Widdershins

by Charles de Lint

  “Oh, Christ,” Lizzie started, “would you give it a—”

  But then her mouth stopped moving. She . . .

  Del laughed. He lifted his boot and stepped away from her, allowing her to get up.

  Lizzie lifted shaking hands to her mouth, but there was nothing there. Only smooth skin from the bottom of her nose down to her chin. She tried to move her jaw, but there was nothing there to move. Under her fingertips she could feel that it was all solid bone beneath her skin. No jaw. No jaw muscles. No mouth.

  “See,” Del said. “I don’t need to know your name to work my mojo on you. That’s how it works here. Asking your name—that was just me being sociable.”

  Lizzie couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t stop moving her hands over the bottom of her face. A huge, gibbering dark panic was starting up in the pit of her stomach. When she finally turned in his direction, she couldn’t stop the pleading in her eyes.

  Don’t do this. Fix this. Please . . .

  But he wasn’t even looking at her anymore. There was only Mattie, staring at her with big eyes and a smile twitching in the corner of her mouth. Del had walked over to the priest who still lay where Lizzie had dropped him.

  “Well, aren’t you a piece of work,” he said to the unconscious man. “Letting an itty-bitty girl like that knock you flat on your arse and out cold.”

  “He’s just a big stupid,” Mattie said.

  Del nodded. “It’s not like we didn’t know that. All we really needed him for was to help discombobulate our little Miss Jillian, and he did a fine job of that. But now . . . well, I guess we don’t have much more of a use for him, do we?”

  He glanced at Mattie who only shrugged. He shifted his gaze to Lizzie.

  “Guess you can say goodbye to the priest,” he told her, then he grinned. “Oh, wait. You can’t say anything anymore, can you?”

  He turned back to the priest and waved his hand casually over the supine body. Instead of vanishing the way Timony had, the priest simply dissolved. Flesh and vestments turned into a dark, gooey liquid. Moments later, all that was left of him was a dark stain in the grass. The horrific and impossible sight was probably the only thing that could have taken Lizzie’s mind from her own awful predicament.

  “Mattie and I are going back to the house,” Del said, drawing her attention back to him. “You can come or stay, I don’t care. But little nameless girl, don’t you forget for one sweet second that I’m the rule here. What I say goes.”

  He seemed to be waiting for some kind of acknowledgement, so she nodded. She was too scared not to respond. What else might he do to her?

  “That’s a good girl. Maybe there’s hope for you. Maybe I’ll give you back your mouth before you starve to death.”

  He took Mattie’s hand and they started across the field, back to the house. Lizzie stared at the stain on the grass, trying to get her mind around how the priest had simply melted away, then her gaze drifted to Mattie’s stuffed toy, the two pieces lying abandoned on the grass where Lizzie had dropped them. She lifted a hand back to where her mouth should be.

  The panic started up again, deep inside her, swelling.

  She quickly dropped her hand and took a deep breath through her nose, trying to calm herself.

  This wasn’t real, she told herself, remembering what Timony had said just before Del sent him away.

  She and Jilly had been transformed only because they’d let it happen to themselves. Because they believed it was true.

  It was all lies. That they could be trapped in the bodies of little girls. That Del was all-powerful. That a teddy bear could become a full-size grizzly.

  But something didn’t fit.

  She didn’t really believe in any of this.

  Even with what her senses were telling her, she hadn’t fully accepted anything that had happened to her since the moment the bogans dragged her out of her bed. No. From before that. From when she first saw them at the crossroads.

  So, if she didn’t believe, why was she still here, stuck in a world inside of Jilly’s head in the body of a nine- or ten-year-old girl?

  A horrible thought occurred to her.

  Maybe Timony hadn’t been talking to her specifically. Maybe it was only so long as Jilly believed.

  She turned to look at the distant farmhouse. Del and Mattie had almost reached it now.

