“What do you mean by that?”
“It’s just another way of saying ‘still waters run deep.’ All we know about each other is that face we present to the world. Inside we could be anything. Anybody.”
“So who’s the real villain?” Izzy wanted to know. “John or Rushkin?”
“Lover or mentor.”
“Or maybe it’s me. Since I’m the one bringing people across from this otherworld. Maybe I’m the villain.”
“Never a villain,” Kathy assured her. “But maybe there is no otherworldat least not in the sense that either of them are telling you. Maybe you’re bringing them up out of yourself.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Maybe they come from those secret landscapes,” Kathy said. “The place where we go when we dream. The place where the muses whisper to us and we bring back the inspiration for our art. Accepting magic as a given, if you can bring back inspiration, then why not an actual manifestation of that inspiration?”
“But that doesn’t make any sense.”
“And painting a nonexistent person’s portrait and so making them real does?”
“I don’t know,” Izzy said. “I don’t even think I care. I just wish I could turn back time to before ...
before this evening ever happened.”
As Izzy’s eyes filled with tears, Kathy put an arm around her. Izzy burrowed her face in the crook of Kathy’s shoulder and began to cry. When she finally sat up again, Kathy took a Kleenex tissue from out of her sleeve and passed it over. Izzy blew her nose.
“The worst thing is,” she managed after a while, “I’ve got no way to get hold of him so I can’t even tell him I was wrong, or that I’m sorry or anything.”
“If he loves you, he’ll be back.”
Izzy shook her head. “You don’t understand. I called him a liar. He told me once that his word was the only currency he had that was of any worth. He’s got too much pride to come back to me. Don’t you see? I’m never going to see him again. I told him not to ever see me again.”
When she started to cry again, Kathy drew her back into her arms.
“Oh, ma belle Izzy,” she said, the words getting lost in Izzy’s hair. “What are we going to do for you?”
This time when she stopped crying, Izzy let her roommate lead her into her bedroom.
“Do you want me to keep you company for a while?” Kathy asked.
Izzy shook her head. “Could you ... could you take the painting out of my closet and lean it up against the wall where I can see it?”
Kathy looked in the closet and found The Spirit Is Strong standing in among a stack of papers and hardwood panels.
“Are you sure this is such a good idea?” she asked as she pulled it out. “It’s all I’ve got left of him.”
After propping the painting up against the wall, Kathy stood there for a long moment before kneeling down beside Izzy’s mattress. She smoothed the hair back from Izzy’s brow and gave the exposed skin a kiss.
“Call me if you need anything,” she said.
Izzy nodded. She waited until Kathy had left the room; then she pressed her face into her pillow and started to cry once more. It took her a long time to fall asleep; when she did, she found no comfort in dream.
It began innocuously enough. She was outside, walking through the falling snow, the whole city muffled in silence. Even when a cab passed her on the street, the sound of its motor was muted. No one else seemed to be abroad, a rare occurrence in this part of town. Even when the deep frosts settled onto the city, there were always one or two hardy souls to be found out and about on Waterhouse Street.
But tonight she had it to herself. She walked down Waterhouse to Lee Street. Perry’s Diner was closed, the windows dark. Only the neon sign was lit above the front door. When she looked up and down Lee, there were no cars, no pedestrians. The clubs, the restaurants and stores were all closed. The snow continued to fall, thick and fast. Underfoot it was gathering into lazy drifts that spun across the width of the street, the snow pushed and whirled in small dervishing twisters by a rising wind.
She didn’t know why she turned into the alleyway just past the diner. Her feet seemed to know where they wanted to go and she was content to follow, but her complacency died in her chest when she entered the mouth of the alley and looked down its length. There, on the landing of a fire escape that seemed to have been taken directly from her painting, was the winged cat. But it wasn’t the presence of the cat that woke the sudden terror in her. At the bottom of the fire escape, half-hidden by the swirling snow, a squat hooded figure holding a cross-bow was creeping up its metal steps. The cat watched the figure rise up toward it, the tip of its tail flicking nervously with a rattling sound.
“No!” Izzy cried.
But she was too late. Before the word left her throat, the crossbow had been fired. Its shaft plunged into the cat’s chest just as it was spreading its wings in flight. The impact of the blow drove it back against the side of the fire escape. Izzy stared in horror. The crossbow shaft protruded from the tiny creature’s chest—a stiff, unnatural additional limb. There was no blood. Just the limp form of the cat, sprawled in the snow. A living, breathing piece of magic reduced to dead flesh. And the figure, head turning now toward Izzy, features hidden under the shadow of its hood.
Izzy fled. She ran down Lee Street, stumbling through the snow, until she collapsed in the doorway of a grocer’s. There she pressed her face against the cold glass of the display window, her eyes open wide, because if she closed them, the winged cat’s death would play out again in her mind’s eye. She tried to think of something else, but that only brought John back to mind. John. The wild skeltering of her thoughts slowed down as something occurred to her. She remembered something he’d said to her earlier in the evening and heard his voice repeating it now as clearly as if he were standing right beside her instead of only in her memory.
Do you still have those dreams you told me about?
Izzy straightened up from the window. She looked out at Lee Street through the falling snow.
Dreams. This was just a dream. An awful, horrible dream, but that was all. The winged cat wasn’t dead because the painting was safe in the Grumbling Greenhouse Studio where no one could harm it. No one even knew it existed, except for Kathy, and she’d only learned about it tonight.
Standing up, Izzy made her way back out onto the sidewalk. There was no real danger to anyone she’d brought across from John’s before. This was only happening because John had woken the fear of it in her, not because she was dreaming her creations’ actual deaths. It was all “what if”—her mind playing out her fears while she was safely asleep in her bed and the paintings were hidden away, three of them in the greenhouse, John’s in her bedroom.
She started back toward the alleyway. It was harder going because the wind was against her and the snow on the pavement seemed to have risen another foot since she’d fled down it what seemed like only moments before. Her earlier footprints were already filled, the drifts stretching smooth and unmarred.
When she reached the alley and looked down its length to the fire escape, there was no sign of either the winged cat’s corpse or the strange little hooded man with the crossbow.
Turning, she made her way past the diner and started back up Waterhouse Street once more. Just a dream, she told herself as the wind got in under her coat. Her feet felt like blocks of ice in her boots, her cheeks bright red with the cold. But weren’t you supposed to wake up from a dream, once you knew you were dreaming?
She had to laugh at herself. Yeah, right. It wasn’t as though there were rules to dreaming. Dreams were the place where anything could happen. You could play out your fears, or live out a fantasy, but none of it was real. And it all happened at its own pace. It wasn’t as though you could control what you dreamed. She’d heard of people who could, but she’d always put that down to their simply having a good imagination. They weren’t really controlling their dreams—they’d simply convinced themselves that daydreams were real dreams.