Free Moonlight & Vines by Charles De Lint Page B

he was.
    There was no time for breakfast—he didn’t have much of an appetite at the moment anyway. He’d grab a coffee and a bagel at the deli around the corner from the studio. Tugging on his jeans, he carried his boots out into the living room and phoned the studio while he put them on. All he got was ringing at the other end.
    â€œCome on,” he muttered. “Somebody pick it up.”
    How could there be nobody there to answer?
    It was as he was cradling the receiver that he saw the book lying on the coffee table, reminding him of last night’s strange encounter. He picked the book up and looked at it, turning it over in his hands. There was something different about it this morning. Something wrong. And then he realized what it was. The color dust wrapper had gone monochrome. The book and . . . His gaze settled on his hand and he dropped the book in shock. He stared at his hand, turning it front to back, then looked wildly around the living room.
    Oh, Jesus. Everything was black and white.
    He’d been so bleary when he woke up that he hadn’t noticed that the world had gone monochrome on him overnight. He’d had a vague impression of gloominess when he got up, but he hadn’t really thought about it. He’d simply put it down to it being a particularly overcast day. But this . . . this . . .
    It was impossible.
    His gaze was drawn to the window. The light coming in was devoid ofcolor where it touched his furniture and walls, but outside . . . He walked slowly to the window and stared at his lawn, the street beyond it, the houses across the way. Everything was the way it was supposed to be. The day was cloudless, the colors so vivid, the sunlight so bright it hurt his eyes. The richness of all that colour and light burned his retinas.
    He stood there until tears formed in his eyes and he had to turn away. He covered his eyes with his hands until the pain faded. When he took his palms away, his hands were still leached of color. The living room was a thousand monochrome shades of black and white. Numbly, he walked to his front door and flung it open. The blast of color overloaded the sensory membranes of his eyes. He knelt down where he’d tossed his jacket last night and scrabbled about in its pockets until he found a pair of shades.
    The sunglasses helped when he turned back to the open door. It still hurt to look at all that color, but the pain was much less than it had been. He shuffled out onto his porch, down the steps. He looked at what he could see of himself. Hands and arms. His legs. All monochrome. He was like a black and white cutout that someone had stuck onto a colored background.
    I’m dreaming, he thought.
    He could feel the start of a panic attack. It was like the slight nervousness that sometimes came when he stepped onto stage—the kind that came when he was backing up someone he’d never played with before—only increased a hundredfold. Sweat beaded on his temples and under his arms. It made his shirt clammy and stick to his back. His hands began to shake so much that he had to hug himself to make them stop.
    He was dreaming, or he’d gone insane.
    Movement caught his eye down the street and he recognized one of his neighbors. He stumbled in the man’s direction.
    â€œBob!” he called. “Bob, you’ve got to help me.” The man never even looked in his direction. John stepped directly in front of him on the sidewalk and Bob walked right into him, knocking him down. But Bob hadn’t felt a thing, John realized. Hadn’t seen him, hadn’t felt the impact, was just walking on down the street as if John had simply ceased to exist for him.
    John fled back into the house. He slammed the door, locked it. He pulled the curtains in the living room and started to pace, from the fireplace to the hallway, back again, back and forth, back and forth. At one point he caught sight of the book he’d dropped earlier.