The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

CHAPTER VIII
WHERE THERE’S A WHELK THERE’S A WAY

In Which September Walks on the Moon, Is Accused of Sundry Wickednesses by a Lobster and Two Jackals, Hails a Crab, and Meets a Very Unusual Mollusk

We have said before that the world is a house.

You and I have gone together into the basement where the underworlds are kept. We have lounged comfortably in the front room and shared our familiar tea with all things familiar: Omaha and Europe and cruel schoolmates and spy movies and airplane factories and amiable dogs. We have played such wonderful games in the upstairs bedroom, where Wyveraries and Marids and witches and giant talking cats peek out from behind the bedpost and the Lamp is always on. You might think that I will take you to the attic next, where the heavens of a house get bundled up with twine and draped with muslin and wait quietly for our footsteps. But it is not so. In the house of the world, the heavens are not in the attic.

They are on the roof.

Shall we crawl up there and see?

Why, here is everything that soared up high and got lost, everything that wanted to keep safe from marauders below. The tenderhearted old world catches everything thrown too far and too hard, keeps everything fragile whole: baseballs and stuffed bears and birds’ nests and last autumn’s leaves, zeppelins and Icarus and Leonardo’s flying machine, Fairies and pterodactyls and cherubim and hot air balloons and a Russian dog or two. It’s hard to get up there, harder than the stairs down into the basement. It takes longer; you must climb out a window and shimmy up the chimney and pull yourself over by your fingernails without breaking the gutters. Gravity is involved, and unbreakable spells concerning escape velocity. After all, anyone can go down into the cellar if they are not afraid of the dark. Any tale you care to tell calls for a quick trip to the underworld to bring up another bag of flour and a working knowledge of your darker nature. The surface of the world is like a great black net; any moment you could fall through and fall deep. But for every underworld there is an overworld, an upper world just as strange as the lower, just as bright as its cousin is brooding. The snow that falls in one splashes down as rain in the other-and brightness is not less perilous than shadow. An Italian poet got himself a ticket good for both shows once and came back to tell us all about it, which shows excellent manners.

Everything that goes down must come up again.

When you leave the world, the going gets tough, whether you are a chemical rocket or a little girl. Take my hand, I know the way. Narrators have a professional obligation not to let their charges fall onto the pavement.

Aroostook and September idled, each in their ways. The Model A’s rumble mellowed into a thick purr as Ballast’s soda-gas flowed through her insides. The light of the sun on the Moon blazed pure white; the pearly sand beneath those four piebald tires sparkled sharply, purposefully.

September stared. Specifically, she stared up. She could not quite put a name to what she saw towering above her. Even after climbing out of the car and putting the handbrake carefully on, she still could not get her head all the way around it. Her hands shook even though the Moon had stilled some time ago. In the end they had only fallen a few, embarrassing feet. The off-ramp hung miserably behind her, broken off in midair, jumbled and cracked and twisted by the quake. Bits of ivory briar crumbled away into the starry black; an awful metallic whine wheezed out of the silver paving stones. B.D.’s Moondock Salvagation drifted back downroad, righted and ruddered, looking for wrecks. But September barely heard the sounds of the barge and the creaking road. What clanged behind her could not possibly be important.

In front of her yawned the mouth of a seashell the size of a mountain.

It lay on its side, a sea-snail shell tapering for miles into a slender point on one end and a massive knobbly spiral crown on the other. Along its spine rose great prongs tipped with glowing white flame. It seemed to be every color at once, jade-green and amethyst and quicksilver at the crown, swirling into deep blue and indigo and bright fuchsia, and then into white-orange and copper and gold as its tail swept away up the shore. For the off-ramp emptied out not only directly into the giant shell but onto the shore of a scarlet, frothing sea, its waves washing the curve of the sea-snail and leaving pink rinds of salt behind. The height of the thing made September dizzy. Polished mother-of-pearl lined the shell’s wide mouth. It opened gracefully inward like a smile. A steep coral staircase led up to the lip of the entrance and what could be inside September would have ventured no guesses.

“It’s all right to gape, girl. I love it when people gape! Means they recognize the spectacular when they see it.”

