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

accentuated by the oversized clothing she tended to wear. Her brown hair was a thick tangle, her eyes the electric blue of sapphires. She was too pretty and too small to be wandering about in places like Old City on her own.
    “You know the band, No Nuns Here?” Jilly asked.
    Meran nodded.
    “I’m doing the cover painting for their first album,” Jilly ex-plained. “They wanted something moody for the background—sort of like the Tombs, but darker and grimmer—and I thought Old City would be the perfect place to get some reference shots.”
    “But to go there on your own ...”
    Jilly just shrugged. She was known to wander anywhere and everywhere, at any time of the night or day, camera or sketchbook in hand, often both.
    Meran shook her head. Like most of Jilly’s friends, she’d long since given up trying to point out the dangers of carrying on the way Jilly did.
    “So you found this drum,” she said.
    Jilly nodded. She looked down at the little scab on the palm of her hand. It itched like crazy, but she was determined not to open it again by scratching it.

    “And now you want to ... ?”
    Jilly looked up. “Take it back. Only I’m scared to go there on my own. I thought maybe Cerin would come with me—for moral support, you know?”
    “He’s out of town,” Meran said.
    Meran and her husband made up the two halves of the Kelledys, a local traditional music duo that played coffee houses, festivals and colleges from one coast to the other. For years now, however, Newford had been their home base.
    “He’s teaching another of those harp workshops,” Meran added. Jilly did her best to hide her disappointment.
    What she’d told Meran about “moral support” was only partly the reason she’d wanted their help because, more so than either Rid-dell’s stories or Bramley’s askew theories, the Kelledys were the closest thing to real magic that she could think of in Newford. There was an otherworldly air about the two of them that went beyond the glamour that seemed to always gather around people who became successful in their creative endeavors.
    It wasn’t something Jilly could put her finger on. It wasn’t as though they went on and on about this sort of thing at the drop of a hat the way that Bramley did. Nor that they were responsible for anything more mysterious than the enchantment they awoke on stage when they were playing their instruments. It was just there. Something that gave the impression that they were aware of what lay beyond the here and now. That they could see things others couldn’t; knew things that remained secret to anyone else.
    Nobody even knew where they had come from; they’d just arrived in Newford a few years ago, speaking with accents that had rapidly vanished, and here they’d pretty well stayed ever since. Jilly had always privately supposed that if there was a place called Faerie, then that was from where they’d come, so when she woke up this morning, deciding she needed magical help, she’d gone looking for one or the other and found Meran. But now ...
    “Oh,” she said.
    Meran smiled.
    “But that doesn’t mean I can’t try to help,” she said.
    Jilly sighed. Help with what? she had to ask herself. The more she thought about it, the sillier it all seemed. Skookin. Right. Maybe they held debating contests with Riddell’s mutant rats.
    “I think maybe I’m nuts,” she said finally. “I mean, goblins living under the city ... ?”
    “I believe in the little people,” Meran said. “We called them bodachs where I come from.”
    Jilly just looked at her.
    “But you laughed when I talked about them,” she said finally. “I know—and I shouldn’t have. It’s just that whenever I hear that name that Christy’s given them, I can’t help myself. It’s so silly.”
    “What I saw last night didn’t feel silly,” Jilly said.
    If she’d actually seen anything. By this point—even with Meran’s apparent belief—she wasn’t sure what to think