The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

CHAPTER XVII
A HOLE IN THE WORLD

In Which September Loses Her Temper, Nearly Boxes a Minotaur, Accomplishes Some Magic, and Sees Her Mother Through a Hole in a Very Strange Wall

Darkness.

The revolving door spun shut behind them and vanished. Satiny, perfect blackness greeted them, blacker than the Panther of Rough Storms in the midst of the most livid thundercloud, blacker than the ink-sodden page in Avogadra’s book. September’s eyes ached with trying to see through the crowblack air. Iago, being a cat, had a somewhat better time of it. He stepped forward carefully, his paws landing quietly as footsteps in snow.

Someone lit a candle.

The orange flame snapped into life, its sudden brightness causing both September and the Marquess to shield their eyes. One, two, three candles lit up, and then three more, the crown of a cast-iron candelabra. The firelight rippled over the round base of the candlestick, where an engraving read: Beware of Dog. Slowly, as the candles settled, the place they had found themselves in came into focus. First the candelabra, then the vast, ancient desk it rested upon, polished teak with an ink pot the size of a pumpkin in one corner, with a long peacock feather dipped into it. Then the walls, also scrubbed, gleaming wood, and hung with artifacts like the study of a big-game hunter. Six long, spangled spears hung in a neat row over a dormant, cold fireplace. Seven Greek bronze helmets stared out through empty eyeholes along with seven wide bronze necklaces that covered the chest like breastplates (September knew the helmets were Greek because in one of her books a fellow named Perseus had worn one). A portrait of a beautiful girl wearing a dress of every color and holding a spindle full of thread hung under an arch of three leather shields.

The hand that lit the candle belonged to a well-dressed and bespectacled Minotaur.

The Minotaur rested in a luxurious chocolate-colored chair, like those one might find in a lawyer’s or principal’s office. September had got quite used to thinking of Minotaurs as boys in her reading, for they always seemed to be-but this one was most certainly a lady. Enormous, curving dark horns crowned her head. She had a very wide nose with a light covering of nearly invisible fur, save that the candlelight made her scant pelt ripple with fire when she moved. She wore a thick brass ring in her nose, and her ears were furry and long like a cow’s, but beyond that her face was quite human, with big, liquid brown eyes behind her librarian’s glasses, and full, dark lips. Her hands folded gracefully in front of her. Under the desk, strong, hard hooves peeked out from under a plain brown schoolmarm skirt.

“This can’t be right,” said September, climbing down from Iago’s broad back. The Marquess’s shadow followed her, but hung back, close to the Panther’s glossy flank. “A Minotaur lives in the center of the labyrinth, and I haven’t set foot inside one! I think I would know a maze if I had already solved it!” She peered over the desk at the Minotaur, who might have been a statue, she sat so still.

Slowly, the Minotaur laid her head to one side. “What did you think you were doing, then, when you went up through one door and down through another, turning this way and that, through the pages of a book and a deep mine and an entire ocean and the hideout of a wise woman? My dear, labyrinths ensnare and entangle; they draw one inexorably inward-but it would not be much of a labyrinth if you waited in line with a ticket to get in and the door was clearly marked, like some country-harvest hay maze. All underworlds are labyrinths, in the end. Perhaps all the sunlit lands, too. A labyrinth, when it is big enough, is just the world.”

“Is Prince Myrrh here, then? Do you have his unopenable box in your collection?”

“No. I am here. I am the dark anchor at the bottom of the world. And I will decide whether to let you go further down.”

September knew she ought to be asking important, urgent things of the lady Minotaur. But a statement jumped the line and leapt out of her ahead of all those questions. “I thought only bulls had horns.”

The Minotaur’s thick eyebrow quirked. “And I thought all human girls wore dresses. Yet I am sure you have worn trousers in your life. Do you never prefer to wear boy’s clothes when they are more suitable, and more sensible?”

“I suppose so, when I have hard work to do.”

“Ah, my dear girl! I always have hard work to do.” She stood up. The Minotaur towered over all of them, her shoulders muscled, her legs powerful-that was easy enough to see, even with the plain skirt to cover them. She crossed to a home-hewn rocking chair near the hearth and settled herself into it, taking up a scrap of knitting from a basket, the ball of translucent yarn looking very much like the spindle in the painting above her. She gestured absentmindedly at the black logs with one knitting needle. They burst into eager flame. Her fingers wrapped the yarn deftly as she talked.

