Deep cover notwithstanding, Josh revealed himself to be conspicuously American by asking the bartender for beer. He wound up settling for a Pimm’s Cup, which he consumed with an air of disappointed bafflement. But he and Poppy made themselves agreeable to the other guests with an ease and skill that Quentin found awe-inspiring. Genuinely social people never ceased to amaze him. Their brains seemed to generate an inexhaustible fund of things to say, naturally, with no effort, out of nothing at all. It was a trick Quentin had never figured out.As an unattached American male among English strangers, he felt inherently suspicious. He did his best to affiliate himself with small groups and nod along politely in response to people who weren’t especially talking to him.
Julia found a wall to put her slender back against and looked decorously mysterious. Only one man dared to approach her, a tall Cantabridgian type with a half-grown beard, and she sent him packing in terms so uncertain he had to salve his wounds with cucumber sandwich. After a half hour of this Quentin felt he could begin a slow drift toward the stairs—not the grand Tara-style ones in front but a more unassuming, utilitarian staircase toward the back of the house. One by one he caught the others’ eyes in turn and inclined his head. We were just looking for a bathroom? All four of us? Too bad they didn’t have drugs; that would have made a better cover story.
The staircase performed a tight switchback up to the second floor, a hushed and darkened maze of white walls and parquet. The rumble and tinkle of the party was still clearly audible, but hushed now, like distant surf. There were a few kids up here, helling along the hallways and racketing in and out of rooms, laughing a little too hysterically, playing some game nobody knew the rules of, flopping down on the coats when they got tired, the kind of forced pack of one-shot friends that exists on the margins of all grown-up parties.
The World in the Walls wasn’t a how-to manual, and it was irritatingly vague as to the precise location of the famous clock. “One of the back corridors of one of the upper floors” was all the detail Plover gave them. Maybe it would have been better to split up, except that would have violated the basic teaching of every movie ever made. Quentin would have worried that everybody else would slip through into Fillory without him, leaving him behind in reality like the last man standing in a game of Sardines.
Whoever lived here now didn’t use the top floor at all, and it had gone unrestored. Another piece of luck. They hadn’t even refinished the floors—the varnish had worn off them, and the walls were old wallpaper, with even older wallpaper showing through in places. The ceilings were low. The rooms were full of mismatched and broken furniture under sheets. The quieter it got the realer Fillory began to feel. It loomed in the shadows, under beds, behind the wallpaper, in the corner of his eye, just out of view. Ten minutes from now they could be back on the Muntjac.
This was the place. This was where the children played, where Martin vanished, where Jane watched, where the whole terrible fantasy began. And there in the hallway, the back hallway—as it had been written, as the prophecy foretold—stood a grandfather clock.
It was a beast of a clock, with a big fat brass face orbited by four smaller dials tracking the months and the phases of the moon and the signs of the zodiac and God knew what else, all framed in plain, uncarved dark wood. The works must have been hellishly complex, the eighteenth-century equivalent of a supercomputer. The wood was the wood of a Fillorian sunset tree, it said in the book, which shed its flaming orange leaves every day at sundown, endured a leafless winter overnight, and then sprouted fresh green new ones at dawn.
Quentin, Julia, Josh, and Poppy gathered around it. It was like they were re-enacting a Fillory book—no, they were in one, a new one, and they were writing it together. The pendulum wasn’t moving. Quentin wondered if the connection could still be live, or whether it had broken after the children went through. He couldn’t feel anything. But it had to work, he would make it work. He was going back to Fillory if he had to cram himself into every fucking piece of cabinetry in this house.
Even so it was going to be a tight fit. Maybe if he breathed out all his air and wriggled through sideways. Not how he planned to make his triumphant return to Fillory, but at this point he’d take whatever worked.
“Quentin,” Josh said.
“Yeah.”
“Quentin, look at me.”
He had to tear his eyes away from the clock. When he did he found Josh watching him with a gravity that didn’t suit him. It was a new-Josh gravity.
“You know I’m not going, right?”
