The Entirely True Story of the Unbelievable FIB

by Adam Shaughnessy

  “What do you mean?” Pru asked.

  “If you two learned anything from the story I told you, you should at least have learned that answers aren’t just valuable. Sometimes, they’re expensive. Now, I’m not a witch. I’m not going to age with every answer I give. But that doesn’t mean I give them out freely. Answers have to be earned. Sometimes, that can be done by asking the right question. Pru and ABE, the answers to everything that’s happened to you, that’s happening to your town . . . and to so much more . . . all those answers wait inside this house. But you don’t get to learn them, not unless you ask the right question.”

  To anyone else, Mister Fox’s challenge might have seemed daunting. But Pru knew what question to ask. She’d been carrying it around in her messenger bag for days. She’d been seeing the words of the question in her mind’s eye for just as long, golden words on a field of inky blue.

  “WHAT IS THE ‘UNBELIEVABLE FIB’?” she quoted, and a thrill ran up her spine as she spoke the words aloud and, for the first time, felt hope for an answer.

  Mister Fox relaxed and his grin settled on his face with the ease of a frequent guest.

  “Now that is a good question. And do you know what good questions are? They’re invitations. Good questions are like invitations to learn something new. You may come inside,” he said, and his voice carried an unusual formality when he spoke the words. “Or you may go home. But this is an invitation you’ll only receive once.”

  With that, Mister Fox turned to enter the Henhouse. He paused just long enough to add, “Mind the toes.” Then he continued on. He had to duck as he passed beneath the first couple of archways. After that, the hallway through which he walked opened and expanded around him, and he stood at his full height.

  “Pru,” ABE said, and there was caution in his voice.

  Pru understood. For all the mystery and magic of the moment, following Mister Fox into his impossible house still amounted to entering a stranger’s home, something that all children learn at a young age never to do.

  “He saved our lives.” Pru wasn’t sure whether she said it to reassure ABE or herself.

  ABE opened his mouth to respond but closed it a moment later, looking thoughtful.

  Pru still didn’t cross the threshold. Instead, she called after Mister Fox. “You said our town was in danger. Is it still, with the giant gone? And if it is still in danger, will following you help?”

  “Perhaps,” Mister Fox called back. He didn’t turn or pause.

  “Perhaps? ‘Perhaps’ to what? To the danger, or to it helping?”

  But Mister Fox had vanished into the Henhouse, and no other answer was forthcoming.

  Pru looked at ABE, who sighed. Then she stepped into the Henhouse. The wood of the floor felt surprisingly soft beneath her feet, and the air smelled of green and growing things. Pru moved in farther and ABE stepped up behind her. Together they walked down the impossible hallway. Ribbed as it was with doorframes every few feet, it reminded Pru of the gullet of some giant beast. Even though the space around them grew with every step, Pru couldn’t quite escape the feeling that they were being swallowed whole.

  She quickened her step, and before too long the arched hallway opened into a space so large that Pru could only stare, openmouthed, as she stepped into it and caught up to Mister Fox.

  The room at the end of the arched hallway stretched out in every direction, larger than three of Middleton Elementary School’s gymnasiums put together. Doors lined the walls. Each door stood between two columns. Each column was carved to look like a tree trunk, complete with a complicated network of branches that reached out and laced together with the branches of its neighbor on either side to form an entangled arch over every door.

  The forest of columns supported a second story to the building, where that same pattern was repeated: more doors, more columns, and another story above. Each floor stood slightly set back from the one below it, so that walkways circled the open space in the center of the room. Pru tried to count the number of floors rising above and expanding around her, but her head began to spin and she lost count.

  Oil lamps hung from the treelike columns and filled the space with a warm, golden glow, like a forest glade in the first moments of an autumn sunset. Shadows grew from where the light hit the doorframe branches. Those shadows stretched across walls and ceilings. They shifted and swayed with each flicker of light, like actual tree limbs caught in a gentle breeze. It was as though the inside of the Henhouse were the extension of an actual forest, ancient and grand. Any anxiety Pru had felt about entering the Henhouse slipped away as she stood in the gentle glow of Mister Fox’s magnificent home.

