Dreams of Distant Shores

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  I saw Cawley, then, perched on the beam where the bar glasses hung, right above Quin’s head.

  He might have been carved out of wood himself, he was that motionless. The monster fry cook beneath him still had its hand on Quin’s shoulder, and it was staring across the room at us. I forced myself to look away from the weird little group of Quin and crow and creepy thing. As I started playing, something flashed across my brain. Something glittery, green, catching light like Pyx’s pins. It flew in and out of my thoughts a second time; I saw a golden eye. I hit a sour note, recognizing it. The gecko pin. It was on my hair; what was it doing in my head? Liesl caught my eye and grinned maniacally; she loves it when I screw up. The gecko skittered across my thoughts again. This time it made a sound. I had no idea geckos sound so much like crows.

  My fingers froze. Gecko. Gecko pin. That was what Cawley said to me. The thing at the bar let go of Quin. He swayed a little, blinking confusedly. It was staring at me now, grabbing at me with its eyes. I felt my skin crawl; insects skittered all over me. My bow was still stuck in place. Liesl lost her smile and covered for me. What about the gecko? I cried silently at Cawley. What about the pin?

  The monster took a step toward us, and Quin upended his Toothless Vampire onto its head.

  Then he jumped all over the fry cook, which caused the startled bartender to shoot him with the tonic water hose. The fry cook melted away. A black shape, familiar but bigger than I’d ever seen, streaked over the crowed, aiming not at me and my worthless-but-ofsentimental-value gecko, I realized then, but at Pyx’s pins.

  Cawley came to life, went flying off the rafter after it.

  A note came out of Pyx that I’d never heard before. But I recognized its power and so did one of the pins on her vest. The spiral of blackened silver and garnets started spinning, covering the open-mouthed crowd with gyrating red stars. Everybody applauded wildly. I felt the colorful force shoot past me and added something of my own: a shriek of bowed string and a word my mother taught me early on to yell in emergencies. Of course it was the Spinreel G string, and it promptly broke. Liesl added her version to mine, and Madrona walloped a cymbal so hard the reverberations scudded like fast flying golden ripples across the air at the incoming magic. Rune hit the lowest note on the bass while a deep demonic sound came out of his mouth, making the crowd go crazy again. Through it all, Archibald hung on to that pin with one claw, whirling around and refusing to budge, and Graymalkin yowled like the walking dead out for your brains.

  All that didn’t stop the thing flying at us, but it did slow a bit, bouncing over Madrona’s waves and splashing into the wall of power we raised against it. I heard a strange, muffled squawk in my head, which was the only way I could have heard anything in all that uproar. It sounded like Cawley, only sort of squashed, like something was sitting on him.

  Then I saw him, fluttering furiously against the grip of a claw bigger than my head.

  Several things, all of them incoherent, flooded into my head at once. Cawley might be a disaster of a familiar, but he was my disaster, and nothing could break that bond without losing teeth. Or in this case, feathers. I felt myself fill like a balloon with outrage; in the same moment I glimpsed Hibiscus, who was puffed up like a yellow cloud on top of Madrona’s head, facing off something nineteen hundred times her size. A good idea, it looked like, so I puffed, and I puffed, staring that looming monster smack in its moon-black eye, until itseemed that feathers were breaking out all over me. My fiddle wailed a couple of times; more strings broke. I dropped it. A black cloud came down out of the rafters all over the club, covered the gigantic crow-thing from beak to tail fathers, and, I discovered, as we started pulling and shredding, that I was one of them.

  A murder of crows.

  The crowd went totally bonkers, especially when Pyx hit the note she did and caused a sizzling short in the stage lights overhead. I hung upside down on the humongous claw, pecking and biting at it, while some gigantic feathers drifted into me from the rumpus on the monster’s back. Cawley got his head free and grabbed a beak full of claw. I couldn’t tell if we were winning or losing. But judging from the things flying around us—high heels, baseball caps, lit keychain flashlights, even a T-shirt or two—the crowd was loving our act.

  Then a wave of garnet came at us like an exploding red star, and all the lights in the club went out.

