The Little Country by Charles de Lint
For this kind of a thing, all you needed was patience.
And Grimes had that in spades.
11.
Dinny Boyd arrived at the Gaffer’s house to find no one home. The front door was locked, and though he rang the bell a number of times, there was no reply. His pulse quickened as he tried peering in through the lace-curtained window above the door, but he couldn’t make out very much.
It wasn’t like Tom Little to say one thing, then do another. If the Gaffer planned to meet a body somewhere, then he would be there for that meeting.
Unless he’d run into trouble.
There was something decidedly odd going on—Dinny had no doubt about that. This business with the farm and then the things that Janey had told him earlier this afternoon . . .
He went around back, his pulse quickening still more as he took in the state of the kitchen door.
Someone had broken in.
He stepped nervously inside, stilling his first impulse to call out.
What if whoever had done this was still inside?
There were dirty dishes piled up near the sink. Taking a bread knife from where it lay on the counter, he moved cautiously into the living room. A thorough search of the house let him know that he was alone in it.
Janey, Clare, and Felix were gone.
And so was the Gaffer.
Then the phone rang.
Dinny went back into the living room.
That’d be one of them ringing up to explain matters, he thought as he picked up the receiver. But he couldn’t still the prickle of uneasiness that had lodged in between his shoulder blades—an uneasiness that only increased when he answered the phone.
“Hello?”
“Who’s this?” an unfamiliar voice asked. The accent wasn’t quite American.
“Dinny Boyd.”
“Sorry. Wrong number.”
The line went dead.
Dinny slowly cradled the receiver. He looked around the room again, searching for some clue as to what was up. His gaze settled on a piece of folded paper that was propped up on the mantel. He crossed the room, read the note, then returned to the phone.
“Dad?” he said when the connection was made. “I think you’d better meet me at the Gaffer’s.”
“What’s the matter, then, Dinny?”
“I’ll explain when you get here. Bring Sean or Uncle Pat with you, just don’t leave Mum and Bridget alone.”
He went to the front door and unlocked it, standing on the Gaffer’s small stoop while he waited for his father to come. The early evening lay quietly upon the village, giving no indication of the danger Dinny could feel closing in on him, his family, and his friends.
Kick the World Before You
I seem to be a verb.
—attributed to
BUCKMINSTER FULLER
Bodbury seemed a strange and furious place to Jodi when the Widow’s fetch carried her through it.
The wind howled and leapt through the narrow streets in a hundred different directions at once, whirling and spinning like a mad pack of dervishes. It crept in between the glass panes and metal frames of the gaslit street lamps, blowing out the flames, making the dark streets darker still. Litter danced and tumbled in its wake. Shutters rattled. Red clay shingles were torn from the rooftops to shatter on the cobblestones. Windows were blown open, curtains billowing inward until the owners of the houses had a chance to shut them again.
The fetch chittered happily to itself as it scampered down the steep streets towards the harbour, careening from side to side to keep its balance as the wind buffeted it. The creature seemed utterly in its element, its fearsome mouth split from ear to ear in a grin as it ran.
When they reached Peter Street, Jodi shrieked as loud as she could in the hope that she’d been wrong about those new longstones out on the moor near the Men-an-Tol. Surely they weren’t her friends, enchanted by the Widow the way that legend told that the wicked young women who danced on a Sunday had been changed into the Merry Maidens or Boskednan stone circles in times long past and gone.
The fetch paused to look up as the window to Denzil’s loft rattled and then flew open. Jodi’s heart lifted high with hope at the thought of rescue, then plummeted again when she saw it was only Ollie, peering curiously out into the stormy night from the windowsill. Denzil’s monkey clung to the curtains as the wind tried to blow him from his perch. Jodi opened her mouth to call again, but then Windle hissed and she realized that while Ollie could easily swing down from the upper story to the street, she doubted that he was any match for the Widow’s fetch.
She kept silent, allowing the fetch to bear her off down to the harbour. Ollie remained behind on the windowsill, playing tug-of-war with the wind as he tried to close the window once more. The last view Jodi had of the monkey, before the fetch bore her around a corner, was of him hanging from the window as it was swept back and forth by the battering wind.
Now they were nearing the waterfront. The waves lashed up against the shore, spraying in enormous white spumes as they struck the wood and stone of the piers. By New Dock, fishermen were struggling with their luggers and boats—to little avail. Jodi saw that some of the boats were already wrecked; others were breaking free to smash against the stone quay.
And then there was the Widow.
She stood well back from the washing spray of the seawater, a tall forbidding figure in a dark mantle with eyes that seemed to glow with their own inner light. On either side of her, shadowy sloch capered and flittered in the wind. Between where she stood and the wild sea itself were rank upon rank of drowned men—corpses dragged up from their sea graves to serve her. They paid no mind to the battering waves that lashed them. Seawater streamed from their limp hair, their tattered rags and the seaweed that clung to their limbs.
It was all some horrible nightmare, Jodi prayed. Please let that be what this was. Don’t let it be real.
But the grip of the fetch’s bony fingers was too solid to be a dream; the storm too wild. The Widow too imposing. The sloch and sea dead . . .
