The Very Best of Charles De Lint

by Charles de Lint

  “B-begging your pardon, your ladyship,” he said to Meran. His gaze slid to me and I gave him a quick smile. He blinked, swallowed hard, and returned his attention to my companion. “Dick Bobbins,” he added, giving a quick nod of his head. “At your service, as it were. I’ll just be on my way, then, no harm done.”

  “Why are you so frightened of me?” Meran asked.

  He looked at the floor. “Well, you’re a king’s daughter, aren’t you just, and I’m only me.”

  A king’s daughter? I thought.

  Meran smiled. “We’re all only who we are, no one of more importance than the other.”

  “Easy for you to say,” he began. Then his eyes grew wide and he put a hand to his mouth. “Oh, that was a bad thing to say to such a great and wise lady such as yourself.”

  Meran glanced at me. “They think we’re like movie stars,” she explained. “Just because we were born in a court instead of a hobhole.”

  I was getting a bit of a case of the celebrity nerves myself. Court? King’s daughter? Who exactly was this woman?

  “But you know,” she went on, returning her attention to the little man, “my father’s court was only a glade, our palace no more than a tree.”

  He nodded quickly, giving her a thin smile that never reached his eyes.

  “Well, wonderful to meet you,” he said. “Must be on my way now.”

  He picked up his carpetbag and started to sidle towards the other aisle that wasn’t blocked by what he must see as two great big hulking women and a dog.

  “But we need your help,” Meran told him.

  Whereupon he burst into tears.

  The mothering instinct that makes me such a sap for Snippet kicked into gear and I wanted to hold him in my arms and comfort him. But I had Snippet to consider, straining in my grip, the growl in her chest quite audible now. And I wasn’t sure how the little man would have taken my sympathies. After all, he might be child-sized, but for all his tears, he was obviously an adult, not a child. And if the stories were anything to go by, he was probably older than me—by a few hundred years.

  Meran had no such compunction. She slipped up to him and put her arms around him, cradling his face against the crook of her shoulder.

  It took a while before we coaxed the story out of him. I locked the front door and we went upstairs to my kitchen where I made tea for us all. Sitting at the table, raised up to the proper height by a stack of books, Dick told us about the pixies coming out of the computer screen, how they’d knocked down the bookcases and finally disappeared into the night. The small mug I’d given him looked enormous in his hands. He fell silent when he was done and stared glumly down at the steam rising from his tea.

  “But none of what they did was your fault,” I told him.

  “Kind of you to say,” he managed. He had to stop and sniff, wipe his nose on his sleeve. “But if I’d b-been braver—”

  “They would have drowned you in a puddle,” Meran said. “And I think you were brave, shouting at them the way you did and then rescuing your mistress from being pixy-led.”

  I remembered those dancing lights and shivered. I knew those stories as well. There weren’t any swamps or marshes to be led into around here, but there were eighteen-wheelers out on the highway only a few blocks away. Entranced as I’d been, the pixies could easily have walked me right out in front of any one of them. I was lucky to only have a sore shoulder.

  “Do you…really think so?” he asked, sitting up a little straighter.

  We both nodded.

  Snippet was lying under my chair, her curiosity having been satisfied that Dick was only one more visitor and therefore out-of-bounds in terms of biting and barking at. There’d been a nervous moment while she’d sniffed at his trembling hand and he’d looked as though he was ready to scurry up one of the bookcases, but they quickly made their peace. Now Snippet was only bored and had fallen asleep.

  “Well,” Meran said. “It’s time we put our heads together and considered how we can put our unwanted visitors back where they came from and keep them there.”

  “Back onto the Internet?” I asked. “Do you really think we should?”

  “Well, we could try to kill them….”

  I shook my head. That seemed too extreme. I started to protest, only to see that she’d been teasing me.

