Dreams Underfoot: A Newford Collection by Charles de Lint & John Jude Palencar

Author:Charles de Lint & John Jude Palencar [Lint, Charles de & Palencar, John Jude]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Contemporary, General, Fantasy, Newford (Imaginary Place), Fiction, Short Stories, City and Town Life
ISBN: 9780765306791
Publisher: Orb Books
Published: 1993-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

“What exactly is it that you’re saying?” she asked.

“A Tree of Tales is an act of magic, of faith. It’s existence becomes an affirmation of the power that the human spirit can have over its own destiny. The stories are just stories—they entertain, they make one laugh or cry—but if they have any worth, they carry within them a deeper resonance that remains long after the final page is turned, or the storyteller has come to the end of her tale. Both aspects of the story are necessary for it to have any worth.”

He was silent for a long moment, then added, “Otherwise the story goes on without you.”

Wendy gave him a questioning look.

“Do you know what ‘ever after’ means?” he asked.

“I suppose.”

“It’s one bookend of a tale—the kind that begins with ‘once upon a time.’ It’s the end of the story when everybody goes home. That’s what they said at the end of the story John was in, but John wasn’t loying attention, so he got left behind.”

“I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about,” Wendy said.

Not sure? she thought. She was positive. It was all so much ... well, not exactly nonsense, as queer.

And unrelated to any working of the world with which she was familiar. But the oddest thing was that everything he said continued to pull a kind of tickle out from deep in her mind so that while she didn’t completely understand him, some part of her did. Some part, hidden behind the person who took care of all the day-to-day business of her life, perhaps the same part of her that pulled a poem into the empty page where no words had ever existed before. The part of her that was a conjurer.

“John took care of the Tale of Trees,” the conjure man went on. “Because John got left behind in his own story, he wanted to make sure that the stories themselves would at least live on. But one day he went wandering too far—just like he did when his story was ending—and when he got back she was gone. When he got back, they’d done this to her.”

Wendy said nothing. For all that he was a comical figure in his bright clothes and with his Santa Clause air, there was nothing even faintly humorous about the sudden anguish in his voice.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

And she was. Not just in sympathy with him, but because in her own way she’d loved that old oak tree as well. And—just like the conjure man, she supposed—she’d wandered away as well.

“Well then,” the conjure man said. He rubbed a sleeve up against his nose and looked away from her. “John just wanted you to see.”

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