The Boy Who Lost Fairyland

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “It’s my forest,” Tamburlaine yelped.

  But Thomas was not listening. The moment he stopped running, he looked down at himself, and even if a marching band made entirely of tubas and drums and brass bombs struck up next to his ear, he wouldn’t have heard a single note.

  Have you ever bundled up in a snowstorm? Piled on so many layers of scarf and sweater and parka and snow pants and mittens and great stomping boots that you could hardly move? Suddenly you are quite a lot bigger than before! You bang against bannisters and bounce off cabinets and tumble about in the icy drifts like a panda bear and not like a little human at all.

  Then you may have some idea of how Thomas felt. He felt his old body padded up and stuffed and cushioned in a thick, heavy suit, so thick and heavy he couldn’t feel anything the way he used to and would certainly go whanging and pranging into everything in sight if he wasn’t careful.

  But he was not wearing a snowsuit. Not even mittens. His hands were quite bare. And big. And strong. With knuckles the size of crabapples. Thomas squinted in the sunlight—a sunlight unlike any Chicago could boil up in her pots—warm, pumpkin-gold sunlight that dripped, that poured, that fizzed, that tasted, actually had a taste, and the taste was the taste of home. Thomas’s eyes grew big to gobble up that sunshine. But the rest of him was big, too. So much bigger than he had been on the other side of his bedroom wall. His shoulders felt vast and bony and tough within his old jeweled jacket, which now squeezed uncomfortably tight. His legs wanted to run again, as though they had never run before—Let us go fast, they seemed to scream, bursting the seams of his trousers. We’re good for anything you can think of! His chest gulped down champion breaths, so much air at once that it felt like drinking a whole pint of milk in one go. Thomas touched his hair. Thomas touched his nose. Thomas touched his jaw.

  Only he knew, the minute he landed, feet squelching in churning rainbow mud, the moment his nose filled with sparkling, spiced air, that his name wasn’t Thomas. It never had been. His name was Hawthorn. And he was a troll.

  “It’s my forest,” Tamburlaine repeated. She was pointing at something in the distance. She tasted a dollop of mud from her thumb. Her wooden thumb—Tamburlaine’s human skin and her wig were gone. She was a carved girl, her grain dark and rich and fine, her hair no longer flowers or even branches, but hard, chiseled waves cut deep into her wooden skull and wooden neck and wooden shoulders.

  The monstrous baseball stared down at his four captives, sprawled out in the shimmering mud. He seemed suddenly not to know what to do with them. He panted, his fuchsia eyes blazing, his breath reeking of belladonna and mandrake and despair and other poisonous things. His truck-engine chest heaved; his shoulders arched. Thomas’s stomach tried to hide behind his spine. No one moved. In the end, it was Scratch who was bravest. He wound his crank, set his needle down, and sang out in the big, boom-barrel voice of the man in the sky-blue suit on an album cover they might never see again:

  Take me out to the ball game

  Take me out to the crowd…

  “Silence,” the baseball-thing snarled. His voice sounded like a barrel of skulls and iron nails rattling all together. “How dare you speak to me, you blasted worms? How dare you?”

  “Excuse me, sir,” said Tamburlaine, her voice tight and thin as a toy aeroplane’s rubber band, “but who are you? I should think we’d dare to speak to anyone unless we knew they were a principal or a president or a fellow in the movies.”

  “He’s not any of that lot,” grumbled Blunderbuss, shaking twigs out of her yarny ears. “Unless he’s President of Being Left in the Backyard and Forgotten All the Time Because a Baseball’s Only Good for One Thing and That Thing’s Boring.”

  The creature blinked several times.

  “Besides, this is my forest. If anything, he shouldn’t be daring to speak to me!” Tamburlaine grinned a marvelously bossy grin. “Look, Tom—it’s mine! My trees, the ones I painted. And look there!” She pointed into the distance again. The half-finished tree of frogs rose up on a little hill, its branches still only sketch lines, thin, wispy strokes where the leaves and burls remained unfinished. A wind kicked up and the gray outline of half a tree swayed. The baseball-beast opened his gold-plated mouth as though he wanted to bellow and call them worms again, but it couldn’t quite come out. He shut it, and opened it, and shut it once more. When he spoke his fearsome voice shook a little, as though he were not quite sure of what he’d meant to holler.

