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    Yarrow
    Yarrow
    Yarrow
    Ebook336 pages5 hours

    Yarrow

    By Charles de Lint

    4/5

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Cat Midhir lives in a land of dreams, crossing nightly over the borders of sleep into a magic realm. A land where gnomes hide among standing stones and shelties dwell beneath the waves, where the harper Kothlen tells tales of the ancient days and the antlered Mynfel walks by moonlight...

    When Cat wakes she weaves stories around the Otherworld. Her books are labelled as fantasy, but Mynfel's domain deems more real to her than the humdrum streets of the city.

    Until a thief comes stalking—and steals Cat's dreams away...

    Reviews

    From Fantasy Review, 1986:
    Charles de Lint is an excellent writer, and Yarrow his fourth novel is terrific. Yarrow is a tale of friendship and trust, hope and honor, faith and love, with a dark eroticism for spice. It settles for no cliched scenes and no easy answers, and conveys a reality of place (modern Ottawa) not commonly found in any fiction. Novels as good as Yarrow don't come along that often. As one of de Lint's characters puts it, "while the tale itself...is of utmost importance...the trueness of the telling is what makes up a storyteller's craft." De Lint's telling is indeed true and Yarrow is highly recommended.

    Mythlore, 1986:
    It is always gratifying to watch a writer grow into the style that best serves his/her creative gift. This has certainly been happening with Charles de Lint. ...his imagination has expressed itself with a new vitality. Yarrow: An Autumn Tale is by far his most successful work to date, and lines together the many strengths his writing has acquired. The plotting is perfect, holding reader's attention unflaggingly until the last page. ...more than confirms de Lint's skill as a fantasist.

    BooksILoved.com:
    In Yarrow, Charles de Lint takes a light-hearted, yet candid look at the need for balance between reality and fantasy in our existence. Through Caitlin's journey of self-discovery, de Lint reveals that remaining distant from reality all of the time could mean missing out on a whole lot of wonderful things. Inspiration can come from many sources. But at the same time, he also reminds us of how beautiful it is to dream.

    Urban fantasy is one of my favorite genres because it assumes that modern-day-reality and fantasy can in fact co-exist. De Lint's refreshing writing style reflects this genre, mixing everyday language with Otherworldly terms that can reach out and touch readers from any background or lifestyle. His characters could be any one of us. We can relate with them because in their lives they struggle with the same things we do. What I love the most is that de Lint treats the fanciful with reverent belief and melds it right into his characters' everyday lives. He leads the reader to stop thinking of such things as fairy tales and start believing them as the possible.

    Yarrow is profound truth clothed in a delightful tale.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCharles de Lint
    Release dateOct 23, 2015
    ISBN9780920623688
    Yarrow
    Author

    Charles de Lint

    Charles de Lint and his wife, the artist MaryAnn Harris, live in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. His evocative novels, including Moonheart, Forests of the Heart, and The Onion Girl, have earned him a devoted following and critical acclaim as a master of contemporary magical fiction in the manner of storytellers like John Crowley, Jonathan Carroll, Alice Hoffman, Ray Bradbury, and Isabel Allende.

