The Boy Who Lost Fairyland

by Catherynne M. Valente

  Thomas held his breath. He picked up a pea and squashed it between his fingers, so hard his fingertips turned red. And he breathed it out all in a rush:

  “You fell into a chasm and wanted to make a Thomas and so you went to the Wizard’s Palace and put on magic clothes and a Wizard said magic words over you and then you danced in mystical circles so the stars would love you best and you ate the enchanted cake of the Kingdom of Married and it was beautiful and now you eat peas and not polar bears.”

  Nicholas Rood stared at his son. He pushed his glasses up on top of his nose.

  “You could still be married and ride polar bears across the Wild Yukon, though.” Thomas went on happily squishing peas, one by one. “Do you know that Redcaps—even the girl-caps!—have nine murderwives each who only appear when blood is spilt in the homehearth? I’ve read about it. If you conquered the Wild Yukon, Gwen could have a murderwife and she wouldn’t be lonely, so you wouldn’t have to worry. I should like a murderwife better than a nanny, I think. And satyrs turn into giant mountain goats when they want mates. I think being a giant mountain goat is better than a white dress. And trolls!”

  “I won’t hear one word more about trolls, Thomas Rood. Or the Wild Yukon or your ghastly murderwives. Why can’t you be a Normal child? I’m sure you don’t get this from my side of the family. The Roods are not a morbid lot. Now sit up straight and no more chatter or it’s to bed with you.” Nicholas bit off his words like mouthfuls of mountain.

  “But I shan’t,” mumbled Thomas, and squashed another pea. He hated it when Nicholas said Normal. He could always hear the capital N. It made his skin burn and his eyes tickle like they always did before he was definitely going to cry. “Trolls don’t sit up straight. They have marvelous hunchbacks like camels and inside their hunches there’s precious gems like pearls in oysters. Hunchbacks are more beautiful than weddings and I want one so I shan’t I shan’t I shan’t sit up, not ever!”

  Nicholas heaved a great sigh and looked mournfully at his wife.

  “Gwen, our Tom is Not Normal. I think I really ought to take him down to the office to see Dr. Malory. He specializes in children, you know.”

  “No, I am not Normal!” cried Thomas, and jumped up on his chair. He was always jumping up on things so that he could be taller, because trolls and other worthwhile things were always tall. “I am Sir Thomas the Un-Normal and all shall bow down to me! If Sir Malory comes near me with his squinty eyes and his stinky pipe, I shall turn him into a toad with my magic pencil!”

  So went the song of Thomas Rood. Something is Not Normal about that boy. Thomas, that is Not what Normal Children do. Stop that racket, Tommy, it’s Not Normal!

  Thomas did not have any clear idea what Normal meant, except that it was something Gwendolyn and Nicholas were, and Mysterious Unnamed Other Children also were, and possibly Grocers and Teachers and Street Sweepers as well, but that Thomas was not. Despite the awful hurt that capital N did to his raw, naked heart, Thomas was still a little boy—at least, mostly a little boy—and he did not like his father to be sour. He began to collect Normals, so that he could identify them on sight. Anything to keep him away from Dr. Malory and his miserable, smoky, stuffy office where even the bookshelves seemed to frown.

  It was Normal to eat your supper all up and go to bed on time and count sheep to get to sleep. It was Not Normal to try to fit your whole supper into your mouth at once because trolls have mouths so big they can swallow basilisks and leap upon the sideboard and holler at the top of your lungs that the Wicked Realm of Bedtime had no power over you and if the vicious were-sheep that ruled there came near you you would slash them all to pieces with your butter knife and pour hot milk over their heads from the battlements. It was Normal to put more wood in the stove if it got cold, or if boiled water was wanted for tea. It was Not Normal to open the grate and feed the bones of the Ravening Oak Golem to the burning red mouth of Jøtun, the King of Fire and Pancakes. It was Normal to take the nice things your mother knits for you and say, Thank you, they are very nice. Especially if she has made you a sweater with matching mittens and scarves and a long, oversize hat with a long tail and a pom on the end, blue and orange and red and green, with row after row of polar bears and kangaroos knitted into it, which is quite a lot of work. It was Not Normal to stretch the hat out so you could fit inside it up to your neck and fall down the stairs screaming that you are not Thomas, but Horace the Genie of Ten Thousand Burnt Toasts and you are here to take back all your wishes. It was Normal, when your mother offered to knit you any sort of animal you liked out of all the mismatched bits of scrap yarn she had left over, to ask for a moose or a bear or a lion or a dog and be grateful because after all the toys you’ve destroyed you oughtn’t get another one ever. It was Not Normal to say that mooses and lions and dogs are nothing more than ugly horses and pussycats and lazy layabout wolves and insist on a wombat when your mother has no idea what a wombat is, even though it was obvious to anyone that wombats are the best creatures ever invented because they are muscley and strong and angry and fierce and have square dung and boney rumps and sharp teeth and soft squishy faces and pouches where you could hide all your treasures and if wombats were kings of the world everything would be a lot better than it is now. It was especially Not Normal, when your mother said mooses are also fierce and angry and far bigger than wombats, and live practically next door to Wisconsin, to tear around the house hollering: “WOMBAT! WOMBAT! ONLY WOMBATS! I AM THE WOMBAT PRINCE OF CHICAGO!” at the ceiling until she relented.

