Widdershins

by Charles de Lint

  Zia nodded. “Because we’re helping.”

  “We’re looking everywhere.”

  “And then at all the theres all over again.”

  “Thanks,” I told them. “I appreciate it.”

  “Of course you do,” Maida said.

  “We’re the sort of people that should be appreciated.”

  “Because we’re so helpful,” Maida explained, just in case I didn’t get it.

  They looked at me for a moment, heads cocked like the birds that were their natural shapes.

  “Well, it’s been nice talking to you,” Zia said.

  “But we can’t stay.”

  “We’re busybusy, you know.”

  “Very very.”

  “Looking and all.”

  “Being ever so useful, don’t you think?”

  Before I could respond, the pair of them were gone, and it was just Cassie and me on the pier. I took a deep breath, feeling as though I’d just run up a flight of stairs. Talking to the crow girls always did that to me.

  “How are you holding up?” she asked me.

  “Like crap. Do you have any news from Joe?”

  She shook her head. “Not since he called me from Jimmy’s. He’s got Whiskey Jack helping him out and a corbae named Grey.”

  I gave her a sharp look. “Did you say ‘Grey’?”

  She nodded. “Do you know him?”

  “No. But I think he’s involved in all of this.”

  I gave her the longer version of what had happened to Lizzie the other night, all the details I hadn’t gotten into when we’d talked on the phone. The business with Grey and the cerva hadn’t seemed relevant then.

  “From what you’re telling me,” Cassie said when I was done, “it doesn’t sound as though he’s got it in for Lizzie, and he doesn’t even know Jilly—does he?”

  “Not so’s I know. But doesn’t it seem weird to you that Grey should be helping Joe, when Jilly was kidnapped by the same bogans that he had the run-in with a couple of nights ago?”

  “Maybe. Joe doesn’t know about the bogans—or he didn’t when I was talking to him.”

  “We should tell him.”

  Cassie nodded. “Except since I can’t get him to carry a cell phone, I have to wait for him to call me back.” She paused for a moment before adding, “Maybe this Grey doesn’t know what happened either.”

  “I guess.”

  It didn’t take a genius to see how discouraged I was feeling.

  “Let’s go see the room that they took Lizzie from,” Cassie said. “I’m not nearly as good as Joe is with this sort of thing, but I might be able to pick up a trace of where they’ve taken her.”

  Except when we went back to Lizzie and Siobhan’s room, the only thing Cassie could confirm was that bogans had been there. The other members of the Knotted Cord joined us before we could leave the room and I made introductions.

  “What about the cards?” I asked.

  “It’s hard when I don’t know the person I’m laying them out for.”

  “Can’t you use that mind-meld thing the fairy woman did?” Con asked.

  Cassie raised her eyebrows.

  “Mother Crone was scrying earlier,” I explained. “You know how she can tap into your memories by taking your hand?”

  Cassie nodded. “It’s a good trick, but not one I ever mastered. You probably need fairy blood to be able to pull off that sort of thing. But maybe if you’ve got something of hers that she was particularly fond of, a favourite shirt or—”

  “Her fiddle,” Siobhan and I said at the same time.

  “Normally she wouldn’t go anywhere without it,” Siobhan added, “and she played it every day.”

  “That might work.”

  Siobhan got Lizzie’s fiddle case from the corner of the room and took it over to her bed. Sitting down, she put the case on her lap and opened the clasps.

  “Is it okay if I touch it?” she asked. “I mean, it won’t throw off whatever you’re going to do, will it?”

  “No, it’ll be fine,” Cassie told her.

  She took the fiddle from Siobhan and sat cross-legged on the floor. Closing her eyes, she put the fiddle on her lap and rested her hands lightly on its wooden top. Siobhan, Andy, and Con watched wide-eyed and expectant, and I had to smile. I don’t know what they had in mind, but some vision wasn’t going to suddenly appear in the air before us. Although to be fair, this was all so new for them, they could be forgiven for thinking that anything really might happen.