He did know. He’d just let himself forget in all the excitement. Things were different now. They weren’t kids. Josh was part of a different story.
“Yeah,” Quentin said. “I guess I do know. Thanks for coming this far. What about you, Poppy? Chance of a lifetime.”
“Thank you for asking me.” She seemed to mean it, to take it in the spirit in which it was offered. She put a hand on her chest. “But I’ve got my whole life here. I can’t go to Fillory.”
Quentin looked at Julia, who’d taken off her shades in deference to the gloom of the top floor. Just you and me, kid. Together they stepped forward. Quentin got down on one knee. The roar of their imminent escape thundered in his ears.
As soon as he got up close he could see that it wasn’t going to work. The thing wasn’t ticking, but more than that it just looked too solid. The clock was what it was and nothing more—it was brute, mundane matter, wood and metal. He turned the little knob and opened the glass case and looked in at the hanging pendulum and chimes and whatnot other brass hardware, dangling there impotently. His heart had already gone out of it.
It was dark in here. He reached in and rapped the back of the case with his knuckles. Nothing. He closed his eyes.
“Goddamn it,” he said.
Never mind. It wasn’t over. They could always try climbing trees. Though at that moment he felt less like climbing a tree than he’d ever felt like doing anything in his entire life.
“You’re doing it wrong, you know.”
Their heads turned in unison. It was a little kid’s voice, a boy. He was standing at the end of the corridor in his pajamas, watching them. He might have been eight years old.
“What am I doing wrong?” Quentin said.
“You have to set it going first,” the boy said. “It says in the book. But it doesn’t work anymore, I tried it.”
The boy had fine tousled brown hair and blue eyes. A more quintessential English moppet it would have been hard to find, right down to his having a spot of trouble pronouncing his l’s and r’s. He could have been cloned from Christopher Robin’s toenail clippings.
“Mummy says she’s going to send it to the shop, but she never does. I climbed the trees too. And I did a painting. Lots of them actually. D’you want to see?”
They stared at him. Not finding himself rebuffed, he walked over on bare feet. He had that dismal air of sprightly self-possession that some English children have. Just looking at him, you knew you were going to have to play a game with him.
“I even had Mummy pull me round in an old wagon we found in the garage.” He said it garage. “It’s not the same as a bicycle, but I had to try it.”
“I can see that,” Quentin said. “I can see where you would have to do that.”
“But we can keep looking though,” he said. “I like it. My name’s Thomas.”
He actually held out his little paw for Quentin to shake, like a tiny alien ambassador. Poor kid. It wasn’t his fault. He must be so chronically neglected by his parents that he had taken to press-ganging random party guests into paying attention to him. He made Quentin think of faraway Eleanor, the little girl on the Outer Island.
The really awful thing was that Quentin was going to go along with it, and not for the right reasons. He took the proffered paw. It wasn’t that he felt bad for Thomas, though he did. It was that Thomas was a valuable ally. Adults never got into Fillory by themselves, at least not without a magic button. It was
always the kids. What Quentin needed, he realized, was a native guide to act as bait. Maybe if he let young Thomas here course along ahead of him, like a hound across the moors, he just might flush out a portal or two. He was going to use Thomas to chum the waters.
“Just get me a drink,” Quentin said to Josh as Thomas pulled him away. As they passed Poppy, Quentin firmly grabbed her hand. The misery train was leaving the station, and Quentin wasn’t going to travel alone.
It emerged, with remarkably little prompting from Quentin or Poppy, that Thomas’s parents had bought the Chatwin house a couple of years ago from the children of Fiona Chatwin; Thomas and his parents were themselves, through some connection that Quentin couldn’t follow, distantly related to Plover. Maybe that was where the money came from. Thomas had been simply mad with excitement when he heard the news. Weren’t all his friends at school jealous! Of course now he had all new friends, because before he’d been in London, and now they were in Cornwall. But his friends here were much nicer, and he only missed London when he thought about the Rainforest Life exhibit at the zoo. Had Quentin ever been to the zoo in London? If he could choose, would he be an Asian lion or a Sumatran tiger? And did he know that there was a monkey called a red titi monkey? It wasn’t rude, you could say it because it was a real kind of monkey. And didn’t he agree that, under certain extreme circumstances, the murder of children was completely ethically justifiable?
