Scratch kicked his long brass legs like a dance-hall girl as Gertrude the Green Lamp clicked on, then off, then on again, rocking from side to side on her squat, round base, then leapt to the floor and bounced madcap round the bedroom, her light flashing on and off, faster and faster, while the gramophone sang:
How ’ya gonna keep ’em, down on farm,
After they’ve seen Paree?
Thomas ran through the house, writing with his paper propped on the wall, on the dining table, on the floor, on his knee. Dear Hephaestus, Who Is a Woodstove with One Dented Burner; Dear Ophelia, Who Is a Vase of Five Sort of Wilted Irises; Dear Grandfather Horatio, Who Is a Grandfather Clock! And Hephaestus roared in patterns of flame and dark, and Ophelia opened and closed her blossoms and bounced along with Gertrude in a foxtrot, and Grandfather Horatio bonged out seventeen o’clock. Tamburlaine looked up from her painting and tilted her head to one side. The apartment quaked with stomping and crowing.
“You only asked them to talk. You didn’t give them mouths. They’re like Scratch; they talk with the parts they have. Though Gertrude seems to know Morse code.”
The green glass lamp flashed gleefully: long, short, long, long.
Under her hands a chartreuse tree was growing. Its leaves unfurled in ultramarine, boiling hot colors dripping with light.
Thomas looked up at the chandelier in the parlor.
“Will-o’-the-wisp, if you come out today I shall love you until I am dead.”
Thomas wrote to the chandelier. He called her Citrine as he always had. I shall not tell you what he wrote, for some things that pass between a boy and a lighting fixture are secret and strange. He got up onto a ladder and coiled the note around one of the silver flourishes hung with crystal. He waited. His heart felt as though it were bursting and collapsing back and bursting again.
Nothing happened. No will-o’-the-wisp soared up out of the lights and settled on his shoulder. Thomas shook his head. It was the first disappointment of his new world. He tried to reason it out. To invent a rule, for rules give one a little kingship over disappointments. It was not, after all, Thomas’s fault if he had run afoul of a Law of the Universe. They weren’t posted; he hadn’t known.
“I think maybe I can’t make new things,” he called out to Tamburlaine, who was shading a stained-glass pinecone in maroon. “Just wake things up. Have you ever made anything new, something that wasn’t there before?” And in his heart he thought: Is this what a troll does? Is this troll magic?
But Tamburlaine did not answer. She was too full of her new trees.
Dear Arabesque, Who Is a Girl Dancing with Orchids in the Hallway Painting… Thomas began to write. He concentrated so fiercely that he did not see a pair of crystal legs bathed in daffodil-colored light unfold from the ceiling and pirouette down. He did not see the slender, gentle body of teardrop-shaped crystals, nor the hair of silver curling chandelier arms, nor the glowing eyes of round glass bulbs until he turned round to take his new note to the girl in the hallway painting. Thomas stared at Citrine. She stared back. Not a will-o’-the-wisp—alive all the same. She smiled with her glittering glass mouth and swept up Thomas into her arms, spinning him in a crystalline polka round the apartment, grabbing Tamburlaine as they passed the bedroom, clutching her with jeweled fingers, making a clumsy, hopping, lovely three-person step from corner to corner to corner. Scratch leapt along behind them, singing, moving his needle double-quick, back and forth across the record:
How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm,
After they’ve seen Paree?
But then, in the second hour, Thomas was compelled to teach the citizens of his new world a game, for Nicholas and Gwendolyn would not stay away forever. The wild objects of Apartment #7 gathered close round: the green glass lamp and the vase of irises leaned in, the woodstove strained to hear from the kitchen, the draperies swirled open and shut, the grandfather clock put his hands into his best attentive position. The girl in the painting put down her orchids and stood on tiptoe. The chandelier sat cross-legged on the parlor rug. Blunderbuss snoozed, uninterested, her yarn nose twitching.
“Everybody, please, listen, this is very important!” Thomas cried. “We must learn a game, all together. It’s a very easy game. It’s called Red Light, Green Light.”
The green lamp flashed delightedly.