  “It’s not your forest,” the creature said. Wrinkles rolled from the nape of his rune-covered white neck around to his forehead. “You just got here.”

  “That’s my butterfly tree there! And my eyeball tree up on that ridge, and my fireworks tree, and my dagger tree, and all of them! I thought I was remembering them but I wasn’t, I wasn’t! It’s better than remembering! I made a forest! I’m its mum! Which is a flower, you know! I should have made more of those!” Tamburlaine fell over in the mud, laughing madly. “And you! Look at you, Tom! You look amazing! The handsomest warts I’ve ever seen on a troll! Your nose is spectacular! What can you do? Can you smell thoughts? Can you talk to the dirt? I feel dizzy.” She lay down in the dirt and laughed again.

  “Is it time for physical education?” the great pale beast said slowly, as though he’d been asleep all afternoon.

  “Yes,” chirped Blunderbuss. “Bend down and we’ll whack you with a stick.”

  “What’s your name?” Thomas said softly, holding up his hand to his old baseball. “I’m—” Half his heart wanted to holler out Hawthorn as loud as it could, to feel its own name again, and hear it, too. The other half had got quite used to being Thomas, and thus it was just the littlest bit faster. “Tomthorn,” he stuttered. Tamburlaine stared. “Tom Thorn. That’s fine for now. Tom Thorn. You were my baseball for a long time but now you’re not. Isn’t that nice? Not to be a baseball?”

  The giant’s magenta eyes kindled with some deep flame, beyond words and names and niceties.

  “I’m hungry,” he growled. “I’m starving.”

  “There’s fruit everywhere,” Tamburlaine said nervously. “I know I made a nice Sunday dinner tree when I was little. Roast pork pinecones, cornbread trunk, mushed pea sap, and plum pie blossoms. I’m sure I can find it.”

  “Sunday…” the giant whispered, spreading his massive, rune-scribbled hand across his chest.

  “Is that your name?” barked Blunderbuss. “Who’s named after a day of the week?”

  Faster than falling, the giant grabbed Thomas in his fist again, hauling him up toward his glistening golden teeth. Slowly, horribly, he began to push his fingers into Tom’s mouth like a cruel dentist. What’s he doing? Tom thought wildly. His fingers are too big, they’ll never fit. But they did. Tom felt a wretched stretching in his new, strong jaw, as though it were nothing but taffy. His lips and his teeth stretched, too, into a horrid, bone-cracking yawn. Those terrible huge fingers worked their way down his throat, searching for something, reaching for something, prodding, prying, and it hurt, it hurt so awfully much, he could feel himself coming apart, like a leg tearing off a roast turkey—

  The giant screeched. He yanked his fingers away as though Tom had burned him. The stretching snapped back, the pain split in half, and Tom splashed down into the wet paint-mud of the forest floor as he was unceremoniously dropped on his back. Perhaps troll-flesh was poisonous to baseballs. Or giants.

  But he was not so lucky—Tamburlaine crouched next to the creature’s huge, scribbled-over leg, brandishing delicate, decorated daggers in each hand, plucked from the dagger-tree she had drawn herself so long ago. The wind rustled its boughs behind her and the clinking of knives, one against the other, filled the forest air. She had stabbed him, twice, in the hollow of his knee, and was quite ready to go again, her knees bent, knives raised, wooden teeth bared. The giant brandished his fist to knock her flat—and glass exploded against his face. Thomas whipped his head round to see Blunderbuss, rainbow mud staining her rainbow yarn, in the
traditional Wom Fighting Stance, her bone-armored rump in the air, front legs splayed out before her, mouth gaping open in a tremendous snarl, spitting whiskey bottles, passionfruits, and horseshoes into the baseball’s flabby cheeks.

  “I’m not afraid of you!” the wombat yelled. “I saw you get stuck in the washing machine once. Round and round you went! Who’s afraid of something that can’t defeat a rinse cycle?”

  The funniest thing happened. The tattooed giant blushed. They were all so shocked to see such a thing on his awful face that for a moment they hadn’t the first idea what he was doing. Red spread over his sharp, starving cheekbones and his great bald head. He was embarrassed. It was gone in a second, but they’d all seen it. He looked so wretched, so confused, like a walrus suddenly deposited at the perfume counter of a department store.

