“Anyway, we bes’ get goin’,” Ivor said, his mouth full of chocolate, too. “Man who lives upstairs don’ like us hangin’ about fer too long. Jus’ let’s us pass fru.”
“Is it C.S. Lewis?” I asked, hopefully. I’d met a version of him once at a poetry reading in Fiction, but for some reason he’d only answer to the name Clive Hamilton.
“No, the real Lewis died years ago, din’t he? Anyway, don’ know who ‘e is. We jus’ leave the payment an’ go. Only ever seen his dog once.”
“So you have no idea who he is—the very person who brings Fiction into the Real World, and the Real World into Fiction? The very person who, in this story, provides the very gateway into this world? I’m sorry, but that seems kind of important. Shouldn’t we meet him?”
“Or her,” Terrill added, somewhat surprisingly.
“No. No, no, no. We’re wastin’ time on this. ‘Oever it is ‘at lives here wants it ta be anonermous. So let’s jus’ leave the payment an’ go.” With that, Ivor stooped over to the sack on the floor next to him, and from it, pulled, one at a time, the seven books in that other boy wizard series. He fanned these out next to the wardrobe, then next to them placed four bricks, wrapped in golden foil, of Fiction’s finest chocolate, straight from Wonka’s Factory itself.
“Weird payment,” I muttered, finally standing up for the first time. I felt a little less like personified Hell than I had when I’d first stepped through the wardrobe, but I still felt somewhat… bombarded with senses. I could feel my body’s weight like I never had before. I could see details in Terrill and Ivor that, honestly, I’d rather have just skimmed over; and I could smell something like incense seeping into the old room from above. I thought, too, I could hear the light sound of fingers typing, clicking along a keyboard, but it was too faint to tell.
“Right then, grab yer crap an’ less go. Mind, we’re jus’ here for ye ta practice a bit, ge’ yer feet abou’ ye an’ see if ye’ can blend in in the town. We’ll make these trips as of’en as we need te before ye’ try anyfing te bring back those erased characters.”
I bent over slowly and picked up my backpack, hoping they wouldn’t ask me what was inside it, or to perhaps leave it behind to pick up on the way out. But they were already moving toward the door and seemed ready to get this little recon mission over with. Following their lead, like some pained and less coordinated version of the Tin Man, we walked up the rickety wooden steps and out of the basement. The living room beyond was bright—way too bright—so I reached into my pocket and pulled out my wand for a simple light obscuring spell, muttered the incantation, and: nothing. I tried it again, swiping my arm through the air more forcefully.
“Oy! Watch where yer swingin’ tha’ thing!” But the lights didn’t appear any dimmer. The room—which I’m sure I would have found warm and inviting, what with its overstuffed couch, its soft, old, Persian rug, the lamps dotted here and there with gold and red fabrics draped over them, and what looked like a fresh, steaming mug of tea on antique, white end table, and yes, I could definitely hear the sound of typing somewhere close by, and the sound of a dog’s feet against wood floors—all of this would have been just great, if I hadn’t been suddenly so worried.
“No magic? No magic?!” I whisper-shouted, shaking my wand uselessly.
“O’ I don’ know. I fink there’s probably magic. May be iss jus’ a bit dif’rent ‘ere. It’ll be okay, c’mon, ‘ere we go…”
I had the distinct feeling that Terrill was just trying to move things along, but I went with them meekly anyway. I hadn’t been counting on no magic in The Real World, and while I hadn’t exactly had a fully-formed plan to bring back the other characters (at all), I was certainly operating under the impression that along with the backstories in my bag, magic would have to be involved. I felt useless. Suddenly vulnerable. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to proceed with my original plan.
“You know,” I admitted quietly as we passed through the kitchen (beautiful, clean marble countertops, a dark wood floor, homey, colorful appliances, and on the ground, a giant, stuffed bone squeaky toy), “I’m glad I tried that out, at least. I hate to admit it, but I’d had my own plan for how today would go this whole time. That I’d come out here, ditch you two, and then go off on my own. Find one of those news reporters, or something, and show the world the backstories.”
