The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

CHAPTER XVIII
EVERYONE’S HOUSE

In Which an Unopenable Box Is Opened, an Unbreakable Bier Is Broken, a Tapir Gloats Rather More Than Is Polite, and a Thing Lost Is Found

When September stepped through the fiery wound, she squeezed her eyes shut, bracing herself for something to leap out and fight her for real and true.

Nothing happened. She opened her eyes. Still nothing.

Maud and Iago still stood near her, just behind, as a shadow will, which September did not like in the least. The Minotaur had gone. The rushing wind and the smell of hardy, tangly moor-flowers had gone, too. Instead, all around them stood a silent, dark house. Shadows-the usual, flat, soft kind that can’t talk-hung everywhere. September reached blindly and found the bannister to a flight of stairs which she seemed to be coming down. She stepped out into the front room of the house, where a big, threadbare couch sat invitingly. A tall, walnut-wood radio stood quiet and dark in the corner.

“Why, it’s my house!” September cried. Her voice sounded very loud in the empty place. “There’s our old radio-and look! The sink is still full of pink-and-yellow teacups!”

“No,” whispered the shadow of the Marquess. “It’s my house. There’s Father’s broken rocking chair, and his liquor cabinet still full up, and tomato soup still on the stove.”

September looked where the shadow pointed, but she did not see any rocking chair, nor any liquor cabinet, nor any pot of soup.

“But look, here’s Mother’s umbrella in the stand, and still wet! And my own books on the table. I’m sure the sunflowers I planted will be just coming up outside the window, you’ll see-”

But when September went to the window she didn’t see her baby sunflowers peeking up their little heads. She saw a yawning, endless cavern full of glittering stalactites, such a profound red that they might have been black, but for a strange torchlight that showed the bloody color within. A narrow, milky river rippled through a colossal cavern, spilling down in waterfalls where rocks had sheared off or worn away. Gnarled, leafless trees bent and groaned over its current, bearing pomegranates so big you could hardly put your arms around them if you tried.

September gasped, and ran to the kitchen window-there, there she would see her own long prairie, the one she’d stared at so often in the evenings that she knew every furry head of wheat. Where the Green Wind had come for her, and asked her if she wanted to go to Fairyland. But outside that window roared a black and shoreless sea, its waves thundering so tall that should they ever break, September had no doubt the whole world would drown. But they never did break, only rolled on forever.

September dashed upstairs to her own bedroom, where her own bed lay neatly made and her own clothes hung in the closet. Outside the window was nothing but a field of stars dropping down into nothing, no land, no moon, no sun, just stars flaming on as far as any eye could see.

“You’re both wrong,” Iago said behind her. The pair had followed her up into her room, just as hushed as air. The Marquess looked as though she might cry. She held her arms tight to her chest. “It’s my old house in Nephelo, where I was a kitten before I took up with the Red Wind and became a more cosmopolitan cat. There’s my cloud-bed with all the nice little cumulus pillows I loved, and my mist-mirror where I groomed myself to be so handsome, and I don’t know how either of you can have missed the lightning-hearth downstairs, with a nice fat cloud-roast turning over it.”

“Father will be home,” the Marquess said, and she sounded so small and afraid September could not believe this was the same girl who had ruled Fairyland with her gloved fists.

But September thought she had the puzzle licked. “If you see your own room, and I see mine, and Iago sees his, perhaps we are not really at home, any of us. There’s lizards in Africa that can change color whenever they like, to hide or to make other lizards like them better. Maybe this house is trying to get us to like it-or hiding from us what it really looks like. Maybe…maybe we’ve got here at last, and at the bottom of the world there’s a place that looks like everyone’s house all at once, because the world has got to have a house just like a person. And the house the world lives in would have to have every other house inside it! And outside…” September refused to look at the dizzying plain of stars again. “Outside all the bits of Fairyland-Below crowd in on top of it, because we’re under everything. Or maybe they’re not even Fairyland-Below, but other underworlds, like A-Through-L said. Underworlds all the way down.”

