The Little Country

by Charles de Lint

  “Go,” Kara repeated.

  Straddling her own bicycle, she held it upright with her knees and gave Ethy a push with her free hand. Ethy’s bike wobbled as she set off down the hill, but soon picked up speed. With the balloon still in one hand, her other gripping the handlebar of her own bicycle, Kara backed up, wheeled her bike farther away from the Widow.

  “I’ll have you all,” the Widow told her. “There’ll be no escape.”

  Shuddering, Kara quickly turned her bicycle about and whizzed off down the hill herself. She dropped the balloon back into its satchel and bent low over her handlebars, trying to catch up to Ethy who was still far ahead of her. Behind her she could hear the trailing fade of the Widow’s curses. She heard her name a second time, but before she could hear it repeated for the third time that Taupin had said would give the spell its potency, she was beyond hearing distance and safe.

  Safe.

  Her pulse drummed with fear. How could she ever be safe again when she knew that from now until forever she was carrying a witch’s enmity along with her wherever she went? She and Ethy might have escaped for the moment, but sooner or later the Widow would track them down, each and every one of them‌—just as she’d promised‌—and then what would they do?

  What could they do?

  They would have to push her into the sea, Kara realized. They would have to become murderers in truth.

  The day had begun as a lark. Now it felt so grim that Kara wondered if she’d ever feel lighthearted again.

  She finally caught up with Ethy and the two of them pedaled on across town until they reached Peter Street. There they threw their bicycles by the door that led up to Denzil’s loft and pelted up the stairs to tell him what had happened.

  3.

  The Widow stood in the middle of the road until the two girls were out of sight. She saw a curtain move in the window of a neighbouring house and turned in its direction. Whoever had been watching from the window had now ducked out of sight.

  “You, too,” the Widow said. “I’ll ruin you all. I’ll bring down such a storm on this town that there won’t be anyone left after its tempest and roar to remember it.”

  But first she would deal with this ragtag gaggle of miserable urchins and the like who thought they could prove any sort of a match for her.

  Faint laughter spilled from the shadows alongside the hedge as she entered her garden, but she ignored it. She knelt down by the stoop and unfolded the newspapers from around her fetch. Her eyes teared as she took in the damage that the small creature had sustained.

  “There, there,” she crooned, gently lifting Windle from the papers. “Mother will have you well again, my sweet.”

  Her heart broke at the pitiful whimpers that even her gentle handling drew out of the fetch.

  This would be redressed, she swore.

  “On the graves of my mother and grandmother,” she said, looking into the shadows where they collected against the side of the cottage. “Do you hear me? Let them never know rest if I fail to keep my vow.”

  We hear, the shadows whispered.

  “Will you lend me what I need?”

  Whatever you need.

  And then the shadows rang again with that too familiar laughter, hollow and mocking.

  The Widow merely regarded them for a long moment, then opened the door to her cottage and carried Windle inside.

  4.

  High on Mabe Hill, overlooking the town of Bodbury, were the ruins of an old church called Creak-a-vose after the ancient barrow mound upon which it had been built. A rambling affair, its bell tower had fallen in on itself and one of its walls had tumbled down. Its roof was open to the air. The remaining three walls were covered with vines and ivy and home to birds and one owl. It was there that the conspirators met as evening fell, straggling into the ruins by ones and twos until all, except Ratty Friggens, were gathered.

  “I fear the worst,” Denzil said when another half hour had dragged by and the Tatters boy still hadn’t made an appearance. “After what the girls told me . . .”

  Henkie nodded grimly. “The bloody Widow must have got to him.”

  Jodi’s happiness at finally being freed from the confines of Lizzie’s office had taken a downward turn as she learned of the narrow escapes made by Kara and Ethy. Ratty’s absence simply made her feel worse.

