The Little Country

  When they reached the end of the lane and turned onto the road, Grimes looked back up the way they’d come from the moor.

  I’ll give you ten more minutes, Madden, he thought. And then I’m coming to look for you.

  He didn’t bother worrying about what he’d just heard, didn’t think at all. Madden would come, or he’d go find him. It was that simple. He just let himself sink back into the invisibility of the night.

  Ten minutes hadn’t quite gone by when he heard footsteps coming from the direction of the stile that led onto the moor.

  He was careful now, far more careful than he’d been when the other three had been approaching.

  His missing hand ached, reminding him of just how much Madden was capable. One look in that sucker’s hoodoo eyes, even in the dark, and it was game over. No way Grimes was letting that happen to him again.

  He gave Madden all the time he needed to make his slow way down the path, not moving until he was opening his car door. And then Grimes drifted across the space between them like a ghost‌—swift and silent. He had his right arm around Madden’s neck, the prosthetic digging into the old man’s flesh, and slammed him up against the side of the car before Madden could have possibly guessed he was there. His left hand rose and brought the muzzle of his .38 up to Madden’s temple.

  “Hello, John,” he said. “Remember me?”

  He felt Madden stiffen.

  “You . . . you’re Sandoe’s man.”

  “Yeah, and whoever you sent after him took care of old Phil just fine. I appreciated not having to pay back my advance for screwing up. But I didn’t”‌—he shoved the prosthetic harder against Madden’s skin‌—“appreciate this.”

  “What do you want?”

  His coolness enraged Grimes and it took all his willpower to not just pull the trigger right then and there.

  “I know you like games, John‌—like the one where you made me cut off my own hand. Well, I’ve got a game for you now that goes by the name of Russian roulette. Feel like playing?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  What the hell did he mean, it doesn’t matter? Did the sucker think he had some ace up his sleeve? Did Madden think he was going to turn him around and let him have a chance to use those hoodoo eyes of his? Maybe Madden figured he was going to just hand the gun over and let Madden pull the trigger himself.

  Hang loose, Grimes told himself. You’ve got the advantage. He’s just trying to spook you.

  And doing a damn good job of it, too.

  “This gun’s got six chambers,” Grimes went on, his voice only slightly betraying his nervousness, “but only one of them’s got a bullet in it. I gave her a little spin after I loaded her up earlier tonight, so even I don’t know which one it’s in.”

  “Fine.”

  “You just might be dying right here,” Grimes said.

  Come on, he thought. Give me a reaction.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Madden said again.

  Screw this, Grimes thought.

  He pulled the trigger. Madden bucked in his arms. The bullet made a small hole in the old man’s left temple and took out most of the right one on its way out.

  Grimes stepped back and let the body fall. Then he fired again, emptying the gun into Madden’s body.

  “About that one bullet,” he said to the corpse, “I lied.”

  He stared down at the corpse and heard only a whispering echo of the old man’s voice.

  It doesn’t matter.

  He’s dead, Grimes told himself. You said you’d get him for what he’d done and you kept your word.

  But he didn’t feel anything.

  It doesn’t matter.

  Only an empty feeling inside.

  Two years of waiting for this day, of imagining how it was going to go, coming up with a hundred different scenarios until Bett finally got in touch with him and told him to be patient, he’d deliver Madden to him, no problem. So he’d been patient. Waiting for Bett to come through.

  And Bett had come through.

  It doesn’t matter.

  And now here he was. The sucker was dead and all he felt was zip. Nada.

  There had to be more.

  He wiped down the gun and stuck it in Madden’s hand.

  Suicide, he thought with a smile. Maybe the local yokels will actually believe it, too.

  He straightened up, still waiting for that sense of accomplishment to hit him, but the emptiness just sat there inside him.

  It doesn’t matter.

  It was like the sucker had wanted to die. Like he hadn’t cared. . . .

  It doesn’t matter.

  Grimes’s missing hand still ached. There was no relief of the burning need inside him.

  Bastard won, he thought as he trudged off down the lane towards his own car.

  I kill him and he still comes up on top.

  It doesn’t matter.

  Because he’d wanted to die.

  Grimes paused to look back, his prosthetic hand held against his chest, its ache deepening.

  Go figure it, he thought.

  He continued on down the lane.

  The Touchstone

  A church is a stone tooth in the jawbone of the ground. That’s why the cold bites. The toothache of antiquity, the twinges of time. A church gets you ready for your coffin.

  ‌—IAN WATSON, from “The Mole Field,”

  The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1988

  Somehow Jodi wasn’t surprised at how quickly the memory of the Widow’s magics faded from her friends’ minds. She’d already had some forewarning with the fisherman down at the waterfront the night of the storm, and while it took longer for Denzil and the others to forget, in the end it was less than a week, all told, before their memories were gone as well.