  “We could take a thousand of them out of the web,” Meran said, “and still not have them all. Once tricksy folk like pixies have their foot in a place, you can’t ever be completely rid of them.” She smiled. “But if we can get them to go back in, there are measures we can take to stop them from troubling you again.”

  “And what about everybody else on-line?” I asked.

  Meran shrugged. “They’ll have to take their chances—just like they do when they go for a walk in the woods. The little people are everywhere.”

  I glanced across my kitchen table to where the hob was sitting and thought, no kidding.

  “The trick, if you’ll pardon my speaking out of turn,” Dick said, “is to play on their curiosity.”

  Meran gave him an encouraging smile. “We want your help,” she said. “Go on.”

  The little man sat up straighter still and put his shoulders back.

  “We could use a book that’s never been read,” he said. “We could put it in the middle of the road, in front of the store. That would certainly make me curious.”

  “An excellent idea,” Meran told him.

  “And then we could use the old spell of bell, book and candle. The churchmen stole that one from us.”

  Even I’d heard of it. Bell, book and candle had once been another way of saying excommunication in the Catholic church. After pronouncing the sentence, the officiating cleric would close his book, extinguish the candle, and toll the bell as if for someone who had died. The book symbolized the book of life, the candle a man’s soul, removed from the sight of God as the candle had been from the sight of men.

  But I didn’t get the unread book bit.

  “Do you mean a brand new book?” I asked. “A particular copy that nobody might have opened yet, or one that’s so bad that no one’s actually made their way all the way through it?”

  “Though someone would have had to,” Dick said, “for it to have been published in the first place. I meant the way books were made in the old days, with the pages still sealed. You had to cut them apart as you read them.”

  “Oh, I remember those,” Meran said.

  Like she was there. I took another look at her and sighed. Maybe she had

  been.

  “Do you have any like that?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said slowly, unable to hide my reluctance.

  I didn’t particularly like the idea of putting a collector’s item like that out in the middle of the road.

  But in the end, that’s what we did.

  * * *

  The only book I had that passed Dick’s inspection was The Trembling of the Veil by William Butler Yeats, number seventy-one of a thousand-copy edition privately printed by T. Werner Laurie, Ltd. in 1922. All the pages were still sealed at the top. It was currently listing on the Internet in the $450 to $500 range and I kept it safely stowed away in the glass-doored bookcase that held my first editions.

  The other two items were easier to deal with. I had a lovely brass bell that my friend Tatiana had given me for Christmas last year and a whole box of fat white candles just because I liked to burn them. But it broke my heart to go out onto the street around two A.M., and place the Yeats on the pavement.

  We left the front door to the store ajar, the computer on. I wasn’t entirely sure how we were supposed to lure the pixies back into the store and then onto the Internet once more, but Meran took a flute out of her bag and fit the wooden pieces of it together. She spoke of a calling-on music and Dick nodded sagely, so I simply went along with their better experience. Mind you, I also wasn’t all that sure that my Yeats would actually draw the pixies back in the first place, but what did I
know?

  We all hid in the alleyway running between my store and the futon shop, except for Snippet, who was locked up in my apartment. She hadn’t been very pleased by that. After an hour of crouching in the cold in the alley, I wasn’t feeling very pleased myself. What if the pixies didn’t come? What if they did, but they approached from the fields behind the store and came traipsing up this very alleyway?

  By three-thirty we all had a terrible chill. Looking up at my apartment, I could see Snippet lying in the window of the dining room, looking down at us. She didn’t appear to have forgiven me yet and I would happily have changed places with her.

  “Maybe we should just—”

  I didn’t get to finish with “call it a night.” Meran put a finger to her lips and hugged the wall. I looked past her to the street.

  At first I didn’t see anything. There was just my Yeats, lying there on the pavement, waiting for a car to come and run over it. But then I saw the little man, not even half the size of Dick, come creeping up from the sewer grating. He was followed by two more. Another pair came down the brick wall of the temporary office help building across the street. Small dancing lights that I remembered too clearly from last night, dipped and wove their way from the other end of the block, descending to the pavement and becoming more of the little men when they drew near to the book. One of them poked at it with his foot and I had visions of them tearing it apart.