“Minotaurs are all descended from the same poor, sorry fellow. You have probably heard of him-Grandfather is quite famous. The Queen of a distant land fell in love with a bull. Nevermind how odd that sounds! The ancient world was an appalling place. Even if it were not, love may unclose itself between any number of seemingly upside-down and turned-around folk. Especially if one is a Fairy Bull who can talk and write poems and have tea and discourse on natural philosophy. In any event, a Queen and a bull are not mixable elements, and so she called on a Fairy Inventor to help her. I believe you met his great-granddaughter. In those days one could transit between worlds as easily as one takes a trolley now. The Inventor came on a pair of wax wings he had invented himself and made a heifer out of ivory and leather and mirrors for the Queen to live inside, so that the royal wedding could take place. When their first child came, he was, as might have been predicted, half bull and half human, huge and monstrous and frightening. His own mother hid behind the bureau when he cried for milk. So the Inventor built a labyrinth to hide the child, so that his mother would not have to look at him, yes, but also so that no one in the country would try to stab him or vanquish him in some way to prove their strength. Every once in a while, they would try to send that first Minotaur friends to play with, but a Minotaur’s play is rough, and some did not survive. Others must have. Eventually, the Fairy Bull died in battle with a certain Babylonian scoundrel and his hairy giant of a brother. The Queen found a nice young man who did not inquire into her previous marriage and had a perfectly lovely daughter with him-that’s her there, my Auntie.” The Minotaur gestured at the portrait above her head. “And all the while, down in the labyrinth, a whole village had grown up in the dark. Grandfather lived quite well with the youths and maidens who had gone down, not very eagerly, to make nice with the monster. They built houses together in the maze, traded grain and oil, had country dances and learned to make cheese and beer. The youths and maidens grew up and found it pleasant that no one bothered them about things like taxes and foreign wars. They stayed in the labyrinth-town to have children or open up a nice carpentry service. The Minotaur wasn’t so bad, once you got to know him, and if you were nimble enough to avoid the horns. And it must have been possible to love Grandfather if you were not his mother, for some brave girl made him her husband, and the rest of us owe our lives to that noble maid. We are all Tauruses, naturally. We are good, wholesome monsters. I am named Left, for generally speaking, if one keeps turning left, one finds one’s way out of a maze, no matter how tangled.”

“Miss Cabbage said I was born under the sign of the Bull,” ventured September, hoping to make a beginning of friendship.

“Well, perhaps you have a little Minotaur in you, child. Of course, the town didn’t end well. Some years later, a ruffian broke into the place and bashed Grandfather’s head in, just to impress his daddy with how big and strong he was. Still, we all remember, somewhere deep and untouchable, that town, those dark corridors. Something in our monstrous blood still seeks the underground, still wants to be wrapped up cozy in a maze, wants to draw youths and maidens to us and judge them, wants to guard, wants to hide. You cannot escape where you come from, September. Some part of it remains inside you always, like the slender white heart in the center of the thickest onion.”

“I’m a monster,” said the shadow of the Marquess suddenly. “Everyone says so.”

The Minotaur glanced up at her. “So are we all, dear,” said the Minotaur kindly. “The thing to decide is what kind of monster to be. The kind who builds towns or the kind who breaks them.”

Iago yawned, showing his generous shadowy pink tongue. “There’s something to be said for breaking things. They make a satisfying sound when they crunch.”

“I break everything,” whispered Maud. Her hair hung deep blue around her shadowy face.

“Hush,” purred Iago. “All that’s done now.”

“I need to get to the Prince,” said September, resting her hand on the great desk.

The Minotaur did not look up from her knitting. “I am aware.”

“Well…are you going to show me the way or not?” September asked.

The Minotaur laughed. “You’re terribly impatient! And a bit ill-tempered, I must say. Is there some reason you’re in such a damnable hurry?”

“The Alleyman takes more shadows every day, and the magic in Fairyland-Above is leaking out. Soon there will be nothing left.”

“Oh? Is that all? Well, perhaps they could do with a bit less magic up there. You saw what this one did with it.” The shadow of the Marquess narrowed her eyes in disdain, the old fire sparking in them. “Well, certainly, let’s get on with things!” The Minotaur put her knitting aside and stood up. She slipped her long fingers over the mantel of her fireplace, feeling for some hidden thing. “Of course,” she mused, “if that’s all the danger you’ve discovered on your journeys, perhaps you aren’t the right beast for this sort of thing at all. A more curious child would have arrived at the end with all the knowledge she needed.”

“I am curious!” said September indignantly. “If there’s some other awful thing afoot, you should just tell me, instead of teasing me. It’s not very nice.”

“We’ve already discussed the fact that I am a monster, and that I play rough. I’ll tell you what. Give me that fine gun of yours, and I’ll let you pass.”