  That Denzil put it so easily from his mind was the least surprising. His thoughts worked along such logical byways that any twisty path that might lead to something out of the ordinary was immediately suspect. She had expected more from Taupin, but he was less inclined to whimsy now than he had been before the whole affair began. And while she didn’t know Lizzie well enough to form much of an opinion as to how she might react, Jodi was amazed that Henkie Whale‌—who, after all, kept the body of his dead friend somewhere in the catacombs under his warehouse and was known to talk to that corpse‌—should also be able to forget so easily.

  The Tatters children still talked about it‌—but they spoke of it as though it were a story that they had heard, not as something that had happened to them personally. Only Ratty Friggens‌—whom the Widow’s button charm had called back from the air itself, rather than from a longstone like the others‌—still seemed affected by his ordeal, but he wouldn’t speak of it. When he was about at all, it was with a haunted look in his eyes; mostly he kept to himself.

  As time passed, Jodi found it increasingly difficult to remember it all herself. Details kept shifting in her mind, fading out, getting tangled up with bits of fairy tales that she’d heard as a child, until there were times when she doubted much of it herself.

  For even the music had left her. She remembered the fact of it; she just couldn’t call it back up. When she listened to her heartbeat, all she heard was the thump-thump in her chest. There was no answering rhythm, no twinning of her pulse with that ancient rhythm.

  She didn’t see much of Taupin in those days. His wanderings took him farther afield from Bodbury than usual‌—and for longer periods of time. Neither Henkie nor Lizzie seemed to do more than vaguely recognize her when she passed one of them on the streets, and the Tatters children were strangely quiet around her. Denzil, when she tried talking about it with him, had less patience than ever for what he termed “Complete and utter nonsense. If you keep filling up your head with such tomfoolery, soon you won’t have a speck of room left for common sense, you.”

  Jodi took to wandering the streets of Bodbury at all hours of the day and night, searching for something that grew more vague in her mind w
ith every passing day. She often found herself standing outside the Widow Pender’s cottage that was boarded up and presented the only mystery that the people of Bodbury had the inclination to gossip about.

  Where had she gone? What had become of her?

  They had a hundred theories, each more preposterous than the next, but not one came close to what had actually taken place.

  Only Jodi knew, but no one wanted to listen to her.

  So she would stand there in front of the cottage, remembering her and Edern’s descent from the windowsill and their mad ride through the town, dangling from Ansum’s collar. She no longer worried about what had been real, and what not. She just appreciated the memories she still had, for day by day they became less defined, so vague that at times she felt like one of the Tatters children, remembering a story rather than something that had actually happened to her.

  The boarded-up windows of the cottage depressed her‌—they reminded her too much of the boarded-up minds of her friends and the way her own mind was being boarded up. It was as though she’d spent her whole life half asleep and had woken for just a moment before drifting off again, her memories fading like dreams in the morning light.

  The Widow’s cottage was the best place to bring those memories all clearly to mind again‌—or at least as clearly as she could recall them. She would stand there, remembering and thinking. Of being a Small. Of Edern and the Barrow World and the first music. Of the Widow and how the poor choices she had made had created such a ruin of her life.

  Jodi would always turn away then, feeling sorry for the Widow and pretending that she didn’t hear a whispering in the shadows along the garden hedge and close in to the walls of the deserted cottage itself. She would see the Widow’s ruined features, the innocent child that the old woman had been superimposed on her features for just a moment before she died, and tears would well in Jodi’s eyes.

  She wondered sometimes how she could be so sympathetic towards someone as evil as the Widow had been, and yet have so little patience for her own friends. She knew it wasn’t their fault that they forgot. It was this world that they lived in that made magic fade and logic rise to the fore; just as logic was absent from the Barrow World. But she couldn’t help but be angry with them.

  It wasn’t as though they hadn’t seen the magic with their own eyes. It wasn’t as though they hadn’t been enchanted themselves. . . .

  One day, after a particularly frustrating morning spent arguing with Denzil, she found herself walking up Mabe Hill to where the ruins of Creak-a-vose lay in a jumble of stone under the afternoon sky. The Widow’s clothes were no longer where she’d dropped them after taking the mantle with its buttons that she’d needed that night; someone had stuffed them‌—dress, stockings, and all‌—into the hedgerow where they were now grey with dust. She stood and looked at them for a long moment, then went into the old ruined church and sat down on a fallen pillar.

  She felt depressed. She’d been moping about for days now and she knew the real reason. It wasn’t anything to do with how everyone else was forgetting the magic, nor even how she herself was losing her own memories of it, thread by tattered thread.

  It was the promise she’d made to Edern Gee about the first music‌—about keeping it alive in this world so that both it and the Barrow World would grow closer together again.

  She’d defeated the Widow, rescued both herself and her friends, but the most important thing was still undone. In the great scheme of things, in her memories of the music that she could still recall, she remembered what was lost with the music. Not just magic, or wonder, or mystery. But the perfect symmetry of the land itself that was slowly unraveling as the worlds drew further and further apart. If she closed her eyes, she could remember the feeling‌—

  Species extinct.

  Hopes extinguished.

  Heartlands ravaged.

  Waste and barren lands lying both in the world and in the hearts of its inhabitants.

