Little, Big

by John Crowley

  “I went over to the fire. I picked up the shovel. I dug up a whole lotta hot stuff from deep inside the fire. I showed it: mmm mmm good. Follow me, follow me. Okay, it wants to play this game, hot chestnuts, very hot chestnuts, come on, come on, we went out and up the stairs, it keeps reaching for the shovel; uh-uh, no no, I keep leading it on.

  “Now listen, man. I don’t know if I was crazy or what. All I knew was that this thing was evil: I mean not evil evil, because I don’t think it was anything, I mean it was like a doll or a puppet or a machine, but moving on its own, like awful things in dreams that you know aren’t alive, piles of old clothes or mounds of grease that suddenly get up and start threatening you, okay? Dead, but moving. Animated. But evil, I mean an awful evil thing to have in the world. All I could think of was: get rid of it. Lilac or no Lilac. Just. Get. Rid of it.

  “So anyway it’s following me. And up on the third floor across from the library is my, you know, my studio. Okay? Get the picture? The door is closed, of course; I closed it when I came down, always did, can’t be too careful. So I’m fumbling with it, and the thing is looking at me with these eyes that weren’t eyes, and oh shit any minute now it’s going to figure out the scam. I shove the shovel under it’s nose. The damn door won’t open, won’t open, then it does—and—”

  With a mighty imaginary gesture, George heaved the shovelful of live coals into the studio filled with charged fireworks. Auberon held his breath.

  “And then for the kid—”

  With a swift, careful kick, side of the foot, George propelled the false Lilac into the studio also.

  “And then the door!” He flung shut the door, staring at Auberon with the same wild horror and hurry that must have been in his eyes that night. “So done! Done! I flew down the stairs. ‘Sophie! Sophie! Run!’ She’s still sitting in that chair—right there—paralyzed. So I picked her up—not exactly carried her, but like a bum’s rush, because I can already hear the noises upstairs—and get her out into the hall. Bang! Blooey! Out the front door.

  “And we stood out there in the rain, man, just looking up. Or anyway I looked up, she just sort of hid her head. And out the studio windows comes my whole show. Stars. Rockets. Magnesium, phosphorus, sulfur. Light for days. Noise. Stuff is falling all around us, hissing in the puddles. Then blowey! Some big cache goes up, and puts a hole right through the roof. Smoke and stars, boy we lit up the neighborhood. But the rain had got a lot worse; and pretty soon it was out, about the time the cops and the fire-trucks got there.

  “Well, I had the studio pretty well reinforced, you know, steel door and asbestos and stuff, so the building didn’t go. But by God if there was anything left of that kid, or whatever it was …”

  “And Sophie?” Auberon said.

  “Sophie,” George said. “I told her: ‘Listen, it’s all right. I got it.’

  “ ‘What?’ she says. ‘What?’

  “ ‘I got it,’ I said. ‘I blew it up,’ I said. ‘Nothing left of it.’ “And hey: do you know what she said to me?” Auberon could not say.

  “She looked up at me—and man I don’t think anything I saw that night was as bad as her face just then—and she said: ‘You killed her.’

  “That’s what she said. ‘You killed her.’ That’s all.”

  George sat down, weary, depleted, at the kitchen table. “Killed her,” he said. “That’s what Sophie thought, that I’d killed her only child. Maybe that’s what she still thinks, I don’t know. That old George killed her only child, and his too. Blew her up, in stars and stripes forever.” He looked down. “Man, I don’t want to see somebody look at me the way she did that night, not ever again.”

  “What a story,” Auberon said, when he could find his voice again.

  “See, if,” George said. “If it was Lilac, but just transformed in some weird way …”

  “But she knew,” Auberon said. “She knew it wasn’t really Lilac.”

  “Did she?” George said. “Who knows what the hell she knew.” A dark silence rose. “Women. How do you figure ‘em.”

  “But,” Auberon said, “what I don’t understand is, why they would have brought her that thing in the first place. I mean if it was such a fake.”

  George eyed him suspiciously. “What ‘they’ is this?” he asked.

