Yarrow, Page 8

  "Tiddy?" she called in a husky voice. "Is that you?"

  Gaze flitting nervously left and right, the gnome approached her. His entire body was taut with tension and he looked ready to bolt at the slightest provocation.

  "It's me, it's me," the little man said mournfully. He came up close, saucer eyes searching her face. "Why did you leave us?" he asked.

  Ben had gone to bed more than a little tipsy. The clock beside his bed showed two-thirteen when he crawled under the covers. An hour later he woke in a cold sweat with the afterimages of a bad dream floating before his eyes and a buzzing in his ears.

  There had been a man stalking him in his dreams— a man with skin like white frost and glittering blue eyes. His fingernails were curved like talons. When he smiled, his lips pulled back to reveal row upon row of incisors like a barracuda's. He had Ben backed up against the wall of an alleyway, the bricks pressing against Ben's shoulder blades, the man's eyes flat and cold, his grin widening. And then suddenly the mouth of alley was filled with cats— a wave of them that crested and swept over the man, clawing and biting….

  That was when Ben woke.

  Too weird, he thought. He sat up against the headboard, still shaken by the intensity of the images. He didn't normally have dreams— or at least he didn't normally remember them. But even the ones he remembered had never been like this. And there'd been something about the man who was stalking him— something familiar that eluded him the more he tried to place it.

  After a while he lay down again, calmer, but still puzzled. He turned his thoughts to the evening just past, Becki's pleasure that he'd danced with her— "Guess you're not such an old fart after all," she'd teased him— and hanging out afterward with her and Mick and a couple of guys from the band— Johnny Too Bad and Ras… Ras Danny Dread.

  He fell asleep again, the nightmare all but forgotten.

  "I didn't leave you," Cat said. "I just… I don't know what happened. I just couldn't get here anymore. Something was stopping me. Oh, Tiddy, I've missed you. Why didn't you come to me?"

  "I couldn't find the way," he replied in a small voice.

  "But where have you been?"

  "Hiding."

  "Hiding from what? From me?" Just the possibility of that made the knot in her stomach tighten.

  "Not from you," Tiddy Mun told her. "Never from you. From… from the evil one…."

  "Evil….?" That was what filled the night, she realized. What was seeking her. Not the night itself, but something inhuman all the same. Something evil. "Where are the others?" she asked. "Mabwen and Kothlen… and all your kin?"

  "Gone, gone. Kothlen is dead. Mabwen is fled." Tiddy Mun began to shiver uncontrollably. "All the… others are too scared to do anything but run and hide."

  Cat stared at him in shock. "Kothlen… is dead?"

  "The evil killed him. It comes like a great shadow to steal your soul. We thought… I thought he'd killed you too."

  Cat drew the little man close and held him. Tears spilled from her eyes, ran down her cheek unheeded. Kothlen dead. That tall bright lord— dead. She couldn't accept it, but the truth plummeted through her like a rock plunging through water, sending up ripples of sorrow that threatened to drown her as they widened. She'd never be with him again. Never see him smile. Never sit with Tiddy Mun at the tall elflord's knee, listening to his stories or just sharing a companionable silence. He was dead. Dead.

  "How can he be gone?" she cried.

  Her despair rang across the hills, and Tiddy Mun grew very still in her arms. They both sensed the gathering of whatever it was that hunted in the night. Its searching narrowed, focused on them. A pressure beat at them from beyond the protection of the standing stones. It came from the darkness, sapping their wills, drawing them out from between the stones.

  They stumbled on trembling legs, collapsing just outside the safety of the dolmen. Unprotected, they huddled under the night skies and felt the darkness sweeping near.

  Lysistratus could sense her now. She wasn't far— a mile, perhaps two. She slept alone, in another's house. She was too far to feed on, but close enough to draw her to him. She hid, but hiding would do her no good. If she didn't come to him, he would go to her, but feed he would tonight.

  "Come home, sweet dreamer," he whispered into the night. "Come to the comfort of your own bed, your own secret place of solace. No one can harm you here…."

