The Very Best of Charles De Lint

by Charles de Lint

  He ran up behind her and grabbed her ankle, bracing himself. Like the pixies, he was much stronger than his size might give him to appear. He held firm as the mistress tried to raise her foot. She lost her balance and down she went, down and down, toppling like some enormous tree. Dick jumped back, hands to his mouth, appalled at what he’d had to do. She banged her shoulder against a display at the front of the store, sending yet another mass of books cascading onto the floor.

  Landing heavily on her arms, she stayed bent over for a long time before she finally looked up. She shook her head as though to clear it. The pixy lights had returned to the store, buzzing angrily about, but it was no use. The spell had been broken. One by one, they zoomed out of the store, down the street and were quickly lost from sight. The mistress’s little dog ran back out onto the sidewalk and continued to bark at them, long after they were gone.

  “Please let me be dreaming….” the mistress said.

  Dick stooped quickly out of sight as she looked about at the sudden ruin of the store. He peeked at her from his hiding place, watched her rub at her face, then slowly stand up and massage her shoulder where it had hit the display. She called the dog back in, but stood in the doorway herself for a long time, staring out at the street, before she finally shut and locked the door behind her.

  Oh, it was all such a horrible, terrible, awful mess.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Dick murmured, his voice barely a whisper, tears blurring his eyes.

  The mistress couldn’t hear him. She gave the store another survey, then shook her head.

  “Come on, Snippet,” she said to the dog. “We’re going back to bed. Because this is just a dream.”

  She picked her way through the fallen books and shelves as she spoke.

  “And when we wake up tomorrow everything will be back to normal.”

  But it wouldn’t be. Dick knew. This was more of a mess than even the most industrious of hobs could clear up in just one night. But he did what he could until the morning came, one eye on the task at hand, the other on the windows in case the horrible pixies decided to return. Though what he’d do if they did, probably only the moon knew, and she wasn’t telling.

  * * *

  Did you ever wake up from the weirdest, most unpleasant dream, only to find that it wasn’t a dream at all?

  When I came down to the store that morning, I literally had to lean against the wall at the foot of the stairs and catch my breath. I felt all faint and woozy. Snippet walked daintily ahead of me, sniffing the fallen books and whining softly.

  An earthquake, I told myself. That’s what it had been. I must have woken up right after the main shock, come down half-asleep and seen the mess, and just gone right back to bed again, thinking I was dreaming.

  Except there’d been those dancing lights. Like a dozen or more Tinkerbells. Or fireflies. Calling me to follow, follow, follow, out into the night, until I’d tripped and fallen….

  I shook my head slowly, trying to clear it. My shoulder was still sore and I massaged it as I took in the damage.

  Actually, the mess wasn’t as bad as it had looked at first. Many of the books appeared to have toppled from the shelves and landed in relatively alphabetical order.

  Snippet whined again, but this time it was her “I really have to go” whine, so I grabbed her leash and a plastic bag from behind the desk and out we went for her morning constitutional.

  It was brisk outside, but warm for early December, and there still wasn’t any snow. At first glance, the damage from the quake appeared to be fairly marginal, considering it had managed to topple a couple of the bookcases in my store. The worst I could see were that all garbage canisters on the block had been overturned, the wind picking up the paper litter and carrying it in eddying pools up and down the street. Other than that, everything seemed pretty much normal. At least it did until I stopped into Café Joe’s down the street to get my morning latte.

  Joe Lapegna had originally operated a sandwich bar at the same location, but with the coming of Starbucks to town, he’d quickly seen which way the wind was blowing and renovated his place into a café. He’d done a good job with the décor. His café was every bit as contemporary and urban as any of the other high-end coffee bars in the city, the only real difference being that, instead of young college kids with rings through their noses, you got Joe serving the lattes and espressos. Joe with his broad shoulders and meaty, tattooed forearms, a fat caterpillar of a black moustache perched on his upper lip.

  Before I could mention the quake, Joe started to tell me how he’d opened up this morning to find every porcelain mug in the store broken. None of the other breakables, not the plates or coffee makers. Nothing else was even out of place.

  “What a weird quake it was,” I said.

  “Quake?” Joe said. “What quake?”

  I waved a hand at the broken china he was sweeping up.

  “This was vandals,” he said. “Some little bastards broke in and had themselves a laugh.”

  So I told him about the bookcases in my shop, but he only shook his head.

  “You hear anything about a quake on the radio?” he asked.

  “I wasn’t listening to it.”

  “I was. There was nothing. And what kind of a quake only breaks mugs and knocks over a couple of bookcases?”

  Now that I thought of it, it was odd that there hadn’t been any other disruption in my own store. If those bookcases had come down, why hadn’t the front window display? I’d noticed a few books had fallen off my desk, but that was about it.

  “It’s so weird,” I repeated.

  Joe shook his head. “Nothing weird about it. Just some punks out having their idea of fun.”

  By the time I got back to my own store, I didn’t know what to think.

