The Very Best of Charles De Lint

  There’s something in that hand, a small slip of paper or cardboard. I step closer to the edge of the roof and see it’s a ticket. I’m so caught up in the presence of the wheel and what the blue moon’s holding, that the footsteps on the gravel behind me don’t really register until someone calls my name.

  “Spyboy.”

  I don’t need to hear the French accent to know who it is. I turn to find the shooter standing there. He either doesn’t see the wheel, or he’s only got eyes for me.

  “I have a message for you,” he says. “From Madame Couteau.”

  I see the pistol in his hand, hanging by his side. As he starts to lift it, I turn and jump, launching myself towards the seat where the blue moon Sammy is holding my ticket.

  And all those possibilities open up into new worlds.

  Maybe I just hit the pavement below.

  Maybe I take a bullet, still hit the pavement, but I’m dead before the impact.

  Maybe I reached the wheel, hands slipping on the bone joints, my scrabbling feet finding purchase, allowing me to climb up into my seat, my face falling off like a mask to reveal another face underneath, made up like a harlequin.

  A carnival Spyboy.

  Or maybe I never went to the Beanery that night, didn’t meet Sammy, turned in early and went to work the next day.

  They’re all possible. Maybe somewhere, they’re all true.

  I sit there in the gently swaying seat and look out over a darkened carnival, out past the fields of corn stubble, into the mists where anything can happen, everything is true. I remember what Sammy told me last night, though it seems like an eternity ago.

  You’re thinking of the outside, he told me. Concentrate on all the journeys you can take inside.

  I have, I had, a thousand thousand lives out there. Past, present, future, they’re all happening at the same time in my head. This world, all the other worlds that are born every time I made a choice, all these lives that I can journey through inside my head.

  I guess what I can’t figure out is, which one is really mine. Either I’m living one of those lives and dreaming this, or I’m here and those lives belong to someone else, someone I once was, someone I could have been.

  I sit there beside the blue moon Sammy, the ticket he gave me held in my hand, and I think about it as the wheel takes our seat up, all the way to where the stars are whispering and the Ferris wheel kisses the sky.

  Sisters

  One: Appoline

  1

  It’s not like on that TV show, you know where the cute blond cheerleader type stakes all these vampires and they blow away into dust? For one thing, they don’t disappear into dust, which would be way more convenient. Outside of life in televisionland, when you stake one, you’ve got this great big dead corpse to deal with, which is not fun. Beheading works, too, but that’s just way too gross for me and you’ve still got to find some place to stash both a head and a body.

  The trick is to not turn your victim in the first place—you know, drain all their blood so that they rise again. When that happens, you have to clean up after yourself, because a vamp is forever, and do you really want these losers you’ve been feeding on hanging around until the end of time? I don’t think so.

  The show gets a lot of other things wrong, too, but then most of the movies and books do. Vamps don’t have a problem with mirrors (unless they’re ugly and don’t want to look at themselves, I suppose), crosses (unless they’ve got issues with Christianity), or garlic (except who likes to smell it on anybody’s breath?). They don’t have demons riding around inside them (unless they’ve got some kind of satanic inner child), they can’t turn into bats or rats or wolves or mist (I mean, just look at the physics involved, right?) and sunlight doesn’t bother them. No spontaneous combustion—they just run the same risk of skin cancer as anybody else.

  I figure if the people writing the books and making the movies actually do have any firsthand experience with vampires, they’re sugarcoating the information so that people don’t freak out. If you’re going to accept that they exist in the first place, it’s much more comforting to believe that you’re safe in the daylight, or that a cross or a fistful of garlic will keep them at bay.

  About the only thing they do get right is that it takes a vamp to make a vamp. You do have to die from the bite and then rise again three days later. It’s as easy as that. It’s also the best time to kill a vamp—they’re kind of like ragdolls, all loose and muddy-brained, for the first few hours.

  Oh, and you do have to invite us into your house. If it’s a public place, we can go in the same as anyone else.

  What’s that? No, that wasn’t a slip of the tongue. I’m one, too. So while I like the TV show as much as the next person, and I know it’s fiction, blond cheerleader types still make me twitch a little.

  2

  Appoline Smith was raking yellow maple leaves into a pile on the front lawn when the old four-door sedan came to a stop at the curb. She looked up to find the driver staring at her. She didn’t recognize him. He was just some old guy in his thirties who’d been watching way too many old Miami Vice reruns. His look—the dark hair slicked back, silk shirt opened to show off a big gold chain, fancy shades—was so been there it was prehistoric. The pair of dusty red-and-white velour dice hanging from the mirror did nothing to enhance his image.

  “Why don’t you just take a picture?” she asked him.

  “Nobody likes a lippy kid,” he said.

  “Yeah, nobody likes a pervert either.”

  “I’m not some perv’.”

  “Oh really? What do you call a guy cruising a nice neighbourhood like this with his tongue hanging out whenever he sees some teenage girl?”

  “I’m looking for A. Smith.”

  “Well, you found one.”