September startled. The great snail shell had so swallowed up her attention that she’d noticed nothing else, not even the trio of creatures guarding that steep staircase. On the left side of it crouched a black jackal with great dark ears and bright silver eyes. On the right side perched a white jackal with a long, pale snout and piercing dark eyes. Between them, a large, muscular, and very green lobster stood watch. In her thick, powerful claw she clamped a long, two-pronged fork whose tips glittered as if to assure September of their sharpness. Her antennae and the jackals’ tails wafted to and fro in the same rhythm. Two of the shell’s fiery prongs framed the three of them. It was the white jackal who had spoken.

“If you need more time to be amazed, just give us an estimate, love,” said the black jackal. Their voices were quite high and human-like.

“What is this place?” whispered September. The shushing sounds of the sea seemed to rub against her, making her skin feel prickly and hot.

The lobster cleared her throat-do lobsters have a throat? September wondered.

“Welcome to Almanack, the All-In-One! Sanctuary, Safehouse, Home of the Stationary Circus and the College of Lunar Arts, Number One Tourist Destination on the Heavenly Circuit and Capital of the Moon! These are my associates Rushe and Waite, Knights of the Crepuscular Girdle, and I am Nefarious Freedom Coppermolt the Third, Lobster of the Watch.”

“This is Almanack? There’s…a city in there?”

The white jackal laughed, a shrill yip and cry.

“What else would it be? The highway leads here, after all.”

“But highways might lead anywhere!”

Nefarious Freedom Coppermolt the Third stamped her fork. “They might, but they don’t. King Crunchcrab decreed that in a proper Empire, all roads lead to capitals, and they couldn’t have rogue roads just lying about leading anywhere they pleased. A road has to go to a city at the least, or else it will be arrested and sent to the countryside for rehabilitation.”

September could not quite believe this, but she could not quite disbelieve it, either. She thought she ought to visit Charlie, and sooner rather than later.

“Of course, the Moon isn’t strictly speaking part of Fairyland,” Rushe, the white jackal, growled.

“No it is not,” harrumphed the lobster. “My great-great-grandmother, for whom I am named, would pinch her own gravestone rather than see it happen. She fought in the Battle of the Whelk when the Moon washed its hands of Fairies and threw away the bucket. Wrestled a basilisk to a standstill, my gran! Lost her claw in a Fairy’s mouth, but it was mostly turned to stone anyway. Lived to lay her eggs and shed her shell and show no mercy to collaborating crayfish. Now I serve in her name and in her place! Nobody throws a fork farther. I also juggle better than you might expect,” she added confidentially. “Just to pass the time.”

“But the Road starts in Fairyland, so it’s theirs, too, and they get to order it about and tell it its shortcomings and send it to sit in a corner and think about what it’s done,” finished the black jackal Waite.

“For now,” said Nefarious Freedom darkly. She clapped her pincers together.

“Well,” said September, taking a deep breath, “if this is Almanack, this is where I’m meant to be!” She pulled the long, carved box from the backseat and held it before her like a shield. “I’m to take this directly to the Whelk of the Moon.”

The Lobster of the Watch tapped on the lid with her claw and listened for an echo. If one sounded, September did not hear it.

“Well, I don’t think that’s likely,” barked Waite.

“You must be joking,” growled Rushe.

“You do know the lee side is riddled with holes and tunnels?” Nefarious Freedom added in a low voice. “I don’t know why you’d even try to come in by the front gate in broad daylight. Bold of you! But goodness, why? Has someone told you we were easy marks? That we could be bought? It’s not so, or my name isn’t-”

September leapt in. “What on earth are you talking about? I only want to put this thing down where it belongs and be on my way!”

Rushe narrowed his dark eyes. “You mean smuggle in some sort of device or weapon or counterfeit or…”

“…stolen property or wicked beastie or bomb,” finished Waite.

“Certainly not!”

“But you’re a Criminal!” snapped the Lobster of the Watch.

“Oh, I’m no such thing,” September sighed.

“But you’re dressed like one,” whined Rushe, his pink tongue lolling out of his muzzle.

“Well, if you’re going to go passing judgment on those what wear black,” retorted Waite, thumping his black tail, “then so am I.”