  Cat felt weak, as though she'd tried to get up too soon from a sickbed and had slumped helplessly to the floor. She wanted to be safe at home, in her own bed. Not in an Otherworld where Kothlen was dead and everything except for Tiddy Mun was strange. Nor to wake in a strange apartment, on a strange couch, to see the four enclosing walls of a living room that belonged to someone else surrounding her.

  Tiddy Mun whimpered in her arms. The darkness above them took the impossible shape of a great dark-winged pterodactyl. They clutched each other tightly. Cat knew that they had to move, to get back inside the protection of the long-stones, but they were both too frightened to move. Then that black saurion shape in the darkness above them swept down with an icy rush of fetid air, talons outstretched and raking the sky.

  Cat heard a wailing scream pierce the night and was only dimly aware that it had been torn from her own throat.

  Peter sat bolt upright in his bed, the scream that had woken him still ringing in his ears. It took him a moment to get his bearings, then he thought: Cat!

  "Oh, Jesus."

  He lunged from the bed and skidded across the floor to the living room, hitting the light switch as he went in. In the sudden glare of light, he saw Cat crouched in a corner of the open daybed, holding what looked to be some sort of doll in her arms. Except it was too large to be a doll, Peter realized, and who'd make a doll as wild and tattered as this one was? Raggedy clothes, bone-thin limbs, wild hair, eyes too big for the pinched features of its face. Then the doll moved and Peter took a step back, stumbled over an end table, and sprawled on the floor.

  When he got to his feet and half-fearfully looked back, there was only Cat, huddled on the couch, eyes wide with fright, hair plastered wetly against her forehead. She moaned, hands opening and closing on the blanket that she'd drawn up to her chin.

  "Easy," Peter said, wondering just what the hell he thought he'd seen. He moved toward her. "It's okay, Cat. It was just a bad dream."

  She looked blankly at him, then slowly her eyes focused. He sat on the edge of the daybed and drew her to him, rubbing her back with the palm of his hand in long soothing strokes. The shirt she'd borrowed from him was damp with perspiration.

  "That was a bad one," he said when she finally drew back.

  She nodded, swallowed with difficulty. "He's dead," she said numbly.

  "Who's dead?"

  "Kothlen. And—" She looked wildly about the room. "Tiddy Mun!"

  "What—" Peter began. Then he heard a scuffling on the stairs that led down to the store.

  The image returned to him— the image of what he'd thought she was holding when he first flicked on the lights, before he'd stumbled and fallen. It had to have been a trick of the light. He'd seen the blanket bunched up in her arms and given it features. Or the pillow that was now lying on the floor. Except… He turned toward the stairwell. The sound hadn't been repeated, but that didn't mean—

  "You saw him too, didn't you?" Cat asked. "Tiddy Mun. A little man. A moment ago. I know he came back with me…."

  He hadn't seen anything, Peter told himself. Especially not some lingering figment of her dreams. He just didn't need something like that to be real. But his whole body was tense and he found himself straining to hear another sound from downstairs. Was that the front door? Again the sound wasn't repeated. There was only silence.

  As though she were following his thoughts. Cat asked, "You're going to pretend that you didn't see anything, aren't you?"

  "Look, Cat. I'm not sure what I did or didn't see. All I know is I heard you scream and got out here so fast that I wasn't even awake ye
t."

  That wild face with its huge eyes returned to him. It was like something out of a Rackham print or one of Charles Vess's illustrations.

  "He was here," Cat said. "We were in the Otherworld, but everything was changed. There was something… hunting us. And then just when it was about to get us I…" Her voice trailed off. She'd been about to say, I woke up.

  "It's okay," Peter said. "It's over now."

  As soon as he spoke the words, he realized that he was being too quick to offer comfort, too pat. She wanted to talk it out, while he just wanted to forget it. Now she was withdrawing again. Bottling it all up inside because he was being too pigheaded to admit that maybe he had seen something.

