Free Very Best of Charles de Lint, The by Charles de Lint Page B

oak was gone. That pregnant sense of something about to happen had faded. She was left with the moon, hanging lower now, the stars still bright, the garden quiet. It was all magical, to be sure, but natural magic—not supernatural.
    She sighed and kicked at the autumn debris that lay thick about the base of the old tree. Browned leaves, broad and brittle. And acorns. Hundreds of acorns. Fred the gardener would be collecting them soon for his compost—at least those that the black squirrels didn’t hoard away against the winter. She went down on one knee and picked up a handful of them, letting them spill out of her hand.
    Something different about one of them caught her eye as it fell and she plucked it up from the ground. It was a small brown ovoid shape, an incongruity in the crowded midst of all the capped acorns. She held it up to her eye.
    Even in the moonlight she could see what it was.
    A hazelnut.
    Salmon wisdom locked in a seed.
    Had she regained memories, memories returned to her now from a place where the Summer Stars always shone, or had she just had a dream in the Mondream Wood where as a child she’d thought that the trees dreamed they were people?
    Smiling, she pocketed the nut, then slowly made her way back into the house.

    The Stone Drum

    There is no question that there
    is an unseen world. The problem
    is how far is it from midtown and
    how late is it open?
    —attributed to Woody Allen

    It was Jilly Coppercorn who found the stone drum, late one afternoon. She brought it around to Professor Dapple’s rambling Tudor-styled house in the old quarter of Lower Crowsea that same evening, wrapped up in folds of brown paper and tied with twine. She rapped sharply on the Professor’s door with the little brass lion’s head knocker that always seemed to stare too intently at her, then stepped back as Olaf Goonasekara, Dapple’s odd little housekeeper, flung the door open and glowered out at where she stood on the rickety porch.
    “You,” he grumbled.
    “Me,” she agreed, amicably. “Is Bramley in?”
    “I’ll see,” he replied and shut the door.
    Jilly sighed and sat down on one of the two worn rattan chairs that stood to the left of the door, her package bundled on her knee. A black and orange cat regarded her incuriously from the seat of the other chair, then turned to watch the progress of a woman walking her dachshund down the street.
    Professor Dapple still taught a few classes at Butler U., but he wasn’t nearly as involved with the curriculum as he had been when Jilly attended the university. There’d been some kind of a scandal—something about a Bishop, some old coins and the daughter of a Tarot reader—but Jilly had never quite got the story straight. The Professor was a jolly fellow—wizened like an old apple, but more active than many who were only half his apparent sixty years of age. He could talk and joke all night, incessantly polishing his wire-rimmed spectacles for which he didn’t even have a prescription.
    What he was doing with someone like Olaf Goonasekara as a housekeeper Jilly didn’t know. It was true that Goon looked comical enough, what with his protruding stomach and puffed cheeks, the halo of unruly hair and his thin little arms and legs, reminding her of nothing so much as a pumpkin with twig limbs, or a monkey. His usual striped trousers, organ grinder’s jacket and the little green and yellow cap he liked to wear, didn’t help. Nor did the fact that he was barely four feet tall and that the Professor claimed he was a goblin and just called him Goon.
    It didn’t seem to allow Goon much dignity and Jilly would have understood his grumpiness, if she didn’t know that he himself insisted on being called Goon and his wardrobe was entirely of his own choosing. Bramley hated Goon’s sense of fashion—or rather, his lack thereof.
    The door was flung open again and Jilly stood up to find Goon glowering at her once more.
    “He’s in,” he said.
    Jilly smiled. As