Sympathy for the Devil - By Tim Pratt Page 0,20

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.

I don’t have much, just a basement apartment in this Kelly Street tenement. I get it rent-free in exchange for my custodian duties on it and a couple of other buildings the landlord owns in the area. Seems I don’t ever have any folding money, but I manage to get by with odd jobs and tips from the tenants when I do a little work for them. It’s not much, but it’s a sight better than living on the street like I was doing when Staley and I first met.

I send her on ahead of me, down the stairs and through the door into my place, and lock the door behind us. I use the term “lock” loosely. Mostly it’s the idea of a lock. I mean I’m pushing the tail-end of fifty and I could easily kick it open. But I still feel a sight better with the night shut out and that flimsy lock doing its best.

“You said there’s something after him?” I say once we’re inside.

Staley sits down in my sorry excuse of an armchair—picked it out of the trash before the truck came one morning. It’s amazing the things people will throw away, though I’ll be honest, this chair’s had its day. Still I figured maybe a used-up old man and a used-up old chair could find some use for each other and so far it’s been holding up its end of the bargain. I pull up a kitchen chair for myself. As for the rabbit, he sticks his head out of the cloth folds of the shopping bag and then sits there on the floor looking from me to Staley, like he’s following the conversation. Hell, the way Staley tells it, he probably can.

“Something,” Staley says.

“What kind of something?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t rightly know.”

Then she tells me about the roadhouse and her friend dropping her off near home. Tells me about her walk through the fields that night and finding the rabbit hiding in the underbrush near her trailer.

“See, this calling-on’s not something I do on purpose,” she explains when she’s taken the story so far. “But I got to thinking, if I opened some door to who knows where, well, maybe I can close