But the shadow of the Marquess was not listening to her. She looked out the bedroom door toward the stairs they’d come up, and before September had finished being very clever if she said so herself, Maud had started down the steps again. The Marquess said nothing, just went down the stairs and around the bannister and through the kitchen to the cellar door. September hurried after her, shivering with an eerie sort of familiarness. Even if she believed all the things she’d thought about the place, it was her house. She’d put up pickles with her mother in that cellar last fall. She’d left that pan soaking in the sink, and that teakettle ready for a nice pot. But it stood so empty and awfully dark, with no one inside and no sound, not even of the little dog scrabbling about looking for treats.

The Marquess put her hand on the doorknob. The radio crackled to life, and all of them jumped, startled, their hearts beating wildly. A voice crackled and popped from within.

“…missing in France after hostilities erupted outside Strasbourg. Early casualty reports are grim-”

September snapped it off. She barely heard the words, the blood in her face beat so hard and hot. No one said this was a bad place, she told herself. No one said the bottom of the world was somewhere terrible. It’s only dark, and dark’s not so frightening. Everything’s dark in Fairyland-Below. That doesn’t mean it’s wicked.

The Marquess-Maud-started down the cellar stairs. The old wood creaked loudly under her feet, and louder still under Iago’s paws as he padded after her. September wanted to just let the Marquess go. If she was going to be rude and wander off when any fool could see they ought to stick together, well, what did she expect from a girl like that? But the cellar, even back at home, with a good lantern and her mother at her side, still scared her a bit. So terribly dark and full of dust and spiders! And they were not at home, no matter how home-like it looked. And so September went down into the blackness, because she could not let another girl go alone.

This is what comes of having a heart, even a very small and young one. It causes no end of trouble, and that’s the truth.

The cellar of the house at the bottom of the world looked like any cellar you have ever seen. Full of old, forgotten things or else things put away for a cold, needful day. Jars of pickles and bottles of liquor and jams, each neatly labeled: Idun’s Apple Butter, Bacchus’s Best Blackberry Wine, Eve’s Blue Ribbon Fig Jelly, Kali’s Red-Hot Pickled Peppers. Stacks of old newspapers moldered away, their headlines growing dark moss. A hurricane lamp resting on a great sack of Coyote’s Extra-Fine Cornmeal Flour flickered, guttered, and flared up again, showing Brobdingnagian cobwebs and crowded shelves and the Marquess and her Panther-and a large, long steamer trunk in the middle of the floor. It sat up on wooden pallets, to keep it off the earthen floor in rains and snows. Brass studs stubbled all over it; a brass lock bigger than a hog’s head kept it locked tight.

“An unopenable box on an unbreakable bier,” September said softly. It just felt right, to whisper in such a cellar. “Though it doesn’t look very unbreakable to me, I must say.”

The Marquess stared at it. “I thought I heard something,” she said. “Something rustling down here. Something…chewing. But there’s no one here. Surely, we can’t get any lower than this. It’s the bottom of the bottom of the world.”

And then September heard it, too: a strange little mumbling chewing sound in the dark. Like a mouse gnawing at something far too big for it. Iago growled deep in his throat and wiggled down on his haunches, his eyes flashing. He crept forward on his belly, sniffing at a barrel labeled Ratatosk’s High-Yield World-Tree Seeds. His whiskers twitched; his tail snapped from side to side.

“Oh, lay off it,” came a low, chuckling voice from behind the barrel. “Call off your cat and I’ll come out. Don’t you growl at me that way, young Sir. I’ll have your ears.”

Iago stood up and returned to his mistress, flowing around her and arching his back to rub against her shoulder. When he’d settled beside her, a large tapir emerged from behind the seed-store.

September, having grown up in farm country, could not be expected to know what a tapir was. The Marquess knew, as she knew all the creatures she had once ruled, though she thought of it by its proper name. For it was not only a tapir, which would be unusual enough, but a Baku. September thought it looked like a cross between a pig and an anteater. It had a long, velvety, double-barreled snout like a miniature elephant’s trunk, bright little eyes, dark purple fur with wild red stripes down its back, and round mousy ears.

“You interrupted my supper,” it complained. “Such a lovely one, too. He was dreaming of his mother. Those are always juicy meals, with all the fixings.”

“You eat dreams?” September said, and not without some wonder.