“What’s in there?” Rushe sniffed at it, his ruff bristling.

“I… I don’t rightly know, but a Wind gave it to me specially and though Winds can be rather rude sometimes, they’re very rarely nasty. I’m sure it’s nothing like what you said!” But was she sure? It was terribly heavy.

Nefarious Freedom clapped her pincers again in exasperation. “If you’re wearing silks, you’re a Criminal of the Realm. Tell me you haven’t got a writ in your pocket!”

September could not. She pulled it out of the deep, soft slits of her black trousers and unfolded it for the guards to see. Nefarious Freedom covered her eyes and would not look at it.

“We don’t go in for Fairyish decadence up here. Commit your crimes under cover of darkness like an honest crustacean, I say. Folk down below might treat you fancy just because you’ve got a dash of official danger on you-and danger approved and accounted for is hardly danger at all if you ask me and my grandmother-but here on the Moon, we call them like we see them and I see you plain as the tide! No Writ of Rascalry recognized! Petition denied! Take your trash elsewhere, missy!”

But the lobster could not help being at least a little curious. She peeked through the rough teeth of her green claw at September’s scroll. Then she opened it wider. And wider still.

“Professional Revolutionary?” she cried, reading the writ. “Do you mean to say you’ve led revolts? Real rebellions? In Fairyland?”

September demurred. “No, no, it’s all a misunderstanding, everything’s got twisted round…” But she saw the jackals’ ruffs rise and the lobster stiffen. She cleared her throat and changed her tack. “What I mean to say is that I brought down the Marquess who ruled over all of Fairyland, but it wasn’t a revolt, it was just me.”

“Don’t be modest!” roared Nefarious Freedom with delight. “Any enemy of the Fairy establishment is a bosom companion of mine. My gran would drop her shell if she caught me treating rough with comrades-at-arms!”

Rushe bowed, stretching his legs in front of him like a cat. “Right up the stairs, ma’am,” he purred, “and watch your step.”

Waite licked his chops. “And if there’s a thing we can do to aid and abet you just howl and we’ll hear it. Excellent acoustics in Almanack.”

September did not like using the Marquess as a strange sort of password. It had been so much more complicated than that. And it felt like bragging, which was not at all nice when you considered the consequences of it all. Nor could she understand how these beasts could hate Fairyland so-and Fairies, who were nearly as extinct as dimetrodons, save a few stray orphans like King Charlie and Belinda Cabbage and Calpurnia Farthing. But she had little to barter with but her reputation. The sooner she finished with this nonsense, the sooner she could set about finding A-Through-L and Saturday.

“You could winch up my…my friend. I fear she won’t make it up the steps.” September did not know what to call Aroostook, but what use might a lobster and two jackals have for the word car?

The lobster-knight looked dubious. “Your friend would crack the pearl! Smash it right to bits. We’ve got strict preservation codes. No Alien Conveyances Allowed. But never you worry. You’ll find Almanack has taken care of all your needs, I promise. Travel by Public Tram, Taxicrab, or Regularly Scheduled Trapeze! See the Grand Moonflower Lawn from the sack of a luxury lunar pelican! You’ll have no cause to complain, friend.”

“I can’t just leave Aroostook. What if someone made off with her or vandalized her parts? Oh, I’m sure they wouldn’t mean to, but she’s a complicated machine. A Tool, really, and Tools Have Rights.” September fell back lamely on the only law she knew by name.

The jackals exchanged glances. “Who told you that?” they said together.

“Never mind, never mind!” cried Nefarious, waving her emerald pincers in the air. “We’ll watch over her nice and snug. Safe as seahorses. It’s what we do, after all! Come back for her when you’re finished.”

September felt very reluctant indeed to leave the Model A. Fairyish folk seemed so terribly fascinated by the automobile. But faster in, faster out! September turned off the engine and pocketed the key. She patted the burlaped wheel. “I won’t be long,” she whispered. “Don’t go running off this time! You can’t trust just any old person who comes along with a hundred puffins and a pretty face!”

Aroostook settled into silence as September walked up the coral staircase and into Almanack.

