The Little Country

by Charles de Lint

  “Would you lose the rest as well?”

  He pointed then, beyond their vantage point in the tolmen. She saw the moorland heaving and moving like an angry tide. Waves of heathered hills rose in crests to cascade down again. There was a roaring in the air, a shrillness of grinding stone, a thunder of rumbling earth.

  The peaceful calm of the Barrow World had changed into a place of mad chaos.

  “I‌—I . . .”

  She was doing this, she realized. Here in the Barrow World where magic ran rampant. Her calling up the first music had let it run free, pulling the world into chaos.

  But she didn’t know how to stop it.

  The tolmen shook and she clutched at Edern for balance. He braced himself so that they wouldn’t topple over into that seething mass of earth, but the effort to do so grew rapidly more difficult with each buffeting wave of earth that rocked the stone.

  A heaviness lay inside her‌—a deep sorrow that even the remembered joy that the music had also brought could not take away.

  “H-help me,” she asked Edern.

  Braced against the stone, holding her firm, he gave her a grave, considering look‌—the worry plain in his features.

  “Please. I‌—I can’t stop it. . . .”

  And he tickled her.

  Her first thought was that he’d gone mad. They were going to fall into the roiling flood of earth that lashed and beat against the tolmen.

  “Stop it!” she cried.

  But then her body betrayed her and she couldn’t help but squirm. And giggle. Try to push his hands away, but he wouldn’t stop until she almost fell from their perch and then finally lay still. Exhausted. And became aware of the silence.

  She lifted her head weakly to see that the world had returned to what it had been. There were no waves of earth, washing across the moorland. No thunder under the ground. No shrieking of stone.

  Only stillness.

  Quiet. And‌—

  Dhumm-dum.

  ‌—the sound of her heartbeat, echoing on inside her.

  She remembered her experience, but already it was fading into a vague, disconnected series of images and emotions that she would be hard put to frame into coherent thought, little say words. But the joy was remembered. And the sorrow.

  Both were bearable now.

  “What‌—what happened?” she asked.

  “It was my fault,” Edern said. “I hadn’t realized what your Iron World blood would call up when you remembered the music.”

  “I almost destroyed your world, didn’t I?”

  Edern shook his head. “I told you, the magic is too thick here. All you did‌—with the sorrow the music woke in you‌—was give it something to focus through.”

  “I can’t call it up again,” she told him. “I can’t chance it.”

  “It won’t be the same in your world,” he said. “There it will be a quiet murmur of mystery that will set hearts beating to the old remembered dance‌—but gently.”

  “There’s so much lost,” she said. “So much gone forever.”

  “But there’s still much we can reclaim,” Edern said. “So much that is now in peril that we can yet rescue.”

  “And . . . and that’s all I do?” Jodi asked. “I just follow my heartbeat down to the music when I’m back in my own world?”

  Edern nodded.

  “It seems too easy.”

  “The magics of the world,” he began.

  “Are far simpler than we make them out to be,” Jodi finished for him. “I remember.” She was quiet for a moment, then asked, “Why do you call it music?”

  “What would you call it?”

  Jodi thought about that and realized music was as close a word as could come to describing it. Except for perhaps‌—

  “What about mystery?”

  “Or magic. It has a hundred thousand names and is sought after in a hundred thousand ways, but it can’t be named. That is its magic. Men have borrowed pieces of it for their own use, but they can’t tame it, only those pieces that they steal away, and the cost of doing so is dear. What’s saddest of all is that they didn’t need to take or steal those pieces in the first place‌—they had their own echoes of it inside themselves all along.”

  “Could an instrument play that music?” Jodi asked.

  Edern shook his head. “But it can come so close as to almost make no difference. It can come so close that the resonances it sets up call the first music to it.”

  Jodi said nothing for a long time, then. She just sat, thinking. Remembering. Until Edern finally spoke.

  “You should go,” he said.

  Jodi nodded. “How do I get back?”

  Edern stood up and called through the hole in the stone, called something in a language that Jodi didn’t recognize, though she did hear a phrase that was repeated three times. She gave a little start as a cool draft of air wafted over her and she could see the night of her own world from where she stood.

  It made for a very disconcerting experience. Looking one way, she could see the sunlit moorland of the Barrow World; the other, and she was looking into the benighted moors of her own world.

  Edern clasped her shoulder and gave it a squeeze, but Jodi wasn’t going to leave it at that. She stepped close to him and hugged him fiercely for a long moment.

  “Thank you,” he murmured into her hair.

  “No. Thank you.”

  She moved from his arms and took a step across the odd border, pausing when she stood with one foot in her own world, one in his.

  “Will I see you again?” she asked.

  “If we can thin the borders, we’ll see each other whenever we choose.”

  “And if we don’t? If it takes a long time to work‌—longer than we have years to live, or at least than I do. I suppose you live forever.”

  “For a long time,” Edern agreed.

  “Well?”

  “Then we’ll see each other in dreams.”

  Jodi sighed. Dreams weren’t going to be nearly enough.

  She started to step through once more, then paused for a second time.

