The Actual Account of Peter Able

by Natalie Grigson

  “Why do I care? Because the Real World, Peter, is not a place for Fiction! I came here to escape all that technicolor, fluffy bullshit. Where science doesn’t mean anything, because—oh look, we have magic to solve our problems! Where people can fall in and out of love at the whims of their authors. And oh, there’s a unicorn, let’s ride it to one of Sci Fi’s green moons because it’s Purple Fiddlebum Day! It’s utter bullshit. That couldn’t possibly happen in the Real World.”

  “Are you a thientist?”

  “I’m not done!”

  “I like Fiddlebum Day,” I muttered.

  She stood up then, gun in hand and began pacing the small length of the room in between the coffee table and her armchair. “So I fled Fiction almost thirty years ago, after discovering the wormhole through worlds, through that ridiculous cabinet in Nonfiction.”

  “Wardrobe.”

  “Then I got a job—as an actual scientist, not one of those Fictional kooks—and I met my now husband, Albert. He was the opposite of me—which I’d learned after years of loving someone too similar might actually be a good thing. Al is a creative type, you know. He painted, he did some acting, and he wrote. Little things—short stories, poems. I despised it, but I loved him.

  “Three years later, we were married. We had our first daughter later that same year. He got so busy taking care of her when I was at work, he stopped writing for a while. But then, then when she turned six and went off to school during the days… That’s when he started writing about her.” She sat down heavily and folded her arms petulantly.

  “Who—”

  “Don’t interrupt me! As I said, that’s when he started writing about her. Jenny. Jenny the Girl Wizard. I never thought he had a book in him, but it turns out, he did—and then some! A bestselling series at one point. Luckily, then came along a whole slew of other wizarding books, including your first series, and so he gave up. Threw in the towel. He went back to being my husband and Fate’s father, but for several years Al was… just gone. On tours. Travelling the world. And when he was home, he wasn’t here at all. He was writing. About her. He was completely immersed in Fiction—in a different way than I’d been, of course, but nevertheless, I’d fought to leave all of that behind.

  “So I gave that Jekyll character her backstory over a year ago and as you know, ? then erased her. Of course, Al doesn’t remember any of it this way—not really. He still has an inkling that something is missing; like he’s forgotten something, but he’s in his sixties now, so he just chalks it up to age. He doesn’t pine for the book that got away, though, like he used to.

  “But since reading your last two books, I know the truth; I remember how bad it could be if he were to start writing those books again, because in some alternate reality, he’d already done it. The memory was there, just waiting for me. Now I have a feeling you’re out here to stir up trouble. Well, I’m sorry, Peter, but I just can’t let you do that.”

  I had just been starting to stand up to sneak off quietly and then run like hell, but she looked across at me and smiled that creepy Cheshire Cat smile, gun in hand, daring me to move.

  “What do you want from me?” I sat back down resignedly. “Are you just going to keep me, Terrill, and Ivor locked up in your basement forever, then? Hey my lisp is gone! A selfish shellfish smelt a stale fish. If the stale fish was a smelt, then the selfish shellfish smelt—”

  “SHUT UP. God, no; I don’t want any other Fictional characters to stay here. No, no, I’ll just do some experiments on you so that I can trace what exactly makes your Fictional DNA different from the Real World DNA, create a serum that mimics this, and use it to transform myself into a Real Worlder once and for all. As I’ve been here for thirty years, I’ve mostly changed over naturally, but my eyes, you see. My eyes are irritatingly Fictional sometimes.”

  “Is that all?”

  “I’ll also be torturing you and your hobbit friends.”

  “Is that a—”

  “And then I’ll be killing you.”

  I had to ask.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Terrill, Ivor, and I had been in the basement for days—three, four, five? It was hard to tell, with no indication of the sky outside. Every few hours, she would insert some Real World food through a little slat in the basement door—biscuits, tea, fish, chips—really playing up those English stereotypes. It wasn’t bad, but with each bite, I felt myself grow… more real. Less animated, somehow. I could see it on Terrill and Ivor, too; it was as if their color was fading into something utterly more boring.

  D didn’t seem too fussed about it, though. What I assumed was each morning and evening, she came down the steps and, gun pointed at one of our heads, walked us over to the strange tank in the other part of the room. Whoever’s turn it was would strip down, lower himself into the weird liquid, and she’d hook us up with clamps, wires coming off our bodies like bizarre porcupines. She’d watch the monitors, her gun always at the ready. She’d inject us with different substances—golds, greens, a red one that looked suspiciously like someone else’s blood—and then she’d watch the monitors again. Gun at the ready.

  On what must have been something like the second or one millionth morning (or evening), Terrill and Ivor waited by the door as they heard it unlocking; they were going to try and take her out at the knees before she made her way down the steps. Unfortunately, she had security cameras monitoring the room and knew exactly what they were up to. She opened the door and in she walked. Terrill and Ivor jumped toward each other to pull her down—only to move right through her, crunching into one another. The real D then walked through the door, laughing mirthlessly.