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    Reviews for Yarrow

    4/5

    223 ratings9 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Cat Midhir is a best-selling fantasy author, but now she's blocked. Her stories come from her dreaming life in the Other World, and now she's no longer dreaming. Someone is stealing her dreams.Charles de Lint is one of my favorite fantasy authors. This is one of his very early works (I'm pretty sure I've read it before a long time ago). I found it a bit uneven, especially in the beginning where there are a lot of characters to keep track of. About a third into the book the story found it's pace and cohesion, and it was all good from there. Yarrow is a bit more gritty than most of Mr. de Lint's books. References to the eighties time period didn't make it seem dated though there were times when I wished Ben or Peter had a cell phone in the more harrowing parts. The writing is best (in my opinion) when Cat is in the Otherworld. The descriptions and characters draw the reader in so you never want Cat to wake up. Still, it's a satisfying urban fantasy tale and a solid story from this master author.
    • 3/5
      A psychic vampire is on the loose. An introvert fantasy author, with her dreams, is his victim of choice. She must reconcile her dreams with reality, finally reach out to those close to her, and, with their help, face her predator.Not particularly exciting or intense, but competent.
    • 5/5
      Favorite de Lint, even if it's a slighter work. Loved the idea of the Otherworld of ideas for Cat. I really wanted to be her.
    • 5/5
      This is one of my favorite de Lint books, I read it back in high school and I just really identified with the lead character and so wanted her powers. Charles de Lint is one of the best at writing urban fantasy, he was in fact my introduction to it, and I love the mix of mysticism, darkness, depth and sheer beauty he brings to his stories and characters. When I read it I felt that Caitlin and the characters she created were as real as anyone I knew in the real world, and was totally sucked into the story and the dangers she was in. I was totally engaged in the world he created here and felt that the threat to Caitlin was real and there was no real guarantee that she would escape unscathed as de Lint doesn't always write happy endings for all his characters.
    • 4/5
      Yarrow is about Cat, who lives in her dreams and floats through her real life without ever really living it. The place she goes to in her dreams is real and the people (such as they are) she meets are real. What appealed to me about this what that as a child I often wished that some of the places I fantasized about could be real and that I could interact with the characters in my favorite movies or books. I think I watched the Never Ending Story about 500 times (almost as much as the Breakfast Club or Annie but not quite)! Cat begins having problems when someone comes along and steals her dreams and she has to figure out how to interact with people more than superficially in her daytime world for the first time. Even after reading this I still wish sometimes I could go visit Willy Wonka or talk to the Last Unicorn.
    • 3/5
      Yet another book I haven't read in probably twenty years, Yarrow is the story of Cat Midhir, a fantasy novelist who, unbeknownst to everyone but herself, is dependent on her dreams for her writing. Every night she has found herself in another world, where she sits at the feet of the tall fae bard Kothlen as he spins tales, which she on waking weaves into her books. Every night of her life since she was very young she has had what for lack of better language she calls dreams - every night until three months ago, when she stopped dreaming at all, and because of that stopped writing. We the reader know what she cannot: there's an ancient creature called Lysistratus who feeds off dreams, off soul, and who finds her a rich source of sustenance. Quick note: why on earth call a soul/dream vampire "Lysistratus"?? There was a real Lysistratus in the 4th century who was a highly skilled sculptor (a creator), and there was the fictional Lysistrata, the Athenian heroine of Aristophanes's comedy about the women on both sides of a war deciding to withhold sex until peace could be achieved. Not, either of them, anything remotely appropriate for this character, which is unusual, especially if my assumption is right, that he took the name for himself. This was probably one of the first de Lint books I read, which helped lead to my reading more, which is by and large a good thing ... but if this was my first time reading it I'm not at all sure I'd pursue the author. It's not bad, at all; it's well-written, characters are well done, there's a good story, the setting (especially the Otherworld) is very good... I just didn't like it. I will, of course, being me, explain. First off, the main character. Cat Midhir is, we are told early in the book, sick unto death of explaining to everyone in the universe and his sister how her name is pronounced. Honey? I have to spell both my names to everyone in the universe, because both names have multiple variations. You should have taken a self-explanatory pseudonym if it's going to get to you this much, and you didn't, and it's an odd name so it will keep happening, so suck it up. And that's the thin end of the wedge, cracking open her character for the reader: there's not much there, there. She is a talented writer, but socially inept and alone (what ever happened to her parents? It's not a good thing that I can't remember if we're told). Now that her dreams have abandoned her, she can't write a single decent sentence, and I'm afraid I can't muster up a single spark of sympathy for her. I have delusions of authorship. I've had a couple of wild dreams that might someday, with a lot of work, become something readable. I have not ever had the ridiculous advantage of being able to sit at the feet of a bard, soak in his stories, and then write them down. We are assured that she took the stories deeper than Kothlen did, expanding, fleshing out the places he skimmed over and using her own gift of expression to turn them into best-selling novels... but we are also told several times that every word she tries to write without the umbilical cord of the Otherworld is "lifeless". I'll buy that she's not merely transcribing but actually writing - but how am I supposed to feel anything but mild contempt for a woman who has sponged off others for her livelihood? A woman who has never had to sit in front of a blank sheet of paper and search for what comes next in the story? Given a rich source like Kothlen, I'd be a best-seller too. If anything, her "writer's block" gives me a self-righteous and slightly perverse delight. Again, suck it up, honey, and sink or swim on your own damn merits. Wet dishrag, her. The other characters, as I said, are well done: Peter, the bookstore owner who has tentatively befriended her over the years and who becomes a true friend now; Ben, the cab-driver who has had a minor obsession with her since he read her first book (though I kept thinking he was an old man for some reason); Mick, the mohawked punk-rocker with a heart, apparently, of gold; Rick, whose name is well chosen as the only word I can think of to describe him ends in "rick"... The Otherworld characters are not as strong, but sketched in well enough to serve, if not as clearly as I would like. Some of the many red shirts in the story were given more time and delineation than the major characters of the Otherworld, and I resented being asked to get to know and like them (which I