Welcome to Newford. . . . Welcome to the music clubs, the waterfront, the alleyways where ancient myths and magic spill into the modern world. Come meet Jilly, painting wonders in the rough city streets; and Geordie, playing fiddle while he dreams of a ghost; and the Angel of Grasso Street gathering the fey and the wild and the poor and the lost. Gemmins live in abandoned cars and skells traverse the tunnels below, while mermaids swim in the grey harbor waters and fill the cold night with their song. Like Mark Helprin's A Winter's Tale and John Crowley's Little, Big, Dreams Underfoot is a must-read book not only for fans of urban fantasy but for all who seek magic in everyday life. “In de Lint's capable hands, modern fantasy becomes something other than escapism. It becomes folk song, the stuff of urban myth.” ― The Phoenix Gazette “Charles de Lint shows that, far from being escapism, contemporary fantasy can be the deep mythic literature of our time.” ― The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 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. Dreams Underfoot The Newford Collection By De Lint, Charles Orb Books Copyright © 2003 De Lint, Charles All right reserved. ISBN: 9780765306791 UNCLE DOBBIN’S PARROT FAIR   1 She would see them in the twilight when the wind was right, roly-poly shapes propelled by ocean breezes, turning end-over-end along the beach or down the alley behind her house like errant beach balls granted a moment’s freedom. Sometimes they would get caught up against a building or stuck on a curb and then spindly little arms and legs would unfold from their fat bodies until they could push themselves free and go rolling with the wind again. Like flotsam in a river, like tumbleweeds, only brightly colored in primary reds and yellows and blues. They seemed very solid until the wind died down. Then she would watch them come apart the way morning mist will when the sun burns it away, the bright colors turning to ragged ribbons that tattered smoke-like until they were completely gone. Those were special nights, the evenings that the Balloon Men came. * * * In the late sixties in Haight-Ashbury, she talked about them once. Incense lay thick in the air—two cones of jasmine burning on a battered windowsill. There was an old iron bed in the room, up on the third floor of a house that no one lived in except for runaways and street people. The mattress had rust-colored stains on it. The incense covered the room’s musty smell. She’d lived in a form of self-imposed poverty back then, but it was all a part of the Summer of Love. “I know what you mean, man,” Greg Longman told her. “I’ve seen them.” He was wearing a dirty white T-shirt with a simple peace symbol on it and scuffed plastic thongs. Sticking up from the waist of his bell-bottomed jeans at a forty-five degree angle was a descant recorder. His long blonde hair was tied back with an elastic. His features were thin—an ascetic-looking face, thin and drawn-out from too much time on the streets with too little to eat, or from too much dope. “They’re like…” His hands moved as he spoke, trying to convey what he didn’t feel words alone could say—a whole other language, she often thought, watching the long slender fingers weave through the air between them. “…they’re just too much.” “You’ve really seen them?” she asked. “Oh, yeah. Except not on the streets. They’re floating high up in the air, y’know, like fat little kites.” It was such a relief to know that they were real. “’Course,” Greg added, “I gotta do a lot of dope to clue in on ’em, man.” * * * Ellen Brady laid her book aside. Leaning back, she flicked off the light behind her and stared out into the night. The memory had come back to her, so clear, so sharp, she could almost smell the incense, see Greg’s hands move between them, little colored after-image traces following each movement until he had more arms than Kali. She wondered what had ever happened to the Balloon Men. Long light-brown hair hung like a cape to her waist. Her parents were Irish—Munster O’Healys on her mother’s side, and Bradys from Derry on her father’s. There was a touch of Spanish blood in her mother’s side of the family, which gave her skin its warm dark cast. The Bradys were pure Irish and it was from them that she got her big-boned frame. And something else. Her eyes were a clear grey—twilight eyes, her father had liked to tease her, eyes that could see beyond the here and now into somewhere else. She hadn’t needed drugs to see the Balloon Men. Shifting in her wicker chair, she looked up and down the beach, but it was late and the wind wasn’