  But Thomas did learn. He learned to put on Normal like a hat. When Gwendolyn presented him with his wombat, every color of yarn you can think of, thick and thin and frayed and braided and ribbons and cords, with one red button eye and one brass one and silver cloak-clasps for teeth, he whispered:

  “How did you do that?”

  And she said: “Magic.”

  Thomas put his arms around her neck. He called her Mother and not Gwendolyn, because these were Normal things to do. And when his patchwork scrap-yarn wombat, who wore a little puff-yarn cocoa-barrel round her neck like a Saint Bernard, did not answer back when he asked her to tell him tales of the marvelous Land of Wom where everything was Biteable and Good, he did not tear her head off in his anguish, though he wanted to, very badly. Instead, he named her Blunderbuss and dreamed of holding her in front of him, wriggling and warm and alive, while she fired passionfruits and horseshoes and whiskey bottles out of her mouth at his enemies. He woke up with a guilty start—Normal wombats couldn’t do that. Thomas tried to be good and dream about something else.

  Every day, even though it was Not Normal, and he knew it, Thomas Rood stood under the chandelier and whispered:

  “Will-o’-the-wisp! If you come out today, I shall give you a kiss!” And after a moment, he added: “Please, please talk to me.”

  But the chandelier did not want a kiss, and years went by, and the heart of Thomas Rood fired itself at all the quiet, still objects of our world, begging them, pleading with them to come alive.

  CHAPTER V

  THE ADVENTURES OF INSPECTOR BALLOON

  In Which Thomas Meets a Book, a Desk, a Mud Puddle, and a Girl and Fights the Battle of Hastings Over Again

  In the lower left-hand corner of his clothes dresser Thomas Rood kept a notebook whose cover was red and whose pages had no lines. The clothes dresser was called Bruno. The notebook was called Inspector Balloon for the six bright balloons and a big white moon like a magnifying glass painted on it.

  Thomas named everything he could put his hands on. After all, he reasoned, nothing could really be real unless it had a name. How awful he would have felt if he had been called nothing at all and had to be summoned to dinner with cries of “Nobody in Particular!” He preferred strange-sounding and thorny names out of his books and his head, and secretly resented every day being called something as workaday as Thomas. He called their cantankerous oven Hephaestus, the laundry tub and washboard Beatrice and Benedick, the chandelier he dubb
ed Citrine, the standing radio Scheherazade. His bed was clearly an Amalthea; his toothbrush answered to no name but the Ivory Knight. He insisted upon calling their neighbors’ cats Henrys I through VIII, though they had their own names to which they had become quite accustomed. Thomas knew they weren’t really Patches or Moustache, but eight proud Kings, and he would not be moved on the subject. Names were a serious business and no mistaking. You couldn’t expect anything to talk to you if you didn’t call it by name.

