A Little Strangeness

By Marcelle Dube

Fourteen stories from the wild imagination of Marcelle Dubé.

 

Here you will find a woman whose talent is the ability to find her way whenever—or wherever—she gets lost; a veteran who returns from the war with strange new powers; a midwife who receives help from an unexpected source; a lonely woman who finds her purpose in an old photograph; Fey ironworkers who build a bridge to freedom; a young woman who inherits a fierce and dangerous guardian; an amulet designer dealing with evil in an alternate Belgium; a grieving woman whose airship crashes in the Yukon; a creature who lives in the Arctic Ocean; a woman confronted with a maiden, a mother and a crone; two Yukon women who battle a otherworldly creature; a daughter who bargains with the Fey for her father's life; a chef and his partner who must deal with unexpected guests; and a trio of sisters whose terrifying past suddenly returns for them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Falcon Ridge Publishing
• Release date: Apr 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781987937350

Marcelle Dube

Marcelle Dubé writes mystery, science fiction, fantasy, contemporary and—occasionally—romance fiction. She grew up near Montreal and after trying out a number of different provinces (not to mention Belgium) she settled in the Yukon, where people outnumber carnivores, but not by much. Her short stories have appeared in magazines and award-winning anthologies. Her novels include the Mendenhall Mystery series (a number of her short stories are also set in the world of Mendenhall Chief of Police Kate Williams) and The A'lle Chronicles, as well as standalone fantasy and mystery titles. Her work is available in print and in electronic format. To find out more about Marcelle, visit her at www.marcellemdube.com.  

Book preview

A LITTLE STRANGENESS

14 tales of fey ironworkers, ancient

goddesses and other magical creatures

WAYFINDER

Abby chose the Takhini River because she couldn’t get lost on it. At least, she didn’t think she could.

It was wide and meandering, with no rapids to worry about on this stretch. This close to Whitehorse, there were quite a few houses and cabins peeking out between the black spruce and the aspen, but it was Tuesday, and early June. Kids were still in school and there wouldn’t be many people on the river.

It was a perfect day. Warm enough to bring out the sweet smell of the willows growing at the river’s edge, with just enough breeze and clouds to keep the leaves fluttering and her from getting too hot. The sun felt wonderful on her bare legs and arms. The mountains—some still brilliantly snow-capped—formed a majestic backdrop to her thoughts.

Her depressing thoughts.

There really wasn’t much to think about. She had tried for a year to make it and had run out of money. It was time to grow up.

She always thought of herself as a pale imitation of Mom. Where Mom’s skin was café au lait, Abby’s was pale and freckled. Where Mom had long, lustrous, curly brown hair, Abby’s was short, frizzy and mousy. Where Mom was five-foot-ten and fashionably thin, Abby was barely five-foot-three and muscled from tromping through the bush as an exploration geologist.

Even their talents were different yet similar. Mom could find anything. Lost your state secrets? Mom would find them. Lost a submarine? Mom was your gal.

Abby’s talent, on the other hand, was much more specific. Where Mom could find anything that was lost, Abby could get lost getting out of bed. But she could always get unlost.

Which wasn’t something other people needed, apparently.

Anyone could get unlost. All it took was a good map or a smart phone.

And Mom was judicious in her choice of clients. Only high-end, high-paying clients. Which was why she could afford a condo in Vancouver’s Shaughnessy district, while Abby was wondering how she would make next month’s rent on her Whitehorse apartment.

She hadn’t had a client since... well, ever.

She sighed and let her paddles trail in the water. Twenty-four years old, and all she had to show for it was a battered pick-up. Even the green, sixteen-foot Old Town canoe she’d had to borrow from a friend.

A bend was coming up. She flicked the paddle to guide the canoe into it just as she became aware of the sound of voices floating on the air.

No, not floating. Sharp calls. Alarmed calls. As she rounded the bend, she saw an old-fashioned cedar-strip canoe pulled up on a narrow beach. A striped red and gray blanket lay on the beach with a small blue cooler anchoring it against the wind. She couldn’t see anyone, but somewhere nearby, a man and a woman were calling out Charlie! at staggered intervals, pausing to listen, then calling out again.

