The Little Country

by Charles de Lint

  “Now be good,” the Widow said before the cloth hid her and the room from view.

  It was immediately gloomy inside the aquarium, the only light coming from where the stovepipe met the glass. The cloth had been cut away there so that it wouldn’t touch the tin.

  As soon as she heard the sitting-room door close, Jodi turned to her companion.

  “I’ve got a plan,” she told him.

  “This’ll be good.”

  “Do you want to escape or not?”

  Edern held his hands out in front of him in mock surrender. “I’m all ears.”

  “Well, help me get rid of this coal,” Jodi said.

  They pushed the rug back from the stove, then used the back of a chair to lift the coal up from inside and topple it to the floor where it fell with a shower of sparks upon the glass.

  “That’s made a fine mess,” Edern said.

  “Oh, bother and damn,” Jodi said. “Will you be quiet?”

  Edern listened to her plan and slowly nodded his head when she was done.

  “It might work,” he said. “But. . .”

  “But what?”

  “You’re forgetting Windle.”

  “We’ll pick up a nail from the Widow’s worktable and stab him with it.”

  “Um-hmm,” Edern said dubiously.

  Jodi glared at him for a long moment, then turned her back on him and stuck her head in the stove. It was still warm from the coal, but not uncomfortably so. She turned on her back and then squeezed herself up into the stovepipe.

  Plenty of room, she thought.

  It was just a few moments’ work to shimmy her way up the pipe’s length. The corner where it made a right-angle turn to leave the aquarium proved a little tricky, but manageable. Grabbing handfuls of velvet cloth, she pulled herself out. With her feet balanced on the lip of the pipe, her hands keeping her balance, she found herself face-to-face with Edern, only the glass wall of the aquarium separating them.

  She raised her eyebrows questioningly. When he nodded that he was ready, she took a firmer grip of the velvet and swung out, coming back to kick the pipe with both feet, the force of all her weight behind her. It came loose on the first kick. Edern swayed on top of it, looking as though he was going to drop with it. He only just managed to get hold of the opening before the pipe fell away, back into their prison. It crashed onto the glass floor beside the bed.

  They both held their breath, listening. And heard nothing.

  “Come on,” Jodi whispered.

  She made her way quickly down the cloth, lowering herself hand over hand until her feet touched the surface of the worktable. As Edern started his own descent, she crawled out from under the cloth and cautiously peered about the sitting room.

  Their luck held, for there was no sign of the witch’s fetch.

  While Edern manhandled the roll of twine across the tabletop, Jodi clambered up on the windowsill and gave the latch a try. It wouldn’t budge.

  “I need a hand,” she called softly to her companion.

  Edern joined her and with his help they got the latch undone and swung the window open. The sharp tang of a salty wind blew in at them.

  “La,” Jodi said. “I can already taste freedom.”

  She tied the twine to the latch with a seaman’s knot, then the two of them hoisted the roll of twine up onto the sill and let it tumble out the window where it landed on the ground between the cottage wall and the rosebushes growing up alongside of it.

  Edern gave her a flourishing bow. “After you.”

  Grinning, Jodi scampered down the rope, then held it taut for Edern as he descended.

  “Now where to?” he asked when he reached the bottom.

  “To Denzil’s,” Jodi said. At Edern’s questioning look, she added, “He’s my friend. An inventor.”

  “An inventor?”

  “He’s‌—oh, never mind. You’ll see soon enough.”

  She led the way out from under the rosebush, Edern on her heels. He bumped into her when she came to an abrupt stop.

  “What. . . ?” he began, but then he saw what was waiting for them on the Widow’s lawn.

  Windle was there, saucer eyes laughing, teeth bared in an unpleasant grin. The creature was crouched low and out of sight from a chance passerby on the street beyond the Widow’s garden and obviously just waiting for them to move from under the thorny bushes to pounce on them.

  “Bother and damn,” Jodi muttered. “We forgot our nail.”

  “Nail?” Edern said softly. “We’d need more than a nail to stop that creature. Look at the size of it!”

