Widdershins

by Charles de de Lint

Let me be Dust Girl.

  “You go on,” I say. “Just leave me here. I need to stay here.”

  We can’t do that, Lizzie says. We won’t.

  “Sure you can. You just put one foot in front of the other and away you go.”

  Honey gives me a soft bump with her muzzle. Jilly . . .

  I turn to look at her. She knows what I’m going through. She’s failed the ones she’s loved as well. I remember Joe telling me about it, how her family all died in the dog fighting pits and there was nothing she could do about it.

  How did you get past that? I want to ask her.

  Geordie wouldn’t want you to be doing this, she says.

  She’s right. Geordie wouldn’t. But the world doesn’t go by what we want. I didn’t want Geordie to die, but he went ahead and got killed anyway, didn’t he?

  Still, I let Lizzie pull me to my feet. Poor Lizzie, trapped in a child’s body just like me, except the lower part of her face is like a crash test dummy’s. She has no mouth, no jaw. She can’t eat, she can’t drink. She can’t speak.

  But I suppose if she can still have hope, the least I can do is pretend that I do, too. And what does it matter? If I die here or someplace else? At least if we get away, we might be able to find someone who can fix Lizzie.

  So I let her help me to my feet. I rub the tears from my eyes, making muddy streaks in the dust on my cheeks. I think of how Geordie would smile to see the mess and that just makes me want to cry again. But I can’t seem to cry anymore. Everything’s too dry, me included.

  We hardly get started down the vague trail we’d been following before I fell, when Honey suddenly stiffens at my side. She turns, a threatening growl rumbling deep in her chest.

  I remember what happened to Del and wouldn’t want to be whoever’s on the trail behind us.

  There are two strangers there, obviously having just stepped out of nowhere the way we did earlier. For a long moment, we’re all transfixed. The monster holds our gaze first, a shambling thing in the shape of a man, made of seaweed and driftwood and shells. Beside him is a small fairy man the size of a child, but with the face of an old man. He’s dressed in a ragged litter of clothes, brown and dull green and grey, and his hair is a nest of matted dreadlocks.

  Fairy and monster. Probably sent to us by the bogans.

  At my side, I can sense that Honey is ready to attack. One wrong move on the part of the strangers is all it’ll take.

  But Lizzie’s voice rings in our heads and stops her.

  Honey, no! she cries. That’s my friend Timony.

  Then I remember. I’d seen the little man before. I’d seen him changing from a pony into a man, falling out of a tree with Lizzie. She said he was a doonie. That he’d helped her.

  Del made him vanish with a wave of his hand. But that doesn’t explain where the monster came from.

  Then the monster speaks. It looks right at me with those weird seashell eyes and says, It’s me, Jilly.

  All I can do is stare.

  That was Geordie’s voice I heard. It’s so improbable that I’m sure I didn’t hear it right.

  “Geordie . . . “ I say anyway, and hope flickers inside me.

  Finally you can hear me. I kept trying and trying before, but it was like I was just a ghost.

  I’m having a real problem equating my dear Geordie with this shambling thing put together from seaweed and shoreline debris.

  “But you’re . . .”

  I can’t say the word. Dead. He’s dead.

  It’s really me, the voice says in my head.

  Hope changes from a flicker into a bright light inside me.

  He’s here.

  While he might be inhabiting some freaky seaweed creature, it’s still him, speaking in my head.

  But I’d seen what Del had done to him. And then I’d gone and dropped his remains off the side of this mesa.

  “But aren’t you a ghost?” I have to ask.

  I . . .

  The thing that claims to be Geordie, that has Geordie’s voice, looks to Timony, but the doonie only has eyes for Lizzie.

  “What have they done to you?” he cries.

  He doesn’t give Lizzie or any of us a chance to answer. Running over to her, he puts his hands on her temples. It’s the strangest thing to watch—like when the Nature Channel shows you a flower opening in slow motion. One moment, she and the doonie are of equal height. In the next, he has to reach up to keep his hold on her as Lizzie returns to her normal size. Most wonderful of all, her mouth reappears.