  She had to get the message to Jilly. How she was supposed to do that without being able to talk, she had no idea. But she had to try.

  If there was a moment of bravery for her in all of what had happened, this was it. Everything else, from killing the bogan, knocking down the priest, attacking Del . . . all of that had just been her acting on instinct. Standing up against what she knew wasn’t right without stopping to think.

  She lifted her hand once more, caressing the strange smooth expanse of skin the way she’d run a finger over a scab, or tongue a sore on the roof of her mouth—hardly even aware she was doing it.

  Her gaze remained fixed on the farmhouse. Del and Mattie had gone inside now.

  This time, Lizzie realized, she knew exactly what she was getting into. Until she could get Jilly to understand how everything was dependent on what she believed, Del could make anything happen. Anything. She was sure that taking away her mouth was only the least of the horrors he could come up with.

  His voice echoed in her head.

  Little girl, you can’t even imagine my worst.

  No, she probably couldn’t. Because she wasn’t some insane sociopath with the power of a god in his hands.

  But she got up all the same. She brushed dirt and grass from her pants, then slowly started across the fields herself, aiming for the farmhouse.

  Rabedy

  Rabedy was sure he was going to throw up if he didn’t first fall off the salmon’s back and break his neck on the ground below. The ground far, far below.

  Their route through the forest had been bad enough, weaving and bobbing to avoid the trunks and boughs of the trees, leaves slapping him in the face, branches almost knocking him from his precarious perch. But then they broke from the trees and up Odawa took them, up and up, high into the sky, to where the clouds lived and bogans weren’t supposed to go. If they were, the Moon-mother would have given them wings. But she hadn’t, so that was fairly clear, wasn’t it?

  Nevertheless, here they were, a salmon swimming through the air with a bogan clinging to its back and his stomach crawling up his throat.

  Until that moment, Rabedy hadn’t known that he had a fear of heights.

  Or maybe it was just a fear of clinging to the back of some giant pluiking fish while soaring through the sky.

  There were probably worse things that could happen to a bogan, but Rabedy couldn’t think of one at the moment. It was all he could do to hang onto the salmon’s dorsal fin, knees clamped as tight as they could be against the slippery scales of its body. He knew he should just keep his eyes closed, but he couldn’t stop himself from staring at the ground speeding by below.

  He really was going to throw up.

  The terrain changed under them as they passed through various worlds, from forest to desert, large frightening expanses of deep, dark water to endless sweeps of tundra that went as far as the horizon until the passage into yet another world put those desolate lands behind.

  Rabedy had no idea where they were going. He didn’t care.

  “Let me down, let me down!” he kept shouting.

  But all Odawa would reply was Patience, his voice ringing in Rabedy’s head, resonant and most unpleasant.

  “Bugger your patience,” Rabedy finally cried. “Let me down now!”

  Fine.

  Their descent was fast and sudden. Rabedy held on so tightly that by the time they were finally near the ground, it was all he could do to pry his hands from the salmon’s fin and drop the last few feet. He lost his balance and fell to his knees. For a long moment, he kept his head close to the ground, waiting for the contents of his stomach to come roaring up his
throat. For the pounding in his head to stop.

  The vertigo passed, if not the thunder in his head. He pushed himself to his feet, swaying because his legs felt all rubbery. He put one hand out for balance, the other against his temple in a vain hope to stop the pounding. His gaze searched for and found Odawa, standing in his own form at the edge of a cliff, looking down at something below.

  Supposed to be pluiking blind, he thought as he stumbled over to join the green-bree, so what was he staring at?

  “What do you see?” Odawa asked when Rabedy was beside him. “My senses tell me one thing, but this once, I don’t trust them.”

  “I see . . . ”

  Rabedy’s voice trailed off. He stared down at the thousands of buffalo warriors gathered on the plains far below and let his hand drop from his temple. The pounding wasn’t in his head. It came from them, from hundreds of thousands of hooves stamping and war drums beating. The buffalo filled the land below, from one horizon to the other.