  But all Cassie was doing was getting a vibe off the instrument, making a connection between herself and its owner. After a few moments she handed the fiddle back to Siobhan and pulled a pack of cards out of her pocket that were held together with a rubber band.

  Cassie’s a street fortune-teller, and she’s got this amazing pack of Tarot cards: large, with beautiful art on the back pattern and individual paintings for each card’s front. When she takes them out of their silk bag for a customer, you can’t help but be impressed and expect an accurate reading—which is the whole point of them, of course. But this old pack she pulled out now were her real working cards, battered and worn with a plain pattern on their backs. She’d apparently gotten them from some old witchy woman years ago, long before I met her and Joe.

  She shuffled the deck once, twice, three times, then laid three cards down on the carpet by her knee.

  “They’re all blank,” Siobhan said.

  They were. The fronts of the whole pack were blank. But that would change, now that Cassie had put her mojo on them.

  “Watch,” I said. “Pictures will show up.”

  A long moment passed with no visible change, but I, at least, could feel something in the air. It was like the static charge you get when you walk across a carpet in the winter and the air’s so dry; like a promise, except instead of a static shock it was the promise of magic.

  “Are we all supposed to believe in this for it to work?” Andy asked.

  Cassie responded with a wistful smile.

  “If magic required any kind of widespread belief to exist,” she said, “there wouldn’t be any left in the world at all—not in this day and age.”

  Andy looked like he wanted to ask something else, but then the images began to form on the blank fronts of the cards, rising up from the white surfaces the way a picture develops in a darkroom, and we all leaned forward.

  “Jesus,” Andy murmured.

  I didn’t pay attention to anything the others went on to say as I studied the images.

  The first showed a number of small figures doing something in what looked like an empty lot surrounded by abandoned buildings and rubble—I thought it might be the Tombs, that part of Newford that’s fallen into the worst kind of urban decay. I needed a closer look to see who the figures were, and what they were doing, but first I turned my attention to the next card.

  It had Lizzie riding a small brown pony that was walking along a deserted shoreline. Sand, sea, and sky all appeared leeched of colour, which made the bright red shock of her dyed hair really jump out.

  The third . . . I caught my breath. The third showed Jilly, but not the Jilly who referred to herself as the Broken Girl. This was the Jilly I remembered from when we were in our twenties—a vibrant and young Jilly who didn’t need canes or a wheelchair. She was in a forest of some kind, but it wasn’t the Greatwood—at least not the way it had ever been described to me. It looked more like the bush country up around here or over in Tyson, where Jilly was originally from.

  I looked up to meet Cassie’s gaze.

  “It doesn’t look like they’re together,” I said.

  She shook her ahead. “But they seem unharmed.”

  “Who are these people?” Con asked, pointing to the first card.

  I got down on the floor so that I could get a better look. I could see now that they were bogans, but not just a marauding pack like Lizzie had described. There were old and young ones here, male and female. An extended family, maybe. And t
hen I realized what they were doing.

  “That’s a bogan funeral,” I said. “See the figure on the pyre? Why are the cards showing this?”

  “I think it’s the Tombs,” Con said. “That building back there is the old Charleton Mill.”

  He was right.

  Siobhan pointed to the third card. “And that could be anywhere between here and Tyson.”

  “Damn Joe,” Cassie said. “Because,” she added when we all looked at her, “he’d know where these places are. He could take us to wherever they are. And if he’d carry a cell, we could call him right now.”

  “Can you get hold of the crow girls again?” I asked. “They could take us, couldn’t they?”

  “Probably,” she said. “But I don’t know to get in touch with them. I was lucky to run into them in the first place and just like Joe, they don’t have phones.”

  “Fairies don’t use phones?” Andy asked.

  “They’re not fairies,” I said, “and they’re just like us. Some of them have no use for technology, some can’t live without it.”