  He was horribly accurate, of course. Small as mice as they were, the cat-sized fetch appeared to be monstrously huge.

  “What are we going to do?” Jodi asked. “The Widow’ll be back soon.”

  Edern nodded glumly, gaze not leaving the creature.

  “I’m not going back into her aquarium!” Jodi said.

  Brave words. Her legs trembled, knees feeling weak. If only her heartbeat would slow down. The drum of her pulse in her ears made thinking impossible.

  “I’m not,” she said, as though repeating it would make it true.

  Edern nodded again, then touched her arm as the fetch cocked its head and looked towards the low, overgrown stone wall that separated the garden from the street beyond it.

  “What’s that it hears?”

  “The Widow . . . ?”

  Edern shook his head.

  They could see nothing, but there was a jingling in the air, accompanied by a snuffling sound.

  Excitement pushed Jodi’s fear aside.

  “Edern,” she said slowly. “Can you whistle? Whistle really loud and shrill?”

  Pull the Knife and Stick It Again

  I don’t feel guilty for anything. . . . I feel sorry for people who feel guilt.

  ‌—attributed to TED BUNDY

  Michael Bett took one of Madden Enterprises’ private jets to London’s Heathrow, with only one stopover in St. John’s for refueling. He didn’t leave the plane in St. John’s, preferring to keep at his research.

  His only true enjoyment in life was discovering what made things work‌—to cut through all the frivolities and get to the heart of whatever particular business currently absorbed his interest. Sometimes that involved research and study, as he was doing now; sometimes it was a matter of living a certain kind of life, as he did with Mad-den’s Order of the Grey Dove; sometimes all it required was to take a knife and see how deeply and often it could cut before the mystery of life fled.

  The first to fall under his knife was the family dog. Body still aching from the beating his latest “Daddy” had given him, he’d taken the old hound out into the vacant lot that stood between two deserted tenements near his mother’s house. He stood for a long time looking down at the dog. There was a curiously empty feeling inside him as its trusting eyes looked up into his own. The lolling tongue and the big tail slapping the ground that always made him laugh couldn’t even raise a smile today.

  Then he took the knife he’d stolen from the kitchen out of his jacket pocket, pulled up the dog’s head to expose its neck, and drew the sharp blade across its throat. Blood fountained and he only just stepped back in time to keep it from spraying all over him. Circling around, he came at the dog from behind and brought the knife down again and again, stabbing and hacking away at the poor creature long after it was dead.

  He’d been eleven years old at the time.

  Other neighbourhood pets followed the first dog’s fate. When he was thirteen, he killed his first human‌—a five-year-old boy whom he kidnapped from a backyard and took away to an empty building where the boy’s dying amused him for hours. When he was fifteen, his latest victim‌—a teenage girl lured away into a deserted tenement with the promise of a party‌—provided him with a moment of pure epiphany.

  Dying, helpless, an inferno of pain flaring in her eyes, she’d croaked out one word: “Why?”

  Until then Bett hadn’t thoug
ht to question what he did, hadn’t understood what drove him to such ultimate thievery.

  “Because I can,” he’d told the girl.

  But that wasn’t the whole of the truth, just the most obvious part of it. Lying under it was a purpose that, as the years went by, became the focus of his existence: the need to understand, not just the secret of life, but the mystery of its passage into death; how a thing worked, why it worked as it did. He never felt a sense of self-recrimination or outrage for his methodology of pursuit for this knowledge. The deaths were only a kind of fuel to feed the curiosity that burned inside him like a smoldering fire.

  He lived a kind of controlled autism in the sense that he was always absorbed in one form or another of self-centered subjective mental activity, but he had no difficulty relating to the world around him. The world and what inhabited it fascinated him. He was disciplined to the degree that he could settle his attention single-mindedly on an object or subject for as long as it took him to understand it, or in the case of the subject, for as long as it took his victim to die.

  Everything was important‌—but only in how it related to him.