Abby’s heart began to beat faster as she realized that someone was lost. Without thinking, she turned her canoe into the bank and pulled off her slip-on canvas shoes. She carefully slipped out of the canoe into the achingly cold water of the Takhini—soaking the hem of her mid-thigh shorts—grabbed the tow rope at the stern and pulled the canoe up the gravelly beach.

There was no humming or buzzing of insects. No birds called to each other. It was as if everything had paused to listen to the frantic calls.

She leaned over the stern to retrieve her shoes and when she straightened, an old First Nation woman stood beside her on the beach.

Abby swallowed the startled curse that wanted to escape. She hadn’t heard the old woman come up behind her. She must have been in the trees.

The woman was stooped with age, but at one time she would have been tall, taller than Abby. Her broad, brown face was seamed with time and laughter. And pain. She wore canvas pants, a long-sleeved flowered shirt and a bright red sweater over top, despite the warmth of the day, and like many First Nation elders, she wore a bright, flowery kerchief over her gray hair. It didn’t match the shirt.

Aunty, said Abby respectfully. You’ve lost someone? She could still hear the voices calling for Charlie from the woods, but they were growing fainter as the man and woman got farther away.

The elder’s lips were pressed tightly together and worry deepened the creases between her eyes.

You’re late, she said querulously. Hurry, now. Find the boy.

Abby blinked. Did she know the elder? She studied the old woman’s face more carefully. No. She would have remembered this woman.

Did he wander off? Abby asked politely.

The elder shook her head. Raven took him. If you don’t hurry, we will lose the boy. She reached out a veined, scarred hand, crooked with age and work. He is the hope of mankind, she said. Yours is the power to save him.

The hope of mankind? Seriously?

Aunty, said Abby helplessly. I will look for him, of course I will. But this is not my power.

If someone got lost, they called on someone like Mom, not someone like her.

Go, ordered the elder. And if you see Raven, don’t trust him.

Raven? Abby controlled a smile. It wasn’t the time or place, and she didn’t want to offend the elder.

How long ago did the boy go missing?

Half an hour, said the elder. Suddenly her brown eyes filled with tears. He is five.

Five. All thoughts of smiling disappeared. Five years old, alone, lost in the bush...

All right, Aunty, said Abby soberly. She squeezed the elder’s hand. I’ll help look for him.

The elder nodded, as if she had expected nothing less.

Which direction did his parents go? asked Abby. She would strike out in a different direction, cover more ground.

The old woman shrugged. It does not matter. Go.

Abby stared into the fierce brown eyes for a moment longer, and this time she did sigh. She would try to help, but she didn’t hold out much hope. The likelihood of her getting lost was much greater than that of finding the boy.

But still, she had to try.

Do you have a cell phone? she asked. There would probably be reception—they weren’t that far from town. Did you call for help?

The elder shook her head. It won’t get here in time. Go. She shooed Abby off toward the trees.

Abby resisted long enough to slip the canvas shoes onto her feet. She was definitely not dressed for this. She was in a tee-shirt, her shorts didn’t cover her legs and her shoes offered no support at all for walking in the bush. She was going to get eaten alive, twist her ankle and have to be rescued. Some hero.

At least she would find her way back. She always did.

Leaving the old woman behind, she struck off into the bush. The deeper she walked into the forest, the darker it became. There was no path and she had to bushwhack her way through the willow bushes and young alders.

She called, Charlie! a couple of times, then listened, but all she heard was the rustling of the trembling aspen leaves and the sighing of the wind through the spruce needles. Everything smelled fresh and rotten at the same time—sap and wild roses and clean willow scent competing with the cloying smell of rotting leaves.

What had the kid been thinking, wandering off like that? What had his parents been thinking, not keeping an eye on him?

Willow bushes slapped and scratched at her legs and she stepped on a sharp rock that bruised her heel through the thin sole of her canvas shoe.

Crap, she said.

Such language, said a mocking voice, and she whirled on her bad heel and promptly fell, bruising yet another part of her anatomy.