  “Edern,” she asked. “Will the music stop the Widow’s magics? Can I use it to get back to my proper size?”

  He shook his head.

  “Only salt will work against her,” he said.

  “Like seawater?” Jodi asked, remembering Kara’s saltwater bombs.

  Edern nodded. “But tears work best.”

  She had more she wanted to ask him. A dozen more things, a hundred. She knew she could stay here forever, just talking, but also knew she shouldn’t. Her friends were waiting for her, back in her own world. They might be in danger. And she had a message to bring, as well‌—a secret song to sing in the quiet places that would hopefully ripple away through the world and bring it closer to its cousin, here on the other side of the Men-an-Tol.

  So she smiled, gave Edern a wave that was far jauntier than she felt, and stepped all the way through.

  She shivered at the chill in the night air of her own world, blinking as her eyes adjusted to the darker light. When she turned to look back, Edern and the Barrow World were gone. She saw only the moorland of her own world through the hole in the stone where once they’d been.

  Oh raw we, she thought. What a tale I have to tell.

  But when she looked for her friends, she found herself alone here. The area around the Men-an-Tol was deserted.

  She had a sudden fear. She found herself remembering all those tales of mortals straying off into Faerie‌—gone for an hour or a day or a week, only to find that years had passed in their own world while they were gone.

  Had this happened to her?

  She wrapped her arms around herself, shivering at the thought. And then she caught the boggy smell in the air and another kind of fear overrode the first.

  The Widow’s creatures had been here.

  Had they harmed Denzil or any of the others?

  Thunder rumbled and she turned in the direction of the town.
The skies were beclouded here, but a true storm hung over Bodbury. Lightning flickered in the dark clouds above it. And then Jodi’s gaze fell on something that lay in between the town and the tolmen. Standing stones.

  They hadn’t been there before, she thought.

  Had years and years passed since she stepped from one world to another?

  But there was something familiar about their number. And their heights. Their stone surfaces, even viewed from a distance, seemed too unweathered. Too new. She counted them off. The one large stone. Three more almost as tall, but not so thick. All the small ones. . . .

  And then she knew.

  Clearly, immediately, with an intuition that echoed the magic of her experience in the Barrow World when she touched the hidden music.

  They were her friends. Turned to stone by the Widow.

  And that storm hanging over Bodbury . . . She remembered the stories of the Widow and the storm she was said to have brought some twenty years ago.

  That storm was also her doing.

  She had to get to town. She had to stop the Widow. She had to rescue her friends, regain her size. . . . But it was so far and she was so small. The journey would take her days at her present size.

  What was she going to do?

  The answer was taken out of her hands.

  Fingers closed around her, tightly, fiercely.

  Jodi shrieked with alarmed surprise.

  She was hoisted into the air and found herself face-to-face with Windle, the Widow’s fetch, left behind to watch the holed stone. Chittering with pride, the evil little creature clutched her to its breast and bounded from the tolmen, heading for Bodbury, ignoring the blows that Jodi rained on it with her tiny fists.

  Those blows, she soon realized, had about as much of a chance of hurting the fetch as a man might have trying to swab out his boat with a piece of netting.

  But she kept hitting it all the same‌—all the way across the moorland and into the town. And once in town, she began to shriek for help. But her voice was a tiny piping thing, barely audible at any distance in normal times. It was utterly useless now with the winds of the storm whistling down the streets and the thunder rumbling above.

  Tottering Hame

  You must understand that our lives were raw, red bleeding meat.

  ‌—CAITLIN THOMAS, from an Interview in People, June 1987

  So how do I look?”

  Connie stood in the doorway of Sam Dennison’s room, leaning casually against the door jamb as she tried to gauge a reaction from the private investigator’s taciturn features. He gave back nothing, just sat by the small desk in his room, tapping an envelope against his knee.

  She wondered why she bothered looking for his approval‌—she didn’t even like the man. But looking for approval was a habit. She couldn’t come near a man without trying to get a reaction. It had always been that way, getting worse instead of better as the years went by. If she didn’t get what she was looking for the first time, then all she did was keep shifting gears until she did. It was the unfortunate story of her life‌—she saw her own worth only in how it was reflected in a man’s eyes.

  She didn’t want them, but she needed them. Needed the confirmation.

  So she’d done what Dennison had asked‌—toned down the makeup and hair and squeezed her bod into some sucky threads that she’d brought along at Bett’s request: a narrow tweed skirt with a hem that fell just below the knee, a white blouse with only the top button undone, and, yessir Mr. Uptight, a bra underneath so we don’t go too bouncy-bouncy. Completing the look was a snappy little businesswoman’s jacket worn overtop, sensible stockings, and flat-heeled shoes. What more did he want?

  Personally, she thought she’d have a lot more effect on the Gaffer and her kid looking the way she usually did. But what the hell. When you took the money, you played the gig their way. The least Dennison could do was appreciate the effort.

  “C’mon,” she said, pouring on the charm. “You’ve made your point. Everybody knows you’re a hard case, so why don’t you lighten up a bit.”

  Dennison nodded. “Okay. You look good.”

