Very Best of Charles de Lint, The
Read Very Best of Charles de Lint, The Online
Authors: Charles de Lint
Tags: #Fiction, #Contemporary, #Collections & Anthologies, #Fantasy
The Very Best of Charles de Lint
by
Charles de Lint
Copyright © 2010 by Charles de Lint
this one’s for my readers
with a deep appreciation
for all your support
over the years
with a special thanks to the readers
on my social media pages
who helped choose these stories
CONTENTS
In Which We Meet Jilly Coppercorn
Merlin Dreams in the Mondream Wood
Mr. Truepenny’s Book Emporium and Gallery
The Moon Is Drowning While I Sleep
Held Safe by Moonlight and Vines
Introduction
Over the years I’ve put together a number of collections of my own work. It’s a fairly painless process, since I usually have some specific theme in mind as I begin to gather the stories. A collection might be centered around Newford (as in
Dreams Underfoot
, through to the fifth and most recent one,
Muse & Reverie
), early stories (
A Handful of Coppers
and its two sequels), stories with teenagers as the protagonists (
Waifs & Strays
), stories for children (
What the Mouse Found
), or even a chronological collection of the chapbooks I used to write at the end of the year and send out as Christmas cards (the two
Triskell Tales
collections).
There’s still work to do on such books: going over each story to make sure there are no typos or mistakes in the text, tracking down the copyright acknowledgements, writing introductions for either the collection as a whole or the individual stories—sometimes both. But
choosing
stories hasn’t been so hard.
That wasn’t the case for this book.
My editor here at Tachyon was set on using the title
The Very Best of Charles de Lint
and I had no idea how to choose what would be included. Selecting my
favourite
stories would have been hard (because they’re all like my kids and how do you choose which of your kids is your favourite?), but with a lot of back-and-forthing, it would probably be doable. But my
best
stories?
I really didn’t know where to begin. I have my own ideas as to which are the best, but my judgement is coloured by circumstances and events that have less to do with the actual stories themselves and more to do with what was going on in my life while I was writing them, or what I was trying to accomplish. The
actual
best stories? How could I ever be objective enough to put such a collection together?
I suppose I could have asked some of the editors and reviewers I know to help me out, but then I realized that if I was going to turn to outside help, I should ask the people who really know. Those who have put their hard-earned money down, year after year, and bought the books and magazines where these stories first appeared. The ones that buy my books and give me the gift of being able to do this thing I love as a living.
In other words, my readers.
So I went on a few of the social networking sites and asked my readers to name their favourite stories. They responded enthusiastically and what we have collected here are the stories that got the most votes. Mostly. I added a few to make this collection more representative of all the styles in which I’ve written, but ninety percent of what is to be found in these pages was chosen by my readers.
Here’s hoping you agree with them.
If any of you are on the Internet, come visit my home page at www.charlesdelint.com. I’m also on Facebook and Twitter, so you can drop in and say hello to me there as well.
Charles de Lint
Ottawa, Autumn 2009
In Which We Meet Jilly Coppercorn
Bramley Dapple was the wizard in “A Week of Saturdays,” the third story in Christy Riddell’s
How to Make the Wind Blow
. He was a small wizened old man, spry as a kitten, thin as a reed, with features lined and brown as a dried fig. He wore a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles without prescription lenses that he polished incessantly and he loved to talk.
“It doesn’t matter what they believe,” he was saying to his guest, “so much as what
you
believe.”
He paused as the brown-skinned goblin who looked after his house came in with a tray of biscuits and tea. His name was Goon, a tallish creature at three-foot-four who wore the garb of an organ grinder’s monkey: striped black and yellow trousers, a red jacket with yellow trim, small black slippers, and a little green and yellow cap that pushed down an unruly mop of thin dark curly hair. Gangly limbs with a protruding tummy, puffed cheeks, a wide nose, and tiny black eyes added to his monkey-like appearance.
The wizard’s guest observed Goon’s entrance with a startled look which pleased Bramley to no end.
“There,” he said. “Goon proves my point.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“We live in a consensual reality where things exist because we want them to exist. I believe in Goon, Goon believes in Goon, and you, presented with his undeniable presence, tea tray in hand, believe in Goon as well. Yet, if you were to listen to the world at large, Goon is nothing more than a figment of some fevered writer’s imagination—a literary construct, an artistic representation of something that can’t possibly exist in the world as we know it.”
