Free Dreams Underfoot: A Newford Collection by Charles De Lint, John Jude Palencar

twenty others that could still be used, the number depending only on who was doing the bragging. The entrance to which Jilly led Meran was the most commonly known and used—a steel maintenance door that was situated two hundred yards or so down the east tracks of the Grasso Street subway station.
    The door led into the city’s sewer maintenance tunnels, but had long since been abandoned. Skells had broken the locking mecha-nism and the door stood continually ajar. Inside, time and weather-ing had worn down a connecting wall between the maintenance tunnels and what had once been the top floor of one of Old City’s proud skyscrapers—an office complex that had towered some four stories above the city’s streets before the quake dropped it into its present subterranean setting.
    It was a good fifteen minute walk from the Kelledys’ house to the
    Grasso Street station and Jilly plodded miserably through the rain at Meran’s side for every block of it. Her sneakers were soaked and her hair plastered against her scalp. She carried the stone drum tucked under one arm and was very tempted to simply pitch it in front of a bus.
    “This is crazy,” Jilly said. “We’re just giving ourselves up to them.”

    Meran shook her head. “No. We’re confronting them of our own free will—there’s a difference.”
    “That’s just semantics. There won’t be a difference in the re-sults.”
    “That’s where you’re wrong.”
    They both turned at the sound of a new voice to find Goon standing in the doorway of a closed antique shop. His eyes glittered oddly in the poor light, reminding Jilly all too much of the skookin, and he didn’t seem to be the least bit wet.
    “What are you doing here?” Jilly demanded.
    “You must always confront your fears,” Goon said as though she hadn’t spoke. “Then skulking monsters become merely unfamiliar shadows, thrown by a tree bough. Whispering voices are just the wind. The wild flare of panic is merely a burst of emotion, not a terror spell cast by some evil witch.”
    Meran nodded. “That’s what Cerin would say. And that’s what I mean to do. Confront them with a truth so bright that they won’t dare come near us again.”
    Jilly held up her hand. The discoloration was spreading. It had grown from its pinprick inception, first to the size of a dime, now to that of a silver dollar.
    “What about this?” she asked.
    “There’s always a price for meddling,” Goon agreed. “Sometimes it’s the simple curse of knowledge.”
    “There’s always a price,” Meran agreed.
    Everybody always seemed to know more than she did these days, Jilly thought unhappily.
    “You still haven’t told me what you’re doing here,” she told Goon. “Skulking about and following us.”
    Goon smiled. “It seems to me, that you came upon me.”
    “You know what I mean.”
    “I have my own business in Old City tonight,” he said. “And since we all have the same destination in mind, I thought perhaps you would appreciate the company.”
    Everything was wrong about this, Jilly thought. Goon was never nice to her. Goon was never nice to anyone.
    “Yeah, well, you can just—” she began.
    Meran laid a hand on Jilly’s arm. “It’s bad luck to turn away help when it’s freely offered.”
    “But you don’t know what he’s like,” Jilly said.
    “Olaf and I have met before,” Meran said.
    Jilly caught the grimace on Goon’s face at the use of his given name. It made him seem more himself, which, while not exactly comforting, was at least familiar. Then she looked at Meran. She thought of the wind outside the musician’s house, driving away the skookin, the mystery that cloaked her which ran even deeper, per-haps, than that which Goon wore so easily ....
    “Sometimes you just have to trust in people,” Meran said, as though reading Jilly’s mind.
    Jilly sighed. She rubbed her itchy palm against her thigh, shifted the drum into a more comfortable position.
    “Okay,” she said.