Drink Down the Moon (12 page)

What Johnny was suffering from was a trauma of some sort. Henk couldn’t quite sort out exactly what had happened to his friend last night— the things Johnny babbled about were just too unreal— but something had happened to him. He was sure of that much.

“We’ll go see Greg,” he said as Johnny finally took a few more bites.

He noted that this time, Johnny, after mechanically taking the first few mouthfuls, was now finishing the omelette. Henk poured them both another cup of coffee.

Johnny pushed the plate away again, but this time it was empty. He rubbed his temples, his hand drifting to the back of his head where it gingerly felt the bump there. He could remember falling face down on the stones, but he couldn’t remember getting a knock on the back of his head. All he could remember

The crowd of alien creatures swirled through his head again.

He drank his coffee, then stood up from the table, waiting for a moment to see if he felt woozy.

“Let’s go,” he said when everything stayed put. “I want my fiddle back.”

Henk nodded. He took the dishes to the sink, then followed Johnny outside.

Greg Parker lived in the Glebe as well, on Fifth Avenue, just a few blocks over from Johnny’s apartment. His eight-year-old daughter, Brenda, opened the door when they pushed the buzzer and studied them for a few moments before allowing that, yes, her daddy was in, and yes, she’d go get him. They waited outside on the porch, listening to Brenda shouting for her father. Greg appeared a minute or so later, wiping his hands on an apron.

“Making cookies,” he explained. “Larry’s helping me.”

There were smudges all over the apron, the most recent of which looked like chocolate chip batter. Some of the handprints were very small. Larry was Greg’s four-year-old son. His head, topped by tousled blond hair, peeked around Greg’s leg.

“Henk!” he squealed when he recognized who was there, and threw himself forward.

Henk caught him up and swung him around in the air.

“How’s it going, tiger?”

“We’re making cookies!”

“Sounds great.”

“You guys want a coffee or something?” Greg asked.

Henk shook his head. “No. We just wanted to get Jemi’s address from you. Johnny left his fiddle with her last night, but he forgot to find out where she lived so that he could pick it up today.”

Greg gave them the address.

“We’ve got a rehearsal today,” he added, “so if you don’t catch her at home, I’ll let her know that you’re looking for her.”

“What’s her phone number?” Henk asked. “Maybe we should give her a call before we drop by.”

“She doesn’t have a phone.”

“So how do you get in touch with her?”

“Oh, you know Jemi. She’s always around. Are you coming to see us this weekend? We’re playing the Saucy Noodle— three nights.”

“We’ll definitely make it.” Henk put Larry down and gave him a pat on the rump. “Better get back to those cookies, tiger.”

Larry looked fiercely at him and growled. Henk laughed and pretended to back off from him.

“Listen, thanks, Greg. If we don’t see you sooner, we’ll catch you at the Noodle.”

Greg nodded. “I’ll tell Jemi you’re looking for her if I see her first.”

“That’d be great,” Henk said. “Stub a toe— okay?”

Greg laughed and “waved them off.

They took a #1 bus downtown and walked over to the Sandy Hill address that Greg had given them. It proved to be a three-storywood-frame rooming house on Sweetland, near the corner of Laurier. The building stood at the top of a hill, the street dropping sharply down the remainder of its three-block length. They tried the front door and it was open, so they walked in. Jemi’s name was on the mailboxes in the foyer— room 11.

“Anybody here?” Henk called.

They waited a moment or so, then, just before Henk called out again, a large woman came from the back of the building. She wore a tent-like pinafore over a T-shirt and faded overalls. Her face was like a full moon— big and friendly— and she wore her hair in a long braid that hung over one enormous breast.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“We’re looking for Jemi,” Henk said.

“I don’t think she’s up yet— at least I haven’t seen her. Come to think of it, I don’t remember her coming in last night. My room’s just beside hers and I was up late last night reading the new Caitlin Midhir book— To Drive Away the Northern Cold. Have you read it yet?”

“Uh

” Henk began.

“Well, it’s not like her other stuff at all,” she informed them. “She’s having fun here, with the way we see things in the here and now, you know? But it’s still got that magicky feel that—”

“Excuse me,” Johnny broke in, “but would you mind knocking on her door to see if she’s in?”

