Widdershins

by Charles de de Lint

  “Be warned,” she said when she stepped back. “He’s in a bit of a mood.” I raised an eyebrow.

  “Oh, it’s just that limited edition retrospective collection that Alan wants to do.”

  “But that’s a good thing, right?”

  She smiled. “You’d think. But all he can focus on is having to sign a few thousand signature sheets.”

  “Maybe we should buy him one of those automated signature machines.”

  “Except then he’d just find something else to get wound up over,” she said.

  She gave me a kiss on the cheek.

  “Coffee’s on the stove, and I’ll be back in an hour,” she added. “Will you stay for dinner?”

  “Love to, thanks.”

  Then she went out onto the street, and I took the stairs up to their apartment.

  I guess the biggest thing Saskia did for Christy and me was to teach us that family didn’t have to be a dirty word. It wasn’t something she actually talked about, or worked to convince either of us to accept. It just kind of happened. Before she came into Christy’s life, Christy and I really didn’t have much time or patience for each other. But once he and Saskia were a couple, she made a point of having me over for dinner, or getting Christy to take her out to one of my shows—just bringing us together with her present so that we were on better behaviour than we might have been if it was just the two of us.

  It was a slow process, with lots of bristling and affronts taken on both our parts, but Saskia knew how to smooth over the rough patches without ever really letting on that she was doing so. She’d just show us how much we had in common, gentle the start of angry words, and generally refused to let us drift apart. She was such a success with us that she could probably have reconciled us with our parents if we’d let her try, but we stood shoulder-to-shoulder on that one and would have nothing of it.

  I guess the reason she was so good at it was because she never had even the pretense of a family herself and was determined to make one for all of us.

  “Saskia says you’re grumpy today,” I said after I gave a perfunctory knock on their apartment door and then went on inside without waiting for a response.

  Christy looked up from where he was reading a stack of manuscript pages on the sofa.

  “She’s probably right,” he said.

  “You should be happy that your readers will pay the big bucks for a signed limited edition of your stories.”

  He smiled. “Oh, I am. But you know me. . . .”

  “You have to pretend to at least make a credible fuss about it.”

  “Or something. There’s coffee on the stove.”

  “Thanks. You want some?”

  “No, I’m good.”

  I liked this apartment. Before Saskia came into his life, Christy used to move about once a year, and half his books were still in boxes when the time came for us to move him again. That was about as often as he and I would deliberately got together. Everywhere he lived felt temporary—the way my living arrangements still are.

  But it was different now. They’d been here a few years, and the place had a warm, lived-in feel that wasn’t just Saskia’s touch. She’d inspired Christy to actually put down some roots—get all his books out and shelved, put up photos and art, set out handfuls of small artful objects that, to date, had spent most of their lives in boxes.

  I had to admit that I envied Christy. For finding someone like Saskia. For making a real home with her.

  “Were you playing at a revel last night?” Christy asked.

  And there was a big reason I didn’t have what he had. We’d both chosen—or had chosen for us by our respective muses—careers that didn’t exactly lend themselves to stability. But Christy had put the effort into making his writing an actual career, while I just let the music take me where it would.

  This past couple of years, the music took me to the mall. To the fairies and Galfreya, and neither was particularly conducive to putting down roots—either with a home or a career.

  But I didn’t get into any of that. I just nodded and said, “It was a good one. There was this visiting—hell, I don’t know what she was. Part tree, part something like an otter. But could she play this strange little set of pipes that she had. And she knew at least a half-dozen tunes I’d never heard before.”

  “A whole half-dozen?” Christy asked, smiling.

  I shrugged. “So I know a lot of tunes. But I don’t pretend to know them all.”

  “I wish I had your memory.”

  “Then we both have something the other wants,” I found myself saying.

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “All of this,” I said.

  I waved a hand to encompass his life as represented by the room we were in. Cozy, full of comfortable furniture and shelves of books, thick rugs on the floor, photos and art on the walls that meant something in their own merit, as well as their placement to each other.

  “A real home you can call your own,” I explained. “And more importantly, someone to share it with.”

  Christy gave a slow nod. “There’s not a day goes by that I’m not grateful. Especially given . . . you know . . .”

  He didn’t have to bring up the environment in which we’d grown up for me to know exactly what he was talking about.

  “Finding a partner’s not something you can just decide to do,” he said, “but there’s nothing stopping you from making a home for yourself.”

  I rubbed my thumb against my fingers. “No money.”

  “That’s not necessarily an insurmountable problem.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  He shook his head. “No, I think I’m being reasonable. You’d just have to change a few things in your life.”

  “You mean like get a regular job? I think I’d go insane.”

  “No, I was thinking more of working with the marketable skills you already have.”

  I gave him a blank look.

  “Your music, dummy.”

  “My music.”

