Widdershins

by Charles de de Lint

  “How did you know?” I asked.

  “Joe put some kind of mojo on Jilly after that last time people were messing around with her. I don’t know exactly what—I mean, it’s Joe, right? But whatever it was, he set it up so that when something dangerous is threatening her, it would take her out of danger and send a warning to Joe. And that’s what happened last night.”

  “So you know where she is? She’s okay, right?”

  “No, that’s the problem. It was supposed to take her to the Greatwood—that place in the otherworld she used to go when she was in the hospital.”

  “Yeah, she told me about it.”

  “Except it didn’t,” Cassie said. “He had me lay out the cards before he went looking. One of them showed you. One showed that old woman of the woods—you know who I mean?”

  “No.”

  “She’s got a hundred names. Joe calls her the White Deer Woman, or Grandmother Toad.”

  “What was the third card?” I asked, because Cassie always laid them out in threes.

  “The Greatwood.”

  “But you said she wasn’t there.”

  Cassie sighed. “I know. Your card was clear, but the other two weren’t quite right. It was like there was a mist on them, or a veil. I think the cards were trying to look into some piece of the unknown, and that’s all they could give me.”

  “Is Joe coming here?”

  “No, since he can’t get a bead on Jilly, he’s gone looking for the old woman. He figures the confusion’s got something to do with her. The last I heard from him was when he called me from the pool hall on Palm Street to tell me he’s got some folks helping him out.”

  “I hope they figure this out quickly,” I said.

  “Me, too. What happened anyway?”

  So I explained about the bogans and what Galfreya had told me.

  “You’re still in Sweetwater?” she asked when I was done.

  “We’re at the hotel.”

  “I’ve never been there, but I’ll see if I can get someone to take me up there.”

  She meant going by the between, which was way quicker than her driving here, or me going to pick her up.

  “Maybe there’ll be something I can pick up from where the other girl disappeared,” she added. “Wait until I come, okay?”

  “I’ve got nowhere to go,” I told her.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “Jilly’s tough.”

  “I know.” Then I had a thought. “That protection Joe put on her—does it still hold?”

  She hesitated for a moment, then said, “Not until he’s had the chance to reset it. But don’t worry. Joe won’t let us down. You just hang in there, Geordie.”

  “We’ll be here,” I said and cut the connection.

  There was nothing more to say. Sure, Jilly was tough, but she was also physically limited so it wasn’t like she’d be able to do much on her own. And while I knew Joe would do his best, I was too worried to be comforted by that.

  Con came into the room as I relayed my conversation to the others, putting the positive spin on it for them that I couldn’t muster for myself. I let them fill him in on what was going on while I went back to the room I’d been sharing with Jilly.

  I sat on her bed and picked up one of her canes, holding it across my knees.

  “Where are you Jilly?” I asked the empty room. “What did those freaks do with the two of you?”

  There was no response, but I hadn’t expected any.

  I hated feeling so useless.

  I wanted to break something. I wanted to go out into the bush, track down these bogans, and pound the answers I needed out of them with this cane of Jilly’s.

  But I knew Cassie was right. This was taking place in Joe’s world and he knew how to handle it. And unlike Galfreya, he wouldn’t care what it took to get Jilly back. Whatever was needed, he’d do it.

  The others came drifting into the room then. I set the cane aside and schooled my face to not show how depressed I felt, doing my best to bolster their hopes.

  I guess I didn’t do such a bad job because, after awhile, I almost started to believe it myself.

  Lizzie

  As soon as she was in among the trees, Lizzie dropped to the ground and threw up.

  Oh, she’d talked brave back there, facing the two bogans. Acted brave, too. But she hadn’t been. What she’d been was furious. And when the bigger of the bogans started threatening her, she hadn’t even stopped to think. She’d simply put all those lessons with Johnny back at the gym to good use. Except . . .

  She threw up again, dry heaving now because there was nothing left in her stomach. Dizzy and weak, she sat up slowly, pressing her face against the rough bark of the nearest tree trunk.

  Except she hadn’t simply defended herself the way Johnny had taught her.

  She’d killed him. The bogan. Miserable excuse for a creature though he was, he’d still been a living, breathing, thinking being.

  And she’d killed him.

  The memory of the wet sound as her heel struck his windpipe made her feel sick all over again.

  She leaned against the tree for a long time until she became aware of something else. Or rather a lack of something. The forest around her was utterly silent. Not an animal sound, not a breath of wind.

  Shivering, she got to her feet and looked around.

  Where was she?

  All she remembered was waking in her bed, the two bogans grabbing her and dragging her . . . elsewhere. One moment they were in the hotel room, the next here, in this strange and silent forest.

  It was fairyland, she realized. The otherworld. And she had no way of getting back home. Unless there was something in that glade.

  Her gaze went to the knife she’d taken from the dead bogan. Reluctantly, she picked it up. This was a whole new world. Who knew what she’d need the knife to defend herself against? She might still feel sick from killing the bogan, but her sense of self-preservation was too strong for her to turn her back on a weapon.