  Meran glanced at Dick and he nodded, mouthing the words, “That’s the lot of them.”

  She nodded back and took her flute out from under her coat where she’d been keeping it warm.

  At this point I wasn’t really thinking of how the calling music would work. I’m sure my mouth hung agape as I stared at the pixies. I felt light-headed, a big grin tugging at my lips. Yes, they were pranksters, and mean-spirited ones at that. But they were also magical. The way they’d changed from little lights to little men…I’d never seen anything like it before. The hob who lived in my bookstore was magical, too, of course, but somehow it wasn’t the same thing. He was already familiar, so down-to-earth. Sitting around during the afternoon and evening while we waited, I’d had a delightful time talking books with him, as though he were an old friend. I’d completely forgotten that he was a little magic man himself.

  The pixies were truly puzzled by the book. I suppose it would be odd from any perspective, a book that old, never once having been opened or read. It defeated the whole purpose of why it had been made.

  I’m not sure when Meran began to play her flute. The soft breathy sound of it seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere, all at once, a resonant wave of slow, stately notes, one falling after the other, rolling into a melody that was at once hauntingly strange and heartachingly familiar.

  The pixies lifted their heads at the sound. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected, but when they began to dance, I almost clapped my hands. They were so funny. Their bodies kept perfect time to the music, but their little eyes glared at Meran as she stepped out of the alley and Pied Pipered them into the store.

  Dick fetched the Yeats and then he and I followed after, arriving in time to see the music make the little men dance up onto my chair, onto the desk, until they began to vanish, one by one, into the screen of my monitor, a fat candle sitting on top of it, its flame flickering with their movement. Dick opened the book and I took the bell out of my pocket. Meran took the flute from her lips.

  “Now,” she said.

  Dick slapped the book closed, she leaned forward and blew out the candle while I began to chime the bell, the clear brass notes ringing in the silence left behind by the flute. We saw a horde of little faces staring out at us from the screen, eyes glaring. One of the little men actually popped back through, but Dick caught him by the leg and tossed him back into the screen.

  Meran laid her flute down on the desk and brought out a garland she’d made earlier of rowan twigs, green leaves and red berry sprigs still attached in places. When she laid it on top of the monitor, we heard the modem dial up my Internet service. When the connection was made, the little men vanished from the screen. The last turned his bum towards us and let out a loud fart before he, too, was gone.

  The three of us couldn’t help it. We all broke up.

  “That went rather well,” Meran said when we finally caught our breath. “My husband Cerin is usually the one to handle this sort of thing, but it’s nice to know I haven’t forgotten how to deal with such rascals myself. And it’s probably best he didn’t come along this evening. He can seem rather fierce and I don’t doubt poor Dick here would have thought him far too menacing.”

  I looked around the store.

  “Where is Dick?” I asked.

  But the little man was gone. I couldn’t believe it. Surely he hadn’t just up and left us like in the stories.

  “Hobs and brownies,” Meran said when I asked, her voice gentle, “they tend to take their leave rather abruptly when the tale is done.”

  “I thought you had to leave them a suit of clothes or something.”

  Meran shrugged. “Sometimes simply being identified is enough to make them go.”

  “Why does it have to be like that?”

  “I’m not really sure. I suppose it’s a rule or something, or a geas—a thing that has to happen. Or perhaps it’s no more than a simple habit they’ve handed down from one generation to the next.”

  “But I loved the idea of him living here,” I said. “I thought it would be so much fun. With all the work he’s been doing, I’d have been happy to make him a partner.”

  Meran smiled. “Faerie and commerce don’t usually go hand in hand.”

  “But you and your husband play music for money.”

  Her smile grew wider, her eyes enigmatic, but also amused.

  “What makes you think we’re faerie?” she asked.