When she was quite out of sight, a peculiar thing happened. The big, rusty horn nestled into the driver’s-side door melted away into hot steam. In its place billowed up a huge cobalt and white striped phonograph bell. A squeeze bulb ballooned out from the bottom of it, looking a bit like a tulip bulb, delicate and coppery and sheathed in gauzy layers like a live thing.

The jackals sniffed at it. It smelled of sunshine.

September stepped inside the snail-shell and onto a long shimmering street full of sound and tumult. It spiraled down and in along the floor of the great shell-but up and down had clearly become such good friends here that it hardly mattered who was who. Almanack was all mother-of-pearl, silver-green, and blue-violet chasing each other in gleaming ribbons. Houses and streetlamps and storefronts and skinny bright towers and fountains and bridges and pavilions sprung out everywhere: not only out of the floor of the shell but sticking out sideways from the walls and upside down from the misty reaches of the ceiling. It looked as though they had grown there, budded out of the shell itself like mushrooms. Every bank and gambling hall and bakery and public house flashed with the same mother-of-pearl. Everything was Almanack and Almanack was everything. Fishwives cast nets in a pearly river that ran across a curve of spiral wall and should have spilled out all over the avenue and September herself, but somehow did not. People and creatures and carts walked and rolled along, chatting merrily, the men wearing fabulous anemones like corsages, the women tipping coral top hats to anyone they passed. A great pelican whose tail sported no feathers but flapped a long, diaphanous goldfish’s tail behind it wafted overhead, its hefty pouch filled with a tumult of mermaids splashing in a specially provided pool.

With a skittering thump, something barreled toward September, nearly crashing into a lovely, tall mother-of-pearl candelabra that lit the way into Almanack, only righting itself with a wild thrashing of four of its eight legs as it careened up on its side. It brought itself in hand with a thud and a scrabble and looked up at September with piercing, intelligent eyes: a broad, polished, black-and-white-checkered crab.

“Afternoon,” he said crisply. “Name’s Spoke and I’ll be your Taxicrab on this fine day. First visit to Almanack? I can always spot a first-timer. Can’t stop gawking at the ceiling. Sometimes they throw up! Please don’t throw up. I’ve just had a wash.”

September looked from the checkered crab to the green pearl ceiling and back again. “But I didn’t call for a…a Taxicrab,” she said softly.

“Who calls for one? Screamingly inefficient, if you ask me! Almanack takes care of all your needs. I suppose if you felt like insisting on it I could fetch you a walking map, but they’re a devil to catch and take at least four hands and an opposable tail to operate so it’s my professional opinion as a crabbie of venerable years that you ought to climb on and let me scuttle you wherever you need to scut!”

Indeed, a very comfortable-looking cushioned chair was strapped to the crab’s chessboard back with a number of enormous black belts. Throw pillows in all the shades of mother-of-pearl plumped invitingly along the seat.

“I’m afraid I haven’t got a fare…” September bit the inside of her cheek so as not to show the fullness of her embarrassment. How hard she had tried to avoid this! How carefully she’d saved!

The Taxicrab’s slender claws went snick-snick-crunch. “Fare? I don’t know the meaning of the word! You’re a fair young girl; I’m a fair old crab and I pinch my children equally when they’ve been wretched. But if you mean paying your way, like I summed it, Almanack looks after your littlest need before you know you’ve got one in your pocket. Hup, hup, hup! In you go, don’t be shy, I won’t drop you-well, I won’t drop you far. I’m low to the ground, which is how I spell safety!”

September could not help smiling. After the Blue Wind, she felt the crab’s cheerfulness wash over her like a hot and happy bath. She put her foot in one of the belt loops like a horse’s stirrup and hoisted herself onto the plush seat.

“Where to, my four-legged maid?”

“I haven’t got four legs! I think you must have miscounted.”

“Sure you have! Just like I’ve got ten. Oh, the ignorant will say eight, but my claws are for walking as well as snatching and pinching and digging. I daresay you could walk around on your hands and knees if you had a hankering to do it. And why slow yourself down by only using your body parts for only one thing each? Very limiting!”