  “Look,” he said. “I know how you feel about recording and putting together a permanent band and all of that. And I’m not saying you should compromise your ideals. But if you want some of the things that money can buy, like a place to call your own, then maybe it’s something to think about. You already accept money when you’re busking and from these pickup gigs you do. It’s not that big a stretch to recording and selling a CD, and doing some touring with a band to promote it.”

  There was a time when I heard that a lot, but considering how vocal I could be against the idea, my friends pretty much stopped bringing it up years ago. Now it was only something I’d get at a gig from strangers, caught up in the excitement of the moment. I honestly didn’t think about it anymore.

  I’d wanted to at one time, when I first got into playing in the early seventies, but it hadn’t been feasible back then. Celtic music wasn’t particularly popular in those days. There was no Worldbeat, no Pogues. The Chieftains were barely known outside of Ireland. A group like the Incredible String Band, one of the earliest proponents of mixing musical genres, weren’t on most people’s radar. So a recording company wouldn’t get excited about recording some kid who played fiddle on street corners and in bars. And I sure couldn’t afford to pay for it myself.

  I still couldn’t, but it was different now. These days I knew a half-dozen people who recorded everything directly into their computer. I’d done session work for any number of folks with real studios. They’d all offered, at one time or another, to help me out if I was ever interested in laying down some tracks.

  “Maybe I’ll think about it,” I told my brother.

  “Okay, that’s new,” he said.

  I smiled. “Don’t get pushy.” Then, before he could press me any further, I changed the subject and asked, “What’s that you’re reading?”

  He knew what I was doing, but let me get away with it.

  “This?” he asked, tapping the manuscript with a finger. “They’re transcrip
ts of some of the interviews I’ve done over the past few years.”

  “For a new book?”

  “Possibly. But mostly I’m trying to figure out something for myself. There’s been a real escalation in paranormal experiences over the past few years, and I’m trying to get a fix on when it started.”

  “No kidding,” I said. “These days you can’t turn around without tripping over someone in this city who’s had at least one encounter with a ghost or a fairy or a monster or something.”

  Christy smiled and shook his head. “No, it just seems that way.”

  “Everybody we know has some weird experience or another.”

  “That’s because people who have had these kinds of unusual experiences are drawn into each other’s peripheries—at least it happens to those of us who don’t manage to forget the experience. Sometimes I think it’s like a kind of magnetic attraction. If you’ve had one experience, it appears to automatically raise the possibility that you’ll have another. And just having one seems to bring you into the proximity of others who’ve had at least one, thereby raising the probability that you’ll both have another.”

  I just looked at him.

  “But most people,” he said, “go about their daily lives, oblivious—even after an experience.” He smiled. “Though sometimes they really have to work at not remembering.”

  That was me, up to a couple of years ago when I finally had to give in and admit that all this weird stuff that kept intruding into my life was real.

  “And you think it’s happening more often now?” I asked.

  Christy nodded. “When I first started cataloguing the incidents, they were few and far between, and pretty hard to track down. But I’ve had it relatively easy. It was more difficult when the Professor got into it, because he started even earlier than I did.”

  “And is it happening all over, or just here?”

  “I don’t know for sure. I doubt that this is the only pocket of increased activity, but it’s definitely a lively one.”

  “Hence the police department actually having a task force to deal with it.”

  The fact that the Newford Police Department had a unit devoted to dealing with the paranormal wasn’t exactly common knowledge, but I knew, because both Christy and the Professor had been tapped as consultants for it.

  “Hence—” Christy smiled at the word. “—indeed.”

  “So what do you think is causing it?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “I do. Newford’s one of those rare places built on a nexus of time and spirit zones, which means the spiritworld rubs shoulders with this one more than it normally would otherwise.”

  We both looked up at the sound of the new voice to find Christy’s shadow, Christiana, lounging on one of the two club chairs set across from the sofa where we were sitting. She was a small woman, all red hair and skinny limbs in a pair of black tights and a baggy sweatshirt. She grinned at our looks of surprise.

  “I hate it when she does that,” Christy said, “just appearing out of nowhere.”

  He smiled as he spoke.

  “Oh, right,” she said. “Like talking about me as if I’m not even here is so endearing.”

  They have a complicated relationship. I just accept Christiana as the sister I never knew I had until a couple of years ago, but it’s different for Christy. Supposedly, she was made up of all the bits of himself that he cast off when he was seven. When he cast those parts of himself away, they became Christiana—a seven-year-old girl as real as you or me who decided to call herself Christiana, a mash-up of Christy’s name and that of his first-grade school crush, Anna. Since then, they’ve each grown to become their own individual person, though in a lot of ways I think they’re more alike than either will admit.

  Like I said, it’s complicated.