  It was still an hour’s walk across farmers’ pastures and moorland to the field where the Men-an-Tol stood with its two outriding standing stones, one on either side of its hole. Taupin had reckoned that if they left Creak-a-vose come dusk, they would reach the tolmen just as the moon was rising. The argument now was as to who would go.

  “The children must be sent back to town,” Denzil said. “We can’t be responsible for harm coming to any more of them, you.”

  The other adults nodded in agreement, but Kara shook her head.

  “We’re coming,” she said.

  “Don’t start,” Henkie told her.

  But Kara stood her ground.

  “It will be too dangerous,” Lizzie said. “You’ve done your share already‌—more than your share.”

  Taupin had also reckoned that they’d had such an easy time of it for the later part of the afternoon because the Widow had been lying low, seeing to the wounds of her fetch.

  “We’re not scared,” Ethy said, though even in the dim light they could all see her trembling.

  “You don’t understand,” Kara added. “It’s not that we want to come; we just don’t have any other choice.”

  Ethy nodded.

  “We have to stick together,” Peter said.

  “None of us wants to be on our own when the Widow sends her creatures out to hunt us down,” Kara said.

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Taupin said.

  But Denzil still disagreed. “She’ll be too concerned with us to trouble anyone else tonight,” he said.

  “How can you be sure?” Kara asked.

  “I. . .” Denzil looked to the others for help, but no one could offer any. “I can’t,” he finished lamely.

  “So there you have it,” Kara said firmly. “We all go.”

  “If we’re going,” Taupin put in, “then it’ll have to be quickly. If we’re to make it to the stone by moonrise, that is.”

  Denzil looked around one last time at the other adults, hoping that someone could think of a better solution than bringing the chil-

  dren along with them, but there was still no help to be found. Lizzie sighed and shook her head. Taupin shrugged. Henkie grumbled into his beard.

  “No other way about it that I can see,” the big man said.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t go at all,” Jodi piped up. “Any of us. We could sit out the night in a boat, out on the bay where she can’t get near us.”

  “Sea dead,” Peter muttered.

  “She didn’t call up any sea dead last night,” Jodi said.

  “It was probably too late at night,” Kara said, “or it all happened too quickly for her. Perhaps it takes time to call them up.”

  “Perhaps there’s no such thing,” Denzil offered.

  Taupin smiled. “Still begrudging what lies at the end of your nose?”

  “Just because one mad thing is true, it doesn’t mean it all is,” Denzil replied.

  “How can you look at Jodi and not accept‌—”

  “I accept she’s a Small, you,” Denzil said. “But the secret to science is that one should be able to arrive at the same set of results every time one has set up a specific experiment or set of conditions. It has to be repeatable‌—nothing else will do. I can see Jodi is a Small, and she remains a Small, therefore such a thing can be.”

  “And the Widow’s magics?”

  “I can accept that she’s capable of turning a normal-sized being into a Small and I will remain open to her other powers for safety’s sake, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she can do all that a witch from the folktales can.”

  “Like raising the dead?” Henkie asked.
>
  “Exactly.”

  “Can’t be done?”

  Denzil nodded firmly.

  “Then what do you have to say about my mate Briello who you were gabbing with last night?”

  “I . . .”

  “It grows late,” Lizzie interrupted.

  Denzil blinked at her for a moment, then nodded. “We should go.”

  They trooped outside and stood in a bunch.

  “Seawater works against the Widow and the creatures she makes,” Henkie said, “but what about these sea dead? What’ll we do if we run into them?”

  They each had satchels carrying balloons filled with salt water, or watersacks filled with the same. They were heavy, but no one complained.

  “We’ll have to hope that we’re going too far inland for them to come,” Taupin said. “Come along now, and watch your step.”

  With the moon still below the horizon, it was dark out in the fields. Henkie complained about the lack of light. He had a big hammer stuck in his belt and had also carried up an oil lamp.

  “It’s not like she won’t track us down,” he said.

  “Only why make it easier for her?” Lizzie asked him.

