Widdershins

by Charles de Lint

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He shrugs. “Just that I’ve heard of you. This black spruce jay, wandering around these parts, doing good.” He smiles. “It’s kind of funny, now that I think of it. My name’s Whiskey Jack, and Whiskey Jack’s what people call you birds. That’s about as close as corbae and canid are going to get without having mixed blood like my buddy Crazy Dog.”

  I take another drag from the cigarette and start to hand it back, but Jack shakes his head.

  “Keep it,” he says and starts to roll himself another one.

  “Did you know her?” I ask.

  “Who? Walker’s little girl?”

  I nod.

  “Yeah, I did,” he says. He sighs and gets his cigarette lit. “They named her well: Anwatan. Calm Water. I guess it’s okay to speak her true name, now that she’s gone. She was a little sweetheart, always ready to see the best in everything. But I guess you know that already.”

  I shake my head. “I never met her.”

  “But here you are, paying your respects all the same.”

  I nod.

  “So, why?” Jack asked.

  I just look at him, then finally say, “You sure do talk a lot.”

  “Yeah, that’s what everybody says. But that doesn’t mean I don’t listen. And man, I’m as bad as you blackbirds when it comes to being curious about just any damn thing you can think of.”

  I hesitate a moment, then realize that telling what I know is a way of adding to Anwatan’s story. Like the songs and dancing coming up from below, it would help her spirit move on. So I tell Jack about the fiddler I rescued from the bogans, how the bogans had been out hunting, how Lizzie buried Anwatan’s remains and played a lament over the grave.

  “That was a kind gesture on her part,” Jack says.

  “She seems like a pretty decent sort.”

  Jack starts to pull out his tobacco pouch again, but I shake my head. I get out my own and roll us each another cigarette. Jack lights them with that shiny lighter of his.

  “You sweet on her?” he asks.

  “Who, Lizzie? Hardly. Like I told you, she’s human.”

  Jack shakes his head. “You’ve got to get these preconceptions out of your head. Seriously.” Then he smiles and gives me a considering look. “She sweet on you?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Man, you blackbirds really don’t have a clue, do you? You’re either all dark thoughts and deep philosophy, or you’re headlong into having some fun. You need to learn to mix it up a little.”

  “Like the crow girls.”

  “Yeah, right,” Jack says. “Maybe they were here when your Raven pulled the world out of the long ago, but they’re all party for the moment now, man. They wouldn’t know a deep thought if it came up and kicked them in the butt—though speaking of which, they do have nice ones.”

  “Then you don’t know them.”

  “I know a nice butt when I see it.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Jack shrugs. “There’s more I don’t know in this world than I could ever hope to get a handle on. Maybe the crow girls have this hidden deep side to them, maybe they don’t. That’s not the point. The point is you need to loosen up some.”

  “You don’t know me, either.”

  “True. But I hear the gossip. From all I hear, you’ve spent a long time walking a dark road on your own.”

  “I’ve got my reasons.”

  “I’m sure you do,” Jack says. “And I’m sure they’re good ones.” Then he shakes his head. “Aw, what the hell do I know? And this isn’t really the time or the place to talk about this kind of thing anyway. I should just learn to mind my own business, but then I wouldn’t be much of a coyote, would I?”

  I can’t help but return his smile. He surely does like to run on at the mouth. He’s also nosy, not to mention pushy, but I can tell that none of it comes from a mean spirit. It isn’t that I think he couldn’t be hard, or even cruel. It just isn’t where he’s coming from at the moment.

  The two of us stand there looking down at the ceremony and finish our cigarettes. Finally, Jack bends down and puts his out against the granite underfoot. I follow suit.

  “So, are you going down?” Jack asks.

  I shake my head. “Don’t know that I’d be welcome.”

  “Yeah, the cerva always get skittish around predators, even when we’re not hunting. Think we can’t tell the difference between them and the cousins that aren’t our kin.”

  “You going?”

  “Nope. Same deal. Maybe I’ll stop by that crossroads tree where your little fiddler buried what was left of Anwatan. Pay my respects directly to her.”

  I nod. I wait for Jack to leave, but the canid continues to stand beside me, gaze on the fire below.

  “You planning to hunt down these bogans?” he asks after a time.

  I glance at him. “Seems like a plan. It’s not like Walker’s going to do anything, and doing nothing doesn’t seem right.”

  “Well, that’s part of what makes the cerva so special. They’ve got these big open hearts that don’t have any room for violence.” He grins. “Outside of rutting season, that is.”

  “I suppose.”

  “So do you want some company?”

  I raise my eyebrows.

  “I’ve always been kind of an eye-for-an-eye guy,” Jack tells me. “It’s pretty much hardwired into me. Plus, I think it’s time these damn aganesha were reminded of a few of the rules we have around here.”

  “What happened to not judging people by their tribes or clans?”

  Jack smiles at me, a dark coyote smile.

  “Assholes come in every size, shape, and colour,” he says, “and I purely don’t have any patience for them when they hurt anybody but themselves. It’s that simple. I like Walker. I liked his daughter. There’s plenty of deer out there who aren’t of the People, and you can’t tell me these little assholes with their hunting freak on couldn’t tell the difference. So these bogans have just become my unfinished business, too.”