“Naturally,” said the tapir, licking its snout. “Everyone does.”

“I don’t!”

The tapir rubbed its cheek on the steamer trunk. “ ’Course you do. If you didn’t sleep and dream, you’d get sick and eventually you’d die. Dreams keep the heart alive, just like your boring old suppers keep your body alive. Just because you’re ignorant of how your own self works, doesn’t mean you ought to get snooty about how I make my way.”

“I never remember my dreams,” said the shadow of the Marquess quietly.

“You must have rich, tasty ones then. When you can’t remember a dream, it’s because a Baku ate it. We leave plenty for you to keep your health up, don’t worry. We’re very careful, just like a good farmer is careful how many cows he slaughters for meat and how many he keeps for milk. But people all look like cows to a Baku, just bursting with sweet cream.”

September thought she ought to introduce herself and the Marquess and the Panther, but when she began to do it, the tapir snorted. A little cloud of dirt puffed up from the earth below that powerful snort.

“Oh, I know who you are! He dreams about you all the time. Not the cat, but then, I never paid much mind to cats. They don’t dream, so they’re of no interest to me. My name is Nod, if it matters.”

“Do you mean Prince Myrrh?” September asked.

“Who else?”

“How could he possibly dream about us?”

The tapir shrugged. “That’s what magical objects do. They dream of the day when heroes will come and claim them.”

“But he’s not an object at all, he’s a boy, even if he is a boy in a box.”

Nod jostled the trunk with his round flank. It rocked a little. “Nope. He’s an object. Never comes out, never wakes up, could be picked up, put into a wagon, and moved like luggage.”

“Don’t you think it’s a bit awful, you hiding down here and…well, eating him, bit by bit?”

The purple tapir widened his eyes. “Oh, no, you misunderstand. It’s not like that at all.”

September flushed. “Well, I do misunderstand sometimes, when folk are slow about explaining.”

Nod chuckled, a watery, snorty, pleasant sort of sound. “I guard him. Surely someone told you that all magical objects have guardians. It’s good work when you can get it-times being what they are. When I was a calf, I just wandered from town to town, munching on an innkeeper’s nightmare about an endless hall of empty rooms with his lost loves’ names on the doors, or a wizard’s worried dream of retaking the same examination over and over again. Occasionally, I would find others like me, and we’d go in a pack for a while. We’d head down to Baku-Town in Pandemonium and rollick about, go to a dream café and sample something really exotic, maybe a Pooka in her real, original shape lost in a forest of all the faces she’s ever worn-maybe a changeling child dreaming of home. But I wasn’t a serious fellow. I didn’t have a calling and I didn’t have a care.” September’s heart leaned in to listen, for she had hardly yet heard of someone in Fairyland without a calling, who didn’t know exactly who they were. “But one night, I had too much vintage leprechaun gold-fever to drink and fell asleep in a twisty old alleyway. I dreamed that I was a zebra instead of a tapir. A lion asked me to dance, and I did, the way you do inadvisable things in dreams. But, lo, what do you know? All of the sudden someone was eating one of my dreams, which I did not approve of at all. The lion turned into a fellow Baku, a big, green female with a golden rump. I squirmed under the press of her snout on my dream, but I could not shake her. So I bit back-and discovered that she was the guardian of the Widow’s Polearm, a weapon that once belonged to Myrmo the Striped. Some witch somewhere says it cannot be wielded again until the end of the world. The Baku had gotten quite fat on the dreams of the Polearm, which were interesting and quite unlike the dreams of creatures who walk and talk and fight on their own steam. I suppose it would be like you were the first person in the world to ever taste caviar. It’s a bit funny, but you could really get to like it, if you hold on tight and take it slow. So when I woke up, I joined the union, Local Number 333-Guardians, Sibyls, Junkyard Dogs, and Scarecrows. That was ages ago now.”

The Marquess paid no attention to Nod. She walked slowly around the box as he spoke, prodding the wooden pallets with the toes of her black boots. Suddenly, she knelt and slipped her fingers into the lock. The gap where a key might fit yawned quite big enough to fit her hand. But though it was a good idea to pick that monstrous lock with her own deft fingers-one does not get to rule much of anything without good ideas-nothing happened.