didn't, always) in the pages before they were hideously murdered. That was actually a problem with the beginning of the book, as well: a large number of characters were introduced, one after the other, and it was fairly clear which ones weren't going to be around long. After that it was just a matter of Lysistratus picking them off at will. My main issue with characterization shouldn't be a big one, but is: their language. As in profanity. It's constant, and every non-fae male character, antagonist or pro-, cusses like a sailor. And it's not just nice pungent anglo-saxon words, but it's those anglo-saxon words with "jesus" (no caps) in front, which ... Come on. I'm not a prude when it comes to strong language - anyone who thinks so has not driven with me on the highway - but this was just too much. On every page, every circumstance from minor annoyance to lives being threatened prompts the same response. It gets old. Also, I was reminded frequently that de Lint has a horror background under another name. There were strong horror elements throughout - Lysistratus is evil, and does evil for evil's sake, and it's no fun to read. And that's something of a problem. As with profanity, some is fine, even good in context. More is not better. If I want to read horror, I will read horror. I don't want to read horror. I don't appreciate a constant barrage of blood-soaked scenes packaged as a fantasy - particularly with my edition's cover - except for the skull in the foreground, it leads a prospective reader to believe the concentration is on the fae, not the evil. I'm uneasy with the idea that L stole people's souls, too, but that's my own issue. Or, to be more timely, hang-up. Which leads me to - - A last issue, sometimes fairly easily overlooked but still a distraction, was that the book did not age well: it is very, very dated. Very. This was startling at times (there was a comment about the awareness of Reagan in office south of the border apparently intent on starting a war, which was an unexpected and unusual Canadian political commentary), and almost funny at times (how many times would a cell phone have made all the difference? And - a turntable! Aw!), but frequently it was just ... odd. The name-checking was annoying - there was a great detail of corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude ... who was on the turntable, what books Peter was ordering, what books everyone was reading (everyone) (seriously) - it felt grafted on to prove de Lint was "hip". Oddest, though, and unintentionally hilarious, was Lysistratus humming the Human League song "Don't You Want Me". The radio station I leave on at work plays this now and then, and I get the joke. It's just not funny. He could have been an amazing Big Bad. He wasn't. He was the well-dressed "Dude" (*sigh*) with the piercing blue eyes who you really want to avoid, and particularly to avoid having sex with. Who has terrible tast in music. That detracts from his fearsomeness, and I think it would have even in the 80's. ***minor spoilers*** The ending felt a little rushed. I still don't think Cat did enough, and what she did was undermined and cleaned up to pave the way for a happily-ever-after, with some major questions left unanswered (Is the whole Otherworld, or is it not, part of her? And how in hell is she the deer woman whose name escapes me? And why? And when??). I resented the death of one major character, rather than regretting it, and unfortunately the result of "the Dude"'s eye contact - paralysis - was sometimes funnier than it was scary. And in the end ... two things. I can't help but be resentful that someone who is never shown as deserving has a devoted lover, a loyal friend, access to faery, and a continuing career I'd kill for. The other thing is: I've been listening to a movie review/writing podcast called "The Popcorn Dialogues", and a comment made in one I just heard was that if at the end of a romantic comedy you're thinking "Geez, I really thought she'd end up with the other guy", it's not a successful romance story. That's the case here: I don't quite get why we needed both Ben and Peter. Overall, three stars; probably won't read it again unless in twenty more years I forget not only the book but this review; disappointed; not in the mood for more de Lint soon. But I do admit I want to read Cat's books.
    • 3/5
      This is urban fantasy from back when that did not automatically mean a formulaic vampire-werewolf-femme-fatale love triangle. Its a story about a group of people whose lives are intruded upon by an immortal human-like predator that feeds on dreams. The intended main course of his culinary tour of Ottowa is to be Cat, a fantasy author whose source of inspiration for her books comes from fantastical beings in a magical land that she is able to visit in her own dreams. Once her nocturnal sightseeing trips become snacks for the evil one, she suffers a major dose of writer's block. a genuine misanthrope who has only ever really connected to the beings she meets in her dreams, she is now cut off from her only friends and endangered by a mysterious assailant. Discovering and dealing with said assailaint can only come about if she breaks through her isolation and connects with the people around her.A decent urban fantasy tale, quiet dark in bits, which reminded me to some extent of Neil Gaiman's work. Entertaining but not exceptional.
    • 4/5
      3.5 starsCat is an author and gets her inspiration through dreams. Unfortunately, she has not been dreaming for a few months and is now blocked. What she doesn’t know is that there is… something out there feeding on her dreams! And he’s feeding on others, as well, but Cat’s dreams are the ones he really wants. This was good. I liked the real world sections of the book more than the dream sections, but that’s not a surprise to me. Cat didn’t really have friends in the real world, so I enjoyed the sections where she was making friends (though that was more secondary to the story). There were a lot of characters introduced at the very start of the book, so I was afraid I would get them confused, but surprisingly, it was rare to not figure out who we were following in the story fairly quickly – de Lint must have given enough clues to be able to follow easily.
    • 3/5
      I must confess that I read this book to kill three birds with one stone. I needed a ‘Y’ title, a Canadian book, and a fantasy book so I could fit it into three challenges. I had always wanted to read de Lint anyway, so it seemed like a good fit. But, it really wasn’t. This was my first foray into urban fantasy and while I’m not giving up on it yet, I don’t know if I really like the genre. Cat Midhir is an isolated Canadian fantasy writer who finds inspiration through her dreams. Suddenly, though, she has a severe writer’s block and cannot find the reason for it. She confides in Peter, a bookshop owner, and the two become friends. Peter helps her to open up and even thinks he can fix her up with his friend Ben. Meanwhile, Cat soon realizes she is being stalked and is afraid to go to her own home at night. Afraid of being alone, she begins spending more and more time with Peter. This story actually reminded me a bit of Lisey’s Story by Stephen King. I was uncomfortable with aspects of that story, and was even more so with this one. Yarrow was much too gritty for my taste, but I’m usually in the minority on that score. On the positive side, de Lint knows how to build characters. I really, really liked the ‘good guys’ in this and really hated the bad ones. I probably will try at least one more of de Lint’s books before I make a final judgment. Any suggestions? 1986, 255 pp.