  Just like that, everything’s back to normal.

  “Oh,” she says.

  Then she puts her hands to her mouth and starts to grin. Grabbing the doonie, she gives him a big hug and dances him around, laughing, her mouth wide open. When she finally lets him go, he comes up to me, a question in his eyes.

  I don’t say anything, but I guess he reads that as my agreeing because now he’s got his hands on my temples. I feel the oddest sensation, a tingling from head to foot as though a static charge is running through me, but nothing changes in me. We’re still at each other’s eye level.

  His brow furrows as he concentrates harder.

  The tingle is sharper now, but still nothing.

  “Something’s blocking me,” he says. “Every time I begin to feel my way to how you should be, something pushes me away.”

  “It’s Del,” Lizzie says.

  I’m sure she’s right, but I don’t really care.

  “Never mind me,” I say. “Can you bring Geordie back?”

  He nods. “I just need his body—or rather the changeling that he was turned into.”

  Of course he does.

  There was an accident, Honey says.

  “I was carrying the bits and pieces in a pail,” I explain, “but I tripped and fell and the pail . . . the pail went over the edge . . .”

  The doonie stares down at the jumble of red rock, all the way to where the pail lies far below.

  “He . . .” I start, then I have to try again because the words choke in my throat.

  I touch some of the dirt that’s still on the rocks where I fell. Moist and dark, when I was carrying it. Now it’s just dust.

  “That’s all that’s left,” Lizzie says. “The rest went down the mountainside.”

  Timony gives a sad shake of his head.

  “Don’t say you can’t do anything,” she adds.

  I look at the seaweed creature, but I can’t read an expression in its features and Geordie doesn’t speak in my head.

  Maybe that’s a good thing. I don’t know if I could bear the hurt that would be in his eyes. The disappointment that I couldn’t even do this one thing right.

  “Living creatures are different from things like clothes and food,” Timony says. “I need a substantial amount of the actual being to have anything to work with. I can make a semblance of him—better than what we have here. But I can’t bring him back without . . . ”

  His gaze goes back to where I let the pail go tumbling down the mountainside.

  “Please,” I say. “Please try.”

  “Can’t you just make him a new human body?” Lizzie asks. “You know, the way you can make clothes and stuff out of nothing?”

  The doonie shakes his head. “As I said, bodies are more complicated. You need the actual substance of the original to work with.”

  “So . . . “ I say. “If we could gather some of it up . . .”

  “Perhaps.”

  “How much do you need?”

  Timony lifts his hands and cups them, indicating more than we could ever gather together. The rocks below are way too steep, and how could we ever tell the difference between his dirt and the dirt that’s already there? It’s all dust now.

  It’s not your fault, Geordie says.

  I turn to the seaweed changeling. It doesn’t look like a monster anymore. But it doesn’t even remotely look like Geordie.

  “How can you say that?” I ask him. “I was the one who was too stupi
d to be able to hang on to a simple pail.”

  It was an accident.

  “But that doesn’t matter. Not if we can’t get you back.”

  The seaweed head turns to Timony.

  Maybe there’s someone who can get down there for us, he says. Mice, or birds, or something.

  “This isn’t a campfire story,” the doonie replies. “There are no magical beasts to ask.” He turns to look at Honey. “Unless Mistress Honey knows of some?”

  I know enough not to hunt the little cousins, she replies, but I’ve made no friends among them.

  “But we know someone,” I say to Geordie.

  I’m thinking of that time after my accident, when I was still in the rehab. The crow girls left me two locks of their dark hair that turned into crow feathers when they laid them on my bed.

  If you ever think we can help, they told me, hold these in your hand and call our names.

  I still have those feathers. Or at least I had them back at the Professor’s house in Lower Crowsea. In Newford. They’re in my room, in the drawer of my night table.