Yammering happily to itself in its high grating voice, Windle bore her forward and presented her to the Widow. Jodi shivered as the Widow’s cold fingers closed around her and took her from Windle’s grip. She lifted Jodi to the level of her eyes.
The fires in them burned like hot coals and Jodi remembered Edern’s warning.
Don’t look into her eyes.
The memory came too late. Jodi tried to look away, to block the crackle of power that leapt from the Widow’s gaze into her own eyes, but the Widow’s witcheries tore down the feeble walls Jodi tried to raise and easily entered her mind.
The fingers squeezed painfully, rubbing Jodi’s ribs against one another. It was growing impossible to breathe.
No, Jodi realized mournfully. It wasn’t a dream.
It was all too real.
The Widow’s witcheries stirred about in Jodi’s mind as though they were a ladle, her mind a cauldron. Jodi’s memories churned and roiled in confusion until, as though from a great distance, she heard a vague rhythmic sound.
Dhumm-dum.
“You’ve led me a pretty chase,” the Widow was saying, “but now you’re mine, you miserable little wretch.”
Her eyes glittered with promises of the torments she had in store for her diminutive captive.
But Jodi was beyond fear now. The Widow’s witcheries had called up a trace of that sense of unity that Jodi had shared with the Barrow World, a sliver of memory that had still remained lodged inside her. It echoed to her heartbeat—
Dhumm-dum. Dhumm-dum.
—and distanced her from the moment at hand. It took her past her terror into a place where a numbness spread throughout her limbs, separating her from her body and the pain that the Widow was inflicting upon it until she could look on what was happening to her and the town with the dispassionate gaze of a simple observer.
She was still aware of her danger, still afraid. But the part
Yesterday the Widow had been hard put to raise a few miniature shambling sloch and send them after one clockwork man and Jodi herself. And failed. But today . . . today her sloch were tall and moved like quicksilver, the sea dead answered her call, and she seemed to rule the elements.
How had she become so powerful?
“I want the secret,” the Widow went on. “You will give me the secret to the Barrow World.”
Jodi merely looked at her, thinking, what secret? It lay all around them, separated only by an invisible boundary of onion-layered thickness. With her sympathy to the Barrow World still thrumming powerfully inside her—
Dhumm-dum.
—Jodi could almost see that otherworld superimposed over the storm-wracked view in front of her. It was that close.
“Each time you refuse,” the Widow said, “I’ll pluck a limb from your body. I’ll keep you alive until you’re nothing more than a bodiless head, pleading for death. And don’t think you can trick me. I can smell the stink of a lie.”
The pressure of the Widow’s witcheries in Jodi’s mind was like a dull, throbbing headache.
“Lie . . . ?” Jodi asked.
Her voice was still hoarse from when she’d cried for help on the mad journey from the Men-an-Tol to Bodbury in the fetch’s grip.
Lie, she thought dreamily. She would like to lie down if she could.
For everything had become increasingly bewildering. It was as though she were here, but not here. Viewing a droll from the safe anonymity of an audience, rather than from the stage itself. The world about her was now a surreal blending of two worlds—on one hand, the storm-tossed bay at Bodbury’s harbour; on the other, the clear, still water of the Barrow World.
The night here with its thunder and shocks of lightning set against the Barrow World’s bright blue skies. The Widow, her monstrous sea dead and sloch and the struggling fishermen compared to a strange array of the Barrow World’s creatures who had gathered near the shore of their own world—mermaids and piskies; a man with a raven’s head, another with a stag’s antlers sprouting from his brow; creatures that appeared to be small trees that had pulled their roots from the ground and gone walking; a woman with a round face like the moon, whose hair was green, whose eyes were golden, whose hips disappeared into the shoulders of a grey-backed horse so that the two disparate segments were a part of the same body. . . .
In this world, the Widow and her creatures threatened; in that world, the folk were listening to that music—
Dhumm-dum. Dhumm-dum.
—that echoed inside Jodi.
“You will tell me,” the Widow said.
Her voice seemed to come from very far away—a vague murmuring sound against the deep richness of the first music.
“Tell you . . . ?” Jodi asked dreamily.
She saw that Bodbury’s fishermen had given up their struggle with the sea and were gaping openmouthed at the Widow and her creatures. One or two, more attuned to secrets and hidden things than their fellows, were pointing at cottages and buildings that flickered, were replaced by the green swards of the Barrow World, only to blur and disappear again.
Dhumm-dum.
And now Jodi saw more than a blurring blend of the two worlds. She saw the past and present mingled: Old Bodbury mixed with the new. All was changed—the same but different. There were fewer buildings in the town, there were more. New Dock existed; it was gone as though it had never been. The ruin of the Old Quay appeared as it had been in its former heyday; echo of her heartbeat, the drum of her pulse, the heartbeat of the town, of the bay, or the moorland that lay beyond. . . .
Dhumm-dum.
Jodi felt herself expanding to become a part of it all, of both worlds, of the past and of the present, drifting further and further away from the moment at hand, from its danger, from the Widow and her creatures. . . .
Dhumm-dum.
The Widow shook Jodi until her teeth were rattling in her head.
