The Boy Who Lost Fairyland

  “Is your mom home?” Thomas asked, dumbfounded. His voice sounded too loud in his own ears. He had books, of course, and so did his parents. But their books…their books behaved. They didn’t grow and sprawl and soar. They didn’t gobble up a house like they were hungry.

  “She’s at a Ladies Auxiliary meeting,” Tamburlaine murmured. “We have a couple of hours. Maybe you can stay for dinner.”

  For some reason, this struck her as unreasonably funny, and Tamburlaine laughed shakily, her laugh bursting free of her like bubbles from a soda bottle. She laughed too long, holding her stomach. Thomas waited. He thought maybe she was laughing so that she could put off whatever came next just a little longer. But laughs, even the best and most dearly needed of laughs, have a natural life span, and hers finally died on the battlefield of her nerves. She had nothing else to stand between her and having to explain what had happened on the baseball field that day. So she just sighed, walked straight up to her trouble, and asked it in for cake.

  “When you were little,” Tamburlaine said carefully, “were you ever afraid of the monster under the bed?”

  “Sure,” Thomas said. “Everyone is. It’s Normal.”

  Tamburlaine narrowed her eyes. “Yes, thank you. But…were you really afraid? Did you really think it could get you and eat you up in the dark?”

  Thomas felt sweat bead up behind his ears. There was no breeze in the house of books. Not enough air. That lime-green lady on the gramophone wouldn’t shut up about her apple blossoms, either. He remembered Gwendolyn lifting her pretty hand to turn out the light before bed. Begging her not to. Please, Mom! Leave the light!

  “No,” he whispered. “Not really.”

  “Why not?”

  Thomas remembered his mother laughing in a warm, thick, encouraging way, in the back of her throat. She saved that laugh for the rare occasion when he said something a Normal child might say. Oh, darling, are you afraid of the dark? Shall I check for monsters under the bed? Will that make you feel better? And the look on her face when he answered, like he’d just unzipped his skin in front of her. He couldn’t bear the thought of Tamburlaine’s face twisting into that same expression.

  “Thomas, why weren’t you afraid? Did you not believe in monsters?”

  “No, I believed in monsters.”

  Tamburlaine had wooden bones. He’d seen it. He’d seen her blood oozing sticky sap.

  “Then why not? Like you said, everyone’s afraid of them. It’s normal.”

  He could tell her the truth. She wanted him to tell her. That he’d never been afraid. That he only wanted his mother to leave the light on so he could read.

  Monsters don’t live under the bed, Mom. Don’t be silly. It’s dirty down there.

  He took a deep breath.

  My clever son. Where do they live, then?

  Thomas lifted his eyes to Tamburlaine’s, searching. What did she want? He’d seen her wounded—did she want to see what he looked like on the inside? It seemed suddenly that standing in this hallway talking about what lived under the bed was quite the strangest thing to happen to him today. A girl with sap for blood didn’t compete. He would tell her. He would.

  “I wasn’t afraid of monsters under the bed because I was the monster on top of the bed,” Thomas confessed. His face burned in the half-light of the house.

  Tamburlaine breathed relief. Her soapbox smile raced across her face. She nodded twice. “Okay. Okay. Do you want to see my room?”

  Now, in the Kingdom of School, to be asked into another child’s room is like being asked inside their heart. Thomas knew that. It was Inspector Balloon’s Rule #309. Your room is where you keep yourself, or at least all the parts of yourself that live on the outside. It’s a shadowy lair, a thief’s den of favorite objects and pictures and books, toys you’re meant to have outgrown, as if you could ever outgrow a creature made only to love you and be loved by you. Your secret possessions—diaries and notes passed under desks and treasures hoarded from summer trips to the seashore, some few things your parents don’t know you have, a novel you’re too young to read, a pack of gum you swiped from the corner store last Autumn, too exciting to throw away, too shameful to chew. A child’s room is no different from a Wyvern’s nest—it is full of cloth and bone-trophies left over when the meat of music and reading and dreaming has been devoured, and all of it warms the egg of passions and pleasures and secrets waiting to become a Grown-Up Beast.