  “Yeah, but do I look great? I feel like I’ve got a pickle up my ass in this getup.”

  A smile touched his eyes, there and gone, and she knew that was all she was going to get. But it was enough. She had him figured now. It wasn’t that he didn’t like women, he just liked the packaging to hide more of the product, that was all. He wanted to imagine, before he got to see.

  Well, lookee but no touchee, big guy.

  Knowing now that she could turn him on, she lost interest in him and settled down on the edge of his bed. He handed her the envelope he was holding.

  “Mr. Bett dropped this by for you,” he said.

  The envelope wasn’t sealed. Connie slid its contents out onto her lap and found herself looking at a photocopy of a legal document, the last will and testament of one Paul Little.

  “I still can’t figure out why Bett flew me all the way in to hand this over to them,” she said. “Don’t they have lawyers over here?”

  “You tell me‌—you’re the native.”

  Connie shook her head. “That was a whole other person, pal. I’m not from here anymore. When you live in a city like New York, it doesn’t matter where you come from, that’s where you belong.”

  “I know the feeling,” Dennison said.

  She didn’t doubt that for a moment. Born and bred in the Bronx, this was probably the first time he’d ever been away from home in his life.

  She tapped the papers again. “Seems to me having a lawyer deliver these would make it more official. Save Bett some dough, too. I don’t come cheap and then there’s expenses. . . .” She looked around the room. “Not that Bett’s going all out on us. Economy class tickets and this dump. I’ve met bigger spenders in my time, let me tell you.”

  “I think Mr. Bett is pushing for the psychological edge.”

  Connie thought about what her reappearance might mean to her father-in-law and daughter. How long had it been since they’d seen each other? Fifteen, twenty years?

  Never bothering to think about it, she’d lost count long ago.

  “I’m not really looking forward to it,” she said.

  She’d spoken before she really thought about what she was saying, but it was true. She was surprised at the realization. It was going to be unpleasant‌—she’d known that from the first time Bett had approached her with his proposition‌—but she’d been sure she could handle it. She was still sure. But when she thought about how this was going to hurt the old man and Jane . . . She might never see the kid, but she was still her kid.

  “Then why are you doing it?” Dennison asked.

  Connie put her uneasiness aside, her tough mask slipping easily back into place.

  Screw ’em both. It wasn’t like they’d ever had time for her either.

  “For the ten grand Bett’s paying me,” she said. “What did you think‌—that I’d be doing it for charity?”

  Dennison didn’t say anything, but she read disapproval in his silence.

  “It’s not like you’re doing this just for your health,” she added.

  “Didn’t say I was.”

  No, he was just sitting there thinking that he was better than she was because it wasn’t so up close and personal for him. Like he’d never done a sleazy thing in his life.

  Asshole.

  Connie sighed. Why did guys like Dennison always rub her the wrong way?

  “So what do you think?” she asked finally. She held up the will. “Is this thing legit?”

  Dennison shrugged. “Beats me.”

  “The way I figure it, Paul would’ve changed his will as soon as the divorce went final.”

  “Doesn’t much matter whether it’s legal or not,” Dennison said. “Not for Mr. Bett’s purposes. Like I said, he’s playing head games with them and you can bet that this is just one more move on the board. Mr. Bett doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who’d
do anything halfway.”

  Connie nodded. “He’s got money to burn, all right.”

  She stuffed the will back into its envelope and stood up, hiding a smile when she caught Dennison staring at her legs.

  “What is it?” she said. “About dinnertime? I’m so screwed up with these time changes.”

  Dennison checked his watch. “Just going on six-thirty, English time.”

  “Well, then. I guess we might as well get this over with.”

  How did that old Shangri-las’ song go? Something about how you could never go home again?

  Well, it wasn’t true, she thought as she rode in the back of the cab with Dennison.

  You could go back‌—there just wasn’t much point in it. When you left for the reasons she had, because you wanted to see the frigging world instead of being caged up in the past, coming back was just putting yourself back into the cage again and shutting the door.

  She didn’t need this.

  The familiar sights of her childhood flooded her mind with memories; some bad, some good. There’d been changes, but not so many as she had expected. She’d rarely thought of her ex-husband, because there was nothing in her life to remind her of him. But here, where they’d both lived, where they’d gone through the whole shmear‌—growing up together, falling in love, getting married, having a kid‌—it was hard not to remember him.

  He’d never understood what she needed.

  They’d talked of leaving‌—Paul just as eager as she was‌—of seeing more than what Penwith had to offer, but it never happened. The past hooked Paul, just like it had God knew how many generations of Littles. Whenever she brought up the idea of moving‌—to London, say, or anyplace where the twentieth century had a stronger hold‌—it kept getting put off. When the farthest you went was a day-trip to Plymouth, you just lost patience after a while. Hooked on to the first ride out you could get‌—in her case, a sleazebag film producer‌—and made your escape.

  She had to smile at the idea of calling Eddie Booth a film producer. That was like calling herself an actress. But what the hell. She was up there on the screen, and she made good dough, and she couldn’t really complain. She’d known what she was getting into as soon as Eddie came on to her in the pub where they’d first met.