  “You think that one of the most esteemed Real World scientists doesn’t have holographic technology?” She’d plunged them both into the tank that day and injected them with a strange silver liquid. It made them scream, and after she’d removed them, they refused to tell me about it. Or couldn’t.

  And so it went on like that. We could hardly communicate a plan to one another to escape, with her monitoring our every move, and we couldn’t risk attacking her, with the gun pointed at one of our heads like a hostage. So even though I had an awesome plan as to what to do—I couldn’t tell them. But I’m telling you, it was good.

  On one of the days, I was lying naked in the tank of liquid, no longer embarrassed in the slightest. Not even scared. I couldn’t tell if this was me becoming more real, more hopeless, or if they were one in the same. Either way, she leaned over the tank to adjust one of the little metal clamps attached to my chest. The necklace fell forward from beneath her collar. The atomic whirl with the heart.

  “I know who you are,” I croaked. My throat was rough from lack of talking. “You’re Doctor Albrecht. You’re from those old, weird, German mad scientist love story books— Mein Experiment, or something like that.”

  “Mein Wissenschaftler. And yes, that is who I was. But I told you; I left all that silliness behind. After that last book when Dedrick left science—and me—needless to say, it changed my patience with Fiction. And soon enough,” she injected the needle of the syringe into my shoulder, “I’ll have everything I need to leave it behind completely.”

  “What I don’t get,” I said thickly; whatever she’d jabbed into my vein was working quickly, slowing everything down. “What I don’t get… is why you go by D. Is it short for Doctor? Or, Delightful? Dandy…? Hah. Hah…”

  She smiled coldly at me, fuzzy and indistinct; the world around her seemed to be closing in to a point.

  “Destiny. It’s short for Destiny.”

  And then, once again, the world went black.

  “Peter!”

  I knew I was dreaming because that voice, that voice that sounded so far away, couldn’t possibly be the one I thought it was…

  “Peter!” the voice hissed again, more urgently.

  “‘E keeps blackin’ out at these impor’ant moments,” Ivor said in my dream.

  “Yeah, like earlier ‘at woman ‘ad juss said ‘e
r name was Destiny; then ‘e juss sort o’ went all limp.”

  “Ah, that’d be to keep things in suspense, I suspect,” Dream Randy said as he shook me, a little roughly, by the shoulders. “Move things along in the story.”

  “Bwe’reinda RilWorl,” I slurred groggily. What I meant to say was, But we’re in the Real World. Why wouldn’t my mouth work properly if I was dreaming?

  “Oh good, he’s waking up,” Randy said again, this time his voice a little bit clearer.

  Slowly, I opened my dream eyes and hovering above me, saw Randy’s head, apparently floating in mid-air. Yep, definitely a dream.

  I closed my eyes again, hoping to move on to the next dream, but that didn’t last long.

  “Peter, get up!” This time Randy hoisted me right up into a seated position, and with the sudden movement, I felt lightheaded and queasy. Real lightheaded and queasy. This was no dream.

  “Randy, what are you—”

  (This is the part where I threw up. I know I didn’t have to tell you, but in the spirit of full disclosure, I thought I should.)

  “—doing—”

  (And again.)

  “—here—”

  (Sorry.)

  “?”

  He was patting my back comfortingly. I could see Terrill and Ivor out of the corner of my eye, looking a little alarmed.

  “I’m here to take you three home. Now, we don’t have much time, I’m afraid, so you’ll have to get up. Do you think you can stand?”

  Slowly, I got to my knees, then with Randy’s help, to my feet.

  “Backpack,” I managed. Randy stooped and picked it up, slung it over his shoulder. Then he began guiding me from the room and up the steps.

  I felt like my veins had been injected with lead. Every step was agony. Heavy. I could feel the bones in my feet, each one rolling along the bottom of my shoes, which suddenly seemed too small and too hard.

  “What’s happened to him? What did she inject him with?” Randy snapped at Terrill and Ivor as we made our way down the hall.

  “Dono exactly,” Terrill said, “Said sumfin’ about makin’ him inta a Real Worlder. She wants ta do that ta ‘erself, see; I ‘spect she wos’ tryin’ it out on ‘im first.”

  Randy didn’t say anything but he started to move through the house more quickly, nearly dragging me along beside him. I closed my eyes and let him guide me. I was exhausted. Sleep seemed nice…

  Something hard collided with my cheek.

  “Randy says ye can’t sleep, mate.” I found myself sitting in a sort of crumpled heap, my head propped against Ivor’s shoulder, Terrill sitting down by my feet. We were in the front yard, blades of grass—not soft like they are in Fantasy—poking up into my palms; rocks digging into my legs through my jeans. To my left was a large garden, the one visible through the living room window.

  “Where’s Randy?” I asked, still slowly, but happy that I was at least legible now.

  “Gone te get the car,” Terrill said. He was watching the road. “‘Ere we are. Le’ss go.” A dark blue sedan had pulled up on the gravel road, tires crunching as it stopped. Randy hopped out of the driver’s seat, the car still idling, and met us in the middle of the yard. The three of them pulled, pushed, and lifted me up into the backseat.

