The Little Country

by Charles de Lint

  “No. Reading a book. All the way through, like, from start to finish. One without pictures.”

  “You’ve never read a book?” Clare asked, trying to keep the incredulity out of her voice.

  Davie shrugged. “Never really had the time. . . .”

  “But what do you do with your time?” She regretted what she had said the moment the words were out of her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she added quickly. “It’s really none of my business.”

  “I don’t mind your asking. I like to walk. I go for long walks. And I have a bicycle now that I got from Willie. Sometimes I’ll pedal all the way up to St. Ives and back in a day. I listen to the radio a lot and in the evenings Mum and I watch the telly. And I love to go to the cinema. But I look at all those books in your study and I get to thinking that you can’t half help being clever after you’ve read so many of them.”

  “It takes more than reading to be clever,” Clare said.

  Lord knew, she saw that every day in the shop where they sold more romances and bestsellers than anything that had a bit more literary worth or insight. She couldn’t remember the last time they’d sold a copy of Joyce that wasn’t to a student.

  “It’s understanding what you read,” she added. “And it’s challenging your mind. I’ve no quarrel with entertainment, but I like to mix my reading about so that I get a bit of everything.”

  Davie nodded, but she saw that he was only going through the motion of understanding.

  “You play music, too,” he said. “Up at Charlie Boyd’s, don’t you?”

  “Most Friday nights,” Clare said. “I haven’t seen you there, though.”

  Davie shrugged. “Sometimes when I’m walking by, I hear the music and I stop outside for a bit of a listen.”

  “Why don’t you come in?”

  “I can’t play an instrument or carry a tune.”

  “You could tell a story, then, like some of the old gaffers.”

  “Don’t know any stories. I. . .” He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “It’s just that everything changes when I come in a room. Goes all quiet like and then people are always looking at me. When I go ’round to the local, the only way I can get any company is by playing the fool. Then I can have a crowd around me, buying drinks or letting me play billiards with them, but. . .” His voice trailed off.

  Clare was at a loss as to what to say.

  “I just get tired of it sometimes,” he added after a few moments.

  Clare nodded. “It’s not easy being . . . different. I know that well enough.”

  “You’re not that different,” Davie said. “You’re pretty and clever and‌—”

  He broke off suddenly and finished his tea in one long swallow.

  “It’s getting late,” he said, standing up from the table. “If you could bring me a blanket and pillow, I can make my own bed on the sofa.”

  Clare started to say something commiserating, but then left it unsaid. If he was anything like she was, it would just sound like pity, and she hated to be pitied.

  “I’ll just go get them,” she said.

  Later she looked in on her sleeping mother‌—as she had when she’d first come home‌—but her mother was still sleeping. She left a note on her mother’s night table briefly explaining Davie Rowe’s presence downstairs, then went into her own room. She changed for bed, but then found she couldn’t sleep. Instead she spent the remaining hours of the night staring out the window, watching the rain die to a drizzle, then give away altogether until only an overcast sky remained as a reminder of the night just past.

  The gulls were wheeling about the roof of the house when she finally fell asleep in the chair where she was sitting. She dreamed of a masked man stalking her down narrow, winding streets where she could only flee by crawling painfully along the cobblestones because she’d lost her cane. Rain made the cobblestones slick and hard to grip. The goggled face of her pursuer loomed over her. He held a long shining blade upraised in his hand, the incongruously peaceful image of a dove tattooed on his wrist. Laughter spilled from behind the scarf that hid his features.

  She woke with that hideous laughter in her ears, then realized it was only the raucous cries of the gulls. Feeling stiff, she limped over to her bed and crawled under the covers where she immediately fell asleep once more, this time without dreams.

  8.

  The Gaffer awoke with a start when the front door banged open. The Dunthorn book fell from his lap and he only just caught it before it tumbled to the floor. He looked over, then quickly rose to his feet as his much bedraggled granddaughter came in bringing with her an equally bedraggled Felix who also appeared to be in a somewhat somnambulant state.

  “You found him!” he said. “Felix, I can’t tell you how sorry I am about‌—”

  “Doesn’t do any good to talk to him, Gramps,” Janey said.

  The Gaffer peered closer and saw that while Felix’s eyes were open, he saw nothing. The only reason he was moving at all was because Janey was nudging him along.

  “What’s happened?” the Gaffer asked. “Was he in an accident?”

  Janey shook her head. “No. I’d say this was brought about very deliberately. Will you help me get him to bed?”

  It took a while to get Felix upstairs, undressed, and in bed. Some more time was spent in fetching his gear from the Reliant, but finally everything was done. Janey and the Gaffer sat down in the living room, sitting together on the sofa, and it was then, as she started to explain what had happened, that the finely held control Janey had kept in place all evening unraveled. She burst into tears and buried her face against the Gaffer’s shoulder.

  It took him a while to get the story out of her. Then he merely held her, close to him, stroking her hair and murmuring in her ear. What he said made no real sense. There were promises of everything getting better, and that they’d get to the bottom of things, just you wait and see, my robin, and the mystery would soon be solved, wouldn’t it just, when they all put their minds to it together, and how she wasn’t to worry.