  Knife in hand, she started back toward the glade, but had to stop when she came up on an impenetrable wall of undergrowth and thorns. A machete the knife wasn’t. It would be no help here. Turning, she tried going in the opposite direction and found herself on the edge of the glade. She stayed hidden at the tree line, studying the moonlit view. The dead bogan was there. So was the tall grey stone in the center of the glade. The other bogan didn’t seem to have returned yet, either to take the body or to come after her.

  No, she thought. He wouldn’t do that on his own after she’d killed his companion. He’d probably gone back to wherever to get the rest of them before coming after her.

  Steeling herself, she stepped out into the glade. She walked once all around it, then stopped to study the standing stone. If there was a door or a gate back into her own world, she couldn’t see it.

  She kept her gaze away from the dead bogan.

  Okay. So there was no way home, nothing to help her here. But maybe she could summon help.

  She tried Grey first, calling his name. Her voice seemed feeble, as though something about the air was swallowing its volume.

  And there was no response.

  So much for his help, she thought. But then, he hadn’t promised to help her. Not like Walker had.

  She called his name next, over and over, until her throat felt rough.

  When she stopped, the silence was oppressive. Nervousness went skittering up her spine and she began to shiver again.

  She was too much in the open. At any moment, the bogan could return, a pack of his friends in tow.

  She retreated to the tree line, then went deeper in amongst the trees until once again she was stopped by the wall of underbrush and thorn. Dressed only in panties and a T-shirt, there was no way she could get through it unscathed. She wasn’t sure it was passable even if she had been properly dressed for it.

  But she couldn’t just stay here, waiting for the bogans. So she began to follow the wall of tightly-knit branches an
d thorns, hoping to find a place where she could get through. Get through to where, she had no idea, but she didn’t want to still be here, where the bogans would have no trouble finding her upon their return. There was no real place to hide. The lowest tree boughs were well out of her reach, and she wasn’t much of a climber—not enough so that she could shimmy up a trunk in bare legs.

  She wasn’t sure how far she’d gone when she was suddenly struck by something odd on one of the trees ahead of her. She couldn’t make out what it was, just that it was a white blotch against the dark of the tree’s trunk. Knife held out before her, she walked slowly toward it. The moonlight was faint by the time it got through the boughs above and her gaze had long-since adjusted to the dimness, but she had to get right up to the tree before she was actually able to see what it was.

  And then she felt like throwing up all over again.

  A little man—two, no more like three feet tall and with skin the white of alabaster—hung from the tree. He was held in place by spikes of wood that had been driven through the palms of his hands to keep him aloft. His head lolled against his chest, and he was dressed in a ragged tatter of clothing all browns, moss greens and greys, his hair a bird’s nest of matted dreads.

  She wanted to look away, but her gaze was drawn and locked to the pitiful figure. She’d thought he was a child at first, a thought too horrible to comprehend, that someone could do this to a child. But when she realized he was full-grown—some sort of fairy man, she supposed—his fate seemed no less awful.

  The tears that hadn’t risen for her own situation—torn from her bed, killing the bogan, abandoned in this eerie silent wood with no way home—now filled her eyes. She wept for the little man, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  That the bogans had done this, she had no doubt. And just as she’d known that she couldn’t leave the remains of Walker’s daughter on the side of the road, she couldn’t leave the little man hanging from this tree, either.

  She dropped the knife to the ground. Catching hold of one of the spikes, she worked it back and forth, trying to get it loose. It was slick with tacky blood and hard to grip, and her hands and shoulders were aching by the time she was finally able to pull it free. Getting that first spike out turned out to the easiest part of the task. To get at the second one, she had to step in close, supporting the dead weight of the little man, while she worked on the spike. She could have let him dangle from it—that would certainly have been easier on her—but she couldn’t bring herself to let him just hang there while she tried to get his other hand free, even if he was dead and couldn’t feel anything anymore. It just didn’t seem right.

  So she supported the weight of the dead man, holding his cold body in place with her own torso pressing him against the tree while she worked the bloody spike back and forth, her tears still flowing. When the spike came free at last, pulling out quickly with a final hard jerk, she lost her balance and collapsed at the foot of the tree. The little man tumbled to the grass beside her. Sitting up, she drew him onto her lap. She cradled him in her arms, and brushed the dreadlocks from his pale face, her tears dropping onto his skin.

  She was no longer sorry she’d killed the bogan. She only wished she could have killed the other one, too. She’d like to give them all a taste of their own medicine.

  Her gaze was blurred by her tears, her ears filled with the sound she was making, so the first indication she got that something had changed was when she realized that she could no longer feel the cold that had been emanating from the dead little man. He was warm now to her touch. She sniveled, wiped her eyes and nose on the shoulder of her T-shirt, then looked down.

  The little man’s pale skin had changed. Now the pure alabaster of it was mottled with varying shades of brown.

  Where it was wet from her tears, she realized.

