The Little Country by Charles de Lint
“Why can’t you just tell me?”
“Because I don’t know.”
Goninan rose stiffly to his feet.
“I should go back,” he said. “It’s time for my medicine and Helen will have my hide if I’m much later.”
Janey and Clare rose with him.
“Why did we have to talk about all of this outside?” Clare asked as they walked back towards the cottage.
“As my totems are my birds,” Goninan replied. “So Madden’s lie in shadows—the shadows cast by man-made objects. He can see through them, hear through them, speak through them . . . perhaps even move through them. They give him his health; they feed on his magic.”
“Can’t your birds help you?” Janey asked.
“How so?”
“You know—to cure you.”
Goninan smiled. “Why should I ask them to? Dying is a part of living—a natural progression. Should I ignore the natural order of my life, twist it to my liking and thereby become something I was not meant to be?”
“That sounds so fatalistic—” She put her hand across her mouth the moment she spoke. “I’m sorry,” she added quickly. “I didn’t mean . . .”
“I know what you meant,” Goninan said. “You feel that such a way of living lacks free will.”
Janey nodded.
“You forget that I made the choice to live in such a way.”
There was nothing more that could be added to that. When they reached the cottage door, Helen was waiting for them, a frown vying with worry in her features.
“Thank you for your time,” Clare said.
“For everything,” Janey added.
Goninan nodded. “I enjoyed the chance to meet and talk with you both.”
“Peter,” Helen said. “You have to come in.”
She motioned for him to enter the cottage. Goninan gave Janey and Clare a wink.
“She’s ever so strict.”
“We won’t take any more of your time,” Janey said.
Goninan caught her arm before she could turn away.
“One more word of warning,” he said. “Madden has arrived in this country. I can feel his step on the land.”
“We’ll be careful,” Janey assured him.
“I hope you will be. Especially of what you say when shadows can hear you speak. Godspeed and good luck.”
Janey smiled. She looked at him, seeing the birdishness still in his stock-thin frame and his shining eyes, but seeing the illness now as well.
“You are leaving the world a better place,” she said.
Before he could reply she hurried off, leaving Clare to follow at a slower pace.
6.
“I guess you’re wondering how I tracked you down,” Bett said.
A thin smile touched his lips as he watched Davie Rowe. The big man stood as still as the stone outcrops that dotted the clifftop around them, his own gaze not meeting Bett’s, but fixed rather on the muzzle of the automatic that Bett held.
Christ, he was an ugly one, Bett thought. Killing him was doing the world a favour.
“I . . .” Rowe began.
Walking on the edge as he was, Bett felt he could see right down into the big man’s soul and taste the fear that cowered there. He knew there was no mercy in his own features. All Rowe would see in Bett’s eyes was his death. Old Mr. D., staring right back at him, a big death’s-head grin laughing in the face of the man’s terror.
Bett shrugged.
“Guess you’ll just have to take that question down to your grave,” he said.
And pulled the trigger.
The automatic’s report was loud in the still air. Rowe jerked back as the bullet punched his chest. He went tumbling from the path into the long couch grass at the lip of the cliff. Bett stepped closer, the muzzle of his revolver tracking the man’s fall for a second shot. His finger tightened on the trigger.
“Hey!”
Bett turned as sharply as though he’d been shot himself at the sound of the new voice. Coming around the corner where the Coastal Path dipped past an outcrop of rocks that had the appearance of a stone armchair was a young, blond-haired man in jeans and a wind-breaker, a small knapsack on his back.
Shit, Bett thought. Just what I needed. A hiker.
He ducked away into the undergrowth, worming his way deep into its thickets on his stomach, pulling himself along on his elbows.
“What is the matter here?” the stranger cried.
German, Bett realized from the accent. And he was no dummy.
The man had stopped near the stone armchair. Keeping a cautious distance, he peered in the direction where Bett had first disappeared into the thick vegetation. But Bett had already worked himself parallel to the path so that he was well away from the spot where he’d disappeared.
Bett smiled.
The man was no dummy, but he didn’t have a chance.
He wasn’t walking the edge.
The hiker took a few more tentative steps forward, pausing again to rake the landscape with his gaze. Bett ducked as the man’s gaze tracked past his own hiding place. He waited for a count of five, then crawled farther along the route he’d chosen, still parallel to the path, but above it now, for here the land rose steeply above the outcropping of rocks of which the stone armchair was a part.
When he chanced another look, it was to find himself behind and above the hiker who was now gingerly approaching the place where Davie Rowe had fallen. The stranger paused again before reaching the Coastguard lookout and called out once more.
Bett shoved the revolver back into his jacket pocket and rose as silently as a ghost from his hiding place. He crept forward and was about to jump down upon the stranger when the man turned and saw him.
Too late.
Bett landed like a cat beside him and gave him a shove. The hiker went over the edge of the path with a scream, pinwheeling his arms as he fell to the rocks some two hundred feet below. When Bett bent over the lip of the cliff to look down at him, all he could see was the hiker’s splayed figure lying still—a splash of colour against the grey. Waves lashed the rocks. The hiker didn’t move.
