Dreams Underfoot: A Newford Collection by Charles De Lint, John Jude Palencar

the white canvas was a Crowsea street scene. I recognized the corner-McKennitt and Lee. I’d played there from time to time, mostly in the spring. Lately a rockabilly band called the Broken Hearts had taken over the spot.
    “Well?” Jilly prompted.
    “Well what?”
    “Aren’t you going to give me all the lovely sordid details?”
    I nodded at the painting. She’d already started to work in the background with oils.
    “Are you putting in the Hearts?” I asked.
    Jilly jabbed at me with her paint brush, leaving a smudge the color of a Crowsea red brick tenement on my jean jacket.
    “I’ll thump you if you don’t spill it all, Geordie, me lad. Just watch if I don’t.”
    She was liable to do just that, so I sat down on the ledge behind her and talked while she painted.
    We shared a pot of her cowboy coffee, which was what Jilly called the foul brew she made from used coffee grounds. I took two spoons of sugar to my usual one, just to cut back on the bitter taste it left in my throat. Still, beggars couldn’t be choosers. That morning I didn’t even have used coffee grounds at my own place.
    “I like ghost stories,” she said when I was finished telling her about my evening. She’d finished roughing out the buildings by now and bent closer to the canvas to start working on some of the finer details before she lost the last of the morning light.
    “Was it real?” I asked.
    “That depends. Bramley says—”
    “I know, I know,” I said, breaking in.
    If it wasn’t Ply telling me some weird story about him, it was my brother. What Jilly liked best about him was his theory of consensual reality, the idea that things exist because we agree that they exist.
    “But think about it,” Jilly went on. “Sam sees a ghost—maybe because she expects to see one—and you see the same ghost because you care about her, so you’re willing to agree that there’s one there where she says it will be.”
    “Say it’s not that, then what could it be?”
    “Any number of things. A timeslip—a bit of the past slipping into the present. It could be a restless spirit with unfinished business. From what you say Sam’s told you, though, I’d guess that it’s a case of a timeskip.”
    She turned to grin at me, which let me know that the word was one of her own coining. I gave her a dutifully admiring look, then asked, “A what?”
    “A timeskip. It’s like a broken record, you know? It just keeps playing the same bit over and over again, only unlike the record it needs something specific to cue it in.”
    “Like rain.”
    “Exactly.” She gave me a sudden sharp look. “This isn’t for one of your brother’s stories, is it?”
    My brother Christy collects odd tales just like Jilly does, only he writes them down. I’ve heard some grand arguments between the two of them comparing the superior qualities of the oral versus written traditions.
    “I haven’t seen Christy in weeks,” I said.
    “All right, then.”
    “So how do you go about handling this sort of thing?” I asked. “Sam thinks he’s waiting for something.”
    Jilly nodded. “For someone to lift the tone arm of time.” At the pained look on my face, she added,
    “Well, have you got a better analogy?”
    I admitted that I didn’t. “But how do you do that? Do you just go over and talk to him, or grab him, or what?”
    “Any and all might work. But you have to be careful about that kind of thing.”
    “How so?”
    “Well,” Jilly said, turning from the canvas to give me a serious look, “sometimes a ghost like that can drag you back to whenever it is that he’s from and you’ll be trapped in his time. Or you might end up taking his place in the timeskip.”
    “Lovely.”
    “Isn’t it?” She went back to the painting. “What color’s that sign Duffy has over his shop on McKennitt?” she asked.
    I closed my eyes, trying to picture it, but all I could see was the face of last night’s ghost, wet with rain.
    It didn’t rain again for a