  ‌—but she could no longer feel it.

  Edern would just have to find someone else, she thought. He’d have to go into somebody else’s dreams.

  But what if he couldn’t? What if she’d been his last chance?

  Thinking that just made her feel worse.

  I’m where I should be, she thought. In a ruined church with a barrow underneath it. A forsaken place of worship built up on the bones of those long dead. A place where hopes die.

  She sank lower and lower into her depression. She looked around herself and everything had a dull pallor about it, as though someone had draped the gauze of a corpse shroud over her head and she was only able to see through its dimming fabric. There was such an utter pointlessness to everything, she realized.

  The first music? Better to call it the lost music: the forever lost music.

  And what if she did find it again? Of what use would it be? Who would hear it‌—who would even remember it long enough for it to do any good? If she, caught up in its thundering measures as she had been in the Barrow World, living and breathing its rhythm and the power of its cadences . . . if she could forget that, if it had changed inside her from something she felt and knew to something she could only vaguely recall, the way she could remember the first time she met Denzil’s menagerie, but not how she felt at that moment, then how could she expect anyone else to remember it? All she’d be able to call up would be some faint echo.

  And what good could that possibly do?

  She’d had the chance to do something important with her life‌— just like she’d always wanted. To do something that had real meaning. And she’d let it slip away.

  Lost.

  Like the music.

  It was so frustrating, to remember but not remember. She could call up the logic of what she’d experienced, but not the emotion of it. It was like the proverbial word on the tip of one’s tongue‌—so close, but it might as well be a thousand miles away.

  If only . . .

  She lifted her head, hearing a sound. Her heart lifted for a moment, thinking that the music had returned, but it wasn’t that. Nor was it the wind. It was more a soft, snickering whisper of dark laughter coming from the shadows. . . .

  She looked at those places where the shadows lay deepest.

  “Go ahead,” she told them. “You might as well laugh. After all, you’ve won. . . .”

  Won, won, won. . . .

  The echoes mocked her.

  And then she stopped to think about what she had just said. The shadows had won. Won what?

  It wasn’t the shadows that were at fault here‌—as they had been with the Widow‌—but her own self. The shadows didn’t mock her because they’d won, but because she’d simply given up.

  The insight shivered through her.

  She stood up from where she’d been sitting and walked out of the gloom inside the ruined church’s walls to stand in the sunshine outside. The step she took, from shadow to light, was like a switch being thrown in her head. She looked around herself, truly looked around and wondered how she could have let herself sink into such a morbid mood.

  No matter which way she turned, everything looked marvelous. The hedgerows, the moorland behind them, the rooftops of the town, the old ruins of Creak-a-vose . . . they all had a crystalline clarity about them that simply took her breath away. Why did men worship in churches, locking themselves away in the dark, when the world lay beyond its doors in all its real glory?

  Bother and damn. The only pointlessness at work here was her own moping about. So what if Denzil and the others didn’t remember anymore. She still did, didn’t she? Not everything, but enough to keep it alive.

  She couldn’t change the world all at once. But she could change a bit of it‌—her bit, at least. It might not be much, but something was better than nothing.

  It seemed so childishly simple. She could almost hear Edern’s voice.

  The magics of the world are far simpler than we make them out to be.

  The music wasn’t lost. How cou
ld it be lost when it was there inside her all the time? She hadn’t discovered it in the Barrow World, she had rediscovered it.

  “Thank you!” she called to the shadows that lay inside the ruins.

  There was no response from them as she slipped through a hedge and headed off across the moor towards the Men-an-Tol, but then she probably wouldn’t have heard it if there had been a response. Her heart was bubbling over, too full with the simple joy of being alive. She couldn’t have begun to explain to anyone how it was that she could be so depressed one moment, and so alive in the next. She only knew, as she skipped through the yellow-flowering gorse, that she’d been walking through the past days like one deaf, dumb, and blind.

  But she could finally hear again‌—the rustle of her trousers against the gorse, the skip of her step on the ground, the distant sound of a birdsong, the breath of the wind as it rattled dried ferns, one against the other; she could sing‌—wildly off-key, but full of enthusiasm as she made up her own words and her own melody to propel her along her way; and she could see‌—the rolling sea of yellow and green gorse, brown ferns and the dusty-rose blooms of the heather.

  When she finally reached the tolmen, she was out of breath and giddy. She collapsed on the ground beside the holed stone, and lolled back against it to stare up at the sky where a kestrel was silhouetted against a dusting of white cloud, islanded in a surrounding ocean of blue.

  “Hello, up there!” she called, waving up at the bird.

  And didn’t it seem to dip its wings‌—just for a moment there‌—in response, or was it only her imagination?

  She didn’t care. Wasn’t that half of what life was all about‌—imagining possibilities and then following through on them? And what she was going to imagine‌—what she was going to do‌—was make the Men-an-Tol sing. Out here, on the moor. It would sing and never stop singing, and whoever came by would hear that music and take it away with them. The wind itself would carry it to other lands until one day the whole of the Iron World would hear and recall that music.