So I went to school. When I got home, I did my homework. When I was done, I would work even more. Mostly, I’d just make phone calls or write letters to characters I knew of in faraway places, asking for their help in looking for a mysterious? creature, who, no, I couldn’t send a picture of, and well, yes, he was kind of hard to describe, as he’d morph from one form to the next. I got a lot of people asking if it was a joke; some hung up on me straight away, and one just grunted at me. Of course, this one was Frankenstein’s Monster over in Fictional Geneva, so I’m not sure if he’d agreed to help or told me to get lost.
Randy and The, meanwhile, were out “in the field.” Nearly all of the remaining detectives and cops who weren’t currently guarding the door to Narnia were working with him, combing all of Fiction and Nonfiction, searching old abandoned buildings and forests (as we know these are a favorite hiding place for certain formless villains), and even knocking on people’s doors and searching their homes. At this point, everyone was on high alert, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a character who didn’t know what we were looking for.
Of course, the lack of police force closer to home had some definite drawbacks. A group of blue pixies had taken to flying around my neighborhood, quite openly selling their dust to anyone who was interested. The number of residential break-ins throughout Fantasy and Romance had gone up tenfold, until I started going around and putting protective charms on people’s homes. But there wasn’t much I could do about the increase in illegal punctuation. It seemed everyone was taking advantage of the lack of cops patrolling the streets, punctuating walls, street signs, sidewalks, bridges, even defacing Fictional Government buildings with commas, semicolons; “quotation marks,” and the like—it was a mess!
But irritating as all of this may have been, I could handle it. The thing that was wearing on me most about the police force being gone was it meant, of course, that Randy was gone. He would check in as often as he could to update me on The’s progress, but it was hard. In some genres it was impossible to get service, and in many, phones simply didn’t exist.
So I’d go several days not knowing anything. Had The found any backstories? Any clues? ‘?’? I was quickly falling into unhappily familiar territory—skipping over large chunks of time and description so that I could just focus on my schoolwork, and missing Jenny more than ever. I fretted about her fate and that of the rest of the vanished characters, then distracted myself with more schoolwork, more phone calls, and more letters.
After almost a month of this blurry nonexistence, I finally got a phone call from Randy—he’d been out of touch for nearly five days, moving around through Historical Fiction. Even then, the reception was finicky at best.
“Pe-er. Can you __ me?”
“Randy! I’m so happy to hear from you.” I found myself more present and alert than I’d been in weeks. “What’s going on? What’s new? Have you found Jenny’s backstory yet? Any of the others? I have been getting in touch with everyone—”
“Hello?”
“Randy?”
“Okay, I can hear you now. We’re driving past Joycean Dublin, so re-eptio_ is a little bit iffy. And if I get interr_pted by—”
INELUCTABLE MODALITY OF THE VISIBLE: AT LEAST THAT IF NO MORE, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot.
“—just ignore it.”
“Okay, what’s going on?”
“___ we are ___ing back to more modern lit_ature today. So far we haven’t found?, but we have found _ne backstory.”
“Sorry, I could hear you pretty well, then you broke up,” I said, pushing the emergency phone to my ear so hard I could hear my own heartbeat pulsing against the receiver. “It sounded like you said you had only found one backstory this week.” I twirled the long red cord around my finger nervously.
“No, no.”
My heart resumed a more normal and less life-threatening pace.
“We __ found one __story total. We’ve found _laddin’s so far. This wee_ we ha_n’t found any—”
. . . Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn . . .
“Hello?” I banged the receiver on the kitchen counter. “Hello? Randy?”
But he was gone.
They’d found one backstory, Aladdin’s, in a month. One backstory—in a month! In a month, they had found one backstory. No matter how I emphasized or punctuated it, it was just as bad. At this rate, it would be months before I could write Jenny and the other characters back—and who knew—by then? could have broken the defenses at Narnia and gone through to erase more characters.
No, no. I had to put a stop to this. I had the power to fix this. I had—
I HARDLY HEAR THE PURLIEU CRY
OR A TOMMY TALK AS I PASS ONE BY
BEFORE MY THOUGHTS BEGIN TO RUN
ON F. M’CURDY ATKINSON,
THE SAME THAT HAD THE WOODEN LEG
AND THAT FILIBUSTERING FILIBEG
THAT NEVER DARED TO SLAKE HIS DROUTH,
MAGEE THAT HAD THE CHINLESS MOUTH.
BEING AFRAID TO MARRY ON EARTH
THEY—
I had the receiver in my hand still, so first, I hung it up, and then I decided it was time to see a woman about a spell.
Twenty minutes later, I was standing in the middle of the school’s courtyard, hands on my knees, out of breath, with a slight sinking sensation in my stomach. I had no idea where to go. Aimlessly, I walked around the space—no longer the immaculate rose-laden courtyard that I’d seen under that other Long John’s tutelage but still pleasant enough. In fact, little lightning fairies were just starting to come out, twinkling brightly near the lush trees just beyond the benches around the courtyard’s edges. I thought about perhaps asking one of them, as there were no other students milling about at this time of day but ended up just walking along. Lightning fairies are notorious chatterboxes.