The woman blinked, then frowned.

“Room eleven,” she said. “Go knock yourself.”

The she turned and went back down the hall.

“What floor?” Johnny called after her.

“Second. Turn right at the top of the stairs.”

“Thanks.”

There was no reply.

Johnny and Henk looked at each other, then shrugged. Johnny took the lead up the stairs. Room 11 was at the far end of the hall. The door had an All Kindly Toes poster on it, dating back to a gig at the Rainbow earlier in the summer. Johnny knocked briskly, knocked again after a few moments when there was no answer.

“Well, that’s that,” he said, turning away from the door after a third knock and the same lack of success.

Henk bent over the lock. “I can get us in.”

“We can’t do that, Henk. It’s not right.”

“Maybe your fiddle’s just sitting in there, Johnny. Besides, she gave you a runaround last night, didn’t she?”

“Yeah, but—”

“It’ll just take me a couple of secs.”

“That woman downstairs knows we’re up here,” Johnny said as Henk took his wallet out. “She’s probably listening for us right now.”

“Let her listen.”

Henk took out a credit card and wedged it behind the door’s casing trim. The trim was loose— obviously somebody had used this way of getting in before.

“What are you doing with a credit card?” Johnny asked.

“I just use it for ID when I’m writing a cheque. Hang on now.”

He slipped the card down behind the angled latch bolt, turned the door handle, and pushed. The door swung open.

“See?” he said. “Nothing to it.”

Johnny looked nervously back to the head of the stairs.

“Come on,” Henk said, and pulled him inside, shutting the door behind them.

Now that they were inside, Johnny looked curiously around. At first glance there was no sign of either his fiddle or Jemi’s tenor saxophone case. Instead there was a double bed that took up about a quarter of the room, a closet, a dresser, a bay window with an easy chair and a reading lamp beside it, and a small bookcase near the bed, the top of which was obviously being used as a night table.

The two men moved quickly through the room.

Under the bed were dozens of pairs of shoes and boots. The closet was full of clothes, mostly brightly-coloured and dating from the forties and fifties, though there were some Tshirts and jeans. A sopranino sax sat in its case on the windowsill with a handful of tin whistles, all in different keys. The bookcase held mysteries and best-sellers. The dresser was a clutter of makeup and costume jewelry. Necklaces hung from a small knob on the side of the dresser’s mirror— rhinestones and fake pearls, beads and coloured glass.

“Look at this,” Henk said.

Johnny came over to the dresser and saw what Henk was pulling free from the other necklaces. It was a carving of a little bone flute that was hanging from a leather thong. Johnny took his own bone carving from his pocket.

“They’re like a matched set,” he said.

Henk nodded. “Well, they were sisters, you said.”

Johnny frowned, remembering Jemi’s anguished features.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said.

“You should take this,” Henk said, holding out the bone flute. “Trade it to her for your fiddle.”

“It’s just a pendant.”

“Yeah. But I don’t know. I’ve got a feeling it means something important.”

Johnny did too, more so than Henk perhaps. He’d felt a tingle touching it, and for some reason envisioned the two carvings pulling at each other like the opposite ends of a pair of magnets.

He took the pendant from Henk’s hand and rehung it with the other necklaces.

“I’m not taking anything,” he said. “Now, let’s go.”

He opened the door and peered nervously out, but the hallway was empty. Motioning to Henk, he stepped out into the hall. Henk joined him, shutting the door, and they made for the stairs.

Johnny felt terrible. He was missing his fiddle and last night was still a “weird collage of disjointed images in his head, but it wasn’t right to go poking through somebody else’s personal things. It was too much an invasion of their privacy.

They made it downstairs and outside without meeting anyone. It wasn’t until they were a few blocks away that Johnny began to breathe easier.

“Listen,” Henk said. “I’ve got to get to work. Are you going to be okay?”

Henk worked afternoons in a record store called Record Runner on Rideau Street.

“Yeah,” Johnny said. “I’ll be fine.”

“What’re you going to do about your fiddle?”

“Drop in on the AKT rehearsal, I guess.”

“Okay. Talk to you tonight— and watch it around those pink-haired ladies.”

A faint smile touched Johnny’s lips— gone almost before it was there.