“Yes, I expect you’ll be very good at it, Gertrude! Now, when I say Green Light, we can all do as we like and roll about and pounce and howl. But when I say Red Light, you must freeze, back in your old places, and hold your breath, and not move even a little. Red Light means someone is coming who wouldn’t understand why you are all suddenly interested in pouncing, and might take us all to the dump if they found out. Let’s try? Red Light!”
The house eagerly leapt to order. They practiced all afternoon, except Blunderbuss, who slept the hours away below Tamburlaine’s chartreuse pine, snoring up into the blue needles, each one a tiny rapier glinting under the stars of a faraway place.
In the third hour, Blunderbuss begged Thomas to take her to school.
“In the Land of Wom, we learn by fighting! If you spy a wombat who looks like he might know something you don’t, you sneak along behind him while he’s looking for grasses to eat and when he thinks he is very safe, you LEAP out and POUNCE on him! You bite his NECK and dig your claws into his RUMP! You hold him down till the things he knows start trying to wiggle out so that at least they can escape your wrath alive. Out of his furry wombat muzzle might shoot snowballs with the formula to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius written in the ice! Papayas with seeds who bear the faces of all the Prime Ministers of Wom, in chronological order! Painted eggs you can crack open and suck out the Code of Hammurabi! Did you know Hammurabi was part wombat? Well, children are ignorant these days. I want to go to this Kingdom of School and fight humans for their know-how! Who knows what I can pummel out of them?”
“Nothing,” Thomas begged her. “That’s not how it works here. You can’t pummel them at all. If I take you tomorrow, if I take you, you must stay completely silent. The Reddest of Red Lights! You must stay in my satchel and not come out until it is all over. Promise, Blunderbuss. Or you stay home with Gertrude and her flashing will give you a nasty headache.”
Blunderbuss reared up on her squat black-and-white hind legs. She held up one turquoise paw. “I solemnly swear on the soul of Wattle, the great wombat empress who stood up to the kangaroos and told them what’s what. I will stay in your satchel and not make so much as a snort.”
In the fourth hour, Tamburlaine began a new tree to the left of the stained-glass pine, a violently violet willow whose drooping branches sprouted all over with pocket watches. And Thomas got very close to Blunderbuss’s woolen ear and said: “You called me a troll.”
“What I see I say, and what I says I seen, I sawed,” nodded the scrap-yarn wombat.
“But I don’t look like a troll. I’ve looked at heaps of pictures of trolls, and they’re…they’re so-so much prettier than me.”
“A wombat also sees with her nose. And her teeth. You reek like a troll and you taste like a troll. Don’t worry, it’s a nice reek. Mossy and muddy and a little like a diamond. In the Land of Wom, we collect reeks like stamps. When I was a bub I had a book with twelve kinds of cockatrice reek in it. Would have knocked you down dead just to turn the page.”
Thomas tried to smell himself, but he only smelled like Thomas to his own nose. Is it true? Would a wombat lie to him? What if she was right?
In the fifth hour, Tamburlaine’s third tree sprang up, an applejack tree whose fruit were glassy green flasks sloshing with powerful cider. She worked so fast it made her pant and sweat. The way she stared at the forest on his wall made Thomas shiver. A gaze like that could set a poor unsuspecting wall on fire. He sat back while the apartment thundered around him, creatures running up every which ceiling, laughing and chattering in their many peculiar tongues. The girl in the painting waved at him; he waved back. Though he did not know it, A
partment #7 now looked very like a house in Fairyland. It was nearly an outpost of Fairyland itself, so thickly did it swarm with magic.
In the sixth hour, Thomas Rood cast about for some new thing to enchant. The icebox was too big, really. An icebox come alive was too close to a Yeti to keep in an apartment. The jewelry on his beloved coat seemed like a good prospect, but then he should not have the coat any longer, once the necklaces on its shoulders had minds of their own.
In the depths of his satchel, having waited patiently for its moment, Thomas’s baseball stirred.