  Auberon looked away from his cousin’s inquiry. “Well, they,” he said, surprised and oddly embarrassed that this explanation was coming out of his mouth. “The ones who stole the real one.”

  “Hm,” George said.

  Auberon said nothing further, having nothing further to say on that head, and seeing quite plainly and for the first time in his life just why silence had been kept so well among those whom he had used to spy on. Having them for explanation felt in fact like having none at all, and he found himself now, willy-nilly, sworn to the same silence; and yet he thought he would not ever again be able to explain a single thing in the world without recourse to that collective pronoun: they. Them.

  “Well, anyway,” he said at last. “That accounts for two.”

  George raised his eyebrow in question.

  “Two Lilacs,” Auberon said. He counted them off: “Of the three I thought there were, one was imaginary, mine, and I know where she is.” In fact he felt her, deep within, take notice of his mention of her. “One was false. That’s the one you blew up.”

  “But if,” George said, “if that was the real one, only Somehow changed … Naaah.”

  “No,” said Auberon. “That’s the one that’s left, the one that’s unaccounted for: the true one.” He looked out the casement at the gloaming which was stealing now over Old Law Farm as well as over the high towers of the City. “I wonder,” he said.

  “I wonder …” George said. “I’d give a lot to know.”

  “Where,” Auberon said. “Where, where.”

  Thinking of Waking

  Far, far, and dreaming: turning in her sleep, restless, and thinking of waking, though she would not wake yet for many a year; an itch in her nose, and a yawn in her throat. She even blinked, but saw nothing through sleeping eyes but dream: a dream, amid the spring she slept in, of autumn: of the gray vale where, on the day of her tour, the stork that bore her and Mrs. Underhill had at last put its feet on terra firma or something like it, and how Mrs. Underhill had sighed and dismounted, and how she, Lilac, had reached out to put her arms around Mrs. Underhill’s neck and be helped down…. She yawned; having learned how to do it, she was now apparently unable to stop, and couldn’t decide whether she liked the sensation or not.

  “Sleepy,” Mrs. Underhill said.

  “Where is this?” Lilac said when she had been set on her feet.

  “Oh, a place,” Mrs. Underhill said softly. “Come along.”

  A broken arch, roughly carved, or finely carved and roughly weathered, stood before them; no walls extended from it, it stood alone astride the leaf-littered path showing the only way into the sere November wood beyond. Lilac, apprehensive yet resigned now, put her young small hand in Mrs. Underhill’s old huge one, and like any granny and child in a chill park from which summer and fun have fled, they went on to the gate; the stork stood alone on one red leg, preening her rumpled and disordered feathers.

  They passed under the arch. Old birds’ nests and moss filled its coffers and reliefs. The carving was obscure, creatures inchoate or returning to chaos. Lilac passed her hand over it as they passed: the stuff it was made of was not stone. Glass? Lilac wondered. Bone?

  “Horn,” said Mrs. Underhill. She took off one of her many cloaks, and dressed Lilac’s nakedness in it. Lilac kicked the brown leaves of the vale, thinking it might be nice to lie down in them, for a long time.

  “Well, a long day,” said Mrs. Underhill, as though sensing this thought.

  “It went too fast,” Lilac said.

  Mrs. Underhill put her arm around Lilac’s shoulder. Lilac stumbled against her, her feet seeming to have lost contact with her will. She yawned again. “Aw,” said Mrs. Underhill tender
ly, and she picked up Lilac with a single swift motion of her strong arms. She drew the cloak more tightly around her as Lilac nestled against her. “And was it fun?” she asked.

  “It was fun,” Lilac said.

  They had stopped before a great oak at whose foot a whole summer’s worth of leaves was piled. From a hollow in it an owl, just awakened, boomed softly to itself. Mrs. Underhill bent to lay her burden in the rustling leaves.

  “Dream of it,” she said.