    Book preview

    Yarrow - Charles de Lint

    SHADOWINGS

    Do not seek to follow in the

    footsteps of the men of old;

    Seek what they sought.

    —Matsuo Basho, The Rustic Gate

    1: time was

    Old ghosts lived behind Cat Midhir's eyes, memories that had no home until they came to haunt her.

    They came visiting in dreams, a gangly pack of Rackham gnomes, with long skinny arms and legs, and eyes like saucers, dry-voiced like cattails rattling in the wind. Their tunics and trousers were a motley brown, their green and yellow caps pushed down unruly thatches of wild hair. Sometimes she sensed them outside of sleep, their wizened faces peering sharp-edged from sudden corners or, shy as fawns, soft-stepping behind her through parks and vacant lots—shadow companions who capered in her peripheral vision and were gone when she turned her head, dry voices piping strange music that became only the wind when she listened closely.

    Rarer, they stepped her dreams in the shapes of tall and stately beings, like the children of fabled Dana or Tolkien's golden elves. When they came as such—the women in long embroidered gowns and the men in jerkins of soft leather, with their pale green eyes and silvery hair all braided—they told her ancient histories of the Otherworld and its people in voices liquid as water—tales that she transcribed in the light of day and wove into the fabric of her novels and short stories.

    Rarer still, antlered Mynfel came, her eyes like honey, great branching horns lifting from her brow. Mynfel, whose very name was a charm against the riddling unknown, who sharpened Cat's intuition and filled the hollow places inside her with a quiet gladness, who made of simple living an art and made art a soaring swan with moon-tipped glittering wings. On those nights the stars held their breath and every sound, from the whirring buzz of a June bug to the scrape of a cricket's legs, hallowed her presence. Mynfel never spoke, but on such nights there was no need for tales or speaking.

    Then the night visits stopped and her dreams, if they came at all, were empty….

    2: sunday night

    It was August 29th, the last day of the 1982 SuperEx—Ottawa's annual exhibition of the tasteless and the tawdry, when the nation's bureaucratic capital removed its grey-flannel sobriety for ten days to reveal a garish underbelly. Lansdowne Park, the traditional site for this extravaganza, was choked with a gaudy array of concession stands and hucksters' booths, games and prizes, bargains and swindles, horse shows and music concerts, exhibitions that ranged from livestock to crafts to kitchen and household items, rides like The Bomb and the double Ferris wheel, and as many people as the organizers could induce to pack into the park's 25.6 acres.

    The overspill of attendees and their various vehicles strangled the streets for blocks in every direction. This was a great irritation to most of the local businesses and residents, but the enterprising souls who'd been renting out their front lawns as parking spaces for five to ten dollars a car, and the owners of the Mac's Milk, Fat Albert’s, smoke shops, and corner stores were happy as they counted their daily takes.