Towed by Thomas the tank engine, they toured the grounds. As a threesome they conducted a deep-cavity search of the top floor, including closets and attics. They made seven or eight circuits of the enormous green behind the house, with special attention paid to rodent burrows and spooky trees and copses large enough for a human being to infiltrate. Meanwhile Josh kept up an underground railroad of gin-and-tonics, handing them off to Quentin whenever he happened to pass by, like a spectator handing Gatorade to a marathoner.
It could have been worse. The view from the back terrace was even grander than the front. An orderly English estate had been hacked out of the rough Cornish countryside by main force, including a flat, still swimming pool that by some landscaper’s artifice had mostly escaped looking anachronistic. Beyond it a perfect Constable vista rolled down and away, green hills and fallow hay fields and pocket villages, all slowly dissolving in the viscous light of a golden English sunset.
Thomas enjoyed the attention. And Poppy—he’d give her this—was a heroically good sport. She had no real stake in how all this turned out, but she pitched right in. She was nothing if not game. Moreover she was better at it than he was, hardened as she was by many tours in the babysitting trenches.
It all finished up, predictably, in Thomas’s bedroom. By ten thirty even Thomas, with his titanically fresh-faced lust for life, couldn’t be coaxed into one more round of Find Fillory. They all sat or sprawled on the rainbow-colored woolly yarn rug in Thomas’s room. It was a huge room, a little kingdom all Thomas’s own. It even had an extra bed in it, in the shape of a space rocket, as if to cruelly emphasize Thomas’s only-childhood, the hilarious sleepovers he wasn’t having. Josh and Julia joined them there. The party raged on beneath them, into the night, having degenerated from a cocktail party into a regular party party.
They should leave, obviously. At this point Thomas had gone from harasser to harassed. Maybe Josh was right, maybe they’d try Stonehenge next. But not before they’d burned this bridge right down to its charred pilings.
So they played other games. They ground out rounds of Animal Snap and rummy and Connect 4. They played board games, Cluedo and Monopoly and Mouse Trap, until Thomas was too tired and they were too drunk to follow the rules. They dug deeper into Thomas’s toy closet, and thus further back into Thomas’s childhood, for games so mathematically simple they were barely games at all, lacking as they did almost any strategic element: War and Snakes and Ladders and Hi Ho! Cherry-O and finally High C’s, a primally simple alphabet game in which the main goal seemed to be to win the pregame argument with your fellow players over who got to be the dolphin. After that everything else was blind chance and cartoon fish.
Quentin took a slug of flat, warm gin-and-tonic. It tasted like defeat. This was how the dream died, in a welter of plastic primary-colored board game pieces, upstairs at a bad party. They would keep looking, they would knock on all the first doors they could think of, but for the first time, lying there sprawled on the spare bed, his long legs flat out, with his back against Thomas’s rocketship headboard, Quentin took seriously the possibility that he wasn’t going back after all. Probably hundreds of years had gone by in Fillory anyway. The ruins of Whitespire were dissolving in the rain, white stones softening like sugar cubes under green moss, by a now nameless bay. The tombs of King Eliot and Queen Janet were probably long since overgrown with ivy, twin clock-trees rising from their twin plots. Perhaps he was remembered as a legend, King Quentin the Missing. The Once and Future King, like King Arthur. Except unlike Arthur he wasn’t coming back from Avalon. Just the Once King.
Well, it was a fitting place to end it, in the Chatwins’ house, where everything started. The first door. The really funny thing was that even though he’d hit bottom, he couldn’t honestly say that it was all that bad there. He had his friends, or some of them. They had Josh’s money. They still had magic, and alcohol, and sex, and food. They had everything. He thought of Venice, and the pure green Cornish landscape they’d just driven through. There was so much more to this world than he thought. What the hell did he have to complain about?