  “Glad to have you on board,” I tell him.

  “Can you track the ones that did it? Because the one thing I don’t want to do is start a war by bringing justice to the wrong gang of bogans.”

  I shake my head. “But I’ll know them when I see them.”

  “Maybe I can get their scent, back at the crossroads where you ran into them.”

  “It’s worth a try,” I say.

  I give the mourners below one last look, tip a finger to my brow, then turn away. Jack’s at my side as we disappear under the boughs of the tall pine trees.

  Jilly

  Once upon a time . . .

  I’m having a weird dream. It reminds me of when I was in the hospital, right after the accident. When I was even more of a Broken Girl than I am now.

  But back then, in amidst my pain and helplessness, I finally learned to cross over into the otherworld. Not for real, like Joe does, walking in his body. But like Sophie used to do, projecting my . . . I don’t know exactly what. My soul? My spirit? Whatever it was, something crossed over from this world to the other while my body lay broken in a hospital bed. I crossed over, and when I was in the otherworld, it was as real to me as this world. I felt the full range of physical sensations. Better yet, I could walk. I could draw. It was as though the accident had never happened.

  And not only that, I was young again, too.

  Joe explained it to me, how when you cross over into the otherworld, you appear the way you want to see yourself. Life for me as Jilly Coppercom began when I was in my late teens—in my head I’ve always ignored the hopeless little victim girl called Jillian Carter that I’d been growing up. I didn’t have any fond memories until I started going to college, when I started hanging around with Geordie and Sophie and Wendy, and realized that life didn’t have to be a horror show. That it could be something good, too. You had to work at it, you had to make it good, but it was possible. So that was how I al
ways saw myself, and that’s how I appeared when I finally did cross over: this twenty-something artist with a mad head of hair and more enthusiastic energy than she knew what to do with.

  And it’s like that tonight, too, in this dream I’m having. I’m young and I can move without pain.

  I’m in a forest of immense cathedral trees—the Greatwood, where I spent most of my time when I was first crossing over. Think redwoods, but bigger. Way bigger. I’ve missed the deep peace to be found under their immense boughs. It’s like the whole world is calm and gentle, and everybody cares for each other.

  Mind you, I’m not particularly calm. I’m so full of happiness and energy, that I do a few cartwheels in between the giant tree trunks before I finally plunk myself down and lean back against one and stare up through the twilit air to how the boughs of the trees seem to go on forever.

  I am so loving this dream.

  And ‘round about then is when I realize that I’m no longer alone. She’s standing so quietly that I could almost mistake her for part of the forest. Then I realize that she is a part of the forest—its spiritual heart. She’s the woman I met the last time I was in the otherworld, when I traded my own chance for health to bring my sister Raylene back to life. A nameless spirit who’s been known as Mystery and Fate and White Deer Woman, though I wonder at the latter name, since her skin’s a coppery brown, while her hair’s a black curly cloud surrounding her round moon of a face.

  I scramble to my feet—and how cool is it that I can be sitting on the ground and just get up like that?

  “Am I really here?” I ask her as I walk over to where she’s standing. “Because I thought the otherworld was closed to me after . . . you know, all that happened.”

  “I never said that,” she tells me. “I wasn’t sure. I only knew that if you came back, it would be a long time before it happened.”

  “Why have you let me back now?”

  “I didn’t do anything,” she says. “You closed yourself to this world. But something else let you break through tonight.”

  I laugh. “Yeah, I got drunk. Which is weird because I was pretty tipsy last night with Mona, but I didn’t find myself here. Maybe it’s just the difference between wine and whiskey.”

  She gives me a noncommittal look.

  “Perhaps that is it,” is all she says.

  “Well, it’ll play hell on my liver, but it’s good to know how to do it again.”

  Because I’ll get drunk every night if it means I can dream myself back here once more. I feel alive for the first time in years. Young. Whole. Not broken. Not in pain.

  “You don’t need to drink to cross over again,” she tells me. “Not now that you’ve remembered how to reopen the door.”

  “But I don’t remember doing anything different, besides getting drunk. What if I can’t do it again?”

  She studies me for a long moment.

  “Is it so bad for you in the World As It Is?”

  “Well, yeah.” Then I sigh. “No, not totally. I don’t know. I try not to think about it because it’s too depressing. But here in this dream, being able to put that old broken body aside and be here again . . . I haven’t felt this alive in a long time.”

  “Then I wish I could help you be able to make the journey whenever you wish.”

  “Why can’t you? You’re like this big old powerful spirit, aren’t you?” She shrugs. “Perhaps the woman you’ve based me upon is, but I’m not.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not really here,” she says. “Or rather the me that you think I am, isn’t really here. I’m only a memory that you’ve called up out of yourself, given a temporary existence while you visit the spiritworld.”

  “Aw, come on. Don’t go all Alice on me.”

  “Alice?”

  “You know, like in the Lewis Carroll books where everything’s contradictory and screwy and confusing.”

  “I’m sorry for the confusion.”

  I give a slow nod as it starts to sink in.