September laughed and held a little tighter to the arms of her chair, suddenly not entirely certain of the sort of locomotion Spoke intended to use on her. “I’ve got to see the Whelk of the Moon, if you please,” she said nervously.

The Taxicrab made a burbling sound somewhere deep in his shell, an uncertain sort of giggle.

“Pardon and all but you’ll have to be more specific. Where there’s a Whelk there’s a way, I always say! Well, we all say. I can’t take credit. It’s the Taxicrab motto.”

“I… I don’t follow, sir. But I’ve got a lovely long casket”-she felt it best to talk up the box a little so no one would think it suspicious-“and I’m meant to bring it to the Whelk of the Moon and I hoped someone else would know who that was. I’m not from these parts-I’m not even from the parts this part is part of!”

The Taxicrab bubbled again. “Nup, nup, I’ve got you now. Don’t spin your head about it. I’ll spin it plenty on my ownsome!”

Spoke reared up like a pony, stabbed his fore-claws down into the stuff of the street, and launched forward with a tremendous vault, clearing streetlamps, a skating rink, and a throng of little Naiads with ribbons in their seafoam hair, who squealed in delight and waved their hands. They came down with a chin-jarring crunch near a shop full of round rice candy in the windows and skittered away so fast September’s hair blew back and her eyes watered. The Taxicrab obeyed no logic at all. He dashed up one wall and swerved toward the ceiling until September cried out in terror, having no seat belt and hanging nearly upside down. Then he leapt out, checkered legs splayed wide, and landed in some poor soul’s back garden, shredding their delicate snow-colored grapevines-which tore off and trailed out behind them like streamers when he leapt again.

“On your left you can see the Stationary Circus in all its splendor! Not far nor wide will you find dancing bears more nimble than ours, ringmasters more masterful, Lunaphants more buoyant!”

September looked down and leftward as best she could. She could see the dancing bears, the ringmaster blowing peonies out of her mouth like fire, an elephant floating in the air, her trunk raised, her feet in mid-foxtrot-and all of them paper. The skin of the bears was all folded envelopes; they stared out of sealing-wax eyes. The ringmaster wore a suit of birthday invitations dazzling with balloons and cakes and purple-foil presents; her face was a telegram. Even the elephant seemed to be made up of cast-off letterheads from some far-off office, thick and creamy and stamped with sure, bold letters. A long, sweeping trapeze swung out before them. Two acrobats held on, one made of grocery lists, the other of legal opinions. September could see Latin on the one and lemons, ice, bread (not rye!), and lamb chops on the other in a cursive hand. When they let go of the trapeze-bar, they turned identical flips in the air and folded out into paper airplanes, gliding in circles all the way back down to the peony-littered ring. September gasped and clapped her hands-but the acrobats were already long behind them, bowing and catching paper roses in their paper teeth.

“Up top you’ll find the College of Lunar Arts-home of the Lopsided Library and the Insomniac Coliseum. Oh! Too late, we’ve passed it-look faster! If you practice, your eyeballs can move so quick you can see yourself go by before you’ve even thought to leave!”

Everything flew by in a sleek swirl of color. September’s eyes swam. “Maybe a crab can!” She gasped.

“A Taxicrab must be as limber as time and twice as punctual!” Spoke rocketed over a vast expanse of pale, milky flowers waving sweetly. “Straight lines are a loser’s game! I once picked up an old lady hobgoblin, no bigger than a stump, eyes like a lantern fish! Got her to an appointment she missed when she was a maiden, just in time to give a man a donkey’s head, kick him twice, and still turn up early for supper.”

“You don’t mean to say-”

But they reared up again, dizzyingly, the house-cluttered ceiling of Almanack yawning into view and out again-and then the crab stopped short, claws clicking triumph.

“Here we are, Central Almanack, Executive District! Off you hop, no need for thanks, I’m wanted down the circus, careful now, my belts do like to tangle, there you are, safe and sound, and here I go-check your watch, I’ll get to the off-duty bear before she sees her bicycle’s sprung a flat! All in a day and a night, my girl, just look sharp and you’ll find your mark.”

And the Taxicrab was gone. His checkered body zoomed off faster than September’s eyes could follow.