  “Names first, before we go any further. Names are important,” Mister Fox said, partially breaking the spell. He turned to ABE first, who was closest. “You are?”

  “Oh.” With an apparent effort, ABE turned his attention away from the spectacle before them and focused on the question. “Um, I’m ABE.”

  “No. You’re not.”

  Mister Fox spoke with hardly a hesitation. When ABE blinked his confusion, Mister Fox explained, “You paused before you answered. That’s usually an indication that someone’s not telling the truth. Trust me, I know about such things.”

  “Oh. That. Well, A-­B-­E is sort of a nickname. They’re my initials.”

  “Are they? Well, then, that’s different. I like people who go by their initials. They’re the sort of people who stand for something. And you?” He turned to Pru.

  For just a moment, Prudence Potts considered introducing herself by her initials. She quickly thought better of it.

  “I’m Pru. Well, Prudence, really, but I prefer Pru. How is this possible?” she blurted before Mister Fox could say anything else.

  “Walk with me while I explain. Stay close. The Henhouse can play tricks with a person’s sense of space and direction.” He set off, heading toward a staircase Pru hadn’t noticed before. “Have you ever heard of Russian nesting dolls?”

  ABE spoke up when Pru didn’t answer. “Aren’t they those hollow wooden dolls that fit inside each other? One wooden figure is placed inside another one that looks just like it, only bigger, and so on.”

  “Exactly right.” Mister Fox nodded and spun about once, his arms extended to gesture to the space around them. “Think of the Henhouse as being like that. Imagine it’s a series of houses all occupying the same space, but each one is a little larger than the one inside it. The only difference is that, in this case, it’s like someone reached in and turned the whole thing inside out, so that the smallest house is on the outside and each copy gets progressively larger as you move inward.”

  “But that’s not possible,” Pru said.

  “I think you’ll find that what is possible and what is not possible is a far less certain thing than most people imagine. The point is, can you picture what I’m describing?”

  “I suppose so,” Pru admitted.

  “There you go. That’s what magic is. Magic is something that seems absolutely impossible until you think about it in just the right way. Then it makes perfect sense.”

  Mister Fox continued to lead the way through the Henhouse. As they ascended to a new level, Pru slowed her steps and peered over the railing. A wave of vertigo washed over her.

  They’d climbed so high! She couldn’t remember climbing that many stairs, but the main floor lay far enough below that she could barely make out the details of the doors through which they’d entered.

  “Pru!”

  She looked up as ABE spoke her name, shocked to see that he and Mister Fox had already turned the corner and were nearing another set of stairs a good distance away. Pru had to run to catch them.

  When they had first entered the Henhouse, it appeared to Pru that some of the many doors visible around the grand inner courtyard were open. And yet every door they passed stood closed. Now and again, Pru thought she heard sounds from behind the doors.

  “Do other people live here?” she asked.


  “People? No. Not as such. Just me and the domovye.”

  “Domovye?”

  “Russian household spirits.”

  “Your house is haunted?” ABE asked, stumbling as he tried to look in every direction around them at once.

  “It’s a house that typically resides in a cemetery and was built by a witch. Are you really surprised? But don’t worry. The domovye are mostly harmless, if at times a bit mischievous. They can actually even be helpful and protective, so long as you don’t upset them. Most houses just have one, if any. The Henhouse is something of a special case.”

  Mister Fox led them up a crooked stairway all the way to the uppermost level of the Henhouse, to what Pru would have considered the attic in any other home. There, in the canopy that grew from the forest of columns below, carved branches reached up through the floor and climbed to the top of the vaulted ceiling above. Lanterns hung throughout the twisting labyrinth of tree limbs and painted more shadows on roof and wall.

