LITTLE PEOPLE!

by Gardner Dozois

  “He never did. I sort of worked it out over the years.”

  “Oh, God,” she cried, “it’s been that long?”

  “Let’s walk on down to the creek,” I said. “I’ll tell you on the way.”

  ###

  We descended through open woods. Sunlight barred the slope with streaks of gray shadow, and small white flowers, like vanilla flecks, were scattered under hickory and walnut. The air smelled sweetly cool.

  I said, “It’s a way of looking at things. Here we are in the middle of reality. It’s solid and concrete. It has specific odors and colors. You can feel it and measure it. That’s reality. But every now and then you see something else. Say you’re in these woods and you look up through the branches toward a cloud. You see that the angle of the branches, a cluster of leaves, a bit of that cloud combine to make up the outline of a face. Take a step forward and the face vanishes. It doesn’t exist. It’s just a suggestion, a bunch of fortuitous factors.

  Maybe you look into the water and see weeds and a pebble and a ripple. And maybe that sort of suggests a human shape. If you move, the perspective changes, and it disappears.

  “So you get to thinking. Wouldn’t it be funny if these shapes in trees and water aren’t illusions. They might be like reflections of something real. Someplace else. Maybe realities at a different angle to us, each one throwing off its own reflections.”

  “But that isn’t real,” she said, setting down her painting box. Flat white stones scattered along a strip of sandy mud. Beyond slipped a shallow sheet of water, whispering across light tan rock.

  “It isn’t real to us.”

  Crisp snaps as she released the catches of the painting box. “That’s sick, Ray. He believes it’s real. Something physical, out there in the water. He says you can see them.”

  “Maybe you can if you look at them right.”

  Scowling faintly, she set up the easel, opened the sketchbook, began wetting her paints. At last she said, “I’ve tried. I can’t see them. I keep thinking, this time I’m going to see them, too.”

  “Maybe his imagination runs away with him.”

  “You’re not being any help.”

  That was so obviously true I felt a small convulsion of anger. She could read the problem as well as I could—Ted was showing obsessive symptoms of some kind. “There’s really not very much I can do.”

  “You’re really cold, aren’t you,” she snapped, swinging around at me.

  I said, “No, I’m not. I just don’t know what to tell you. Maybe he ought to see a doctor.”

  She swept color across the page, her brush darting and jabbing. “Let’s not quarrel,” she said finally, eyes on her work. “I don’t know what to do either.”

  “Don’t look too hard at the water,” I said.

  It was the wrong moment for a joke. Her lips clamped together. She did not look at or speak to me again. After a few minutes, I excused myself. I might as well have said goodbye to one of the white rocks.

  I went away from the creek, angling along the base of the hill. Finally I came out on the gravel road and walked slowly up to the house through full sunshine. When I got under the trees, it was silent again. Silent. No sound. No bird cry. No breeze. Nothing.

  It scared the fool out of me. I went in and had some coffee and fiddled around in the house, listening and furious with myself for listening. There was no sound in that terrible place, nothing at all but the pressure of silence. I could see no movement along the upper limbs. I even went out and looked.

  ###

  Prancing across the kitchen, loudly elated, Ted tossed down his briefcase. “So you finally got up. I had a great morning. Did a ton of stuff. Next Saturday, I’ll do it all over again. Great life. Where’s Barb?”

  “I said, “Haven’t seen her since morning.”

  That swiveled his eyes to mine. “Painting?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Creek?”

  “Yeah.”

  Exuberance went away. He grew taller and graver. “I guess maybe we better wander down there and remind her it’s lunchtime.”

  “You go ahead. I’ll fix up some sandwiches.” I was not eager to see Barbara again so soon.

  “Come on along. I’m using you shamelessly, if you want to know. You’re my buffer. Every time the creek’s involved, we get into a snapping match.” He tugged gently on my arm in the old way I remembered from years back. “Humor me.”