  Snippet and I stopped in at a few other places along the strip and while everyone had damage to report, none of it was what could be put down to a quake. In the bakery, all the pies had been thrown against the front windows. In the hardware store, each and every electrical bulb was smashed—though they looked as though they’d simply exploded. All the rolls of paper towels and toilet paper from the grocery store had been tossed up into the trees behind their shipping and receiving bays, turning the bare-branched oaks and elms into bizarre mummy-like versions of themselves. And on it went.

  The police arrived not long after I returned to the store. I felt like such a fool when one of the detectives came by to interview me. Yes, I’d heard the crash and come down to investigate. No, I hadn’t seen anything.

  I couldn’t bring myself to mention the dancing lights.

  No, I hadn’t thought to phone it in.

  “I thought I was dreaming,” I told him. “I was half-asleep when I came downstairs and didn’t think it had really happened. It wasn’t until I came back down in the morning…”

  The detective was of the opinion that it had been gang-related, kids out on the prowl, egging each other on until it had gotten out of control.

  I thought about it when he left and knew he had to be right. The damage we’d sustained was all on the level of pranks—mean-spirited, to be sure, but pranks nonetheless. I didn’t like the idea of our little area being the sudden target of vandals, but there really wasn’t any other logical explanation. At least none occurred to me until I stepped back into the store and glanced at my computer. That’s when I remembered Meran Kelledy, how she’d gotten me to turn my sweater inside out and the odd things she’d been saying about pixies on the web.

  If you’re lucky, they’re still on the Internet and didn’t follow you home.

  Of course that wasn’t even remotely logical. But it made me think. After all, if the Wordwood database could take on a life of its own, who was to say that pixies on the Internet was any more improbable? As my friend Richard likes to point out, everyone has odd problems with their computers that could as easily be attributed to mischievous spirits as to software glitches. At least they could be if your mind wa
s inclined to think along those lines, and mine certainly was. I stood for a long moment, staring at the screen of my computer. I don’t know exactly at what point I realized that the machine was on. I’d turned it off last night before Snippet and I went up to the apartment. And I hadn’t stopped to turn it on this morning before we’d gone out. So either I was getting monumentally forgetful, or I’d turned it on while sleepwalking last night, or…

  I glanced over at Snippet who was once again sniffing everything as though she’d never been in the store before. Or as if someone or something interesting and strange had.

  “This is silly,” I said.

  But I dug out Meran’s card and called the number on it all the same, staring at the computer screen as I did. I just hoped nobody had been tinkering with my files.

  * * *

  Bookstore hobs are a relatively recent phenomenon, dating back only a couple of hundred years. Dick knew hobs back home in the old country who’d lived in the same household for three times that length of time. He’d been a farm hob himself, once, living on a Devon steading for two-hundred-and-twelve-years until a new family moved in and began to take his services for granted. When one year they actually dared to complain about how poorly the harvest had been put away, he’d thrown every bit of it down into a nearby ravine and set off to find new habitation.

  A cousin who lived in a shop had suggested to Dick that he try the same, but there were fewer commercial establishments in those days and they all had their own hob by the time he went looking, first up into Somerset, then back down through Devon, finally moving west to Cornwall. In the end, he made his home in a small cubbyhole of a bookstore he found in Penzance. He lived there for years until the place went out of business, the owner setting sail for North America with plans to open another shop in the new land once he arrived.

  Dick had followed, taking up residence in the new store when it was established. That was where he’d taught himself to read.

  But he soon discovered that stores didn’t have the longevity of a farm. They opened and closed up business seemingly on nothing more than a whim, which made it a hard life for a hob, always looking for a new place to live. By the latter part of this century, he had moved twelve times in the space of five years before finally settling into the place he now called home, the bookstore of his present mistress with its simple sign out front:

  HOLLY RUE—USED BOOKS

  He’d discovered that a quality used bookstore was always the best. Libraries were good, too, but they were usually home to displaced gargoyles and the ghosts of writers and had no room for a hob as well. He’d tried new bookstores, but the smaller ones couldn’t keep him busy enough and the large ones were too bright, their hours of business too long. And he loved the wide and eclectic range of old and new books to be explored in a shop such as Mistress Holly’s, titles that wandered far from the beaten path, or worthy books no longer in print, but nonetheless inspired. The stories he found in them sustained him in a way that nothing else could, for they fed the heart and the spirit.

  But this morning, sitting behind the furnace, he only felt old and tired. There’d been no time to read at all last night, and he hadn’t thought to bring a book down with him when he finally had to leave the store.

  “I hate pixies,” he said, his voice soft and lonely in the darkness. “I really really do.”

  Faerie and pixies had never gotten along, especially not since the last pitched battle between them in the old country when the faeries had been driven back across the River Parrett, leaving everything west of the Parrett as pixyland. For years, hobs such as Dick had lived a clandestine existence in their little steadings, avoiding the attention of pixies whenever they could.

  Dick hadn’t needed last night’s experience to tell him why.

  After a while he heard the mistress and her dog leave the store so he crept out from behind the furnace to stand guard in case the pixies returned while the pair of them were gone. Though what he would do if the pixies did come back, he had no idea. He was an absolute failure when it came to protecting anything, that had been made all too clear last night.

