Memory and Dream

you.”

“But ..... Izzy lifted the charred bit of canvas and wood she was holding. “Why did you burn this?”

“Because it’s your work. I did it as a study, for myself, nothing more. I didn’t want to keep such pieces around because ... well, what if I were to die and they were found in my estate? Do you think anyone would believe that I had copied them from you?”

Izzy slowly shook her head.

“Exactly. So once I’ve learned what I can from a piece, I destroy it to preserve the integrity of your art. I wouldn’t dream of letting your unique vision appear to be based upon work I’d done—and I was only insuring that no one else would gather the wrong impression.”

“But what could you possibly be learning from me?” Izzy had to know. Rushkin hesitated. “I’ll tell you,” he said after a moment, “but remember, you were the one to bring this up, not I.”

Izzy nodded.

“Let me take that,” Rushkin said.

Izzy gave him the canvas that he’d asked for and watched as he dropped it into the brass wastebasket that stood by the door. He led her back into the kitchen then and poured them each a mug of tea from a pot he’d had steeping when she burst in. Not until they were settled at the table did he go on.

“We talked about spirits before,” he said. “Of how artists can call them up from ... well, no one knows where. But we call them up with certain paintings or songs or any creative endeavor that builds a bridge between our world and that mysterious Garden of the Muses.”

“I remember,” Izzy said. She got an apologetic look on her face. “I’m just not so sure I can believe in it.”

“Fair enough. But it doesn’t matter. Insofar as the current situation lies, all that matters is that I believe it. Are you with me so far?”

“I suppose.”

“I used to be able to bring them across,” Rushkin said. “I made homes for those spirits in my paintings, gave them bodies to wear. My work was a bridge between the worlds. But no longer. I’ve lost the touch, you see. For many years now, when I paint, I make a painting. A wondrous enough enchantment in its own right, to be sure, but when you’ve known more, merely painting can no longer be enough.”

“But you ... you said you were teaching me how to do that.”

Izzy felt a little odd as she spoke. She didn’t believe, but she felt cheated at the same time to learn that this calling up of spirits was no longer possible.

“I was,” Rushkin said. “I am. I still will. You see, I can remember how I did it, but I have lost the ability to do so. Lost the gift. But you have not. It lies strong inside you. So I was copying those pieces of yours in hopes of building a bridge to that other place to see if I could regain what I had lost by seeing how you did it.

“And?” Izzy asked, forgetting for the moment how she felt about the whole idea. “Did it work?”

Rushkin shook his head. “No. All that resulted was exact duplicates of your work. After each attempt, I destroyed them.”

Izzy frowned, thinking this all through. “So the painting can call up spirits—spirits that can physically manifest in our world.”

“Yes.”

“And do they become real, then?”

“What do you mean?”

“Once they’re here in our world,” Izzy asked. “Are they real like you and me?”

“They become real, but not like you or I,” Rushkin told her. “There remains a bond in them to that place from which they originated so that they always carry a piece of otherness inside. They might seem like you or I, but they don’t have our needs. They require neither food, nor sleep. They don’t dream.

And because they can’t dream, they are unable to create.”

“And it’s just people that come across?” Izzy asked.

“Beings,” Rushkin said. “Yes. However, they won’t necessarily seem like people. They have the same source as legend and myth, Isabelle. When the ancients first made their paintings and sculptures of marvelous beings— dryads and satyrs, angels and dragons—they were not rendering things they had seen. Rather they were bringing them into being. Not all of them, of course. Only those artists with the gift. The others were working from observation, but what they observed was what the gifted had first brought across.”

“What about the tree in Smither’s Oak? You said it had spirit. Did it come across as well?”

Rushkin’s shoulders lifted and fell helplessly. “I don’t know. Perhaps. I have never been aware of such a crossing, but it seems possible. Of course, such a spirit would have no mobility. It would be forced to remain at whatever spot it crossed over.”

“And what you were saying earlier,” Izzy asked. “You weren’t just talking about painting. You made it sound like music or writing could build a bridge as well.”

“It seems logical and so I’ve been told, but I know only how to use the gift through my painting. My understanding of it has always been limited in that sense.”

What got to Izzy the most was Rushkin’s sincerity. He took such impossible concepts and damned if he didn’t make them seem plausible.

“You really believe in this stuff, don’t you?” she asked.

“Without question,” he replied. “Though as I told you before, I was as skeptical when my mentor told me of them, as you are listening to me.”

XVIII

It was while Izzy was riding home on the bus that the fatigue hit her hard. She’d been burning adrenaline all the way to the studio and through her confrontation with Rushkin, so angry that she hadn’t even had time to feel scared. After his explanation, her energy deflated. Her head spun from the emotional roller coaster she’d just been on and she felt so weak it was all she could do to sit upright in her seat. But the events of the day continued to turn over and over in her mind.

She would have cheerfully killed Rushkin, she realized. That easily. And over what? Paintings. It was true that she’d invested an incredible amount of herself in each one, but paintings could always be redone. When she likened what might have been her loss to what had happened to Rochelle, there was really no comparison at all. What had been stolen from Rochelle could never be recovered.

Izzy thought she understood Kathy’s argument better now, seeing it from the other side of the coin as it were. And as for what had happened to Rochelle’s attackers ... She didn’t necessarily agree any more than she had earlier, but it was easier to empathize with the killers now.

Killers.

Or killer?

She knew now why John had deflected her question earlier in the evening by handing her that piece of charred canvas he’d found behind the studio. He had done so to make her understand what true anger meant. Justified anger. Had he been involved in the deaths of Rochelle’s attackers? At this moment she thought it was more to the point to ask, was he even real?

Rushkin’s arguments were so seductive that, impossible though they had to be, she had left the coach house halfway convinced that spirits could be called up through certain art, through the concentration and focus one held while working on a piece. Rushkin had never lied to her before. Why should he begin now? And why with something so bizarre?

If that process Rushkin described was real ...

She had painted John before she’d ever met him. John never seemed to eat. He never seemed to sleep. He never spoke of dreams. He remained as much an enigma to her now as he’d been when they’d first met. It could simply be the way he was. But if Rushkin was to be believed, the mystery she always sensed surrounding John might not be inborn, or self-produced; it might have its source in that piece of otherness that he’d brought with him when her painting had called him up from that other place.

The whole idea was crazy, but she knew now that she had to explore it or she’d really feel she’d gone mad. Imagine if it was real and she turned her back upon it.