The Little Country by Charles de Lint
Turning right from the front door, the stone patio went through a small archway to a smaller courtyard. Directly facing the arch was the entrance to the cellar where the Gaffer kept the freezers for his fish. Turning right again, one could see a narrow set of stairs that led up to where Janey lived.
She had two rooms.
The outer one had the bathroom directly in front of the door as you came in, and two windows, one looking back into the courtyard, the other overlooking the Gaffer’s tiny square of lawn in back of his cottage, which was hedged with blackberry bushes. This was Janey’s sitting room and where she practiced her music. The walls were covered with festival posters, including her favorite from the Cornwall ‘86 Folk Festival in Wade-bridge where she’d gotten her first large print billing, as opposed to being lost in among the tiny type or simply listed as “and others.” Near the door were two paintings by the Newlyn artist Bernard Evans—one of Mousehole harbour, the other depicting one of the old luggers that used to fish this part of the coast.
The furnishings here consisted of two wooden straightback chairs (Janey couldn’t play sitting on a sofa or a chair with arms); a battered sofa that she’d patched with swatches from a pair of Laura Ashley dresses she’d outgrown; a crate under the back window with a hotplate, kettle, and teapot on it; a dresser filled with records that held her stereo on top, along with a jumble of cassettes; a bookcase filled mostly with tunebooks; and of course her instruments. Two other fiddles and a flat-backed mandolin hung from the wall, her first set of pipes sat in its case in a corner, while various whistles, pipe chanters, spare reeds, and the like were scattered across the low table in front of the couch. A bodhran lay on the couch itself.
The other room was her bedroom. In one corner was the Aquatron shower that the Gaffer had installed for her a couple of years ago, saving her from having to throw something decent on to go next door whenever she wanted to take a shower. There was also her bed, an old wooden wardrobe stuffed with clothes—some of which she’d long outgrown but couldn’t throw out—another dresser, and a bookcase jammed with more books than it should have been able to hold. The window in this room also looked out on the inner courtyard.
Leaving her instruments in the first room, Janey wandered into her bedroom. She undressed slowly, only half thinking of what she was doing, then curled up under her comforter, the Dunthorn book held against her chest.
Things were going to look different in the morning, the Gaffer had promised. Which was all well and fine, but how was she supposed to stop thinking about them in the meantime?
She lay there for a long while, listening to the wind outside and the patter of rain that it soon brought with it. After a time she opened the book and let Dunthorn take her away from her troubles until she fell asleep, the book dropping onto the bedclothes beside her leg.
Off She Goes!
It’s not that I’m afraid to die. It’s just that I don’t want to be there when it happens.
—attributed to WOODY ALLEN
Jodi had never fainted before. In the story that was her life she saw herself as the plucky and brave heroine who—when some moment of adventurous duress finally arose—Got Things Done and Made A Difference. She definitely did not see herself as a light-headed poppet who collapsed at the first sign of trouble.
But faint she did.
And when she came around, she almost fainted again.
For she found herself lying on top of a bed with a man sitting beside her on the coverlets who bore an awfully close resemblance to the little fellow she’d seen inside the Widow Pender’s aquarium, except that this man was the same size as she. What made her almost pass out once more was the realization that he hadn’t become large. No. For she could see past the bed, through the glass sides of the aquarium, to discover that she was with him in the aquarium, set up on the worktable in the Widow’s giant sitting room.
The little man hadn’t grown large at all.
She’d been shrunk down to his size.
It was impossible, of course. She was just dreaming. Any minute now she’d wake up in her aunt’s house to find that she’d fallen asleep and only dreamt the whole affair. Her midnight adventure had yet to begin, and given the warning wisdom of her dream, she’d do the sensible thing for a change and just stay in her bed until morning.
“Are you feeling a little better?” the small man asked.
She still thought of him as tiny, even though they were now the same size. He was a pleasant enough looking individual with a countryman’s rounded features and a sturdy frame; older than she was—at least in his early twenties—which would make him positively ancient to the children of the Tatters. She gave him a considering glance, then tried to will the whole scene away.
Wake up, wake up, she told herself.
Her surroundings and size remained uncomfortably unchanged.
“Miss?” the little man tried again.
Jodi sat up on the bed, leaning against the backboard when the inside of the aquarium began to do a slow spin around her. She waited a few long moments for her head to settle down, then focused on the little man’s face again.
“I’m dreaming, aren’t I?”
He shook his head. “No dream—though it is a nightmare.”
Well, of course he wouldn’t think it was a dream, not when he was a part of it. She tried to place his accent. It wasn’t quite the soft burr predominant around Bodbury; instead it had a clipped property about it, which gave it a bit of a formal ring. She wondered what his name was.
“Edern Gee,” he told her when she asked.
And that sounded exactly like something she’d make up—not a proper name at all.