    The sky above the park was lit up as though the Mother Ship from Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind had docked in it; the air smelled cotton-candy sweet as far away as Billings Bridge Plaza a mile south. The sound of the Ex was a cacophonous roar in the park itself, and washed in waves over the surrounding residential areas.

    A half mile southeast of Lansdowne and a block northwest of the Rideau River, Albert Cousins crossed his sparsely furnished room and turned off his black and white television set, interrupting Johnny Carson in the middle of an interview with someone who looked like Tyrone Power but wasn't. His window was open in a futile attempt to alleviate the August heat; through it, replacing Johnny's voice, came the murmur of the Ex.

    Albert smiled at that sound, a weary, old man's smile, full of remembrance. When Jean was still alive… He could still remember the last time they took the boys to the Ex. Tommy was…what? Sixteen then? And Billy a year younger. Of course, the Ex wasn't the same in those days. Not so big. Not so…what was the word? Commercial. Everybody talked a lot about whether or not things were commercial these days. Didn't much matter to him.

    He and Jean had still gone a couple of times after that last outing with the boys. But that was the year Billy got hit by a car—in late September; the funeral was the first week of October. And Tommy didn't much care to have the old man and old lady tagging along with him and his friends the following year. Old man and old lady. They hadn't been old then. The way he lived now—this was what it meant to be old.

    Being old meant being lonely. He'd outlived Jean and Tommy, and all of his friends. That was all it meant. It meant watching a black and white TV set in a rooming house for other old people just like him, living off his government pension, which barely allowed him to pay his rent and eat, much less go to the Ex. They called it the SuperEx now. But that didn't matter to him. It wasn't like he'd be going to it.

    He'd sit up by the window a little while longer, maybe watch the late show, maybe not. It didn't matter. Time had a way of blending all the days and nights together, and the TV didn't help. All those little black and white actors looked and talked the same. The women all wore too little and the men looked like they'd stepped from the pages of a Sears catalogue. Not like in the old days. But at least it kept him from remembering too much.

    * * *

    Peter Baird's apartment was on Fourth Avenue, four blocks north of Lansdowne and just above the bookstore that he half owned and managed—the House of Speculative Fiction. After ten days of the SuperEx he kept the constant noise factor at bay by consciously ceasing to be aware of it. It was that or just go plain nuts. Sometimes you couldn't ignore it, but tonight he'd managed to—at least for a couple of hours.

    It was going on to eleven-forty when he finished reading the last page of The Borderlord by Caitlin Midhir. This was the second time he'd read Cat's new book, but not the first time he'd stopped to wonder at the magic those printed words on paper could evoke in him. It wasn't so much the fantastical elements like elves and wizards—or in this case, the antlered Borderlord Aldon—nor the twists and turns of the plot. That, he could find in myriad other books. No, there was a certain depth to her characters and underlying themes that reached out and grabbed him every time. The writing was lyrical, too, without ever descending into mush.

    He glanced at the photo on the dust jacket and sighed. He could see why Ben was so enamored with her—could see it more than Ben, perhaps, because he'd known Cat for a couple of years now. She dropped into the bookstore every few weeks or so and they'd shoot the breeze over a cup of coffee. She didn't talk about her writing at first, so it had taken him a couple of months to put the shy woman he knew only as Cat together with the novelist Caitlin Midhir, whose four novels and one short story collection he carried in the store. He'd found out when he'd tried to sell her one of her own novels—the then-just-released Cloak and Hood. He'd known she liked that particular style of writing because she'd been picking up LeGuin's fantasies, McKillip and the like, and had even recommended Nancy Springer's The White Hart to him when it was still called The Book of Suns and marketed as a historical. So while she sat beside him quietly sipping her coffee, he'd handed her a copy of Cloak and Hook and started in on his sales spiel.

    She'd looked at him strangely, and for a moment he thought he'd killed the book by raving it up too much. Then she said, in a very small voice, I'm glad you liked it, and he flashed on what he'd been trying to do. It was the first time he'd ever raised a genuine laugh out of her.

    Peter smiled, thinking back. Placing The Borderlord on his night table, he killed the light. He listened to the crowd noise coming from Lansdowne, pulled his pillow up over his ear, and tried to sleep.