  “I used to be somebody else,” he whispered.

  “Me too,” said Tom Thorn.

  He could almost remember it now. A house with a well for a chimney. Bridges. Church bells. The ever-present danger of pirates. Something about a frog…or a toad. Something amphibian. “Me too. But if you try to eat any of us again, I still have my pencil and my notebook and I shall not hesitate at all to write you into a baseball quick as you can say third strike. Or worse! A golf ball. Or a little marble I promise to instantly lose down a storm drain.”

  He drew his pencil out of his satchel and held it before him like a sword. Its tip was broken, and he had no notion of whether or not such magic would work here, or whether he could turn alive things back into unalive things at all, but the main thing was to look as though he meant it. He did hope his new troll eyes were fierce and steely and all the things they ought to be. “Now, Mr. Sunday, which we’ll call you until you come round to your senses again and can tell us it’s Harold or whatever it is, you can come with us if you like—”

  But it would seem the wild man did not like. He hissed at them, showing his golden fangs and the depths of his golden throat, and leapt away through the eyeball and firework trees, which boomed in his wake.

  The Sunday dinner tree rose above them into the night sky, its porkcones glistening caramely brown, its cornbread branches oozing butter and honey and mushed peas, its plum pie blossoms dripping crust onto the little camp of four below. They had managed a fire of fallen firework branches. It blazed green, then blue, then purple, then green again, shooting up showers of sparks whenever it felt particularly festive. Tamburlaine sat a little farther back than her friends, so as not to scorch. They all lay back, very pleased with themselves indeed, as you might be if you frightened off a grizzly thing and followed that up with supper from a tree you’d invented yourself. The stars overhead glittered in birthday colors, unfamiliar and familiar all at once. Tam stroked Scratch’s bell, which had got dented somewhere along the way. He sang softly, his crank turning:

  In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,

  There’s a land that’s fair and bright,

  Where the handouts grow on bushes

  And you sleep out every night…

  “This is Fairyland, isn’t it, Tam?”

  “I think so, Tom.”

  “Well, it’s not Sydney, you dimwits,” yawned Blunderbuss. Bits of cornbread and peas made a mustache over her muzzle. “My favorite dimwits!” she corrected hurriedly. “Best dimwits in all the world.”

  Tamburlaine stared up into the Sunday dinner tree with the lazy, gentle thoughtfulness one straps on after a good meal. “It’s my mother’s recipe. Roast pork with mint and thyme. My mouth watered while I painted it. I think she’d laugh till she fell over to see her Sunday roast growing out of the ground. I wonder what it looks like in Autumn? It ought to have a Latin name. All plants have Latin names. Animals, too. It’s the magic language of humans. Nothing’s really official, really real, unless you can call it to lunch in Latin. Porcinus delicia Ameliae, I should think. That sounds mostly Latin.”

  Something moved in the long meadows outside the Painted Forest. Something vast and heavy and curious. None of our merry band could hear it yet. But it had scented them, and loped hungrily across the grass under the stars.

  Tamburlaine rolled over onto her stomach and kicked her feet up, waggling them back and forth. Thomas looked up through the shadowy baked-apple leaves at the great dinner plate of the moon—dinner plate and bread saucer, for here in this place not one moon but two rolled through the sky, one enormous and one small.

  “You look fantastic,” Tamburlaine giggled, the firelight kicking up glints in her wooden eyes.

  “Do I?” said Tom Thorn softly, suddenly shy. “I’m so big. I never thought I could be so big. I’m starting to remember things, too. I feel all over pins and needles, like my heart’s been squashed asleep since I was born.”

  “Me too,” nodded Tamburlaine excitedly. “I remember hands carving me out of a big slab of wood. One set of hands were red, and the other set were yellow. The fingers swelled up to do the long parts of me, like legs and arms, and shrunk up for the delicate bits. My hair, my eyes, my fingernails. Spriggans can do that, I think. Get bigger or smaller. Maybe I was made by spriggans!”

