Very Best of Charles de Lint, The (45 page)

Before I could mention the quake, Joe started to tell me how he’d opened up this morning to find every porcelain mug in the store broken. None of the other breakables, not the plates or coffee makers. Nothing else was even out of place.

“What a weird quake it was,” I said.

“Quake?” Joe said. “What quake?”

I waved a hand at the broken china he was sweeping up.

“This was vandals,” he said. “Some little bastards broke in and had themselves a laugh.”

So I told him about the bookcases in my shop, but he only shook his head.

“You hear anything about a quake on the radio?” he asked.

“I wasn’t listening to it.”

“I was. There was nothing. And what kind of a quake only breaks mugs and knocks over a couple of bookcases?”

Now that I thought of it, it was odd that there hadn’t been any other disruption in my own store. If those bookcases had come down, why hadn’t the front window display? I’d noticed a few books had fallen off my desk, but that was about it.

“It’s so weird,” I repeated.

Joe shook his head. “Nothing weird about it. Just some punks out having their idea of fun.”

By the time I got back to my own store, I didn’t know what to think.

Snippet and I stopped in at a few other places along the strip and while everyone had damage to report, none of it was what could be put down to a quake. In the bakery, all the pies had been thrown against the front windows. In the hardware store, each and every electrical bulb was smashed—though they looked as though they’d simply exploded. All the rolls of paper towels and toilet paper from the grocery store had been tossed up into the trees behind their shipping and receiving bays, turning the bare-branched oaks and elms into bizarre mummy-like versions of themselves. And on it went.

The police arrived not long after I returned to the store. I felt like such a fool when one of the detectives came by to interview me. Yes, I’d heard the crash and come down to investigate. No, I hadn’t seen anything.

I couldn’t bring myself to mention the dancing lights.

No, I hadn’t thought to phone it in.

“I thought I was dreaming,” I told him. “I was half-asleep when I came downstairs and didn’t think it had really happened. It wasn’t until I came back down in the morning…”

The detective was of the opinion that it had been gang-related, kids out on the prowl, egging each other on until it had gotten out of control.

I thought about it when he left and knew he had to be right. The damage we’d sustained was all on the level of pranks—mean-spirited, to be sure, but pranks nonetheless. I didn’t like the idea of our little area being the sudden target of vandals, but there really wasn’t any other logical explanation. At least none occurred to me until I stepped back into the store and glanced at my computer. That’s when I remembered Meran Kelledy, how she’d gotten me to turn my sweater inside out and the odd things she’d been saying about pixies on the web.

If you’re lucky, they’re still on the Internet and didn’t follow you home.

Of course that wasn’t even remotely logical. But it made me think. After all, if the Wordwood database could take on a life of its own, who was to say that pixies on the Internet was any more improbable? As my friend Richard likes to point out, everyone has odd problems with their computers that could as easily be attributed to mischievous spirits as to software glitches. At least they could be if your mind was inclined to think along those lines, and mine certainly was. I stood for a long moment, staring at the screen of my computer. I don’t know exactly at what point I realized that the machine was on. I’d turned it off last night before Snippet and I went up to the apartment. And I hadn’t stopped to turn it on this morning before we’d gone out. So either I was getting monumentally forgetful, or I’d turned it on while sleepwalking last night, or…

I glanced over at Snippet who was once again sniffing everything as though she’d never been in the store before. Or as if someone or something interesting and strange
had
.

“This is silly,” I said.

But I dug out Meran’s card and called the number on it all the same, staring at the computer screen as I did. I just hoped nobody had been tinkering with my files.

* * *

Bookstore hobs are a relatively recent phenomenon, dating back only a couple of hundred years. Dick knew hobs back home in the old country who’d lived in the same household for three times that length of time. He’d been a farm hob himself, once, living on a Devon steading for two-hundred-and-twelve-years until a new family moved in and began to take his services for granted. When one year they actually dared to complain about how poorly the harvest had been put away, he’d thrown every bit of it down into a nearby ravine and set off to find new habitation.

A cousin who lived in a shop had suggested to Dick that he try the same, but there were fewer commercial establishments in those days and they all had their own hob by the time he went looking, first up into Somerset, then back down through Devon, finally moving west to Cornwall. In the end, he made his home in a small cubbyhole of a bookstore he found in Penzance. He lived there for years until the place went out of business, the owner setting sail for North America with plans to open another shop in the new land once he arrived.

Dick had followed, taking up residence in the new store when it was established. That was where he’d taught himself to read.

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 bookstore 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 bookstores, 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 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 mid morning 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? However 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.”