The Boy Who Lost Fairyland Read online

  It looked like nothing so much as a dressing room in back of a theatre. Mirrors ringed with big lightbulbs dotted the walls, bright rags and feathers and coats and dresses and half-patchworked hats lay on tables and chairs everywhere. Nothing matched, furniture came from wherever it was found, a red carousel bench here, a polka-dotted fainting couch with one leg missing there, a striped writing desk in one corner, a glass sewing table in another. All over the walls were concert programs and menus and train schedules and angry, snippy notes in fine handwriting. Anna, if you let the fire go out before dawn one more time I shall turn you into a musk ox! Bernard, you cow, can’t you remember a simple thing like sparrow hearts at market? Report to the parlor at teatime for punishment! Delia, Master Bluebell demands that you dance for company this evening. Do try not to be awful at it.

  And sprawled on every bench and couch and stool and chair and scrap of floor were twenty or so human children, some, like Penny, older than Tom and Tam, almost grown, some much younger, laughing and whispering. Some even smoked odd little cherry-red cigarettes and drank green and shimmery things from square bottles.

  Everyone fell silent when they saw the newcomers. One little boy, hardly old enough to dress himself, squealed in panic and hid under the fainting couch.

  “Oh, Herbert, silly, don’t be afraid!” Penny hushed the boy. “They’re like us! Changelings! I know they look like Fairy folk, but the King himself brought them to Bessie for their shoe fitting. They’re one of ours. They won’t bite or tell on us.”

  “I bite,” the scrap-yarn wombat said helpfully. “But only when I really want to.”

  At the sound of Blunderbuss’s fuzzy voice, Herbert peeked out from under the couch. He took in her pea-green and tangerine ear, her blue-and-green striped belly, her mismatched eyes and squealed again. He barreled out into the open again and fell onto the wombat in joy, squeezing her and hugging her. Tom watched with some satisfaction, as she’d done much the same to him when they met—and a little sadness, for he’d been too busy trying his teeth on magic to give her the hugging he ought to have done. He would, when he got a moment to breathe, he promised himself.

  “Easy on the squishables, little monkey!” the wombat huffed. “In the Land of Wom it’s considered polite to challenge a wombat to a duel before you throttle them like that!” But she seemed pleased anyway.

  “Welcome to the Changeling Room,” Penny Farthing said, with not a little bit of pride. “We made it, it’s ours. Of course Changelings made a lot of things in Pandemonium, but this one is our favorite because it only loves us. Fairylanders aren’t allowed. Bayleaf—the tall chap there? Remembered some old nonsense from before he was taken and made us great beefy passwords that Fairies could never guess. This is where we come when we’re not…occupied.”

  “But they are Fairylanders,” said Bayleaf. “That one’s a troll. And the other’s a…matchstick girl or something. But they’re not Changelings. Did you hit your head?”

  Penny squared her feet. “They are! Come on, don’t be thick. Can’t you guess?” But he could not. Penny Farthing, by great feat of will, kept herself from bouncing up and down and gloating out loud. “They’re the other ones. Goods exchanged! Born here, dropped off in our cradles like the Tuesday post. We always thought they existed! Now we know! And they know how to get back where they came from! It’s only the best thing that’s ever happened, you know.”

  But the rest of the Changelings did not cheer. They stared at Tom and Tam—and it was not a very nice stare. It was the stare an urchin gives to a child with a fur hat in a sweet shop who has gotten to pick out a whole cake for herself every week of her life.

  “Hullo,” Tom Thorn said. No one answered. A little child not much bigger than Herbert reached up and poked Tom’s arm as if to see whether he was real. He cleared his throat. “Where are we, actually?” Tom asked. “Can’t Fairies go anywhere? It’s their city, after all.”

  “That’s the clever bit,” Bayleaf piped up. He had a shock of dark hair that stuck up every which way and wore at least three waistcoats. “This is like…a hidden pocket in a suit jacket, or a hollow cane. It’s in Pandemonium, but it isn’t Pandemonium.”

