He was a mechanic at the BP station on the corner of Riverdale and Bank where Ben Summerfield took his cab when it needed repairs. Ben knew him as a good-natured, somewhat aggressive proponent of the whole British punk/new wave scene— the music and ideologies of groups like the Damned and the Clash, Vice Squad and the Anti-Nowhere League. "I finally figured out that you can't solve everything with flowers," Mick had explained to Ben once. "Sometimes you've got to kick a little ass."
"Any beer left?" Becki asked during the silence between cuts.
She was about eighteen or nineteen— Mick didn't know which, and had never bothered to ask— with spiked black hair and strong Slavic features. The T-shirt she was wearing looked like someone had spilled battery acid all over it. There were rents and tears in all the strategic places, and you could only vaguely make out that it had once said SID LIVES.
"I'll check," Mick said. He left the room, returning with a couple of Buds.
"What're you smiling about?" Becki asked when he handed her one of the cans.
"I was thinking of Ben— working his ass off with the Ex. He'll have fares running him from one end of the city to the other tonight."
"I don't know why you hang around with him. He's so fucking straight."
"Hey, Ben's a good shit, you know what I mean? I don't hear him bad-mouthing you."
Becki shrugged. "Oh, I like him all right. I just think he's a little weird, that's all. All he does is drive that cab of his and read his space-and-elves books."
"Well, we can't all change the world," Mick replied.
He tilted his beer back, Adam's apple bobbing as he chugged. Paul Simonon, the Clash's bass player, was singing "The Guns of Brixton" now, something about having your hands on your head or on the trigger of a gun. When they came knocking on his door, Mick thought, he knew how he'd be stepping out.
Farley O'Dennehy was panhandling in front of the Ex at closing time that night. He had his battered suitcase hoisted in one hand, and kept an eye out for the cops while he scanned the crowd for easy marks. He was feeling bold tonight— fueled by a couple of bottles of Brights wine. So far he'd pulled in six bucks and change. If he could work the crowd for another half hour or so without getting busted, he'd be getting so piss-drunk tomorrow that he wouldn't even miss the Ex and its easy pickings.
"Hey, pal," he asked a man in white trousers and a light blue shirt. "Can you spare me a quarter?"
"Fuck off, creep."
"Yeah? Well, you can—" Farley broke off when he spotted six-feet-three and two hundred twenty pounds of Ottawa's finest looking in their direction. "— have a nice day," he finished lamely, and shuffled off.
"You didn't have to be so mean," Stella Sidney told her boyfriend.
"Aw, the guy bugged me," Rick replied. "Why the hell should he get a free ride? At least I
work
for my money."
Rick Kirkby had just opened his own store— Captain Computer— and was filled with the righteousness of a small businessman standing up for the North American work ethic. Stella decided that it wasn't the time to remind him that if it hadn't been for
her
money, Rick would never have got the business off the ground in the first place. Bad enough he'd dragged her to the Ex tonight, without finishing the evening with a fight.
"Let's go find the car," she said.
"Yeah. Sure."
Stella followed his distracted gaze to see that it was centered on two high school girls in tie-tops and cutoff jeans that were so short you could see the cheeks of their rumps hanging out.
"Come
on,"
she said.
"Okay, okay. I was just looking."
By three a.m., the streets were quiet. Humming the Human League's "Don't You Want Me" under his breath, a tall slender man stepped from the two-storied house he was renting on Willard Street in Ottawa South and ambled down the block to Cameron. He had short pale-blond hair and wore a lightweight suit with padded shoulders that hung stylishly from his lean frame. His eyes, when he stepped under the pooling glow of a streetlight, gleamed like blue crystals.
The name on the passport he was currently using identified him as Lucius Marn, residing in Canada on an extended visit from the United Kingdom. It was the same name that he'd used to sign his lease. The name he had been given at birth, however, in a time long before the use of passports or other identifying papers, was Lysistratus.