  They might as well be on the other side of the moon.

  Except . . .

  Once upon a time . . .

  I turn my attention to Honey and Timony.

  “Can either of you get back to Newford?” I ask. “You know, do your walking between the worlds thing and just step over there?”

  “You want one of us to take you back?” Timony asks.

  I shake my head. That wouldn’t work. I’d be the Broken Girl then and sure to screw something up. And I refuse to go if Geordie’s still here.

  I look at him again. The seaweed that’s holding all the bits and pieces of him together is starting to dry out. Whenever he moves little pieces flutter to the ground. There’s already a pool of dried-out debris lying around him.

  “I need one of you to go back and get something for me,” I say, turning back to the others. “Two crow feathers in the drawer of my night table. Can you do that?”

  I’ve never been there before, Honey says.

  “Neither have I,” Timony tells me. “But I can take the knowledge from your mind, if you’ll let me.”

  “Go for it.”

  He puts a hand on me again, just the palm lying against my brow. I feel the tingle again, but it’s different this time. Softer. Like anticipation.

  “Picture it,” he says.

  I do.

  And then he’s gone.

  I blink. I know I’ve seen a lot of magical comings and goings in my time, but it still surprises me every time.

  I start to say something reassuring to Geordie, but before I can even open my mouth, Timony is back. Lizzie and I both jump. I don’t know that Geordie can in his seaweed body and who can tell what he’s feeling? Honey just regards the doonie with a considering eye.

  He’s holding the two crow feathers in his hand.

  “Are these the ones?” he asks as he gives them to me.

  I nod.

  Please let this work.

  Once upon a time . . .

  I’m not asking magic for me.

  This is for Geordie.

  My sweet and gentle friend Geordie, who doesn’t deserve having his life turned into a horror show. Who doesn’t deserve to lose that life just because he tried to help the Broken Girl who can’t be fixed.

  Once upon a time . . .

  I hold the feathers tight and call their names. Maida and Zia.

  But nothing happens.

  “With fairy,” Timony says, “everything is in threes.”

  With the cousins, it’s usually fours, Honey adds.

  So I repeat their names again, calling those crow girls to me. A second time, a third.

  I don’t have to do it a fourth.

  As their names are pulled away by the wind for a third time, they drop from the sky. Two black crows, changing into two black-haired girls as they reach the ground. Skinny in their black jackets and jeans, faces brown, eyes laughing.

  Once upon a time . . .

  I let out a breath I wasn’t aware I’d been holding.

  Thank you, I think.

  I don’t know who I’m directing my thanks to. The crow girls. Nokomis. The spirit of life itself. Or maybe magic.

  “Hello, hello!” Maida cries.

  Zia spins in a slow circle, arms held out wide. She stops when she sees Geordie.

  “Oh, look,” she says. “It’s a seaweed man.”

  Maida smiles and waves at the changeling that Geordie inhabits. “Hello, hello, seaweed man,” she says.

  Zia turns from him to look at me.

  “And Jilly’s gone all small and girly,” she says.

  Maida grins and shrinks down until she’s a small dark-haired girl, my apparent age and size. Clapping her hands, Zia follows suit. Then the two of them dance around me, singing some nonsense song.

  I lay a hand on each of their shoulders and make them stop.

  “Please,” I say. “This isn’t a time for joyful prattle.”

  Zia looks at me with this serious expression in her eyes that transforms all her lightness and silly humour into something old and wise and just a little dark.

  “Sometimes,” she says, “that’s exactly when you need a dose of joyful prattle.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “We’ve just come from watching crow boys tear apart a gang of bogans,” Maida says, looking as serious as her companion. “Bits of flesh and blood and bone spraying everywhere.”

  Zia nods. “Because Raven said find them, but those crow boys saw what happened to Anwatan and when they’re angry, mercy’s not a word in their lexicon.”

  I have no idea what they’re talking about, but apparently I’m alone in that.

