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

“So what’re we waiting for?”
    The few times Jilly had come down to Old City, she’d been cau-tious, perhaps even a little nervous, but never frightened. Tonight was different. It was always dark in Old City, but the darkness had never seemed so ... so watchful before. There were always odd little sounds, but they had never seemed so furtive. Even with her com-panions—maybe because of them, she thought, thinking mostly of Goon—she felt very much alone in the eerie darkness.
    Goon didn’t appear to need the wobbly light of their flashlights to see his way and though he seemed content enough to simply follow them, Jilly couldn’t shake the feeling that he was actually leading the way.
    They were soon in a part of the subterranean city that she’d never seen before.
    There was less dust and dirt here. No litter, nor the remains of the skells’ fires. No broken bottles, nor the piles of newspapers and ratty blanketing that served the skells as bedding. The buildings seemed in better repair. The air had a clean, dry smell to it, rather than the close, musty reek of refuse and human wastes that it carried closer to the entrance.

    And there were no people.
    From when they’d first stepped through the steel door in Grasso Street Station’s east tunnel, she hadn’t seen a bag lady or wino or any kind of skell, and that in itself was odd because they were always down here. But there was something sharing the darkness with them. Something watched them, marked their progress, followed with a barely discernible pad of sly footsteps in their wake and on either side.
    The drum seemed warm against the skin of her hand. The blemish on her other palm prickled with itchiness. Her shoulder muscles were stiff with tension.
    “Not far now,” Goon said softly and Jilly suddenly understood what it meant to jump out of one’s skin.
    The beam of her flashlight made a wild arc across the faces of the buildings on either side of her as she started. Her heartbeat jumped into second gear.
    “What do you see?” Meran asked, her voice calm.
    The beam of her flashlight turned towards Goon and he pointed ahead.
    “Turn off your flashlights,” he said.
    Oh sure, Jilly thought. Easy for you to say.
    But she did so a moment after Meran had. The sudden darkness was so abrupt that Ply thought she’d gone blind. But then she realized that it wasn’t as black as it should be. Looking ahead to where Goon had pointed, she could see a faint glow seeping onto the street ahead of them. It was a little less than a half block away, the source of the light hidden behind the squatting bulk of a half-tumbled-down building.
    “What could it ... ?” Jilly started to say, but then the sounds began, and the rest of her words dried up in her throat.
    It was supposed to be music, she realized after a few moments, but there was no discernible rhythm and while the sounds were blown or rasped or plucked from instruments, they searched in vain for a melody.
    “It begins,” Goon said.
    He took the lead, hurrying them up to the corner of the street.
    “What does?” Jilly wanted to know.
    “The king appears—as he must once a moon. It’s that or lose his throne.”
    Jilly wanted to know what he was talking about—better yet, how he knew what he was talking about—but she didn’t have a chance. The discordant not-music scraped and squealed to a kind of cre-scendo. Suddenly they were surrounded by the capering forms of dozens of skookin that bumped them, thin long fingers tugging at their clothing. Jilly shrieked at the first touch. One of them tried to snatch the drum from her grip. She regained control of her nerves at the same time as she pulled the artifact free from the grasping fingers.
    “1789,” she said. “That’s when the Bastille was stormed and the French Revolution began. Uh, 1807, slave trade was abolished in the British Empire. 1776, the Declaration of Independence was signed.”
    The skookin backed away from her, as did the others,