The Little Country

by Charles de Lint

  Janey pressed her lips close to Felix’s ears and began to murmur soothingly. She pried his hands away from his instrument, took them in her own. She told him what strong hands they were, how she loved their gentleness when he touched her. He was better than the whole audience combined, she said, and reminded him that the music was important for how he wanted to play it, not how others wanted to hear it. She assured him she didn’t care if he never played on even the smallest stage, just so they could be together. Just so that they couldn’t lose what they’d so recently regained.

  “Listen,” she said. “Listen to Clare play.”

  She laid her arm around his shoulder and pulled him in close to her. He trembled‌—a feverish shiver that ran through his entire body.

  “J-Janey . . . ?” he murmured.

  “I’m here.”

  “They . . . they . . . I can’t. . . .”

  “This is all a lie,” she said. “There’s no stage. No audience. It’s just Madden.”

  As she spoke the sound of the audience was finally overwhelmed by the music. Clare stood straight and tall, her fingers dancing on the small whistle. Janey had never heard the instrument sound so good. She’d never heard Clare play so well. She took her arm from around Felix’s shoulder. Picking up his accordion, she took it from his lap and set it down on the floor. Then she tucked her hand in the crook of his arm and gave him a gentle tug.

  “Come on,” she said. “We’re going to leave this place.”

  Felix finally lifted his head.

  “Why does this happen to me?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, Felix. It doesn’t matter. This isn’t real.”

  He shook his head. “It’s just as real as what . . . as what happens to me anytime I get on a stage.”

  “But this time it’s just Madden’s doing. Let’s go, Felix. These people don’t matter.”

  She nodded towards the audience who sat utterly silent now‌—so still that in the darkness beyond the spotlight they might just as well not have existed at all.

  “I could play that music,” Felix said. “Any other place. On ship, at a session, on a bloody street corner. . . . Why can’t I play it here?”

  “I don’t know,” Janey said. “It really doesn’t matter.”

  “It does matter,” Felix said.

  He disengaged his arm from her grip and picked up his box.

  Janey started to protest, to tell him he shouldn’t try again, but she stopped herself. She knew he could do it. There was just something inside him that blocked him. Trying again now might make things worse, but she knew she couldn’t stop him from the attempt. Maybe the first music would help him. Maybe nothing would change. It seemed an awful lot to expect that a lifetime’s fear could be dissolved in just a few moments like this. Whatever the root of his problem was, it had to be far more complex than what a few bars of music could cure.

  But then she remembered: The magics of the world are far simpler than we make them out to be.

  “I love you, Felix,” she said as he strapped on his box.

  She stepped back from his chair. He lifted his head, stared into the spotlight’s glare, trying to look past it to the darkness beyond. He’s trying to focus on just one person, Janey realized. Trying to convince himself that he was playing just for that one person, that there’s no one else out there.

  She’d done the same thing herself when she first got stage jitters at the beginning of her career.

  He put his left hand through the wrist strap near the accompaniment buttons, rested his left hand lightly on the fingerboard. Thumbing down the air release button, he stretched out the bellows.

  Oh, do it, Janey wished.

  But he couldn’t play. Sweat broke out on his already glistening face. His hands started to shake. He tried to play along with Clare, but the notes came out in a discordant jumble. They were all wrong.

  Janey couldn’t bear to watch it happen to him again.

  Before the audience could react, before he froze up completely once more, she stepped in behind his chair and pressed her chest in close to its rungs. She put her arms around him.

  “Listen,” she breathed in his ear. “To the music. To what Clare’s playing.”

  “I . . .”

  “Don’t try to play. Just listen. Let the music fill you. Close your eyes. You’re not here. You’re not anywhere. There’s just the music. Feel the rhythm‌—it’s the same as your heartbeat. The tune’s as simple as breathing.”

  She stroked his temples.

  “Who cares about who’s listening?” she said. “It’s the music that’s important. And this music . . .”

  “This . . . music . . .” he repeated slowly.

  “It’s magic.”

  Haltingly, he worked the bellows and played a simple two-note chord with his right hand on the melody buttons. Incomplete as it was, it didn’t matter if the tune Clare was playing was in a minor or a major key. The partial chord fit.

  “That’s it,” Janey encouraged him as he drew the chord out, shifted to another as the tune required it.

  He fumbled the next chord change, but caught it quickly.

  “Magic,” Janey whispered.

  “Magic,” he said, repeating the word as though it were a talisman.

  The next change went more smoothly. As did the next. He added some accompanying notes to fill in the space between the chords. Janey could feel the tension in his shoulders. His muscles were locked tight as braided wire. She kneaded them, feeling them loosen as much from her ministrations as from his growing confidence.

  He was playing along with the melody now‌—tentatively, catching two notes in three the way one might play at a session when the tune was unfamiliar and you were learning it as you went along with the rest of the musicians, letting them carry the bulk of the melody while you were still picking it up.

  Felix straightened in his chair. His box began to bounce on his knee as he tapped his foot. The notes came more quickly, the music changing, catching up both accordion and whistle and pulling them along into the brisk 4/4 measures of a high lilting tune.