“Not so fast, young lady,” snapped the Baku.

“I am not young,” shot back the Marquess.

“And not a lady, either, I expect. But I can’t let you do that.”

September frowned at him. “We have to get the box open, and the Prince waking, and I don’t mind telling you that sometimes I do manage to get my way, and when I do, I leave a big mess behind, as often as not.”

“I’m a guardian, girl. It’s my whole job to make sure no one harms or bothers the lad. I eat his dreams, yes, but he’s been down here a good long while, and I have to keep living so I can keep guarding. You wouldn’t have me eat what’s in these jars would you? What if the folks who put up all this rot came back and expected a nice mature bottle? I’d be stomped on, you can bet on it. And I keep him company, in his dreams. I dance with him, when he wants to dance. I shoot dream-pheasants with him, when he wants to see something beautiful fall apart. We talk about our troubles, and I tell him about the world. He’s my friend, even though he’s never once opened his eyes. You don’t even know him at all.”

“There has to be a key,” September said, ignoring the argument of the Baku.

“Don’t you have ears? It’s an unopenable box. The whole idea is you can’t open it.” Nod sneered.

September grinned. “It’s a riddle then! I mean, it must be. Everyone keeps saying unopenable-they never say locked or closed or shut. I shall figure it out, presently. I must only think slantwise and backward, as a proper Bishop should. How do you get something out of a box without opening it?”

“You frighten it until it gets out of the box on its own if it knows what’s good for it,” purred Iago.

“You outlaw all closed boxes,” said the Marquess.

September looked around the cellar. She felt sure that she had all the pieces of the puzzle, if only she could think of the solution. When she’d stood in the terrible, wonderful room full of clocks with the other Marquess, the real one, as she could not help but think of that cruel queen, everything she’d needed to defeat her had been lying around her. She’d only needed to think hard enough, and want it enough. Her eyes fell on more jars, more sacks, old, broken wagon wheels and spools and butter churns. Nothing useful, nothing that even looked like a key or a wedge or a hammer. Anansi’s No-Weight Silk Yarn. Erishkegal’s Black Label Whiskey.

And then her eyes fell to the earthen floor, illuminated by the ashen light of the hurricane lamp.

The steamer trunk cast a long, deep, dark shadow.

“Oh!” said September. “Oh. Marq… Maud, come here. You must come here.” She could still hardly call the shadow-girl in her shadow-petticoats by her poor, small human name. Nevertheless, the Marquess came. Her black hat jingled softly. September pointed at the shadow on the floor. “Don’t you see? You’ve got to open the shadow! It’s not opening the box at all. Whatever a thing does, its shadow does; but perhaps, here in the undermost of the underneath and the furthest down of the Upside-Down, it could work the other way, too, and whatever a shadow does, its thing must do, too.”

“Why can’t you open the shadow?” said Maud. She seemed suddenly reluctant, as though something in the box might hurt her, though only a moment ago she had had her hand inside the lock.

“You understand I don’t know how anything works. I only think it might be that this isn’t a shadow like you’re a shadow. It’s not alive. So a shadow has to touch it and move it, because no person can move a shadow, only a shadow can even touch another one. If this is to happen, it must happen all in shadow, or it would count as opening the box. But I’ve gotten very good at thinking these things out! I’ve got you to thank for that in a slantwise way. I wonder if thinking can become muscular, like your magic, if you train it up enough. My thinking has become muscular, like your magic used to be.”

Nod furrowed his brow. The scarlet stripes on his neck bunched together as he frowned deeper than any tapir has ever frowned.

“It’s not openable,” he said firmly. “Not any way under the sun. I was told. I was assured. This won’t work.” But his voice trembled, and when Maud, never taking her eyes from September, touched the lid of the box’s shadow, the dream-eating tapir bit her wrist to yank it away.

The Marquess screamed. All this time, she had been small and cowering, nothing like herself, a shadow of a shadow. But when Nod sunk his squarish teeth into her dark skin, she screamed and hissed-and then suddenly stood. She stared at the creature clamping down on her wrist. He shook his muzzle to get a better grip on her. Her spine straightened, and September saw her face settle into its old self, a face used to power, to getting her way, and never balking at any single thing.

