Tapping the Dream Tree (28 page)

But he soon discovered that stores didn't have the longevity of a farm. They opened and closed up business seemingly on nothing more than a whim, which made it a hard life for a hob, always looking for a new place to live. By the latter part of this century, he had moved twelve times in the space of five years before finally settling into the place he now called home, the bookstore of his present mistress with its simple sign out front:

HOLLY RUE-USED BOOKS

He'd discovered that a quality used book store was always the best. Libraries were good, too, but they were usually home to displaced gargoyles and the ghosts of writers and had no room for a hob as well. He'd tried new book stores, but the smaller ones couldn't keep him busy enough and the large ones were too bright, their hours of business too long. And he loved the wide and eclectic range of old and new books to be explored in a shop such as Mistress Holly's, titles that wandered far from the beaten path, or worthy books no longer in print, but nonetheless inspired. The stories he found in them sustained him in a way that nothing else could, for they fed the heart and the spirit.

But this morning, sitting behind the furnace, he only felt old and tired. There'd been no time to read at all last night, and he hadn't thought to bring a book down with him when he finally had to leave the store.

“I hate pixies,” he said, his voice soft and lonely in the darkness. “I really really do.”

Faerie and pixies had never gotten along, especially not since the last pitched battle between them in the old country when the faeries had been driven back across the River Parrett, leaving everything west of the Parrett as pixyland. For years, hobs such as Dick had lived a clandestine existence in their little steadings, avoiding the attention of pixies whenever they could.

Dick hadn't needed last night's experience to tell him why.

After a while he heard the mistress and her dog leave the store so he crept out from behind the furnace to stand guard in case the pixies returned while the pair of them were gone. Though what he would do if the pixies did come back, he still had no idea. He was an absolute failure when it came to protecting anything, that had been made all too clear last night.

Luckily the question never arose. Mistress Holly and the dog returned and he slipped back behind the furnace, morosely clutching his knees and rocking back and forth, waiting for the night to come. He could hear life go on upstairs. Someone came by to help the mistress right the fallen bookcases. Customers arrived and left with much discussion of the vandalism on the street. Most of the time he could hear only the mistress, replacing the books on their shelves.

“I should be doing that,” Dick said. “That's my job.”

But he was only an incompetent hob, concealed in his hidey-hole, of no use to anyone until they all went to bed and he could go about his business. And even then, any ruffian could come along and bully him and what could he do to stop them?

Dick's mood went from bad to worse, from sad to sadder still. It might have lasted all the day, growing unhappier with each passing hour, except at midmorning he suddenly sat up, ears and nose quivering. A presence had come into the store above. A piece of an old mystery, walking about as plain as could be.

He realized that he'd sensed it yesterday as well, while he was dozing. Then he'd put it down to the dream he was wandering in, forgetting all about it when he woke. But today, wide awake, he couldn't ignore it. There was an oak king's daughter upstairs, an old and powerful spirit walking far from her woods. He began to shiver. Important faerie such as she wouldn't be out and about unless the need was great. His shiver deepened. Perhaps she'd come to reprimand him for the job so poorly done. She might turn him into a stick or a mouse.

Oh, this was very bad. First pixies, now this.

Whatever was he going to do? How ever could he even begin to explain that he'd meant to chase the pixies away, truly he had, but he simply wasn't big enough, nor strong enough. Perhaps not even brave enough.

He rocked back and forth, harder now, his face burrowed against his knees.

After I'd made my call to Meran, Samuel, who works at the deli down the street, came by and helped me stand the bookcases upright once more. The deli hadn't been spared a visit from the vandals either. He told me that they'd taken all the sausages out of the freezer and used them to spell out rude words on the floor.

“Remember when all we had to worry about was some graffiti on the walls outside?” he asked when he was leaving.

I was still replacing books on the shelves when Meran arrived. She looked around the store while I expanded on what I'd told her over the phone. Her brow furrowed thoughtfully and I was wondering if she was going to tell me to put my sweater on backwards again.

“You must have a hob in here,” she said.

“A what?”

It was the last thing I expected her to say.

“A hobgoblin,” she said. “A brownie. A little faerie man who dusts and tidies and keeps things neat.”

“I just thought it didn't get all that dirty,” I said, realizing as I spoke how ridiculous that sounded.

Because, when I thought about it, a helpful brownie living in the store explained a lot. While I certainly ran the vacuum cleaner over the carpets every other morning or so, and dusted when I could, the place never seemed to need much cleaning. My apartment upstairs required more and it didn't get a fraction of the traffic.

And it wasn't just the cleaning. The store, for all its clutter, was organized, though half the time I didn't know how. But I always seemed to be able to lay my hand on whatever I needed to find without having to root about too much. Books often got put away without my remembering I'd done it. Others mysteriously vanished, then reappeared a day or so later, properly filed in their appropriate section—even if they had originally disappeared from the top of my desk. I rarely needed to alphabetize my sections while my colleagues in other stores were constantly complaining of the mess their customers left behind.

“But aren't you supposed to leave cakes and cream out for them?” I found myself asking.

“You never leave a specific gift,” Meran said. “Not unless you want him to leave. It's better to simply ‘forget' a cake or a sweet treat on one of the shelves when you leave for the night.”

“I haven't even done that. What could he be living on?”

Meran smiled as she looked around the store. “Maybe the books nourish him. Stranger things have been known to happen in Faerie.”

“Faerie,” I repeated slowly.

Bad enough I'd helped create a database on the Internet that had taken on a life of its own. Now my store was in Faerie. Or at least straddling the border, I supposed. Maybe the one had come about because of the other.

“Your hob will know what happened here last night,” Meran said.

“But how would we even go about asking him?”

It seemed a logical question, since I'd never known I had one living with me in the first place. But Meran only smiled.