    * * *

    Ben Summerfield pulled his cab up in front of the R&R Restaurant at the corner of Bank and Holmwood and leaned on the horn. He glanced at the much-worn copy of Christopher Stasheff's The Warlock in Spite of Himself that was sitting on his dash. Peter had told him the other day that a first edition of it was worth about fifty dollars American to a serious paperback collector. Seemed like a lot of money to pay for a yellowing book that had cost only seventy-five cents when it first came out back in '69. Not that it wasn't a good book, but you'd think for that kind of money you'd get something solid. Signed, maybe. A cloth edition for sure.

    He leaned on the horn again and an attractive blonde wearing a tight T-shirt and tighter jeans came out the restaurant's door, followed by a tall, dark-haired man who looked like he thought he was Mr. Casual—designer jeans, shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest, his hair swept back for that wind-tossed beer-ad look. They approached the cab, Mr. Casual making a show of opening the door for his companion.

    Gallantry is not yet dead, the man said with a grin that made Ben want to pull away before the grease in the grin got all over the cab's seats. Five-thirteen Coronation, chief, he added to Ben as he got in beside the woman.

    Sure thing, Ben said, adding asshole under his breath. What was with this chief shit? What did women see in guys like this anyway?

    He took his foot off the brake pedal, pushed down on the gas, and pulled away from the curb, cutting into the traffic. Behind him an irate driver sounded his horn.

    * * *

    What a zoo that was, Debbie Mitchell said. She fluffed her hair, caught the cabbie's eye in the mirror and winked, smiling to herself when he blushed. Every year I tell myself, that's it. I'm not going to the Ex again, not even if they get the Beatles to reunite for the Grandstand Show.

    It was pretty awful, Andy Barnes agreed.

    He moved his leg closer to hers, laid his hand on her thigh.

    Debbie nodded, replying to his comment rather than his unsubtle body language. What she really wanted was a hot bath. Going to the Ex made her feel unclean all over. And while normally she didn't mind Andy's attention—he could be a lot of fun if she was in the right mood—tonight his puppy-dog eagerness was wearing a little on her. She wondered if it was worth the bother to try and put him off tonight. His hand inched up her thigh. She glanced at the mirror again, but the cabbie kept his gaze studiously on the road.

    Turning to Andy, she offered him her lips and dropped her hand down between his legs. His brave little soldier, as he liked to call it, sprang to attention. Well, if he didn't manage to keep it up for any more than his usual fifteen minutes, she'd be able to have that bath she was looking forward to all that much sooner.

    * * *

    Mick Jennings's apartment was on Third Avenue, a little more than half a mile northwest of Lansdowne Park. The noise of the Ex didn't bother him at all. He and his girlfriend, Becki Bones, late of Toronto's punk scene, were listening to the Clash at full volume. Bass, drums, and guitars roared as Joe Strummer shouted out the lyrics to Clampdown from the band's two-LP set, London Calling.

    Mick was an old hippie who'd gone punk. He kept his hair short except for the two-and-a-half-inch Mohawk band that ran from the top of his brow to the nape of his neck. The tattered jeans he wore were the same as those he'd worn in the old days, but he'd traded in his MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR and SUN POWER T-shirts for ones like the Clash's COMBAT ROCK, or the one he was wearing now: a skull with a crossed fork and knife under it, white on black, the legend EAT THE RICH in bold print above the skull. The earring he now wore in his left earlobe was a silver Anarchy symbol—a capitol A enclosed in a circle—replacing the peace symbol that had been there for so many years.

    He was a mechanic at the BP station on the corner of Riverdale and Bank where Ben Summerfield took his cab when it needed repairs. Ben knew him as a good-natured, somewhat aggressive proponent of the whole British punk/new wave scene—the music and ideologies of groups like the Damned and the Clash, Vice Squad and the Anti-Nowhere League. I finally figured out that you can't solve everything with flowers, Mick had explained to Ben once. Sometimes you've got to kick a little ass.

    Any beer left? Becki asked during the silence between cuts.

    She was about eighteen or nineteen—Mick didn't know which, and had never bothered to ask—with spiked black hair and strong Slavic features. The T-shirt she was wearing looked like someone had spilled battery acid all over it. There were rents and tears in all the strategic places, and you could only vaguely make out that it had once said SID LIVES.

    I'll check, Mick said. He left the room, returning with a couple of Buds.

    What're you smiling about? Becki asked when he handed her one of the cans.

    I was thinking of Ben—working his ass off with the Ex. He'll have fares running him from one end of the city to the other tonight.

    I don't know why you hang around with him. He's so fucking straight.

    Hey, Ben's a good shit, you know what I mean? I don't hear him bad-mouthing you.

    Becki shrugged. Oh, I like him all right. I just think he's a little weird, that's all. All he does is drive that cab of his and read his space-and-elves books.