  We stepped out the back door into an uneasy filigree of leaf shadow, gray and white on the pale gravel. The sky was stacked with broken clouds. Ted strode rapidly off across the parking area, not waiting for me.

  When I caught up with him, I said, “I feel like a fool saying it, but maybe you ought to ease up on Barbara about that creek.”

  He glanced at me with that sudden stab of intelligence I found so disconcerting. “You mean Barb’s worried about my intellectual vagaries?”

  “Well, she doesn’t know how nutty you can be.”

  We walked quickly down the sharp slanted road, the air sweet with leaves and warm dust, walking where the shadows had moved last night.

  He said lightly, “Just like when we were kids. You’d never listen.”

  “I had to listen to you. You never told me anything right out.”

  He said quite sharply, “Did I have to? You’re not that thick-headed. You know exactly what I mean. Whenever I get near water—you know how it was.”

  “Down and down,” I said.

  “Right down among ’em, every time.”

  The road swerved right toward disciplined fields lined with corn. Bearing left, we entered woods where no line was straight and the hill concealed its surface under last year’s leaves. Ahead, dense green foliage clustered along the creek.

  I said, “So you saw dreams in water.”

  “Not dreams. Entities.”

  “I never saw them.”

  “It’s a way you have to look,” he told me. “You can’t expect to see them just by staring. I don’t mean they’re incorporeal. It’s just a different way of looking.”

  “I never found out how.”

  “I did. It was natural. I just did it.”

  He glanced toward me over his shoulder, a graying man, belief hollow in his eyes. He grinned. “You see what a crazy you raised, Ray. A water psychic.”

  “Maybe you’ve got a special talent. So why worry about Barbara?”

  “She wants to see. That’s the problem.”

  Keeping my voice uninflected, I said, “Maybe they don’t want her.”

  “Maybe they haven’t made up their minds.”

  Crossing a narrow field, we entered under the trees. The light became a clear soft gray and the air smelled darkly of water and wet stone. Waist-high weeds slapped at us as we followed a worn track along the creek bank.

  Ted’s long stride broke into a trot. “Barb!” he called.

  We burst out into the flat place by the creek. Near the water stood the easel, a watercolor propped on the crossbar. Her painting box lay open on the rock. Her shoes and socks were scattered by the creek edge. A single slim footprint showed in the sandy mud. Blurred impressions lined out under the still water. Perhaps they were footprints, lost where the rock began in midstream.

  “Dear God!” Ted said.

  He darted into the creek. He ran splashing through ankle-deep water to the center, his arms and legs in exaggerated motion, looking absurdly like a child at play.

  I looked at the shore, the footprint, the shoes. I thought, Fraud, and did not believe.

  He stared at me in blank confusion, then raced downstream, bent over to peer into the shallow water.

  I stepped to the easel, sure that the watercolor would contain some alien thing. And, yes, it did. There, in delicately rendered water, floated a tiny, partially formed eye.

  It was a setup, then, arranged to shock. In a moment he would find clothing in the stream, evidence that she had been entrapped. That the People had called. That she had walked guileless
ly into the water, and walking dissolved, and dissolving vanished.

  She would be watching us from someplace close. I began methodical checking of the low foliage, searching for the glint of skin and intent eye.

  Downstream, Ted uttered a harsh bark of sound.

  He would have found clothing.

  The moment of horror, now. Pause for maximum effect. Pause and pause. The revelation—Now.

  Nothing happened.

  Upstream toward me came Ted, picking his steps, holding himself tall. He threw down the sodden blouse, the jeans, the bra. Clear water ran from blue and white cloth.

  “Where is she?” he asked.

  I said nothing.

  “I thought it was a gag,” he said. “I looked at the shoes, the footprint. I said, ‘Oh, hell, they’re ribbing me. They’re putting me on.’ Only you’re not, are you?”

  “No.”

  “The timing was wrong,” he said. “When she didn’t pop out of the bushes and laugh, that’s when I knew it wasn’t a joke.”

  This precise recreation of my own thoughts had the effect of shutting off my brain entirely. I could think of nothing to say.