A stranger stood before her, limned by the light from the river. Tall. Black hair flowing over his shoulders. Black shirt, black jeans. Broad shoulders, slim build. He leaned over and offered her his hand and as he did, she made out his features: brilliant black eyes, high cheekbones, lean face.

She stared at the hand for a moment, until he grinned at her.

I don’t bite, he said. His eyes laughed at her.

Stung, she accepted his hand. The moment she touched him, she realized who he was.

Raven, she said, her heart suddenly beating faster. The elder had warned her.

I’m honoured, said Raven, pulling her up. You are the finder.

Abby brushed the dirt and leaves from her shorts. Hardly.

He cocked his head to look at her from a different angle.

And yet, here you are.

Did you take the boy? she asked him outright.

He shrugged and a strange smell wafted from him. It reminded her of old rocks and deep waters.

I accepted the commission, he said carelessly.

She blinked up at him. A commission? Someone paid you to lose the boy?

He just looked at her, a small smile on his lips and again, she remembered the old woman’s warning. Don’t trust him.

She looked around, suddenly unsure of herself. The trees surrounding her were no longer the familiar southern Yukon trees. These were dark and tall—firs, cedars, hemlock—and the forest floor was no longer choked with willow bushes and alders. Instead, ferns and mosses grew everywhere. There was no sun to be seen through the thick trees.

Where—? But when she turned, Raven was gone.

Was this what he had done to the boy? Sent him so far away no one would ever find him again? She had heard of Raven, knew he was unpredictable, and maybe capricious, but she had never heard of him being mean-spirited. Or a murderer.

Because a five-year-old boy would not survive alone in the forest. Too much conspired against it.

She took a deep breath of moisture-laden air and was rewarded with the smell of damp cedar.

Charlie? she called tentatively.

Hello? a small voice replied.

She turned toward the voice. Keep talking, she called out. She began walking in the direction of the voice. There were so many trees that a bear could have been hiding behind one and she wouldn’t have seen it.

I want to go home, said the voice, and there was a quaver in it.

I know, she said. What’s your full name?

Charlie Morris. She followed the voice until she saw him, sitting on a fallen fir tree, hands clasped in his lap, brown eyes watchful and suspiciously bright.

Hello, Charlie Morris, she said with a smile. People are looking for you.

He nodded solemnly. There was a bird. He wanted me to follow him. His black hair gleamed in the diffused light of the coastal forest. Tears had left tracks on his dirty cheeks. He watched her approach, his face impassive.

Was it a raven? she asked.

He nodded again but didn’t say anything.

Abby sat down next to him and placed her hands on her thighs, trying to calm her racing heart. She wanted to grab the boy by the hand and run, but that wasn’t the way her talent worked. She had to wait, like a well filling up, before she was ready. As if her talent had to realize she was lost, before it could figure out how to get her unlost.

My name is Abby. She looked at him, tried to see if he was hurt under the grey tee-shirt and blue jeans he was wearing. He had the same nut-brown skin as the elder she had met on the beach. Wherever it was.

Your granny is worried about you, she said. She sent me to find you.

He looked at her strangely. My grannies are dead.

Abby looked away and stared at the trees for a while. Who had that old woman been, then? A ghost?

She shook her head slightly. There was no such thing as ghosts.

Shaman? Abby glanced at Charlie again. A shaman had come to her and urged her to find this boy. Told her he was the hope of mankind.

And so she had come, and gotten lost with the help of Raven, only to find the boy. Raven had accepted a commission to lose the boy, but he hadn’t promised to keep him lost.

Whoever had commissioned Raven might try again. Might try something more permanent next time.

Charlie’s hand reached out for hers and she wrapped hers protectively around his. He looked up at her, dark eyes much too old for his age.

You’ve come to save me, haven’t you?

She squeezed his hand and stood up, drawing him with her.

Yes, I have, she said.

Maybe her talent was good for something, after all.

She led Charlie away from the fallen tree, down a path that hadn’t been there a moment ago, and onto the tiny beach on the Takhini River.