    Well, we can't all change the world, Mick replied.

    He tilted his beer back, Adam's apple bobbing as he chugged. Paul Simonon, the Clash's bass player, was singing The Guns of Brixton now, something about having your hands on your head or on the trigger of a gun. When they came knocking on his door, Mick thought, he knew how he'd be stepping out.

    * * *

    Farley O'Dennehy was panhandling in front of the Ex at closing time that night. He had his battered suitcase hoisted in one hand, and kept an eye out for the cops while he scanned the crowd for easy marks. He was feeling bold tonight—fueled by a couple of bottles of Brights wine. So far he'd pulled in six bucks and change. If he could work the crowd for another half hour or so without getting busted, he'd be getting so piss-drunk tomorrow that he wouldn't even miss the Ex and its easy pickings.

    Hey, pal, he asked a man in white trousers and a light blue shirt. Can you spare me a quarter?

    Fuck off, creep.

    Yeah? Well, you can— Farley broke off when he spotted six-foot-three and two hundred twenty pounds of Ottawa's finest looking in their direction. —have a nice day, he finished lamely, and shuffled off.

    * * *

    You didn't have to be so mean, Stella Sidney told her boyfriend.

    Aw, the guy bugged me, Rick replied. "Why the hell should he get a free ride? At least I work for my money."

    Rick Kirkby had just opened his own store—Captain Computer—and was filled with the righteousness of a small businessman standing up for the North American work ethic. Stella decided that it wasn't the time to remind him that if it hadn't been for her money, Rick would never have got the business off the ground in the first place. Bad enough he'd dragged her to the Ex tonight, without finishing the evening with a fight.

    Let's go find the car, she said.

    Yeah. Sure.

    Stella followed his distracted gaze to see that it was centered on two high school girls in tie-tops and cutoff jeans that were so short you could see the cheeks of their rumps hanging out.

    "Come on," she said.

    Okay, okay. I was just looking.

    3: monday morning

    By three a.m., the streets were quiet. Humming the Human League's Don't You Want Me under his breath, a tall slender man stepped from the two-story house he was renting on Willard Street in Ottawa South and ambled down the block to Cameron. He had short pale-blond hair and wore a lightweight suit with padded shoulders that hung stylishly from his lean frame. His eyes, when he stepped under the pooling glow of a streetlight, gleamed like blue crystals.

    The name on the passport he was currently using identified him as Lucius Marn, residing in Canada on an extended visit from the United Kingdom. It was the same name that he'd used to sign his lease. The name he had been given at birth, however, in a time long before the use of passports or other identifying papers, was Lysistratus.

    He paused at the corner of the block, moving into the shadow of the big red-brick house that, unlike his own, was divided into two half-doubles. Using honed senses he reached inside to touch the sleeping minds of its occupants—three on one side, two on the other. The texture of their dreams was coarse, diffused; sufficient to appease his hunger, but like a man given a choice between a gourmet dinner and simple nourishment, satisfying that hunger was not enough. Not when there was a choice.

    Across the street, meeting the point of the V Willard and Bellwood made as they met Cameron, Cat Midhir unknowingly waited for him.

    Her house was sheltered from the street by a tall hedge of gangly cedars and stood farther back from the street than its neighbors on either side. A giant birch on the right of the front lawn and a Dutch elm—one of the few in the city not yet stricken by disease—framed the front of the building. In the backyard a tall pine lifted from behind its roof like a second chimney.

    The house was red brick with a wooden veranda painted cream-yellow that ran the length of the front. An antique horse-drawn buggy stood forgotten on the left side of the long porch. The other half had been enclosed with screening. Decorous wooden eaves and gables, and the shutters on the dormer windows, matched the color of the veranda.

    Yet for all the house's charm, there was a certain forsaken quality about it, as though it was a poor country cousin come visiting its more urban relatives. Not so much a sense of disrepair as being worn about the edges. In point of fact, the house had once been in a rural setting. Originally part of the Billings Estate, a farm that had sprawled on either side of the Rideau River, the city had grown up around both the house and the estate, swallowing the farmland. The estate still stood on top of the hill across the river, spotlighted every night like a fairy tale palace.

    Lysistratus could not see the Billings Estate from where he stood. What light he did see spilled down from the upper right dormer of Cat's house, and it gave him pause. He didn't need the lit window to know that his prey was still awake. There was a distinct difference between waking and sleeping thoughts. The one he could feed on, the other… The other meant no more to him than the garish packaging of food in a supermarket. Waking thoughts carried dreams, but they were too difficult to pry sustenance from.