  Janey recognized the tune, and smiled. It was “Miss McLeod’s Reel,” but both she and Felix knew it as “The May Day.” A spring tune, to call in the summer, like the old “Hal-an-Tow” song. A promise of new beginnings. Of the wheel turning, the cycle of the year beginning anew.

  And the first music was a part of it‌—as it was a part of all tunes. It sang a counterpointing harmony of wonders and wisdoms . . . and magic.

  Of hope found.

  Music was immortal‌—but it needed the players to keep it alive. Just as the world itself needed those who walked it to keep its heartbeat singing.

  Someone whistled in the audience. A few people near the front began to clap along. By the time the three-part reel came ’round to the first part again, the whole audience was clapping in time to its infectious rhythm.

  When the tune ended, they broke into a thunderous applause. The spotlight dimmed. Janey looked out over Felix’s shoulder to see the thousands of cheerful faces and she hugged Felix proudly.

  “I . . .” he began.

  “You did it,” Janey said.

  He set the accordion down and turned to grin at her. He got up from his chair and lifted her to her feet to return her hug. Behind him, the applause was dying down.

  No, Janey realized, it was fading. As was the stage. There was just her and Felix here now. Clare stood nearby, the Eagle whistle in her hand, Kempy sitting at her feet. She felt Felix’s body grow insubstantial in her arms. Clare and Kempy fading. Felix fading. And she was‌—

  She opened her eyes to find herself kneeling in the dirt by the Men-an-Tol. The silence, after the constant presence of the first music inside her, after the thunderous applause in the concert hall, seemed almost deafening. She lifted a hand, touched her shoulder, ran the hand down her arm.

  Had any of it been real?

  But then she saw John Madden, hunched on his knees by the tolme
n, face pressed against the stone, one hand reaching through its hole and dangling limply out the other end. She turned to find Felix sitting up, staring around himself in confusion. And Clare‌—Clare was now holding the tin whistle that Janey had had in her own hand before Madden took her into his mind.

  Impossible as it seemed, it had to have been real.

  “What‌—what happened?” Clare said. “I was having the most horrible dream, but then it turned . . . all golden. . . .”

  “We won,” Janey said.

  She collected her purse from where it lay in the dirt in front of her and got to her feet.

  “We hid the book so it can’t ever be found,” she went on, “and though Madden tried to use his mind powers on us, they didn’t take hold. We proved we’re stronger than him.”

  Except there was still her canceled tour. And the Boyds’ farm. And‌—

  No, she told herself. Don’t think about any of that right now. Hang on to the victory and face the rest of it when it comes.

  Clare and Felix were looking at Madden, but the man never stirred from beside the stone.

  “Is he . . . dead?” Clare asked.

  “I don’t know,” Janey said.

  She gave Kempy a pat as he came out of the nearby gorse where he’d been hiding and pressed his face anxiously against her leg.

  “And I really don’t care,” she added.

  “But we can’t just leave him here. . . .”

  “Why not?” Felix said. “We don’t owe him anything.”

  He was remembering what Madden had done to him, Janey thought.

  She moved closer to Clare and took her arm.

  “Let’s just go home,” she said.

  “We really did beat him, didn’t we?” Clare said as she let herself be led away.

  “We beat him.” Janey said.

  “Together,” Felix added.

  Janey nodded. “Together,” she agreed. “The three of us‌—all right, four,” she added as Kempy pushed against her leg again. “The four of us and the music.”

  “The music,” Felix and Clare breathed in unison, remembering.

  None of them spoke again as they followed the path back to where they had left Janey’s car.

  6.

  Madden couldn’t move. He leaned against the Men-an-Tol, face pressed against its rough surface, one arm still hanging through its hole. The world had closed in on him. He tried to shut off his mind, but the secret‌—

  Dunthorn’s secret that the Little woman had so casually handed over to him‌—

  That damned music‌—

  It fed back through his mind, overloading his mind’s ability to process the information. He was aware of everything. Every sound, scent, sight, taste, emotion that existed in the world and beyond it was flooding into his mind.

  He could no more control the vast torrent of input than a man could cease to breathe and still live.

  He was aware of it all.

  From molten rock flowing deep under the earth’s crust to a whisper of conversation halfway around the world.

  From the sugar-heavy cereal that some snotty-nosed child was consuming in a suburb of Chicago to the fall of a tree in a Brazilian rain forest.

  From a deep-space panorama of uncharted stars, far beyond the scope of earth’s most powerful telescope, to a bug crawling along a water-logged wooden post on a Cambodian riverbank.

  From a high Himalayan wind to the brain-dead mind of a drunken man lying in a Melbourne alley.

  It was the detail, the vast wealth of unfocused detail, flooding him.

  From the lumbering tread of a Kenyan elephant to the whine of a mosquito in a Florida everglade.

  From a marital dispute in one of the stately houses near his home in Victoria to the ear-piercing shriek of a heavy metal band in a small London club.

  From the vast sweep of the empty silent spaces between the stars to‌—

  He caught that tiny fragment of input and held to it.

  Be calm, he told himself. Be calm. Still your mind. Hold that silence.

  He wanted to scream.

