The Boy Who Lost Fairyland (17 page)

“My old ball!” cried Thomas. “Oh, yes! It's perfect! Just this last one, I think. It's getting late.”

“It is,” sighed Tamburlaine, rubbing her eyes. “But I don't want to go home yet, Tom! Just a little longer? There hasn't been room on my wall for three whole trees since I don't know when!”

Thomas ran to her and squeezed her tight, and this was the second world they made, though if we told them they'd done it, the Changelings wouldn't know a bit what we were on about. Tamburlaine, who hardly let anyone touch her besides her parents, lest they feel the hardness of her shoulders, her arms, her hands, stiffened with panic. And then smiled, where Thomas could not see.

“One more, then,” he whispered in her ear, and using her back as a desk, dashed out his note. To be honest, he had begun to get a little sloppy with his requests, as everyone seemed to come out right no matter what he wrote.
Anyway,
he thought,
it's good to be brief and to the point. That's what Mr. Wolcott says.

Dear Baseball, Which I Have Had Since Forever and a Little Longer,

Please come alive this very moment and be able to walk and talk and think and fly even farther than you could when you were just a baseball that couldn't walk and talk and think. And please forgive me for not playing with you very much. It is not your fault you are not a book and therefore not one of my favorite things. Please be one of my favorite things now! Thank you!

A baseball has nowhere convenient to put a note, which flummoxed Thomas for a moment. Tamburlaine left off her fourth tree, half finished, only the bare outlines of the rest sketched out. It just so happened to be a hawthorn, full of glittering, many-colored toads with runes on their ballooning throats, all singing together in its branches. She took the paper from him and wrapped it around the baseball good and tight. So we must admit that Thomas did not do it alone, and cannot be blamed completely. The two of them can share, like a very unpleasant lunch.

Tom put the ball down in the center of his room. Blunderbuss snuffled at it. Scratch leaned in, murmuring:

Ain't we got fun?

At first it seemed a dud—the ball sat stubbornly and did nothing. The paper did not even crinkle. But then, slowly, it rocked back and forth, back and forth, swelling with each
forth
. The notepaper shredded into snow. It grew to the size of a basketball, a beach ball, a mammoth prize pumpkin from some terrifying county fair. Thomas and Tamburlaine clutched each other's hands. Nothing else had grown huge and frightening. Gertrude had no awful ambition to light the whole of Chicago. But the baseball kept on growing. Finally, one by one, the hundred and thirty-six stitches popped with one hundred and thirty-six sounds like muskets firing.

And the baseball unfolded, unwrapped, unbaseballed into a great creature glaring at them with fiery magenta eyes. His clothes were white as the skin of the baseball, but now they were rough pale furs. Every kind of jewel that ever thought of shining clung to his cloaks. His nose bulged, barrel-thick, hanging down so far as to hide his mouth and mustache the tops of his golden lips—and those lips covered golden sharp teeth and a golden tongue. Furry green eyebrows concealed his gaze. His bald head had been tattooed with astrological gibberish, the graffiti of a hundred royal stargazers. He had scars all over his wrinkled skin, puncture wounds, as though long ago someone had sewn him up like a purse.

The creature panted. His eyes burned, actual flames flickering in his dark pink irises. His golden fangs showed wickedly. Tamburlaine bared hers, and reached out a slow, careful hand to pull Scratch closer.
I know what that is,
thought Thomas.
I've seen one. In my books. If only he weren't blocking my shelf I could look him up.…

But he did not get a chance. Blunderbuss leapt forward, dropping onto the floor between the children and the beast, growling, her own cloak-clasp teeth showing, her wool bristling in lavender, olive, burgundy, black.

And the beast roared. He put his head back, all its wild symbols crawling over his skull, and howled from the depths of his gold-plated soul. He swept his right arm round and seized Blunderbuss and Thomas in the crook of his enormous elbow, then swept his left arm and grabbed Tamburlaine and Scratch. Thomas's feet snagged on the strap of his satchel as they left the ground. Everyone screamed together, Scratch screeched as his record skipped, Tam beat at the creature's biceps. Blunderbuss cursed in Wom. Thomas reached back over that giant forearm at his wonderful new world of Apartment #7, 3 Racine Avenue. That brand-new dancing, all-alive world froze in horror as the jeweled baseball-monster took one savage leap—and disappeared into the painted forest on Thomas Rood's bedroom wall.

“Red Light,” the girl in the hallway painting whispered, and dropped her orchids to the ground.

 

INTERLUDE

A
N
E
QUATION
I
S
A
P
ROPHECY
T
HAT
A
LWAYS
C
OMES
T
RUE

In Which Something Rumbles Most Dreadfully

The gears of Fairyland are trembling.

Deep beneath the bruisey-purple sea that washes the ruins of the Lonely Gaol, great stone cogs turn one against the other, biting, grinding, clunking, sending up strange bubbles to the surface. The teeth of the gears thunder into each other, the gears of our world slipping into the gears of Fairyland, which slip into the gears of other worlds entirely, worlds with names one can only pronounce with three tongues, penguin beaks, or flashes of pink and black light. The gears have turned forever, for as long as stars have known about combustion, as long as hydrogen and oxygen have known they were meant to love each other and make baby oceans. The gears of Fairyland have gone about their business for all that time, mostly uneventfully, only troubled by the occasional earthquake or wrestling match.

But now, they
wobble
. They
quiver,
like frightened kittens caught out of doors at suppertime. They tilt back and forth like tops' heads, churning the water to white foam. The sea above them is an upset stomach, heaving and rolling in sour distress. The bubbles that break on the waves have whispers trapped inside them now, whispers that sigh free when they pop:

Help,
they cry.

