"I'm one hundred and five years old." She still couldn't look at him. "I just wanted you to know. Because I do like you. Now you probably hate me." He could only stare. "I know I seem older. Well, sometimes. My parents think I'm a child, but I'm not — I've had lots of lovers already. But I didn't want you to find out and think I was trying to trick you. I'm not at university like you probably thought — I'm in my last year of Swansdown Academy. But I'm old enough to marry, you know, so I'm not that young!" Now she finally looked up, but seemed puzzled by the stunned expression on his face. "I don't mean you have to marry me!" She narrowed her extraordinary eyes a little. "So how old are you?"
Theo's stammering was interrupted by the return of Applecore. "Right," she said. "Me kidneys have sighted land again. Should we get going?"
————— Outside the station it was early evening and the lights were coming on all over Starlightshire, streetlamps and advertising signs, but they all seemed fainter than the electric lights Theo knew, even the simplest more silvery than ordinary white light and also more . . . witchy, was the only word he could summon. Thus, when the huge fog-colored car rolled up to the sidewalk in front of the station, silent as Charon's barge, he jumped a little. The driver stepped out and Theo was startled by what at first seemed like a familiar horselike face.
No, he realized, it's not Heath, just another doonie. He said a lot of them were drivers. "Are you the parties wanting a ride to the City?" the driver asked. His greenish skin was heavily mottled with white — Theo wondered if he might be from something like the pinto branch of the family — and he wore a gray uniform whose sheen was only a little less pearlescent under the station's flood lamps than the car itself. "I need someone to signify, please."
Poppy bristled. "I told them who I was!"
"No offense, Mistress Thornapple. It's just the way things are these days. It's a shame, but there you go." He wagged his eyeless head apologetically and produced a small leather-bound book from the pocket of his coat. "A formality." He opened it to what seemed to Theo a pair of blank pages and held it out. Poppy held her small hand over it for a moment; the driver nodded and put it away again. The whole thing was so much like ceremonial magic and yet so similar to using a bar code reader that Theo was suddenly struck not by the strangeness of the Fairie world but by the previously unremarked strangeness of his own.
When they were seated in the deep and spacious passenger compartment with all Poppy's luggage stowed in the trunk, the car slid out of the station parking lot. Theo looked anxiously out the tinted windows for signs of someone watching them, but the crowd hurrying in and out of Starlightshire Station's lunar light seemed oblivious to them.
"It's about three hours to the City from here," said the driver. "Would you like to hear some music?" "Oh, yes, please," said Poppy. From out of nowhere — or more likely from hidden speakers, but Theo couldn't simply dismiss the "from nowhere" theory after what he'd seen lately — a mournful air filled the car. The music seemed to occupy the center of a previously unimagined triangle whose three sides were Arab flutes, quiet polka changes played backward on the glockenspiel with a lot of reverb, and the noise of running water. Theo listened with fascinated attention. It was enchanting, almost literally so, like being hypnotized in the nicest possible fashion. At last the tune ended and a new one began, an even more improbable combination that was something like "Danny Boy" played at one-tenth normal speed and arranged for gong and sitar. This one had a vocal, a helium whisper like something sending back its last transmission as it drifted away into the void of space. The only words Theo could make out were ". . . far far far the mirror we are, the nearer star . . ."
"I love this tune," Poppy said happily. "Whatever happened to these people?"
"One-hit wonders?" Theo guessed. Despite the fact that the third passenger was no larger than a parakeet, Poppy had squeezed herself against Theo and showed no signs of moving away. He was having a hard time not reacting to her; the feeling of a woman's firm leg pressed against his own was exactly as distracting in Fairyland as it would have been back in good old Mortalia.
But she's a hundred and five years old! Old enough to be a great-great grandmother — no, old enough to be dead! The mere thought of her in a romantic light should have felt like that film Harold and Maude, but it didn't, quite. Or what was that other one with Ursula Andress, where she's really like a million years old and turns into a mummy at the end . . . ? But that was bullshit, he told himself — she wasn't some really old woman who looked young by magic. She was young. Just not by the standards of his own world.