He paused at the corner of the block, moving into the shadow of the big red-brick house that, unlike his own, was divided into two half-doubles. Using honed senses he reached inside to touch the sleeping minds of its occupants— three on one side, two on the other. The texture of their dreams was coarse, diffused; sufficient to appease his hunger, but like a man given a choice between a gourmet dinner and simple nourishment, satisfying that hunger was not enough. Not when there was a choice.
Across the street, meeting the point of the V Willard and Bellwood made as they met Cameron, Cat Midhir unknowingly waited for him.
Her house was sheltered from the street by a tall hedge of gangly cedars and stood farther back from the street than its neighbors on either side. A giant birch on the right of the front lawn and a Dutch elm— one of the few in the city not yet stricken by disease— framed the front of the building. In the backyard a tall pine lifted from behind its roof like a second chimney.
The house was red brick, with a wooden veranda painted cream-yellow that ran the length of the front. An antique horse-drawn buggy stood forgotten on the left side of the long porch. The other half had been, enclosed with screening. Decorous wooden eaves and gables, and the shutters on the dormer windows, matched the color of the veranda.
Yet for all the house's charm, there was a certain forsaken quality about it, as though it was a poor country cousin come visiting its more urban relatives. Not so much a sense of disrepair as being worn about the edges. In point of fact the house had once been in a rural setting. Originally part of the Billings Estate, a farm that had sprawled on either side of the Rideau River, the city had grown up around both the house and the estate, swallowing the farmland. The estate still stood on top of the hill across the river, spotlighted every night like a fairy tale palace.
Lysistratus could not see the Billings Estate from where he stood. What light he did see spilled down from the upper right dormer of Cat's house, and it gave him pause. He didn't need the lit window to know that his prey was still wake. There was a distinct difference between waking and sleeping thoughts. The one he could feed on, the other… The other meant no more to him than the garish packaging of food in a supermarket. Waking thoughts carried dreams, but they were too difficult to pry sustenance from.
For a long time Lysistratus regarded the house. He began to hum again, "Anitra's Dance" from Grieg's
Peer Gynt Suites,
while he considered the woman inside. The quality of her dreams was such that they fed more than the gnawing hunger inside him; they fed the soul as well.
Mankind needed its dreams to keep its sanity. He needed mankind's dreams as sustenance. He took his bulk nourishment from those who didn't dream so true. The dreams of creative beings were more of a delicacy, while her dreams… they coursed through his system like a narcotic. They were rare gems, and he treated them accordingly, being careful not to be too greedy when he fed, lest he irreparably damage the source of his pleasure.
Before her, the best nourishment was to be found in primitive societies, strong-dreaming aboriginies unsullied by the vacuous glitter of the Western world. But such societies were closed to him. His skin was too pale to pass as one of them, and their shaman, knowing that such parasites existed, had developed harsh and successful methods of dealing with his kind.
The danger was less in a city like this— its inhabitants would not accept that he existed, except as a titillating fiction, and it was comfortable. He enjoyed its luxuries— theatres, opera, clubs. He took the same pleasure from Wagner as he did from David Bowie, from Bergman as from Lucas. He was safe, so long as he didn't overstay himself.
He had made a tour of the great cities of Europe and now planned a similar circuit of North America. A year here, a year there. He'd started small— Ottawa with its international flavor yet smalltown atmosphere— but planned to visit all the major cities: New York, Vancouver, L.A., Montreal, Chicago, Toronto, Washington.
He meant to enjoy himself, even with the one major drawback that the present age had delivered to one such as he:
Modern men and women moved too quickly. Their lifestyle was filled with too much stimuli, leaving them jaded, too easily satisfied, unable to use their imaginations. He found himself snatching half-formed images from those who dozed on public transportation or in parks and theatres. Where he once took lightly from one, perhaps two, throughout the dark hours, he was forced to feed on five or six now, occasionally killing his victims to harvest enough sustenance from their thin dreams.
"But you are safe," he murmured, gazing up to Cat's lighted window. "From death at least."