  “I mean, the initial ‘A,’ then ‘Smith.’”

  “You found that, too. So why don’t you check it off on your life list and keep on driving.”

  The birder reference went right over his head. All things considered, she supposed most things would go over his head.

  “I got something for you,” he said.

  He reached over to the passenger’s side of the car’s bench seat, then turned back to her and offered her an envelope. She supposed it had been white once. Looking at the dirt and a couple of greasy fingerprints smeared on it, she made no move to take it. The guy looked at her for a long moment, then shrugged and tossed it onto the lawn.

  “Don’t call the cops,” he said and drove away.

  As if they didn’t have better things to do than chase after some guy in a car making pathetic attempts to flirt with girls he happened to spy as he drove around. He was one of just too many guys she’d met, thinking he was Lothario when he was just a loser.

  She waited until he’d driven down the block and turned the corner before she stepped closer to look at the envelope he’d left on the lawn.

  Okay, she thought, when she saw that it actually had “A. Smith” and the name of her street written on it. So maybe it wasn’t random. Maybe he was only stalking her.

  She picked up the envelope, holding it distastefully between two fingers.

  “Who was in the car?”

  She turned to see her little sister limping down the driveway towards her and quickly stuck the envelope in her jacket pocket.

  “Just some guy,” she told Cassie. “How’re you doing?”

  Cassie’d had a bad asthma attack this morning and was still lying down in the rec room watching videos when Apples had come out to rake leaves.

  “I’m okay,” Cassie told her. “And besides, I’ve got my buddy,” she added, holding up her bronchodilator. “Can I help?”

  “Sure. But only if you promise to take it easy.”

  It wasn’t until a couple of hours later that Apples was able to open the envelope. She took it into the bathroom and slit the seal, pulling out a grimy sheet of paper with handwriting on it that read:

  I no yer secret. Meet me to
nite at midnite at the cow castle, or they’ll be

  trouble. I no you got a little sister.

  Don’t call the cops. Don’t tell nobody.

  Okay, Apples thought, getting angry as she reread the note. The loser in the car just went from annoying pervert to a sick freak who needed to be dealt with. Nobody threatened her little sister.

  By “cow castle” she assumed he meant the Aberdeen Pavilion at Lansdowne Park, commonly known as the Cattle Castle because the cupola on its roof gave it a castle-like appearance. And though it was obviously a trap of some sort, she’d be there all the same. She couldn’t begin to guess what he wanted from her, what he hoped to accomplish. It didn’t matter. By threatening Cassie, he’d just gone to the head of her “deal with this” list.

  3

  Okay, here’s the thing. I didn’t ask to get turned, but it’s not like we sat down and talked out how I felt about it. By the time it’s over, I’ve been three days dead, I rise, and here I am, vamp girl, and I don’t mean sexy, though I can play that card if I have to. Anybody can do it. It just needs the right clothes and makeup, with one secret ingredient: attitude.

  It’s funny. I didn’t have too many friends before I got turned. I don’t have so many now either, mind you, but now it’s by choice. Getting turned gave me this boost of self-confidence, I guess, and that’s really what people find attractive. Everybody’s intrigued by someone comfortable in their own skin because most of us aren’t.

  The parents freaked, of course. Not because I’m a vamp—they still don’t know that—but because so far as they know, I just did the big disappearing act the night I got turned. Went to a concert and came back home four days later. Trust me, that did not go over well. I was canned for a solid month, which made feeding a real pain—having to sneak out through a window between two A.M., when Dad finally goes to bed, and dawn to find what I can at that time of the night. I never much cared for booze or drugs when I was human and that’s carried over to what I am now. I still hate the taste of it in someone’s blood.

  Yeah, I drink blood. But it’s not as gross as it sounds. And it’s not as messy as it is in some of the movies.

  4

  The Aberdeen Pavilion was a wonderfully eccentric building in the middle of Lansdowne Park where the Central Canadian Exhibition, the oldest agricultural fair in Canada, was held every year. The pavilion was the largest of the exhibition buildings that dotted the park, an enormous barn-like structure surrounded by parking lots, with an angled roof curved like a half-moon and topped with a cupola. For a city kid like Apples, going inside during the Ex had always been a wonderful experience. The air was redolent of farm smells—cattle, sheep, horses, hogs—and she’d loved to walk along the stalls to look at the livestock, or sit with Cassie on the wooden seats in the huge arena and watch the animals vying for first place ribbons.

  Though she still took Cassie to the midway every August, she hadn’t gone inside the pavilion for a couple of years now.

  As she walked across a parking lot towards the Cattle Castle, Apples wondered if this was part of the freak’s plan, if he knew that this was where she’d gotten turned. It had been right here, between the Cattle Castle and the Coliseum when she’d come to see a Bryan Adams concert a few years ago.

