The Little Country

by Charles de Lint

  The Moving Bog

  From ghoulies and ghosties and long leggety beasties,

  And things that go bump in the night, Good Lord, deliver us.

  ‌—CORNISH PRAYER

  “Don’t look into her eyes!” Edern cried as the fetch moved aside to allow the Widow to bend down and peer in between the crates to where he and Jodi were hiding.

  But his warning came too late.

  That one enormous eye of the Widow’s, staring at her with its unblinking magnetic gaze, had already pinned Jodi to the spot where she stood. It mesmerized her, called to her.

  Come to me, come to me. . . .

  Jodi took a step forward.

  “Jodi, don’t!” Edern called.

  He might just as well have tried to catch water in a sieve, for the Widow’s spell was already taking root in Jodi’s mind. All she could hear was that warm, friendly voice, beckoning her to its promised safety.

  Come to me, my pretty. . . .

  As Jodi took a second step, Edern grabbed her by the arm and shoved her roughly against the side of a crate. The jolting movement was enough to momentarily break the Widow’s spell.

  “What. . . ?” Jodi began.

  Edern’s face was inches from her own.

  “Don’t look into her eyes,” he warned again, “and don’t listen to what she says.”

  Before Jodi could argue, he caught her arm again and hauled her deeper into the labyrinth between the crates. Freed now from the Widow’s mesmerizing gaze, Jodi shivered. Behind them, the Widow called after them, her words dripping honey, promising them their heart’s desire if they would only return. Will she, nill she, Jodi found herself starting to turn back until Edern gripped her arm again and began to sing. His clear tenor voice cut through the Widow’s enchantment leaving her words to lie bare and be revealed for the lies they were.

  But if she didn’t listen to Edern’s voice, it was so easy to just believe. . . .

  Edern, as though sensing how she was weakening again, sang louder as he reached the chorus:

  “Hal-an-tow,

  Jolly rumble-o,

  We were up, long before the day-o‌—”

  “Sing with me!” Edern cried.

  Jodi hesitated for a heartbeat, then joined in on the familiar song.

  “To welcome in the summer,

  To welcome in the May-o,

  For summer is a-coming in

  And winter’s gone away-o.”

  Forgoing a verse that she might not know, Edern launched straight into a repeat of the chorus. He kept a hand on Jodi’s arm, pulling her along when she seemed to falter in her step.

  Singing at the top of their lungs, they retreated to where the wharf ended and they could go no farther. They could still hear the Widow’s voice, but now the stretch of the massed crates between them and the sound of the tide as it washed the pilings below stole away its enchantment.

  Finally, the Widow gave up and fell silent.

  Jodi slumped against a crate. “Oh raw we,” she said. “Wasn’t that close?”

  “Too close,” Edern agreed.

  “How can she do that with her voice? She must be able to get anything she wants from anybody.”

  Edern shook his head. “She needs to have a piece of you, first. Your name called three times, or a pinch of your soul, the way she’s got that one of yours sewn up in her cloak. Can you imagine having a conversation with someone who, just before they ask you something, calls you by your full name three times? It wouldn’t be long before they knew her for what she was and brought out all the old charms to ward off her spells.”

  “Still, we’re safe for now, aren’t we?”

  “Not for long. And don’t forget, they’ll be loading these crates soon and then where will we hide?”

  “Maybe we can get inside one of them?” Jodi tried.

  “And end up where?”

  She nodded glumly. “Bother and damn. You’d think‌—” She paused to lift her head, smelling at the air. “What’s that awful pong in the air?”

  She couldn’t really make out Edern’s features in the gloom, but she could sense his sudden tension.

  “Edern,” she said. “What’s the matter?”

  “She has more power than I gave her credit for,” he replied.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Jodi stood up as she spoke because the wood planking of the wharf under her was becoming damp. The smell grew worse: It was like the stink raised from disturbing stagnant waters. Standing, she wiped at the seat of her trousers and wrinkled her nose. The planking underfoot was acquiring a definite spongy feel to it.