  "I can't stay here," Cat said abruptly. "I'm going home."

  Peter glanced at the clock on the mantle. "For God's sake, Cat. It's just going on four. Why don't you just go back to—"

  "I can't stay here. I have to go home. At home I'll be safe."

  "You're safe here. I don't bite."

  She didn't crack a smile. "I'm going," she said, and stood up.

  Picking up her clothes, she headed for the bathroom and shut the door firmly behind her. Peter started to follow, then realized he'd better get dressed himself. All he was wearing was a pair of boxer shorts. She was ready to leave as he came out of the bedroom, and looked at him strangely.

  "Why are you dressed?'

  "I'm going with you."

  "I want to be alone, Peter."

  "That's okay. I'm just going as far as your front door. Humor me, won't you?"

  They went downstairs in silence: Peter looked carefully around, but nothing seemed disturbed. He glanced at Cat. What if he had seen something?

  "Who was he?" he asked as they stepped out onto the street.

  Cat stood silently, studying the sky. She shivered as she remembered that great winged shape dropping down out of the Otherworld darkness. Where was Tiddy Mun now?

  "Cat—" Peter began.

  "Don't patronize me, Peter."

  "I'm not." He shrugged. "Okay, so maybe I was. But just take a look at it from my point of view."

  "You saw him," she said. "You just won't believe that you did. Or you won't admit it."

  Her temper was rising. She was about to tell him to just leave her alone, but then she thought of last night's watcher and tonight's feeling in the Otherworld.

  "Tiddy Mun is a gnome," she said softly. "One of my… my ghosts, I suppose you could say."

  Peter realized how much that had taken out of her. Yesterday evening had been different. That had been a cleansing of sorts. This morning she was all closed up again. Somehow he had to get past that block, as he had last night. But he couldn't do it by playing along with her fantasies— no matter what he might or might not think he'd seen in her arms earlier.

  "I thought you said they only visited you in your dreams."

  "The gnomes used to always follow me around, here as well as in the Otherworld, though mostly it was Tiddy Mun. I'd feel him watching me from around a corner, but when I turned he'd be gone. It was son of a game that we played. But then I stopped dreaming…."

  "You said someone had died."

  "Kothlen. He…"

  She couldn't go on. All the sorrow she'd been suppressing came surging up inside her. For the third time in less than twelve hours, Peter held her close, desperately trying to bring her back to the plain reality of the here and now. They stood near the corner of Bank Street and Fifth. He could see their reflection in the front window of Britton's Smoke Shop— the small form pressed against him, hair as wild as her gnome's….

  The thought trailed off. Damn it. He had seen something. All he had to do was close his eyes and he could call up those alien features in his mind. The triangular-shaped face, pinched and brown as bark. And the eyes, like two small moons, glinting gold…

  A cab drove by and Cat pulled away from him as though even that passing driver was too much of a crowd to witness her grief. Peter thought of flagging it down, but by then it was already far down Bank, taillights winking red. He turned back to Cat, reached for and captured her hand.

  "I did see something" he said. "What it was, I don't know. I just find it really hard to accept that it was a little man from your dreams, Cat."

  Hard to accept? Try impossible. But she believed. And her grief for the death of one of the dream companions— that was real for her as well. So what did that mean? That she had a good imagination? He could tell that from reading her books. But no matter how real it was for her, he knew he shouldn't play up to her fantasy. It was just going to support an illusion, and that wouldn't help in the long run. It would make it harder for her to accept that it was her subconscious mind peopling her sleep with the companions she was too shy to meet in real life.

  An excellent theory, barring one small detail. He'd seen something too.

  Cat watched his face through a film of tears, trying to understand what was going through his mind.

  "C'mon," he said simply, squeezing her hand.

  They walked along in silence, past the Civic Centre and Lansdowne Park. Halfway across the bridge they paused and looked down at the still waters of the canal, arms propped on the balustrade.