  “Well, you…that is…”

  “I’ll tell you a secret,” she said, relenting. “We’re something else again, but what exactly that might be, even we have no idea anymore. Mostly we’re the same as you. Where we differ is that Cerin and I always live with half a foot in the otherworld that you’ve only visited these past few days.”

  “And only the borders of it, I’m sure.”

  She shrugged. “Faerie is everywhere. It just seems closer at certain times, in certain places.”

  She began to take her flute apart and stow the wooden pieces away in the instrument’s carrying case.

  “Your hob will be fine,” she said. “The kindly ones such as he always find a good household to live in.”

  “I hope so,” I said. “But all the same, I was really looking forward to getting to know him better.”

  * * *

  Dick Bobbins got an odd feeling listening to the two of them talk, his mistress and the oak king’s daughter. Neither were quite what he’d expected. Mistress Holly was far kinder and not at all the brusque, rather self-centered human that figured in so many old hob fireside tales. And her ladyship…well, who would have thought that one of the highborn would treat a simple hob as though they stood on equal footing? It was all very unexpected.

  But it was time for him to go. He could feel it in his blood and in his bones. He waited while they said their goodbyes. Waited while Mistress Holly took the dog out for a last quick pee before the pair of them retired to their apartment. Then he had the store completely to himself, with no chance of unexpected company. He fetched his little leather carpetbag from his hobhole behind the furnace and came back upstairs to say goodbye to the books, to the store, to his home.

  Finally all there was left to do was to spell the door open, step outside and go. He hesitated on the welcoming carpet, thinking of what Mistress Holly had asked, what her ladyship had answered. Was the leaving song that ran in his blood and rumbled in his bones truly a geas, or only habit? How was a poor hob to know? If it was a rule, then who had made it and what would happen if he broke it?

  He took a step away from the door, back into the store and p
aused, waiting for he didn’t know what. Some force to propel him out the door. A flash of light to burn down from the sky and strike him where he stood. Instead all he felt was the heaviness in his heart and the funny tingling warmth he’d known when he’d heard the mistress say how she’d been looking forward to getting to know him. That she wanted him to be a partner in her store. Him. Dick Bobbins, of all things.

  He looked at the stairs leading up to her apartment.

  Just as an experiment, he made his way over to them, then up the risers, one by one, until he stood at her door.

  Oh, did he dare, did he dare?

  He took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. Then setting down his carpetbag, he twisted his cloth cap in his hands for a long moment before he finally lifted an arm and rapped a knuckle against the wood panel of Mistress Holly’s door.

  Many Worlds Are Born Tonight

  I went down to the Beanery that night, you know, that café down in the old factory district by the canal that’s more like a warehouse than a coffee bar. Big enough for a rave, but the wildest the music gets is Chet Baker or Morcheeba. Very hip place, at least this week. Non-smoking, of course, but everything is these days. Open concept with lots of woodwork: pine floors, rustic rafters and support beams. No real general lighting, only pockets, low-hanging overhead lights illuminating tables with groups of people in earnest conversation, drinking low-fat lattés and decaf espressos, go figure. Kind of like a singles bar without the action, but I like it for that. For the anonymity it allows me. So I’m surprised when I catch a name I haven’t heard in years.

  “Hey, Spyboy.”

  It takes me back to New Orleans, Mardi Gras. Spyboys are part of the Big Chiefs’ entourages during the annual parade, the Mardi Gras “Indians” who scout ahead for the other tribes on the march and just generally make a lot of mischief. I did my bit in the parades back in those days, but the name stuck because of another job I held before I retired: digging up dirt for the Couteau family. I’m good at secrets—keeping my own, uncovering those that belong to others. I guess I’d still be there, but I took exception to the use of my expertise. I don’t mind tracking down deadbeats and the like, but it turned out that people died because of information I dug up. When I found out how the Couteaus were using me, I couldn’t live with it, but you don’t say goodbye to people like this.