  Luckily the question never arose. Mistress Holly and the dog returned and he slipped back behind the furnace, morosely clutching his knees and rocking back and forth, waiting for the night to come. He could hear life go on upstairs. Someone came by to help the mistress right the fallen bookcases. Customers arrived and left with much discussion of the vandalism on the street. Most of the time he could hear only the mistress, replacing the books on their shelves.

  “I should be doing that,” Dick said. “That’s my job.”

  But he was only an incompetent hob, concealed in his hidey-hole, of no use to anyone until they all went to bed and he could go about his business. And even then, any ruffian could come along and bully him and what could he do to stop them?

  Dick’s mood went from bad to worse, from sad to sadder still. It might have lasted all the day, growing unhappier with each passing hour, except at mid morning he suddenly sat up, ears and nose quivering. A presence had come into the store above. A piece of an old mystery, walking about as plain as could be.

  He realized that he’d sensed it yesterday as well, while he was dozing. Then he’d put it down to the dream he was wandering in, forgetting all about it when he woke. But today, wide awake, he couldn’t ignore it. There was an oak king’s daughter upstairs, an old and powerful spirit walking far from her woods. He began to shiver. Important faerie such as she wouldn’t be out and about unless the need was great. His shiver deepened. Perhaps she’d come to reprimand him for the job so poorly done. She might turn him into a stick or a mouse.

  Oh, this was very bad. First pixies, now this.

  Whatever was he going to do? However could he even begin to explain that he’d meant to chase the pixies away, truly he had, but he simply wasn’t big enough, nor strong enough. Perhaps not even brave enough.

  He rocked back and forth, harder now, his face burrowed against his knees.

  * * *

  After I’d made my call to Meran, Samuel, who works at the deli down the street, came by and helped me stand the bookcases upright once more. The deli hadn’t been spared a visit from the vandals either. He told me that they’d taken all the sausages out of the freezer and used them to spell out rude words on the floor.

  “Remember when all we had to worry about was some graffiti on the walls outside?” he asked when he was leaving.

  I was still replacing books on the shelves when Meran arrived. She looked around the store while I expanded on what I’d told her over the phone. Her brow furrowed thoughtfully and I was wondering if she was going to tell me to put my sweater on backwards again.

  “You must have a hob in here,” she said.

  “A what?”

  It was the last thing I expected her to say.

  “A hobgoblin,” she said. “A brownie. A little faerie man who dusts and tidies and keeps things neat.”

  “I just thought it didn’t get all that dirty,” I said, realizing as I spoke how ridiculous that sounded.

  Because, when I thought about it, a helpful brownie living in the store explained a lot. While I certainly ran the vacuum cleaner over the carpets every other morning or so, and dusted when I could, the place never seemed to need much cleaning. My apartment upstairs required more and it didn’t get a fraction of the traffic.

  And it wasn’t just the cleaning. The store, for all its clutter, was organized, though half the time I didn’t know how. But I always seemed to be able to lay my hand on whatever I needed to find without having to root about too much. Books often got put away without my remembering I’d done it. Others mysteriously vanished, then reappeared a day or so later, properly filed in their appropriate section—even if they had originally disappeared from the top of my desk. I rarely needed to alphabetize my sections while my colleagues in other stores were constantly complaining of the mess their customers left behind.

  “But aren’t you suppose
d to leave cakes and cream out for them?” I found myself asking.

  “You never leave a specific gift,” Meran said. “Not unless you want him to leave. It’s better to simply ‘forget’ a cake or a sweet treat on one of the shelves when you leave for the night.”

  “I haven’t even done that. What could he be living on?”

  Meran smiled as she looked around the store. “Maybe the books nourish him. Stranger things have been known to happen in Faerie.”

  “Faerie,” I repeated slowly.

  Bad enough I’d helped create a database on the Internet that had taken on a life of its own. Now my store was in Faerie. Or at least straddling the border, I supposed. Maybe the one had come about because of the other.

  “Your hob will know what happened here last night,” Meran said.

  “But how would we even go about asking him?”

  It seemed a logical question, since I’d never known I had one living with me in the first place. But Meran only smiled.

  “Oh, I can usually get their attention,” she told me.

  She called out something in a foreign language, a handful of words that rang with great strength and appeared to linger and echo longer than they should. The poor little man who came sidling up from the basement in response looked absolutely terrified. He was all curly hair and raggedy clothes with a broad face that, I assumed from the laugh lines, normally didn’t look so miserable. He was carrying a battered little leather carpetbag and held a brown cloth cap in his hand. He couldn’t have been more than two feet tall.

  All I could do was stare at him, though I did have the foresight to pick up Snippet before she could lunge in his direction. I could feel the growl rumbling in her chest more than hear it. I think she was as surprised as me to find that he’d been living in our basement all this time.

  Meran sat on her haunches, bringing her head down to the general level of the hob’s. To put him at ease, I supposed, so I did the same myself. The little man didn’t appear to lose any of his nervousness. I could see his knees knocking against each other, his cheek twitching.