September put her hand on the grip of the Rivet Gun. She’d only just gotten it, and she’d promised to take copious notes for Belinda Cabbage, which probably did not mean handing it over to the first person who asked and taking notes on what she got for it. But more than that, she wanted it with her. It had chosen her. She felt safer with it, even though she knew it was probably quite dangerous.

“No,” she said finally. “I can’t. What if I need it?”

“Good girl,” said the Minotaur. “A warrior never gives up her weapon.”

“I’m not a warrior.”

“No?”

Something boiled up in September’s heart, hot and furious. The moment she started to raise her voice, Maud put a charcoal hand on her shoulder. This only made the boiling thing spill over. “Stop it! I am tired and hurt and all my friends have abandoned me except the one girl I never wanted to see again. I don’t even know where I am, and I don’t know how to get out. Either help me or fight me or say I’m not what’s wanted and a disappointment to the Minotaur Nation, but speak plain and let me keep moving. I want to keep moving! Now.”

A wisp of green smoke puffed up from the pocket of the wine-colored coat, smelling sharply of sunny grasses and warm winds. “Oh, no!” September cried, fishing out the smoking, charred magic ration book. It had no more cards, and, in a moment, had crumbled entirely to green ash. “But I didn’t ask it to do any magic! I was saving it!”

But the Minotaur had already found the latch on her mantel and turned it. The fire in the hearth went out, and a pearly, waxen light appeared deep in the fireplace, which yawned up and in, becoming a long tunnel.

“You have your shadow with you,” said the Minotaur. “Right at your back, holding on tight. I admit, I feel a little silly-I had meant to hold out on you. But you do Want things so terribly hard. Magic gets what it wants. I’m only one monster.”

“She’s not my shadow!”

Maud took September’s slightly scorched hand. “We are alike, I said. I said that before. I did say it, I’m sure of it. I am her shadow, but I can stand behind you, too.” She paused for a moment, as if digging something up from the bottom of her heart. “It would break your heart, September, how alike we are.”

“You Wanted it-that was like kindling. That shadow was a spark, and the ration card caught flame. Now, if you’re going to snap at me, you might follow me when I am so good as to hold the door open for you.” The Minotaur wrinkled her velvety nose.

September yanked her hand away from the Marquess. She did not for a moment want to hear how alike they were. Once had been enough. She stepped over the charred logs and into the tunnel, which seemed to be made of a very nice mud brick, like the basement of some ancient pyramid.

September fell out of a patch in the sky. Iago floated down, and the Minotaur, even larger in this place than her study, simply lifted her skirts and stepped out into a wild, tumbling expanse of moorland, gray and purple and black with mist. Heather and gorse and long curlicued vines of rampion and icy hard peas grew everywhere.

A high wall greeted them, the only object for miles. It did not look like the little wall September had tripped over when she entered Fairyland. It looked infinitely older, of a stone that probably remembered when the moon was just a baby. Weather and abuse had lashed the rocks and left them crumbling here, impenetrable there. As with any wall that has the gall to stand in the middle of nowhere with nobody guarding it, folk had written things on it, painted and chiseled their names or some little message, a thousand years of graffiti. Some were little more than signs and sigils, as old as writing itself. Some September could read, even if she didn’t understand most of them.

Philadelphia 9 Million Miles That-a-Way. Beware of Dog. Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here. No Trespassing-This Means You. I Miss My Mother. Theseus Was Here. I Told You Not to Turn Around-You Never Listened to Me. No Parking Any Time. Never Let ’Em Take Your Necklace.

September ran her hands across the letters.

“Look here,” the Minotaur said imperiously, and September did not argue. In the midst of the wall she saw a hole, a crack in the stone. It looked as though someone had put their fist through the wall-its edges sheared off broken and ugly, covered in pale moss, sharp and ragged. Up above it someone had written in childlike handwriting, “Why Did the Chicken Cross Fairyland?”

“Is that the way to the Prince?” she asked. “Will I look through and see him?”

The Minotaur said nothing, only continued to point. When September still hesitated, the beast put her hand on the girl’s neck, hard and unignorable, rough and hot. She pushed her down before the hole in the wall. September stumbled to her knees and peered through it. This is what she saw: A field of warm, rich grain, still tinged with green, a May field, and a sweet little house at one end of it-why, it was her own house! And the lights were on! And there! Could those be the shadows of her mother and her dog moving behind the distant curtains? It looked like early evening, only a few minutes after she’d left. September laughed and tried to wave to her mother through the hole in the world. The Minotaur stayed her hand.

“No one can see or hear you-yet. There is no wall on the other side of the wall. Only a world. You will not believe me, but that is a part of Fairyland-Above, in the far, far west of the land.”

“But that’s my house! I can see it! There, in the yard, that’s my bicycle with the basket! There’s the milkman’s empty bottles!”

