Widdershins (75 page)

“I’ll try,” he said.

He started to get up, but Jack put a hand on his arm.

“Wait,” he said.

“Wait? For what?”

“Well, for one thing, to get centered again. I’ve never seen you like this, Joe. If you don’t get focused, something
is
going to get screwed up.”

“And how are we going to get centered?”

Jack smiled. “For starters, we’re going to sit here a moment and let the night fill us. We’re going to appreciate the beauty and the stillness. Then we’re going to offer some smoke to the four directions and the Grace.”

Joe gave a slow nod.

“And then,” Jack said, “we’re going to see what needs to be done. And if we need to kick some ass, we’ll be ready for that, too.”

He waited until Joe nodded again, then pulled out his tobacco and started to build a smoke.

“Pretty place you’ve got here,” he told Honey. “I can see why it appeals more than where Joe first found you.”

I wanted to raise my pups far from the stink and smell of that world.

“Yeah, well, it’s not all pretty. No argument there.”

Joe could feel Honey’s smile in his mind.

But it’s not all bad either
, she admitted.

“I wasn’t going to bring that up,” Jack said. “But since you did, yeah. There are parts of that world that’ll just take your breath away. I figure it’s just like most of us. We’ve all got some good in us, we’ve got some bad.”

Not all of us. There are some that are all bad.

“Or the same as,” Jack agreed. He grinned at her, a feral coyote’s grin. “And the ones that are like that, well, we just put down to make more room for beauty to grow.”

He finished making the cigarette and handed it and his lighter to Joe.

“Do the honours,” he said.

Joe flicked the wheel of the Zippo and a small flame sprang up from its wick.

“Light in the dark,” Jack murmured.

Joe nodded and lit the cigarette.

“Light in the dark,” he agreed.

Jilly

I write down the story
the way I made it happen for Mattie, how every time Del came swaggering into my room, I put all the evil and hurt he did to me onto her so that she had to carry the weight of it instead of me. He would always say that I made him do those terrible things, but in my head, she was the one who made him do it. Not me. But all I really did was transfer my pain to her just so that I could get through the days and nights I had to live in that house of my enemy.

I don’t sugarcoat the story now, or leave anything out, because it’s not going to work if I’m not totally honest.

It doesn’t matter that I didn’t know what I was doing at the time.

It doesn’t matter that I was just a messed-up kid myself.

All that matters is for me to find a way to make things right for Mattie.

So I sit there on the floor, working on it, filling the handful of blank pages at the end of the book with lines of tiny printing and little sketches.

After awhile I get up and take the book outside. I realize that this isn’t the kind of thing I can finish in here. Not in this house, in
this
room.

It’s where it all started, not where it should end.

It’s still sunny outside and the humidity’s completely gone. It’s a perfect summer’s day—the kind you’d get once or twice during the season back in the real Tyson County. I lean against the porch pillar to listen to a jay somewhere off in the spruce, scolding and raucous, then sit down on the top step and open the book again.

“Do you really think that’s going to be enough?” an unfamiliar voice asks.

I suppose I should feel nervous, but I’m very calm as I turn to see who’s spoken. I’m even calm when I recognize the newcomer as another character from the Ellen Wentworth book.

This time it’s Tom Foolery, the title character from “The Scarecrow That Couldn’t Sleep.” Like Mattie, he looks like he simply stepped out of one of Wentworth’s paintings. I could turn to the page of the book on my lap and find the same raggedy man with the painted cloth face and the bits of straw sticking out of his seams and from under his floppy brown hat. He’s wearing a checkered shirt, old worn overalls, and a pair of rubber boots that are cracked with age.

“Don’t tell me I did something to you, too,” I say.

“No,” he says. He waves a floppy arm out past the yard. “I was just hanging around out in the fields and got this sudden inclination to come back to the house.”

I smile. “Literally hanging around?”

“Oh, no. I’m retired now. I was never much good as a scarecrow anyway. I like crows too much and, well, why shouldn’t they have a share of the corn? They were here first, after all.”

“Not in Ellen’s story.”

He takes a seat beside me. “Yes, well, that’s the thing with stories. They only hold a little piece of your life, and even then, it’s from somebody else’s perspective.”

“Unless you write it yourself.”

He shakes his head. “No, the perspective still wouldn’t be right. It would be an older you writing about a younger you, and memory has a knack of playing tricks on us, no matter how much we think we know better. Nobody remembers things the way they really happened, only how we think they happened.”

“Are you talking about my memories of Del?”

“No, no. It’s just . . . “ He has work gloves for hands and spreads them between us. “You’re getting the details right, but you’re missing the big picture.”

“I don’t understand.”

It’s weird following the play of emotions on his face. The features are painted on, but they’re still mobile like a real person’s.

“The little girl who didn’t know what she was doing, but still made Mattie’s life miserable . . .”

“You mean me.”

He nods. “The young you, yes. Where do you think she got the ability to do that?”

“What ability? I just couldn’t face up to what was happening to me, so I pretended it was happening to someone else. That doesn’t exactly require any special powers.”

“Perhaps not. But then tell me this: what made it real?”

I blink in confusion. “Okay, I’m still not following you. What’s real about this place? It’s just inside my head.”

“And yet here we are. Here we
physically
are.”

“Someone said I’d probably created a hidden pocket world back when. You know, a few acres stashed away in the dreamlands, but parked just outside of normal access for anybody but me.”

“And how did the little girl you were manage to do that?”

“Beats me. I don’t know how I made it. I don’t know how I pulled Mattie out of the book and invested her with all my bad memories. It just happened.”

He nods. “Because of the light.”