He remembered something that the poet Ibycus had said once: "There is no medicine to be found for a life which is fled." Dead, Cat could no longer feed him her true dreams. Dead, her dreams were lost to him forever.
He ran a hand through his hair, then gave Cat's window a brief salute before turning to go. The leather soles of his shoes made no sound on the pavement as he walked toward Windsor Park.
Albert Cousins never heard the door to his room open, never saw the slender man with the glittering blue eyes lean over his bed, never felt the stranger lay a hand on either side of his wrinkled face. Albert was dreaming of his wife, of Jean and him driving their old Chevy up the Gatineau, with the boys in the backseat— the one seven, the other six— and a picnic hamper in the trunk.
A final dream.
Lysistratus took the old man in the rooming house, took a lifetime of dreams and left behind a body with its motor-workings intact, but no soul to drive it. Standing over his drained victim, Lysistratus watched the body, bereft of its soul, slowly expire. His own body converted the old man's psychic essence into nourishment that would sustain his needs.
The basic hunger was satiated. But he thought of true dreams and the woman who dreamed them, and knew it was not enough. The simple satisfying of base needs could never be enough.
In the big house on Cameron where Willard and Bellwood join to form their V, Cat Midhir slept a dreamless sleep. In the morning she would wake with a headache, for on his return from the rooming house, Lysistratus had touched her sleeping mind with his and swallowed the night's dreams. Tomorrow she would sit at her typewriter, as she had every day for the past nine years, but tomorrow morning she would not keep anything that she wrote— if she wrote at all.
Three months ago she had stopped dreaming. Three months ago the words that had come so easily for so many years simply dried up.
Tomorrow would be no different.
Sorcerers are not the same as other men. Part of their magic is to appear like us.
Mick Jennings lay on his back on a dolly, doing a brake job on a Honda Civic. His coveralls were more black than the gray they'd been when he'd first bought them, his hands and forearms were grimy, and he had a greasy streak on his forehead beneath the spikes of his mohawk. He was listening to CHEZ-FM because that was the station Jim had tuned in.
They were playing Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven"— as they seemed to every three or four hours. Remember progressive rock? Hard to forget it, mate, the way the radio stations still flogged it. Christ, he wished they'd let that song give up the ghost and die the death it probably yearned for. It wasn't as though he hadn't listened to it himself when it first came out— he probably still had a scratched copy of the album hiding somewhere in a milk carton with all his other oldies-but-moldy-goldies. But the song came out in '71. It was eleven years old. What was it going to take to convince the station's programmer that this was the eighties and they should be playing music relevant to
now,
instead of tired old licks and—
The
ping-ping-ping of
someone driving over the signal cord by the pumps set his mind along a new track. Any bets Jim's too busy to get that? he asked himself. He paused in his work and counted to ten. Before he reached six, he heard his boss call out from the office, "Hey, Mick. Can you get that? I'm busy with a customer."
He rolled out from under the Civic. "Yeah. Sure."
He scratched his nose, leaving a new smudge behind, and looked ruefully at his hands. Wiping them on his coveralls, he headed out to the pumps.
"I'll be honest with you," Melissa Robinson said. "The reason I flew up today is because I'm starting to get seriously worried."
They made an odd couple. In contrast to the sleek, fashionable image that Melissa projected, Cat dressed haphazardly and was slender almost to the point of being skinny, with a heart-shaped face and intense gray-green eyes. Her dark curly hair fell in a tangle across her forehead; she brushed it aside with a quick nervous motion and sighed.
She'd felt as though she were on trial ever since she and her agent had arrived at Noddy's Place for lunch. But no matter how much Melissa threatened or cajoled, Cat still couldn't produce the new novel for her. It wasn't written yet. The way things were going, it might never get written.
"The people at McClelland and Stewart are making nervous noises," Melissa continued. "Dana phoned me twice last week as it is." She leaned across the table. "Can you at least give me an outline to take back to them?"
"I don't use outlines— you know that. I get a theme and then just go ahead—"