Bloodhound

The smell insinuated itself into Luke Corrigan’s dreams; he turned away from the open window of his bedroom, trying to escape the acrid stink.

Finally he woke up and swung his feet out of bed and sat on the edge, naked and sweating, his heart beating fast. In the war, he’d wake up just like this, convinced that something was in the trench with him. Only once had it been a German. Usually it was just rats.

He reached for the filter on his bedside table, then paused. He needed to figure out what the smell was before putting on the filter.

It was still dark, and the only sound was the loud ticking of the alarm clock by his bedside. Moonlight streamed through the window of the barn loft that was his bedroom, gilding the barrel stove against one wall, washing the rough pine planks of the floor in pale light, and bouncing off the old, warped mirror above the chest of drawers, where he kept the flowered porcelain pitcher and bowl for shaving.

The smell teased him, first appearing, then disappearing, leaving only the ancient smells of hay, manure, and horses filtering up through the floorboards of the loft, along with the more recent smells of gasoline and grease from the little repair shop he had set up in the far corner of the barn.

He wrinkled his nose and took a deep breath. Some smells grew bright and sharp when he did that. Not this time. Whatever it was, it wasn’t near. Still, something about it was familiar enough to raise his hackles.

He pushed the tangled sheet away and stood up to pad over to the window. The hot Manitoba night filled his room. Filled the valley with dust and parched crops and small dead things lying by dried-up waterholes. Even the crickets didn’t have the heart to chirp. His back was damp from the sheets, and he could smell the sweat on his scalp.

Harriet MacNeil’s farm stood middle-of-the-night quiet, with a half-moon and a wash of diamond stars beaming down on the seared fields beyond her farmhouse. Nothing moved.

Breathing shallowly, he turned his head one way, then the other, trying to make sense of what he was smelling. Dry earth thirsty for rain. Boulders gradually releasing their warmed stone smell. The faint whiff of a coyote that had passed by a few hours ago.

Other smells were so prevalent that he only noticed them by their absence: Rex, the MacNeils’s dog, whose smell was as much a part of the scent landscape as the smell of the maple trees in the farmyard; the faint, gagging smell of Jamison’s pig farm three miles upwind; the ever-present perfume of a wild grass that he had yet to identify but had come to call sweet hay, which was what Allie, Missus MacNeil’s granddaughter, called it. He had moved into the loft above the empty barn in February, where he near froze to death before he figured out the wood stove, and even then the smell of sweet hay had lingered.

And now, underneath them all, the ghost stink of death riding the wind.

He stuck his head out the window and looked in the direction of the pig farm. There, on the horizon, was a long, glowing snake that seemed to leap toward him even as he watched.

HARRIET MACNEIL WOKE from a deep sleep to the sound of her name. Allie? Then the voice penetrated her sleep-befuddled awareness. Luke. Her strange tenant.

She sat up suddenly, clutching the threadbare cotton sheet to her chest, and the old iron bed that had belonged to her parents squeaked beneath her bulk. What was Luke Corrigan doing in her bedroom?

He was a dark figure standing by her bedside. Rex stood next to him, whining a little.

What is it? she asked, automatically looking to the window, but there was no glow of fire, her ever-present fear, especially now, in this drought. The farmhouse had been built in 1912, after the original one burned down, but the barn was even older.

Fire, said Luke. You have to take your granddaughter and get away from the farm.

What? She pushed the sheet off and climbed out of bed, despite the fact that she wore only her cotton nightgown. At sixty-three, after bearing six children and losing two husbands, one to a horse’s hooves and one to influenza, not to mention struggling to keep herself and Allie afloat, she had outgrown any idea of modesty. Luke stepped back, giving her room to go to the window. Rex followed her, and leaned against her when she stopped. The Lab was getting on in years, too.

Even the linoleum beneath her feet felt hot and sticky. After a moment, she turned back to her tenant.

Have you been drinking? She wouldn’t have thought it of him, but a lot of the men who came back from the front had taken to drink. Not that she blamed them. Buchenwald and Dachau ... who could live with the things these young men had seen?