  Lilac said something that made no sense, about clouds and houses, and then no more, for she was asleep. Asleep, never having noticed the moment when she began, dreaming of it already as she would go on dreaming of it from now on; dreaming of all that she had seen, and all that would come of it; dreaming of the spring when she would dream of the autumn when she fell asleep, and dreaming of the winter when she would wake; in the involution of her dream, turning and altering those things she dreamed even as she dreamed them and as elsewhere they came to pass. She drew up, though unaware she did so, her knees; she drew her hands close to her chin, which drew down, till she took the same S-shape she had taken when she had lived within Sophie. Lilac was asleep.

  Mrs. Underhill tucked the cloak once more carefully around her, and then straightened up. With both hands she pressed the small of her back and bent backwards, as weary as she had ever been. She pointed to the owl, whose soft-blooming eyes were looking out from its house, and said, “You. Take care, watch well,” which those eyes could do as well as any pair she knew. She looked upward. Twilight, even the endless twilight of this November day, had nearly ended, and she with all her tasks left undone: the last of the year still unburied, and the rains that were to bury it (and a million insect larvae, a million bulbs and seeds) yet unpoured; the floor of heaven unswept of dirty cloud and its winter lamps still to be lit. Brother North-wind, she was sure, champed at his bit to be unleashed. It was a wonder, she thought, that day followed night, that the very earth turned at all, she had given it so little thought of late. She sighed, turned away, and (growing huger and older and more puissant than Lilac had ever supposed, or could imagine or even dream her to be) she expanded upward and outward toward these tasks without a backward look at her adopted grand-daughter asleep among the leaves.

  BOOK SIX: THE FAIRIES’ PARLIAMENT

  CHAPTER ONE

  High on the hilltop

  The old King sits;

  He is now so old and gray

  He’s nigh lost his wits.

  —Allingham, The Fairies

  The first years after what Russell Eigenblick thought of as his accession were the hardest anyone then alive would live to see—so it would seem to them, looking back. Sudden snowstorms raged on the November day when against token opposition he was elected President, and seemed scarcely to abate thereafter. It could not have been always winter in those years, summer must have come around duly as ever, yet universally people remembered winters: the longest, coldest, deepest winters ever known; one continuous winter. Every hardship the Tyrant regretfully imposed or his opponents wilfully inflicted in their uprisings against him was made worse by winter, by months of frozen mud and sleety rain that continually mired every enterprise. Winter made ghastly and hopeless the movements of trucks, traffic, brown-clad troops; everywhere, deeply marking the memory, were the huddled clots and queues of refugees, rag-bound against the cold; the stalled trains, grounded planes; the new frontiers at which lines of slush-bound cars, tailpipes breathing cold clouds, waited to be examined by muffled guards; the shortages of everything, the awful struggle, the difficulties and uncertainties made more awful by the isolating endless cold. And the blood of martyrs and reactionaries frozen on the dirty snow of city squares.

  At Edgewood, the old house submitted to indignities: antique plumbing froze; a whole floor was closed up, cold dust collecting in its disused rooms; glum black stoves were set to squat in front of marble fireplaces; and, worst, sheets of plastic for the first time were stapled up over dozens of windows, making every day a foggy day. One night, Smoky, hearing noises in the wilderness of the kitchen-garden, went out and surprised with his flashlight a starveling, an animal long, gray, red-eyed and slavering, mad with cold and hunger. A stray dog, the others said, or something; but only Smoky had seen it, and Smoky wondered.

  Winters

  There was a pan of water on the stove which sat in the old music room, to help keep the plaster of the ceiling from cracking further from the dryness. A big wooden box roughly carpentered by Smoky held logs to feed the stove, and the two together, stove and woodbox, gave a Klondike air to the pretty room. Rudy Flood had cut the logs, and been felled himself doing so; had pitched face forward, chain saw still gripped in his hands, dead before he struck the ground, which (so Robin said, who was much changed by witnessing it) shook when he met it. Sophie, whenever she rose from her place at the drum-table to feed the insatiable Moloch, had an unpleasant or at least odd sensation that it was pieces of Rudy and not of his woodlot that she thrust into its maw.