  But it was all just words.

  He looked across the room as he spoke, at the Dunthorn book where it lay on the chair.

  It was uncomfortably apparent that whatever they had become involved in was just beginning, though the Gaffer couldn’t have said how he knew that. It was just a feeling he got.

  When he looked at the book.

  When he listened to the wind outside the house, rattling the shutters as it went hurrying up the street.

  When he remembered the last time the strangeness had come into his home.

  He knew it was only beginning.

  And that this time it would be worse.

  Silly Old Man

  Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head 0f a pin, but materialists have known all along that it depends on whether they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek.

  ‌—TOM ROBBINS, from Jitterbug Perfume

  The water of the harbour punched Jodi like a fist. Stunned, she sank deep into its shadows, propelled down by the momentum of her long drop. Moments later she bobbed back to the surface, brought up by the natural buoyancy of the salt water. The shock of its coldness immediately numbed her. Already suffering from the trauma of discovering that Edern had been no more than some enchanted clockwork man, this second shock on her system left her barely aware of her predicament.

  The sea ran cold around Bodbury in late autumn. More than one fisherman had died in its waters as the cold seeped into their muscles, stealing away the sweet heat of life. Then the undertow would pull them under.

  If they were washed ashore, their grieving families would have their swollen blue corpses to bury. A small comfort, but comfort nonetheless, for most were dragged out to sea, their bodies never seen again. For all their closeness to the sea‌—day in and day out upon its waters‌—given a choice, most fisher-folk would choose to leave their bones on land, buried deep in the solid earth, rather than know that they�
�d become nothing more than the playthings of the tide and currents.

  Jodi was only dimly aware of the cold and the heat it was stealing from her body. She kept herself afloat with haphazard flutterings of her arms and legs, but her mind was locked on a stark impossible image:

  Edern Gee. . . .

  The spraying blood of the bog creatures as it melted his skin and made it flow like hot candle wax. . . .

  The hole punched in his chest and the bewildering spill of cogs and gears and spoked wheels rolling across the boggy planking of the wharf. . . .

  The memory stuck in her mind like a waterwheel snagged on a branch and locked in place. Movement frozen. The moment captured and held fast, looped like a cat’s cradle string, so that no matter how much you turned it, there was no beginning and no end. Just the endless parade of that one instant, splayed across her mind, that she couldn’t escape.

  Until her head fell forward and a trickle of salt water exploded in her lungs. She lifted her face, choking and coughing. And then the first shivers began.

  Swim, she told herself. Swim or you’ll drown here.

  But the shivers turned to trembling, which in turn became an uncontrollable shaking. Her head dipped into the water again, too heavy to keep aloft, but she managed to raise her face before she took another breath of water.

  The current had already taken her some distance from the pier. She could see its dark bulk towering up behind her. Perched on a crate was Windle, the witch’s fetch, gibbering angrily at her. There was no sign of the Widow herself. Farther away still was the length of the Old Quay‌—the distance between it and her multiplied a thousand times because of her present diminutive size.

  She closed her eyes‌—

  . . . and there was Edern, his face melting, his torso burst open, spilling out its clockwork mechanisms. . . .

  ‌—and opened them quickly again.

  Swim, she told herself again.

  But her arms and legs had grown too heavy. They felt so thick‌—cold and prickling with numbness. Her face sank into the water again and she had barely the strength to lift it. The current turned her so that she was no longer facing shore. When a wave lifted her to its crest, she could see out across the endless wash of its dark waters, then she dropped into another trough.

  Hope died in her. Her movements were no more than minimal now.

  Why fight the cold? she asked herself. Why fight the waves?

  The sea had never been her friend, stealing Mother and Father as it was now stealing her life as well. But she could sense a kind of peacefulness waiting for her deep beneath the waves. A promise of warmth and solace if she just let herself sink. . . .

  The wave crest lifted her again, but this time there was more than the never-ending vista of dark water to be seen. Something darker still was moving through the water towards her, leaving a V-shaped wake behind it.

  Shark, Jodi thought, a new surge of panic hurling adrenaline through her body. It had to be one of the small blue sharks that the fishermen caught with their baited lines of mackerel and pilchard just outside the harbour.

  A moment or so ago she’d been ready to give up, to simply allow herself to sink and let the waves claim her. But self-preservation‌—kicked awake by the immediate threat of being some shark’s late-night snack‌—had her struggling to live once more.

  She splashed frantically in the water, trying to get away, then realized that she was just going to draw it to her all the more quickly with her thrashing about. The swell of the waves drew her down into a trough.

  It wasn’t fair, she thought, and never mind what Aunt Nettie had to say about fairness. There weren’t even supposed to be sharks about at this time of year.

  Back she rose on the crest of another wave, to find her assailant had vanished.

  Oh raw we, she thought with relief, then screamed as something came up from the waters underneath her.

  She pounded her tiny fists against the thing, shrieking all the while, until she realized that she wasn’t inside a shark’s mouth, nor was it a shark’s smooth skin that she was pummeling, but rather the wet-slicked fur of a seal’s head. Her cries died and she grasped the fur with both hands.

