“Aw, fuck—” Reece began, but it was easier on his ribs to stand up than to fight her.
“Let’s get you cleaned up,” she said.
“Florence fucking Nightingale,” he muttered, but she merely led him back the way she’d come.
From under the pier a wet shadow stirred at their departure. Reece’s booger drew back lips that had the rubbery texture of an octopus’
skin. Row on row of pointed teeth reflected back the light from the streetlights. Hatehot eyes glimmered red. On silent leathery paws, the creature followed the slowmoving pair, grunting softly to itself, claws clicking on the pavement.
Bramley Dapple was the wizard in “A Week of Saturdays,” the third story in Christy Riddell’s
“It doesn’t matter what they believe,” he was saying to his guest, “so much as what
He paused as the brownskinned goblin who looked after his house came in with a tray of biscuits and tea. His name was Goon, a tallish creature at threefoot-four who wore the garb of an organgrinder’s monkey: striped black and yellow trousers, a red jacket with yellow trim, small black slippers, and a little green and yellow cap that pushed down an unruly mop of thin dark curly hair. Gangly limbs with a protruding tummy, puffed cheeks, a wide nose, and tiny black eyes added to his monkeylike appearance.
The wizard’s guest observed Goon’s entrance with a startled look, which pleased Bramley to no end.
“There,” he said. “Goon proves my point.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“We live in a consensual reality where things exist because we want them to exist. I believe in Goon, Goon believes in Goon, and you, presented with his undeniable presence, tea tray in hand, believe in Goon as well. Yet, if you were to listen to the world at large, Goon is nothing more than a figment of some fevered writer’s imagination —a literary construct, an artistic representation of something that can’t possibly exist in the world as we know it.”
Goon gave Bramley a sour look, but the wizard’s guest leaned forward, hand outstretched, and brushed the goblin’s shoulder with a featherlight touch. Slowly she leaned back into the big armchair, cushions so comfortable they seemed to embrace her as she settled against them.
“So ... anything we can imagine can exist?” she asked finally. Goon turned his sour look on her now.
She was a student at the university where the wizard taught; third year, majoring in fine arts, and she had the look of an artist about her. There were old paint stains on her jeans and under her fingernails.
Her hair was a thick tangle of brown hair, more unruly than Goon’s curls. She had a smudge of a nose and thin puckering lips, workman’s boots that stood by the door with a history of scuffs and stains written into their leather, thick woolen socks with a hole in the left heel, and one shirttail that had escaped the waist of her jeans. But her eyes were a pale, pale blue, clear and alert, for all the casualness of her attire.
Her name was Jilly Coppercorn.
Bramley shook his head. “It’s not imagining. It’s knowing that it exists—without one smidgen of doubt.”
“Yes, but someone had to think him up for him to ...” She hesitated as Goon’s scowl deepened.
“That is ...”
Bramley continued to shake his head. “There is some semblance of order to things,” he admitted, “for if the world was simply everyone’s different conceptual universe mixed up together, we’d have nothing but chaos. It all relies on will, you see—to observe the changes, at any rate. Or the differences. The anomalies. Like Goon—oh, do stop scowling,” he added to the goblin.
“The world as we have it,” he went on to Jilly, “is here mostly because of habit. We’ve all agreed that certain things exist—we’re taught as impressionable infants that this is a table and this is what it looks like, that’s a tree out the window there, a dog looks and sounds just so. At the same time we’re informed that Goon and his like don’t exist, so we don’t—or can’t—see them.”
“They’re not made up?” Jilly asked.
This was too much for Goon. He set the tray down and gave her leg a pinch. Jilly jumped away from him, trying to back deeper into the chair as the goblin grinned, revealing two rows of decidedly nastylooking teeth.
“Rather impolite,” Bramley said, “but I suppose you do get the point?”
Jilly nodded quickly. Still grinning, Goon set about pouring their teas.
“So,” Jilly asked, “how can someone ... how can I see things as they really are?”
“Well, it’s not that simple,” the wizard told her. “First you have to know what it is that you’re looking for— before you can find it, you see.”
Ellen closed the book and leaned back in her own chair, thinking about that, about Balloon Men, about the young man lying in her bed. To know what you were looking for. Was that why when she went out hoping to find Balloon Men, she’d come home with Reece?
She got up and went to the bedroom door to look in at him. After much protesting, he’d finally let her clean his hurts and put him to bed. Claiming to be not the least bit hungry, he’d polished of a whole tin of soup and the better part of the loaf of sourdough bread that she had just bought that afternoon. Then, of course, he wasn’t tired at all and promptly fell asleep the moment his head touched the pillow.
She shook her head, looking at him now. His rainbow Mohawk made it look as though she’d brought some hybrid creature into her home—part rooster, part boy, it lay in her bed snoring softly, hardly real. But definitely not a Balloon Man, she thought, looking at his thin torso under the sheets.
About to turn away, something at the window caught her eye. Frozen in place, she saw a doglike face peering back at her from the other side of the pane—which was patently impossible since the bedroom was on the second floor and there was nothing to stand on outside that window. But impossible or not, that doglike face with its coalred eyes and a fierce grin of glimmering teeth was there all the same.
She stared at it, feeling sick as the moments ticked by. Hunger burned in those eyes. Anger.
Unbridled hate. She couldn’t move, not until it finally disappeared—sliding from sight, physically escaping rather than vanishing the way a hallucination should.
She leaned weakly against the doorjamb, a faint buzzing in her head. Not until she’d caught her breath did she go to the window, but of course there was nothing there. Consensual reality, Christy’s wizard had called it. Things that exist because we want them to exist. But she knew that not even in a nightmare would she consider giving life to that monstrous head she’d seen staring back in at her from the night beyond her window.
Her gaze went to the sleeping boy in her bed. All that anger burning up inside him. Had she caught a glimpse of something that
Ellen, she told herself as she backed out of the room, you’re making entirely too much out of nothing.
Except something had certainly seemed to be there. There was absolutely no question in her mind that
In the living room she looked down at Christy’s book. Bramley Dapple’s words skittered through her mind, chased by a feeling of ... of strangeness that she couldn’t shake. The wind, the night, finding Reece in that doorway. And now that thing in the window.
She went and poured herself a brandy before making her bed on the sofa, studiously avoiding looking at the windows. She knew she was being silly—she had to have imagined it—but there was a feeling in the air tonight, a sense of being on the edge of something vast and grey. One false step, and she’d plunge down into it. A void. A nightmare.
It took a second brandy before she fell asleep.
Outside, Reece’s booger snuffled around the walls of the house, crawling up the side of the building from time to time to peer into this or that window. Something kept it from entering—some disturbance in the air that was like a wind, but not a wind at the same time. When it finally retreated, it was with the knowledge in what passed for its mind that time itself was the key. Hours and minutes would unlock whatever kept it presently at bay.
Barracuda teeth gleamed as the creature grinned. It could wait. Not long, but it could wait.
