Widdershins (46 page)

The blind gaze regarded him for a long moment, then the green-bree smiled. There wasn’t even a hint of warmth in that smile.

“That, my little high-minded friend,” he said, “is something you’ll have to do on your own. I have a corbae to kill.”

And with that he stepped away and Rabedy was left alone on the cliff top, looking down at more buffalo green-brees than he could ever have imagined existed.

Geordie

It was an astonishing sight
, this view that Timony showed me of thousands of buffalo gathered on the plains below. It was like a sea of brown waves undulating softly as the individual cerva stomped and pounded their drums.

This, I thought, was what it must have been like in the old days, when the early explorers first reached the prairies and came upon the vast herds that lived there. The difference was, the European hunters immediately started butchering the buffalo for their hides, leaving the skinned carcasses to rot on the ground by the hundreds of thousands, while Timony and I would just as soon stay off their radar completely.

Thinking of those killing fields, I didn’t have to ask Timony what he meant by his simple reply of “War.” But then something else occurred to me.

“Fairy followed the buffalo hunters, didn’t they?” I said.

Timony shrugged. “I suppose. I wasn’t here in those days. I came on the later boats, after one of those big wars where you people killed each other.”

“So when you said war, did you mean with humans or fairy?”

“Fairy,” he replied. “But if they’re successful in that endeavour, I don’t doubt that they’ll turn their wrath on your people.”

It was weird, his constantly saying “your people.” I didn’t feel the remotest connection to those early explorers who only saw the Americas as a source for monetary gain—no more than I do now with the big companies that run roughshod over anyone and anything that gets in the way of their profits.

I returned my gaze to that vast gathering of buffalo cousins. Their numbers seemed endless.

“There’s nothing we can do about this, is there?” I said.

“A doonie and a human? Hardly.”

“Then maybe we should concentrate on what we
can
do and try to find Joe.”

The doonie nodded. I didn’t see what he did next, but the view into the between disappeared, and we were back on that lonely grey shore once more. After what we’d just experienced, this place seemed even more desolate and lost, reflecting my mood. I tried not to get absorbed by the feeling it woke inside me.

“So, how do we start?” I asked.

“Concentrate on your friend,” Timony told me. “If you can bring up a strong enough essence of him in your mind, I should be able to use that to start my own search.”

Fairy magic’s mostly about will—I’d learned that from Galfreya. Oh, there are spells and magical talismans and all the usual baggage you hear about with magic, but the clarity of your vision and the strength of your will are what underlies everything.

Well and good in theory, but it wasn’t anything I’d ever put into practice.

Have you ever noticed how when you don’t want to think about something, you can’t get it out of your mind? Conversely, when you’re trying to concentrate, holding a particular person or place in your head seems impossible. No matter how well you think you know them, the familiar keeps sliding away and all you’re left with are ghost traces of these things you thought you knew so well.

It was like that when I tried to envision Joe. He was the kind of guy who made a serious impression on you—those crazy eyes, for starters—but I couldn’t seem to hold onto an image of him. So I tried thinking about the times I’d been around him, which were usually in Jilly’s company, and that made me think of Jilly instead. I had no trouble calling up an image of her. She’s hardwired into my head and has been pretty much from the day we first met, working as part-timers for the post office that Christmas so long ago.

It’s funny. I was in my early twenties at the time, but it feels like I’ve known her all my life. Sometimes when we’re talking, I’ll bring up things from when I was a teenager—swimming at the sand pits, being chased by that bull on the old Haile Farm, playing fiddle tunes on a granite outcrop out behind my parents’ house—and I’m surprised when she doesn’t remember them. She’ll give me a look and then I realize, well,
of course
she wouldn’t. We didn’t even know each other back then. But it sure feels like we did. Or that we should have. And I don’t have to try very hard to be able to picture her there, even when I know she wasn’t.

Jilly says that’s because we must have known each other in past lives, “You know, like when I was a teapot and you were a kettle. Or there was that time we were both mice in a Victorian travelling circus. Ah, those were the days, Geordie, me lad. It was all cheese and applause.”

The memory brought a bittersweet warmth, but it also reminded me of what I was supposed to be doing: concentrating on finding Joe. Because if we didn’t find Joe, then we might never find Jilly and then these memories would be all I’d have.

I needed more than memories.

I needed her.

I tried again, but if anything, I was getting worse at bringing Joe clearly to mind. He became this elusive butterfly, always hovering just a few steps away, no matter how carefully I approached. This happened again and again until I started to get frustrated, which is pretty much the last thing you want to do in a case like this.

Frustration, worry, anger . . . these are the things that totally muddy our thinking. Not that I’ve ever been a clear, linear thinker, which is another reason that Jilly and I get along so well because she’s anything but linear.

Jilly . . .

I went back to trying to hold onto Joe in my mind. I remembered him coming to visit me one time at the apartment I had on Lee Street. I’d lived there pretty much forever—this was before the disaster of my moving to L.A. to be with Tanya. There wasn’t much to the place, but then I’ve never needed a lot. If you need proof, consider how long I’ve been staying in Jilly’s studio loft and how little of myself you’ll find in there. Most of my things are still boxed up and stored in the basement of my brother Christy’s apartment building.

But back at the Lee Street apartment, I’d taken the time to make the place look nice. I had posters and art on the walls—mostly courtesy of Jilly and our various artist friends. There was a stereo set up with all my albums organized in old milk crates. Brick and plank bookcases for my tune book collections. And then all the instruments, of course, leaning in corners, hanging from the walls, the better-quality ones stored safely away in their cases.