  Fifty-Two

  Work consumed men. It hadn’t been so in Sophie’s youth. Not only Robin, but Sonny Noon and many others who in the old expansive days might have given up the farms their parents had worked, now drew in, thinking that if they had not these acres, and this labor, they’d have nothing. Rudy had after all been an exception; the older generation’s experience had mostly been with endless possibility, sudden change for the better, vistas of freedom and ease. The younger saw things differently. Their motto was, perforce had to be, the old one about Use it up, wear it out and so on. That applied all around: doing his part, Smoky had decided that rents would be reduced or in abeyance indefinitely. And the house showed it: it was, or seemed to be, wearing out. Sophie, pulling her thick shawl more closely around her, looked up at the skeleton’s hand and arm drawn in cracks across the ceiling, and then returned to her cards.

  Being used up, worn out, and not replaced. Could that be it? She looked at the fall she had made.

  Nora Cloud had left Sophie not only her cards, but her sense that every fall made with them was Somehow contiguous with every other, that they made only one geography, or told only one story, though it could be read or viewed differently to different purposes, which made it seem discontinuous. Sophie, taking up Cloud’s view at the point where she had left it, had taken it further: if it were all one thing, then one question continually proposed to it should come eventually to have a whole answer, however lengthy and encyclopaedic; should come to have the whole thing for an answer. If only she could concentrate hard enough, continue to formulate the question properly and with the right variations and qualifications, and not be distracted by the shadow answers to unasked small questions which lurked within the falls—yes, Smoky’s angina will worsen, Lily’s baby will be a boy—then perhaps she could reach it.

  The question she had was not exactly the one that Ariel Hawksquill had come to have answered, though that lady’s sudden appearance and importunity had jolted Sophie into beginning to try and ask it. Hawksquill had had no trouble locating in the cards the huge events that had lately been taking place in the world, and the reasons for them, and her own part in them too, cutting them from the trivia and puzzlements like a surgeon finding and excising a tumor. Sophie’s difficulty in doing such a thing had been that, ever since her search for Lilac, question and answer with these cards had seemed to her to be one; all answers seemed to her to be only questions about the question, every question only a form of the answer it sought. Hawksquill’s long training had allowed her to overcome this difficulty, and any Gypsy fortune-teller could have explained to Sophie how to ignore it or evade it: but perhaps if one had, Sophie wouldn’t have struggled so with the question, through years, through long winters, and would not now be as close as she felt herself to be to a sort of great dictionary or guidebook or almanac of answers to her (strictly speaking unaskable) single question.

  Being used up, one by one, and not being replaced; dying, in fact, though they coul
dn’t die, or anyway Sophie had always supposed they couldn’t, she didn’t know why…. Could it be so? Or was it just a winter thought in a time of hardship and shortage?

  Cloud had said: it only seems as though the world is getting old and worn out, just as you are yourself. Its life is far too long for you to feel it age during your own. What you learn as you get older is that the world is old, and has been old for a long time.

  Well: all right. But what Sophie felt to be aging wasn’t a world, but only its inhabitants: if there were such a thing as a world which they inhabited, distinct from them, which Sophie couldn’t imagine really—but anyway, suppose there was such a world, old or young didn’t matter, what Sophie knew for sure was that however densely populated those lands may have been in Dr. Bramble’s time or in Paracelsus’s, they weren’t populated at all any longer in any large sense, Sophie thought it would be possible eventually—soon!—if not to name at least to number all of them, and that the total number wouldn’t be a large one; two digits only, possibly, probably. Which (since everyone without exception quoted in the Architecture, and everyone else for that matter who had considered the question at all, supposed there to be uncounted milliards of them, one for every harebell and thorn-bush at least) might mean that Somehow lately they were being one by one consumed, like the split muscled logs Sophie fed into the fire, or worn down to ravelings by grief and care and age, and blown away.

  Or reduced by war. War was what Ariel Hawksquill had determined to be the relation at work, the thing that had made the world or this Tale (if there was a difference) turn so sad and puzzling and uncertain. Like all wars, an unchosen thing, however inevitable, with awful losses on their side at least, Sophie couldn’t imagine what losses they might themselves have inflicted, or how … War: could it be then that all that remained of them was one last forlorn hope, a brave band caught in a desperate rearguard action and going down to the last man?