  Tom Thorn picked at the soft napkin-grass below their wonderful tree. He still couldn’t remember his parents—his real parents. His troll parents. When he thought of his mother and father, Nicholas and Gwendolyn’s faces still rose in his head like balloons. Scratch’s dented bell was turned toward them, listening intently. But now and again it began to droop, falling toward the strange dreams of gramophones, where no one needs cranks and all records are smooth and scratchless as skin. Blunderbuss, being nocturnal, was quite busily awake, snuffling about in the roots of the Sunday dinner tree for cornbread crumbs.

  “Top grub,” the wombat snorted. “We’ll live here now. Yes. Much better. Much best.”

  And all the while, through the wild, unsown fields beyond the trees, something crept closer, closer, holding its breath so as not to startle its prey too soon.

  Tom Thorn’s body could hardly keep awake—but his heart was running circles round his bones. The troll in his heart was now free. The troll inside was the troll outside—and it hadn’t the foggiest what to do with itself.

  One question burned through him like a wish.

  “Tam—oh, Tam! What are we going to do tomorrow? Everything’s changed, everything in the whole world and the world, too. There’s no school, no after school, no houses or bookshelves or apartments. Where will we go? What will we do?”

  But Tamburlaine was already asleep, Scratch leaned up against her shoulders like an exhausted puppy. Tom poked the last of the fire into sizzling pieces with one of Tam’s daggers. He settled back against a log shaped like a snare drum, fallen from a marching band tree growing healthy and full of green tubas next to the Sunday dinner tree. What a strange girl his friend was! Strange enough when he thought she’d only remembered this place, dimly, the way he now remembered Apartment #7. But she’d made it up, all of it, in her head, and painted it alive. Being in the forest was like walking and talking and sleeping and eating in her mind.

  With his last scrap of wakefulness, Tom stroked Blunderbuss behind her fuzzy pea-green and tangerine-colored ear. He remembered that yarn. Gwendolyn had used it to make the pom of his polar-bear-and-kangaroo hat. His hat! He rummaged in his satchel, ever so grateful he’d managed to drag it along with them. There it was, bunched up at the bottom. Tom Thorn pulled out the long, wonderfully knit hat and pulled it onto his head. It stretched, thank goodness, big enough to hold a troll’s thick skull. He felt better at once.

  “Buss, when you first woke up,” Tom slurred dreamily, “you said a whole lot of silly things. Yes and No and then two Yeses and two Nos and a Maybe. Green. Pineapples. Gin. Who were you talking to?”

  Blunderbuss nuzzled up next to her troll. She bit his great, gnarled hand softly and looked up at him with her mismatched button eyes.

  “You, dearest darling delirious dimwit,” she growled gently. “When Gwennie first made me you asked me all sorts of things
. I answered as soon as I could, for crying out loud. You were only little. You said: Will you be my best friend? Do you want some of my ham sandwich? Do you miss the Excellent Land of Wom? Are you quite vicious? Will you gobble up Nicholas if he yells at me again? If I sleep with the window open, will you run away in the night? Will you stay with me forever and never leave? What is your favorite color? What is your favorite food? What’s really in your little barrel?”

  By the time Blunderbuss finished, Tom Thorn was having his first snore as a troll—a deep, blossoming, bassoon of a snore that, should you listen long enough, would become its own odd melody, a secret song of sleeping each troll makes but never hears.

  Toward dawn, the great something that hunted our little band arrived at the edge of the Painted Forest. It stood up on its tiptoes and peered through the branches at the sleeping children and their cold, ashen fire. Even the scrap-yarn wombat had burrowed into the dirt to dream of biting the moon. It had hunted them through the night and felt quite self-satisfied, having been such an excellent and stealthy stalker that the sweet little things just snoozed away like nothing at all was the matter.

  Colored lights poured over their faces, dancing, flitting, batting at their cheeks like hot butterflies. Long shadows dropped their black bars onto the forest floor. Rustling sounds filled the air—the great something could not keep quiet forever. Curtains opened in the morning air, coffee trickled into cups, ten thousand fair folk stretched till their shoulders popped delightfully. Newspapers opened, birds peeked out from under gargoyles at the new day, and a river flowed round and round in a circle. Spires of wool and silk and bombazine and corduroy and gingham sparkled in the clean, fresh sun. This huge, happy hunter gurgled along its morning rituals, waiting for Thomas and Tamburlaine and Blunderbuss and Scratch to wake up and notice that they’d been captured by a city.

  Pandemonium had come for them.