“The what?”

“Your gift from the Grace.”

“Oh, that.”

I’ve been hearing about this for ages. From Joe. From the White Deer Woman. From pretty much anybody with an ounce of magic in their blood. I’m supposed to be filled with this magical light which doesn’t seem to do anything for me except make me an easy target to find in the otherworld.

“You’re saying the light made Mattie?” I ask. “And I guess you?”

“Not the light.
You
brought us to life from the book. The light was only the fuel that allowed you to do so.”

“Okay. Whatever. The light let me do it. So what’s your point?”

“You didn’t just make a nightmare for Mattie Finn. You made all of us, too.”

“ ‘Us’?”

A floppy hand rises to point at the yard in front of us. I follow the movement and stare at the crowd of beings standing out there in the grass.

They approached the house so quietly, I never heard them, which, considering the size of some of them, means they’re either really good at sneaking around, or I need to pay attention to my surroundings more.

There’s the tubby hippopotamus Hank-a-Widdle and Frocious the lion from “A Circus in a Teapot.” I look more closely and spot the Dancing Greasy Groos—a family of gangly-limbed monkeys—from the same story. There’s a pack of Rackhamish fairies—all twiggy and leafed; the Prince and Princess from “Speckled, My Egg”; Farmer Dorn, his wife Sarah, and the farmyard mutt Putsy from Tom’s story; the nine sisters from “The Cakemaker’s Magic Candlestick.” And more, so many more.

There are traditional fairy-tale characters, too. Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother, the seven swan brothers and their sister. None of the villains, but otherwise it seems as though every character Wentworth ever painted is standing out there in the yard. All the companions of my childhood that I used to people the stories I made up in my head.

I’d forgotten all about them, though how I could have done that seems impossible. But seeing them now fills me with a confused delight.

It’s like finding a box of childhood toys that you haven’t looked at in thirty years. You never think of them. It’s like they never existed. But if you come upon that box and open it, the memories all flood back. Each toy you pick up, no matter how small and inconsequential, looms large once you hold it in your hand again.

Some things you can’t forget. Bad things. Awful things. Sad things. When you’ve had a childhood like mine, you just try to put it all out of your mind. But seeing this crowd of memories come to life in the yard, I realize it’s so important to remember that there were good things, too. Maybe they only lived on paper, or in my head, but they sustained me through those long, unhappy years.

“Without you,” Tom says, “we wouldn’t exist.”

I turn to look at him. “So, you’re like Eadar?”

Eadar are the inhabitants of the half world—what Joe calls the between. Beings created out of imagination, who exist only as long as someone believes in them. They’re like my friend Toby Childers, the little man who was my companion the last time I got lost in the otherworld. Some are only wisps of beings—born from a daydream and fading quickly away. But others—like the beloved characters of favourite books—can become so real that they take on a life of their own.

Tom looks puzzled until I explain it to him.

“Exactly,” he says. “We are Eadar, made real from the page by the power of your imagination.”

I look out again at the crowd . . .

“But I haven’t thought of any of you for so long,” I say. “How would you all still be here if you need belief to exist?”

“You were that powerful. You
are
that powerful.”

“Here,” I say.

He nods. “Yes, here.”

I’m trying to figure this out, but I must be totally dense because I really can’t see where he’s going with all of this.

“So, what are you saying?” I ask. “that you’re . . . grateful?”

“Indeed,” he says. “How could we not be? And we’ve come to you now to remind you that the child you were did good, as well.”

“For you, maybe, but that doesn’t change what happened to Mattie.”

“No, of course not. But if you’re going to write down the tale of what happened back then, you need to tell the whole of it.”

“I don’t think it’s going to make Mattie feel any better. It’s going to make her feel worse. You guys get to . . . do whatever it is you do, which I’m guessing is enjoyable because no one looks particularly ticked off. But all she got was my nightmares.”

He nods. “But if you don’t put our part of the tale in there, we might no longer have these lives of ours.”

Now I get it.

“You’re trying to get me to not make another mess of things,” I say.

He nods. “And if we’re still here, we can take care of Mattie when you’re finished setting the world a-right again.”

“You couldn’t before?”

He glances back at the house. “Not so long as the Conjurer was in power. I won’t say that we don’t want to live, as well. We do. But we are not like him. And if you don’t write us into the story, then the good you did when you were the child you were will be gone. Only the ugliness will remain.”

Now I totally understand what he meant when he first asked me,
Do you really think that’s going to be enough?

“But I didn’t
know
I was doing it.”

“You didn’t know you were hurting Mattie, either.”

I look away from him and try to pick Mattie out in the crowd.

“I don’t see her,” I say.

He shakes his head. “She’s not here. She’s in the dark woods.”

He points to the left, to where the spruce and pine and cedar grow thick, climbing up into the hills.

Once upon a time, I think.

Because that’s how it is in fairy tales. You have to go through the dark woods before you can come out the other side again.

But what if you don’t ever get to come out?

I see Mattie’s face in my mind. The way she looked at me.

I look back at Tom. “I can’t just ‘once upon a time’ this better, can I?”

I don’t have to explain what I mean.

“In this place, you’re the Conjurer,” he tells me. “At least you are once more, now that you’ve defeated your brother.”

It’s funny. I never thought of it as defeating him. I just thought of it as surviving.

“You can do anything you want,” Tom adds.

When he says that, I know how I can fix things for him and the rest of the Eadar my younger self pulled out of Wentworth’s book. But that won’t work with Mattie. Just as the healers couldn’t fix my body until I dealt with the monster hidden in my head, I have to help Mattie do the same before I can work any magic for her.