Tim Pratt - Sympathy for the Devil

Round about hunting season Staley closed up the trailer and headed south herself. She only summered in the deep woods. The other half of the year she was a travelling musician, a city girl, making do with what work her music could bring her, sometimes a desert girl, if she travelled far enough south.

But tonight the city and travelling were far from her mind. She drank in the tall night sky and meandered her way through the fields, fiddling herself home with a music she only played here, when she was on her own. Grandma called it a calling-on music, said it was the fiddle sending spirit tunes back into the otherworld from which it had first come. Staley didn’t know about spirit music and otherworlds; she just fancied a good tune played from the heart, and if the fiddle called up anything here, it was that. Heart music.

When she got in under the trees, the music changed some, took on an older, more resonant sound, long low notes that spoke of hemlock roots growing deep in the earth, or needled boughs cathedralling between the earth and the stars. It changed again when she got near the bottle tree, harmonizing with the soft clink of the glass bottles hanging from its branches by leather thongs. Grandma taught her about the bottle tree.

“I don’t rightly know that it keeps unwelcome spirits at bay,” she said, “but it surely does discourage uninvited visitors.”

Up in these hills everybody knew that only witches kept a bottle tree.

A little further on Staley finally reached the meadow that held her trailer. The trailer itself was half-hidden in a tangle of vines, bookended on either side by a pair of rain barrels that caught spill off from the eaves. The grass and weeds were kept trimmed here, not quite short enough to be a lawn, but not wild like the fields along the county road.

Stepping out from under the relative darkness cast by the trees, the starlight seemed bright in contrast. Staley curtsied to the scarecrow keeping watch over her little vegetable patch, a tall, raggedy shape that sometimes seemed to dance to her music when the wind was right. She’d had it four years now, made it herself from apple boughs and old clothes. The second summer she’d noticed buds on what were supposed to be dead limbs. This spring, the boughs had actually blossomed and now bore small, tart fruit.

She stood in front of it for a long moment, tying off her tune with a complicated knot of sliding notes, and that was when she sensed the boy.

He’d made himself a nest in the underbrush that crowded close up against the north side of her clearing-a goosey, nervous presence where none should be. Staley walked over to her trailer to lay fiddle and bow on the steps, then carefully approached the boy’s hiding place. She hummed under her breath, a soothing old modal tune that had first been born somewhere deeper in the hills than this clearing. When she got to the very edge of her meadow, she eased down until she was kneeling in the grass, then peered under the bush.

“Hey, there,” she said. “Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

Only it wasn’t a boy crouching there under the bushes.

She blinked at the gangly hare her gaze found. It was undernourished, one ear chewed up from a losing encounter with some predator, limbs trembling, big brown eyes wide with fear.

“Well, now,” Staley said, sitting back on her haunches.

She studied the animal for a long moment before reaching carefully under the branches of the bush. The rabbit was too scared or worn out-probably both-to do much more than shake in her arms when she picked it up. Standing, she cradled the little animal against her breast.

Now what should she do with it?

It was round about then she realized that she and the rabbit weren’t alone, here in the clearing. Calling-on music, she thought and looked around. Called up the rabbit, and then something else, though what, she couldn’t say. All she got was the sense that it was something old. And dangerous. And it was hungry for the trembling bundle of fur and bone she held cradled in her arms.

It wasn’t quite all the way here yet, hadn’t quite managed to cross over the way its prey had. But it was worrying at the fabric of distance that kept it at bay.

Staley had played her fiddle tunes a thousand times, here in her meadow. What made tonight different from any other?

“You be careful with this music,” Grandma had told her more than once. “What that fiddle can wake in your chest and set you to playing has lived over there behind the hills and trees forever. Some of it’s safe and pretty. Some of it’s old and connects a straight line between you and a million years ago. And some of it’s just plain dangerous.”

“How do you know the difference?” she’d asked.

Grandma could only shake her head. “You don’t till you call it up. That’s why you need be careful, girl.”

Staley Cross is about the last person I expect to find knocking on my apartment door at six a.m. I haven’t seen her since Malicorne and Jake went away-and that’s maybe three, four years ago now-but she looks about the same. Straw-coloured hair cut short like a boy’s, the heart-shaped face and those big green eyes. Still fancies those denim overalls, though the ones she’s wearing over a white T-shirt tonight are a better fit than those she had on the last time I saw her. Her slight frame used to swim in that pair.

I see she’s still got that old Army surplus knapsack hanging on her back, and her fiddlecase is standing on the floor by her feet. What’s new is the raggedy-ass rabbit she’s carrying around in a cloth shopping bag, but I don’t see that straightaway.

“Hey, William,” she says when I open the door on her, my eyes still thick with sleep. “Remember me?”

I have to smile at that. She’s not easy to forget, not her nor that blue fiddle of hers.

“Let’s see,” I say. “Are you the one who went skinny-dipping in the mayor’s pool the night he won the election, or the one who could call up blackbirds with her fiddle?”

I guess it was Malicorne who told me about that, how where ravens or crows gather, a door to the otherworld stands ajar. Told me how Staley’s blue spirit fiddle can play a calling-on music. It can call up the blackbirds and open that door, and it can call us to cross over into the otherworld. Or call something back to us from over there.

“Looks like it’s not just blackbirds anymore,” she tells me.

That’s when she opens the top of her shopping bag and shows me the rabbit she’s got hidden away inside. It looks up at me with its mournful brown eyes, one ear all chewed up, ribs showing.

“Sorry-looking thing,” I say.

Staley nods.

“Where’d you find it?”

“Up yonder,” she says. “In the hills. I kind of called him to me, though I wasn’t trying to or anything.” She gives me a little smile. “’Course I don’t try to call up the crows either, and they still come with no nevermind.”

I nod like I understand what’s going on here.

“Anyway,” she goes on. “The thing is, there’s a boy trapped in there, under that fur and-”

“A boy?” I have to ask.

“Well, I’m thinking he’s young. All I know for sure is he’s scared and wore out and he’s male.”

“When you say boy…?”

“I mean a human boy who’s wearing the shape of a hare. Like a skinwalker.” She pauses, looks over her shoulder. “Did I mention that there’s something after him?”

There’s something in the studied casualness of how she puts it that sends a quick chill scooting up my spine. I don’t see anything out of the ordinary on the street behind her. Crowsea tenements. Parked cars. Dawn pinking the horizon. But something doesn’t set right all the same.

“Maybe you better come inside,” I say.