  Sitting in Madden’s jet, his undivided attention was fixed upon the puzzle of Janey Little.

  He wore a Walkman on which played a tape containing both of her albums. The small cassette machine was turned to its reverse mode so that the tape played over and over again, stopping only when the batteries wore out. Then Bett replaced them, and the music played on once more.

  On the empty seat beside him was a leather briefcase, beside it a Toshiba laptop computer. On his lap was a slender folder of press clippings and a private detective’s thirty-seven-page report; the subject of both was the same woman whose music sounded in Bett’s ear. He was currently absorbed in the profile of her in an old issue of Folk Roots magazine. He’d read it so often that he could have quoted the entire article, word for word. Mostly he studied the photos that accompanied the article, comparing them to those that were attached to the detective’s report.

  With the material at hand, and the video tapes he had‌—also provided by the detective agency‌—he knew as much, if not more, about Janey Little as anyone. Perhaps as much as the woman did herself.

  Madden knew nothing of this private research Bett had undertaken‌—undertaken long before Madden sent him to Cornwall earlier this evening. For Bett had seen, as soon as he learned of the interest that the Order had in Thomas Little, that the answer to what they were looking for lay not in him, but in his granddaughter. She would be the doorway to the old man’s secrets. But the approach had to be made subtly‌—far more so than the Order’s own previous bumbling attempts to plunder whatever riddle it was that Tom Little kept.

  Ah, yes: the riddle. The secret.

  What was it?

  Madden wouldn’t‌—perhaps couldn’t‌—say, and no one else knew. And that made it infinitely intriguing to Bett.

  He smiled, thinking of John Madden. Sitting together with a glass of sherry before them in the library, Madden loved to repeat the story of how the two of them had met. How he, Madden, had immediately recognized the soul of his old friend Aleister Crowley in Bett’s eyes. Madden had a mind that was sharp as a razor, but he let his hermetic studies blind that one part of his logic that would reveal all the occult mumbo-jumbo as drivel.

  Bett had another impression of that night in Chicago. All Madden had recognized in Bett was a kindred spirit‌—the difference between them being that Madden only dreamed of picking up the knife, while Bett allowed himself whatever indulgence pleased him at the moment.

  Still this reincarnation business had served Bett well. It amused him to keep up the charade. As soon as he’d realized what could be his if he could convince Madden that he really was the sorcerer who’d called himself the Beast, he’d surreptitiously researched Crowley’s life. Utilizing the same thoroughness with which he approached every project, he’d come away with enough obscure details of biographical data that Madden wasn’t simply convinced; he believed.

  Naturally, Bett hadn’t been fool enough to give it all out at once. He fed it out, tidbit by tidbit. Haltingly. Unsure of himself‌—allowing Madden, and his excitement, to “convince” both of them.

  This weakness of Madden’s‌—his only weakness‌—was what made the man so fascinating to Bett. That a man with his hard-nosed common sense and acumen should so readily accept what could only be fairy tales . . .

  If that was what they were.

  Bett was blessed, or cursed, with an open mind. Even with such illogical beliefs as those held by the Order, he was still willing to withhold complete judgment. For there were certain anomalies between what could logically be real and what he perceived to be real among Madden and his peers. There was the matter of Madden’s longevity‌—shared by other old guard members of the Order. Their worldly success that couldn’t always be put down to simple business astuteness. The curious way in which they invariably attained what they aimed for.

  The will is all, the Order said.

  Bett knew about will and what one could accomplish with it. What he wasn’t ready to make a decision on was whether one’s will allowed one to tap into an outside force or entity to gain its potency‌—as the Order held‌—or whether that strength came from within one’s own self. Or both.

  Until he had resolved that to his own satisfaction, Bett would remain a part of this secret order of old men and women who thought they ruled the world.

  2.

  A car met him at Heathrow and took him to Victoria Station where he caught the train to Penzance. Madden had been surprised at that decision, arguing against it, but Bett had remained unswayed.