  The big man’s reply was a wordless sound that rumbled deep in his chest.

  “If we should get separated,” Denzil said, always the worrier, “should we plan to meet back here‌—at the church?”

  With that agreed upon, they finally set off.

  Taupin led the way cross country, following trails that only he knew, acquiring his knowledge of them from his constant traveling about the countryside that surrounded the town. He knew which fields had boggy patches that needed to be avoided, which hedgerows could be slipped through with the least amount of effort, where there were nettles and where there weren’t.

  The fields opened up into ragged moorland as they neared the Men-an-Tol. Sweeps of heather, dried ferns, and prickly gorse spread out on all sides of them, but were soon lost to easy view as ragged mists rose up from the ground with the cooling of the night air.

  “Good weather for hummocks,” Peter whispered.

  “Don’t even mention anything to do with ghosts,” Denzil warned him.

  He was holding Ethy’s hand and could feel her trembling beside him at the very thought of some ethereal hummock rising up from the gorse to pluck at her clothing.

  They reached the holed stone just as the moon was peeking over the horizon, giving the mists an even ghostlier air. Photographs and etchings gave the tolmen a height and majesty that it didn’t have in real life. The circular stone came to just barely above Henkie’s waist, but the hole was large enough for even Peter to crawl through, and there remained an air of mystery and ancient riddles about it despite its small size. The rising mists added to its sense of otherworldly glamour.

  Shivering, they all gathered about the stone and looked at one another.

  “What do we do now?” Kara asked.

  “I have to go nine times through the hole in the stone,” Jodi piped.

  Her throat was getting sore again from constantly having to shout to be heard.

  “Do the rest of us do anything?” Peter asked as Lizzie stepped towards the stone with Jodi cupped in her hands.

  “Watch, I suppose,” Jodi said.

  “Should we make a circle of seawater around the stone to protect us from the witch’s creatures?” Henkie asked.

  “That would kill the vegetation,” Taupin said.

  “Who’s to mind?”

  “Maybe what we’re calling up from the stone?”

  “There’s that,” Henkie agreed.

  He set his oil lamp down on the ground at his feet and fingered the haft of his hammer.

  “Are you ready?” Lizzie asked Jodi.

  “What’s to do?” she replied, sounding cockier than Denzil knew she must be feeling.

  Lizzie passed her through the hole in the stone.

  “That’s one,” Henkie said.

  Nothing happened, except that the mists continued to deepen, hanging low to the moors, while the moon climbed steadily up in the sky. As Lizzie continued to pass Jodi through the hole in the Men-an-Tol, one voice, then another, joined Henkie’s counting until they were all counting with him.

  “Seven.”

  Denzil cocked his ear, thinking that he had heard something. He sensed something approaching, felt it deep in his bones. It wasn’t the Widow, or any of her creatures. It was more a sound. A strange sort of music, distant and eerie. Unfamiliar, but he felt as though he’d known it all his life.

  “Eight.”

  The music grew until he could begin to pick out the instruments. He could hear harping in it and fiddle, the hollow drumbeat of a crowdy crawn and a breathy flute. But there were no musicians, just the moor.

  He could tell that the others also heard it now as they lifted their heads and tried to peer through the mists that surrounded them. A faint light caught Denzil’s eye. He turned back to look at the tolmen where a glow like the last ember of a fire hovered in the center of the stone’s hole.

  Lizzie brought Jodi through the hole and around the outside of the stone again. As she started to put her through for the final time, the music swelled around them.

  “Nine,” Henkie breathed, his voice alone, the others all hushed.

  Light flared from the hole, piercing and bright. The music had risen to a crescendo with the flare, then faded to dying echoes as the light died, winked out, was gone.

  Henkie fumbled with a match, muttering to himself until he finally got his oil lamp lit. The lamp’s light cast a dim glow over the stone where Lizzie stood staring down at her empty palms.