It rolled forward, pushed open the flap of the satchel, and peeked out, its red stitches gleaming invitingly. Look at me, Tom, the ball seemed to whisper. How much fun I am! But Tom was considering the virtues of his Sunday suit coming to life and not paying attention where it ought to be paid, thank you very much. But the ball was quite proud. It would not be ignored. It nudged forward again, boldly tumbling out onto the floor where it could not be missed.
“My old ball!” cried Thomas. “Oh, yes! It’s perfect! Just this last one, I think. It’s getting late.”
“It is,” sighed Tamburlaine, rubbing her eyes. “But I don’t want to go home yet, Tom! Just a little longer? There hasn’t been room on my wall for three whole trees since I don’t know when!”
Thomas ran to her and squeezed her tight, and this was the second world they made, though if we told them they’d done it, the Changelings wouldn’t know a bit what we were on about. Tamburlaine, who hardly let anyone touch her besides her parents, lest they feel the hardness of her shoulders, her arms, her hands, stiffened with panic. And then smiled, where Thomas could not see.
“One more, then,” he whispered in her ear, and using her back as a desk, dashed out his note. To be honest, he had begun to get a little sloppy with his requests, as everyone seemed to come out right no matter what he wrote. Anyway, he thought, it’s good to be brief and to the point. That’s what Mr. Wolcott says.
Dear Baseball, Which I Have Had Since Forever and a Little Longer,
Please come alive this very moment and be able to walk and talk and think and fly even farther than you could when you were just a baseball that couldn’t walk and talk and think. And please forgive me for not playing with you very much. It is not your fault you are not a book and therefore not one of my favorite things. Please be one of my favorite things now!
Thank you!
Thomas Michael Rood
A baseball has nowhere convenient to put a note, which flummoxed Thomas for a moment. Tamburlaine left off her fourth tree, half finished, only the bare outlines of the rest sketched out. It just so happened to be a hawthorn, full of glittering, many-colored toads with runes on their ballooning throats, all singing together in its branches. She took the paper from him and wrapped it around the baseball good and tight. So we must admit that Thomas did not do it alone, and cannot be blamed completely. The two of them can share, like a very unpleasant lunch.
Tom put the ball down in the center of his room. Blunderbuss snuffled at it. Scratch leaned in, murmuring:
Ain’t we got fun?
At first it seemed a dud—the ball sat stubbornly and did nothing. The paper did not even crinkle. But then, slowly, it rocked back and forth, back and forth, swelling with each forth. The notepaper shredded into snow. It grew to the size of a basketball, a beach ball, a mammoth prize pumpkin from some terrifying county fair. Thomas and Tamburlaine clutched each other’s hands. Nothing else had grown huge and frightening. Gertrude had no awful ambition to light the whole of Chicago. But the baseball kept on growing. Finally, one by one, the hundred and thirty-six stitches popped with one hundred and thirty-six sounds like muskets firing.
And the baseball unfolded, unwrapped, unbaseballed into a great creature glaring at them with fiery magenta eyes. His clothes were white as the skin of the baseball, but now they were rough pale furs. Every kind of jewel that ever thought of shining clung to his cloaks. His nose bulged, barrel-thick, hanging down so far as to hide his mouth and mustache the tops of his golden lips—and those lips covered golden sharp teeth and a golden tongue. Furry green eyebrows concealed his gaze. His bald head had been tattooed with astrological gibberish, the graffiti of a hundred royal stargazers. He had scars all over his wrinkled skin, puncture wounds, as though long ago someone had sewn him up like a purse.
The creature panted. His eyes burned, actual flames flickering in his dark pink irises. His golden fangs showed wickedly. Tamburlaine bared hers, and reached out a slow, careful hand to pull Scratch closer. I know what that is, thought Thomas. I’ve seen one. In my books. If only he weren’t blocking my shelf I could look him up…
But he did not get a chance. Blunderbuss leapt forward, dropping onto the floor between the children and the beast, growling, her own cloak-clasp teeth showing, her wool bristling in lavender, olive, burgundy, black.