I passed the boxlike brick main building and found myself, quite involuntarily, walking down the little dirt path that I knew led to some of the teachers’ apartments. I knew this, of course, because last year I’d come here with Randy to interrogate Long John, then Professor and now Headmaster, Silver. Surely the headmaster would know where all of the teachers lived outside of working hours?
The path took a turn and climbed up a hill, and then there it was, just as I remembered it: an old, squat house, stretched long, with several chimneys poking out of its thatched, sloped roof. There were ten front doors rather than one, and I went immediately to the one I remembered being Long John’s. It was only slightly different than it had been the year before.
HEADMASTER Long John Silver
Get lost.
It didn’t look good. No, really—the sign looked terrible, Long John had really bad handwriting. But also, my prospects of finding him inside seemed grim, as there was no light on. I knocked anyway and waited a few minutes, and as I did, I glanced over at the window to the apartment next door. Even through the window, Merlin’s apartment looked cozy and inviting—a warm, gold light shone through the glass, I could just make out a fire burning merrily in the fireplace across the room, thick clouds of blue and purple smoke were puffing away from the chimney above, and oh, there was Merlin! The old man was sitting on his couch, slightly stooped over, looking at something I coul
dn’t see and smiling.
I took a step closer to nosily and slightly creepily look farther into Merlin’s apartment and saw the very person I was looking for—she was now pulling Merlin to his rickety old feet and slowly guiding him to a waltz around the center of the room. She turned him sharply, looked out the window, and for a moment, we just stared at each other. Then she screamed.
“Peter! What are you doing here?” she hissed, poking her head out of the front door. I looked up from where I was cowering beneath the window and even from there could see that Mattie was blushing furiously, her cheeks so red they almost matched her hair.
“I was looking for you, actually . . . What are you doing here?”
“She’s teaching me how to waltz!” Merlin said happily, poking his head out underneath hers. “Come on in, Peter. I’m sure she could teach you a thing or two as well!”
Feeling just as awkward as I had on my previous visit to this apartment building last year, I walked inside behind the two of them and set myself down on the couch where Merlin had been sitting before. Inside, I could see that a coffee table and two plush armchairs had been moved out of the room into the small connected kitchen area, leaving little indentations of where they had been on the thick wool rug. It really was quite cozy—and much warmer. I took off my jacket and looked between the two—Merlin was smiling happily, blinking at me politely, Mattie looked furious.
“So are you guys . . .”
It seemed the . . . had done the job, for Mattie sputtered indignantly and Merlin chuckled. “Dear Boy, of course we’re not . . . Mattie here is my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter.
“We didn’t want anyone to find out lest we be accused of nepotism!” he chuckled.
“Right.” I chanced a look at Mattie; she still looked pretty mad. “Well, I won’t tell anyone. And for what it’s worth, I had no idea—you’re a really good teacher, Mattie. One of the best. I mean, I didn’t know I could even do magic again until I started taking your class.”
“What do you need, Peter?” she asked bluntly. She knew me too well to be buttered up; I just wasn’t that polite a person.
“Okay, listen. There’s a spell I need to learn.” I paused for a moment, as Mattie sent the two armchairs and coffee table back into the living room. She and Merlin sat down. “You guys know that Randy and The have been working to gather up the remaining backstories—but they’ve been gone a month, and they’ve only found one. So I was just wondering—”
“It can’t be done, Peter,” Mattie said shortly. Merlin, who was looking politely concerned, leaned forward and added gravely, “It is just too risky.”
“I can do it.”
They both looked at me, sizing me up.
“If the spell isn’t strong enough, you’ll only alert? of what you’re trying to do and he may disappear forever,” Mattie said slowly, letting the words sink in.
“Well, if we don’t act faster, he’ll find a way back through the wardrobe to get more backstories and make himself stronger again! Listen, he’s got to already know we’re looking for his backstories—he’s getting weaker every time we erase him from one. At this rate, it will be months, if not more, before we round them all up. It’s too long.”
Mattie stared at me, her glare magnified cartoonishly through her thick glasses. I stared back. Merlin muttered something about tea and shuffled off into the kitchen area.
“Okay, Peter. I’ll teach you the spell for long-distance summoning—but before you do it, know that it is extremely difficult to bring something forth when you don’t know where it is. I, myself, have never been able to master it. The only witch I know of who can is Circe—and she mysteriously quit her post and left last week, saying something about an unruly student.”
“That’s weird.”
“My thoughts exactly,” she said, raising her eyebrows, and yes, there was a slight smile there. She then stood up and with a mere darting of her eyes, the two chairs and coffee table once again floated from the room back into their places in the kitchen. Merlin returned a moment later carrying a tray of tea things, saw that there was nowhere to set it, and put it down in the kitchen.
“Oh! Are we doing a spell?” he asked, clapping his hands.
“We’re going to try. Okay, Peter, I don’t think you’ll have any trouble with the spell itself—it’s
“Excuse me?”
It’s Urdu.”
“Well, what does it say?” I asked.