Fuck-all was the answer. One day he’d have a house like this too, and a kid like Thomas, who lay fast asleep with the lights on and his arms thrown up over his head, a marathon runner breaking the tape in his dreams. He and some lovely and talented Mrs. Quentin (Who? Poppy? Surely not) would get married, and Fillory would fade away like the dream it so fundamentally was. So what if he wasn’t a king. It had been lovely for a while, but here was real life, and he would make the most of it like everybody else. What kind of a hero was he, if he couldn’t do that?
Julia kicked his foot. By unspoken agreement they were all grimly determined to finish the game of High C’s, and it was his turn. He flicked the spinner and moved forward two waves. Josh, who was playing as the whale, had a commanding lead, but Julia (the squid) was making a late charge, leaving Poppy (fish) and Quentin (jellyfish) to battle it out for a distant third place.
Josh spun. He was on a charade square.
“Caw!” Josh said. “Caw! Caw!”
“Seagull,” they all said in unison. It was like when they were geese. Josh spun again. Julia belched.
Quentin slumped over behind Poppy’s warm back, onto the infinitely soft and sweet-smelling pillows. From this point of view it was apparent that Poppy was wearing a thong. The bed was not entirely stable. The drinks were catching up with him. It wasn’t clear whether the spins were going to spin themselves out or gather speed and power and wreak a terrible vengeance upon him for his many transgressions. Well, time would undoubtedly tell.
“Caw!” Josh said.
“Enough already,” Quentin said.
“Caw! Caw!”
“Seagull! I said seagull!”
The light hurt his eyes. It was uncomfortably bright in Thomas’s room. That was enough drinking for tonight. Quentin sat up.
“I know, man,” Josh said. “I heard you.”
“Caw!”
The cawing didn’t stop, nor did the spinning. The bed was definitely in motion, not so much spinning as rocking gently. They all froze.
Poppy reacted first.
“No way.” She lunged off the bed and landed in water. “Goddamn it! No fucking way!”
The sun was hot overhead. A curious albatross was circling over them, making respectful inquiries.
Quentin jumped up on the bed.
“Oh my God! We did it. We did it!”
They had broken through. It wasn’t the end, it was all about to start all over again. He spread his arms wide to the daylight
and let the hot sun slam straight down into his face. He was a man reborn. Julia was looking around her and sobbing as though her heart would break. They were back. The dream was real again. They were adrift on the high seas of Fillory.
BOOK III
CHAPTER 17
“Thomas will be so disappointed,” Poppy said. “He missed everything.”
She sat glumly on a sail locker on the deck of the Muntjac, wrapped in a rough ship’s blanket. Her curly hair was flat from the salt water. She’d tried to swim away, back to Earth, back to Thomas’s little-boy bedroom, but when she saw that she had no shot she stroked back to the bed instead, and they’d hauled her dripping back up onto it to await rescue. She was a strong, easy swimmer, which was somehow not surprising.
The bed, while a top-quality bed that contained a fair amount of actual bona fide wood—Thomas’s parents had spared no expense—was only so-so as a raft and had trended downward rapidly as the bedclothes and then the mattress soaked through and lost their buoyancy. Josh sat heavily on it, crisscross applesauce, resigned, Buddha going down with the ship, while the bed gradually swamped, and the cold seawater lapped up over his knees.
But the Muntjac was already in view by then, sheering keenly through the waves toward them, the force of a fresh wind setting it at a rakish angle. Its sails—his sails, Quentin’s sails, with the pale blue ram of Fillory—stood out in taut, proud curves. The power of it, the color, the solidity, the reality of it, were almost too thrilling. A tiny action-figure sailor was already at the railing, pointing in their direction.
Quentin hadn’t for a second doubted that the Muntjac would be there. It seemed like years since he’d seen it. They had come to take him home.
As it bore down on them he’d had a moment of worry: what if centuries had passed, what if Eliot and Janet really were dead, and the Muntjac was the last survivor of the Brakebills era, and he was going home to a court of strangers? But no, there was Bingle at the railing, looking just as he always had, ready to haul his royal body back on board and get back to guarding it.