Newford Stories (8 page)

The sofa was wide enough that, with the
professor’s help, she was able to lay Jilly out beside the
stranger. Whatever had struck Jilly down was as much of a mystery
to Meran as the stranger’s original ailment. In her mind she began
to run through a list of other healers she could contact to ask for
help when there was a sudden commotion at the front door. A moment
later the crow girls trooped in with Cerin and Lucius following
behind them.

“Jilly…?” Cerin began.

Meran briefly explained what little she knew
of what had happened since they’d been gone.

“We can’t help him,” Zia said before anyone
else could speak.

“We tried,” Maida added, “but we weren’t so
very useful, were we?”

Zia shook her head.

“Not very useful at all,” Maida said.

“But,” Zia offered, “we could maybe help
her.”

Maida nodded and leaned closer to peer at
Jilly. “She’s very pretty, isn’t she? I think we know her.”

“She’s Geordie’s friend,” Zia said.

“Oh, yes.” Zia looked at Cerin. “But he
plays much nicer music.”

“Ever so very much more.”

“It’s for listening to, you see. Not for
making you do things.”

“I’m sorry,” Cerin said. “But we needed to
get your attention.”

“Well, we’re ever so very attentive now,”
Maida told him.

Whereupon the pair of them went very still
and fixed Cerin with expectant gazes. He turned helplessly to his
wife.

“How can you help Jilly?” she asked.

“Jilly,” Maida repeated. “Is that her
name?”

“Silly Jilly.”

“Willy-nilly.”

“Up down dilly.”

“I’m sure making fun of her name’s helpful,”
Lucius said.

“Oh, pooh,” Maida said. “Old Raven never
gets a joke.”

“That’s the trouble with this raven, all
right,” Zia agreed.

“We’ve seen jokes fly right out the window
when they see he’s in the room.”

“About Jilly,” Meran tried again.

“Well, you see,” Maida said, suddenly
serious. “The buffalo man is a piece of the Grace.”

“And we can’t help the Grace—she has to help
herself.”

Maida nodded. “But Jilly—”

Zia giggled, then quickly put a hand over
her mouth.

“—only needs to be shown the way back to her
being all of one piece again,” Maida finished.

“You mean her spirit has gone somewhere?”
Cerin asked.

“Duh.”

“How can we bring her back?” Meran
asked.

The crow girls looked at Cerin.

“Well,” Zia said. “If you know her
calling-on song as well as you do ours, that would maybe work.”

“I’ll get the roseharp,” Cerin said,
standing up.

“Now he needs it in hand,” Lucius said.

Cerin started to frame a reply, but then he
looked at Meran and left the room.

“We were promised sweets,” Maida said.

Zia nodded. “The actual promise was that
there’d be mountains of them.”

“Do you mind if we finish up here first?”
Meran asked.

“Oh, no,” Maida said. “We love to wait.”

Zia gave Meran a bright smile.
“Honestly.”

“Anticipation is so much better than being
attentive.”

“Though they’re much the same, in some
ways.”

“Because they both involve waiting, you
see,” Maida explained, her smile as bright as her companion’s.

Meran stifled a sigh and returned their
smile. She’d forgotten how maddening the crow girls could be.
Normally she enjoyed bantering with their tricksy kind, but at the
moment she was too worried about Jilly to join the fun. And then
there was the stranger whose appearance had started it all. They
hadn’t even
begun
to deal with him.

When Cerin returned with the roseharp, he
sat down on a footstool and drew the instrument onto his lap.

“Play something Jilly,” Maida suggested.

“Did you say silly?” Zia asked. “Because
that’s not being serious at all, you know, making jokes about very
serious things.”

“I didn’t say silly.”

“I think maybe you did.”

Cerin ignored the pair of them and turned to
his wife. “I might not be able to bring her back,” he said.
“Because of him. Because of the doors he can close.”

“I know,” Meran said. “You can only
try.”

- 5 -

“I think I know now what the crow girls
meant,” Jilly said.

The buffalo man raised his eyebrows
questioningly.

