Always October (33 page)

“I think I can take care of that,” said Gnarly.

He hurried to the wall of machinery and stared at it, muttering to himself. Suddenly he cried, “Aha!” and began working levers and switches. After several minutes, and some extremely colorful cursing on Gnarly's part, the blade began to swing. The sight terrified me, but I soon saw that the blade was rising rather than descending.

“Thanks, Mr. Carker,” I called. Trying to hide my trembling, I studied the tapestry as I waited for the blade to lift out of the way. As I did, I realized I had one more problem, a big one: I couldn't reach the spot where I needed to start the repair work!

Before I could say anything, the High Poet stepped toward me. He looked blurry, like an out-of-focus photo. Moving behind me, he placed his massive hands on my waist. I wondered if, in his current state, he could actually lift me. His hands widened alarmingly when he pressed them to my sides, and his fingers looked doughy, but he managed it.

“Repair the world, Jacob,” he said, his voice soft, urgent, hopeful.

A moment later I found myself facing the place where I needed to start my work, at the bottom of the long gash made by the silver blade.

I was doing my thumb-finger thing so fast that my right hand looked blurrier than the circle of monsters who were watching me with such intent and fearful eyes.

Stop!
I thought furiously.

I managed to hold my hand still. But doing so was like building a dam in front of the flood of fear rising inside me. The fear was growing, threatening to make my head explode. Then I figured it out—what I needed was a ritual I could use to help me accomplish this task. With a feeling of “Duh!” I remembered how I used to go into almost a trancelike state when Mom was teaching me to weave and I would get into the rhythm. I had my ritual right in front of me … all I had to do was figure it out.

I studied the division in the fabric. The warp yarn, the strands that ran up and down, were intact; the Silver Slicer had been fine and true, cutting precisely between two of them without damaging either. It was the side-to-side strands, the weft, that had been severed and then pulled apart.

I couldn't reweave for color, of course. And I had no shuttle to shoot back and forth. This would be a sloppy repair at best.

Then I realized another problem: It would not be enough to simply reweave the area that was open. I needed to anchor it to the main tapestry if I was to reconnect the worlds.

Mrs. McSweeney must have seen the problem at the same time. Reaching into her sleeve, she withdrew a long, silvery needle, about half the thickness of a pencil, and handed it up to me. I realized it was hooked at one end—not a knitting needle, but a crochet hook. Perfect! I thrust it through the weave at the right, the Humana side of the tapestry. With the hook, I grabbed the end of Octavia's silk, then pulled it back through. Now I could knot the silk to hold it in place. This was not professional, but that was not the point. The point was to bind things back together.

With one end of the silk anchored, I began the work of weaving it in and out of those parallel lines of yarn. There were thirty-six of them in that six-inch gap that now divided the worlds. I know, because I counted them over and over again as I wove. Passing the entire coil of Octavia's silk under and over each of the vertical strands of yarn made the work slow and tedious.

I closed my eyes and thought of my mother, of all the times I had watched her slim, quick fingers doing a variant of this task and of how she had taught me on my own small loom, the one my father had built. I needed to let what I had seen, what I had known from the time I was not much older than LD, flow through me.

Drawing the silk in and out, in and out, drawing the sides of the tapestry back together, pulling them tight, I tried to repair the world.

Tikkun.

My weaving was not beautiful, not tight and even the way Mom had tried to teach me. Despite that, Octavia's magical silk was doing the job. Glancing down at Keegel Farzym's thick blue arms, I saw that they were becoming more solid, more in focus.

The burns on my face began to throb. What did that mean? It didn't matter. I couldn't let the pain distract me now.

Then I realized something else, something terrifying. I wasn't sure what—the silk itself, the magic of the tapestry, the repair work, maybe all of these combined—was drawing energy from me. Even as I was binding the worlds together, I felt a thread being spun out of me, a thread of strength, of
life
, that was helping to power the renewal of Always October. Would that be the final cost of restoring the tapestry—my life for the existence of this world? I was too dazed to consider the possible ending. All I could do was keep weaving.

Exhaustion began to claim me. I wavered. My vision grew fuzzy. But I could not, dared not stop.

I have no idea how much time had passed when I finally reached the top of the tapestry. As I finished the reweaving, pulled the coil of silk through one last time, then again used the crochet hook to link it to the main body of the tapestry, I hoped the world would snap completely into place.

It didn't.

“It's not working!” I groaned.

“The spell needs to be bound,” Mrs. McSweeney said. “You've stopped the fading, but we need to seal the magic to bring things fully back to normal.”

“How do we do that?” I asked in despair.

“Don't cut the silk—leave it attached to the tapestry. While it's still attached to the tapestry, we have to use the rest of the silk to bind something together … to make two things into one. If I'm right, and we're lucky, a rebinding like that will rebind the worlds as well. But what to use?”

As Mrs. McSweeney looked around, Lily called, “Toozle! Grab your other half and get yourself over here!”

“Perfect,” murmured Mrs. McSweeney. “Brilliant idea, Lily.”