  Pru and ABE followed their host through that enchanted woodland with its glowing, fairy-­light lanterns toward a round window that hung like a moon on the far end of the room. It reached from the floor to the ceiling and was adorned with a wood frame made up of a pattern of interlocked circles. It looked identical to the window Pru had seen above the front door of the Henhouse, only much, much larger.

  Mister Fox turned to face his guests as he reached the window. Beyond him, through the glass, sprawled the whole of Middleton Cemetery as seen from a great height. Pru struggled to reconcile how high they were from the ground with her memory of the tiny shack.

  “What I’m about to tell you isn’t a secret,” Mister Fox began. “It’s a truth. There’s a difference, of course. Secrets are the things that we keep from other people. Truths? Truths are the things we keep from ourselves. And there’s one truth people have been keeping from themselves for a very long time now.”

  CHAPTER

  14

  A SHIVER RAN THROUGH PRU. AT FIRST, SHE THOUGHT it was just a response to Mister Fox’s words, something that bubbled up from inside her like the feeling she got on Christmas morning when she climbed from her bed and wondered what waited in the living room, beneath the tree.

  But there was more to it than that. The whole room seemed to shiver. The glass in the window rippled like someone had tossed a handful of pebbles into a pool of water. The ripples repeated the pattern of interlocked circles. Each outer circle intersected the center ring at a different point. It looked a bit like a child’s drawing of a flower. The ripples moved beyond the glass. Pru saw waves pass through the air. She felt them, too, like a gentle breeze on her skin.

  The breeze gained intensity as it moved past Pru and pushed into the room behind her. It extinguished every lantern in quick succession, like candles on a birthday cake, until the room went utterly black. The window went black, too, and the world beyond disappeared.

  Pru tensed as the darkness swallowed her. But in the shocked moment between breaths, before panic could rise, a pinprick of light appeared. Pru followed the point of light with her eyes as it began to move through the air, tracing the pattern that had covered the window: one circle in the center, surrounded by a cluster of others.

  The glowing pattern cast just enough light for Pru to see ABE and Mister Fox on either side of her. Beyond that, Pru floated in a void.

  “The truth, which you’ve already begun to discover, is that magic is real,” Mister Fox continued. “There are whole worlds of magic out there, all around us.”

  As he spoke, images began to form in the space before Pru. An image of the earth spun into view from out of the darkness and moved to occupy the center circle in the pattern. More pictures followed. New landscapes appeared, each in a different circle. Each new scene offered a glimpse into a different, fantastic world.

  Pru saw a world where long, narrow boats floated on a river of fire past giant pyramids. She saw another world where a man in a flowing white robe and oiled hair stood high atop a mountain, above a host of pillared temples. He held lightning in his fist as he surveyed his domain. A third circle showed a gathering of women and men in flowing silks of every shade of green, keeping company with serpentine dragons.

  “How are you doing this? How are you making those pictures appear?” ABE asked, his voice a whisper in the dark.

  “It’s called scrying,” Mister Fox said. “It’s an old magic. Anything that can reflect an image, like glass in a window, can work if you know the right charm or spell. But it’s not me making it happen, it’s the Henhouse.”

  “What are these places? What are we looking at?” Pru asked.

  “Each place has its own name, of course. You’ve heard of some of them. The High Hills and five rings of Atlantis, mentioned by the Greeks. The Heavenly Ministry of the Great Emperor of the Eastern Peak, discovered by the ancient Chinese, with its troubled bureaucracy and three fateful bridges. The infernal river that runs through the twelve provinces down to the Hall of Two Truths of Egyptian mythology. The blessed Isle of Avalon, where kings sleep and wizards wait. But there are many more.”

  The tone of Mister Fox’s voice drew Pru’s gaze from the window. Wonder spread across his face, revealed by the glowing and changing light of the magical vision before them. Pru thought she saw something else there, as well. She’d seen the same look on her own face in the mirror in the days after her dad’s death. Loss, and longing. Pru wondered if Mister Fox was thinking about Baba Yaga.