Goon gave Bramley a sour look, but the wizard’s guest leaned forward, hand outstretched, and brushed the goblin’s shoulder with a feather-light touch. Slowly she leaned back into the big armchair, cushions so comfortable they seemed to
embrace her as she settled against them.
“So…
anything
we can imagine can exist?” she asked finally.
Goon turned his sour look on her now.
She was a student at the university where the wizard taught; third year, majoring in fine arts, and she had the look of an artist about her. There were old paint stains on her jeans and under her fingernails. Her hair was a thick tangle of brown hair, more unruly than Goon’s curls. She had a smudge of a nose and thin puckering lips, workman’s boots that stood by the door with a history of scuffs and stains written into their leather, thick woolen socks with a hole in the left heel, and one shirttail that had escaped the waist of her jeans. But her eyes were a pale, pale blue, clear and alert, for all the casualness of her attire.
Her name was Jilly Coppercorn.
Bramley shook his head. “It’s not imagining. It’s
knowing
that it exists—without one smidgen of doubt.”
“Yes, but someone had to think him up for him to…” She hesitated as Goon’s scowl deepened. “That is…”
Bramley continued to shake his head. “There
is
some semblance of order to things,” he admitted, “for if the world was simply everyone’s different conceptual universe mixed up together, we’d have nothing but chaos. It all relies on will, you see—to observe the changes, at any rate. Or the differences. The anomalies. Like Goon—oh, do stop scowling,” he added to the goblin.
“The world as we have it,” he went on to Jilly, “is here mostly because of habit. We’ve all agreed that certain things exist—we’re taught as impressionable infants that this is a table and this is what it looks like, that’s a tree out the window there, a dog looks and sounds just so. At the same time we’re informed that Goon and his like don’t exist, so we don’t—or can’t—see them.”
“They’re not made up?” Jilly asked.
This was too much for Goon. He set the tray down and gave her leg a pinch. Jilly jumped away from him, trying to back deeper into the chair as the goblin grinned, revealing two rows of decidedly nasty-looking teeth.
“Rather impolite,” Bramley said, “but I suppose you do get the point?”
Jilly nodded quickly. Still grinning, Goon set about pouring their teas.
“So,” Jilly asked, “how can someone…how can
I
see things as they really are?”
“Well, it’s not that simple,” the wizard told her. “First you have to know what it is that you’re looking for—before you can find it, you see.”
Coyote Stories
Four directions blow the sacred winds
We are standing at the center
Every morning wakes another chance
To make our lives a little better
—Kiya Heartwood, from “Wishing Well”
This day Coyote is feeling pretty thirsty, so he goes into Joey’s Bar, you know, on the corner of Palm and Grasso, across from the Men’s Mission, and he lays a nugget of gold down on the counter, but Joey he won’t serve him.
“So you don’t serve skins no more?” Coyote he asks him.
“Last time you gave me gold, it turned to shit on me,” is what Joey says. He points to the Rolex on Coyote’s wrist. “But I’ll take that. Give you change and everything.”
Coyote scratches his muzzle and pretends he has to think about it. “Cost me twenty-five dollars,” he says. “It looks better than the real thing.”
“I’ll give you fifteen, cash, and a beer.”
“How about a bottle of whiskey?”
So Coyote comes out of Joey’s Bar and he’s missing his Rolex now, but he’s got a bottle of Jack in his hand and that’s when he sees Albert, just around the corner, sitting on the ground with his back against the brick wall and his legs stuck out across the sidewalk so you have to step over them, you want to get by.
“Hey, Albert,” Coyote says. “What’s your problem?”
“Joey won’t serve me no more.”
“That because you’re indigenous?”
“Naw. I got no money.”
So Coyote offers him some of his whiskey. “Have yourself a swallow,” he says, feeling generous, because he only paid two dollars for the Rolex and it never worked anyway.
“Thanks, but I don’t think so,” is what Albert tells him. “Seems to me I’ve been given a sign. Got no money means I should stop drinking.”
Coyote shakes his head and takes a sip of his Jack. “You are one crazy skin,” he says.
That Coyote he likes his whiskey. It goes down smooth and puts a gleam in his eye. Maybe, he drinks enough, he’ll remember some good time and smile, maybe he’ll get mean and pick himself a fight with a lamppost like he’s done before. But one thing he knows, whether he’s got money or not’s got nothing to do with omens. Not for him, anyway.