Free Newford Stories by Charles De Lint

dig in, accumulating stuff, thinking only of themselves or
their own small group—you know, family, company, community,
whatever. A tribal thing.” She hesitated a moment, then added, “And
that’s what’s holding you back, too. You don’t trust the good to
outweigh the bad.”
    “I don’t know that I even can.”
    “No one can help you with that,” Jilly told
him. “That’s something that can only come from inside you.”
    He gave her a slow nod. “Maybe I will try
harder, the next time.”
    “What next time? What’s wrong with right
now?”
    He held out his arms. “If you could read the
history written on my skin, you would not need to ask that
question.”
    Jilly pushed up her sleeves and held out her
own arms.
    “Look,” she said. “You read what I went
through as a kid. I’m no better or stronger or braver than you are.
But I am determined to leave things a little better than they were
before I got here. That’s what gets me through. And I have to admit
there’s a certain selfishness involved. You see, I want to live in
that better world. I know it’s not going to happen unless we all
clean up our act and I know I can’t make anybody else do that. But
I’ll be damned if I don’t do it myself. You know, like a Kickaha
friend of mine says, ‘live large and walk in Beauty.’”
    “You are very…persuasive.”
    Jilly grinned. “It’s just this gift I
have.”
    She stood up and offered him a hand.
    “So what do you say, buffalo man? You want
to give this life another shot?”
    He allowed her to help him up to his
feet.
    “There’s a problem,” he said.
    “No, no, no. Ignore the negatives, if only
for now.”
    “You don’t understand. The door that brought
us here—it only opens one way.”
    “What door?”
    “My old life was finished and I was on my
way to the new. All of this—” He made a motion with his hand to
encompass everything around them. “—is only a memory.”
    “Whose memory?” Jilly asked, getting a bad
feeling.
    “Mine. The memory of a dying man.”
    She smiled brightly. “So live. I thought
we’d already been through this earlier.”
    “I would. You’ve convinced me enough of
that. Only there’s no way back.”
    “There’s always a way back…isn’t there?”
    He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.
    “Oh, great. I get to be in a magical
adventure, only it turns out to be like a train on a one-way track
and we left the happy ending station miles back.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    She took his hand and gave it a squeeze. “Me
too.”
     
    - 6 -
     
    “Nothing’s happening,” Maida said.
    Zia peered at the two still bodies on the
sofa. She gave Jilly a gentle poke with her finger.
    “She’s still veryvery far away,” she
agreed.
    Cerin sighed and let his fingers fall from
the strings of the roseharp. The music echoed on for a few moments,
then all was still.
    “I tried to put all the things she loves
into the calling-on,” he said. “Painting and friendship and crows
and whimsy, but it’s not working. Wherever she’s gone, it’s farther
than I can reach.”
    “How did it happen anyway?” the professor
asked. “All she did was touch him. Meran did the same and she
wasn’t taken away.”
    “Jilly’s too open and trusting,” Meran said.
“She didn’t think to guard herself from the man’s spirit. When we
fall away into death, most of us will grab hold of anything we can
to stay our fall. That’s what happened to her—he grabbed her and
held on hard.”
    “He’s dying?”
    Meran glanced at the professor and
nodded.
    “I should never have brought him here,”
Lucius said.
    “You couldn’t have known.”
    “It’s our fault,” Zia said.
    Maida nodded glumly. “Oh, we’re the most
miserably bad girls, we are.”
    “Let’s worry about whose fault it was some
other time,” Meran said. “Right now I want to concentrate on where
he could have taken her.”
    “I’ve never died,” Lucius said, “so I can’t
say where a dying man