The Little Country

by Charles de Lint

  “I like snakes.”

  Her grandmother smiled. “So do I. But there’s a world of difference between the small cousin we can catch in the grass and the one whose voice tempts us from the shadows. Promise me you won’t listen to it.”

  She had never seen her grandmother so serious, so solemn.

  “I promise,” she said.

  And she did try to follow her grandmother’s advice, to keep her promise, but it was hard not to listen when the world was as it was, when the light seemed to die, no matter where you turned, and all that was left was shadows.

  Hard times.

  Kerra was the first to leave, marrying a shoemaker in Peatyturk. Grandmother died. Aunt married into another traveling family. Mother took sick, but recovered. Gonetta stayed on until they passed through Rosevear, marrying the son of a shopkeeper.

  Then there was only herself and Mother left, following the road with their donkey and their cart.

  Hard times.

  The whispers in the shadows grew stronger and she couldn’t help but listen. But she remembered her promise to her grandmother and did nothing with the secret knowledge that they breathed into her ear.

  Not when the constables sent them from town before they could buy a few meager provisions and they were reduced to grubbing for roots and scavenging along the shore.

  Not when they were jeered at by those who went to church, those fine upstanding townsfolk who listened piously to the teachings of the light spoken of within the holy stone halls, but left with less charity in their hearts than the cold winter winds.

  Not when the children pelted them with stones, or the dogs were set on their heels. For fun.

  Hard times.

  Mother died on a night as cold and lonely as the one on which Hedra had been born. They were camped in back of a different hedge, but the hoarfrost lay as black on the ground, the wind was as cold. Fifteen years old, Hedra sat up all night, rocking her mother’s corpse in her arms. Come morning, she buried the unfamiliar object that her mother had become. It was an empty thing, its soul fled, and bore no more resemblance to her mother than did a stone.

  But she could remember comforting arms, a sweet high voice that sang lullabies to the counterpoint of the wind outside their canvas tent, a smile as warm as sunlight in summer.

  The shadows drew close to her, whispering, whispering.

  She huddled by her mother’s grave, arms wrapped around her chilled body, shivering and trying not to listen, but it was hard, hard. As hard as the times. She crooned one of her mother’s lullabies, closing her ears to the voices, rocking back and forth again, but this time the burden was in her heart, not in her arms.

  And that was how Edwin Pender found her.

  He brought her home. He made her his wife. He gave her order and love and comfort and kept the shadows at bay. The donkey grew old and lived out its life in content. The cart stood behind the Pender cottage, its bright paint fading in the rough weather, grass entwined in the spokes of its wheels, its bed home now to leaves and debris while sleepy cats lay on its driver’s seat when the sun was warm on the wooden slats.

  But Hedra didn’t mind, for Edwin Pender had driven the hard times away and filled the emptiness inside her. He worked the sea and she kept their home. If he was disappointed that she never gave him a child, he never once mentioned it. They went to church together and Hedra was content to exchange her Mother of Light for their Christ, because hadn’t Grandmother said they were one and the same‌—that only the names differed?

  Hard times fled.

  Until she learned of her husband’s mistress.

  He laughed when she confronted him with her knowledge. A man such as he needed more than one woman, he told her, but she wasn’t to worry. Her home was here and he had more than enough love still left over for her, didn’t he just? So come to his arms now. . . .

  She had backed away from him, but she hadn’t said a word.

  Her rage was a silent storm.

  For as her world went dark, the shadows came back in a rush, eyes glittering in the dark corners of the room where they hid, voices whispering, and she remembered all the secret knowledge that they had ever told her.

  When her husband went to sea, she called up a storm. If it drowned the Old Quay and sank the fishing boats, if fifteen men had lost their lives, what did it matter, so long as Edwin Pender was in their number?

  Her husband’s mistress she gave to the shadows. High on a clifftop, on a moonless night, she fed the barmaid a length of steel, then buried the corpse in an unmarked grave where its moldering bones remained to this day.

  She felt no regret.

  She felt no regret because her spirit belonged to the shadows now and they bled all such softness from her spirit, embittering and withering it. In return, they gave her yet more of their secret knowledge.

  She spent the years toying with the folk of Bodbury, working small unpleasantries that could never be traced back to her, setting into motion complex patterns of bad luck that took years to be fully realized and were all the more appealing to her for the invisible machinations of her own hand in their intricate making.

  She created the approximation of a child for herself, from herself, giving it birth as surely as other women nurtured children from their womb. Her fetch. She named it Windle. Together they lived in the borderland between the world as common folk knew it and the secret world that hid in the shadows. Spying and playing their games, they were like a pair of spiders who made an invisible web encompassing the lives of every man, woman, and child in Bodbury.

  And she was content.

  The bright child she had once been was as forgotten as though she had never existed.

  Hedra Scorce? Who was she? There was only the Widow Pender now.

  And the years went by.

  Twenty years since the storm, since she accepted the shadows.

  Those years stole the lives of fishermen on sea. Others died on land, men and women both. Children were born. The wheels of the world turned. And the Widow Pender grew older, her spirit no more than a smear of darkness inside her, as black as the hearts of the shadows.