“You picked a bad time to drop by,” Bett said.
A shame, really. Walking along this treacherous path all by yourself. One misstep and—
Well, it was a long fall.
Dusting off the dirt from his clothes, he pulled out his revolver again and went over to where Rowe had fallen.
The body was gone.
Frowning, Bett looked over the edge of the cliff here, but there were no rocks below to catch the body. Just the sea, washing against the face of the cliff, ragged waves breaking into white foam as they hit the rocks. If the body had fallen all the way down, Bett knew that he wasn’t going to spot it now.
He crouched down and studied the place where Rowe had first dropped. Bett wasn’t any kind of a tracker—at least not outside the city. Hunting humans was a game he liked to play in a forest of steel and concrete. The only kind of tracking it involved was some detective work in picking a victim. Then it was just the stalk and, if he had time, a little knife work to see what made the sucker tick. If there wasn’t time, then the skinning knife could be used just as effectively for the kill.
Rowe had stolen his knife last night, but it wasn’t like Bett didn’t have another couple of blades stashed away in his luggage. But he hadn’t wanted to use the knife today. Rowe was just too big and Bett’s shoulder still hurt from their encounter the previous night. So he used the gun, but he didn’t like it.
It wasn’t personal enough. A gun didn’t let you get up close and see the life-light die.
But you made do.
When time was tight, you just made do with whatever came to hand. But you liked to have a chance to check out the results. You liked the opportunity to stand back and admire your own handiwork.
You liked to make sure the sucker was dead.
So he looked for clues as to what had happened to the body. He’d neve
He spent a few more moments, combing the undergrowth nearby, then put away his automatic once more and headed back towards the village.
Rowe had fallen over the edge and the sea had taken him. It was as simple as that.
And if last night’s failure hadn’t exactly been remedied yet, Bett had at least been compensated for it. Now it was time to get on with the rest of the day’s projects.
He still had a lot of other business to take care of before his work here was done. Next on the agenda was finding a nice out-of-the-way place, something with four walls that was remote, but not so remote that he couldn’t get away from it easily. And thinking back on his walk from Mousehole to where he’d run down Lena’s slimy little friend, Willie Keel, he thought he knew of just the place.
He’d go check it out now.
Staying on the edge.
Letting it all fall into place.
Doing it for himself, because if whatever it was that the Littles had stashed away was important enough for Madden to actually make the trip over here today, then it was worth Bett’s keeping it for himself. If he couldn’t figure it out, if he couldn’t get the girl or her grandfather to show him how it worked . . . well, he’d always liked puzzles.
He liked taking things apart just to see how they worked.
It was what he did best.
7.
Janey waited for Clare at the first stile. She leaned against the tumbled-down stone wall beside it, looking off into the woods on their left.
“Why did you run on ahead like that. . . ?” Clare began.
She broke off when she saw the tears glistening in Janey’s eyes.
“It’s just so sad,” Janey said. “He seems like such a dear old man and it’s so sad that he’s going to die.”
Clare nodded. “I know.”
“And what makes me feel worse,” Janey said, “is all those times I’ve seen him up on the cliffs and either laughed at the way he looked, or ran off scared. I could have known him all this time. . . .”
She looked about in her pockets for a handkerchief, then wiped her eyes on her sleeve. Clare dug about in her own pockets and came up with a tissue that Janey accepted with a nod of thanks. She blew her nose.
“He had such . . . odd things to say,” she said finally, still sniffling a bit.
“Very odd.”
“Did you believe him?”
Clare sighed. “I don’t know. Logically, I know that a lot of it can’t be true—not the bits about Gurdjieff or how you can use your will and that sort of thing. I’ve heard of all that before. But those other things. . . .”
“The real magic,” Janey said.
Clare nodded.
“There’s only one way to find out,” Janey said.
“Compare what you’ve read in the book to what Felix and your grandfather have read,” Clare said.
“Because,” Janey agreed, “if that’s true, then maybe the rest of it is, too.”
They started to walk slowly back to where they had left the car. The tailless cat wasn’t near the stream when they crossed over. The whole of their surroundings, fields and wood, seemed still, as though the land were holding its breath. Even the babble of the stream was muted.
“You know what Mr. Goninan didn’t talk about?” Janey said.
“What’s that?”
“Music. That’s part of the old legends as well, but it’s not something that got written down until during the last century or so. And it’s probably never been written down the way it really was. Every transcriber you hear about prettied it up, took the modal keys and fit them into minor ones—that kind of thing.”
“But it doesn’t pass on the same sorts of things that Mr. Goninan was telling us about,” Clare said.
“It just doesn’t teach it in words,” Janey replied. “But you can still find traces of it in things like old mummers’ plays and Morris dancing. The Hobby Horse Fool—he’s really the trickster. The antlered man—he’s Robin Hood. Not the storybook Robin Hood, but the Robin in the Wood. The Green Man.”