The real, seriously bad problem is that she's some important rich guy's daughter, and as far as they're concerned, she's just a schoolgirl. Like they don't have enough reasons to want to kill me already.
He looked over to Applecore, feeling guilty about the fact that he had somehow come to be holding one of Poppy Thornapple's hands again, and equally guilty that after realizing it he still hadn't disengaged, but the sprite had made herself a sort of nest in the corner of the seat, curled on Poppy's cloche hat, and was apparently sound asleep.
Thanks, he thought bitterly. Leave me here to figure out this weird-ass stuff by myself. Thanks a lot.
Poppy stirred beside him. "Can you open the roof?" He only realized she wasn't talking to him but to the invisible driver when a panel opened in the ceiling of the car. Above them hung a sky full of huge stars like jellied fire, like Van Gogh's maddest visions made real.
"It's always nice in this part of the world," she said. "I can't wait until we're outside of town." Theo was still catching his breath, staring at the stellar fireworks. "Why?" he croaked.
"Because it's so built-up around here these days and so bright, all the streetlights and everything make it hard to see the sky properly." She snuggled in close against him. "Do you like me just a little, Theo? Tell the truth."
"Yes. Yes, of course. You're a very nice . . . young woman." He could hear the pout in her tone of voice. "That's the kind of thing people say about girls in the Young Blossoms — the girls that put together cobweb drives and bake sales to relieve starving goblins in Alder Head."
"All right, you're beautiful, too. But you know that." "Really?" She rubbed her face against his upper arm, slow and comfortable as a fire-warmed cat. "That's better. Will you make love to me, then?"
He took a breath. "I don't think it's a good idea, Poppy. I'm . . ." He couldn't think of a way to say it that didn't sound like the worst kind of letting-someone-down-easy cliché. But it was true! It was actually true! "I'm not a very good person to be involved with right now. But you're lovely. I'm really glad I met you."
She raised her head a bit and regarded him with those huge eyes, the purple so dark that they seemed pools of total shadow even underneath the fierce starlight. "Truly? You wouldn't be lying to me just because I'm a hundred and five, would you?"
He nodded. "Truly." "All right." She nestled into him once more. "Perhaps we shouldn't rush things, anyway. I don't want you just to go away like the others always do. Well, the ones I didn't want to go away. Some of the rest I couldn't chase away with black iron." Her eyes remained closed, but she smiled and covered her mouth with her fingers; she was still a little tipsy. "Sorry. Everyone says I have a shocking vocabulary." She yawned. "I think I'm going to sleep for a little while. It's been such a busy day . . ." There was no sense of transition, but after a while he could tell by the limp heaviness of her body against him that she was asleep. The music played on, a long tapestry of soft flute-noises and droning chords that made him think of the wind moaning around mountaintops, but with a strange little backbeat that kept surfacing and then fading down into the mix again. Theo was reluctant to move or in any way break the spell. He felt as though he had stepped out of the tumultuous events of the past days into some dreamlike pocket of his own past, an eddy of time from his teenage days — a girl, a quiet car, the countryside sliding past the windows. But this girl's a century old and the countryside is full of unicorns and monsters.
For a moment the music dwindled. "Everyone all right back there?" asked the driver. "Just fine," Theo replied. The music came back up, throbbing mysteriously, sugared now with the faint chirping of some stringed instrument. If there were crickets in Heaven, Theo thought, then listening to them must be something like this.
Music really did mean something to him, he realized, and it always had. It called to him, although there were no words to describe what it promised. It was like a secret language he never forgot how to speak, a hometown he could always return to when he tired of what life was throwing at him. From the moment he had first heard himself imitating the sounds that came from his mother's radio, before he even knew that what he was doing was called "singing," music had seemed like a place only Theo knew about and in which he was always welcome. Now he listened with joy to this strange, new music — the first hint of an entire world full of music he had never heard or even imagined, an idea as inviting as a kiss — and as he did so he stared at the sky. As Poppy Thornapple had suggested, the stars, already insanely bright, seemed to be growing even brighter as the car rolled deeper into the countryside darkness. At the same time, their gleam did not turn the sky around them blue, but made it seem even more unashamedly black.
