The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There (6 page)

September approached the cube gingerly and hooked her fingers into the swooping metallic patterns of the gate. She peered inside but saw only a vague redness.

“Hello?” she called. “Is the Sibyl at home?”

No answer came.

September looked around for a bell-pull or a door knocker or something whose job it might be to let visitors in. She saw nothing, only the scarlet cube standing improbably in that open field like a dropped toy. Finally, ducking around to the side of the square, her fingers fell upon a row of huge pearly buttons, ringed in gold and written upon with bold red letters. September gasped with wonder.

The Sibyl lived in an elevator.

The buttons read:

THE SIBYL OF COMFORT

THE SIBYL OF COMEUPPANCE

THE SIBYL OF CRUEL-BUT-TRUE

THE SIBYL OF COMPLEXITY

September hesitated. She did not need to be comforted nor, precisely, did she feel she deserved it. She thought she probably ought to choose comeuppance, but she was already trying to make it right! She did not want her punishment now, before she had even a chance to fix it all! September frowned; she probably did need to hear things which were cruel but true. If they were true it did not matter if they were cruel, even if all her mistakes were laid out before her like rings in a jeweler’s box. But she could not bear it, quite. She could not bring herself to volunteer for cruelty. That left only the last.

“Well, surely everything is always more complicated than it seems, and if the Sibyl can help unravel it, that would be best. But what if it means the Sibyl will make it all more complicated? What if it means I shall not be able to understand her at all?”

But her finger had chosen before her head could catch up, and the button depressed with a very satisfying
click
. She dashed around to the gate just as it rattled open and the most extraordinary creature appeared, seated upon an elevator operator’s red velvet stool.

The Sibyl’s face was not a person’s face. It was a perfectly round disc, like a mask, but without a head behind it. Two thin rectangles served for eyes, and a larger one opened up where her mouth should be. The disc of her face was half gold and half silver, and all around it a lion’s mane of leaves and branches and boughs, each one half gold and half silver, sprouted and glittered around her strange, flat head. Her body had odd carved half-silver and half-golden joints, like a marionette, and she wore a sweeping sort of short gold-and-silver dress that looked like what little girls wore in paintings of ancient times. But September saw no strings and no one else in the red elevator, and the disc of the Sibyl’s face made her shiver in the sun and clench up her toes in her shoes.

“Are you a Terrible Engine?” September whispered. “Like Betsy Basilstalk’s gargoyle or Death’s mushroom lady? Is there someone else back there hiding behind you, someone less frightening and more friendly?”

The Sibyl tipped her head down to look at her, and nothing gleamed in the black bars of her eyes. Her voice emerged from the slash of her mouth, echoing, as if from somewhere very far away.

“No, child. I am only myself. Some things are just what they appear to be. I am the Sibyl, and you are September. Now come in out of the light and have a cup of tea.”

September stepped into the great elevator. The gate closed behind her and a momentary panic rose up in September’s breast—the elevator was a cage and she was caught in it. But the Sibyl touched the walls as she walked into her house, and wherever her hand fell a pearly button lit up with a number on it, illuminating the room like welcoming lamps. 6, 7, 9, 3, 12. The inside of the elevator shone with redness everywhere: red couches, red chaises, red tables, red curtains. The Sibyl settled into a red armchair whose back had creases like a seashell. Before her a little red tea service had already been laid out on a low table the color of a sunset. Above her head a jeweled brass half circle hung on the wall—an elevator arrow, and it pointed toward the second floor. But the room and its clutter seemed a bit shabby and threadbare, patches of worn velvet and tarnished brass, as though once it had all been much grander. Even the Sibyl’s terrible face, now that September felt she could bear to look at it for a full moment, was peeling a little at the edges, and thin cracks shone in its surface.

All around the chair and the table and the tea service and the couches, the elevator was filled with the most extraordinary heaps of junk. Weapons glinted everywhere—swords and maces and cudgels and bows and arrows, daggers and shields and tridents and nets. Besides these September saw armor and jewelry, bucklers and tiaras, helmets and rings, greaves and bracelets. An immense necklace of blue stones lay draped over a long golden rod, and both of these rested against a woman’s dark breastplate. Clothing peeked out here and there, plates and bowls and long plaits of shining hair only a little less bright than the metal, bound beautifully with ribbon and arranged in careful coils. In the midst of all this, September sat frozen on a soft red couch made for a girl just her size.