  “Oh, hell,” he said, and slowly stepped past the saturated clothing to stare at the watercolor on the easel. I heard his breath hiss. He hadn’t missed the eye, either.

  “She’s probably up at the house waiting for us,” I said.

  His head shook very slowly right and left, eyes slit, as if the movement gave him pain. “We better look for her down here.”

  We looked.

  We ranged the creek, splashing its length down, searching its length up, bending to peer into shallow pools, poking into deep cuts under banks matted with blackberry that left delicate dots and lines of blood etched on our skin, moving with the sound of water, waiting for laughter and her voice, seeing sunlight unsteady on the shallows, the sudden panicked dart of a crawdad, the shapes of leaves against the late afternoon light, the sudden animal scuttle through underbrush that brought us erect, taut with expectation.

  Nothing and no one.

  And finally, Ted standing bent in a calm pool, head strained forward, regarding the pebbled bottom, his face anguished.

  I saw his right leg swing. He kicked the water savagely, three times. Kick, kick, kick.

  “Give her back!” he shouted. “Let her go!”

  ###

  When evening came, we returned to the open area where the easel stood. I squatted down beside Ted in the dusk. Neither of us spoke. We waited together, listening to water mutter among the stones. The creek, dim in the larger dark, stretched hugely away.

  He said in a small clear voice, “You needn’t stay.”

  “I will.”

  “Taking care of the stupid younger brother.”

  I said, “You shouldn’t do this all alone.”

  “How else can you do anything?”

  Limbs stirred against a vague sky.

  After a long pause, he said in a rapid monotone, “I’ve always seen them. They didn’t particularly care about me. I don’t know why. In Ohio, in that lake, when I was way underwater down in the mud, they came looking. Watching me drown. They didn’t care. Their way. Not malicious. Just indifferent. When you came down, they scattered. It was dark but I saw them somehow or other. You never did. You were just as indifferent as they were. Only it was different with you.

  You always kind of looked right through me. You never saw me either, you know. You really didn’t care, I figured that out. I carried that all alone—you, and seeing the People—and that was pretty bad later, when nobody else saw them. How I wanted you to see them. But you never did.”

  It was work to keep my voice level. “I couldn’t see. I don’t have the gift.”

  “Gift! Lord protect us from such ill-considered gifts. The People must be all over, you know. Everywhere. A completely unidentified species. Millions of them. All the free water. Think how they swarm in the Mississippi. Think of the Nile.”

  His voice lifted, stumbling with intensity.

  “Millions. And I’m the only one to see. I’m a lunatic in a special way. Oh, my God, you don’t know how horrible it is to know that. And now this with Barb. How do I deal with this? She’s out there. She’s . . .”

  Sound shut off. The flutter of leaves, frog sound, the rasp of small night creatures, creek sound. All stopped, as if a key had been turned. Ted’s fingers chewed into my arm.

  “Listen,” he barked. “Listen.”

  Silence pressed against us with physical force.

  He demanded savagely, “You hear that?”

  “What?”

  “For God’s sake,” he said, “for God’s sake, that’s her voice.”

  He leaped up and plunged toward the creek.

  I called, “Wait for me.”

  “No. No, don’t you come. Please. If you come, they’ll never let me see her.”

  “Ted, I don’t want to have to drag you out.”

  “You won’t have to. I promise you.”

  He strode quickly away into the creek, the beam of his flashlight bobbing ahead of him. As he moved off through the shallow creek water, the sound of splashing abruptly faded and became remote. It was as if he passed through some sound-absorbent medium. He moved a few feet off and sounded a hundred yards away. Then there was no sound at all. I watched him slip downstream like the shadow of a ghost. The enveloping silence made me feel vaguely sick.

  I knelt on the stones, calculating how long to wait before following. The soundlessness made it hard to judge. He would be able to hear me following a long way behind and that he would count as betrayal.

