Newford Stories by Charles De Lint

go
walking right out of their houses, sometimes. They can do all sorts
of things and never remember it in the morning.
    Zia and I once spent days watching a woman
who was convinced she had fairies in her house cleaning everything
up after she’d gone to bed. Except she was the one who got up in
her sleep and tidied and cleaned before slipping back under the
covers. To show her appreciation to the fairies, she left a saucer
of cream on the back steps—which the local cats certainly
appreciated—along with biscuits or cookies or pieces of cake. We
ate those on the nights we came by, but we didn’t help her with her
cleaning. That would make us bad fairies, I suppose, except for the
fact that we weren’t fairies at all.
    After a while the old woman holding my hand
stopped talking and lay back down again. I let go of her hand and
tucked it under the covers.
    It was a funny room that she slept in. It
was full of memories, but none of them were new or very happy. They
made the room feel musty and empty even though she used it every
day. It made me wonder why people hung on to memories if they just
made them sad.
    I leaned over and kissed her brow, then got
off the bed.
    When I came back to the living room, there
was the ghost of a boy around fifteen or sixteen sitting on the
sofa where I’d been looking through the old lady’s scrapbook
earlier. He was still gawky, all arms and legs, with features that
seemed too large at the moment, but would become handsome when he
grew into them. Except, being a ghost, he never would.
    Under his watchful gaze, I stepped up onto
the coffee table and sat cross-legged in front of him.
    “Who are you?” I asked.
    He seemed surprised that I could see him,
but made a quick recovery.
    “Nobody important,” he said. “I’m just the
other child.”
    “The other…”
    “Oh, don’t worry. You didn’t miss anything.
I’m the one that’s not in the scrapbooks.”
    There didn’t seem much I could add to that,
so I simply said, “I don’t usually talk to ghosts.”
    “Why not?”
    I shrugged. “You’re not usually substantial
enough, for one thing.”
    “That’s true. Normally, people can’t even
see me, never mind talk to me.”
    “And for another,” I went on, “you’re
usually way too focused on past wrongs and the like to be any
fun.”
    He didn’t argue the point.
    “Well, I know why I’m here,” he said,
“haunting the place I died and all that. But what are you doing
here?”
    “I like visiting in other people’s houses. I
like looking at their lives and seeing how they might fit if they
were mine.”
    I looked down at the scrapbook on the coffee
table.
    “So you were brother and sister?” I
asked.
    He nodded.
    “Does she ever come back here?”
    He laughed, but without any mirth. “Are you
kidding? She hated this place. Why do you think she joined any
school club and sports team that would have her? She’d do anything
to get out of the house. Mother kept her on such a tight leash that
she couldn’t fart without first asking for permission.”
    “But you’re here.”
    “Like I said, I died here. In my own room. I
got stung by a bee that came in through the window. No one knew I
was allergic. My throat swelled up and I asphyxiated before I could
try to get any help.”
    “It sounds horrible.”
    “It was. They came back from one of
Madeline’s games and found me sprawled dead on the floor in my
bedroom. It did warrant a small notice in the paper—I guess it was
a slow news day—but that clipping never made it into a
scrapbook.”
    “And now you’re here…”
    “Until she finally notices me,” he finished
for me.
    “Why did she ignore you?” I asked. “When you
were alive, I mean.”
    “I don’t know. Madeline said it’s because I
looked too much like our dad. We were in grade school when he
walked out on her, leaving her with a mess of debts and the two of
us. I guess her way of getting over it was to ignore me and focus
on Madeline, who