  Scratch wound his crank and the room jumped at the sound of his scratchy, sweet voice:

  I gave my love a cherry

  That had no stone

  I gave my love a chicken

  That had no bone

  I gave my love a story

  That had no end…

  “Yes, yes!” Penny laughed. “We took out the stone and squirreled into the empty space in the big cherry of Pandemonium. It’s all on account of the hotel, see. The Grand Cookscomb Hotel—a thousand and one rooms, no two alike, and no one the same night after night! The lavish Marie Asphodel Suite becomes the chic, modern Antonia Hyssop Room at midnight! The Cat’s Eye Ballroom becomes the kitchen! The kitchen becomes the telegraph office! But hotels, you know, even regular hotels, are not natural places. A hotel is one house with a thousand other houses inside it. The rooms are little bubbles of Hotel Physicks, boxes of time where folk live a miniature version of their whole lives and then dash as quick as they came. A hotel room has to learn how to be home for anyone—and in all that learning they wake up a little. In fact, the best way to build a hotel is to round up a few rooms where secret things have happened. A hotel will bloom up around it like a dandelion. So when Old Lady Cookscomb was sprouting, we just…popped one of the bubbles free and coaxed it into a sympathetic horse. We fed it with all the things hotel rooms like to eat: tears and jumping on the bed and mints and empty room service trays and secret meetings and ugly mismatched furniture and individually wrapped soap and too many guests crammed in at once. So we’re really in the Hotel, but not inside it. When the big hotel closed down, our bit stayed, and no one would even think to come looking for it. Hotel Physicks is complicated! But here we are.”

  “And you were all human. Born human. And brought here when you were babies,” Tom Thorn said softly.

  One of the others nodded, a girl nearly grown, with a big thick auburn braid and a long velvet dressing gown on, who was called Sadie. “All of us. Some ages ago, some yesterday. You’ll remember—we all chose. We all took one look at Fairyland and said, ‘Yes, please!’ And when I came, I did whatever I liked! I ate so much splutterscotch grass I got drunk as a goblin and I slept under puffball parasols in the Darkest Fungal Fathoms. I befriended the great Hagfish who lives in Milkboil Lake, and she taught me to hold my breath for a year. I rode with the Mushroom Hunters of Brittlegill upon a Giant Jackal of my very own—and with my comrades I slew the Ancient and Carnivorous Crumblecap when I was but eight years old! I rescued four maidens from towers, beat twelve were-salamanders at riddling, and turned six separate reptiles back into minor aristocracy—one of which was a small dinosaur named Spearmint. I was Sour Girl Sadie Spleenwort, terror of the swamps! That was a Changeling’s life! Adventures would just find you. You couldn’t get away. I fell asleep in a pistachio grove when I was ten, and when I woke up I’d been given a cutlass called Hush, a ship made of jester’s caps, and command of twenty levitating hyenas who couldn’t say the word yes as they’d been cursed by the Khan of Zebras. Was that better than school and bedtime at eight and learning arithmetic so I could grow up and teach arithmetic? It was, it was!”

  Tom’s eyes shone. His heart banged a happy beat. He glanced at Tamburlaine, and thought his face must look much the same as hers. She grinned and held her hands to her chest. Yes, this, this! Giant Jackals and Zebra Khans and Mushroom Hunters with colors flying! That is Fairyland! That’s what they’d come for!

  “Even after the Marquess, it wasn’t so bad,” Bayleaf sighed. “We all had to come into the city from the country, even if we were quite busy planning an aerial raid on the Roc of Gristlethatch Manor.” He coughed. “For example. But she had a school built for us. We learned music and poetry and geometry and conversational Pookish. We got weekends free for Exercise.”

  A girl with round che
eks and several earrings in each ear, who was called Virginia, clapped her hands. “Oh, I miss Exercise! As much mischief as you could fit into—”

  “The Grimnasium!” shouted several of the other Changelings all together.

  “It was a secret. In Seresong District,” Bayleaf went on. “Not so far from the Briary itself. She was a funny old thing, the Marquess. She put chains on us, but she seemed to feel bad about it every third or fourth Thursday. She made the Grimnasium for us. Blew it all in one go, out of a glassblower’s punty as long as a whale rib: a great curved building as big as a roller-skating rink, as big as a circus, all of smoky glass and green lanterns and emerald trimming and a jade roof. The Marquess would unload every horned or scaled or winged or tailed creature she could catch in her nets into the back of the place. She dumped baskets of spindles and mirrors and straw and masks and stones and crowns and armor and knives and anything you like all over the staircases. Sometimes you’d go in and it would be a desert with ice-elephants marauding everywhere. Sometimes it’d be a huge stormy ocean with water like melon punch. We took our Exercise there, stretched our legs.” His voice turned bitter. “You know, displayed our native behaviors in our natural habitat. Just like pet seals on a papier-mâché ice floe.”