“I suppose.”
“No, really,” Janey said. “Think about it. We remember ancient rituals in mumming and dancing. It’s like Mr. Goninan said: We don’t forget anything.”
Clare nodded slowly. “We just forget why.”
“I really think that’s true. We go through the motions, and it stirs something in us and we feel good, but we don’t know why it does. I think that’s a real kind of magic—how nothing is ever really lost. Just hidden.”
She smiled. “That’s what draws us to the old tunes, I think. That’s why we always want to learn as many as we can and why they’ve survived for as long as they have the way they are. Not the tunes in books, but the ones we get from memory, the ones we learn from the living tradition. And that’s why we don’t change them. We do new twiddles here, and arrange them with any number of modern instruments, but the bones of the tunes, the heart of the music—we keep it the same.”
When they reached the car, she leaned on its hood and looked back the way they’d come. The sadness came back to her, riding an intangible breeze that washed through her without touching a hair on her head. It went to the heart, ignoring secular concerns. It wasn’t the ache she’d felt last night when she’d thought that Felix had betrayed her, but a gentle sadness, like the breath expended into the mouthpiece of a whistle as it called up the bittersweet notes of a slow air.
Her fingers itched for an instrument, but there was none at hand. And this was neither the time nor the place. They had so much still to do. But she still wished she could play a music, something that would carry across the fields to the cottage where Peter Goninan nested with his bird totems and niece, something that he would hear and know by it that she had understood what he’d been trying to tell them. Understood not with her mind, but with her heart. She wanted to show her gratitude to him and knew that the best thanks the old man would ever ask for was the knowledge of that understanding.
She hoped there’d be time to come back.
She glanced at Clare, wanting to share the feeling with her, but Clare, she believed, for all her interest in the old tunes, didn’t see them, didn’t feel them in the same way.
But Felix would understand. She’d bring him to meet Peter Goninan, she decided. The two of them would get along famously. If they all only lived long enough. . . .
Sighing, she got into the car where Clare was already waiting.
“Felix would like that old man,” she said as she started up the Reliant.
Clare nodded. “In a way, they’re of a kind.”
Maybe she’d been wrong, Janey thought. Maybe Clare did understand.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“They both follow the road that their own hearts tell them to follow and give never a mind to what the rest of the world thinks about it.”
“I never thought of it like that.”
The track was too narrow to turn around in, so Janey carefully backed the car out onto the lane. Shifting into first, she set off for home at a far more sedate pace than they had left at earlier that day.
“I wanted to talk to you about Felix,” Clare said.
“I think we’ll be okay,” Janey said. “I’m going to try really hard to make it work.”
“I know you will. It’s just that—”
She broke off and looked out through the side window at the hedges blurring past.
“Just what?” Janey prompted her.
“It’s something he should probably tell you himself, but knowing him, he’ll never get around to it. And it’s important.”
Janey’s heart sank. What was she going to learn now?
“It’s about how you want Felix to play with you on stage.”
Janey’s relief came as suddenly as her worry had.
“I won’t push him,” she said. “I think I’ve learned my lesson about trying to do that. If he doesn’t want to, then he doesn’t want to.”
“That’s good. Not that it’s my business, really. . . .”
Janey laughed. “We’re all mates, Clare. And we’ve always appreciated the way you’ve made us your business.”
“That’s nice to know,” Clare said.
Janey heard a wistfulness in her friend’s voice, but before she could think of a way to ask what was bothering her, Clare was speaking again.
“But I think it’s important that you know why he won’t do it.”
“I know why,” Janey said. “He just doesn’t like it.”
Clare shook her head. “He’s scared to death of the idea.”
All Janey could do was laugh at the very notion.
“Scared?” she said. “That big lug? I doubt he’s scared of anything. And besides, I’ve seen him play in front of people a thousand times. At sessions, on street corners, backstage at festivals. . . .”
“But not on stage.”
“No,” Janey agreed. “Not on stage. Still, what’s the difference?”
“I don’t know. But I’ve been reading up on phobias since he first told me about this a few days ago, and while there’s usually some hidden root to the problem that can be dealt with, very often there simply is no reasonable answer. What he suffers from is called topophobia—stage fright.”
“But—”
“I know what you’re going to say: Why doesn’t he just deal with it? Get on stage a few times and simply work through his problem.”
Janey nodded. “Well, isn’t that how you deal with that kind of thing?”
“Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be that simple. What happens is a panic syndrome sets in and if you’ve ever had a panic attack, you’ll know it’s not fun.”
“I guess. . . .”
“I can still remember that last operation I had for my leg,” Clare said. “I was panicking so badly—and it’s a horrible feeling—that I fainted before they could give me the anesthetic.”
“Saved them having to give it to you, I suppose.”
Clare shook her head. “No, they can’t do that. It’s too dangerous. Your heartbeat and blood pressure go all irregular and none of their equipment can monitor you properly. They had to bring me around again first, and then give me the needle.”