Luke Corrigan had been lucky, in a way. A piece of shrapnel had injured him, sending him home months before the war’s end, and leaving him with an ugly pink scar peeking through his short brown hair, just above his left temple. But at least he had his life, and all his limbs.

No, ma’am, said Luke calmly. I saw it from the window in the loft. You need to take Allie and Rex, and head for Souris. You need to get across the river.

I’m not leaving, said Harriet, running her hands through her white hair. She automatically began twisting it into the thick braid she customarily wore.

Ma’am, said Luke, and she could hear the frustration in his voice, it’s bad. Jamison’s pig farm was taken by the fire. You need to get the little girl and warn everyone on your way into Souris.

She finally got tired of squinting in the darkness and turned on her bedside lamp. For a fleeting moment, she wondered what her neighbours would say if they could see her in her nightgown, in her bedroom, alone with a man. A young, good-looking one, at that.

Her lips twitched. The women would be jealous, she figured.

Then she got her first good look at her young tenant and the twitching stopped. There was a grim look on his face. He was completely serious.

"Luke, how do you know?"

His nostrils flared and his nose wrinkled, like Rex’s when he was sniffing something particularly odious.

Ma’am... he hesitated, then took a step toward her. It was a measure of her trust in the young man that she allowed him to take her by the elbow and lead her firmly out of her bedroom, past Allie’s room, and down the hall to the far bedroom, the one where the window faced south. The moment he opened the door, she saw the glow past the corner of the barn and her breath caught in her throat.

Despite her instincts urging her to go, go now, she stumbled to the window and looked. Fire burned from one end of the horizon to the other. She didn’t see how Jamison’s farm could have survived.

Oh, damnation, she said, then whirled and ran out. Rex barked sharply and ran after her.

HE’D LOST HIS SENSE of smell in Antwerp, when a piece of exploding shell glanced his skull and laid him out for three weeks. It took him a while to figure out what was wrong, and even longer to get over the grief of it. Every time one of his buddies exclaimed over how good a woman smelled, or someone covered their nose against a foul odour, fresh loss slammed into him.

He tried to hide it from the docs, but they found out and told the army. He was sent back to Toronto on a disability pension and had to watch the end of the war from the newspaper headlines.

A few months later he caught the fever that was going around. He was so sick with it that he was hospitalized for a few days. When he finally regained consciousness, he realized that he had also regained his sense of smell.

After the initial rush of joy, he began to realize that he could smell things now that he’d never smelled before. He left the hospital as soon as he could, because he couldn’t bear the stink of death that hung over it.

He couldn’t stay in the city. The smells ... There were so many of them. Layers of them, some good but most overpoweringly bad. Garbage day was almost his undoing.

Then he heard about some research on smell taking place in Winnipeg. He packed his tattered army rucksack and hopped a freight train, sharing an empty car with three other returned soldiers, one missing an eye and a hand.

The Winnipeg doc seemed to think it was wonderful until Luke explained the reality of the situation. That was when the doc came up with the nose filter. Luke didn’t know what it was made of, but it sat in a soft rubber cup that fit over his nose and strapped to the back of his head. It looked like a pared down gas mask and made him look like he had a muzzle, but it allowed air to flow through while filtering out most of the smells.

It helped. That, and moving into the countryside.

He picked a home where he would live away from regular folk, especially womenfolk. Especially young womenfolk. He could tell when it was their time of the month and when they were fertile. It was unnerving.

Missus MacNeil was well past those years and little Allie wasn’t yet there. It made for a more comfortable living arrangement. He paid Missus MacNeil a small rent for the loft above the barn, and she fed him. In return, he kept her old Chevy JC Master pickup running and did a few odd jobs around the place. She no longer farmed but leased the fields out to neighbouring farmers.

Now, as he drove his Harley-Davidson scouting bike down the bumpy dirt road, heading for the Jensen place, Harriet’s nearest neighbours, he wondered if it wasn’t time to move on again. Missus MacNeil had looked at him strangely when she realized he was right about the fire. A few times lately she had