  She had no idea what it meant, but she dabbed her fingers in the wet areas and spread her tears to where they hadn’t touched the little man’s skin. Wherever she touched the white skin, she left behind brown, as though she’d dipped her hand in mud and was smearing it on him.

  Then suddenly his eyes opened, and she was looking down into a gaze as dark and warm as Walker’s. Deer eyes. They were unfocused, seeing through her or beyond her. She went still with shock, unable to move, unable to even breathe. Slowly the little man’s gaze focused, found her face.

  “Why did you kill me?” he asked with a calmness Lizzie couldn’t begin to feel. “Why did you kill me and then bring me back?”

  “I . . .” She had to clear her throat, remember to breathe. “I didn’t kill you. The bogans did.”

  “Bogans . . . I don’t remember bogans.”

  “It must have been the bogans. There’s nobody else here. There’s nothing here. I’ve never heard a forest so still.”

  The little man studied her for a long moment.

  “Can I get up?” he finally asked.

  “What? Of course.”

  He’d been lying with his head on her lap all this time, having to look up at her. She put a hand under his head and helped him to sit up beside her. He held his hands out in front of himself and gave his fingers an experimental wriggle, then touched his face and his chest. The wounds were gone.

  “I think I remember a blind man,” he said, his gaze returning to her face. “Hesmelledlikeafish.”

  Lizzie shook her head. “I don’t know anybody like that.”

  But the little man didn’t appear to be listening. “He spoke my name and I couldn’t do anything. Couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t slip away. And then he . . . then he pulled my soul out of my chest with another word and cast it away . . . far into some darkness . . .”

  He smiled as he told her the last.

  “That’s awful,” she said.

  She was a little thrown by his obvious delight in what had happened to him.

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “You’re human. You know you have a soul. They’ve always told us that we don’t have souls, but still that blind man took something out of me that can’t be measured or held, and you called it back into this body of mine. If that’s not a soul, then what is?”

  Lizzie didn’t know what to say. “I guess . . .”

  “So what made you think it was bogans that attacked me?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Because they brought me here and that seems to be what they do. Hurt people, I mean.”

  She went on to tell him a little about what had happened to her over the past few days: the death of Walker’s daughter, Siobhan being pushed down the stairs by invisible bogans, being kidnapped from her bed, killing the bogan before it could attack her again in the glade by the standing stone, and how the other one had fled.

  The whole time she spoke, she couldn’t get rid of the weird, dislocating sensation of talking to someone who’d just come back from the dead. The fact that he was a little fairy man—the size of a child, but with the brown wrinkled face of an old man—didn’t feel close to unusual, not compared to that one fact.

  “They shouldn’t be able to come here,” the little man said. “Not them, nor the blind man. This is a private place, my private place that I made here for myself in the Aisling’s Wood.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m a doonie,” he told her, as though that explained everything. “Timony Twotot is what folk call me, at your service. I was freed from mine, and this is where I chose to . . .” He thought for a moment, then settled on, “This is the place I made to live out my days.”

  “All alone?”

  He shrugged. “I spent a lifetime with people, working for them, being around their noise and bustle. I like my solitude. And I can always go visiting if I want.”

  “But there’s a barrier of thorns . . .”

  He grinned. “And spells, too, to keep my stane secret and safe.” But his humour fled. “Except it’s not so safe anymore, is it?”

  “What’s a stane?”

  “How could you miss it? It guards the g
lade for me. Without it, the forest would reclaim the land I cleared. The Aisling’s Wood is riddled with hidey-holes like my own, each protected and kept hidden by its own charms and spells like the ones in my stane.”

  He meant the tall standing stone where she’d killed the bogan, Lizzie realized.

  “Is it broken?” she asked.

  Timony cocked his head and was quiet for a long moment, then gave a slow shake of his head. “No. The blind man is just stronger, it seems. The bogans must be in his service, for bogans alone don’t have the power to outwit the safeguards of a doonie’s stane.”

  Lizzie gave a look in the direction of where she thought the stone was. The stone with the dead bogan lying near its base.

  “We should find a place to hide,” she said. “Because they’ll probably be back.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Well, they brought me here for some reason.”

  To nail her with wooden spikes to a tree the way they had Timony?

  “And I did kill one of them,” she added.

  “Ah, yes,” Timony said. “You must be much fiercer than you look.”

  “I could say the same of you, coming back from the dead and all.”

  The doonie nodded.

  “What was it like?” Lizzie had to ask. “Did you see the light and the tunnel that they talk about?”

  “I don’t remember anything,” Timony told her. “I have only a vague recollection of the blind man, and then there was you, drawing me out of the dark with your tears. I’m lucky you knew the spell to bring me back.”

  “The spell?”

  “Washing me with your tears. The genuine tears of a human hold a potent charm. All human secretions have a gift to some degree or another.”

  Lizzie pulled a face.

  “Thanks for putting those images in my head,” she said.

  Timony gave her a puzzled look.

  “Never mind,” she told him. “It’s not important.”