  When he saw the notebook in a shop window, Thomas had gotten very still inside. He recognized it like he would recognize his own hand. He sometimes had that feeling when he saw certain objects—that they were already his, only temporarily and embarrassingly separated from him due to some error in cosmic bookkeeping. He knew instantly what it was for, what it wanted to be when it grew up—a Real Live Book Owned by a Boy. Gwendolyn, thrilled that he wanted something so small and so Normal, had bought him an impressively businesslike silver-capped pen that spat blue ink to go along with it (called Mr. Indigo). The pen, unlike the book, was not cosmically his, but it would do. Thomas had rushed into his bedroom as soon as the door closed behind them, flung himself onto Amalthea, and opened Inspector Balloon to the first beautiful blank page, new and perfect as the head of cream in a glass milk bottle. Mr. Indigo’s ink carved thick purpley-blue rivers into the paper, dividing it into a fertile and well-watered countryside, every inch of white fed by those deep, generous streams.

  Thomas Rood had excellent handwriting. All trolls are skilled in the Dark Arts of Penmanship, owing to the heroics of Tufa, one of the three Primeval Trolls. Tufa, shortly after solving the mystery of walking upright and making friends with bridges, hunted down a wild Alphabet and made it her pet. Alphabets are one of the longest-lived creatures in all the grand universe. The Troll Alphabet lives still in the Heliotrope Hills, grumbling to itself, devouring passing slang, and blessing, in the small ways an Alphabet can, the folk that tamed it when the world was young.

  Thomas could sign his name in such a fashion as to make John Hancock weep.

  But he quickly learned that the loops and flourishes of his letters disturbed adults, who did not think a six-year-old should be able to write quite so much like a medieval monk. He owned up immediately to having traced Happy Mother’s Day out of one of his fairy books even though he hadn’t. From then on Thomas wrote only carefully shaky, outsize letters with bad spelling and no punctuation at all.

  But Inspector Balloon belonged to him, and where no one could see, he let himself make words as beautiful as pictures, words that would have made the consonants of that wild, ancient Troll Alphabet swell with pride.

  In his book, Thomas wrote the Rules of the World. He wrote them down because he did not understand them. Other Children understood them easily. Normal Children. Normal Children grasped the baffling magics of Bedtime, Not Speaking Unless Spoken To, Sitting Quietly When You Don’t Want to One Bit, Eating Spinach Which Is Obviously Poison, Understanding Why Parents Serve Poison for Supper, and What Its Effects Will Be. For Other Children, for Normal Children, these things were as easy as dessert after dinner. Thomas’s father told him this over and over. It’s just Common Sense, son.

  And yet, Thomas didn’t have that Sense. But if it was so Common, he was determined to get it. If he wrote down each Rule as he tripped over it, and wrote it in a way that made sense to him, he would learn them. He would remember that Furnaces Don’t Talk and the China Is Only for Guests Even Though It’s Prettier Than Our Other Plates and We Never Have Guests.

  These are some of the things Thomas wrote:

  The Honorable (I Guess) Laws of the Nation of Learmont Arms Apartments (Apt. #7)

  If you break something that means it has to be Thrown Out, even if you still like the pieces.

  Knives and scissors are sharp, but different than swords, and you can only use them to fight cucumbers and onions and packages from the postman, not Ancient Enemies from Beyond Time.

  There are no such things as Ancient Enemies from Beyond Time.

  Hot hurts and cold hurts but hot also feels nice and cold also feels nice. Further investigation a must.

  If you smile, people smile back and usually start liking you. If you scowl, they scowl back and start unliking you. This is true even though smiling means showing your sharp teeth and even though you can smile at the same time as being angry or sad, so I don’t see why people should want you to do it so much, but they do.

  Smiling is very complicated. Scowling is better but you are not allowed to do it except in private.

  Mothers and Fathers have certain Words of Power that cannot be denied. So far, I have collected: Go to Bed! Go Play Outside! You Must Have Your Bath! Eat Your Vegetables! There may be others.

  I am not a troll.

  I am also not a wombat.

  Also I am not a saber-toothed tiger or an ogre or a Wizard.

  I am a saber-toothed ogretroll wombat Wizard SO THERE.

  I will understand everything when I am Grown-Up. A Grown-Up is a Person Taller Than Me.

  The phonograph is off-limits.

  Father’s office is off-limits.

  The cabinets are off-limits, even though there is candy inside.

  If something is good, it is off-limits.

  I am to Do What I Am Told.

  There is no such thing as magic.

  Some things are alive and some things aren’t but it is hard to tell right away sometimes.

  Boys wear trousers and girls wear dresses and I am not allowed to wear a dress even though trousers itch and do not come in very many colors.