  “So you’re not real, are you?” I ask.

  “I could lie,” she says, “but that would only be you lying to yourself, and that’s something you’ve never done. You’ll hide things from yourself, but you don’t lie.”

  “Maybe I need to start. Maybe I wouldn’t be living in a broken body if I did.”

  “The car that struck you was nothing you brought upon yourself. Nor were the unwelcome attentions of your brother and foster parents and the others when you were a child.”

  “Except people do bring unhappiness on themselves with their attitude, don’t you think? Negative thinking brings negative energy into your life.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  I have to smile. “Well, I guess that means I don’t either, since you’re a part of me, right?”

  “I originated in your memories of me,” she says, “but the longer I stand outside of you in this world, in this wood, the more I seem to be gaining a reality of my own.” She held up a hand and looked at it. “How odd.”

  “You mean like Christiana—Christy’s shadow self?”

  Her gaze moves to my face.

  “I don’t know. The otherworld . . . there is so much about it that remains unknown. On the one hand, it can seem as though anything is possible here, and yet it follows its own set of rules. The trouble,” she adds with a humourless smile, “is that no one seems to know what those rules are.”

  “So I’m here and you’re here,” I say, “and the longer you’re here, the more real you become. Or at least until I wake up, I suppose. I wonder how long we have before that happens.”

  She gives me a confused look. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you know. My body’s still over there, sleeping in a hotel room. At some point it’s going to wake up and I’ll be drawn back.”

  “But your body is with you.”

  I look down at the twenty-something girl I am, where I should be seeing an older, crippled woman.

  “Yeah, right,” I say. “This isn’t the body I went to bed with. I was drunk, but not that drunk.”

  “And yet, it is your body. You are wholly here, with all that that implies.”

  “How’s that possible?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She cocks her head and I get the sense she’s looking inward.

  “There’s not much that I do know,” she finally adds.

  “Because you were born out of my memory.”

  She nods.

  This is so way off the make-sense scale that I don’t even know where to start with it. Then something else she said registers.

  “What did you mean when you said ‘with all that that implies’?” I ask. “What’s implied?”

  “Your light shines so bright . . .” she begins, her voice trailing off when she sees that I get it.

  Like Joe hasn’t talked to me about this a hundred times before. Like she—the real her—didn’t tell me herself the last time I met her in the otherworld.

  Everybody’s got a light inside them—some reflection of their spirit, or soul, I guess. But apparently I’ve got this extra glow to my shine—courtesy of a gift the real White Deer Woman gave me when I was a kid, telling stories to a tree. See, that’s how we got this connection in the first place. I treated a tree like it was a real person, and that tree was part of her. She took a liking to the sorry little kid I was and invested me with this shine, which was part gift and part burden. It draws magic to me, then helps me send it out into the world using whatever natural talents I can bring to play.

  So I shine, apparently. It’s what draws the otherworldly types to me, which is not a bad thing, mostly. The trouble comes from the fact that the otherworld’s full of dark and nasty things, too, and this shine of mine is like a beacon to them, as well.

  Joe always said he’d teach me how to protect myself—to turn down the shine, I guess, or hide it—but we haven’t really talked about it since I last got back from the otherworld. No need to. The Broke
n Girl I am—or that I am back in the World As It Is—wasn’t going anywhere. She didn’t need to be protected.

  “So I guess I need to wake up,” I say. “If I want to be safe.”

  “You’re not sleeping. You need to cross back over again.”

  I nod. Because I understand. But the thing is, I don’t really want to go. Can you blame me? After two years of being trapped in a body that doesn’t work properly, I want to cut loose. I want to run and dance. I want to find pencil and paper and put down all the images that have been banging around in my head, yearning to get out. I want the rush of immediate creation, not the slow pixel-by-pixel method I use on the laptop that the Professor gave me. Or the big sloppy paintings I can manage with the arm that wasn’t hurt.

  I want detail again.

  I want to be like I was before the accident. Like I am now.

  But I know I can’t stay here. It’s not just that it’s dangerous for me. All of my life, such as it is, lies in the World As It Is. That’s where Geordie and my friends are. That’s where my sister lives. I can’t just disappear on them.

  God, what must Geordie be thinking? All I left behind by way of explanation was an empty bed.

  No, what I need is both worlds. But to have that, I have to get back to the other one first. If the otherworld’s not closed to me anymore, I can get Joe to help me learn to deal with it all. The staying safe. The going back and forth.

  “I guess we have to find someone to ask for help,” I say.

  My companion nods.

  I remember when I was here before, how I managed to make my way to Mabon, the otherworldly city that Sophie brought into being. There would be people there I could ask—I might even be able to track down Sophie. But knowing it exists doesn’t really help, because my getting there before was so arbitrary. I’d go to sleep and either wake up in the cathedral wood, or in Mabon. I only travelled between the two the one time, and that was using something called door magic, which works in both worlds, apparently, but it’s much easier in the otherworld.

  What you do is, you open a door expecting the place you want to be on the other side, and if your will is strong enough, and if you’re lucky—which I’m guessing is a bigger part of the procedure, at least when it comes to me pulling it off—the place you want to be in will be waiting for you.