  Thomas had never asked anyone into his room. He had played in Max’s and Franco’s and William’s, though they had too many toy soldiers and not enough of anything else. Would a girl’s room be different? Was it somehow more serious to play in a girl’s room? At least he was pretty confident she would have more books than soldiers.

  Tamburlaine led him down a hall so swaddled in books he had to turn sideways to squeeze through. He almost apologized to the books for disturbing them, but caught himself in time. Tamburlaine’s house seemed more a place where books kept their people than where people kept their books.

  The neat, dark door at the end of the hall stood shut. Thomas knew without being told that Vampire Law held sway here—he could enter only if invited. She’d said he could see it, she hadn’t asked him in. Suddenly Thomas’s heart beat very fast. He had no reason to feel nervous—this wasn’t a stranger’s room! He had known Tamburlaine since they were tiny children. But he had never been alone with her, not really alone. Grown-Ups talked about not leaving boys and girls Alone Together in quiet, concerned voices. As if something terrible might happen if a boy and a girl were brought too near each other without shields and swords. As if they were baking soda and vinegar and only the presence of other people kept them from becoming a volcano.

  They were Alone Together now. Nothing had happened. The book-sodden air in the hall felt thick and hot. Thomas had the alarming thought that the books were breathing on him, blowing their thousands of words onto the back of his neck.

  Tamburlaine laughed and shook her head—and the thick hotness broke, like a Summer storm.

  “Come on, Thomas. It won’t bite you.”

  But it did.

  She had a bed and a desk and a lamp and a chest of drawers and all the usual things that make a bedroom a bedroom and not a kitchen. Her bed and her desk didn’t trouble him—it was everything else. Tamburlaine’s room had no books in it. She had made some sort of treaty with the rest of the house. The marauding books left this one place uncolonized. But really, really, Thomas thought, there was no room for books in here. They would only get in the way. Thomas felt thick and hot again—and thirsty and unsteady. He wanted to sit down, but where could he sit?

  All over the walls, all over the floor, all over the ceiling and the window frames and the wardrobe door, Tamburlaine had painted a forest.

  He knew she’d done it. The forest started on the back of the bedroom door, and the forest on the back of the bedroom door was not very good. It was a little kid’s idea of a forest: Stick-figure trees with big squiggly leaves splashed in splotches of screamingly bright green, a not-quite-round yellow sun, handprint flowers made by dipping little fingers in pink and blue and purple paint. But as the woods wound on around the room and over the floorboards, they grew deeper and wilder and thicker as the painter learned, the colors and shapes smoothing out, becoming more graceful, more deft, until the thicket around Tamburlaine’s bed looked so real you could fall into it.

  But it wasn’t any forest Thomas had heard of. It wasn’t Sherwood or the Forest of Arden or the Shawnee National Forest. All Thomas could think was: It looks like Hansel and Gretel’s forest. Or Snow White’s. If they were real. Better than if they were real. Some of the trees had deep sapphire-colored leaves, with glowing fruit hanging from them like pale-blue lanterns. Some were startlingly white from root to leaf-tip, but swarmed with bloodred and blood-purple butterflies. Wide, curious green eyes stared from the backs of their wings, reflected in still pools and streams. Some of the trees burned with a beautiful scarlet fire, and f
rom the flaming trees flaming birds burst up like peacocks startled into fireworks. One pine bristled with delicate, decorated daggers, the kind Italian nobles hid in their coats when they had wicked business to do. Even the trees that looked like trees seemed to be hiding creatures in their green depths. Red tails snaked around dark trunks, bright, wicked eyes sparkled from shadows, spangled hooves danced just out of sight. Delicate wisps of smoke rose from invisible chimneys, drifting and coiling up to the ceiling, which glowed indigo and white, blazing with stars, with constellations Thomas did not recognize—and he was on social terms with Orion and Auriga and Taurus and Cassiopeia and both Ursas. The forest floor, the floor of the bedroom, clotted and boiled over with wildflowers. When Thomas looked down at the peonies and lobelias and snapdragons, he could see impossibly tiny little cities in their petals, all full of towers and alleys the color of Spring blossoms.