Keegel Farzym lowered me to the floor. At the same time, Toozle and the half of Sploot Fah for which I had no name approached, looking fearful. I couldn't tell which was which.

Lily glared at them fiercely. “You did a very bad thing.”

“Not my fault!” cried the half standing to my right. “Mazrak made me. Mazrak made me!”

“Even so, you did it. Do you want to make things better?”

The two halves of the creature looked at each other.

“Won't be two parts anymore?” asked the one I now knew to be Toozle.

“If this works, you will be just one glorious self.”

“Might be too much for one body,” said one part of the creature.

“So much wonderfulness might make it explode,” agreed the other.

Lily had no sympathy. “That's a chance you'll have to take,” she said sternly. “Will you do it or not?”

The two parts of Sploot Fah looked at each other.

“Will world stay fuzzy if we don't?” asked the Toozle half.

“Without a doubt,” said Lily.

“Blurch,” said the other half. “Fuzzy world is making stomach go blooey.”

“Then maybe you should agree to do this.”

The two halves of the monster looked at each other again, then nodded. Turning back to Lily, they said in unison, “Sploot Fah did bad thing. Now Sploot Fah will save world!”

She smiled. “I knew I could count on you. All right, Jake, weave them together.”

It was preposterous. How was I supposed to weave them together without a loom? Or with a loom, for that matter? I stared at the two-part creature for a long time, trying to think despite the fact that I felt as if I might faint at any moment. Or maybe it wouldn't be a faint. Maybe death itself was creeping up on me.

Weave them without a loom
, I thought.
Weave them without a loom
.

And then I had it. Sploot Fah himself would be the loom!

“Here's what we're going to do,” I said. “Toozle, hold up your left arm.”

“Not Toozle now,” he said. But he did as I asked.

I turned to the other one. “Okay, you put your right hand here.”

He did as I instructed. When I was done, the creature stood facing itself, hands extended with thumbs pointing upward, each hand about six inches from the next.

“Spread your fingers,” I ordered.

He did as I said. Quickly I wrapped the silk around the leftmost little finger, ran it under all four little fingers, then over and around them again. Bringing the silk up I did the same for the next level of fingers, then the third, then the fourth. That done, I pulled the outermost hands apart to make the threads tight. “Keep your hands exactly where I just put them,” I ordered. “I need you to hold the silk straight and taut.”

They nodded solemnly, their eyes bright with fear and excitement.

I now had eight strands of warp thread—one above and one below each finger—running parallel to the floor. (It was only eight because I wasn't using their thumbs, which pointed straight up.)

With the warp in place, I began to weave, moving the silk over and under the strands that stretched between their hands.

“Very clever, Jacob,” Mrs. McSweeney murmured. “Very clever indeed.”

I nodded but said nothing. The work was continuing to draw energy from me. My vision blurred. I was having a hard time staying on my feet.

I needed to weave three areas together—the stretch between first hand and second hand, the one from second hand to third, and finally the area between third hand and fourth. Each section was about six inches wide. As I finished the first, I murmured, “Maybe someone else should take over. I'm dizzy—not sure I can finish.”

“You have to!” cried Lily. The fierceness of her voice startled me. “I've got an idea. If I'm right, then it's really important that you be the one to weave them together. It's a puzzle, Jake, and I think I've solved it.”

I groaned. The world swam before me. I was pretty sure it wasn't because Always October had started to fade again but because I was about to lose consciousness.

Even so, I wove on. As I completed the second of the stretches, both parts of Sploot Fah began to tremble.

“Something strange,” moaned one.

“Something scary!” cried the other.

“Keep weaving, Jake!” urged Lily.
“Keep weaving!”

Staggering, barely able to stay on my feet, I started the final stretch. Sploot Fah was vibrating now, just as LD had done earlier. “Make him stop!” he cried in terror. “Make him stop!”

“Do
not
stop, Jacob!” commanded Lily. “Keep weaving, for the world's sake, and for your own!”

On I wove, in, out, up, down, my life force still flowing out along Octavia's magic silk.

I fell to my knees, but I kept weaving.

Sploot Fah moaned in terror, but I kept weaving.

I reached the end of the third stretch with only an inch of silk to spare. I knotted it to the topmost finger. As I did, a flash of blue filled the air.

Blackness seized me, and I collapsed.

S
ploot Fah was gone.

In his place stood Jacob's father.

My grandfather looked at me in astonishment. “Did you know that was going to happen?”

I shook my head. “The most you could say is I
hoped
it might. I've been puzzling over Sploot Fah from the time we first met him. He always seemed oddly focused on Jacob. It made me think of a note I found in the papers in the tower room of Jacob's house: ‘Mazrak says blood calls to blood.' Jake's dad was a spelunker, and a prankster. So, in his way, was Sploot Fah. Whether or not I was right about Sploot Fah being Jake's dad, after what Mrs. McSweeney said about binding two things together, I was confident it would work to seal Jake's repair job on the tapestry. Anything else was a bonus.”

Looking around, I saw that Always October had snapped back into focus. I also realized we were still surrounded by monsters … most of them creatures who had been fighting us not long before.