The dark sky got darker. The stars got brighter. The music surrounded him, lifted him, even seemed to teach him things about this world he hadn't understood before he'd heard it. After a time he could not compute, Theo found himself carefully disengaging himself from Poppy Thornapple, moving her head from his shoulder and propping it with his own folded jacket. He lifted himself from the seat, putting first his head and then his shoulders out through the moon roof until he could spread his elbows on the roof of the car. The air that lashed his face was warm and just a little damp; he found himself wondering absently if rain clouds here moved like they did in the real world, or had patterns as confusing as the inconstant towns of Faerie.
But sweet as it was, the fertile-smelling air was barely on his mind or in his senses: with the lights of the town now far behind them and only the silvery beams of the car's headlights smearing the road ahead, the stars seemed to grow even grander and more dramatic, to flame like novas. He could see both their living, burning, gaseous immensity and their diamond hardness, as though they were cosmic and magical objects simultaneously. They filled the sky in all directions, and even the smallest shone so clearly that for the first time in his life he truly felt the world beneath him to be something adrift in a spherical sea of lights. At the same time, as the strange fairy melodies rose up around him and the moist wind tugged at his hair, he could see that beyond doubt they were also gems scattered across the fabric of the sky, or even the eyes of gods.
It was only when he slumped back down in his seat half an hour later that Theo realized that his cheeks were wet, and that he had been crying for a long time.
—————
He woke to find something brushing against his nostril and a sneeze building.
"Don't you dare!" Applecore said sharply. "Then get off my face." He scratched his itching nose and tried to sit up, but discovered that the Thornapple girl was draped over him, lying on his arm. Outside the car it was quite dark; the stars framed in the moon roof, while spectacularly beautiful by any earthly measure, were vastly reduced from what he had seen before.
"We're not in what's-it-called anymore," he said groggily.
"Starlightshire. Not for hours. We're just cutting across the edge of Ivy. We'll be in the City soon." The sprite's wings buzzed briefly as she lit on his knee. From what he could see of her by the dimly illuminated panels over the doors, she looked strained and edgy.
But why wouldn't she? he thought. This hasn't been any easier on her than me. Still, he did not want to be conscious right now — it felt like he hadn't slept in days. "Why did you wake me up?" he complained.
"Because we're going to be there soon and I need to talk to you before she wakes up."
"She's not so bad, you know." "You would think that, wouldn't you?" Applecore crossed her arms over her chest. "But that's neither here nor there. We have to decide where to get out."
"Aren't we going to that, what was it . . . ?" He ransacked his fuzzy memory. "Springwater Square? To see that Foxglove guy?"
"No. Not unless you want to find out what happens to bad mortal boys who don't listen to their elders."
"Elders? Oh, my God, how old are you?" "Old enough to think with my head and not other parts of me, thank you very much. I don't care what Tansy says, we're not going to put ourselves in that Foxglove's hands. Those Flowers think they know everything, but I've been in the City lately and I've heard what people there are saying. That Foxglove and . . ." she lowered her voice, making Theo lean as far toward her as he could with Poppy's head in his armpit, ". . . and this girl's father are thick as thieves. And they're both chummy with Lord Hellebore, and that's about as bad as news can get."
"Who's Hellebore? I think I've heard the name before." "We've time to talk about it later. Right now, you let me do the talking to your girlfriend here."
"She's not . . ." Poppy was stirring. She lifted her head and brushed a strand of ink-black hair out of her eyes. She wore it cut short, shorter even than Applecore's hacked red bob, but without the hat her bangs seemed continually in her eyes. "Theo . . . ? Are we there?"
"Not yet," Applecore said shortly. "Go back to sleep." She sat up, yawning and stretching. "Shade and stream, I must be a terrible sight! I'll have to ask the driver to stop somewhere so I can freshen up before we reach town."