It was easy to call the place up. I could remember the smallest details, from the row of figurines and knickknacks lined up on the windowsill and the odd patchwork quilt on the bed, to the way the red neon light from a sign on the street outside crept in under the bottom of my blinds. That night . . .

I felt a tug in my head. It was like when you have something on the tip of your tongue, something you know backwards to forwards, but you just can’t put it into words at that moment.

I suppose it should have made me feel more frustrated—this new little intrusion added to my inability to grab and hold a strong memory of Joe—but instead, it brought me the oddest feeling of comfort. And then . . . and then . . .

I was back there in that memory. In my Lee Street apartment. Or at least my every sense told me I was. I looked to the window. The blinds were still up and a gentle snow was falling, just as it had been the night Joe came by.

This is good, I thought. I’m going to have that memory for Timony now.

Except there were a hundred other snowy nights that I was living there when Jilly dropped by. And this time, when the door of my apartment opened, it was Jilly who was standing there with snow dripping from her unruly hair, not Joe.

She had a bundle under her arm. Unwrapping the brown butcher’s paper, she took out a painting, and I saw the familiar flower fairies cavorting in a junkyard. That let me place exactly the when of this memory. It was the night after one of her shows at the Green Man Gallery. Throughout the show there’d been a “sold” sticker on the painting she was offering to me here in my apartment. Now I realized that the sticker had only been there so that she could show the painting and then give it to me after.

Because I’d loved it so much. The two little gnomish guys in one corner, playing fiddle and bodhran, using old tin cans for seats. And the flower fairies dancing to their music—like Cicely M. Barker’s, but still very much Jilly’s own, wearing the accoutrements of their naming flower, only punky, kind of raggedy versions of how Barker painted them.

But I could hardly look at the painting.

I’d forgotten all about Joe, I was so relieved to see Jilly again.

Or at least I was until I realized that this wasn’t real. This was a memory. I remembered it so clearly. In those days I never locked my door, and she’d come right in without bothering to knock to find me sitting at the kitchen table with my fiddle on my lap as I was transcribing a new tune.

She’d grinned at me and said, “So what do you think, Geordie, me lad? Can you find a place to hang this old thing?”

Except this time she didn’t. This time she laid the painting on the table and stood there looking at me with the saddest expression.

“Oh, Geordie,” she said. “I’ve done a terrible thing.”

I couldn’t seem to find my voice.

This wasn’t how it had happened. I’ve never forgotten that night. We were all so poor in those days—not that we ever got much richer, but at least we weren’t scrabbling from hand-to-mouth as we had been back then. The money she could have gotten for that painting would have paid her rent and art supplies for a month, but she’d insisted I accept it and wouldn’t take no for an answTer.

“But I had to see you again,” she said. “If just one last time.”

“Juh . . . “ I had to clear my throat. “Jilly, what’s going on here?” I finally managed. I laid my fiddle on the table and got up from the chair. “What are you doing in my head?”

“I’m not in your head,” she said. “You’re in mine.”

And when she said those words, that old apartment of mine faded from around us, and we were standing in some empty bedroom with a roof that made a sharp forty-five degree turn halfway across so that the wall on the window side was only half the height of the wall on the other. There were no furnishings except for a bed frame holding a ratty old mattress. The floor was some kind of hardwood, scratched and scuffed, and paint was peeling from the plaster walls. A single unlit bulb hung from the ceiling with a pull chain dangling below it.

“Your . . . I don’t understand . . .”

My voice trailed off as I turned back to her because she was different now, as well. A child stood in front of me, recognizably Jilly, but a Jilly I’d never known. She was ten or eleven, even smaller and thinner than she normally was.

The child gave me a sad shake of her head.

“I know,” she said. It was Jilly’s voice, but a little higher pitched. “It’s all preposterous and stupid and confusing, but somehow I’ve managed to pull my physical self inside my own head and . . . you know how you used to say—when I was carrying on about some mad thing or another—that I must have this happy attic of a brain, just brim full of interesting things?”

I gave a slow nod.

“Well, it turns out it’s not like that at all. It turns out it’s this weird little world where everybody hates me, or just wants to hurt me, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Jilly, you—”

“Oh, I know. I sound pathetic, don’t I? But you don’t know, Geordie. I always thought that with pluck and perseverance, we could all make it through our dark woods to the other side and safety. But that was before I realized that my dark woods are right here inside me. I can’t get away from this, because it’s a part of me and it won’t ever let me go.”

“Everybody carries their past inside them.”

“Yeah, but not literally. It’s not memories we’re talking about here. This—” She waved a hand to take in the room. “This is all real.”

“No, it’s not like that,” I said, remembering what Timony had told me. “It’s only like that if you believe it to be true.”

“Oh, how I wish that were true. But I know better. I . . .”

She broke off and turned to the window. It took me a moment to hear the voices that had distracted her. Outside I saw unkempt fields, choked with high weeds and brush. Beyond them was a forest—mostly dark cedar, maple and pine. It all looked vaguely familiar—as though I’d seen it before, just not from this particular perspective. In the closest field, I could see a man approaching along a path that wound through the weeds. He had a loose, lanky stride and held the hand of a little girl who trotted to keep up with him. Behind them another little girl followed, redhaired and trailing a half field back. They were all too far away for me to make out any real details.

I turned back to look at Jilly. Her face was scrunched up, eyes closed, brow furrowed.

“Jilly, what are—”

“Shhh,” she told me. “I’m trying to concentrate on sending you back.”