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 a
m 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.”
CHAPTER IX
THE CURSE
In Which September Meets an Old Friend Unexpectedly, Discharges Her Postal Duties, and Is Nearly Burnt to a Crisp
September rang a bell.
She brought her hand down on top of it again—a big glass buzzer-bell like the one in the principal’s office at school. This one did not buzz; it rang clear and high, shattering the silence of the Lopsided Library.
No one answered. A loud shush sounded from the depths of the stacks, but September could not see the shusher, even if she stood on tiptoes.
Whoever named this place got it in one, September thought to herself. It was a very lovely library, a great circular room with a high glass chair on a dais in the middle of it all, from which, when such a one was on duty, a Librarian might glare down most effectively at noisy nellies and book-swipers. Pale blue and green pillars studded with round moonstones separated the sections. Neat rows of green-black stone desks and black-green study lamps stood at the ready. Bright stained-glass stacks sparkle
d as they bore up books of every possible size and type, rising all the way up through several floors to a domed ceiling strung with round lanterns. But all the books seemed to have lurched to one side of the building, as though they had all gotten a good fright from whatever sort of beast haunts the night terrors of books. They piled up on top of each other, wedged in tight to bursting, and if there was an order or a logic to their arrangement it, too, had had a good scare and run off. The stacks on the other side stood nearly empty, stained glass dustless and forlorn, a few lonely tomes leaning over, falling down, huddled in twos and threes for warmth.
“Hello?” September called. Her voice bounced around the rotunda.
This time, an answer came.
It was a roar that was also a shout that was also a laugh that was also a screech that was also a deep, resounding haroom.
A huge ball of red scales, claws, and wings shot up out of the rear stacks and landed on the Librarian’s chair. The ball had bright turquoise eyes that danced and shone and long orange whiskers.
A-Through-L, the Wyverary, crouched on the great glass chair and grinned as wide as any Wyvern ever has.
“September!” he trumpeted—and before September could answer him by vaulting over the circulation counter into his welcoming wings, a strange and awful thing happened.
A plume of indigo fire erupted from the Wyverary’s throat. He threw back his head toward the domed ceiling. The flame flowed thick and oily through the air, coiling and sizzling as it rose. Several lanterns burst into purple sparks and charred chunks, raining back down onto the books. The roof blackened—but it could not get much blacker than the black blast-stars which already scarred it. Finally, the flame sputtered out, leaving A-Through-L looking mortified. He hid his head in one scarlet claw.
And then, without warning, he shrank.
September was sure she saw it: One moment he was as gargantuan as always, towering, a great red beast who could eat two barns for lunch and still have room for tea. The next, he had dropped a foot or two, and cinched in a foot or two, and even lost a foot or two of tail.