The Little Country

by Charles de Lint

  No, she realized. Not moving on top of it. Rising from it. A Lilliputian man stepping from its pages to lift his head and look about the room, his gaze tracking the giant furnishings until it caught, then rested, on Janey’s own gaze.

  He was no bigger than the little mice or moles that Jabez occasionally deposited on the Gaffer’s back doorstep with that smug pride of his species. Janey could have held the man in the palm of her hand‌—the whole of him, from toe tip to the top of his head.

  She found she couldn’t breathe as the light behind those tiny eyes locked on her own.

  The music continued, a kind of slow reel, but played on instruments she couldn’t recognize. They had a certain familiarity with ones that she knew, but something remained odd about them all the same, differences that made their pitch alien, for all their familiarity. There were plucked string sounds and bowed string sounds. An underlying drumming rhythm like that woken from the skin of a crowdy crawn‌—the Cornish equivalent of a bodhran. Free reed instruments and others with oboe-like tones. A kind of psaltry or harpsichord and distant piping that sounded like a chorus of Cornish pibcorns‌—the ancient native instrument that had a single reed and two cow’s horns at the end of a cedarwood pipe and was much like a Breton bombarde.

  She knew this music‌—knew it down to the very core of her being‌—but she had never heard it before. Unfamiliar, it had still always been there inside her, waiting to be woken. It grew from the core of mystery that gives a secret its special delight, religion its awe. It demanded to be accepted by simple faith, not dissected or questioned, and at the same time, it begged to be doubted and probed.

  There was wonder in its strains, and bright flares of joy that set the heart on fire, but there was a darkness in it as well, a shadow that could reach into the soul and cloud all one’s perceptions with a bleak grey shroud. The path between the two was narrow and treacherous, like the winding track that old folk songs claimed led one into Faerie.

  Janey knew those songs, knew the lessons of the hard road to Heaven, the broad easy road to Hell, and the dangers of Faerie that lay in between, onion-layered with the world of the here and now into which she had been born, now lived, and would one day die. Given a choice, she would always take the winding road to Faerie, because Heaven was too bright. There were no secrets there, for none could withstand the judgmental glare of its light. And Hell was too dark.

  But Faerie . . .

  This music seemed to show the way to reach that realm. It led into secret glens where hidden wonders lay waiting for those brave enough to dare to follow it home.

  Janey couldn’t help herself. She had to go.

  The key to where she should put her first foot forward lay there in the music, but it was tantalizingly just out of reach at the same time.

  “How can I . . . ?” she began.

  A new wash of the music, a sudden swell, rising to a crescendo, made her lose her train of thought, and then died down again.

  If you must ask, it seemed to say, then you will never find the way. . . .

  “But. . . ?”

  She looked to the little man on Dunthorn’s book for help.

  Dark is best, the music whispered. Dark is all.

  The tiny man looked back at her with a sense of alarm that she shared.

  The music had settled into a deep drone. The entire house vibrated with its bass tones, wooden beams cracking, foundation stones shifting against one another. Heaven’s awe, Faerie’s wonder, faded from its strains.

  Janey took another step forward all the same.

  An eerie wail rose out of the drone, shrieking across the back of the music like a fingernail drawn across a blackboard. The little man sank back into the book‌—flailing his arms as though he were being drawn into the quickening mire of a bog.

  Janey moved quickly closer, but this time a scratching at the window stopped her. She looked out to see a hundred tiny leering goblin faces staring in at her. The creatures clawed at the glass, slit eyes burning with a yellow light.

  The music was a horror soundtrack now.

  She caught movement from the corner of her eyes and turned to look back at the book. Its pages were flipping once more, rapidly turned by invisible hands. When they stopped this time, the music shrieked to another crescendo and a dark mist rose from the open pages of the book.

  There were monstrous shapes in the mist. The stench of old graves dug open and corpse breath haunted the air. Childhood night terrors came to life: a Pandora’s box of horrors and fears; specters of death and pestilence‌—visited on friends and family.

  Her grandfather, stumbling out of the dark fog like a corpse, animated, but the soul was long fled, mouth full of squirming maggots, the eyes dead. . . .

  Felix, reduced to a skeletal frame and covered with running sores, reaching for her with bleeding hands. . . .

  Clare, dragging herself across the carpet towards her with fingers transformed into eagle’s talons, her body ending at the waist, her mouth a horror of barracuda teeth, dripping blood from its corners. . . .

  The Rolling Stone reporter shuffling forward, eyes milky and unseeing, trailing a ragged stream of his own entrails behind him. . . .

  And more, so many more, all converging on her.

  All reaching for her. . . .

  Hands upon her now, a hundred hands, clawing at her arms and legs and torso, tearing long runnels of bleeding skin from her flesh, dragging her back into the heart of that dark mist where worse horrors waited for their chance to feed on her. . . .

  At the windows outside, the goblins screeching their nails on the glass. . . .

  The room stinking like an abattoir, reeking of blood and excrement, of burning hair and open graves. . . .

  The music a rhythmical electronic drone on which rode the sounds of grinding teeth. . . .

  And wet burbling.