  It was no place he had ever seen.

  But how horribly, achingly, quiveringly familiar it shone! Looking into Tamburlaine’s wood was like looking at a photograph of your parents when they were young. Who are those strange people? Could they ever have been real?

  Thomas wanted to look at his friend. He wanted to tell her she was awfully good at painting. He wanted to say it was the most wonderful room in the whole world. But he couldn’t stop staring into the wild, wandering paths of the wood, trying to peer in toward whatever they led to. The lime-green lady’s voice seemed louder, more insistent, closer. She’d finished her apple blossoms now and was on to green and yellow baskets.

  “You did this,” he said at last. His voice was raspy and soft, like snagged wool. It was not a question.

  “Yes,” Tamburlaine whispered. Anything but a whisper seemed wrong just now.

  “By yourself.”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “Do you mean how do you draw something so it looks like it has depth and shadow, or how do you paint something this big? Daddy bought me the paint and the brushes. On Easter I get baskets of paint tubes. The brightest and darkest colors. I haven’t asked for anything for Christmas and birthdays since I was four other than painting lessons. I still need to learn how to do people. I can’t get it right. Mom says I can have the garden shed when she gets around to clearing it out. Because I’m almost out of room here. There’s just the inside of the wardrobe left. I never paint over mistakes—you can see the parts where I hadn’t got good yet. Okay, once I made a mountain just there, there—” She pointed at the wall around a tall window, which now showed a maple tree with leaves of delicate ice. A hundred little doors opened in the wood of its trunk. Out of some of the doors, elegant gloved hands stretched out, presenting porcelain pots of syrup on their palms. “A mountain with a big church window in it. But it wasn’t right, I knew it wasn’t right. It hurt me how much it wasn’t right. I couldn’t sleep. So I rolled Eggshell White over it and crawled back into bed and didn’t wake up for two whole days. I was more careful after that. To get it right.”

  “How do you know what’s right?”

  Tamburlaine looked down at her floor of incandescent flowers. She twisted her long hair in her fingers.

  “Thomas…”

  Thomas couldn’t breathe. He felt like his head was going to come off and fly up to the sun like a lost balloon. He knew, he knew what she was going to say, even though she hadn’t decided yet whether to say it. It was going to be Something Awfully Big.

  “How do you know?” he said again. Thomas looked away from the painted forest, into her fretful hickory-hazel eyes. It’s a secret, her eyes pleaded. It’s a secret and if you tell a secret the secret comes alive and can never be kept safe at home again. Tears gleamed on her cheeks. Her face grew red and warm. She clenched her fists at her sides and looked up helplessly at her private night sky.

  “I remember it,” Tamburlaine said, and she did not say it quietly. She said it clear and loud, daring him to laugh at her or call her crazy or any of the thousand cruel things Other Children might do. But then she lowered her voice to a library hush. “Thomas, I know a place where everything is alive.”

  The troll that had slept in Thomas’s heart for so many years jolted up, wide awake. It jumped and leapt and tugged its hair and turned backward somersaults. It laughed and sang along with the lime-green lady and beat its chest. It tried to climb up out of his heart and into his throat, into his mouth, into his head. But it was not strong enough. Thomas had been human so long that the pounding and hollering and galumphing of his troll-self just felt awful, like starving for food while sick to his stomach. His human body wanted to stay human, and it punished his troll-self whenever it tried to wake.