“Sure,” he said. “Thanks again, Henk.”

Henk lifted a hand in farewell and set off, leaving Johnny at the corner of Laurier and King Edward. Johnny decided to walk home by way of the bike path along the canal, taking his time. When he finally got back to his apartment, he was feeling a little more clear-headed, if no closer to understanding anything. He had some lunch, then phoned Greg’s place. Greg’s wife, Janet, gave him Trudy MacDonald’s number where the band was rehearsing. When he called there and got Greg on the line, Greg told him that Jemi hadn’t shown up yet.

“Don’t know what happened to her, man. She’s usually pretty good about rehearsals— she just likes to play, you know?”

“Sure. If she shows up, will you have her call me?”

He gave Greg his number.

“No problem,” Greg said. “And if you see her, tell her to shake her ass down here, okay?”

“Sure.”

Johnny hung up and stared at the phone. When he thought of Jemi, the way she’d looked the last time he’d seen her, head tilted back, screaming at the sky

If that was a true memory, he supposed he wasn’t all that surprised that she hadn’t shown up for the AKT rehearsal. But where did that leave him? He had a gig himself on the weekend— two nights at the Earl of Sussex— and while he had a spare fiddle, there was no way he was going to give up the one he’d lost. Tom had given it to him. Just one day, out of the blue. He’d handed Johnny the fiddle, saying, “I think you’re ready for this one now.”

Johnny had never played a fiddle that sounded so sweet. The bass strings woke a low grumble, the high strings just sang. Everything sounded good on it— though by the time he first played that instrument, he’d been studying with Tom for twelve years. If Tom hadn’t taught him everything that Tom himself knew, Johnny couldn’t imagine what it could be.

He got up and stared out the front window, hands in his pockets. He felt the bone carving, remembered the bone flute in Jemi’s apartment, remembered a hollowed hill

.

He stood there for a few moments longer, just staring, then got his bike and pedaled down to Vincent Massey Park.

Puxill, he thought. I’m going to look for the Pook of Puxill.

He said the words aloud, then smiled, seeing the play of words on the title of the Kipling book.

He wondered which had come first.

Dunrobin Finn had a small underground home under the grassy verge between Rideau River Drive and the river itself. Fifteen years or so ago, the spot was a public beach. Now all that remained of its former use was a low stone wall near the river. The sandy beach had been taken over by reeds and rushes. Swans and ducks floated nearby in summer. In winter, the north winds blew down the frozen expanse of the river. But Finn’s home was cool in summer, and snug in winter.

Physically it stood in Faerie, so that its grassy door, or the smoke from his hearth, could only be seen by those few mortals who could see into the Middle Kingdom.

Inside, the hollow was one large, low-ceilinged room, “with a small sleeping area curtained off on one side. The hearth was used for both warmth in winter and cooking. At the moment a pot of tea sat steeping on the warm stones in front of it, the fire already burning low. Woven reed carpets covered the floor, except for near the old sofa and reading chair where a worn Oriental carpet that Jacky and Kate had given the hob lay. Like most faerie not directly connected to the Court; Finn preferred comfortable furnishings— old-fashioned stuffed sofas and Morris chairs with fat pillows.

Near the hearth was a tall pine kitchen hutch with an enamel counter where Finn did his preparations for cooking. A stool stood nearby that he used to reach the top shelves of the hutch, where he kept the herb simples and poultices that he used as a skillyman. The walls of the big room were covered with antique portraits. Finn collected sepia-toned photographs from bygone years— mostly portraits— and loved to hand-tint them on long winter nights. Each photo had its own wooden frame, ornately carved by the hob. Kate and Jacky each had a few of his portraits hanging in their bedrooms.

Kate and Finn were sitting by the hearth now, Finn in his chair, Kate stretched out on the sofa with Caraid on a cushion beside her. They sipped hot honeyed tea and were quiet now that Kate had finished telling the hob all of what she’d learned the previous night. She’d been nodding off when they first arrived, but the conversation and tea had quickly revived her.

“These droichan,” Finn said finally. “They’re quite rare now. So few mortals are prepared to accept that Faerie even exists, they don’t much seek out its secret knowledge anymore.”

“They don’t sound much different from the Unseelie Court,” Kate said.