  “Cerva,” he said after a moment. “Impossible numbers of them.”

  Odawa nodded. “The living, with the spirits of the dead swelling their ranks.”

  Rabedy didn’t bother to ask how he knew that. He just suppressed a shiver and wished they’d landed somewhere else, anywhere else, so long as it was far, far away from here.

  “This part of the between opens onto the city,” Odawa said. “Where the fairy courts lie.”

  “Do you think they mean to attack?”

  “Why else would they gather in such numbers?”

  “But why—” Rabedy began, except he knew.

  This was the price for bogans going off into the wild and the green, hunting what was forbidden.

  “We did this,” he said. “You and I, and pluiking Big Dan with all his grand schemes.”

  The blind man turned his sightless gaze in the bogan’s direction.

  “Now, why would you say that?”

  Rabedy hated the look of those milky-white eyes that seemed to see too much, but he didn’t turn away.

  “Think about it,” he said. “You’re the one who’s helped us to go out into green-bree territories where we’ve been killing cerva. Why else would they be going to war?”

  “I can think of a hundred reasons.”

  “So can I,” Rabedy said. “But have you ever heard of the straw that broke the camel’s back? That’s what this business of ours has been: those last few ugly straws.”

  Odawa studied him for a long moment, then finally said, “You’re not much of a bogan, are you?”

  Rabedy was sick of this. Bad enough he had to take it from his own, without some pluiking green-bree throwing it in his face as well.

  “You try growing up with a mother like mine,” he said, his voice bitter. “Always the butt of every joke, including hers. It doesn’t take too long before you come to understand meanness and the yearning for a kind word. You learn how kindness means something, but it’s not something anyone will ever let you experience.”

  “Then why did you want to learn to shapeshift—if not to hunt, I mean?”

  “For the freedom.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “People’d look at me and they’d see a dog, not a bogan. They wouldn’t be suspicious of my every word and action anymore. They’d take me at face value—for who I am.”

  “And the other bogans don’t?”

  Rabedy shook his head, then realized the motion was useless to a blind man.

  “Bogans think only of themselves. First themselves, then their family, then their clan. And sometimes, though more rarely, of fairy as a whole.”

  “And you?’

  “I don’t like bogans.” He paused, then added, “You see what that says about me?”

  Odawa didn’t respond for a long time. Then finally he laid a hand on Rabedy’s shoulder.

  “There are days I’m not too fond of myself, either,” he said.

  Rabedy shook off the green-bree’s hand. He didn’t need anyone’s sympathy. Certainly not Odawa’s.

  “Don’t pretend you understand me,” Rabedy told him. “You don’t know me and we’re not friends.”

  “I only . . .”

  “You only nothing. I’ve watched you from the beginning. Watched you play on Big Dan’s greed. I don’t know what your game is, but I know that whatever you do for anyone else, it’s only for your benefit.”

  “Then why didn’t you say something?” Odawa asked him, his voice cold.

  “Because who’d ever listen to me?”

  “How sad.”

  “Right now,” Rabedy said, “I’m not important. You’re not important. All that matters is that we do something to stop this.”

  The blind gaze regarded him for a long moment, then the green-bree smiled. There wasn’t even a hint of warmth in that smile.

  “That, my little high-minded friend,” he said, “is something you’ll have to do on your own. I have a corbae to kill.”

  And with that he stepped away and Rabedy was left alone on the cliff top, looking down at more buffalo green-brees than he could ever have imagined existed.

  Geordie

  It was an astonishing sight, this view that Timony showed me of thousands of buffalo gathered on the plains below. It was like a sea of brown waves undulating softly as the individual cerva stomped and pounded their drums.

  This, I thought, was what it must have been like in the old days, when the early explorers first reached the prairies and came upon the vast herds that lived there. The difference was, the European hunters immediately started butchering the buffalo for their hides, leaving the skinned carcasses to rot on the ground by the hundreds of thousands, while Timony and I would just as soon stay off their radar completely.