  Hold the silence. Let it spread. Here and here, and over there. . . .

  Slowly he regained control of his ability to focus and channel external stimuli. When he could finally rise, he looked out across the moor and almost laughed.

  He had been a fool.

  It was true. Dunthorn had unlocked a gateway to unlimited power, but of what use was it when it couldn’t be controlled? When all one could do was apportion small parts of it to one’s needs‌—as he had been doing all along?

  But the Little woman‌—why hadn’t she been affected? How had she, untutored as she was, learned to deal so easily with it?

  There had to be more to it than what he had taken from her mind: a book in which each person created their own story; a gateway through the hole in the tolmen to another world; tiny people the size of mice. . . .

  These were fairy tales.

  But if they were real? Dunthorn had to have had some reason to let himself die before allowing his book to fall into Madden’s hands. And this Janey Little . . .

  He knew he had to leave that puzzle for another day. Tonight he could barely keep his balance leaning on the tolmen. Tonight it was enough that he had survived to learn the lesson.

  But the waste. All those years, searching for Dunthorn’s secret, following his own arcane paths, only to find that what he sought couldn’t be had. To find that it was merely the harmonic vibration to which every element of the universe vibrated.

  Such a simple skein of knowledge. A high school student knew as much. That student couldn’t control it any more than Madden himself could, but at least he knew.

  Madden shook his head.

  The waste.

  He was too old now to begin anew. And with Michael turned against him, he no longer even had an heir to whom he might leave the heritage of this knowledge that he had so painfully acquired tonight.

  And the real irony was that by forcing his hand as he had, he was now left in a position where he was unable to even utilize those strengths that he had gained on his own. He couldn’t open his mind, couldn’t let down his defenses for a moment, without having the flood of the world come rushing back in. He had to fare deaf, dumb, and blind through the world, along with all the other sheep.

  He thrust his hands deep into his pockets and slowly made his way back along the path that led from the Men-an-Tol to the lane where he’d left his car.

  He had to find a way to regain what he had lost. The Little woman would be of no help. Dunthorn was dead. But there was Peter Goninan. He seemed, from what he’d taken from Janey Little’s mind, to know far more than Madden had ever supposed he did. Like Little’s grandfather, Madden had never even realized that Goninan and Dunthorn had been such close friends.

  He would speak to Goninan. But without his power to make Goninan tell him what he needed, he would be reduced to accepting only those tidbits that Goninan deigned to hand him. . . .

  Madden sighed.

  The simple truth was, he could plan and scheme all he wanted, but it changed nothing. He had opened a door that must not be opened‌—not as he had opened it‌—and like all the other feckless meddlers in the history of those who studied the hermetic secrets, now he, too, had to pay the price. The devil would be getting his due.

  Madden didn’t believe in either a benevolent deity, or his evil opposite.

  But he believed in Hell.

  Hell was knowing that he would be spending the remainder of his life as much a sheep as the rest of those who inhabited this sorry world.

  No, it was worse than that. They slept, never knowing that they slept.

  But he knew. He had been awake, and now must sleep.

  It was that or go mad.

  7.

  Ted Grimes straightened up by the hedgerow where he was standing when he heard the voices coming down the lane. He marked them‌—three voices and not one belonged to his quarry. Unless Madden was kee
ping silent, he wasn’t with them.

  But there was a dog.

  Invisibility was another hunter’s trick Grimes knew well. It was easy with people and most animals. You just stayed still. You never looked at them‌—some sixth sense warned them when they were being watched. You just melted into the background and belonged there.

  He wasn’t so sure how that was going to go over with the dog. But at least the wind was blowing from their direction. If he didn’t move, didn’t look at them . . .

  “I still don’t think we should have just left him there,” a woman was saying.

  “Would you want to touch him?” another woman’s voice asked.

  “Not likely.”

  Grimes almost gave himself away. They were talking about Madden. If something had happened to Madden, if they’d taken away his revenge, he’d hunt them down one by one. . . .

  Standing out here in the dark as long as he had, his night vision was about as perfect as it was going to get. There was enough moonlight that he could easily make them out now, studying them from the corner of his eye. Indirectly. Not making waves. Not even breathing.

  There was a woman with a cane, being supported by a shorter woman. The man was big‌—a broad-shouldered, hefty sucker. And the dog. . . .

  The dog never even looked in his direction.

  Stupid mutt.

  “I feel like letting the air out of his tires,” the man said.

  “Why bother?” the shorter woman said. “We’ve already let the air out of him.”

  “What really happened, Janey?” the woman with the cane asked.

  Yeah, Grimes thought. What happened?

  But Janey’s reply was muffled by the opening of the car door.

  They all got into the little three-wheeled job, including the dog. The car’s muffler coughed twice, then the engine caught and the quiet moor was suddenly awash with the intrusive rumble of its motor. Grimes closed his eyes when the headbeams came on, not wanting to lose his night sight.

  He tracked them with his ears, listening to them head back down the lane towards the road. When they paused halfway there, he looked down the road after them to see that they were only letting the dog out at that farmhouse he’d passed earlier. They pulled away again, going on until they were out of sight, though he could still hear the car’s engine as they drove on down to the road.