  “I need the time to fully assimilate the role I mean to play,” he had explained. “Besides, with the time difference, I’ll still arrive in plenty of time.”

  “What role?” Madden asked.

  “Allow me to bring you the results first,” Bett had countered. “Then I’ll explain.”

  And Madden, the doting mentor, had smiled and nodded. Bett could see the suspicion in the old man’s eyes‌—but it was no more than was always present. He’d yet to fail Madden; so why should he fail him now?

  On the train he completed his transformation from Madden’s acolyte into his new role. Gone was the businessman’s tailored suit, the stiff body language, the expressionless features that gave no inkling as to the thoughts that lay behind them.

  He was casually dressed now in corduroys, a light cotton shirt, Nike running shoes, and a dark blue windbreaker. He’d left his briefcase in the jet, bringing only a Nikon camera in a worn case, the laptop computer, and a battered suitcase holding his notes and files and changes of clothing similar in style to what he was wearing.

  His body language was relaxed now, his face expressive and open, his whole attitude making him appear ten years younger than the forty-one years he actually was.

  When he arrived at Penzance Station, he disembarked looking as fresh as though he hadn’t just put in all those many hours of travel. He helped an older woman with her bags, smiling easily with her when she allowed that she wished her own Janet’s husband was half as kind with his family, little say a stranger. After he saw her off, a small unsavory-looking individual approached from where Bett had first noticed him sitting outside the bus station.

  “Mr. Bett?”

  Bett frowned at him. The man was shabbily dressed, his coat patched, shoes worn, a brown cloth cap pulled down low over his ratty features.

  “What do you want?”

  “Miss Grant sent me to fetch you, uh, sir.”

  “Give me the address and I’ll find my own way.”

  “But‌—”

  Bett leaned close and his pretense at an easygoing nature fell away as though it had been stripped from him with the blade of a gutting knife.

  “Never call me by name,” he said. “Never question what I say. Do it again and I’ll feed your heart to your mother.”

  “I‌—I. . .”


  Bett stepped back, smiling pleasantly. “The address?”

  Stumbling over his words, the man gave him the name of a hotel on the Western Promenade, overlooking the bay, and a room number. When Bett ascertained that it was within walking distance, he left the man standing there in the station’s parking lot and set off on his own.

  3.

  Lena Grant looked the same as she always did‌—beautiful, spoiled, and bored. Her dark hair was coiffured and swept back from her brow in a stiff wave. Her makeup was Park Avenue immaculate and out of place in this small Cornish town. As was the perfect cut of her designer blouse and skirt; the blouse unbuttoned far enough to show the lacy top of her bra, the skirt slit so that a long stockinged leg was revealed whenever she took a step.

  “The Golden Boy,” she said as she opened the door of her room to him.

  Bett pushed by her and shut the door.

  “Where’s Willie?” she asked.

  “Can I assume it was ‘Willie’ who met me at the station?”

  Lena nodded. “Willie Keel. He’s local.”

  “I don’t doubt that.”

  “You didn’t get along?”

  “I never get along with fools.”

  Lena frowned. “One of my father’s security men recommended him. Daddy always says that you should use local talent when you’re‌—”

  “The operative word there is talent,” Bett said, interrupting her.

  The perfect lips began a pout that Bett simply ignored. He wasn’t in the mood to listen to the perfection of everything and anything associated with “Daddy.” He knew all about Daddies.

  “Have there been any new developments since yesterday?” he asked before she could go on.

  “I did the best I could,” Lena said.

  He’d give her that. Playing a long-lost relative of Dunthorn’s and demanding his personal effects‌—that was about the limit of her imagination. Or maybe it had been “Daddy’s” plan. Roland‌—“Call me Rollie”‌—Grant might be a big wheel on Wall Street, but there his expertise ended . . . along with his sense of propriety and his social graces, so perhaps it wasn’t all Lena’s fault. But Bett had no time for sympathy. About the only interest he had in Lena was in how long it would take her to die and that, unfortunately, was something he was unlikely to find out.