  Thinking of those killing fields, I didn’t have to ask Timony what he meant by his simple reply of “War.” But then something else occurred to me.

  “Fairy followed the buffalo hunters, didn’t they?” I said.

  Timony shrugged. “I suppose. I wasn’t here in those days. I came on the later boats, after one of those big wars where you people killed each other.”

  “So when you said war, did you mean with humans or fairy?”

  “Fairy,” he replied. “But if they’re successful in that endeavour, I don’t doubt that they’ll turn their wrath on your people.”

  It was weird, his constantly saying “your people.” I didn’t feel the remotest connection to those early explorers who only saw the Americas as a source for monetary gain—no more than I do now with the big companies that run roughshod over anyone and anything that gets in the way of their profits.

  I returned my gaze to that vast gathering of buffalo cousins. Their numbers seemed endless.

  “There’s nothing we can do about this, is there?” I said.

  “A doonie and a human? Hardly.”

  “Then maybe we should concentrate on what we can do and try to find Joe.”

  The doonie nodded. I didn’t see what he did next, but the view into the between disappeared, and we were back on that lonely grey shore once more. After what we’d just experienced, this place seemed even more desolate and lost, reflecting my mood. I tried not to get absorbed by the feeling it woke inside me.

  “So, how do we start?” I asked.

  “Concentrate on your friend,” Timony told me. “If you can bring up a strong enough essence of him in your mind, I should be able to use that to start my own search.”

  Fairy magic’s mostly about will—I’d learned that from Galfreya. Oh, there are spells and magical talismans and all the usual baggage you hear about with magic, but the clarity of your vision and the strength of your will are what underlies everything.

  Well and good in theory, but it wasn’t anything I’d ever put into practice.

  Have you ever noticed how when you don’t want to think about something, you can’t get it out of your mind? Conversely, when you’re trying to concentrate, holding a particular person or place in your head seems impossibl
e. No matter how well you think you know them, the familiar keeps sliding away and all you’re left with are ghost traces of these things you thought you knew so well.

  It was like that when I tried to envision Joe. He was the kind of guy who made a serious impression on you—those crazy eyes, for starters—but I couldn’t seem to hold onto an image of him. So I tried thinking about the times I’d been around him, which were usually in Jilly’s company, and that made me think of Jilly instead. I had no trouble calling up an image of her. She’s hardwired into my head and has been pretty much from the day we first met, working as part-timers for the post office that Christmas so long ago.

  It’s funny. I was in my early twenties at the time, but it feels like I’ve known her all my life. Sometimes when we’re talking, I’ll bring up things from when I was a teenager—swimming at the sand pits, being chased by that bull on the old Haile Farm, playing fiddle tunes on a granite outcrop out behind my parents’ house—and I’m surprised when she doesn’t remember them. She’ll give me a look and then I realize, well, of course she wouldn’t. We didn’t even know each other back then. But it sure feels like we did. Or that we should have. And I don’t have to try very hard to be able to picture her there, even when I know she wasn’t.

  Jilly says that’s because we must have known each other in past lives, “You know, like when I was a teapot and you were a kettle. Or there was that time we were both mice in a Victorian travelling circus. Ah, those were the days, Geordie, me lad. It was all cheese and applause.”

  The memory brought a bittersweet warmth, but it also reminded me of what I was supposed to be doing: concentrating on finding Joe. Because if we didn’t find Joe, then we might never find Jilly and then these memories would be all I’d have.

  I needed more than memories.

  I needed her.

  I tried again, but if anything, I was getting worse at bringing Joe clearly to mind. He became this elusive butterfly, always hovering just a few steps away, no matter how carefully I approached. This happened again and again until I started to get frustrated, which is pretty much the last thing you want to do in a case like this.