“About this ill will business,” Jilly
explained. “Every ugly thought or bad deed you come into contact
with steals away a piece of your vitality, doesn’t it? It’s like
erosion. The pieces keep falling away until finally you get so worn
away that you slip into a kind of coma.”

“Something like that.”

“Has this happened before?”

He nodded.

“So what happens next?”

“I die.”

Jilly stared at him, not sure she’d heard
him right.

“You…die.”

He nodded. “And then I come back and the
cycle begins all over again.”

Neither of them spoke for a long moment
then. It was quiet in the alley where they sat, but Jilly could
hear the traffic go by down the block where the alley opened on to
the street. There was a repetitive pattern to the sound: bus, bus,
a car horn, a number of vehicles in a group, then the buses
again.

“I guess what I don’t understand,” Jilly
finally said, “is why all the good things in the world don’t
balance it out—you know, recharge your vitality.”

“They’re completely overshadowed,” he
said.

Jilly shook her head. “I don’t believe that.
I know there are awful things in the world, but I also know there’s
more that’s good.”

“Then why am I so weak right now, in this,
your season of goodwill?”

“I think it’s because you don’t let the good
in anymore. You don’t trust there to be any good left, so you’ve
put up these protective walls that keep it out.”

“And the bad? Why does it continue to affect
me?”

“Because you concentrate on it,” Jilly said.
“And by doing that, you let it get in. It’s like you’re doing the
exact opposite to what you should be doing.”

“If only it could be so simple.”

“But it is,” she said. “In the end, it
always comes down to small, simple things because that’s the way
the world really works. We’re the ones who make it so complicated.
I mean, think about it. If everybody really and truly treated each
other the way they’d want to be treated, all the problems of the
world would be solved. Nobody would starve, because nobody’d want
to go hungry themselves. Nobody would steal, or kill, or hurt each
other, because they wouldn’t want that to happen to
themselves.”

“So what stops them from doing so?” he
asked.

“Trust. Or rather a lack of it. Too many
people don’t trust the other person to treat them right, so they
just dig in, accumulating stuff, thinking only of themselves or
their own small group—you know, family, company, community,
whatever. A tribal thing.” She hesitated a moment, then added, “And
that’s what’s holding you back, too. You don’t trust the good to
outweigh the bad.”

“I don’t know that I even can.”

“No one can help you with that,” Jilly told
him. “That’s something that can only come from inside you.”

He gave her a slow nod. “Maybe I will try
harder, the next time.”

“What next time? What’s wrong with right
now?”

He held out his arms. “If you could read the
history written on my skin, you would not need to ask that
question.”

Jilly pushed up her sleeves and held out her
own arms.

“Look,” she said. “You read what I went
through as a kid. I’m no better or stronger or braver than you are.
But I am determined to leave things a little better than they were
before I got here. That’s what gets me through. And I have to admit
there’s a certain selfishness involved. You see, I want to live in
that better world. I know it’s not going to happen unless we all
clean up our act and I know I can’t make anybody else do that. But
I’ll be damned if I don’t do it myself. You know, like a Kickaha
friend of mine says, ‘live large and walk in Beauty.’”

“You are very…persuasive.”

Jilly grinned. “It’s just this gift I
have.”

She stood up and offered him a hand.

“So what do you say, buffalo man? You want
to give this life another shot?”

He allowed her to help him up to his
feet.

“There’s a problem,” he said.

“No, no, no. Ignore the negatives, if only
for now.”

“You don’t understand. The door that brought
us here—it only opens one way.”

“What door?”

“My old life was finished and I was on my
way to the new. All of this—” He made a motion with his hand to
encompass everything around them. “—is only a memory.”

“Whose memory?” Jilly asked, getting a bad
feeling.

“Mine. The memory of a dying man.”

She smiled brightly. “So live. I thought
we’d already been through this earlier.”

“I would. You’ve convinced me enough of
that. Only there’s no way back.”

“There’s always a way back…isn’t there?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

“Oh, great. I get to be in a magical
adventure, only it turns out to be like a train on a one-way track
and we left the happy ending station miles back.”