“You stole tha backstories, eh?” Terrill asked, sounding a little impressed.
I nodded. “I thought I could use them, throw in some magic, and get all the erased characters re-written and back into Fiction. Be the hero. Bring Jenny back, without having to wait around so long.”
“Ye soun’ like an impatient baby,” Ivor grunted, ahead of Terrill and me. We were outside now, walking down a stone path, surrounded on either side by green grass. A ways off, there was a verdant, overgrown garden. It was warm and I wondered idly what time of the year it was here.
“Yeah, well, I guess it’ll just have to take longer. I can’t even do a shade charm,” I said, aware that I did, in fact, sound like an impatient baby. Each step got easier, but still, I felt uncoordinated and heavy. There was no getting used to the sensory overload, though, so I just focused my attention on the path in front of me.
Staying out here any longer than an hour suddenly seemed like a very stupid and dangerous plan, indeed.
I’d been so busy concentrating on simply putting one foot in front of the other, I hardly noticed as we entered the town; all I could tell was that the somewhat gravelly road had given way to a sidewalk made of neat, flat cobblestones, and to its left, an asphalt road for cars. I looked up and saw that we were walking down a street, dotted here and there with shops, the buildings tightly packed together, made of brick and white-washed siding, typical of some neighborhoods in Fantasy and Shakespearean Plays. There weren’t many other people on the street, and nobody seemed to be paying me, or the two hobbits, any mind. In fact, they were all walking hurriedly toward the street up ahead, where I could hear what sounded like a riot going on.
“Are you sure we should go out there?” I asked Ivor and Terrill as we neared the end of the smaller street we were on.
“‘Need te see if ye can blend in, what with bein’ shiny an’ all,” Ivor grunted, shoving me in front of him and out onto the next street. The side of the building on the corner told me it was called Market Street, but I didn’t need a sign to see that. It was packed with shops and restaurants. There were wooden signs hanging from awnings proclaiming things like “Costa,” “The Giggling Goblin,” “Dean and Smedley,” and one larger store, “TESCO.” And there were people everywhere. People sitting on benches eating ice cream, people walking their small dogs on leashes, people sitting at colorful little tables, eating lunch inside the windows we passed, people playing instruments on street corners.
I’d never seen so many just plain people all in one place in my life. Above them all, there were bright flags hanging from poles, billowing pleasantly in the breeze, and through the crowds, I could see paintings hanging up around what was clearly the town centre, (yes with an –re), vendors, booths, and more people gathered around those. A large banner hung on the side of a particularly Shakespearean-looking building read “Ashby Arts Festival.” As if this gave me any more indication of the time of year, or where exactly Ashby de La Zouch was—
“‘Scuse me,” someone said politely as they bumped into my shoulder.
“Pardon,” someone else said, as I crashed into her.
“Terribly sorry,” another man said, doffing his hat.
This happened twice more, me crashing around into people like a ridiculous pinball, them apologizing profusely, until I felt someone grab my hand and guide me away from that heavily trafficked area of the sidewalk. As I was pulled away from the crowd, I felt a slight prick on my arm, like maybe I’d been stung by a rather unimpressive bee, but had more important things on my mind.
“Holy Aslan, did you guys see that?” I asked, eyes still on the sidewalk where everyon
e was passing by one another, shoulder to shoulder. “Okay, well they’re making it look easy. It was a bloodbath out there, I tell you. I could have been killed.”
I turned around, still shaking, and looked down. I was surprised not to see Terrill or Ivor, but a woman’s waist. She was wearing a white blouse, dark pants, and as my eyes travelled up, I noticed a gold necklace, and hanging from it, a pendant shaped like the atomic whirl with a little heart rather than circle traveling its rings. It looked like something I’d seen before. Then I realized I’d taken about three sentences just to move my eyes up her body, and decided this was not the best place to linger, so I looked up.