  “It was so nice, though,” sighed Virginia.

  “She didn’t do it to be nice. She did it so she could say she was nice,” snapped Bayleaf. “And school was only so we could give geometry concerts every night and play the grumellphone in the Municipal Orchestra and steal the Pooka’s shapeshifting recipe.”

  “I wish I had a grumellphone now, I’ll tell you what,” said Sadie with a harsh, short laugh like a hammer blow. She wrapped her braid around one hand nervously, as though someone might hear her.

  “And if somebody wanted us, we could go away with them.” Penny Farthing’s lip quivered. “They asked nice and everything back then. I had a Fairy mother. We rode wild bicycles every day and ate tire-jerky round the campfire and she loved me till she wasn’t allowed to love me anymore.”

  “Nobody wants to hear about your stupid mother!” cried Herbert. He had big blue eyes, the kind that are made primarily to fill up with big, blue tears. “Nobody else got one! It’s not fair! I hate your mother!”

  “Shut up,” hissed Penny.

  “I get it,” growled Blunderbuss, who was at that moment nearly having her ear wrenched off by the distressed Herbert. “The Fairies came back and now they’re in charge and they’re nobody’s mummies and once a kidlet lands here they’re good and owned by one beastie or another. Yes? Am I right?”

  “There’s waiting lists,” Sadie whispered. “You can put in for one of us at the Office in Idlelily. We cost the same as a carriage horse in good health. A little cheaper, even.” She looked up to the peeling ceiling and gritted her teeth. “I’m Sadie Spleenwort,” she hissed. She thumped her fist against her chest. “That’s me. I’m worth more than a horse!”

  “And it’s like…like being in service?” Tamburlaine asked gently, trying not to offend. “Like in books they have in England. Butlers and maids and stables and things.”

  “That, too,” nodded Bayleaf, and everyone suddenly got very quiet.

  Penny Farthing started to speak, but Sadie interrupted her. “I’m sorry, Penn. I love you, but you can’t tell them. You don’t know. Your house works you, but you don’t have to…to do it. Calpurnia would never make you. You’re lucky. You’re so lucky.”

  “Don’t tell me what I know,” Penny cried. “Do you know what Calpurnia Farthing had to do to keep me when the Fairies came back? She did used to have two hands, Sadie Spleenwort. You’re not the only one who used to be brave! I rode at the head of a Bike Gang and even the bulls came when I called! Cal and I were the first in Fairyland to cross the Perverse and Perilous Sea by velocipede! They threw us a parade in the Antipodes when we kicked our stands down on dry land at last! Tell me again how much more you know than me!”

  “They’ll find out soon anyway,” piped a boy with great brown eyes like hard toffees. “They’ve got their shoes. The Office will be coming for them soon. They’ll have to Stand in the Corner like we all do!” And he burst into tears.

  At that moment Tom and Tam doubled over, sank to their knees, and cried out together. Their stomachs burned, their hair felt as though it were falling out all at once, and their teeth ached as though they wanted to fire from their mouths like ivory bullets. Blunderbuss bellowed, her mustard-colored mouth showing as she roared. Static flew from Scratch like awful, screaming smoke. The wombat leapt out of Herbert’s strangling hug and jumped this way and that, trying to stand between her troll and whatever was biting him. Scratch screeched, his needle flying, his crank whirling wildly. Tom and Tam held on to each other desperately. A sickening crack snapped the air. The wood of Tam’s left foot split open and gold began to pour out—gold like maple syrup, oozing and hot and glittering. Tom Thorn looked down at his own foot; his shoe was already spilling over with the same sticky, dripping gold.

  They were not the only ones—the girl with round cheeks and earrings screamed along with them, clinging to the side of a mirror to keep from collapsing on the floor.

  “That’s the work bell,” said Bayleaf, who looked a little glad to see the newcomers suffering as the rest had done. “You have to go. It’ll only get worse if you shirk.” He pulled up his trouser-leg to show them—one of his feet was solid gold from the knee on. “Some of us do try to say no. Run off.”

  Penny Farthing hooked an arm under each of Tom’s and Tam’s elbows and pulled them up. Tom thought his arm would come off in her hand—his bones burned.

  “The Office! The Office!” wept the littlest children.