“I’m sorry.”

She took his hand and gave it a squeeze. “Me
too.”

- 6 -

“Nothing’s happening,” Maida said.

Zia peered at the two still bodies on the
sofa. She gave Jilly a gentle poke with her finger.

“She’s still veryvery far away,” she
agreed.

Cerin sighed and let his fingers fall from
the strings of the roseharp. The music echoed on for a few moments,
then all was still.

“I tried to put all the things she loves
into the calling-on,” he said. “Painting and friendship and crows
and whimsy, but it’s not working. Wherever she’s gone, it’s farther
than I can reach.”

“How did it happen anyway?” the professor
asked. “All she did was touch him. Meran did the same and she
wasn’t taken away.”

“Jilly’s too open and trusting,” Meran said.
“She didn’t think to guard herself from the man’s spirit. When we
fall away into death, most of us will grab hold of anything we can
to stay our fall. That’s what happened to her—he grabbed her and
held on hard.”

“He’s dying?”

Meran glanced at the professor and
nodded.

“I should never have brought him here,”
Lucius said.

“You couldn’t have known.”

“It’s our fault,” Zia said.

Maida nodded glumly. “Oh, we’re the most
miserably bad girls, we are.”

“Let’s worry about whose fault it was some
other time,” Meran said. “Right now I want to concentrate on where
he could have taken her.”

“I’ve never died,” Lucius said, “so I can’t
say where a dying man would draw another’s soul, but I’ve withdrawn
from the world…”

“And?” Meran prompted him.

“I went into my own mind. I lived in my
memories. I didn’t
remember
. I lived in them.”

“So if we knew who he was,” Cerin said.
“Then perhaps we could—”

“We don’t need to know who he is,” Meran
broke in. “All we need to know is what he was thinking.”

“Would the proverbial life flashing before
one’s eyes be relevant here?” the professor asked. “Because that
could touch on anything.”

“We need something more specific,” Cerin
said.

Meran nodded. “Such as…where the crow girls
found him. Wouldn’t he be thinking of his surroundings at some
point?”

“It’s still a one-way door,” Cerin pointed
out.

“But if we can open it even a crack…” Lucius
said.

Cerin smiled. “Then maybe we can pull them
out before it closes on us again.”

“We can do that,” Maida said.

Zia nodded. “We’re very good at opening
things.”

“Even better when there’s sweets
inside.”

Zia rapped on the man’s head with a
knuckle.

“Hello, hello in there,” she said. “Can you
hear me?”

“Zia!” Lucius said.

“Well, how else am I supposed to get his
attention?”

“Hold on,” Meran said. “Perhaps we’re going
about this all wrong. Instead of concentrating on the door he is,
we should be concentrating on the door Jilly is.”

“Oh, good idea,” Maida said.

The crow girls immediately turned their
attention to Jilly. They leaned close, one on either side, and
began whispering in her ears.

- 7 -

“So I guess this is sort of like a
recording,” Jilly said, “except instead of being on pause, we’re in
a tape loop.”

Which was why the traffic noise she heard
was so repetitive. Being part of his memory, it, too, was in a
loop.

“You have such an interesting way of looking
at things,” the buffalo man said.

“No, humour me in this. We’re in a loop of
your memory, right? Well, what’s to stop you from thinking of
something else? Or concentrating and getting us past the loop?”

“To what purpose?”

“To whatever comes next.”

“We know what comes next,” he said.

“No. You
assume
we do. The last thing
you seem to remember is lying here in this alleyway. You must have
passed out at that point, which is the loop we’re in. Except I
showed up and you’re conscious and we’ve been talking—none of this
is memory. We’re already somewhere else than your memory. So what’s
to stop you from taking us further?”

“I have no memory beyond the point where I
closed my eyes.”

But Jilly was on a roll.

“Of course not,” she said. “So we’ll have to
use our imaginations.”

“And imagine what?”

“Well, crows would be good for starters. The
crow girls would have been flying above, and then they noticed you
and…” She paused, cocking her head. “Listen. Can you hear
that?”