  But as she grew older, she found herself remembering a time when the world was a brighter place, when she bore a different name and the shadows didn’t rule her. The memories came first as small nagging thoughts that she simply ignored. But as time passed, she’d see faces.

  Her sisters; her aunt. What had become of them?

  Her mother. Her grandmother.

  Edwin Pender.

  How could so much good have gone wrong? she would find herself wondering. Had there been another manipulator‌—one such as she was now‌—who had pulled the marionette-stringed web that was the heart of her life and that of her family?

  The shadows hissed and spat when she thought such thoughts. Windle grew distant.

  She found her birth fetish lying in the back of a drawer, and took to wearing it again. She thought of luck, bad and good, found and lost.

  She remembered an old song she had heard once, verses of which returned to haunt her at odd times of the night or day:

  You took what’s before me and what’s behind me,

  You took east and west when you wouldn’t mind me;

  Sun, moon, and stars from my sky have been taken,

  And God as well, or I’m much mistaken.

  Her husband had given her everything, and then taken it all away again. She would have done anything for him, but even that had not been enough.

  O black as a sloe is the heart that’s in you;

  Black as a coal is the grief that binds me;

  Black as a bootprint in shining hallway‌—

  ‘Twas you that blackened it, forever and always.

  That dark, shriveled stain that was her spirit began to ache, deep in her chest. She thought more and more of what her grandmother had told her, of how the shadows lied, of how they could manipulate the innocent. . . .

  She tried hard to remember, but she couldn’t i
magine what it would be like to be any way other than how she was now. Considered so, how could she know if she’d made the right choice in her life? How could she know that the choice hadn’t been made for her?

  To find out, she needed to be free of the shadows and they wouldn’t let her go. Not unless she could give them a secret that they didn’t hold themselves. That was the price‌—a simple, impossible price.

  Until she remembered the child she had been and the tales her grandmother and mother both had told her of the Barrow World‌—the otherworld of the piskies. The shadows had no hold there. If she could give them its key . . .

  She bought a mechanical toy man and, with wax and charms, made it appear so lifelike that one would expect it to sit up and talk at any moment. Then she woke the one spell concerning piskies that the shadows knew. The enchantment sped through the air one moonless night like a fisherman’s hook and line, whirring through the darkness until it snagged and caught the dreaming mind of a little moor man and brought it back to her cottage.

  Animated now, her mechanical toy man would still not speak. Would reveal no secrets.

  The shadows laughed.

  Windle watched, an unfamiliar grin on its lips.

  But the Widow was undaunted. Like a child with a new toy, she made a home for her captive in an old aquarium and became engrossed in fashioning furniture and clothing to his size. While she worked, she considered and put aside a hundred plans on how to wrest the little man’s secret from him, thought until her head hurt and she began to realize that she was defeated. She would never discover his secrets. She would never be free of the shadows.

  In the end, it was the arrival of the snooping Tatters child that gave her a workable plan. She had meant to let Jodi stew for a few days‌—just long enough for despair at never regaining her own size to settle in‌—then she would strike a bargain with the girl. If Jodi stole the necessary secret from the little man, then the Widow would set her free.

  It was that simple.

  Except the miserable girl and piskie both had escaped and now she was back where she’d begun, with only one hope left‌—that the little man had told the girl something useful while they were together.

  It was clutching at straws, but clutching at straws was all that the Widow had left. The pain in her chest ached fiercely. And the whispering laughter from the shadows was driving her mad. Worse still, understanding had come‌—riding on the back of those selfsame memories that tormented her so‌—that when she died, she would join the shadows.

  If truth be told, she had always known. But it hadn’t seemed so important once. Now she grew old, and with age came a fuller realization of what being part of the shadows meant.

  Never being free of pain.

  Never knowing peace.

  Never joining her family in the beyond.

  Losing all that was hers not simply once or twice, but forevermore without any hope of reprieve. . . .

  The irony of what she was doing‌—attempting to regain lost innocence through tormenting another‌—simply never occurred to her at all. She was blind to all but her own need. Had she stopped to consider, she would have understood exactly what it was that made the shadows laugh as they did.

  But her strength was her single-mindedness and it was for that reason that she crouched by the seawall of the Old Quay, spying on Hedrik Whale’s warehouse, while her fetch scurried about its roof and walls, attempting a closer look. She cared nothing of what the townsfolk would think of her behavior. She wanted only to understand what Whale and the others were up to. She knew they had Jodi in there with them. But what were they going to do with her?

  They were such an improbable collection of individuals that they made an impossible group to second-guess. Each on his or her own could be odd enough, but collected together, they were literally capable of any mad scheme. And when one added the gaggle of Tatters children that had arrived earlier . . .

  The Widow was sure that certain disaster lay ahead.

  She shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot, utterly sick of staring at the weather-beaten side of the warehouse. Then she saw a small spidery shape swing down from the roof to come scuttling along the base of the seawall towards her.

  Something was up. She could feel it brewing in the air.