“It is what Fairyland-Above is becoming, without her shadows, without her magic,” said Left softly. “More and more ordinary, more and more usual, more and more like your world, where you cannot plant poems or turn into a Wyvern or build cities out of bread. Very soon now Fairyland will be little more than another part of your world. Maybe a pretty one, but it will have lost all that made it different. You might say it will have lost its Queerness. Belinda Cabbage would say so. Without the shadows and their sorceries and their wildness, the borders are disappearing, and soon enough this wall itself will just fade away into nothing but a nice May field full of waving grass.”

September tried to imagine Fairyland stuck into her world like a pushpin. A place that would seem like it had always been there, wedged between Kansas and Colorado, perhaps. Another one of the Dakotas. A magicless new prairie stretching on forever.

The Minotaur went on. “And the people of Fairyland, well-perhaps you will remember that the tall, skinny farmer is really a Spriggan, or the short, fat fish-seller was once a Goblin girl, or that the bicycle leaning against your house used to ride wild with her brothers on the high plain. But no one else will know.” Left paused, her hand softening. She stroked September’s hair instead of pressing her cheek against the stone. She looked back over her immense shoulder at the shadow of the Marquess and played her trump card. “Her desires will come to pass, in an odd and slantwise way-no child will go between earth and Fairyland, because there will no longer be any Fairyland to go to.”

September shook her head. “I would never let this happen-I mean, Halloween wouldn’t. She’s still me. I’m part of her, I am her. She’d never want a thing like this, because I’d never want it!”

The Minotaur sighed. “She is so full of Want and Need that the magic of it fills her up like a jar packed with fireflies. She is your shadow, after all. She is you, if you had never learned that sometimes you don’t get what you want. If you had never learned about consequences. Halloween thinks Fairyland-Below will be safe. She thinks if she can pull enough shadows down, we’ll stay put down here while the rest floats off. We’ll anchor ourselves, the sheer weight of all of us. She doesn’t care a bit for the rest, only for her people-an admirable trait in a Queen, really. Not all have it. Oh, and perhaps we will stay, for a little while. But Fairyland-Above is so terribly heavy. Eventually it will drag us through, too. We’ll become beetles and worms and moles, moving in the dark under the mundane world.”

The shadow of the Marquess looked troubled, blue storms moving across her face. Iago nudged her with his broad dark head. “No more fairies making mischief, spoiling beer and cream, stealing children, eating souls. No more humans meddling with Fairyland, mucking up its politics and tracking mud all over the floor.” Grief quivered in her voice, real grief. “Why does that hurt me so? It made me feel so happy once. So safe and warm.”

“I thought you would come to me knowing this,” said Left. “I thought we would battle, as a Minotaur likes to do. Then you would show yourself worthy (perhaps I would even let you win a little), and I would have given you a helmet to wear, to show my favor.”

September threw off the Minotaur’s hand. Her eyes blazed. The hot and furious thing sizzled in her once more. Why did everyone keep assuming she couldn’t do anything for herself? “If you want to fight, I will fight you. I am not strong or tall, and it would be completely unfair, but nothing is fair, ever, and I have already wrestled a Marid nearly to death, so I’ll take you if that’s how I keep this from happening.”

The Rivet Gun stirred at her hip. Its pneumatic tube snaked around her waist and snuffled like a little puppy, searching for something. It crawled up her chest and found the Järlhopp’s Clutch. The end of the tube smacked gleefully and widened like a serpent’s mouth to engulf the pendant. September drew the gun. Her hand barely shook at all as she aimed it at the Minotaur-but she could not aim for her heart as she thought she probably ought to. At the last moment, her own heart quailed: We could talk it out! This will only make her angry! You can’t just shoot people-that’s not fair fighting! But September had already pulled the trigger. If she was to fight, the hard, strange, new part of her meant to win.

A bubbling boom erupted from the mouth of the Rivet Gun. A creamy orange cannonball made of all the things that had ever happened to September exploded into the Minotaur’s muscled thigh.

The Minotaur studied her for a long while. Blood streamed down her leg, but she didn’t seem to notice it. “Good girl,” she said finally.

September shook a little with the force of having had to do such a thing when she didn’t really want to fight anyone at all. She made fists with her hands, and then let go, covering her face with them instead. All that she had done to keep Fairyland whole, to keep it connected to her own world-and now her shadow would finish the job.

The hole in the Minotaur’s leg stopped bleeding. The creamy orange light of September’s memories spread all around her great leg. The wound grew wider and wider and taller and taller until the Minotaur had vanished, and all that was left was the hole the Rivet Gun had made, rimmed in creamy orange fire.

On the other side, September could see nothing at all.