“Tell me!” the Widow cried.
The shaking brought Jodi somewhat back to earth. She stared deep into the fires that lay at the back of the Widow’s eyes and was surprised to find that all her fear of the woman had gone. The pressure of the Widow’s witcheries was gone from her mind.
“I can’t tell you,” she said.
The Widow’s eyes glittered dangerously.
“I can only show you . . .” Jodi said.
Something sparked between their locked gazes—a fire more ancient than anger.
And then the Widow was drawn into seeing the world as Jodi perceived it; hearing the heartbeat rhythm:
Dhumm-dum.
Two worlds flickering between each other, past and present mingling.
In one moment she knew all that Jodi had ever been. And Jodi knew her. Jodi met Hedra Scorce—the girl the Widow had been before she’d lost her innocence, before she’d changed. Jodi saw Hedra’s life unfold, heard the whisper of the shadows that had turned the Widow from what she’d been into who she was now.
Those awful shadows who approached so eagerly now. Not the capering figures of the sloch that surrounded the Widow, but older shadows: the dark voices that whispered to every man’s and woman’s heart, that fed on jealousy and anger and hatred.
“I’m so sorry,” Jodi said.
And she was. Tears welled in her eyes and spilled down her cheeks.
“No,” the Widow said in a small voice.
The winds had died. Above, the sky was still dark with clouds, but the lightning had ceased, the thunder was silenced, the rain still held back.
The sea dead shambled back towards the sea. The capering oversized sloch that the Widow had made from bog and shadow and parts of herself collapsed in upon themselves into heaps of putrefied mud and rotting vegetation.
The Widow fell to her knees.
Dark things crept from the sides of the buildings and walls where the night lay thickest. Old shadows. Evil things.
A witch cannot cry, Jodi thought. And she knew why. Tears, with their salt content, were anathema to them. It made sense that a witch would lay a spell on herself, some form of a defense mechanism to ensure that she physically could not weep.
But the Widow was no longer just herself now. A part of her was Jodi Shepherd; a part of her was Hedra Scorce, the innocent child that she had once been. That part of her wept at the knowledge of what she had become.
Tears welled in her eyes, blinding her. They ran like lava down her cheeks, stripping the skin to the bone. Her flesh smoldered and filled the air with an awful reek. On her knees, the Widow bowed her head until her brow rested against the cobblestones. The muscles of her hands went limp and Jodi slipped free.
Jodi backed away from the Widow, but couldn’t go far. The old shadows that had ringed the Widow completely blocked her escape. They whispered and snickered among themselves. Their greedy eyes drank in the Widow’s pain, her defeat. Forgotten for now was the Barrow World and its secret gate. Sweeter by far was the immediate moment.
The Widow whimpered. Her fetch stroked at her hair and made mewling sounds.
The tears continued to burn from the Widow’s eyes. Her skin smoked. She opened her mouth to scream, but the tears ran down her throat and only smoke issued forth. Her throat worked involuntarily and now she burned from the inside as well as the out.
The shadows tittered.
“Fight them!” Jodi cried.
She didn’t think it at all odd that her sympathy lay now with her former enemy, for when the first music had taken her through the Widow’s history, Jodi had understood that the blame lay not wholly with the Widow herself. The Widow had been weak, she had listened to the evil whispering of the shadows and allowed her own disappointment and sorrow to blind her to the wrongness of what she did, but it was the shadows themselve
Their incessant whispering.
How they trapped those whose despair and weakness left them susceptible to the endless chattering of their voices.
And their false promises. . . .
Jodi could hear them as she stood there watching the Widow die; their whispering battered against her mind. It crept in under her thoughts, tempting her with a dark power. No longer need she be victim to any other, they told her. Hers would be the mastery. Hers the control. Let others beware her. . . .
But Jodi could ignore their voices. She could push them aside. Not because she was stronger than the Widow had been when her name was still Hedra Scorce, and not because she was necessarily a better person, but because she had the first music thrumming inside her.
Dhumm-dum. Dhumm-dum.
Its rhythm showed the whispers to be the lies they were. In its harmony there was no room for their untruth. They brought only pain and suffering while the first music healed.
“Listen to it,” Jodi told the Widow.
She knew the Widow could hear the music—it was there inside her the same way that the Widow’s memories were in Jodi.
“Let the music heal you,” she added.
The Widow lifted her head to look in Jodi’s direction. Her ruined features made Jodi’s stomach churn. Bone showed through the flesh. Skin hung in tattered strips from cheeks and chin. The blind eyes fixed sightlessly on her.
For one moment Jodi saw another face there—that of Hedra Scorce, the sweet and gentle face of an innocent child—then the ruined mask returned.
“It . . . is . . . too . . . late . . .” the Widow said.
Her voice was a rasping croak. More tears streamed from her eyes as she spoke, burning their way through her flesh.
“Try!” Jodi cried. “Oh, please try!”
“I . . . can’t. . . .”
The shadows tittered with great good humour as the Widow collapsed on the cobblestones again. Smoke wreathed from her flesh. Her fetch howled and threw itself upon her as an unearthly blue-green fire flared up, consuming them both.