  Windle began chittering away to her, so fast that she could barely make out a word of the creature’s odd language. She finally realized that it was merely telling her what she already felt‌—that the waiting had ended.

  As though on cue, the door to the warehouse was flung open and the whole crowd, adults and Tatters children, came streaming out. The Widow closed her eyes and reached out with her witch-sight‌—a kind of seeing that looked beyond what could be seen by the naked eye, for it stripped the world down to its basic components.

  Blood called to blood.

  The Widow had taken the precaution of taking a few drops of blood from Jodi when she was unconscious and swallowing them. The taste of them fired sharply against her palate now as her witch-sight reached for, found, and locked on the first child to come through the door.

  That little Tatters girl. She was carrying Jodi, the Widow knew. She could taste Jodi’s blood so near the girl that she had to be carrying her.

  She started to straighten up and open her eyes, but then she realized that the second child was carrying Jodi as well. As was the third and fourth‌—they were all carrying her, children and adults alike.

  Which was impossible.

  She focused her witch-sight more sharply and her head began to ache from the effort.

  She felt old and tired.

  The bright sun made pockets of shadow at the base of the seawall and she could hear sniggering laughter coming from those dark patches.

  Fine, she thought. They’ve either cut her up and they’re all carrying a bit of her, or they’ve managed some other trick, but it won’t help them. She’d merely track them all down, each and every one of them. One way or another, she meant to regain hold of the Small she’d created.

  The sniggering of the shadows grew louder.

  Laugh all you want, she told them. You’ll still not have me in your ranks.

  At that, the laughter came long and sharp.

  Not ever, the Widow said.

  In front of the warehouse, the children were all on their bicycles now. They sped off in a dozen directions, little legs pumping the pedals for all they were worth. The adults also took different directions, only they moved more slowly. The Widow sent Windle after one of the children, then marked and set off after another herself.

  Not ever, she repeated.

  There was no reply from the shadows, but that was only because she had stepped out into the sunlight where they couldn’t follow her.

  3.

  When she heard her parents complaining, when she saw what it was like to be even a few years older than she was, Kara Faull would think that there couldn’t be a grander age to be than eleven. She hated the idea of growing any older. There was the odd adult like Denzil and Taupin who might as well still be children for the way they carried on, or those like Jodi and Ratty who were still in that undefined stage between being normal and adult, but mostly, growing old just seemed to be a steady progression of doors being shut.

  On magic.

  On wonder.

  On just plain having fun.

  She was thinking about that as she pedaled away from Henkie’s warehouse. If you couldn’t go off on a mad lark like this, any which time you pleased, then really, what was the point?

  For this was a lark. And more, it pointed true to all those things that adults said couldn’t be real. For when you saw it with your own two eyes, how could you doubt it? The old stories weren’t lies. There truly were witches and Smalls and every manner of wonderful thing. They were real. And if that wasn’t the best thing she’d learned in weeks, she didn’t know what was.

  Her legs pumped furiously to maintain her speed up the incline that was Weaver Street. When she reach
ed its crest, she grinned as she coasted down the far side of the hill‌—fat bicycle wheels humming on the cobblestones, the wind in her face, the skirt of her sundress flapping against her thighs, laughter bubbling up inside her.

  Tucked away in a pocket of her dress was one of the dolls that they had made in the warehouse. Not one of them looked anything like Jodi, but that wasn’t the point, Taupin had told them. It was the size, and the flash of hair colour, and all the clothing being alike. And it was the tiny drop of Jodi’s blood that was carefully dripped onto the head of each doll, the blood that was immediately absorbed by the thirsty cloth.

  Kara hadn’t liked that part‌—and neither had Jodi, judging by the grimace on her miniature face when she had to prick her finger with a pin and then give a bit of herself to each doll.

  Privately, Kara was sure that even a witch couldn’t be so stupid as to mistake any of these dolls for the genuine article, but Taupin had insisted, quoting tales of enchantment and witcheries where just that sort of trick was not only considered clever, but proved to be successful as well.

  We’ll see, she thought, as she leaned into the corner at the bottom of the hill where Weaver Street briefly met Tinway Walk, crossing over and changing its name to Redruth Steep as it climbed another rise.

  She chanced a glance behind as she turned the corner, but the way was clear. Still grinning, and only narrowly avoiding a collision with a pedestrian who shouted angrily after her, she stood up on her pedals at the bottom of Redruth Steep and began the new ascent. Halfway up the hill, she shot into the mouth of Penzern Way‌—a crooked narrow alley that would take her back to the harbour by a circuitous route as it wound its way between the backs of the close-set stone buildings that clustered in this part of the town.

  Well, I’m away, she thought, slowing her pace to avoid a run-in with someone’s untidily stacked garbage. The witch and her fetch‌—whatever that was‌—had chosen someone else to follow, which only proved her point.

  The dolls simply weren’t the clever trick that Taupin had made them out to be. Now if he’d only listened to her plan of borrowing a fisherman’s net with which they could catch the witch and then toss her into the bay, why then they’d all be laughing by now, because‌—