The Sibyl poured tea from a carnelian pot with a little three-headed stone dog prancing on the lid. One of the dog’s legs had gotten snapped off in some tea-related incident years past. The liquid splashed purple and steaming into a ruby cup. The parchment tag of a tea bag dangled from the lip of the cup. In square, elegant writing it said:

All little girls are terrible.

“Are your sisters about?” September asked, trying to keep her voice from shaking. She felt suddenly that she had chosen dreadfully wrong, that this alien, faceless woman did not mean well to anyone. Taiga had called her an awful old lady, and perhaps she was right.

“What sisters?”

“The Sibyl of Comfort, perhaps? I’ll take Cruel-but-True if I have to.”

The Sibyl laughed, and it came out all wrong, jangling, crashing, crackling somewhere inside her strange body.

“There is only me, girl. My name is Slant, and I am all the Sibyls. You only had to choose which me to talk to, for, you know, we all change our manners, depending on who has come to chat. One doesn’t behave at all the same way to a grandfather as to a bosom friend, to a professor as to a curious niece. I was impressed with your choice, so if you take it back now, then I shall have to be disappointed in you, and make you write ‘I Shall Not Chicken Out’ a thousand times.”

“Why … why would you be impressed? It’s only that I could not bear the others. It was cowardly, really.”

The Sibyl’s head turned slowly to one side, and kept on turning until it had rotated all the way around like a wheel. “Most people don’t like complexity. They would prefer the world to be simple. For example, a child is whisked away to a magical land and saves it, and all is well forever after. Or a child goes to school and grows up and gets married and has children, and those children have children, and everyone enjoys the same cake for Christmas every year and all is well forever after. You could get yourself a sieve the size of the sea, sift through half the world, and still find not two together who would choose a complex world over a simple one. And yet, I am a Sibyl. Complexity is my stock in trade.”

“What is a Sibyl, exactly?”

“A Sibyl is a door shaped like a girl.” Slant sipped her tea. September could hear it trickling down her metallic throat like a rain down a spout. It was a pretty answer, but she did not understand it.

“And how do you … get into that line of work?”

September believed the Sibyl might have smiled, if her mouth worked that way.

“How do you get any job? Aptitude and luck! Why, when I was a girl, I would stand at the threshold of my bedroom for hours with a straight back and clear eyes. When my father came to bring my lunch, I would make him answer three questions before I let him pour my juice. When my governess came to give me a bath, I insisted that she give me seven objects before I let her enter my room. When I grew a little older, and had suitors, I demanded from them rings from the bottom of the sea, or a sword from the depths of the desert, or a golden bough and a thick golden fleece, too, before I allowed even one kiss. Some girls have to go to college to discover what they are good at; some are born doing what they must without even truly knowing why. I felt a hole in my heart shaped like a dark door I needed to guard. I had felt it since I was a baby and asked my mother to solve an impossible riddle before I would let her nurse me. By the time I was grown, I had turned the whole of our house into a labyrinth to which only I had the map. I asked high prices for directions to the kitchen, blood and troths. My parents very sweetly and with much patience asked me to seek out employment before they went mad. So I went searching all over Fairyland, high and low and middling, seeking the door that fit my heart. You know how questing goes. You can’t explain it to anyone else; it would be like telling them your dreams. I looked under a rock, but it was not there. I looked behind a tree, but it was not there, either. Finally I found Asphodel. The ground is thin here, and a little cave greeted me with all the joy a hollow rock can manage. A thousand years later, most breaths spent in Asphodel are concerned with trade with and transit to Fairyland-Below. The Sibyl industry has boomed all over Fairyland, in fact. There are two other gates now, two! I have even heard of a third in Pandemonium itself. What a degenerate age we live in! But still, I was first, and that counts for something.”

“You’re a thousand years old?”

“Close enough for mythic work. A Sibyl must be more or less permanent, like the door she serves. The door keeps her living, for it loves her and needs her, and she loves and needs it.”

“Is that why you look … the way you do?”