  I hit the floor and realized that my bones were back where I was used to them being. “Cawley!” I yelled in the dark. I felt claws tangle in my hair. I scrambled to get up, managed an undignified wobble onto my heels, and started off toward where I thought I had left the stage, worried about Pyx and her exploding pin. Cawley squawked in my ear. I said, “Oh,” and turned the opposite direction. His claws left me abruptly. I stepped on someone’s feet, and we grabbed each other for balance. Then a few of the lights went back on, and I found my hands full of Quin.

  He stared at me. His mouth opened, worked noiselessly a couple of times in goldfish mode. Then he got words out. “That was—” he breathed. “That was. That was. Truly. Awesome.”

  I straightened the gecko pin and smiled, still feeling a bit wobbly. “You were great. The way you tackled the fry cook?”

  Behind him the crowd, dead quiet now and standing in a litter of fallen flying objects, including various drink garnishes, lipsticks, and an order of fried onion rings, still faced the stage, waiting for more.

  “She was evil,” Quin said flatly, and I felt him shudder. “Bad wicked evil.”

  “I know.” I glanced around. It was gone, whatever it was, and so were all the crows, including Cawley. I wondered if they had finished the brawl, or just taken it outside. I listened. But there was no Cawley in my head. I looked for him, saw the bartender, the waiters, the kitchen staff, all motionless, gazing speechlessly at each other, at the band.

  I counted heads onstage, found four humans, to my relief, and four familiars. Four? I counted again. Rune had one, I realized suddenly. He was grinning crookedly at the garter snake wound around his wrist like a cuff. Archibald still clung to the garnet pin; it smoldered, flaring red now and then, like fire dying down. Graymalkin had quit her caterwauling and Hibiscus had dwindled to her usual size, but they still looked alert, tense.

  Pyx cleared her throat but even she was speechless. Madrona brought her sticks very lightly down on the snare and said shakily, “We’ll slow things down a bit for our next number, shall we? Hazel? Are you out there?”

  Cawley! I called again, this time silently, wanting to know what happened to him, where he had gone, and was he coming back? Every other witch in the band, even Rune, now, had a familiar; where was mine? Cawley!

  An eerie image formed in my head: a monster crow under a tree, surrounded by a wide ring of hundreds and hundreds of crows, all watching it while only one spoke. Now and then the huge bird twitched a wing or a tail feather, but it didn’t seem able to fly.

  “. . . for the terrible deeds upon which all crows should look with abhorrence and which deeds no crow deserving of the name shall commit and still remain crow . . .”

  Cawley! I cried again into that dark, still place in my head, and the crow-voice I heard interrupted itself petulantly.

  “Your witch Hazel seems to be listening in to private coven matters.”

  “Uncle Rakl, she became crow and helped us fight.” I realized, with surprise, that I recognized Cawley’s voice. “My witch Hazel earned the right, by the powers that she possesses.”

  “I think he’s right, Rakl,” an unfamiliar voice, higher and more rattly than the first, said. “Private coven matters weren’t so private in that place, and she fought well and fearlessly for my great-grandson. And for her friends, who seem to be in possession of ancient jewels of extraordinary power. Now can we get on with this? My tail feathers are a mess and my claws are killing me.”

  I went back to the stage. The crowd sent up a cheer when I reappeared, maybe just because I made it up the stage steps without toppling over. Madrona clanged the cymbal f
or me. Liesl handed me my fiddle; she had already replaced a couple of broken strings. I’d have to play around the missing G but that seemed a piffling matter by then. Rune’s snake flicked its tongue in friendly fashion at me as I passed. It was a sleek, sturdy, pretty thing with a fine golden stripe down its back. Rune grinned proudly. He was True Witch now, and he had earned it with the subhuman growl that had come out of him. Pyx still seemed a little stunned by the ugly old brooches she’d been wearing without a second thought.

  “Sorry,” she said softly to us. “My mother never had time to teach me about them before she died. I just wore them to remember her.”

  Liesl nodded, looking very curious. “Soon,” she promised, “we’ll help you find out if they can do more than summon evil monster crow god thingies.”