And somewhere, a girl we know very well is trying. She keeps a very tidy desk, though her fingernails are black crescent moons of inkblots, freshened every day like polish. She keeps her hair braided up round her head so that it cannot get in the way. She has a mole on her left cheek and her feet are very large and ungainly. She can hear the gears rumbling, because she once bled on them, and spilled blood never quite forgets where it came from. She has ruined pages and pages with equations, scribbled, printed, crossed out, circled in nine different colors. The girl has learned that Fairy equations have only the vaguest acquaintance with numbers. They are more like pictures, like prophecies that always come true. They are more like stories. A child equals the mass of Fairyland times the speed of luck squared. She has become good at them, or they have become good at her. Her pages look more like comic books than mathematics. Every once in a while, the variables balance—but not often enough. The girl is trying, trying for her life, but she cannot make
x
equal everything back the way it was.

 

CHAPTER X

T
HE
P
AINTED
F
OREST

In Which Thomas Finds Himself in a New Suit of Clothes, Tamburlaine Meets Several Familiar Trees, a Baseball Throws a Tantrum, and a Wombat Imitates a Gatling Gun

It is a little-known fact that when one jumps through a bedroom wall, one does not so much
land
on the other side as
spill
. And when the five of them spilled into the bright, sunny day beyond the bedroom, they found themselves running, running already before they had any earth at all underneath them, not even knowing why it was so vital that they
must
run, their legs working in the air like fish gasping on a countertop. They spilled, running, into a forest so vivid and sore with color that the many little scratches and scrapes Thomas and Tamburlaine had got on the trip, dirty and stinging with bits of drywall and insulation, bled a little more freely and redly just to match. Trees stretched up in throbbing crimson, tangerine, aquamarine, glittering gold, opal-black. Their branches thatched a stained-glass roof over their heads, filtering the sun into prisms and silvery darts. They ran through mud like swirling paint, clingy and sticky and striped like candy.

A tree whizzed by on one side, a tree with a hundred white-gloved hands reaching out of it, offering little clay pots of syrup. Tamburlaine skidded to a stop. Blunderbuss ran headlong into her, knocking her flat into the mud. Thomas and Scratch wheeled round, suddenly unable to remember why they had been running so fiercely in the first place. The great
thing
Thomas's baseball had become stopped too, shaking his head like a bear troubled greatly by bees.

“It's my forest,” Tamburlaine yelped.

But Thomas was not listening. The moment he stopped running, he looked down at himself, and even if a marching band made entirely of tubas and drums and brass bombs struck up next to his ear, he wouldn't have heard a single note.

Have you ever bundled up in a snowstorm? Piled on so many layers of scarf and sweater and parka and snow pants and mittens and great stomping boots that you could hardly move? Suddenly you are quite a lot bigger than before! You bang against bannisters and bounce off cabinets and tumble about in the icy drifts like a panda bear and not like a little human at all.

Then you may have some idea of how Thomas felt. He felt his old body padded up and stuffed and cushioned in a thick, heavy suit, so thick and heavy he couldn't feel anything the way he used to and would certainly go whanging and pranging into everything in sight if he wasn't careful.

But he was not wearing a snowsuit. Not even mittens. His hands were quite bare. And big. And strong. With knuckles the size of crabapples. Thomas squinted in the sunlight—a sunlight unlike any Chicago could boil up in her pots—warm, pumpkin-gold sunlight that
dripped,
that
poured,
that
fizzed
, that
tasted,
actually had a taste, and the taste was the taste of home. Thomas's eyes grew big to gobble up that sunshine. But the rest of him was big, too. So much bigger than he had been on the other side of his bedroom wall. His shoulders felt vast and bony and tough within his old jeweled jacket, which now squeezed uncomfortably tight. His legs wanted to run again, as though they had never run before—
Let us go fast,
they seemed to scream, bursting the seams of his trousers.
We're good for anything you can think of!
His chest gulped down champion breaths, so much air at once that it felt like drinking a whole pint of milk in one go. Thomas touched his hair. Thomas touched his nose. Thomas touched his jaw.

Only he knew, the minute he landed, feet squelching in churning rainbow mud, the moment his nose filled with sparkling, spiced air, that his name wasn't Thomas. It never had been. His name was Hawthorn. And he was a troll.

“It's my forest,” Tamburlaine repeated. She was pointing at something in the distance. She tasted a dollop of mud from her thumb. Her wooden thumb—Tamburlaine's human skin and her wig were gone. She was a carved girl, her grain dark and rich and fine, her hair no longer flowers or even branches, but hard, chiseled waves cut deep into her wooden skull and wooden neck and wooden shoulders.

The monstrous baseball stared down at his four captives, sprawled out in the shimmering mud. He seemed suddenly not to know what to do with them. He panted, his fuchsia eyes blazing, his breath reeking of belladonna and mandrake and despair and other poisonous things. His truck-engine chest heaved; his shoulders arched. Thomas's stomach tried to hide behind his spine. No one moved. In the end, it was Scratch who was bravest. He wound his crank, set his needle down, and sang out in the big, boom-barrel voice of the man in the sky-blue suit on an album cover they might never see again:

Take me out to the ball game

Take me out to the crowd …

“Silence,” the baseball-thing snarled. His voice sounded like a barrel of skulls and iron nails rattling all together. “How dare you speak to me, you blasted worms? How
dare
you?”

“Excuse me, sir,” said Tamburlaine, her voice tight and thin as a toy aeroplane's rubber band, “but who are you? I should think we'd dare to speak to anyone unless we knew they were a principal or a president or a fellow in the movies.”