“How dare you,” the Marquess snarled. “How dare you put your teeth on me?” She clamped her hand down on his snout and tore him free of her flesh. Shadow-blood welled up and fell. The tip of his elephant-like nose stretched far longer than September would have thought possible. It sought and found her wound as she held him fast. She threw him aside like a doll; his weight shattered a crate stamped with Pluto’s Fancy Mushrooms. Dark soil spilled out. The Marquess reached down and opened the shadow of the box, her eyes blazing. She opened it as herself, as the Marquess in all her fury and beauty and terror. And for a moment, nothing happened.

Then a clicking and grinding and groaning belched forth from the huge lock. It crumbled as it came open, turning to rusty dust. The lid sprang back-and September looked down on a handsome young man asleep in the steamer trunk, his hands folded over his belly. He wore fine black clothes and a healthy red color in his cheeks. He had brown hair the color of winter branches and a pair of small, furry wolf’s ears just like those September had seen on a certain cartographer long ago.

“I thought he would wake up,” September said. “I thought opening the box would be enough.”

The Marquess put her hands over her mouth. Her eyes slid shut and she shook her head, as if she wanted it all to go away. The fire drained out of her and she was Maud again.

“It can’t be,” she whispered. “It can’t be. How can it be?”

“Of course it can,” said Nod, shaking Pluto’s Fancy Mushrooms off of his pelt. “I’ve known since I first set eyes on you. I expect you couldn’t have opened the box otherwise-a damnable loophole I’ll be speaking with management about.”

“I don’t understand,” said September.

“Neither do I,” answered the Marquess, shadowy tears spilling out of her eyes.

The dream-eating tapir took her hand in his mouth-gentler this time. He drew her down onto the ground beside him; she sank to her knees. “Listen,” he said, his voice full of rough kindness, the sort an old carouser gives to a young one, or one soldier to another. “Did you ever hear a story where a lady and her fellow desperately wanted a child, but couldn’t have one? And they wanted it so much day in and day out that one morning a peach floated down the river, or a bamboo tree grew near their house, or a clay vessel washed up on the shore, and there was a magical child inside? Those children always do marvelous things-they conquer Ogre Island or marry the moon or bring down a wicked emperor. But those little babies inside the peaches and bamboo and clay have to come from somewhere, you know. And mostly, mostly they come from someone who meant to stay in Fairyland, who meant to be a mother and a knight there, or at least a smashing wizard, but the season turned or a banishing storm struck her ship or…or her clock simply ran out. Ladies with child who fell back into their own worlds and their own child’s bodies, opening their eyes not a moment after they left. The children they were carrying in Fairyland fall down through the earth, and eventually they come to rest down here until some farmer and his wife want a child so terribly much that a peach comes sailing by to claim them. Only this one had all sorts of magic, on account of his parents. His box did not go to some nice tailor or miller. He used the Map Magic in his blood to burrow down as low as any object can go. The burning Wanting Magic he was heir to he used to wait, to wait ages upon ages, and let the peaches and bamboo pass him by. He became an object, one whose dreams touched the roots of everything that grew in Fairyland-Below, until everyone knew who he was, because they’d been eating his beets and onions and drinking his wine, because he slept at the bottom of the world, and his dreams became the water that every root drank. All this time, sleeping and dreaming with me, just waiting. Waiting for his mother to come and wake him up.”

“That’s why he’s a Prince,” September said, and almost laughed at the strangeness of it. “He’s Queen Mallow’s son. He’s asleep because he’s never been born.”

“But he still grows, slowly, terribly slowly,” the Baku agreed. “And we’ve got to know each other quite well, in his dreaming.”

September took the Marquess’s hand. “Come on,” she said. “I know what to do.”

After all, in fairy tales, there was only one thing to do. In every story with a long sleep and a waking in it. An easy thing, a pretty thing. Standard currency.

September and Maud bent over the box, over the boy and his shadow. And gently, sweetly, September kissed the Prince. The Marquess, dark, swirling tears flowing down her face, kissed her child’s shadow.

His eyes opened.

A pain like the hands of a great clock ticking together burst in September’s chest, and the world went out like a candle.