly had worked with me at the post office, that Christmas they hired outside staff instead of letting the regular employees work the overtime, and we’d been friends ever since. These days she worked three nights a week as a waitress, while I made what I could busking on the Market with my father’s old Czech fiddle.
Jilly was slender, with a thick tangle of brown hair and pale blue eyes, electric as sapphires. She had a penchant for loose clothing and fingerless gloves when she wasn’t waitressing. There were times, when I met her on the streets in the evening, that I mistook her for a bag lady: skulking in an alleyway, gaze alternating between the sketchbook held in one hand and the faces of the people on the streets as they walked by. She had more sketches of me playing my fiddle than had any right to exist.
“She’s never going to know how you feel until you talk to her about it,” Jilly went on when I didn’t answer.
“I know.”
I’ll make no bones about it: I was putting the make on Sam Rey and had been ever since she’d started to work at Gypsy Records half a year ago. I never much went in for the blonde California beach girl type, but Sam had a look all her own. She had some indefinable quality that went beyond her basic cheerleader appearance. Right. I can hear you already. Rationalizations of the North American libido.
But it was true. I didn’t just want Sam in my bed; I wanted to know we were going to have a future together. I wanted to grow old with her. I wanted to build up a lifetime of shared memories.
About the most Sam knew about all this was that I hung around and talked to her a lot at the record store.
“Look,” Jilly said. “Just because she’s pretty, doesn’t mean she’s having a perfect life or anything.
Most guys look at someone like her and they won’t even approach her because they’re sure she’s got men coming out of her ears. Well, it doesn’t always work that way. For instance—” she touched her breastbone with a narrow hand and smiled “—consider yours truly.”
I looked at her long fingers. Paint had dried under her nails. “You’ve started a new canvas,” I said.
“And you’re changing the subject,” she replied. “Come on, Geordie. What’s the big deal? The most she can say is no.”
“Well, yeah. But ...”
“She intimidates you, doesn’t she?”
I shook my head. “I talk to her all the time.”
“Right. And that’s why I’ve got to listen to your constant mooning over her.” She gave me a sudden considering look, then grinned. “I’ll tell you what, Geordie, me lad. Here’s the bottom line: I’ll give you twentyfour hours to ask her out. If you haven’t got it together by then, I’ll talk to her myself “
“Don’t even joke about it.”
“Twentyfour hours,” Jilly said firmly. She looked at the chocolate-chip cookie in my hand. “Are you eating that?” she added in that certain tone of voice of hers that plainly said, all previous topics of conversation have been dealt with and completed. We are now changing topics.
So we did. But all the while we talked, I thought about going into the record store and asking Sam out, because if I didn’t, Jilly would do it for me. Whatever else she might be, Jilly wasn’t shy. Having her go in to plead my case would be as bad as having my mother do it for me. I’d never been able to show my face in there again.
Gypsy Records is on Williamson Street, one of the city’s main arteries. It begins as Highway 14
outside the city, lined with a sprawl of fast food outlets, malls and warehouses. On its way downtown, it begins to replace the commercial properties with everincreasing handfuls of residential blocks until it reaches the downtown core where shops and lowrise apartments mingle in gossiping crowds.
The store gets its name from John Butler, a short roundbellied man without a smidgen of Romany blood, who began his business out of the back of a handdrawn cart that gypsied its way through the city’s streets for years,