  Hateful whispers.

  And a long pitiful moan that she‌—when she finally woke‌—realized was crawling up from her own throat. . . .

  It was a very long time before, emotionally exhausted, she finally fell asleep again.

  In his small room in the bed and breakfast, just a hop, skip, and a jump away from the Gaffer’s house on Duck Street, Michael Bett lay alone, brooding.

  He’d dreamt as well‌—of sunlit fields that were thick with the sweet scent of violets and anemones, and the hum of bees. Steep hillsides that ran down to a cove below where the surf washed against ancient granite. The sky was clear and there was a gentle music in the air‌—the soft sound of a set of Northumbrian pipes playing a tune that was familiar to him because it was on Janey Little’s second album.

  Bett had never been in such a peaceful place before.

  It sickened him, enraged him.

  This wasn’t the way the world was. The world was all sharp edges and looking out for number one and take what you can get while you can.

  Not this lie.

  He took up a stick and began hacking at the flowers, cutting the heads from them with vast sweeps of his arm, but his one shoulder felt as though it had almost been dislocated and the bee-buzz/bird chorus sound of the pipes was getting under his skin until he could barely think and all he wanted was to kill whoever was playing them.

  Janey Little.

  He wanted to rip her lungs out of her chest.

  He spun in a circle, flailing with the stick, trying to find the source of the music, a primordial howl building up in his chest, wailing for release.

  He woke with that howl in his throat and only just muffled it in the nest of bedclothes in which his limbs had become entangled. His shoulder throbbed with pain.

  He remembered his failure with Clare Mabley earlier this evening.

  He remembered Lena Grant’s newfound independence.

  He remembered having to explain to Madden how things had become unraveled.

  He wanted to lash out at something, someone, anything, but all he could do was lie there in the dark room, his shoulder aching, and stare
up at the ceiling.

  Patience, he told himself. Be patient. Everything’s going to come together. And then the hurting was going to start. He was going to find out how they worked, every one of them. What arteries were connected to what veins. How long they could breathe with a hole in their lungs. How loud they could scream as he peeled away their skin. . . .

  He could be patient.

  But he wasn’t going to try to sleep again tonight.

  In her hotel room in Penzance, Lena Grant was also awake.

  Her dream had been mundane compared to those that had visited others on the Penwith Peninsula tonight. She had simply been confronted by an angered Felix and had tried to explain herself to him. But he wouldn’t listen. And her heart was breaking. And she wondered why she was even concerned about explaining anything to him, but she went on trying all the same, over and over again. And still her heart was breaking. Until she finally woke, alone in her room, to find her cheeks wet with tears and an emptiness lying there inside her that she’d never experienced before.

  She didn’t try to go back to sleep. Instead, she sat up, knees drawn to her chin, rocking back and forth against the headboard, and tried not to let the emptiness overcome her. She turned her mind back to Boston, to what the peers of her social circles would be up to this weekend, but her thoughts came continually spiraling back to Penzance.

  Sitting alone in this hotel room, heart breaking.

  Wishing . . . wishing. . . .

  Trying not to think. . . .

  Of Felix and of Janey Little and of what they were thinking of her right now. Of how she could ease this ache inside. She wondered if Willie had got to Clare Mabley before Bett had. She thought of her father’s call that she’d just taken, how he and Madden would be arriving in England on one of Madden’s private jets first thing tomorrow morning.

  Like Michael Bett, she also felt that everything had come apart, but she lay the blame solely on herself. She was the one who was changing. Who had changed. And she couldn’t understand why.

  How could one brawny sailor do this to her?

  But failing her father, and indirectly the Order, and worrying about Bett‌—these were all secondary concerns at the moment. What she wanted to know was what had happened inside her to turn her world upside down.

  If this was love, she’d rather do without, thank you very much.

  Unfortunately, no one was asking her for her preference in the matter.

  She was finally learning a truth that her father and Madden had yet to learn: For some things, you didn’t get a choice.

  And so the long night wound on, and those gifted or cursed with the influence of William Dunthorn’s legacy journeyed through its seemingly endless hours, with joy and with sorrow, with fear and with anger.

  For some the morning came too soon.

  For many it seemed as though it would never come.

  PART TWO – The Lost Music

  Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher worlds of knowledge which comprehends mankind, but which mankind cannot comprehend.

  ‌—attributed to

  LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

  Originally, the function of songs was devotional. Then in the balladeering centuries, they became a vehicle for the spreading of information, stories and opinions. Now in the 20th century, they have become a way of making money and achieving fame. I think the other two purposes were better.

  ‌—MIKE SCOTT;

  from an interview in Jamming, 1985

  When Sick Is It Tea You Want?

  I do not know how I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

  ‌—attributed to

  SIR ISAAC NEWTON, In Brewster’s Life of Newton (1831)

  Morning came to the Cornish Riviera, blustery and heavy with dark grey skies when it reached Mount’s Bay. It was what the locals called black eastly weather‌—bad, but not storming. In the fishing days, the men would take extra care to watch for the sudden storms that the Atlantic could throw up at them, seemingly from nowhere. But now the trade was mostly tourism, and the season over, so the weather was something one remarked on sitting over the morning’s tea, rather than a force that could affect their livelihood.