“My name’s Jodi,” she said. “Jodi Shepherd.”
Edern nodded. “I know. I heard it when the witch charmed you.”
“I didn’t find her very charming at all,” Jodi said.
“I meant when she used her magic—when she enchanted you.”
Magic. Oh raw we. It made her head ache to think about it.
“And you?” she asked. “I suppose you’ve been enchanted, too?”
Edern gave her a sour look. “Do you think I was born this size?”
“How would I know? We’ve only just met.”
That earned her a smile.
Jodi looked around their glass prison once more.
“So this is . . . real?” she asked.
“All too.”
“Did you come snooping about her house as well?”
Edern shook his head. “I only meant to pass through Bodbury and stopped in here to ask if there was any work that needed doing. I never got any farther into town.”
“She didn’t like the job you did?”
“Didn’t want to pay me. She shrunk me down when I argued about it with her. I’ve been here three weeks, locked up in this glass box like her pet toad.”
“Three weeks?”
Edern nodded glumly.
“And you didn’t try to escape?”
“You try climbing those glass walls.”
“But what about over there?” Jodi asked, pointing to where the tin chimney rose up from the stove and climbed up alongside the glass.
“The tin’s too hot.”
Jodi laughed. “Well, then put out the fire.”
For a long moment Edern just stared at her, then he sighed.
“It’s not just getting out of the box,” he said. “There’s that as well.”
Jodi looked in the direction he indicated and began to feel all faint again.
Stop this, she ordered herself.
But it was hard, for sitting there on the high back of a chair was the Widow’s odd little creature, all fat-bodied and spindly limbs. When it saw it had her attention, it grinned at her, revealing long rows of wickedly sharp teeth. It had been the size of a cat the last time she’d seen it. Now, with her own reduction in size, it had the relative bulk of an elephant.
“Bother and damn,” she said.
“It’s almost always about,” Edern said. “When you can’t see it—just a tap on the glass will bring it scampering back to its post.”
“What is it?”
“Her fetch.”
“But that’s like a hummock, isn’t it?” Jodi said. “Just another kind of a ghost?”
“It’s also a witch’s familiar. She calls it Windle. Witches grow them from their own phalanges—usually the ones from their little toe.”
Jodi gave him another considering look. Edern Gee might claim to be a simple traveling man, but he seemed to know an awful lot about witches and magic and the like.
“I don’t think you’re a traveler at all,” she said. “I think you’ve come from the Barrow World. You’re a Small—a little piskie man that she caught out on the moors.”
“I could say the same about you.”
“Ah, but you saw me big. You saw her shrink me down to mouse size.”
She found it easy enough to say, but she was nevertheless hedging her bets, mostly because she was still praying that this was all a dream.
“You seem to know all about magic and the like,” she added.
Edern just shrugged. “Did you never hear the stories of the traveling people in Bodbury? How we’re all spellmen and witchwives?”
“But those are just stories. . . .”
Jodi’s voice trailed off. Like Smalls were. Or the fact that a witch could grow an odd little creature from the bones of her baby toe, or shrink someone down to the size of a mole.
“What’s she going to do with us?” she asked finally.
“Don’t know. Keep us as pets, I suppose. She likes to come in here and talk to me while she makes these tiny furnishings and the like. I don’t think she’s bad at heart—just lonely.”
Jodi couldn’t find much sympathy for a lonely witch—at least not for one who’d enchanted her the way the Widow Pender had.
“I can’t stay locked up in here,” she said. “I’ll go mad.”
“Does anyone know where you’ve gone?”
Jodi shook her head. “I’ll be missed—sooner or later. Probably later, when either Denzil or my aunt finally goes looking for me at the other’s place. But that could take a day or so and they’d never know where to look. How about you?”
“A solitary traveling man? Who’s to miss me?”
“Well, I’m not staying,” Jodi said.
She got slowly off the bed. Her head still ached, but at least the room stayed in one place. Crossing the aquarium, she leaned against the glass wall and peered out. Windle sat up on the back of its chair and looked at her with interest in its saucer-big eyes.
“Why hasn’t she put the cover back on?” she asked Edern.
“She only does that when she goes out.”
“And when does she do that?”
Jodi knew about her afternoon walks down by the Old Quay, and her midnight excursions out onto the headland, but that was all.
“Afternoons and late at night—regular as clockwork,” Edern replied, adding nothing to what she already knew.
“Then I suppose I’ll just have to wait until this afternoon,” she said.
She turned from the glass wall to look at her companion.
“Who gets the bed?” she asked.
“It’s big enough for two.”
“I suppose. But mind you keep yourself to yourself.”
Edern laughed. “You’re a bit young for me.”
Was she now?
“Well, you’re far too old for me, geezer,” she told him.
Ignoring his smile, she went ’round to the other side of the bed and, not bothering to remove her clothes, crawled under the covers.