  "Kothlen was like water," Cat said, searching for words to express what her friend had been like, trying to bridge the gap of disbelief that still lay between Peter and herself. "When he was still, he was as quiet as that water down there. You could just sink into his silences, and when you came out of them, you were refreshed. Filled again. He was like Mynfel in that way."

  "The horned woman?" Peter asked, remembering her talking a bit about her yesterday evening.

  Cat nodded. "She's like a goddess. Being with her is like being in the presence of something… I don't know. Solemn. Holy. Kothlen could be like that, but he could also be fun. Did you ever go up into the Gatineaus in the spring and hear one of those small brooks come tumbling down a hill? That's what his laugh was like. And that's why I think of him being like water. He was as hard to understand as the sea, but as immediate as… as rain on your face."

  The depth of her feelings reached Peter. He found himself wishing he could have known this man, wishing Kothlen hadn't been just a fabrication, but someone real. Someone Cat could have introduced him to. Someone he could have talked to himself, to sit around and shoot the breeze with…. Again he returned to the question: Did Kothlen's unreality make any difference to the validity of Cat's feelings? No matter what Kothlen had been— imagined or not— didn't the feelings stay real?

  "You're going to miss him, aren't you?"

  She nodded again, quietly, holding back a new rush of tears.

  Lysistratus smiled in the darkness of Cat's study. He had felt her coming to him ever since he'd broken her dream. Now every footstep brought her closer. He thought again of breeding a woman like her. Was she in a fertile cycle tonight? What sort of child would spring from a union of such a true dreamer and a being like himself?

  When Cat and Peter reached the corner of Belmont and Willard and were looking down the street to where Cat's house rose above the cedar hedge, Peter sensed a change come over her.

  "What's the matter?"

  Somehow she couldn't tell him about the watcher— not after everything else that had come up between yesterday afternoon and this morning. He'd go from thinking her quaintly eccentric to out-and-out paranoic.

  "Cat?"

  She didn't know why she'd insisted on going home. Looking down the street to her house, it appeared sinister. She felt the same disquiet she'd known in her dream— just before everything went wrong. She'd come to be safe in her refuge. Nearing it now, it seemed anything but safe.

  "Are you okay?" Peter tried again.

  "It's nothing," she said with false bravado. "I'm just not having a good night."

  When Lysistratus saw the pair of them coming down the street, he rose from the chair he was sitting in and stepped back from the window. His seed would not fill her tonight, the way her dreams f
illed him. Not unless he dealt with her companion, and he wasn't prepared to do that. He considered waiting in her study to see if her companion was just dropping her off, then shook his head. Downstairs would be better.

  There was something odd about the night. He could almost sense a second Cat Midhir abroad— had ever since he'd pulled her from her dreaming. It existed as a disturbing presence that nipped just at the edge of his awareness. When he reached for it, it flitted from his scrutiny, sliding away into the seas of the night with all the quick grace of a manta ray. Here one moment, gone the next. Hidden. But close.

  He could put no name to it. It felt so much like Cat, like the essence of her dreams… as though some part of her dreaming had broken free and strayed to wander loose on its own.

  Soundlessly he left the room and slipped down the stairs. He could hear their footsteps on the porch as he paused in the hallway in front of the door. The taste of her, of her essence, was strong in the air. Her anodynic dreams…

  He wanted to take her right there on the floor in the hallway, even though it would mean he'd have to deal with her companion and all the problems that could ensue. If he simply put the man to sleep and took her, they would realize something was amiss when they awoke, sprawled in the hall, or however naturally he might arrange their slumbering bodies in her bed. If he killed the man, the police would be brought in. Either way he stood the chance of losing his easy access to her.

  Undecided still, he drifted toward the rear of the house. If only the hunger wasn't so strong tonight.

  Cat dug in her pocket for her key.

  "I was sure they'd be around," she said lightly, hoping to make the end of their very strange evening more normal. She had the quixotic notion that if they parted ordinarily, all the weirdness could be forgotten.

  "You thought who'd be around?"

  "Ginger and Pad. My cats. I haven't seen them for a day or so."