  Madrona hit the cymbal again, this time a thorough whap to bring the crowd back to life. People were still crowding the floor, wanting more, even while they picked up their stuff and dodged brooms sweeping up the squashed onions. The sweepers watched us mindlessly, running into people as they waited to see what we could follow that act with.

  “Gentle people of every persuasion,” Madrona said into the mike, “Which Witch Are You?”

  Midway through that song, Cawley fluttered onto my shoulder where he belonged.

  “Thank you, Witch Hazel. Very impressive work indeed.”

  I wasn’t sure any more which language he spoke, human or crow, or if I heard it with my brain or my heart, but I understood exactly what he said.

  Edith and Henry Go Motoring

  the pile of oranges in the bowl was dwindling, the full, round, bright orbs shrinking, withering as Harry sucked, squeezed, palpated their liquid into his mouth. He seemed to exude it in sunny droplets; he plumped as the oranges shrank. But he looked no happier. His face bore an expression of patient resignation, like a martyr feeling the little eager flames springing up under his sandals.

  He sighed, voluminously and unconsciously.

  There was only one thing for it, Edie thought, glancing at her guest. They sat in white wicker on the terrace of Hill House, itself white on white marble overlooking the pond, drowsy with light, and beyond it, on down the gently sloping paths through the gardens she had designed, the shallows of the lake in the distance, framed by birch and maple, a splash of molten silver in the eye.

  “There really is only one thing for it,” she said briskly. “We must go for a drive.”

  He gazed at her in astonished disbelief, as though she were the cheerily smiling angel with the bucket descending to douse the fire. “My dear lady,” he managed, overwhelmed. “My good woman—”

  As though, she thought with amusement, they had not said these things, they had not done this a dozen times before on those stagnant, broiling late summer days.

  “Of course, yes,” she said, rising instantly to summon Thompson and the car, the housekeeper to find Ned, the cook, for a basket of chicken sandwiches, cold tea, more oranges, in case they rolled themselves into a ditch. Sunshades, she debated, for the Pope-Hartford had no roof. But Harry never seemed to mind the heat with the wind blowing around him. The faster the better, such was his opinion, and she let the idea of sunshades go, for that is what they would do at such speeds: turn inside out and fly away.

  Thompson, their resourceful driver, was alerted; Edie heard the engine harrumph into life as she changed out of her thin lawn into more practical dark linen. There came a message from her husband: Ned had a headache and had taken to bed. She focused a moment’s thought on him, gazing into the mirror as the maid pinned her hat. Ned’s sick headaches, requiring dark rooms and absolute quiet, had been frequent that summer. They were followed by his moods, a couple of black days when he looked critically upon Edie, avoided their guests, and spoke mostly to the dogs.

  Perhaps, she hoped, when the weather changed he would brighten. . . .

  They were out at last, the shiny red tonneau idling, the basket stowed, dear Harry in his seat smiling once again and talking to Thompson behind the wheel.

  “Going south, as it were, is what we seldom do. East and we are well acquainted; we are in complete accord; our views seldom surprise. North not so much so, but then north is vague and wanders off into endless forest without a view or a house for miles. West brings us to the river, for which we need a bridge. In short, what I have in mind is a foray west, and then south, and then again west. Can you, do you think, manage? Might there be, to put it plain, a bridge?”

  “Harry, do you mean to take us into the wilderness?” Edie asked, settling herself beside him in the back. Ned usually rode up beside Thompson; she would have a peculiarly unencumbered view without his head. She felt a tiny pang: some future road without him, she envisioned for a breath.

  “Only think of that cool air above the rushing river,” Harry exclaimed. “Can anything be more agreeable?”

  The efficient Thompson interjected himself here with delicacy, for Harry regarded himself as the intuitive authority on matters of direction. “I think, ma’am, there is a bridge across the river at Tattersclaw.”

  “There, you see?” Harry beamed. “How could we not be drawn irrevocably by the idea of Tattersclaw? The possibilities of it? The very existence of such a name demands our immediate awe and all our scrutiny.”