  I was intensely aware that we had come to one of those points where your actions, in a very brief time, can permanently alter the way you regard each other. It’s easy to fumble. It requires such care. You have to handle yourself with the delicacy of a surgeon cutting along a nerve.

  While I crouched, coldly disturbed, watching the intermittent glimmer of his light, I became aware of my own voice.

  It whispered, “He hears. I don’t. Same thing.”

  At first I didn’t register the meaning of that. Then I felt a light shock of understanding as it made sense.

  Sensitives, the pair of us.

  We sensed the same thing in different ways. It was two sides of the same experience. Where he heard the calling voice, I heard silence.

  Either way it meant the same thing. It meant that the People had come, the flowing, watching People of Happyjack Creek.

  No sooner had I repeated that over to myself a couple of times, trying to understand by repetition, than I realized I could no longer see Ted’s light. It was time to follow. But when I started to move, I could not. The thought of stepping into that water and perhaps putting my foot on one of the People turned my muscles to mush.

  So there I huddled, completely amazed at myself, grinding my fingers together, while Ted sloshed downstream, the light jittering ahead of him, listening to Barbara’s voice calling from God knows where, saying God knows what.

  Shame dragged me erect. I forced myself up into a silence as thick as felt slabs, my back flinching horribly at the darkness behind. I took a tentative step forward, feeling cold water flooding into my shoes, and the darkness came down on me, a thousand tons of it. With no warning at all, it became the way it had been under that Ohio lake, my legs sunk in icy mud and no air.

  The fear pours up through you, stunning the nerves and penetrating the muscles. If you run, it runs with you. But you don’t dare run. Running creates its own pursuit. It is one of the rules that you must face fear at once, head-on. You clamp your teeth and stand and look at it and endure.

  I switched off the flashlight and let night come down.

  When the light went out, I almost fell over. Panic bent me. It was pretty bad. I felt that I was standing on a tongue in an open mouth. I felt the creek banks behind stir and concentrate, preparing to close on me in one whispering rush, vine, stone, dirt, and water clamping shut.

 
; All this, I suppose, was direct attack by the People. I suppose. I don’t know. I do know there were some terrible moments and I resisted them, body stiff and eyes shut, because you have to resist. I endured.

  The way you endure, you get through one second. When that is over, you get through the next one. And so the seconds go. No matter how bad it is, you hang on one second more, because if you run, you know you will remember running later and then the shame will come and that will be worse than standing, enduring, with the mouth around you and the banks moving behind.

  After a long while I got my shoulders back and my head up, although it was terror to move. You come back to yourself a sensation at a time. First, cold water in the shoes. Next, the smell of night leaves. After that, the shirt plastered against your back, the feel of clenched fingers.

  I got my eyes open.

  Gray sky showed behind blurred limbs. Beyond them hung a dusting of stars.

  The ferocity of the night had softened. I saw that the darkness was streaked by variations of light, gray, black, pale silver. I could make out clumps of bushes and the intricate interweaving of limbs. These were familiar, ordinary, natural shapes, the way they had always been.

  Finally I punched on the light and, concentrating hard, began to move. My body felt wooden and uncontrollable. It seemed to take a year to go fifty feet.

  As I blundered slowly downstream through that nasty silence, a small glow flickered behind foliage far down the creek. It wavered like a trace of moonlight, then went out. I could imagine that a flashlight had been waved briefly, the beam crossing overhead limbs. I could think of no reason for that, and anxiety pressed me forward like the push of a hand.

  The creek bent sharply right around bushy shallows. My light grazed cliffs to the left, black water at their base. White and brown rock chunks littered the stream. From the right bank, a muddy bed of gravel tongued into the creek. On the tongue lay Ted’s flashlight pointing its beam serenely across the water.

  He lay on the far side of the gravel, stretched out in a shallow pool.

  My light touched his pale body. He had thrown off his clothing and lay with lifted head, staring into the water.

  As my light came on him, a thick ripple seemed to rise close to his face and rolled away from him across the shallows. It might have marked the passage of a large fish or muskrat.