  “Have you ever heard of a sloch?” Edern asked.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. The motion was lost in the darkness. “Why do I get a bad feeling about what you’re going to tell me?” she added.

  “Because they’re terrible creatures‌—especially to folk our size.”

  Jodi could hear something approaching now‌—more than one something, each moving with a wet, sucking sound.

  “Normally a witch will use them like a fetch,” Edern explained, “but they are only temporary fabrications. They rarely live out the night in which they were created.”

  Jodi stared back the way they had come, into the shadows. In the distance she could make out a dull green glow, but that was all. The reek was truly awful now and there was a chill in the air that had nothing to do with the normal damp of an autumn night in Bodbury.

  “What are they, Edern?”

  “They’re made from materials collected in a bog‌—fouled mud and rotting twigs, bound together with decaying reeds and rushes. Stagnant water runs in their makeshift veins like muddy blood. Their eyes glow with the marsh gas that the witch combines with a spark of her own soul when she animates them.”

  Jodi could see the ghostly pinprick glow of those eyes as he spoke‌—small malevolent sparks that shone brightly in the sickly green glow that preceded the creatures. The stench was so bad now that she had to breathe through her mouth.

  “What are they going to do to us?” she asked. “What can they do?”

  By the glow that seemed to emanate from their skin, she could see the shape of them now as the sloch shuffled wetly forward. Stick-thin limbs attached to fat-bellied torsos, squat heads atop, connected without the benefit of necks. Jodi gagged, nausea roiling in her stomach, as a new wave of their stench rolled towards her. Underfoot, the wharf’s planking had become as soggy as the soft ground of a bog.

  “They can take us back to the Widow,” Edern replied bleakly.

  “No,” Jodi said. “I won’t go back.”

  “They can pull us to pieces, those things,” Edern said. “They’re far stronger than their origins would lead you to believe.”

  “There must be something we can do.”

  But there was nowhere left to go, no place to turn. They were backed up to the edge of the wharf now. Below lay the sea. On either side, crates blocked their way. And in front of them, approaching slowly but inexorably, came the Widow’s reeking creatures.

  “There’s nothing,” Edern said. “Unless. . . .” He turned to look at the dark waters below. “Can you swim?” he added.

  “Yes, but the size we are . . . How would we ever make it all the way to shore?”

  “It’s the chance you’ll have to take‌—the only one left to you. The brine of the sea will protect you.”

  “What do you mean, protect me?”

  “Witches are like hummocks in that way,” Edern said. “Neither can abide the touch of salt. That’s something the travelers know, if others have forgotten it.”

  “I meant,” she said, “the way you just said me. What about you?”

  The sloch were close enough so that their faces could be made out in the feeble light that their bodies cast. Jodi wished they had stayed in the shadows. They had heads like turnips, featureless except for leering grins that split the bottom parts of their faces and those ghastly glowing eyes. The very lac
k of other features made them that much more horrible to her. This close, their reek was unbearable.

  “I can’t swim,” Edern told her.

  “I’ll help you‌—Taupin showed me how to swim while towing someone along with you. It’s not so hard.”

  “You don’t understand‌—it’s not just that I can’t swim. I would sink to the bottom of the ocean as soon as I touched the waves.”

  “That’s nonsense. Why would you‌—”

  “Trust me in this.”

  “I’m not going without you.”

  Edern took a step away from her, towards the horrible creatures.

  “You must,” he said. “Remember the Men-an-Tol. Go nine times through it at moonrise.”

  “I’m not‌—”

  But she had no more chance to argue. Edern ran at the creatures, ramming into them as though he were a living battering ram. The foremost sloch went tumbling down, falling into the ones behind. A weird hissing arose in the air that sounded like an angry hive of bees.

  “I want them alive!” Jodi could hear the Widow faintly cry from beyond the crates.