“Oh, hello,” I said, somewhat surprised that I didn’t know her; there was something so familiar about that pendant. She was somewhere in her fifties, I supposed, had blonde, straight, shoulder length hair, gray eyes, and was clearly a Real Worlder, what with all of her fine details and dimension. She also clearly knew exactly who I was.
“Hello, Peter.” And then the world around me went black.
CHAPTER FIVE
Each of you will have a Showcase of beautiful prizes to bid on, and the one of you who bids closer to the actual retail price of your own Showcase without going over will win it…
Voices, muffled, cotton in my ears.
One, two, three! Begin!
Throat, dry. Words. No good. Grammar – crap.
Higher!
Lower!
Rolling over onto my back. Floor hard. Bones crunchy.
You get a brand new car!
Slowly, achingly, I sat up. My eyes were covered by some sort of cloth, tied tightly behind my head. My ears were not, in fact, filled with cotton; everything just felt stuffy, congested and slow, including my thoughts—which is why it took me several minutes to realize that as I was patting myself down, feeling for anything broken, my hands, in fact, were free. I untied the scarf around my head easily and looked around, panicked for a moment, but then, there it was: my backpack, sitting on the floor just by my left foot. Before doing anything else, I rifled through it: inside were still the pies, my clothes, toiletries, some water, the backstories, and then in the outside pocket, that strange little jar Circe had given me. Without investigating it further, I zipped up the pocket and took in my surroundings.
I was in another basement. This one, though, seemed to be completely underground, unlike the last that had windows at the tops of the walls. There was no sunlight filtering into the room. It was cold, in every sense of the word. Cold, hard, cement floors, cold in temperature, cold…floors again. Okay, just in the one sense of the word, then. The only light came from under the door up the steps to my left, which is where the voices seemed to be coming from, and from something behind me. An odd, dappled, blue light that danced around on the ceiling like water ripples.
I turned around, acutely aware of every inch of my body on the floor. Everything hurt. And just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, I saw what was emitting the weird, blue light.
It was a glass tank, about as deep as a bathtub and as long as a coffin. It was sitting on top of a rectangular wooden platform, and inside was filled about halfway up with blue, swirling liquid; too vibrant to be water (at least outside of Comics), and too fluid to be anything much more solid. I took a clumsy step forward and saw that on the other side of the tank, there were a slew of computer screens. They were connected to wires, which were connected to little, metal clamps, and some, connected to what looked like hospital heart monitors. Before I could investigate further, I heard the door behind me creak open, the Price is Right theme played from the room beyond, no longer muffled, and then I heard what sounded like two large bags of potatoes, bouncing and careening down the steps.
“Oy!”
“Wotch it, then!”
And then the door at the top of the steps closed, muffling the sounds beyond and shutting off the light that had briefly filtered in.
“Terrill, Ivor!” I ran the short distance between us; I never thought I’d be so happy to see the grumpy hobbits before. When I reached them, they were peeling themselves off the floor.
“Gandalf?”
“No, it’s me, Peter. You know, you can just take those blindfolds off. Here, let me help.” I helped Terrill untie the knot at the back of his head; Ivor slipped his off easily.
“She got ya, too, then, eh? Don’ spose ya know why, d’ya?” Ivor asked gruffly, massaging his backside.
“No, I have no idea who she is. Do you?” I asked.
“Not really. Gave us a pithy one-liner, though, din’t she? Right b’fore she frew us into the back ‘o her car? ‘You can just call me D,’ she said, almost like so’ Fictional villain or somfin.”
“D, huh? I don’t know who that could be.” Just then I remembered the pendant, and I swear, I was about to tell them about it, but something distracted me and I forgot—which apparently happens often enough in the Real World, too.
“Oh! Is that the Meow Mix jingle? I love this thing!” I walked up the steps a little ways to press my ear to the door—
Meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow meow—
—and then the door swung inward and I fell to the ground in the room beyond.