    For a long time Lysistratus regarded the house. He began to hum again, Anitra's Dance from Grieg's Peer Gynt Suites, while he considered the woman inside. The quality of her dreams was such that they fed more than the gnawing hunger inside him; they fed the soul as well.

    Mankind needed its dreams to keep its sanity. He needed mankind's dreams as sustenance. He took his bulk nourishment from those who didn't dream so true. The dreams of creative beings were more of a delicacy, while her dreams…they coursed through his system like a narcotic. They were rare gems, and he treated them accordingly, being careful not to be too greedy when he fed lest he irreparably damage the source of his pleasure.

    Before her, the best nourishment was to be found in primitive societies, strong-dreaming aboriginals unsullied by the vacuous glitter of the Western world. But such societies were closed to him. His skin was too pale to pass as one of them, and their shaman, knowing that such parasites existed, had developed harsh and successful methods of dealing with his kind.

    The danger was less in a city like this—its inhabitants would not accept that he existed, except as a titillating fiction, and it was comfortable. He enjoyed its luxuries—theatres, opera, clubs. He took the same pleasure from Wagner as he did from David Bowie, from Bergman as from Lucas. He was safe, so long as he didn't overstay himself.

    He had made a tour of the great cities of Europe and now planned a similar circuit of North America. A year here, a year there. He'd started small—Ottawa with its international flavor yet small town atmosphere—but planned to visit all the major cities: New York, Vancouver, L.A., Montreal, Chicago, Toronto, Washington.

    He meant to enjoy himself, even with the one major drawback that the present age had delivered to one such as he: Modern men and women moved too quickly. Their lifestyle was filled with too much stimuli, leaving them jaded, too easily satisfied, unable to use their imaginations. He found himself snatching half-formed images from those who dozed on public transportation or in parks and theatres. Where he once took lightly from one, perhaps two, throughout the dark hours, he was forced to feed on five or six now, occasionally killing his victims to harvest enough sustenance from their thin dreams.

    But you are safe, he murmured, gazing up to Cat's lighted window. From death at least.

    He remembered something that the poet Ibycus had once said: There is no medicine to be found for a life which is fled. Dead, Cat could no longer feed him her true dreams. Dead, her dreams were lost to him forever.

    He ran a hand through his hair, then gave Cat's window a brief salute before turning to go. The leather soles of his shoes made no sound on the pavement as he walked toward Windsor Park.

    * * *

    Albert Cousins never heard the door to his room open, never saw the slender man with the glittering blue eyes lean over his bed, never felt the stranger lay a hand on either side of his wrinkled face. Albert was dreaming of his wife, of Jean and him driving their old Chevy up the Gatineau, with the boys in the backseat—the one seven, the other six—and a picnic hamper in the trunk.

    A final dream.

    * * *

    Lysistratus took the old man in the rooming house, took a lifetime of dreams and left behind a body with its motor-workings intact, but no soul to drive it. Standing over his drained victim, Lysistratus watched the body, bereft of its soul, slowly expire. His own body converted the old man's psychic essence into nourishment that would sustain his needs.

    The basic hunger was satiated. But he thought of true dreams and the woman who dreamed them, and knew it was not enough. The simple satisfying of base needs could never be enough.

    * * *

    In the big house on Cameron where Willard and Bellwood joined to form their V, Cat Midhir slept a dreamless sleep. In the morning she would wake with a headache, for on his return from the rooming house, Lysistratus had touched her sleeping mind with his and swallowed the night's dreams. Tomorrow she would sit at her typewriter, as she had every day for the past nine years, but tomorrow morning she would not keep anything that she wrote, if she wrote at all.

    Three months ago she had stopped dreaming. Three months ago the words that had come so easily for so many years simply dried up.

    Tomorrow would be no different.

    THIEF OF DREAMS

    Sorcerers are not the

    same as other men.

    Part of their magic

    is to appear like us.

    —Islamic saying

    4: monday afternoon

    Mick Jennings lay on his back on a dolly, doing a brake job on a Honda Civic. His coveralls were more black than the grey they'd been when he'd first bought them, his hands and forearms were grimy, and he had a greasy streak on his forehead beneath the spikes of his mohawk. He was listening to CHEZ-FM because that was the station Jim had tuned in.

    They were playing Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven, as they seemed to every three or four hours. Remember progressive rock? Hard to forget it, mate, the way the radio stations still flogged it. Christ, he wished they'd let that song give up the ghost and die the death it probably yearned for. It wasn't

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