The Sibyl Slant stared out of her slit eyes, the disc of her face showing no feeling at all. “Do you suppose you will look the same when you are an old woman as you do now? Most folk have three faces—the face they get when they’re children, the face they own when they’re grown, and the face they’ve earned when they’re old. But when you live as long as I have, you get many more. I look nothing like I did when I was a wee thing of thirteen. You get the face you build your whole life, with work and loving and grieving and laughing and frowning. I’ve stood between the above world and the below world for an age. Some men get pocket watches when they have worked for fifty years. Think of my face as a thousand-year watch. Now, if we’ve done with introducing ourselves—by which I mean I have introduced myself and you’ve said very little, but I forgive you, since I know all about you, anyway—come sit on my lap and take your medicine like a good girl.”

September found herself climbing up into the Sibyl’s flat gold-and-silver lap before she could even protest that she was far too big for laps and, anyway, what did she mean by medicine? She felt very strange, sitting there. Slant had no smell at all, the way her father smelled of pencils and chalk from his classroom, but also good, warm sunshine and the little tang of cologne he liked to wear. The way her mother smelled of axle grease and steel and also of hot bread and loving. The smell of loving is a difficult one to describe, but if you think of the times when someone has held you close and made you safe, you will remember how it smells just as well as I do.

Slant smelled like nothing.

The Sibyl lifted a comb from a table that had certainly not been there before. The long gray comb prickled with gray gems: cloudy, milky stones and smoky, glimmery ones; clear, watery ones; and pearls with a silvery sheen. The teeth of the comb were mirrors, and September saw her own face briefly before the Sibyl began, absurdly, to comb her hair. It did not hurt, even though September’s brown hair was very tangled indeed.

“What are you doing?” she asked uncertainly. “Am I that untidy?”

“I am combing the sun out of your hair, child. It is a necessary step in sending you below Fairyland. You’ve lived in the sun your whole life—it’s all through you, bright and warm and dazzling. The people of Fairyland-Below have never seen the sun, or if they have, they’ve used very broad straw hats and scarves and dark glasses to keep themselves from being burned up. We have to make you presentable to the underworld. We have to make sure you’re wearing this season’s colors, and this season is always the dark of winter. Underworlds are sensitive beasts. You don’t want to rub their fur the wrong way. Besides, all that sun and safety and life you’ve stored up will be no use to you down there. You’d be like a rich woman dropped into the darkest jungle. The wild striped cats don’t know what diamonds are. They’d only see something shining where nothing ought to shine.” The Sibyl paused in her combing. “Are you afraid of going below? I am always curious.”

September considered this. “No,” she said finally. “I shall not be afraid of anything I haven’t even seen yet. If Fairyland-Below is a terrible place, well, I shall feel sorry for it. But it might be a wonderful place! Just because the wild striped cats don’t know what diamonds are doesn’t mean they’re vicious; it just means they have wildcat sorts of wants and wealth and ways of thinking, and perhaps I could learn them and be a little wilder and cattier and stripier myself. Besides, I haven’t yet met anyone who’s actually been to Fairyland-Below. Oh, I know Neep said there were devils and dragons—but my best friends in all the world are a Marid and a Wyvern, and anyone in Omaha who met them would call them a devil and a dragon, because they wouldn’t know any better! Fairyland itself frightened me at first, after all. It’s only that I wish I did not have to do it all alone. Last time, I had such marvelous friends. I don’t suppose … you would want to come with me, and be my companion, and tell me things I will promise to find extraordinary, and fight by my side?”

The Sibyl resumed her combing, stroke by long, steady stroke. “No,” she said. “I do not go in, I only guard the door. I have never even wanted to. The threshold is my country, the place which is neither here nor there.”

“Sibyl, what
do
you want?”

“I want to live,” the Sibyl said, and her voice rang rich and full. “I want to keep on living forever and watching heroes and fools and knights go up and down, into the world and out. I want to keep being myself and mind the work that minds me. Work is not always a hard thing that looms over your years. Sometimes, work is the gift of the world to the wanting.” At that, Slant patted September’s hair and returned the comb to the table—but in the mirrored teeth, September saw herself and gasped. Her hair was no longer chocolate brown but perfect, curling black, the black of the dark beneath the stairs, as black as if she had never stood in the sun her whole life, and all through it ran stripes of blue and violet, shadowy, twilit, wintry colors.