  “Don’t let him fall asleep,” I heard Randy say sternly as the car began to move. Terrill was sitting in the back next to me; gently, I felt him buckle me up.

  “I’m not sleeping,” I grumbled. And I wasn’t; I felt too nauseous with the car moving.

  “We need to get him back through the wardrobe immediately,” Randy said, more to himself than anyone else. I could see his eyes darting nervously to the rear-view mirror, watching me. He looked about as sick as I felt.

  I glanced at the window and caught a glimpse of my reflection in the glass. I jerked back in surprise. My face looked… so real. It wasn’t that it was more freckled than I remembered it, but that each freckle was darker, an individual shape. My eyes, which in Fiction I’d always just thought of as blue, had little lines, tiny little lines like bike spokes, surrounding the pupils. My eyelashes were long, even on the bottom, which just accentuated the purple circles underneath them. My brown hair was a greasy, matted mess; my face was well beyond scruff and moving into beard territory.

  “I look terrible.” The car took a turn down a street that in no way looked familiar to me.

  “Okay, we’re here,” Randy said and we pulled up alongside a charming little white house, surrounded by lush green grass with a worn stone pathway cutting through the middle to the front door. There was the garden off to the back…

  “Is this the wardrobe house?” I asked, vaguely remembering walking down the path; it seemed like so long ago.

  “Yes. And this was her car.”

  “Whose car, ‘en?” Terrill asked as he unbuckled my seatbelt before leaning over me to open my door. With a shove, he pushed me out of the car and into Randy and Ivor’s outstretched arms.

  “The person who owns the house. I didn’t know it was a big secret, her identity, and besides, I was really worried about you guys. So I just came through the wardrobe and went up and talked to her. For some reason, she had a pretty good idea where you’d gone. Was also able to make sure that Destiny wasn’t in the house when I went to get you.”

  “Huh.”

  My feet still felt sluggish, but I could at least walk with support up to the front door. We clamored up the steps onto the porch, and behind the window, sitting on the living room couch, I could see a woman—short, pixie-like hair, brown eyes, her socked feet propped up on the coffee table, and a laptop in her lap. She looked intensely preoccupied typing something, but as soon as she looked up, she stopped typing and—

  “Well ‘at was weird,” Ivor said as soon as we were on the other side of the wardrobe.

  “No kiddin’, mate. What wos that all about?”

  “Peter, are you okay?” Randy asked, kneeling before me. We were, once again, in the forest of Narnia, the snow a little less thick than it had been before, but it was still just as cold.

  “Yeah, I think so,” I said. I didn’t feel back to normal, by any means, but already felt so much better just being closer to the book world. We made our way through the thick trees, moving branches out of our way as we passed. Randy used his wand to move particularly thick shrubs out of our path, so at least I knew magic worked here, in the halfway world. Funny. I hadn’t tried when we’d been on our way to the wardrobe the first time.

  “Guess I’ll know for next time,” I said to myself. Just so you know, this is a weird thing to do, not just in the Real World.

  “Eh, wha’?” Ivor asked, eyeing me sideways.

  “Oh yeah. Magic. I didn’t ever need to use it coming through Narnia the first time—and even if I had, it would have been edited out. Maybe I’ll try it next time. Of course, I’ll have to count on not using it in the Real World, it doesn’t work out there. Did you notice that, Randy?”

  I stopped and turned around; I hadn’t noticed that Randy was no longer walking with us.

  “What do you mean ‘next time’?” He was staring at me incredulously, wand still held slightly out from having just blasted away a particularly gnarly bunch of thorny bushes. When I didn’t answer, he went on. “You can’t possibly go back out there. The very thing that you know might kill you, Destiny, is waiting for you out there. She nearly did once already!”

  He hadn’t moved yet, but continued to stare. I could feel my shoes starting to soak through from the snow.

  “I know, but that’s the whole point of a Conflict, isn’t it? You have to face it?”

  “Or what? Fail the class? Peter this is about more than a Pass or Fail; it’s about—”

  “It’s about bringing Jenny and the others back! I’m not going to just give up because some crazy woman is trying to kill me. If that were the case, I would have given up in the first book when your ex-wife tried to do me in!”

  “‘S’got a point, there,” Terr
ill muttered to Ivor.

  “Look, I’ve got a plan for the next time we go through. It won’t involve magic, but I will need a lot of help to do it.” Just then, I swayed dangerously. Apparently arguing was using up the last of my energy; I still felt a little too Real.

  “Let’s get him back to Fantasy,” Randy said, clearly more concerned with my health than arguing with me just then. He walked forward and put a bracing arm on my shoulder. “We’ll have to hurry. Oh good, look, there’s that lovely woman’s sleigh coming up. We can just catch a ride with the White—”

  And since we can’t talk about that, now for some excellent non-copyrighted Fiction!

  It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

  The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.