  She didn’t have to close her eyes to be able to visualize the woman, that first sight of her coming out from between the parked cars. Tall and svelte, with a loose walk that lay somewhere between the grace of a panther and a runway model. Golden blond hair fountained over her shoulders and down her back in a spill of ringlets and she was dressed all in black: short velvet skirt, low-cut T-shirt and high-heeled ankle boots. Apples remembered two conflicting sensations: that this woman was so unbelievably gorgeous, and that no one else seemed to notice her.

  “Come with me a moment,” the woman said and without a word to her friends, Apples had left them to follow the stranger into a darker part of the parking lot.

  And nothing was the same for Apples, not ever again.

  I no your secret.

  Maybe he did.

  The area around the Cattle Castle appeared to be deserted, though there were a handful of cars in the parking lot. Apples recognized the sedan that had come by her house earlier in the day and walked in its direction. There was no one seated in it, but Apples could smell the driver. She assumed her semiliterate pervert was lying across the seat, waiting until she’d walked by so that he could jump out and take her by surprise.

  That was okay. She had a surprise of her own. But first she wanted to know how he’d gotten her name and address. With her luck, somebody had put up a directory of known vamps Web site on the Internet and every would-be Van Helsing and Buffy was looking for her now.

  She walked by the car and pretended to be shocked when he opened the door and confronted her, a gun in hand.

  I hope you’ve got wooden bullets for that thing, she wanted to tell him, but she kept silent.

  “Get in the car,” he told her, waving the gun. “Not there,” he added as she started to walk around to the passenger’s side. “Behind the wheel. You can drive, right?”

  To some remote location, Apples supposed. Where he’d have his nasty way with her. Or kill her. Probably, he planned to do both, hopefully in that order. Though technically, any physical relationship with her had to be classified as necrophilia. Ehew.

  This whole business was so clichéd that she could only sigh. Still, a remote location would work for her, too.

  She came back around to the driver’s side and got in.

  “Where to, gun boy?” she asked.

  His face reddened and she watched the veins lift on his brow.

  “This isn’t some joke,” he told her, waving the barrel of the gun in her face. “You’re in way over your head now, kid.”

  Apples looked at him for a long beat.

  “You still haven’t said where to.”

  He frowned. “Just drive. I’ll tell you where.”

  “Okay. You’re the boss.”

  She started the car and put it in drive.

  “Turn right after the gate,” he told her.

  She did as he told her, pulling out of the parking lot and turning right onto the Queen Elizabeth Driveway.

  “So what’s your deal?” she asked as they went under the Lansdowne Bridge at Bank Street and continued west.

  “Shut up.”

  “Why? Are you going to shoot me? I’m driving the car, moron.”

  “Just shut up.”

  “Where’d you get my name and address?”

  “I told you, just—”

  “Shut up. Yeah, yeah. Except I’m not going to. So why don’t you stop sounding like a skipping CD and tell me what your problem is.”

  “You’re the problem,” he said. “End of story.”

  “Maybe. Except where does it begin?”

  They’d driven under the bridge at Bronson now and the Rideau Canal on their right became Dows Lake. She noticed that they’d started draining the water in the canal in preparation for winter.

  “Take a right at the lights,” he said, “and then a left on Carling.”

  “Not unless you start talking, I won’t.”

  “I’ve got two words for you: Randall Gage.”

  “Those aren’t words, they’re a name. And they don’t mean anything to me.”

  “You killed him.”

  Apples made the right onto Preston Street and stopped at the red light waiting for them at Carling Avenue. She turned to look at her captor.

  “I’m not saying I did,” she told him, “but how would you know anyway?”

  She was always careful. There were never any witnesses.

  “He told me you would.”

  “It’s still not ringing any bells,” she said.

  The light went to green and she made the left turn onto Carling. She could smell the first telltale hint of nervousness coming from her captor, could almost read his mind:

  Why’s she so calm? Why isn’t she sca
red?

  Because I’m already dead, moron.

  “Well?” Apples asked.

  “Randall was about five-eight, a hundred-and-sixty pounds. Blond, good looking guy. He used to come into the coffee shop where you work.”

  A face rose up in Apples’s mind, sharp and sudden. She remembered Randall Gage now, remembered him all too well, though she hadn’t known his name. After the first time he’d seen her at the Second Cup where she worked, he seemed to come in every time she had a shift. “A. Smith,” he’d always read from her nametag, fishing for the first name, which she never gave him. Then he’d made the mistake of grabbing her after a late shift and forcing her into the back of his van. He’d bragged to her about other girls he’d snatched, how the last one hadn’t survived, so if she wanted to live, she’d better just lie back and enjoy it, but no problem there, sweetcakes, because this he guaranteed, she was

  going to enjoy it.

  Rather than find out, she’d drained him.

  And then not been able to get back to where she’d stashed his body when his three days were up and he rose from the dead. She’d had to track him for most of the night before she finally found him trying to hide from the dawn in somebody’s garden shed, the idiot. Like the sun was going to burn him.

  “You still haven’t explained how you got my address,” she said.

  “Legwork,” her captor said.

  “Or what you plan to do to me.”

  “Same as you did to Randall. Take the Queensway on-ramp,” he added as they passed Kirkwood Avenue.