Spoke had left her in a little grotto so thick with mother-of-pearl it humped up in stalagmites and antler-points and great dark bulbs. A thin filigree net stitched with tiny specks of light like fireflies hung high up above her head. Bowls of liquid lay on every flat surface, as though a great party had just ended and no one had finished their drinks. Down in the heart of the grotto stood a very pale, very small, very beautiful person. After a moment, September caught her breath-how jangled and bashed about she felt after the quake and the crab!-and started down the rills and hillocks of hard, slick colors. The person stood in a kind of alcove, very still.

“Welcome.” The voice seemed to come from all over, an echo of an echo. “I am Almanack.”

September could not tell if Almanack was a man or a woman. The creature had long, silken hair the color of rosewater candy, and a delicate, pointed face. Long, peach-pale tendrils uncoiled everywhere, looping like vines around draped satin and gauze that covered its body, dipping into the bowls wherever they found them. Almanack had at least six hands, four folded gracefully and two open, held out toward September.

“I beg your pardon,” she said shyly, a little out of breath and a little overcome. “I thought the city was Almanack.”

Almanack smiled; its lips colored deeper to a dusky ginger. It spoke very kindly. “The city is Almanack, little one, but Almanack is me. It is my shell; it grows out of me, more and more and longer and wider each year. When one of my folk needs a thing, I provide. I squeeze shut my eyes and push out a house for them, or a mountain, or a museum for umbrellas. Almanack,” it said softly, “takes care of all your needs before you know you have them. I am the Whelk of the Moon. What is it you need, little rushing bashful two-legged beast?”

“All of this, all of it, the circus and the college and the lawns and the river-it’s all you? Your…your body? People are living inside you?” After a moment, September added: “And I am not a beast.”

A rosy ripple moved through Almanack’s cotton candy hair. “A Whelk will grow as big as it’s allowed before it is eaten or crushed or starved. Give it a little crystal bottle and you will have a little crystal Whelk. Give it an ocean and who knows where it will end? Give it a moon and you get…me. I have never been eaten or crushed or starved.” One of its tendrils found a fresh bowl and sank into the burgundy liquid there. Almanack shut its eyes in joy. “Forgive me, I am hungry. I am forever hungry. It takes so much to feed me now. I am vast. Vastness longs for vastness, don’t you find?” After a moment, the Whelk added: “And we are all beasts.”

September nodded shyly, perfectly willing to defer to the Whelk’s opinion on such things, not being very vast herself.

Almanack opened its four folded hands, holding them out, pearly palms showing. “I was once unvast, like you. I dimly remember it. But even then, barnacles and mussels lived on the outside of me and little marine mites lived in me, so tiny you couldn’t see them-but I could hear them, their invisible briny holidays and squabbles over philosophy. We are safe in the shell; outside the shell we are not safe. There is not much to a mite’s mind, but what there is, is gentle and uncomplicated. As I grew, I could hear them less and less, and I became lonely. One day a bishop-fish walked into me-I’d grown so large she thought I must be empty and available for a nice hermitage. She wore a miter on her trouty head bigger than she was, and her legs were a jumble of fish-hooks with but a little skin left. We got on very well. Her philosophy had more starch in it, dialectics and philippics and things, but it came to the same in the end: We are safe in the shell; outside the shell we are not safe. More and more came, and they needed so much. The first time I made a hut grow I thought I would die from happiness. I watched my bishop-fish fall asleep in it and I sang to her. Haven’t you ever wanted to give someone everything they needed, to make them safe within your own arms, to feed them and keep all harm outside?”

September thought of her father and the soreness in his leg and his heart and his memory. She thought of her mother, so worried and tired all the time. And she thought suddenly of Saturday, who had once been locked into a cage so small he could not stand up.

“As I got bigger, that feeling got bigger in me until it was big enough for all,” Almanack went on. “My heart is a house with room to spare. I wanted to make the marine mites’ philosophy true. Perhaps my philosophy is not so sophisticated. It goes: Come inside. I love you. A Whelk’s love will grow as big as it’s allowed.” Almanack sipped a distant bowl of inky black syrup with one of its tendrils. “There. I have turned the lights on in the college dormitories. A whole bank of lamps in the shapes of their least favorite professors, just to make the students laugh.”