  Jodi danced nearby the struggling figures, trying to get a kick in, but Edern was blocking her way. The passage between the crates was so narrow that only a pair of the creatures could get at him at one time.

  “Let me help!” Jodi cried.

  But “Go!” was Edern’s only response, made without his turning his head towards her.

  He grabbed the arm of the closest creature and pulled it from its torso. Black, muddy blood sprayed about. A drop splattered against the back of Jodi’s hand, stinging like a nettle. And Edern, who took the brunt of the spray‌—

  Jodi started to gag.

  His features seemed to be melting. Where once had been his somewhat handsome face, now there were runnels of dripping skin, like wax going down the side of a candle.

  “Y-you‌—” she began.

  He pulled the limb from another of the sloch and a new spray of the stinging blood erupted. The bee-buzz of the creatures grew higher pitched and angrier now. The sloch in the rear began to clamber over their fallen comrades to get at Edern.

  “No!” Jodi heard the witch cry. “You’ll ruin them!”

  Jodi nodded dumbly in agreement.

  “Don’t hurt him . . .” she said in a small voice.

  Him? she thought. Was he even a person?

  She took a hesitant step forward. Edern turned towards her, his face melted now to show metal, not bone, under the skin. The polished steel gleamed in the light that came from the creatures’ bodies. Jodi put a hand to her mouth, too shocked to even speak. A sloch punched a hole in the little man’s chest. When it withdrew its arm, clockwork mechanisms spilled forth, gears and little wheels and ratchets rolling across the soggy planks of the wharf.

  Frozen in place, Jodi stared at what Edern was revealed to be: a clockwork man.

  Like something she might find on Denzil’s worktable.

  But he’d walked and talked like a real person. Clockwork mechanisms moved with stiff, jerky motions. They couldn’t speak. They couldn’t feel. They . . .

  “You . . .” she began. “You can’t. . . .”

  This couldn’t be real.

  The sloch pushed him aside. More cogs and tiny geared wheels spilled from his chest as he hit the soggy wharf planking.

  None of this was real.

  But he looked up at her, life still impossibly there in his eyes.

  “Remember,” he said. “The stone. Nine times through its hole. . . .”

  His voice had a hollow ring to it now.

  “Remember,” he repeated.

  She nodded numbly. At moonrise.

  “You fools!” she heard the Widow cry.

  She backed away from the shuffling creatures, gaze still locked on Edern’s ruined face. When the light finally died in his eyes‌—no, the eyes simply changed from a real person’s eyes to ones made of glass‌—she turned and ran towards the edge of the wharf.

  The creatures followed. The air was filled with their bee-buzz anger. Their reek was almost a physical presence in the air. She could hear the Widow shouting, caught a glimpse above her of Windle peering down at her through a crack in the crates, then she reached the edge and launched herself out into the air.

  Moments later, the dark waves of the sea closed in over her head.

  2.

  Denzil and Taupin traveled back and forth through Bodbury for hours, but could find no trace of Jodi. It was as though she had simply vanished into thin air.

  Early in their search, Taupin had enlisted the help of Kara Faull, one of the Tatters children, by the simple method of tossing pebbles at her window until she came down to see what they wanted. Once the situation had been explained to her, she set off on her bicycle and soon there was a whole gaggle of Tatters children scouring the town as well. From time to time, one of them would pedal up to wherever Denzil and Taupin were to give a report.

  “She hasn’t been seen on the Hill.”

  “No sign of her in old town.”

  “We’ve been up and down New Dock, but didn’t see a thing except for the Widow walking with what looked to be the ugliest cat I ever did see.”

  “It had no fur, I’ll swear.”

  “Garm, yes. And such a pong there near the wharves.”

  Well past midnight, the children had all returned to their beds and only Denzil and Taupin remained to continue the search, neither of them knowing how to proceed now.

  “Well,” Taupin said finally, sitting on a low stone wall by the Old Quay. “We’ve done it logical, haven’t we?”