  “Very well.” She settled herself in the soft leather, adjusted her veil against wildlife careening through the air. “The fabulous Tattersclaw it shall be.”

  “And do not consider our feelings,” Harry instructed Thompson. “Drive every bit as fast as you like.”

  Which he did, to Harry’s evident relief; he smiled even as the warm wind buffeted him, and the bees and grasshoppers from passing fields and hedgerows performed death-defying skids through his hair. With his usual adroitness, Thompson turned the tangle of dusty cart roads into something workable: he threaded his way through the fields and villages west of Hill House until he reached the mighty Humber. He turned south, then, down an ancient river road. That he’d known such a road along the water must exist impressed Edie. Harry, on the other hand, seemed to have expected it, though Edie suspected he had assumed it would be there because he wanted it. For a while they motored down the tooth-rattling road, dodging antique cartwheel ruts and the occasional terrified animal. They glimpsed water now and then, glittering, smooth, and deep, through shrubbery that Edie longed to take in hand.

  Then there was a choice: they could continue south, or they could veer suddenly west down a branch of road that led, so a worn wooden post stated, to Tattlersclaw and Bridge. Thompson turned the wheel heroically, without a waver. Trees on both sides of them leaned close; leaves brushed them. Abruptly they straightened, thinned, and there, spread along the riverbank, was Tattersclaw. And Bridge.

  The road plunged them down into the village first, as was proper, Edie thought, for such a hard, old, wizened rind of a wagon path that existed for who knew how many centuries to serve the crofters and fishers along the river. She peered curiously at the houses. They were wooden, tall, narrow and dark, set far too close to the road. Dusty panes glinted at them, flicking light, like the shy, sly glances of birds. The doors were all shut tight. And why not, she decided, at that busy hour of the day? But there were not even children about, nor maids on their errands. Just houses, the occasional slate-stooped shop with oddly opaque windows, and dirt lanes running now and then between them, empty and silent.

  “Where is everybody?” she murmured. “You’d think somebody would be out gardening. Look at the weeds around that lovely clematis.”

  “Perhaps they keep European hours,” Harry guessed. “They delve at dawn, and sleep like the dead through the hot, onerous afternoon, to come to life again with the cool breezes riffling over the water at dusk, becoming more and more visible, like fireflies, showing at their most brilliant, their most lively, in full night.”

  They passed beneath the shadow of the bridge, a modern contrivance with steel girders to uphold the road, and massive stone columns and arches rising
across the water to allow the boats to pass under it. A thin layer of houses followed them along both sides of the road, then scattered away as the road, too, at last became modern, curving onto the bridge, wider, flatter, and suddenly tarred.

  There was a tollhouse.

  Edie caught her breath at the sight: a tiny, dark hut with a couple of filthy windows awaiting them in the exact center of the bridge.Behind a window, a face turned toward them, bristling and indistinct with hair.

  She laughed, wondering what, in this outlandish place, they might possibly be expected to pay.

  Harry, dear Harry, absently slapped a pocket at the suggestion of money. The gesture never came up with anything more material than good intentions. Thompson pulled up to the hut and stopped; he glanced back, questioningly, at Edie, who was working her fingers into her handbag. Ned usually kept the coins as they traveled, but she had remembered to bring a few for emergencies and tips.

  The toll-taker pushed out of his flimsy turret by means of a door that scraped the tar; he stumped to the middle of the road in front of the car. Edie nearly laughed again, for he seemed a fantasy that only a village named Tattersclaw would come up with. He was quite short yet burly, with a great deal of black, hairy eyebrows, mustachios, muttonchops, and tangled, untidy waves falling across his shoulders. All that, she marveled, and a wooden leg, a plain honed stump like an old sailor’s; the great black boot on his other leg was trimmed with a huge, rakishly turned cuff.

  A belted coat and a cockaded hat completed the splendor.

  He looked them over as even Harry sat stupefied by the vision, and then gave judgment: “A half.”

  “A half?” Edie echoed, her voice quivering giddily. “A half of what, pray?”

  “A half,” he said. His eyes, she saw, were as black as his boot, with a well-polished gleam in them. “A half of what you bring back from the other side.”