  “Come on,” Penny said. “I’ll go with you. The Fairies can’t really tell us apart. They call off the gold as soon as someone shows up. Ginnie?” The girl with round cheeks nodded gratefully and dragged herself over to Penny. They held hands, and Penny’s red hair turned into Ginnie’s brown curls like ice melting. “We swap a lot. When one of us is just too tired. Or when it’s a Laundry Sabbat. You rest, Gin. Sleep. I left some cocoa in the sink.”

  Tom Thorn could hardly see. His foot felt so awfully, horribly heavy. “The Spinster,” he gasped. “You said…” But he could not finish.

  “What do you want with that dried-up old tragedy?” Sadie Spleenwort, lately of the swamps, scoffed. “You’d best look to your own business or you’ll find yourself with a golden head. She’s with the Redcaps. Holed up fast in their rum cellar and they’ll never let her out, so you just keep your head down and learn how to say yes, sir, like it was your first word.”

  CHAPTER XV

  THE LAUNDRY MOOSE

  In Which Tom and Tam Go to the Office, Meet a Humble Public Servant, Fight Several Albino Moose, and Do a Spot of Laundry

  The Office had come to collect them.

  The Office towered over their heads, blotting out the sunlight and puffing little white cards into the air like smoke. It was a man taller than a tannery, wearing a sweeping dark robe stitched with all the symbols on a keyboard that sit lonely, used but rarely, ampersands and percentages and brackets and at signs and carrots and asterisks. It glowered at them with scalding red eyes.

  “IN YOU GET,” it bellowed, and opened its robe to reveal its chest: a barrel-shaped card catalogue. Brass handles were bolted into its long drawers below little cream-colored cards with addresses printed neatly on them.

  17 Love-Lies-Bleeding Lane rolled smoothly toward them, as spacious as a coffin.

  “Hullo, Rupert,” sighed Penny Farthing with a weak smile. “Doing well?”

  “FINE,” thundered the Office. “MISS MYGNOME. WAS A CUSHY GIG, THAT. I GET A SORE THROAT SOMETIMES BUT WHAT CAN YOU DO.”

  “Comes with the job, I imagine,” she agreed. Tom and Tam tried vainly to stand on their own. They left gold footprints where they’d come running. “All that hollering takes a toll.”

  “I’VE A KNACK FOR IT,” Rupert roared. “GOTTA TAKE
WORK WHILE WORK’S TAKING, YEAH?”

  “Yeah,” Tam offered weakly. This seemed to snap the Office back to the task at hand.

  “COME ON THEN, NO MOANING, I HAVEN’T GOT ALL DAY.”

  Their little wretched band climbed up the card catalogue as best they could. Rupert boosted Scratch up into the drawer first, then popped Blunderbuss, squealing woolly protest, after. Penny got Tom and Tam halfway up to 17 Love-Lies-Bleeding Lane before Rupert hoisted them up the rest of the way with a surprisingly gentle hand.

  Tom and Tam teetered on the edge of the dark drawer. Nothing lay at the bottom of it. Nothing at all, except darkness. But Penny gave them a shove and they toppled ungracefully into the depths of the Office, dripping gold all the way down.

  Let us say a house is a world. Its hallways and landings are rivers and seas connecting the great continents of living room, parlor, kitchen, library. We sail down them, dropping anchor in the port of breakfast, the harbor of bookshelves! Great mountains of stairs lead up into the alpine country of bedrooms and washing rooms and sewing rooms and linen closets. Let us say this is true—for it is just exactly what Tom Thorn and Tamburlaine saw when they passed through the little door at 17 Love-Lies-Bleeding Lane, a handsome tweed brownstone sandwiched between two others just like it on a broad and pleasant street lined with poplin poplars.

  Tom Thorn pushed open the door—an oval velvet elbow patch with a brown-button knob. The horrid pain in his bones and his skin and his teeth and his feet went up like steam and vanished back to wherever it had come from. He stepped into a wide green meadow studded with wildflowers. His friends crowded in behind him, all but Penny gawping at the sloping hills, the bright violets and dahlias and tangled bittersweet berries racing one another across the sweetgrass. Little groves of almond and tangerine and breadfruit trees sprouted up in the most perfect places, where the nooks of hillocks met or where one might most want shade if one were walking through the countryside. The sun gushed light like a burst grape; four happy trickling brooks full of smooth round stones darted through the rich black soil. The clouds blossomed in a very strange shade of eggplant, but it somehow looked lovely and right in this particular sky. They had stepped, not out of the oval velvet door, but out of a very neat groundskeeper’s hut, walls whitewashed and roof tiled in blue.