“Aren’t you afraid they’ll use you all up? There’s so many people, and only one of you!”

Almanack closed its pink eyes. “They are all hungry, too, you know. At the bottom of philosophy something very true and very desperate whispers: Everyone is hungry all the time. Everyone is starving. Everyone wants so much, more than they can stomach, but the appetite doesn’t converse much with the stomach. Everyone is hungry and not only for food-for comfort and love and excitement and the opposite of being alone. Almost everything awful anyone does is to get those things and keep them. Even the mites and the mussels. But no one can use you up unless you let them.” Almanack gave a great and happy sigh. “The whole point of growing is to get big enough to hold the world you want inside you. But it takes a long time, and you really must eat your vegetables, and most often you have to make the world you want out of yourself.”

September’s eyes tingled with tears. Of all the Fairy strangeness she had known, this seemed suddenly both the strangest and least strange of all. How she would have liked to be looked after like that, cared for and watched over. And yet at the same time, she understood the Whelk, and wished she could grow big enough to hold on to everyone she loved at once. To keep them safe and with her always and know their secret needs well enough to answer them. When she spoke, her throat had got thick and tight.

“And what do you eat?”

“I eat their hunger. When a soul inside me longs for something, a bowl fills. As I make a hut or a streetlamp or a hippodrome or a cabaret, I drink up their need and am satisfied when they are satisfied. I am sustained by Being Necessary.”

“That’s very strange.”

Almanack’s deep green eyes shone. “Is it? Have you done a long, hard thing for the sake of someone you loved, so long and so hard that your body shook with the difficulty of it, that you were thirsty and aching and ravenous by the time it was done, but it did not matter, you did not even feel the thirst or the pain or the hunger, because you were doing what was Necessary?”

“Yes,” September whispered. She could feel the salt of the Perverse and Perilous Sea on her skin as if it still caked there. As if she were still sailing around Fairyland to save her friends.

“Then it is not so strange. Being Necessary is food no less than cabbages and strawberry pies. And surely if you have come all this way, you need something from me. Say it and I will do my best. I cannot do everything, but folk who can do everything are terrible bores.”

September’s heart sang out inside her: I need to find Saturday and A-Through-L, I need to touch them and see them and smell them and hear them and to not walk in Fairyland alone. I want a lovely adventure where no one carries a hurt around with them like a satchel or tries to force a country like a door. But she did not say it. She remembered her errand. You do your job and you mind your work. Besides, she did not live in Almanack. She was not one of its folk-it would not be right to go about bellowing demands, and selfish demands at that. September held her heart down while it trumpeted its desires and bit her cheek until she felt she could speak safely without blurting it out.

Oh, September! It is such hard work to keep your heart hidden! And worse, by the time you find it easy, it will be harder still to show it. It is a terrible magic in this world to ask for exactly the thing you want. Not least because to know exactly the thing you want and look it in the eye is a long, long labor. How I long to draw the curtain through this grotto, take September by the serious and stalwart shoulders and tell her the secret of growing up! But I cannot. It is against the rules. Even I am bound by some rules.

“A Wind asked me to bring this to you,” September said instead. “I don’t know what it is, but I came an awfully long way to give it to you.”

Almanack’s elfin face opened up in an expression of enormous delight and gratitude. “Thank you, child! How wonderfully thoughtful of you.” Using all six of its rosy hands, the Whelk of the Moon pried at the lid of the carved ivory box.

But it would not open.

Almanack explored the lock with several of its tendrils. It put its tongue between its teeth as it worked at the mechanism.

But it would not open.

Suddenly, the Whelk of the Moon thumped the box hard with its uppermost right fist. September laughed at the peaceful Whelk’s pummeling.

But it would not open.

“I am so deeply sorry, my small friend,” it said, holding out the four arms which did not still cradle the casket. September stepped into them, hardly knowing why. The Whelk of the Moon wrapped its arms around her. Its skin was warm. Shaking its head, it murmured finally into September’s hair:

“I fear you will have to take it to the Librarian.”