  “Why do I not want to hear what you’re going to tell me next?” Denzil asked.

  Taupin smiled. “All the same, it’s time we considered the impossible now.” At Denzil’s frown, he added, “We did agree to that.”

  “You decided that.”

  “Have you got a better idea?”

  “We could take another turn around by . . .” Denzil’s voice trailed off as Taupin shook his head.

  “To what purpose?”

  “To find Jodi, you!”

  “Will you give me a chance to explain?”

  Denzil sighed. “All right. But I’m worried, Brengy.”

  “I am, too.”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  Taupin pointed with his chin over to the far side of the Tatters where a number of old warehouses stood.

  “We’ll go ask Henkie.”

  “Now I know you’re mad,” Denzil said.

  Hedrik Whale was the town reprobate. As his surname hinted, he was an enormous man, standing six-foot-three and weighing some three hundred pounds. He had a beard that came down to his waist, portions of which he wore in tiny braids, and hair cropped so short he might as well have simply shaved his scalp. He gadded about town in paint-stained dungarees and old workboots, a knee-length jersey and an ever-present scarf.

  Years ago, when the pilchard died out, he had used the immense inheritance left him by his father‌—Rawlyn Whale, of Whale Fisheries‌—to buy up a few of the old Tatters warehouses, which he peopled with the derelicts of the town. One he kept for his own use and in it he stored an immense library and the enormous canvases upon which he worked. His paintings were invariably of beautiful women‌—who for some unknown reason were attracted to him in droves for all that he almost always smelled as though he hadn’t washed in a week‌—and his style was stunning. His canvases seemed to literally breathe‌—not just with life, however, but with lewdness and debauchery as well.

  His real notoriety‌—if one discounted the mural of the town council depicted in various states of inebriation and undress that he’d painted on the side of one of his warehouses‌—was the curious case of a missing corpse. When one of his derelict friends, a certain John Briello of no fixed age nor address, died a few years ago, Henkie, rather than giving the fellow a proper funeral, had followed Briello’s instructions and had his friend stuffed.

  He�
�d kept the body propped up in a corner of his studio until the authorities got wind of its existence, but when the constables arrived en masse at the studio, the body wasn’t to be found. Nor was it ever heard of again, save in rumour.

  For all Denzil’s admiration of the man’s craft‌—or at least the stylistic excellence of his craft, for Denzil, if the truth be told, was somewhat of a prude‌—he’d never been able to spend more than a few minutes in the man’s company. Henkie smelled bad and, for all his artistic ability, was himself an obese eyesore. He was brash, unreasonable, crude, offensive, belligerent. . . in short, not an easy man to like.

  “You only have to get to know him,” Taupin argued.

  “That,” Denzil said, “is what I’d be most afraid of, you.”

  “He can help us,” Taupin insisted.

  “Tee-ta-taw. About as much as the Widow could.”

  “No,” Taupin said. “But he has some of her rumoured talents.”

  Denzil rolled his eyes. “I suppose he can scry with a glass ball?”

  “Better. He can speak with the dead.”

  “You really are mad, you.”

  Taupin stood up from the wall and made a great show of dusting some nonexistent lint from the sleeve of his coat.

  “It makes no sense,” Denzil said.

  Taupin studied his nails, then dug into his pocket until he came up with a penknife that he used to clean one.

  “It would be a complete waste of time,” Denzil tried, obviously weakening.

  Taupin began to whistle a bawdy pub song and turned to look out at the harbour.

  Denzil sighed. “I know I’ll regret this,” he said.

  Turning to face him again, Taupin gave Denzil a hearty clap on the back.

  “That’s the spirit, old sport,” he said. “Optimism. One can do wonders with optimism. Bottle it up and serve it as a tonic, I wouldn’t doubt, if we could only find a way to distill its particular‌—”

  Denzil straightened his glasses, which had gone all askew on the end of his nose, and pushed them back until they were settled in their proper place once more.

  “Can we just get this over with?” he asked.