"That's just what I wanted to talk to you about, Mistress," Applecore began, but the girl sat up straight on the seat and took Theo's hand.
"Look, we are here. I told you it wouldn't take long." They were coming around a hillside bend and for a moment Theo, looking a bit stupidly at the smoked glass that separated them from the driver's seat, couldn't understand what she was talking about. Then he saw the first of the lights framed in the window beside him.
It was immense, so wide that it seemed to fill the entire horizon. At this distance he couldn't make out individual buildings but only the lights that filled the wide, flat valley between the hills, a monstrous wash of lights as though someone had spilled a wheelbarrow full of diamonds, emeralds, and sapphires across the ground, as though the stars through which he had flown earlier had drifted down from the sky and piled up like snowflakes.
"It's . . . it's big." He wasn't certain he'd ever seen any earthly city so large — it had to be in the range of New York or Tokyo or Mexico City, at least — but he also found he didn't care much about comparisons just now. It was majestic and stunningly beautiful and, because the lights were just a few tones off from what he was used to, more than a little alien. His heart was beating very quickly, and not simply from wonder: there was fear, too, at something both so monumental and so utterly indifferent to him.
He swallowed, staring in silence for what might have been half a minute, then at last began to sing in a quiet voice, "They say the neon lights are bright, on Broadway . . ." He gave the old tune a long, slow bluesy read, then, when no one objected, sang "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," and an old Journey song from his childhood about city lights, and finished off his impromptu urban medley with "New York, New York."
" If I can make . . . it . . . there, I'll make it anywhere . . ." Yeah, they call this whistling past the graveyard, he thought as he neared the end. But what the hell.
"You have such a pretty voice, Theo," Poppy said, squeezing his hand. "I've never heard any of those songs — I haven't even heard music like that. Where is it from?"
"Another world," he told her, then fell silent again before the awesome spread of light.
17 THE HOTHOUSE
The Remover of Inconvenient Obstacles admired the way in which he had been kept waiting. Even in the midst of world-changing events, Nidrus, Lord Hellebore, had taken the opportunity for a small assertion of power and status. An hour sitting in a deceptively uncomfortabl
e chair in his lordship's outer office, with only Hellebore's pale and silent secretary for company, had made the point handily.
The Remover wondered if the secretary was always so pale and silent, and whether it was her habit so scrupulously to avoid looking at those her master kept waiting. He did, after all, have a certain effect on people, even when he was spruced up to go visiting. Even very strong charms could not make him look entirely . . . acceptable.
"His lordship will see you now," she announced with her back still toward him. A door opened in the wall, silent as a petal falling to the ground; reddish light spilled onto the carpet. The Remover stood and made his deliberate way into the office of the master of Hellebore House.
Lord Hellebore sat half in shadow, a ghostly presence. The Remover recognized his own habit when receiving his rather infrequent visitors; that part of the Remover's face which could still smile twitched a little as he sat down. The white flower in its spotlit vase glowed like phosphorus between them.
"Dramatic lighting, my lord."
Hellebore flicked his fingers and the light grew more even. "You will forgive me. I was thinking."
"A worthy occupation for a nobleman."
"And the worthier for being unfashionable, eh? So, do you bring me news?"
"Nothing you do not already know, my lord." "Yes. Well."
A long time passed in silence.
"Explain to me," Hellebore said at last, "why you have failed." The Remover's tone was mild. "I have not failed, my lord. I simply have not succeeded yet. Remember, you wished me to begin this while the person in question was still in the other world. When he escaped the initial attempt and crossed over, he gained days. But the pursuer has crossed over now, too. I think your quarry's hours of freedom are numbered." The Remover allowed himself another little smile-like tightening of the mouth. "I gather you have made an attempt of your own, my lord. I am surprised that after you spent so much to purchase my services you are willing to spend still more on what I must honestly suggest are less likely methods. Really, my lord — hollow-men?"