Maybe I’ll fall asleep and wake up back home, she thought.
Maybe she would. And maybe she’d only dream that she did. How would she ever know?
Thinking about that only made her head ache more, so she tried to think of more pleasant things. But everything merely went around and around in dizzying circles, each of which centered on the impossibility of her present situation.
La, but life could be confusing, she thought as sheer exhaustion finally let her drop off.
2.
Waking provided no relief.
She was still mouse-sized when she opened her eyes, still trapped in an aquarium like one of Denzil’s catfish, though happily, unlike theirs, this one wasn’t full of murky water. But dryness was little comfort, all things considered. Her situation was so fanciful that she might as well be in the Barrow World of Faerie—a place she’d longed to visit ever since she read her first fairy tale—as in her native Bodbury. Caught up in the uncomfortable reality of her adventure, however—in reduced circumstances, as it were, she thought with a rueful smile—the wonder of it all had lost much of its previous storybook appeal.
I would settle for my old life, she decided. Pages missing and all. There was no question of it. Unfortunately, the decision of what was to become of her life didn’t seem to be hers to make anymore.
“Getting up, are you?”
She glanced over to the other side of the aquarium where Edern was sitting at a table, eating.
“Best hurry up,” he added, “unless you don’t mind eating in the dark.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s past noon and she’ll be going out in a bit. It’s her habit to feed me—us, now, I suppose—before she leaves.”
Rubbing sleep from her eyes and feeling rumpled from having slept in her clothes, Jodi swung her feet down from the bed and crossed the aquarium to join him. At the mention of food, her stomach had begun to rumble, but the small platter of crumbled cheese and tiny bits of bread didn’t seem very appealing. It reminded her too much of what Denzil fed his mice.
She stood there, combing her short hair with her fingers, until Edern motioned her to sit.
“Is this it?” she asked, waving her hand at the food as she sat down.
“I’ve had worse.”
“Maybe you have, and maybe I have too, but this . . . this is what you feed mice. I’m not her pet and I won’t eat it.”
Never mind that she liked both cheese and bread. It was the principle of the thing.
Edern laughed. “But that’s all we are to the Widow—her pets.”
Jodi said nothing.
“Starving won’t solve a thing,” Edern added.
At Jodi’s frown, he pushed one of two ceramic thimbles across the table towards her.
“Have some tea, at least,” he said.
“Well, maybe some tea.”
She pulled the thimble over to her and took a deep sip. The tea was good, but its container made her feel like Weeman from the old nursery rhyme. She could make up her own bit of verse now:
Now I am small, but once I was big;
I feel like a fool, oh, rig-a-jig-jig.
Without really thinking about it, she put some cheese between two bits of bread and ate it, washing it down with more tea. It was only when she was on her third sandwich that she realized what she was doing. She gave Edern a quick glance, but he was studiously ignoring her.
So she was eating. Well, who cared? Besides, she needed her strength for her big escape.
She finished the third sandwich, then turned her chair so that she could examine the Widow’s sitting room.
Windle didn’t seem to be about, which was just as well. The witch’s fetch made her feel like the Bagle Wight was breathing right upon her neck. And with neither the witch nor her creature in the room, it was a perfect opportunity to do some scouting.
Leaving her seat, Jodi went over to the stove first. The fire was out, so she cautiously touched the stovepipe and found it only warm, rather than hot. Since she’d been climbing about
Descending from the worktable was another matter again. But she soon spied a roll of twine. If she could open the window, then tie the twine to its latch, she could simply roll the twine over the side and into the garden. And she’d be away.
Then she thought about Edern and studied the stovepipe again. Would he fit? Two could manage both the window and twine more easily than one. But if he couldn’t get through . . .
She looked to where the pipe met the glass. It wasn’t glued or anything. If she clung to the cloth and gave it a good kick, she might be able to get it away from the glass. It would be easier done from the outside than the inside, at any rate. She turned to share her plan with him, but just then the sitting-room door opened and the Widow came in.
Humming to herself, the Widow took a small pair of tongs from the worktable and used them to extract a coal from the hearth, which she brought over to the aquarium.
Oh, no, Jodi thought. Don’t.
She might as well have wished for the moon to come down from the sky and whisk her away.
“And how are you today, my sweets?” the Widow asked as she removed the glass lid of the aquarium.
Her voice boomed like dull thunder. Jodi glared at the Widow’s enormous face looming over her, but Edern merely ignored it.
A huge hand came down into the aquarium and shooed Jodi away from the stove. She moved sullenly, wishing she had a large pin. The Widow opened the door to the stove and placed the coal inside, then closed it up again and withdrew her hands.
“There,” she said. “Now you’ll be warm and snug.”
Back went the glass lid. She took the velvet from where it had been hanging over the back of a chair and draped it over the aquarium.