  “She’s gone,” Lizzie said. “She simply vanished. . . .”

  With the light, Denzil thought. With the music.

  Deep in his chest he felt a pang of loss.

  “Jodi . . .” he whispered.

  Would he ever see her again?

  “Oh, bloody hell,” Henkie said.

  Denzil looked up to see what had agitated the artist this time and his own heart sank. Coming out of the mists on all sides of them were shambling man-shapes. A bog-reek was in the air, low and cloying. Cutting above it came the sharp scent of the sea: salt and brine; the smell of wet seaweed and rotting fish.

  Why did he have to be wrong again? Denzil asked.

  But wrong he was.

  For these were drowned men that encircled the stone, drowned men called up from the sea graves that marched across the moors and fields to confront them here in this place.

  The Widow could call up the sea dead.

  5.

  From the dark night on the moors outside Bodbury, the ninth passage through the stone’s hole plunged Jodi into a world of bright light.

  Daylight, she realized as her eyes adjusted to the glare.

  A sunny day.

  In a different world.

  Oh raw we. . . .

  She found herself to be the same tiny size she’d been in the other world. She was sitting in a bed of dried ferns and looking straight at the Men-an-Tol, which had either come with her to this world, or existed here as well. The sunlight gleamed on its stone.

  How could this be real?

  And that made her want to laugh‌—hysterically, perhaps, but laugh all the same. For here she’d just spent the better part of two days the size of a mouse and she was thinking that magical otherworlds were impossible?

  But still. . . .

  “Jodi.”

  She turned at the sound of that familiar voice to find a stranger facing her‌—but a stranger with eyes she knew, whose body, for all its physical unfamiliarity, stood in the same stance that someone else’s body had often stood, who stepped towards her with a step that was also familiar.

  And she had never seen him before in her life.

  He was small, just as she was, which made him exactly the right size, she supposed. His ears tapered to small points at their tops, small gold hoops in each lobe; his hair was curly and golden and also swi
rled up to form a bit of a point at the top of his head. His eyes were familiar, his face merry, his body slender in a shirt, jacket, and trousers of mottled moorland colours. He was barefoot.

  She knew him. She didn’t know him.

  “Edern . . . ?” she asked.

  The stranger nodded.

  “I’m grateful for your coming,” he said.

  Constant Billy

  The stories are always waiting, always listening for names; when they hear the names they’re listening for they swallow the people up.

  ‌—RUSSELL HOBAN, from The Medusa Frequency

  Janey wasn’t ready for more bad news, but that was what was waiting for her when she and Clare finally got back to the house on Duck Street.

  “I’m sorry, my fortune,” the Gaffer said. “I rang up Kit as you asked me to do and she told me she was about to call you herself. It’s about your American tour.”

  Janey could feel her heart sinking.

  “What about it?” she asked.

  “It’s been canceled.”

  “Canceled? But. . . ?”

  She looked to Felix for help, but found only sympathy.

  “Oh, Janey,” Clare said, laying a hand on her arm. “That’s awful.”

  “How can it be canceled?” Janey asked. “Did she say why?”

  The Gaffer shook his head. “She had no idea. She said she would look into it, but couldn’t expect to have any word back until tomorrow, it being Sunday and all. I’m sorry, my love. I know you were looking forward to it.”

  “It’s not just that. It. . .”

  First that odd message from the Rolling Stone reporter this morning about how his editor had canceled her participation in his article, and now this. It wasn’t coincidence. Someone was out to make her life as miserable as they possibly could. And now, after the talk she and Clare had had with Peter Goninan, she could make an educated guess as to who that someone was.

  “It’s Madden,” she said. “It’s that John Madden.”

  Clare nodded in slow agreement. “If what Mr. Goninan told us about him is true, then I think you’re right. He’s set upon getting the book from you and until you give it to him, he’s going to keep after you until you don’t feel you have any choice but to give it to him.”