  “Collectively,” Mister Fox continued, “it might be easier for you to think of them as Worlds of Myth, because the beings that live in those realms inspired the stories that we call myths today.”

  “Mythology is real?” Pru asked, her attention returning to the window. “Myths are true?”

  “Yes. And also no, not always. Think of it this way. There’s at least a seed of truth in them. But it’s the nature of stories to change with each telling, and most myths have been told and retold a great many times.”

  Each circle in the pattern was filled now, and it seemed to Pru there were more than there had been at the start.

  “This is all kind of hard to believe,” ABE said in his quiet way.

  Mister Fox spun away from the window. As he did, the images vanished and the light slowly faded from the room. Mister Fox’s voice floated through the darkness. It reminded Pru of that first day at Winterhaven House.

  “Don’t believe me.”

  Someone snapped his fingers (Pru assumed it was Mister Fox), and all the lanterns in the room flared back to life. As they did, the view of the cemetery returned.

  “That’s the last thing in the world I want you to do,” Mister Fox said.

  “What?” Pru blinked as her eyes struggled to adjust to the sudden absence of the dark and all the mysteries it had revealed. “Why wouldn’t you want us to believe you?”

  “Because you’re no good to me at all if you believe me. It’s like I said to you two before, back in the woods, belief is a powerful thing. Belief changes the whole way a person sees the world. It’s because people nowadays believe so easily that they can’t see magic, they can’t see beings from Worlds of Myth.”

  “But books and movies are always saying you have to believe in magic to see it,” Pru argued, armed with a childhood of evidence to support her claim.

  “Don’t remind me.” Mister Fox threw himself into a large chair in the center of the room. Pru was sure the chair hadn’t been there when they came in. Had the household spirits—the domovye—placed it there while the lights were out? Pru glanced around, hoping in vain to catch a glimpse of one as Mister Fox continued.

  “Don’t get me wrong. It’s a lovely idea. It’s very romantic. ‘Just believe’ and you can experience magic. It’s why grandmothers the world over knit the word Believe into blankets for grandchildren.” His elbows resting on the arms of his chair, Mister Fox waved his hands in a vague, circular gesture. “There’s just one little problem. It’s completely wrong. It’s backward. Whe
n you believe in something, you stop questioning it. You stop looking for answers and ignore other possibilities. Only minds that are truly open to possibility can see magic. It’s people who aren’t sure—of themselves, of the world, of their place in the world—who can see and experience magic.”

  “Sorry, excuse me,” ABE said, half raising his hand to ask a question. “When you said we’d be ‘no good to you’ just a minute ago, what, ah, exactly did you mean by that?”

  “Of course, it wasn’t always like that,” Mister Fox said, continuing as though ABE hadn’t spoken. “People didn’t always believe too easily. Back in the beginning, back when the world was new, people had no idea what to believe. They questioned everything. ‘Why does the sun move across the sky?’ ‘Why does the earth shake?’ ‘Why does it rain?’ They didn’t know, so they imagined possibilities. And because they imagined possibilities, their minds opened and they witnessed fantastic things.”

  “They saw beings from the Worlds of Myth?” Pru asked, beginning to understand.

  “Exactly.” Mister Fox stretched out his legs and crossed his ankles. “I call them Mythics, because it gets tiresome saying ‘beings from Worlds of Myth’ over and over again. But, yes. They saw chariots racing across the sky. They saw great serpents whose movements shook the earth itself. They saw beings with god-­like powers who could control the very elements of weather. And all those things became the seeds of the myths we know now.”

  “What happened, then?” ABE asked. “How come people can’t see beings . . . ah, Mythics, anymore? Well, except us?”

  “You know what happened. I told you. The world changed. Humankind marched on and traded wonder for certainty. People stopped asking so many questions and started believing in answers. Oh, there were individual exceptions, of course, but for the most part that was the way of the world.”

  “Like the villagers changing how they thought about the witch.”