And the beast roared. He put his head back, all its wild symbols crawling over his skull, and howled from the depths of his gold-plated soul. He swept his right arm round and seized Blunderbuss and Thomas in the crook of his enormous elbow, then swept his left arm and grabbed Tamburlaine and Scratch. Thomas’s feet snagged on the strap of his satchel as they left the ground. Everyone screamed together, Scratch screeched as his record skipped, Tam beat at the creature’s biceps. Blunderbuss cursed in Wom. Thomas reached back over that giant forearm at his wonderful new world of Apartment #7, 3 Racine Avenue. That brand-new dancing, all-alive world froze in horror as the jeweled baseball-monster took one savage leap—and disappeared into the painted forest on Thomas Rood’s bedroom wall.
“Red Light,” the girl in the hallway painting whispered, and dropped her orchids to the ground.
INTERLUDE
AN EQUATION IS A PROPHECY
THAT ALWAYS COMES TRUE
In Which Something Rumbles Most Dreadfully
The gears of Fairyland are trembling.
Deep beneath the bruisey-purple sea that washes the ruins of the Lonely Gaol, great stone cogs turn one against the other, biting, grinding, clunking, sending up strange bubbles to the surface. The teeth of the gears thunder into each other, the gears of our world slipping into the gears of Fairyland, which slip into the gears of other worlds entirely, worlds with names one can only pronounce with three tongues, penguin beaks, or flashes of pink and black light. The gears have turned forever, for as long as stars have known about combustion, as long as hydrogen and oxygen have known they were meant to love each other and make baby oceans. The gears of Fairyland have gone about their business for all that time, mostly uneventfully, only troubled by the occasional earthquake or wrestling match.
But now, they wobble. They quiver, like frightened kittens caught out of doors at suppertime. They tilt back and forth like tops’ heads, churning the water to white foam. The sea above them is an upset stomach, heaving and rolling in sour distress. The bubbles that break on the waves have whispers trapped inside them now, whispers that sigh free when they pop:
Help, they cry.
And somewhere, a girl we know very well is trying. She keeps a very tidy desk, though her fingernails are black crescent moons of inkblots, freshened every day like polish. She keeps her hair braided up round her head so that it cannot get in the way. She has a mole on her left cheek and her feet are very large and ungainly. She can hear the gears rumbling, because she once bled on them, and spilled blood never quite forgets where it came from. She has ruined pages and pages with equations, scribbled, printed, crossed out, circled in nine different colors. The girl has learned that Fairy equations have only the vaguest acquaintance with numbers. They are more like pictures, like prophecies that always come true. They are more like stories. A child equals the mass of Fairyland times the speed of luck squared. She has become good at them, or they have become good at her. Her pages look more like comic books than mathematics. Every once in a while, the variables balance—but not often enough. The girl is trying, trying for her life, but she cannot make x equal everything back
the way it was.
CHAPTER X
THE PAINTED FOREST
In Which Thomas Finds Himself in a New Suit of Clothes, Tamburlaine Meets Several Familiar Trees, a Baseball Throws a Tantrum, and a Wombat Imitates a Gatling Gun
It is a little-known fact that when one jumps through a bedroom wall, one does not so much land on the other side as spill. And when the five of them spilled into the bright, sunny day beyond the bedroom, they found themselves running, running already before they had any earth at all underneath them, not even knowing why it was so vital that they must run, their legs working in the air like fish gasping on a countertop. They spilled, running, into a forest so vivid and sore with color that the many little scratches and scrapes Thomas and Tamburlaine had got on the trip, dirty and stinging with bits of drywall and insulation, bled a little more freely and redly just to match. Trees stretched up in throbbing crimson, tangerine, aquamarine, glittering gold, opal-black. Their branches thatched a stained-glass roof over their heads, filtering the sun into prisms and silvery darts. They ran through mud like swirling paint, clingy and sticky and striped like candy.
A tree whizzed by on one side, a tree with a hundred white-gloved hands reaching out of it, offering little clay pots of syrup. Tamburlaine skidded to a stop. Blunderbuss ran headlong into her, knocking her flat into the mud. Thomas and Scratch wheeled round, suddenly unable to remember why they had been running so fiercely in the first place. The great thing Thomas’s baseball had become stopped too, shaking his head like a bear troubled greatly by bees.