  In the Nation of Learmont Arms Apartments (Apt. #7), children are taken away from their parents at the age of six and sent to a castle on a hill and this is called the Kingdom of School and if I cry any more about it I shall have no supper.

  Thomas’s hand trembled a little over the last law. He looked out his darkened window, where a moon as big as the one on Inspector Balloon’s cover looked down, examining him with its huge white detective’s glass.

  And so it came to be that only a little while after taking Inspector Balloon into his confidence, Thomas Rood stood at the iron gates of a wily, dark, enchanted country. He stood bravely, armored to the teeth: On his feet he wore the great and powerful Golden Galoshes; upon his head the Long-Tailed Cap, stitched with protective sigils of polar bears and kangaroos to watch over him with foot and tooth. He sheathed his hands in the rare and precious Carnivorous Mittens, striped like a tiger’s paws, complete with black wool claws. He donned his Troll’s Mantle about his shoulders: one of his father’s old beaten leather jackets that was far too big for little Thomas, hanging as long and billowy as a nightgown. Beneath it, the formidable Houndstooth Suit, which would, if he needed it, tear and bite at his enemies. For weapons he had his baseball and the Magic Pencil, the very one given to him by his own mother so long ago, nestled in the hoary depths of the Secretive Satchel.

  Thomas had made himself ready, though his heart quailed within him. He longed to be in his home country—far-off and far-flung!—by his old hearthside with a bowl of soup and a song. The pleasures of home, which he had once disdained, now seemed the sweetest of all possible things. But they were lost to him now. Now was he an exile, a lonely creature on the borders of a foreign and perilous realm.

  All around him, folk streamed in through the twisted gate. Giants with pockmarked faces, shrieking maidens with shining hair, and many not so different from him, weeping and gnashing their teeth and covering their faces with their own pitiful, clawless, non-carnivorous mittens. Thomas felt sorry for them. We are all of us poor exiles, he thought, though like many of his thoughts, he did not know why he should think of such an odd thing, or be so comfortable calling himself an exile, or even quite where he had learned that word. I will protect you if I can.

  Thomas had done all he could to prepare himself to enter the barbarian city. He could only hope it was enough. He looked up, through the whipping winds of Autumn and the wild
cascade of blood-dark leaves spiraling through his vision. He read what had been writ—by what fell and ancient hand?—upon the gate.

  PUBLIC SCHOOL 348

  “You’ll like school, darling,” Gwendolyn said sweetly, tucking the tail of his polar-bear-and-kangaroo hat into his coat.

  “Shan’t, though,” sniffed Thomas.

  “There’ll be lots of other nice children there, and a desk all your very own, and things to draw with and books to read. And Mrs. Wilkinson is a wonderful teacher. You’ll come home all bright-eyed and full of stories.”

  “Shan’t,” Thomas repeated. His eyes darkened and his eyebrows waggled. He leaned forward and clenched his fists, and this was Thomas Rood’s traditional posture when he meant to deliver a Something Awfully. Gwendolyn had started calling his little tirades Something Awfullies—for it was always Something Awfully Important, or Something Awfully Funny, or Something Awfully Nice, or Something Awfully Wicked that he absolutely must tell her right now. Thomas never said anything plainly or patiently.

  But Gwendolyn knew the signs. She pulled up her son’s scarf over his mouth before he could get a breath up under the hundred balloons of his thoughts and bundled him off to that dreadful castle on a hill that grew windows and chimneys and doors the way a briar grows roses.

  The boy took a shaky, freezing breath, clenched his fists, safe inside the Carnivorous Mittens, and stepped inside.

  The Realm of 348 was divided, Thomas quickly observed, into several smaller districts. His new home was to be in the Underclassmen’s Wing, Classroom 4. A thick carpet decorated with a pattern of tiny red flowers covered the ground beneath his feet. Thomas hunched down on his heels, scowling at them. Light as bright and harsh as white paint splashed over everything—the flowers, a herd of slick brown skinny-legged desks grazing in their petals, the shoulders of his coat, the heads of Other Children milling about in small packs. Crushed pencils and crayons and barrettes and hairpins and buttons and pennies and doll eyeballs and bits of someone’s ancient lunch crunched underfoot. Pictures of letters and numbers hung on every wall like portraits of their ancestors. A papier-mâché model of the solar system spun, wrinkled and wired and garish, in one corner of the classroom.