“Oh, it just says ‘Come to me.’ I’m not sure why it’s written that way. But essentially, you just have to say ‘Come to me!’ out loud, point your wand up toward the heavens, and visualize what you want to attract flowing to you—don’t imagine a location, as this might confuse things since you don’t know. Just imagine that you already have it. It’s a very simple spell; it’s just not at all easy. So let’s practice.” Mattie clapped her hands together, as though we were in a lesson at school again.
The next two hours were madness—chairs, tables, lamps, footstools, a cat, and dishware sailed around the room as I practiced drawing them to me from different parts of the little apartment. To be honest, this part was extremely easy work. I had already known how to attract things to me with my will; I’d just never bothered actually saying a spell along with it. Once I showed them that I could easily bring about the things inside the apartment, they took turns hiding objects just outside, so that I wouldn’t know where they were. I did as Mattie asked, raised my wand up into the air mightily, bellowed the words, and imagined having the object I wanted—and all the while felt really silly doing it.
“Peter, you’re not concentrating hard enough,” Mattie said after I failed to summon a pair of tweezers she’d hidden in a garden outside.
“I just feel so stupid holding my wand up like this,” I said, nodding my head upward at my two hands, clasped around the base of my wand as though I was trying to be a lightning rod. “It’s distracting. And you guys watching—I don’t know. I just feel stupid.”
I dropped my arms and tucked my wand in my pocket.
“I think I might call it a night. Maybe we can try again tomorrow,” I said, feeling rather disappointed. In my mind, I was supposed to have summoned all of the backstories and saved the day by now, perhaps going home to play spaceship with Jenny.
We said our good-byes, Mattie looking rather upset as well and Merlin simply looking for the pair of tweezers, and I walked toward Fantasy to continue practicing without their watching eyes.
* * *
15 Randy had wanted to call the group “The Justice League,” but that was taken, so he just settled for an abbreviated version: “The.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Over the next few days, I spent almost all of my free time at home practicing the spell, just as Mattie had directed. It was much more effective without an audience—I managed to bring about a typewriter, a small bedside table, a brand-new mattress, several small household items like pens, notepads, a few telephones, and once, even a rather peeved hobbit. The only problem was, I knew roughly where these things were and couldn’t help but imagine them there; I had no idea where those backstories might be—especially if they were hidden in Nonfiction. I may love to read the genre, but I’d never been there myself. I wouldn’t have known how to picture that exotic land to the east.
I kept running into a block when I tried to summon something that I couldn’t vaguely place, which wasn’t helped by the fact that my arms were aching from holding my wand over my head for hours on end, and I felt like a moron shouting “Come to me!” in my apartment, when I could hear my super, Mr. Super, downstairs laughing.
Finally, by Friday night, I decided I needed a break. I tucked my wand safely in my pants, walked out onto my front stoop, and was almost surprised to see that everything was just as it always had been (albeit, a few more pixies flying around). Like a tonic, the chill in the air seemed to snap me out of some haze—I’d been so busy, so focused on working, be
it for school or for The—I’d hardly remembered to just look around, to relax. And at that moment, that’s exactly what I felt I needed.
I dashed back inside to grab a jacket and then headed down the stairs of my apartment building. As the golden Fantasy sun dipped lower and lower in the sky, making the cotton candy clouds glow pink, the two crescent moons of Sci Fi, just a neighborhood over, shined more and more brightly, casting an eerie green glow over the area. The trees along my street, once every color of the rainbow, now had few leaves left as it was getting colder, but they still danced about as merrily as ever. I could see clusters of blue pixies dotted along the street as I walked, and I determinedly avoided their gaze—the last thing I needed right now was a bunch of pixie dust in my face; I was trying to relax, not climb a tower in Sci Fi.
I walked and walked, not entirely sure where I wanted to go but just enjoying the cool breeze and watching everyone go about their evenings. The Neighborhood Damsel in Distress stopped me long enough to chat and then faint in my arms. Once I got her standing again, I walked along and met a few large purple frogs playing hopscotch near a pond dotted with lily pads the size of tables. I waved hello to Pip and Pop (this time receiving a much friendlier greeting) and made my way down the one lone street of Romance that runs between Fantasy and Sci Fi.
This street had always been one of my favorites—the smell of pies baking from Pip and Pop’s seemed to somehow get caught in the narrow little alleyway, making the whole place constantly smell like some Clichéd Grandma’s House. The sky was a haze of pink, no matter the time of day or night; there were always morning birds singing, cherubs floating about on small puffs of pink cloud from Fantasy; plus, there were some really good restaurants on the street.
I ducked into one such restaurant intending to have a good meal for a change—I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a meal worth describing—but the place was so crowded, I wound up having to sit at the bar. It took nearly an hour to get my food (a personal pizza topped not with tomato sauce but with crushed fig, goat cheese, scallions, prosciutto, grilled and minced garlic cloves, and a subtle glaze of honey—well worth describing), and in that time, I managed to put down more than a couple of Fantasy Fizzes. But hey, I thought, I’m sposed tobe relaxxinggg, ar’ent I?
The Timeless Tale of Peter Able Page 19