  “I don’t exactly remember it,” Tamburlaine said slowly, searching his eyes for understanding, for panic, for how much it was safe to say. “Or I don’t remember it exactly. It’s like…it’s like a dream I had while I was dreaming. Or like trying to remember a book I read when I had a fever, only the book had a fever, too. I remember it in scraps and handfuls. I chase it through my head, and it’s always faster than me. Sometimes I’m eating eggs at breakfast and I just can’t taste them anymore because I’m tasting something like sarsaparilla and coffee and molten gold and hot sugared limes mixed all up and my mouth is so full of that taste I feel like it must be dribbling out all over my chin, but it isn’t, because it’s only eggs. It’s only eggs and I’m remembering something from There, something that tastes like sarsaparilla and coffee and molten gold and hot sugared limes and rolls down my throat like cream-velvet. And eggs get ruined, ruined forever, because they’ll only taste like disappointment now. I can barely eat anything. I’m down to oatmeal and fried bread and cinnamon candy and persimmons and trout. Everything else tastes like it’s making fun of me. Teasing me because it knows it could taste like moonlight and whipped cream and watercress and teardrops, but it won’t, just to spite me. And sometimes I wake up and I know that some trees have clocks for fruit and if you eat one you’ll age sideways, even if I haven’t the faintest idea what that even means. But not here. Trees here have fruit for fruit. There. There is a real place. I came from There. Somehow I started There. And I think—I think—I could be really, really wrong—but I think you did, too.”

  The troll inside Thomas pranced and whirled. He felt dizzy. The gramophone music pounded on his head now, so awfully loud and close. “I…I don’t understand,” he stuttered. “I’m not like you. I broke my arm trying to climb up to the chandelier when I was four, so I know. When I’m hurt it’s nothing interesting. Red blood and crying. I’m just a boy. I’m Normal.”

  “Everyone’s interesting when they’re hurt,” Tamburlaine said in a curious voice. She scratched the back of her neck. “Stay here. I want to show you something.”

  Tamburlaine sprang up and out of her painted, wondrous forest. He could hear her rummaging, knocking things over, stacking them back up again. She returned, out of breath, her arms full of books—big, wide, illustrated ones with ribbonmarks and colored edges. She laid them down in front of him one by one like gifts. Thomas the Rhymer. The King of Elfland’s Daughter. The Compleat Childe Ballads. Tam Lin.

  “This is us,” she said softly, touching the books with her long fingers. “Heaven knows why they allow books like this in the world. Lying about without locks, where anyone, anywhere might just pick them up! It’s like leaving instructions for making tornados at the bus station!”

  Thomas shook his head. He had read those books. (Well, not all of them. There were just so many of those ballads.) Maybe they were about her. Girls who were wooden on the inside, like Pinocchio, sure. But they weren’t about him. Even as he shook his head, Thomas started to cry. He wanted her to be right. He wanted to be Thomas the Rhymer instead of just Thomas the Un-Normal, Thomas the Patient of Dr. Malory, Thomas the Interviewed by Three Separate Schools for the Disturbed This Week. He wanted to be Tam Lin, he wanted to be special, but he wasn’t, he wasn’t. It was her, Tamburlaine—Tam! It was even in her name!

  The troll in
him cried out to be heard: It is us, it is! Listen!

  “Look at me, Thomas. I’m going to show you something. I know you won’t tell.” She ducked her head to catch his eye and lifted up his chin with a soft fingertip. “Look. It’s not scary, I promise.”

  Tamburlaine reached up behind her ear and grabbed something there. She screwed up her nose and pulled out a hairpin. One, two, three more clattered to the floor. And all that beautiful hair, that long, dark, thick hair he’d stared at in class for six years, came away in her fist. She folded her wig very carefully in her lap, tucking in the ends so they didn’t get dusty.

  Flowers tumbled down from Tamburlaine’s head. Long, thick, bright purple garlands like braids burst free and stretched, able to breathe at last. The sunlight streaming through the window pooled and played in the branches of Tamburlaine, turning her violet, indigo, fuchsia, rose. Thomas thought they were plum blossoms. She began to rub her arms as though she’d caught a chill, rough and hard. She scrubbed her cheeks with her palms—and her cheeks washed away like soap. All those little lines, the thin, strange scars she’d always had, were not scars at all but woodgrain. She was a girl made of fine, polished wood, the deep, dark, expensive kind, jointed and bolted at the elbows and neck like a doll. Tamburlaine breathed in little quick gasps, full of thrill and fearing, smiling all the while so that the green buds of her teeth showed.