“Oh, hello, Peter. Well, I suppose you’ve saved me the trouble of going down the steps.” The woman was peering down at me, her blond hair hanging in front of her face as she bent and hoisted me up from underneath my arms. I would have fought back, or run, or you know, done something, but the truth is, I was too overwhelmed by everything going on around me. She was guiding me through a picture-lined hallway where the T.V., even louder now, was blaring some other jingle. The lights from the kitchen were so intense I felt sick, and there, a cat—a real world cat!—not talking and just doing boring cat things. I could smell something baking, burning a little, in the oven; there was a window looking out onto a garden, and, and—it was all too much. So I just let her guide me, surprisingly gently, into the living room.
She sat me down on a floral-print couch beneath the window to the garden beyond, and then picked up the remote from the coffee table and turned the T.V. off. At a glance, I noticed several bright pink, plastic toys cluttering the carpeted floor.
“Peter,” the woman said, watching me intently. I noticed then that there was something about her grey eyes… they didn’t quite seem to fit in with the rest of her somehow. “I suppose you’re wondering what you’re doing here.”
I nodded.
“Well, the funny thing is, Peter. I’m wondering what you’re doing here.” She smiled sweetly. Perhaps this wouldn’t be too bad—
“OH MY GOD—what are you doing?”
She had reached into one of the coffee table’s drawers and pulled out a black handgun, which she then proceeded to point at the center of my forehead.
“Oh this? I call this my truth gun,” her smile widened.
“That’s stupid.”
She moved her thumb and clicked the gun’s safety. She wasn’t smiling anymore.
“So, Peter, what is it you’re doing here?”
“How do you know my name?”
“PETER! Do you not see that I have a gun pointed at your head right now? One less Fictional character in the real world is just fine by me, so I suggest you let me ask the questions.” I noticed then that her previously posh British accent was falling apart in her anger. Beneath, it seemed, she may have been German.
“Okay. I’m not Peter.”
Good one.
The woman stood up, and in one swift motion reached across the table and smacked me in the face with the butt of the gun. She sat back down primly, and I grabbed a pillow from behind me to mop the blood from my face.
“Thorry but you thmacked me with your thtupid gun,” my lip already felt swollen and my mouth clumsy. She didn’t get up again, but eyed the pillow with disgust.
“I’m here jutht checking thingth out. You know, I’d never been to the Real World before and I wanted to thee what all the futh wuth about.”
; She gave me A Look—a powerful device often used in Fiction, but not so effective in the Real World. And then I realized—
“Hey! How do you know about Ficthion?” Which, yes, I realize sounds like I may have well asked her, Hey, how do you know what a movie is? But I meant, how did she know about the actual Land of Fiction?
She didn’t bat an eye as she said, “It’s where I’m from.
“And what I want to know is why you’re really here. It wouldn’t have anything to do with those characters who were erased last year, would it? With Jenny?”
“How did you know…”
“Oh please, Peter. I’ve read your books. I know all about it. Of course, everyone else out here thinks it’s just a story— they don’t remember the characters who were erased, because when they were erased in Fiction, of course they vanished from out here. For them, it’s been more or less as though they never existed—Aladdin, Pinocchio, Bill the Banana Tree, Cinderella, the fairies, Gorndalf, and that little brat, Jenny. But I know the truth; I grew up in that ridiculous land, after all.”
“You mean, no one out here knowth who Aladdin is? Or Thinderella?”
“Not really. When ? erased them from their backstories, they didn’t just disappear in Fiction. People have an inkling that something is different—maybe they found themselves dressing up as Pinocchio last Halloween or referring to Aladdin’s genie or something, but they don’t know why. Besides, this is the Real World, Peter. People don’t have time to worry about Fiction.”
“Then why do you care so much?” You know that thing in Fiction where villains are always so eager to tell you of their evilly genius plans that they’ll end up talking for like an hour, explaining everything in detail, and then eventually get distracted and the hero makes a break for it? Yeah, that’s what I was going for. And apparently, it’s a thing in the Real World, too. At least for Fictional characters.
The Actual Account of Peter Able Page 6