“Oh, I can usually get their attention,” she told me.

She called out something in a foreign language, a handful of words that rang with great strength and appeared to linger and echo longer than they should. The poor little man who came sidling up from the basement in response looked absolutely terrified. He was all curly hair and raggedy clothes with a broad face that, I assumed from the laugh lines, normally didn't look so miserable. He was carrying a battered little leather carpetbag and held a brown cloth cap in his hand. He couldn't have been more than two feet tall.

All I could do was stare at him, though I did have the foresight to pick up Snippet before she could lunge in his direction. I could feel the growl rumbling in her chest more than hear it. I think she was as surprised as me to find that he'd been living in our basement all this time.

Meran sat on her haunches, bringing her head down to the general level of the hob's. To put him at ease, I supposed, so I did the same myself. The little man didn't appear to lose any of his nervousness. I could see his knees knocking against each other, his cheek twitching.

“B-begging your pardon, your ladyship,” he said to Meran. His gaze slid to me and I gave him a quick smile. He blinked, swallowed hard, and returned his attention to my companion. “Dick Bobbins,” he added, giving a quick nod of his head. “At your service, as it were. I'll just be on my way, then, no harm done.”

“Why are you so frightened of me?” Meran asked.

He looked at the floor. “Well, you're a king's daughter, aren't you just, and I'm only me.”

A king's daughter? I thought.

Meran smiled. “We're all only who we are, no one of more importance than the other.”

“Easy for you to say,” he began. Then his eyes grew wide and he put a hand to his mouth. “Oh, that was a bad thing to say to such a great and wise lady such as yourself.”

Meran glanced at me. “They think we're like movie stars,” she explained. “Just because we were born in a court instead of a hob-hole.”

I was getting a bit of a case of the celebrity nerves myself. Court? King's daughter? Who exactly
was
this woman?

“But you know,” she went on, returning her attention to the little man, “my father's court was only a glade, our palace no more than a tree.”

He nodded quickly, giving her a thin smile that never reached his eyes.

“Well, wonderful to meet you,” he said. “Must be on my way now.”

He picked up his carpetbag and started to sidle toward the other aisle that wasn't blocked by what he must see as two great big hulking women and a dog.

“But we need your help,” Meran told him.

Whereupon he burst into tears.

The mothering instinct that makes me such a sap for Snippet kicked into gear and I wanted to hold him in my arms and comfort him. But I had Snippet to consider, straining in my grip, the growl in her chest quite audible now. And I wasn't sure how the little man would have taken my sympathies. After all, he might be child-sized, but for all his tears, he was obviously an adult, not a child. And if the stories were anything to go by, he was probably older than me— by a few hundred years.

Meran had no such compunction. She slipped up to him and put her arms around him, cradling his face against the crook of her shoulder.

It took a while before we coaxed the story out of him. I locked the front door and we went upstairs to my kitchen where I made tea for us all. Sitting at the table, raised up to the proper height by a stack of books, Dick told us about the pixies coming out of the computer screen, how they'd knocked down the bookcases and finally disappeared into the night. The small mug I'd given him looked enormous in his hands. He fell silent when he was done and stared glumly down at the steam rising from his tea.

“But none of what they did was your fault,” I told him.

“Kind of you to say,” he managed. He had to stop and sniff, wipe his nose on his sleeve. “But if I'd b-been braver—”

“They
would
have drowned you in a puddle,” Meran said. “And I think you were brave, shouting at them the way you did and then rescuing your mistress from being pixy-led.”

I remembered those dancing lights and shivered. I knew those stories as well. There weren't any swamps or marshes to be led into around here, but there were eighteen-wheelers out on the highway only a few blocks away. Entranced as I'd been, the pixies could easily have walked me right out in front of any one of them. I was lucky to have only a sore shoulder.

“Do you … really think so?” he asked, sitting up a little straighter.

We both nodded.

Snippet was lying under my chair, her curiosity having been satisfied that Dick was only one more visitor and therefore out-of-bounds in terms of biting and barking at. There'd been a nervous moment while she'd sniffed at his trembling hand and he'd looked as though he was ready to scurry up one of the bookcases, but they quickly made their peace. Now Snippet was only bored and had fallen asleep.

“Well,” Meran said. “It's time we put our heads together and considered how we can put our unwanted visitors back where they came from and keep them there.”

“Back onto the Internet?” I asked. “Do you really think we should?”

“Well, we could try to kill them ...”

I shook my head. That seemed too extreme. I started to protest, only to see that she'd been teasing me.

“We could take a thousand of them out of the web,” Meran said, “and still not have them all. Once tricksy folk like pixies have their foot in a place, you can't ever be completely rid of them.” She smiled. “But if we can get them to go back in, there are measures we can take to stop them from troubling you again.”

“And what about everybody else on-line?” I asked.

Meran shrugged. “They'll have to take their chances—just like they do when they go for a walk in the woods. The little people are everywhere.”

I glanced across my kitchen table to where the hob was sitting and thought, no kidding.

“The trick, if you'll pardon my speaking out of turn,” Dick said, “is to play on their curiosity.”

Meran gave him an encouraging smile. “We want your help,” she said. “Go on.”

The little man sat up straighter still and put his shoulders back.

“We could use a book that's never been read,” he said. “We could put it in the middle of the road, in front of the store. That would certainly make me curious.”

“An excellent idea,” Meran told him.

“And then we could use the old spell of bell, book and candle. The churchmen stole that one from us.”

Even I'd heard of it. Bell, book and candle had once been another way of saying excommunication in the Catholic church. After pronouncing the sentence, the officiating cleric would close his book, extinguish the candle, and toll the bell as if for someone who had died. The book symbolized the book of life, the candle a man's soul, removed from the sight of God as the candle had been from the sight of men.