  “What did you mean about the city being a nexus?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Just that Newford’s a funny place that draws the weird and the wonderful to it. It brought our brother here, didn’t it?, and he hasn’t left yet.”

  “I hope I’m part of the wonderful,” he said.

  She gave him a shocked look, as though saying, how could it be any other way?, but when he glanced away, she winked at me.

  “So,” she asked me, “are you still playing at the fairy revels?”

  “I did last night. But a funny thing happened. I was going to tell Christy about it just before you showed up.”

  That got their attention. Christiana had as much curiosity as our brother, especially when it came to the mysterious and the strange, though considering her background, she probably had more of the answers, as well. I mean, she lives in the otherworld.

  “Was it at the revel?” Christy asked.

  “Not so much at it, as after.”

  I went on to describe the odd feeling that had briefly woken me this morning, and how I’d realized what it was when I finally got up. I looked back and forth between them as I spoke, the way you do when you’re telling a story, and caught the pleased look on Christiana’s face before she was able to hide it from me.

  “I get the feeling you know something about this,” I said.

  She shrugged. “Well, I might have talked to Mother Crone this morning.”

  I wasn’t sure if she didn’t know Galfreya’s real name, or simply wasn’t using it because Christy had yet to be gifted with it. Fairy are very particular about that kind of thing.

  “What did you talk about?” I asked.

  “You. I . . .” She sighed. “She had an enchantment on you, Geordie—I’ve known it for ages. That’s why you’ve been going to the revels so often.”

  I felt a little sick hearing that.

  “You mean all this time . . . ?”

  She shook her head when she realized where I was going.

  “No, it wasn’t an attraction spell,” she said. “Whatever you and Mother Crone had going on between you was real.”

  “But then, why?”

  “She said she’d had a premonition that if you weren’t kept close to her court, you’d be in danger.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.” I looked at Christy, then back to her. “What kind of danger?”

  “She doesn’t know,” Christiana said. “But she believes it’s real.”

  “So why did she turn off this enchantment?”

  “I asked her to.”

  This was making less and less sense.

  No, that’s not entirely true. Learning about the enchantment did explain why I’d had this compulsion to keep going back to the revels, even when something more interesting was going on. Just last week, Whiskeycrow were in town for a gig, with the promise of a great session afterwards, and I’d really wanted to go. I hadn’t played with Fanny and the rest of them in ages. But the night of the session, off I’d gone to the mall instead.

  What didn’t make sense was Christiana’s involvement in all of this.

  “Why would you do that?” Christy asked her before I could.

  She shrugged. “I don’t agree with coercion enchantments, no matter how well meant. And . . .” Her gaze went to me. “I felt it was holding you back.”

  “From what?” I asked.

  She looked uncomfortable.

  “Christiana?” Christy asked.

  “From having a real life,” she said. “Okay? And I know how that sounds.” She turned to me. “It’s not like I think I can run your life better than you or anything. It’s just—”

  “The revels were holding me back,” I said.

  She nodded, then cocked her head. “You don’t seem mad.”

  “I’m not. I was kind of thinking the same thing. It just didn’t occur to me until the . . . well, I guess when the enchantment was lifted.”

  “Oh.”

  “If I’m mad about anything, it’s at—” I almost said Galfreya, “Mother Crone’s putting it on me in the first place.”

  “Except she thought she was protecting you.”

  I nodded. “It�
�d still be nice to have actually had a choice in the matter.” I sighed and laid my head back against the sofa. “I guess that explains why she never wanted to go anywhere. Why it was always me going to the mall.”

  Christiana nodded.

  I turned to Christy. “See, this is why I don’t like getting involved with any of this. Magics and fairy and everything weird. It makes life way too complicated. It was so much easier to just not believe in any of it.”

  “Kind of late for that,” he said.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “And you kept bumping into it anyway.”

  I couldn’t argue with that either.

  “C’mon,” Christiana said. “Magic’s not so bad.”

  “Easy for you to say. You reap the benefits, living in the otherworld and all. And you don’t have some death threat hanging over your head.”

  “I didn’t say it was a death threat.”

  I nodded. “I know you didn’t. But it has to be something pretty serious if Mother Crone felt she needed to put a spell on me to keep me close to her court.”

  “I suppose . . .”

  “And how am I supposed to figure out what it is?”

  “Is there anybody new in your life?” Christy asked.

  I shook my head. “But why does it have to come from someone new?”

  “It doesn’t,” he said. “But it’s as good a place as any to start. Unless . . .” He looked to Christiana. “Is it a natural disaster?”

  “Don’t look at me,” she said. “I know less than Mother Crone does, and she doesn’t seem to know much of anything except that it’s there and it won’t happen if you stick close to her court.”

  Right. Like I wanted to spend the rest of my life hanging around Woodforest Plaza Mall, knowing what I did now.

  “This sucks,” I said and nobody disagreed.