Dreams Underfoot: A Newford Collection Read Free Page B

wouldn’t take off first chance they got? Though wouldn’t you know it, no sooner did he get free of them than the booger latched onto him, following him around, skulking in the shadows.
    At first, Reece never got much of a look at the thing—just glimpses out of the corner of his eyes—and that was more than enough. But sleeping on the beaches and in parks, some nights he’d wake with that sewer smell in his nostrils and catch something slipping out of sight, a dark wet shadow moving close to the ground. After a few weeks, it started to get bolder, sitting on its haunches a half-dozen yards from wherever he was bedding down, the hot coal eyes fixed on him.
    Reece didn’t know what it was or what it wanted. Was it looking out for him, or saving him up for its supper? Sometimes he thought, what with all the drugs his parents had done back in the sixties—good times for them, shit for him because he’d been born and that was when his troubles had started—he was sure that all those chemi-cals had fucked up his genes. Twisted something in his head so that he imagined he had this two-foot high, walking, grunting booger following him around.
    Like the old man’d say. Bummer.
    Sucker sure seemed real, though.
    Reece held his hurt to himself, ignoring Ellen as she approached. When she stopped in front of him, he gave her a scowl.
    “Are you okay?” she asked, leaning closer to look at him.
    He gave her a withering glance. The long hair and jeans, flowered blouse. Just what he needed.
    Another sixties burnout.
    “Why don’t you just fuck off and die?” he said.
    But Ellen looked past the tough pose to see the blood on his shirt, the bruising on his face that the shadows half-hid, the hurt he was trying so hard to pretend wasn’t there.
    “Where do you live?” she asked.
    “What’s it to you?”
    Ignoring his scowl, she bent down and started to help him to his feet.
    “Aw, fuck—” Reece began, but it was easier on his ribs to stand up than to fight her.
    “Let’s get you cleaned up,” she said.
    “Florence fucking Nightingale,” he muttered, but she merely led him back the way she’d come.
    From under the pier a wet shadow stirred at their departure. Reece’s booger drew back lips that had the rubbery texture of an octopus’
    skin. Row on row of pointed teeth reflected back the light from the streetlights. Hate-hot eyes glimmered red. On silent leathery paws, the creature followed the slow-moving pair, grunting softly to itself, claws clicking on the pavement.
    3
    Bramley Dapple was the wizard in “A Week of Saturdays,” the third story in Christy Riddell’s How to Make the Wind Blow. He was a small wizened old man, spry as a kitten, thin as a reed, with features lined and brown as a dried fig. He wore a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles without prescription lenses that he polished incessantly, and he loved to talk.
    “It doesn’t matter what they believe,” he was saying to his guest, “so much as what you believe.”
    He paused as the brown-skinned goblin who looked after his house came in with a tray of biscuits and tea. His name was Goon, a tallish creature at three-foot-four who wore the garb of an organ-grinder’s monkey: striped black and yellow trousers, a red jacket with yellow trim, small black slippers, and a little green and yellow cap that pushed down an unruly mop of thin dark curly hair. Gangly limbs with a protruding tummy, puffed cheeks, a wide nose, and tiny black eyes added to his monkey-like appearance.
    The wizard’s guest observed Goon’s entrance with a startled look, which pleased Bramley to no end.
    “There,” he said. “Goon proves my point.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “We live in a consensual reality where things exist because we want them to exist. I believe in Goon, Goon believes in Goon, and you, presented with his undeniable presence, tea tray in hand, be-lieve in Goon as well. Yet, if you were to listen to the world at large, Goon is nothing more than a