  “They’re dead?” Lizzie asks. “All of them?”

  “Veryvery dead,” Maida replies.

  “Though not each and every one of them,” Zia adds. “There was one they couldn’t find because he doesn’t have enough blood on his hands.”

  Lizzie’s eyes are clouded, unhappy, and then I remember her telling me about how all the trouble she got into was because of some Unseelie fairies.

  “These are the bogans that you met at the crossroads?” I ask her.

  She nods. “The ones that killed Anwatan—the deer woman. They also killed Timony—or at least this fish guy who travels with them did.”

  My gaze goes to Timony. Incongruously, I wait for him to pipe up in a Monty Pythonesque voice, “But I got better.”

  “I was dead,” he says instead. “Lizzie brought me back.”

  “And I killed one of them,” Lizzie says.

  Maida gives her a wicked grin. “Oh, you’ll have crow boys mooning over you when they find out.”

  “It’s not . . . I don’t . . . “ She sighs and tries again. “What the bogans did was wrong, but I don’t know that killing them solves anything.”

  “It stops them from doing more harm,” Zia says.

  Maida nods. “And it will make the others think twice before they try the same.”

  “I suppose. It’s just . . . ”

  Zia cocks her head when Lizzie’s voice trails off.

  That every life is sacred, Honey says.

  That’s a funny thing for her to say, I think, considering how she so recently tore out Del’s throat. But then I remember how upset she was after she’d killed my sister’s friend Pinky. When I asked him about it, Joe told me that while she knew it had to be done, she also knew she’d have to carry the weight of it with her forever. She hadn’t liked it, but she’d gone into the situation accepting the responsibility for her actions and knowing what she’d have to take away from it.

  “But she eats other animals,” I had said to Joe. “She kills them.”

  “It’s not the same,” he told me. “That’s a whole different wheel of life and death.”

  Lizzie’s nodding in agreement with Honey while all that’s going through my head.

  “Are you sure you don’t have any cerva blood
in you?” Maida asks. “Because they’re all about finding peaceful solutions.”

  “And you’re not?” Lizzie says.

  The crow girls look at us, one by one, their gaze finally resting on me.

  “If we’d known they’d tried to hurt our friend Jilly,” Zia says, “we would have led the crow boys in their attack.”

  They can be so fierce and hard. It always shocks me, even though I’ve seen them like this before. But it’s never easy for me to equate what they really are to the pair of silly corbae girls that I usually know. Except they’re not really like that, are they? Goofy and dancing and always talking about candy. They’re not like that at all.

  Joe says that they were here before the long ago, that they watched Raven make the world. When I asked him why they act the way they do, like a pair of goofy little crow clowns, he told me that most of the time they live in the present. They don’t think of the future, they don’t remember the past. They just are. Because the more they remember, the darker and grimmer they can get.

  Like they are right now.

  Zia’s words hang in the air, and no one says anything for a long moment.

  I look at them all, my gaze settling on the seaweed creature that’s got Geordie inside of it.

  I remember a time, not so long ago, when all I had to worry about was getting around on my canes. About feeling trapped in my wheelchair. About wanting to paint, so desperately, but not ever being able to recapture the way I used to make magic with pigments on canvas.

  For the past couple of years, the one thing I’ve really wanted is to be freed of all those chains on my life.

  Now I wish those days were back. I’d trade them in a moment for how everything’s gone all dark and horrible.

  And Geordie, my Geordie . . .

  No, he’s not my Geordie. Maybe he could have been, but I never opened my heart to him and now it’s too late, unless the crow girls can make a once upon a time happen for me.

  They must feel the need in me because they turn back to me.

  “How can we help you?” Maida asks.

  Zia nods. “Yes, because we promised we would and crow girls always keep their promises.”

  “It’s something we’re good at.”

  “We’re veryvery good at it.”

  “Except when we’re not.”

  “But not today.”

  “Oh, no no no. Today we’re the opposite of not.”