  And if this morning many were quieter than usual, or spoke in subdued voices of their unusual dreams the night before, out-of-doors the tide still rumbled against the shore, the wind still rattled the shutters and spun weather vanes around in dizzying circles as it shifted from one quarter to another, and there were the gulls, sailing like kites and filling the air with their rowdy cries from the first promise of light in the eastern skies.

  They were still swooping and diving above the houses on Raginnis Hill when Lilith Mabley came into her daughter’s bedroom, the note Clare had left for her late the previous night held in one hand. Once she’d had Clare’s same dark hair, but now it was turning to grey; she didn’t believe in touching it up or in dyes. The grey added to her stately bearing‌—straight-backed and head always held high. She carried herself with the pride of a duchess, but then to the people of Penwith, a fisherman’s widow was no less the lady than one born to a manor.

  “Clare?” she called softly from the door.

  Clare woke, heartbeat quickening, then calmed herself when she saw it was only her mother.

  “Hello, Mum.”

  “This note . . . ?”

  “I can explain.”

  “But there’s no one downstairs.”

  Clare sat up and combed her hair with her fingers. Her mind was still muddy from the poor bit of sleep that she’d managed to steal from the first few hours of the morning.

  “No one . . . ?” she repeated.

  Had it all just been part and parcel of the night’s awful dreams?

  “Well now,” her mother said. “There’s a blanket and pillow folded up on the sofa in your study, but no one sleeping on it.”

  No, it hadn’t been a dream, Clare thought as she swung her feet to the floor. For her leg ached something fierce. As did her head. And she had only to close her eyes to see that bug-face with its goggle eyes and scarf.

  And the knife. . . .

  “Davie’s gone?” she said.

  Her mother nodded. “Davie Rowe,” she said in a tone that showed her surprise. “Whatever were you thinking, bringing the likes of him into our home?”

  “I . . .”

  Clare tried to remember what she’d said in the note. Nothing more than a vague explanation. Her mother obviously wanted more now.

  “I took a fall out in the rain last night,” she said, “and Davie happened along to give me a hand home. The rain was so bad by then that I made him up a bed on the sofa. I suppose he left as soon as the weather cleared.”

  “The last I remember, before going up to my bed,” her mother said, “was you sitting in your study, reading.”

  Yes, but then Felix came by, and she’d gone to Janey’s, and some madman had come after her with a knife. . . . But she couldn’t tell her mother all of that, not and have anything of the day left to herself. Had Janey found Felix? Had anyone else been attacked?

  “I got tired of my book,” she said, “so I went ’round by Janey’s.”

  “So late,” her mother said, shaking her head. “You were lucky that the Rowe boy came along when he did.”

  It was obvious from her tone of voice that for all his help she still disapproved of any commerce with Davie Rowe.

  “He’s not so bad,” Clare said.

  Her mother nodded. “Of course not. That’s why they sent him to prison‌—because he’s such a decent sort of a chap.”

  “You know what I meant.”

  “Janey should have given you a lift home,” her mother said to change the subject.

  “Janey had an errand to run.”

  “At that time of night?”
Her mother shook her head. “What is the world coming to?”

  Clare wondered that herself.

  “I’d better get dressed,” she said.

  “You’re going out?”

  “I promised Janey I’d go ’round again this morning.”

  “I was hoping we could work on that puzzle. . . .”

  Her mother loved jigsaw puzzles, the more complicated the better. After they were done, she glued the finished puzzle to a stiff piece of cardboard and displayed it on the mantel until the next one was done. At the back of her closet, there was a stack of mounted puzzles some four feet high. The latest one was a particularly daunting project‌—a bewildering landscape reproduction of a small lugger with a grey-blue sail, adrift on blue-grey water, the skies blue-grey above, the cliffs grey-blue behind, all the similar shades running confusingly into one another.

  Sometimes in the weekday evenings after Clare got home from the shop, and almost invariably on Sunday mornings, they’d sit together at the table in the parlour where the puzzles were laid out, and work together on them. Clare enjoyed that time, for they would bend their heads together, ostensibly concentrating on the task at hand, but more simply enjoying the relaxed conversation that neither of them seemed to have as much occasion for during other times of the week.

  “I’m sorry, Mum,” she said. “Really I am. But it’s important.”

  Her mother smiled, hiding her disappointment well.

  “It’s that Felix, isn’t it?” she asked. “The pair of them need you to referee another of their arguments, I don’t doubt.”

  “Something like that,” Clare allowed.

  Her mother tched. “And he back for no more than a day. You think they’d learn. Well, get yourself dressed, Clare. You’d best get over there quickly before there’s nothing left to be saved.”

  “It’s not so bad as all that.”

  “Perhaps it wasn’t so bad last night, but you’ve told me enough of how that pair carried on the last time they had troubles to know you can’t leave them alone for long.” She shook her head and stuffed Clare’s note into her pocket. “Though what they’ll do when they get married,” she added, “well, I don’t know. We’ll let that be their worry.”