The Very Best of Charles De Lint Read online

  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

  Introduction

  In Which We Meet Jilly Coppercorn

  Coyote Stories

  Laughter in the Leaves

  The Badger in the Bag

  And the Rafters Were Ringing

  Merlin Dreams in the Mondream Wood

  The Stone Drum

  Timeskip

  Freewheeling

  A Wish Named Arnold

  Into the Green

  The Graceless Child

  Winter Was Hard

  The Conjure Man

  We Are Dead Together

  Mr. Truepenny’s Book Emporium and Gallery

  In the House of My Enemy

  The Moon Is Drowning While I Sleep

  Crow Girls

  Birds

  Held Safe by Moonlight and Vines

  In the Pines

  Pixel Pixies

  Many Worlds Are Born Tonight

  Sisters

  Pal o’ Mine

  That Was Radio Clash

  Old Man Crow

  The Fields Beyond the Fields

  Copyrights & Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Memory & Dream excerpt

  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.

  * * *

  But a lack of money isn’t really an omen for Albert either; it’s a way of life. Albert, he’s like the rest of us skins. Left the reserve, and we don’t know why. Come to the city, and we don’t know why. Still alive, and we don’t know why. But Albert, he remembers it being different. He used to listen to his grandmother’s stories, soaked them up like the dirt will rain, thirsty after a long drought. And he tells stories himself, too, or pieces of stories, talk to you all night long if you want to listen to him.

  It’s always Coyote in Albert’s stories, doesn’t matter if he’s making them up or just passing along gossip. Sometimes Coyote’s himself, sometimes he’s Albert, sometimes he’s somebody else. Like it wasn’t Coyote sold his Rolex and ran into him outside Joey’s Bar that day, it was Billy Yazhie. Maybe ten years ago now, Billy he’s standing under a turquoise sky beside Spider Rock one day, looking up, looking up for a long time, before he turns away and walks to the nearest highway, sticks out his thumb and he doesn’t look back till it’s too late. Wakes up one morning and everything he knew is gone and he can’t find his way back.

  Oh that Billy he’s a dark skin, he’s like leather. You shake his hand and it’s like you took hold of a cowboy boot. He knows some of the old songs and he’s got himself a good voice, strong, ask anyone. He used to drum for the dancers back home, but his hands shake too much now, he says. He doesn’t sing much anymore, either. He’s got to be like the rest of us, hanging out in Fitzhenry Park, walking the streets, sleeping in an alleyway because the Men’s Mission it’s out of beds. We’ve got the stoic faces down real good, but you look in our eyes, maybe catch us off guard, you’ll see we don’t forget anything. It’s just most times we don’t want to remember.

  * * *

  This Coyote he’s not too smart sometimes. One day he gets into a fight with a biker, says he going to count coup like his Plains brothers, knock that biker all over the street, only the biker’s got himself a big hickory-handled hunting knife and he cuts Coyote’s head right off. Puts a quick end to that fight, I’ll tell you. Coyote he spends the rest of the afternoon running around, trying to find somebody to sew his head back on again.

  “That Coyote,” Jimmy Coldwater says, “he’s always losing his head over one.thing or another.”

  I tell you we laughed.

  * * *

  But Albert he takes that omen seriously. You see him drinking still, but he’s drinking coffee now, black as a raven’s wing, or some kind of tea he brews for himself in a tin can, makes it from weeds he picks in the empty lots and dries in the sun. He’s living in an abandoned factory these days, and he’s got this one wall, he’s gluing feathers and bones to it, nothing fancy, no eagles’ wings, no bear’s jaw, wolf skull, just what he can find lying around, pigeon feathers and crows’, rat bones, bird bones, a necklace of mouse skulls strung on a wire. Twigs and bundles of weeds, rattles he makes from tin cans and bottles and jars. He paints figures on the wall, in between all the junk. Thunderbird. Bear. Turtle. Raven.

  Everybody’s starting to agree, that Albert he’s one crazy skin.

  Now when he’s got money, he buys food with it and shares it out. Sometimes he walks over to Palm Street where the skin girls are working the trade and he gives them money, asks them to take a night off. Sometimes they take the money and just laugh, getting into the next car that pulls up. But sometimes they take the money and they sit in a coffee shop, sit there by the window, drinking their coffee and look out at where they don’t have to be for one night.

  And he never stops telling stories.

  “That’s what we are,” he tells me one time. Albert he’s smiling, his lips are smiling, his eyes are smiling, but I know he’s not joking when he tells me that. “Just stories. You and me, everybody, we’re a set of stories, and what those stories are is what makes us what we are. Same thing for whites as skins. Same thing for a tribe and a city and a nation and the world. It’s all these stories and how they braid together that tells us who and what and where we are.

  “We got to stop forgetting and get back to remembering. We got to stop asking for things, stop waiting for people to give us the things we think we need. All we really need is the stories. We have the stories and they’ll give us the one thing nobody else can, the thing we can only take for ourselves, because there’s nobody can give you back your pride. You’ve got to take it back yourself.

  “You lose your pride and you lose everything. We don’t want to know the stories, because we don’t want to remember. But we’ve got to take the good with the bad and make ourselves whole again, be proud again. A proud people can never be defeated. They lose battles, but they’ll never lose the war, beca
use for them to lose the war you’ve got to go out and kill each and every one of them, everybody with even a drop of the blood. And even then, the stories will go on. There just won’t be any skins left to hear them.”

  * * *

  This Coyote he’s always getting in trouble. One day he’s sitting at a park bench, reading a newspaper, and this cop starts to talk big to one of the skin girls, starts talking mean, starts pushing her around. Coyote’s feeling chivalrous that day, like he’s in a white man’s movie, and he gets into a fight with the cop. He gets beat up bad and then more cops come and they take him away, put him in jail.

  The judge he turns Coyote into a mouse for a year so that there’s Coyote, got that same lopsided grin, got that sharp muzzle and those long ears and the big bushy tail, but he’s so small now you can hold him in the palm of your hand.

  “Doesn’t matter how small you make me,” Coyote he says to the judge. “I’m still Coyote.”

  * * *

  Albert he’s so serious now. He gets out of jail and he goes back to living in the factory. Kids’ve torn down that wall of his, so he gets back to fixing it right, gets back to sharing food and brewing tea and helping the skin girls out when he can, gets back to telling stories. Some people they start thinking of him as a shaman and call him by an old Kickaha name.

  Dan Whiteduck he translates the name for Billy Yazhie, but Billy he’s not quite sure what he’s heard. Know-more-truth, or No-more-truth? “You spell that with a ‘k’ or what?” Billy he asks Albert.

  “You take your pick how you want to spell it,” Albert he says.

  Billy he learns how to pronounce that old name and that’s what he uses when he’s talking about Albert. Lots of people do. But most of us we just keep on calling him Albert.

  * * *