  My gaze returned to Jilly’s card and I went away for a moment, remembering. We’d been such good friends in those days, seeing each other every day. We could have been more, too. I remember trying to build myself up to broach the possibility of that with her, but then we took a road trip to Tyson and on the night when our relationship could have slipped into a more physical intimacy, we’d shared war stories instead, sorry tellings of how bad it had been for each of us growing up. Hers were worse. Somehow, that night changed the possibility of our being lovers to the certainty of our being best friends instead.

  I’d never want to not have Jilly for a best friend. But they were times over the years when I wished it could have gone differently. That we could have had both.

  “What do we do now?” Siobhan asked.

  I blinked and looked away from Jilly’s card.

  “Mother Crone said that the bogans who’ve been bothering us are camped nearby,” I said. “Along with a cousin she thinks is pretty powerful. So I don’t understand why we’re being shown this funeral.”

  “You know how it is,” Cassie said. “It’s never completely clear if the cards are showing us the present or a possibility. And sometimes it’s . . .” She looked for a word. “. . . more like a metaphor, rather than something we should take as literal.”

  “But we could go the Tombs, couldn’t we?” Siobhan said.

  Cassie nodded. “Except if those bogans are there . . . well, for one thing, they outnumber us, and for another, they’re not exactly prone to talking to humans in the first place.”

  “I don’t understand,” Andy said, still looking at the cards. “Why aren’t Jilly and Lizzie together? And if this is a metaphor, then what is it saying? Jilly in a forest, Lizzie riding a pony along some shoreline. She doesn’t even ride, does she?”

  He looked to Siobhan.

  “We both did some riding when we were kids,” she said, “but that was a long time ago.”

  “Whatever. It still doesn’t explain what this means.”

  I tuned them out, trying to pin down something that was creeping around at the edge of my thoughts. And then I had it. Walker had told Lizzie to call his name three times if she needed his help.

  “You don’t need a phone to call Joe,” I told Cassie. “You can just speak his name three times, can’t you?”

  She shook her head. “I’d have to use his true name.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Con asked.

  “Joe wouldn’t be the only person to hear it,” Cassie explained. “It would give his name away to anyone who might also be listening—the bogans, for instance, or that cousin camping with them.”

  “So what?”

  “So it would give them a power over him,” Cassie said, her voice sharper than she probably meant it to be.

  “Having the gift of someone’s name like that,” I explained, “isn’t something you can take lightly.”

  “This isn’t anything light,” Siobhan said. “Who knows what kind of danger Lizzie and Jilly might be in?”

  “The cards say they’re not,” I told her.

  I didn’t want to say it. Just like her, I wanted to get Joe here right now. I wanted Jilly and Lizzie back. I wanted all these stupid problems to go away.

  But we couldn’t do it like that.

  “It wouldn’t be fair to give up Joe’s name unless it was a real crisis,” I added.

  “And if the cards showed that,” Cassie put in, “I’d be the first to call him to us.”

  I could tell Siobhan didn’t understand—or at least she didn’t agree. I sympathized, but I still wouldn’t do it. I didn’t know Joe’s real name, anyway. I’d heard him referred to as everything from Bones to Joseph Crazy Dog, depending on who I was talking to.

  And I trusted the cards enough to believe that wherever Jilly and Lizzie were, their situation wasn’t critical. Lizzie was just riding that pony. Jilly leaned against a tree and was looking out over a landscape of rolling forested hills. Neither seemed in any immediate danger. We were the ones obsessing and worrying.

  “Well, what about that other guy?” Con asked. “Didn’t Walker say Lizzie could call him for help? She didn’t say anything about having to use a secret name with him.”

  Cassie and I looked at each other.

  “You never know,” she said. “If he made that offer to her, he could respond to us as well. And Walker was the name he gave her to use—or rather, Walks-with-Dreams.”