  “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you,” she mumbled against the fur.

  Her teeth started to chatter against one another again. Her limbs shook as though palsied. She held on tightly, fingers wound into the short fur, as the seal streamed through the waves, bearing her shoreward. And then, improbably as it might seem, she immediately fell into a comalike stupor, still clinging to the seal as she slept.

  Exhaustion and trauma had finally taken their inevitable toll.

  2.

  An hour or so after he was led blindfolded from the hidden underground room that housed John Briello’s animated corpse, Denzil still couldn’t be sure if the odd turn that the night had taken was all a part of some incomprehensible hoax or not. If it was a hoax, it had been most elaborately planned. And was being most elaborately maintained. For here they were now, the four of them, an incongruous grouping if ever there was, out on the harbour in a rowboat, scouring the dark water with lanterns at bow and stern.

  Henkie Whale put his bulk to good use, sitting amidships and bending his back to the oars as they rowed back and forth across the harbour. The big man had forsaken his bearskin for dungarees and jersey, the inevitable scarf wrapped about his neck and fluttering in the wind. Taupin sat in the bow, hanging over the hull with one lantern as he studied the water before them, both to look for Jodi and to call out warnings against the various abandoned ship masts and hulls they might otherwise run into. Denzil had the other lantern and sat in the stern with Lizzie Snell.

  Lizzie had changed her clothes as well, decking herself out like a pirate of old from one of the costume chests Henkie maintained for his models‌—when he had them wear anything at all. She leaned into the starboard quarter, a long bangled sleeve trailing in their wake as she peered out at the water behind them. Denzil sat in the port quarter.

  They were looking for Jodi.

  Who had supposedly been enchanted and shrunk down to the size of a Weeman from the old nursery rhyme and was now helplessly adrift in the harbour.

  According to a dead man.

  Not bloody likely, Denzil thought.

  The whole affair was absurd from start to finish. Except Jodi was missing. And he could still feel the touch of the cadaver’s hands on him, could still hear Briello’s ghostly voice, issuing forth from between his dead lips with its cold, raspy tones. . . .

  “What’s that?” Lizzie cried, pointing off to one side where the light from Denzil’s lantern had momentarily illuminated something floating on the swell of the waves.

  Taupin shone his own lantern in that direction. Henkie paused in his rowing to have a closer look, then took up the oars once more.

  “It’s too big,” Taupin said.

  “Just a seal,” Henkie agreed.

  “Maybe we should ask it to help us, you,” Denzil said, unable to keep the sarcasm from his voice.

  But Henkie appeared to give the idea serious consideration.

  “Oh, no,” Denzil said. “Now you go too far. . . .”

  The seamen around Bodbury‌—fishermen in their pilchard luggers and sharking boats, sailors and Coastguard, smugglers and crabmen, anyone who worked the water‌—were a superstitious lot. And their notions were a motley and dizzying collection of nonsense and old wives’ tales.

  They disliked anything being stolen from their vessels‌—not only for the obvious reasons, but because they believed that a part of the ship’s luck had gone with it. Strong steps were taken, or high prices paid, to get it back. For the same reason, anything lent from one ship to the other detracted from the lender’s luck, unless the object was first damaged a little, however slightly, before being handed over.

  They considered it unlucky to have a clergyman on board, or even to mention a minister, so “fore and after,” with its reference to the clerical collar, was u
sed. Another substitute, used by others, was “white choker.”

  Once on board ship, it was unlucky to return home to fetch some forgotten thing.

  Women aboard brought bad luck.

  To eat a pilchard by starting from the head was the same as driving away the shoals of fish.

  And a hundred other strange and illogical assertions that the fisher-folk clung firmly to, for all that many of them were deeply religious.

  Such as their beliefs when it came to the souls of the dead.

  Never mind heaven and hell. They said that gulls embodied the souls of dead fishermen and sailors, while seals embodied the souls of dead piskies. The small became large; the large, small, was how they put it. And they firmly believed that to harm either would bring on such an incursion of bad luck as to make a broken mirror a joke.

  So the gulls raided the fishermen’s wharves and wheeled and spun freely above Bodbury. And the local colony of seals, whose rookery was by the Yolen Rock south of the town, could swim directly into the harbour with impunity, for who would dare harm them? And didn’t they help the fishermen‌—steering them to pilchard shoals, or guiding their luggers back to harbour in deep fog?

  There were no tales of selchies in Bodbury‌—those creatures who were seals in the water and men on the land. Such stories were saved for those who lived farther north. No, here the seals were ancestrally akin to the Good Neighbours, and treated with the same cautious respect as the country-folk extended to the piskies.

  It was all superstitious poppycock, of course, Denzil thought. A great load of rubbish, pure and simple.

  But Henkie paused in his rowing once more. He cupped his hands together and called out across the water to where the seal rose from a trough to the crest of another wave.

  “It’s got something on its head,” Lizzie said.

  “A hat, I don’t doubt,” Denzil muttered. “Is it a bull or a cow? I hear you can tell by the kind of headgear they assume when they take a turn about the harbour at night.”