  I gave a slow nod. “I guess we could try. Although we might be taking the risk of having a seriously pissed off stag show up and complicating matters even more.”

  Siobhan stood up from her bed. “Well, I say we try it. What do we do—just call the name?”

  “I suppose,” I said. “But not in here. We can’t just call him into this room because what if he shows up in his stag shape? We need to go somewhere else, like the woods behind the hotel.”

  Siobhan looked around at each of us, then started for the door.

  “Well?” she asked. “What are you waiting for?”

  Andy and Con walked over to the door where Siobhan stood. I waited for Cassie to put away her cards before joining them myself. A little reluctantly, I might add. I had an uneasy feeling about this. The trouble with the spirits of the wild was that unless you’d gotten a promise from them before, you never knew how they’d react to being summoned.

  But like Siobhan, and for pretty much the same reasons, I was willing to take the chance.

  Lizzie

  The landscape was a dreary grey for as far as Lizzie could see, which wasn’t all that far because of the banks of fog that shifted with the winds. Sometimes a hole appeared in the fog and she caught glimpses of the water that she could hear lapping against the shore, or the grey dunes that disappeared into the distance opposite the water. But mostly the fog hung close, blocking her view. It made the air damp and cool, waking a chill in her.

  The new clothes the doonie had provided didn’t help, nor did the warmth of his pony body under her as he walked along the drab shore. To add to her discomfort, she was also feeling a little motion sickness from the sudden passage they’d taken between the worlds. They never mentioned that in stories. How come the crew of the Enterprise didn’t throw up every time Scotty beamed them somewhere?

  She took a deep breath of air—it was bracing, with a bit of a salt fishy smell to it—and tried to focus on something other than the damp cold and the queasiness in her stomach.

  “What is this place?” she asked Timony. “Where is this place?”

  I’m not sure.

  Lizzie grimaced and put her free hand against her temple. The other was wrapped in the doonie’s mane.

  “Do you have to talk inside my head like that?” she asked.

  Only so long as I keep this shape, and I need to keep this shape until we can get someplace safe.

  “This place isn’t?”
/>
  No. It’s . . . connected to the blind man.

  “So why are we here?”

  When I had to shift us away from my hidey-hole, this was the only place that was open to me. He hesitated a moment, then added, That’s never happened to me before. I’ve always been free to come and go through the other-world as I willed.

  “Maybe . . . um . . .”

  My dying has something to do with it, Timony finished for her. Yes, I’d already thought that.

  “So can you take us away from here?” Lizzie asked.

  And the sooner the better, so that she didn’t have to have the soft burr of his voice resonating inside her head. It didn’t hurt or anything. It just felt way too creepy.

  I’ve been trying from the moment we got here, Timony said, but I can’t find one single point of exit in my mind.

  “Well, we can’t just wait here for them to show up.”

  No, we can’t. That’s why we need you to find us a way out.

  “Then we’re screwed,” Lizzie told him. “Because when it comes to all this magic and stuff, I have zip. The only reason I’m here is because I spoiled the bogans’ fun a few nights ago.”

  You don’t need magic, Timony assured her. You just need to focus on a safe place and then hold on to the thought of it. I’ll do the work to take us there.

  “You mean like back to the hotel where the others are?”

  If you mean your friends, then, yes. That’s as good a place as any, and we’ll at least have the safety of numbers.

  “I hate to break this to you,” Lizzie said, “but we’re just musicians. Musicians and two incapacitated women. We’re not exactly the National Guard or anything.”

  It doesn’t matter. At the moment, the most important thing is that we get away from here. I don’t know exactly where we are, but I do know it belongs to the blind man. His smell is all over it.

  Because he smells fishy to you, Lizzie thought, and that’s what it smells like here, what it always smells like around the ocean. But she was as ready as Timony to leave the place. It was depressing and just didn’t feel right.

  “So, what do I do?” she asked.

  Concentrate on a safe place, Timony said. On safety. I’ll do the rest.