by Lev Grossman
“Well,” Eliot said, “that tears it. What do we do now?”
It crossed Quentin’s mind, as it had presumably crossed that of the crew, that they had long ago passed the halfway point of their supplies. If they couldn’t go forward they would die on the way back. Or just die here, marooned in a desert of water.
“I will speak to the ship,” Julia said.
As she had even when she was still human, Julia meant what she said and said what she meant. She went down to the hold, to the heart of the ship, where the clockwork was, knelt down, and began to whisper, stopping now and then to listen. It wasn’t a long conversation. After four or five minutes, she patted the thick base of the Muntjac’s mast and stood up.
“It is settled.”
It wasn’t immediately clear what had been settled, or how, but it became apparent. They floated free of the bottom and began gliding forward again as if nothing had happened. Quentin only figured it out when he happened to look back at their wake. Enormous old planks and beams and other assorted carpentry were bobbing and turning in the water behind them. The Muntjac was making herself smaller, rebuilding herself from the keel up and discarding the extra wood as she went. She was giving up her body for them.
Quentin’s eyes smarted. He didn’t know what sort of being the Muntjac was, whether it had feelings or whether it was just some kind of mechanism, an artificial intelligence constructed out of rope and wood, but he felt a surge of gratitude and sadness. They’d asked so much of it already.
“Thank you, old girl,” he said, just in case it, or she, could hear him. He patted the worn railing. “You’ve saved us one more time.”
The shallower the ocean got the more the Muntjac had to alter herself. Quentin told the crew to bring up the sloth, who permitted herself to be slung from a yard, blinking and yawning in the open air. They emptied the cabins and the hold and piled up everything around them on deck.
Banging and groaning sounds came from below, deep in the ship’s guts. Quentin watched as first the Muntjac’s high, proud stern dropped into the water, then its bowsprit and its entire forecastle. At around four o’clock in the afternoon the mizzenmast toppled over into the water with a huge splash and was lost astern. The foremast went that evening. They slept on deck that night, shivering under blankets in the chill.
In the morning when they woke up the sea was shallow enough to wade in, and the Muntjac had become a flat single-masted raft. Its hull was completely gone; only the deck was left. The ocean mirrored the cloudless dawn light, making an infinite plain of smoky rose. When the sun boiled up over the horizon it was immense—you could see its corona curling around its bright, unbearable face.
At noon they ran aground again—the front edge of the raft crunched to a stop on the sandy bottom. That was it; the Muntjac was going no farther. She had nothing more to give.
But by now they could see that their journey did in fact have a destination. A low, dark line had materialized out of the distance, running the full width of the horizon. It was impossible to guess how far away it was.
“Looks like we’ll have to walk,” Quentin said.
One by one Quentin, Eliot, Josh, Julia, and Poppy swung over the side and dropped into the water. It was cold but shallow, not even kneedeep.
They had already set off when they heard a splash behind them. Bingle had climbed over the railing—he was coming too. Evidently he did not consider his bodyguarding duties fully discharged. And Abigail the Sloth: he was carrying her piggyback, her long arms around his neck like a fur wrap, her claws hooked together in front of him.
The loneliness of the scene was beyond anything. After an hour the ship was virtually invisible behind them, and the only sound was the steady soft slosh-slosh of their footsteps. Sometimes the mouthless fish came and bumped harmlessly against their ankles. The thin water was easier to walk through than regular seawater would have been; it put up less resistance. Julia walked along on the surface as befitted a demi-goddess. No one spoke, not even Abigail, who was almost never at a loss for words. The ocean was smooth as glass to the horizon.
The sun was hot on the tops of their heads. After a while Quentin gave up staring at the horizon and looked only down, at his familiar black boots taking step after step after step. Each step took them closer to the end of the story. They were going to finish this. Something could still go wrong now, probably, but he had no idea what. He could gauge their progress by the gradual shallowing of the water, from his calf down to his ankle and finally to a thin film of water that splatted underfoot. The sun was low in the sky behind them. Far off to their right a single evening star had appeared, with its twin shimmering below it in the water.
“Let’s hurry,” Julia said. “I can feel the magic going.”
By that time the wall in front of them was very clear. It might have been ten feet high and was made from old, thin bricks—it looked like the same bricks they’d used to build the wall in hell. They must have used the same contractor. It stood at the back of a thin gray sandy beach that stretched off to the vanishing point in both directions. A huge old wooden door was set in it, bleached and worn by time and weather. As they came closer they could see that the door had seven keyholes of different sizes.
On either side of the door were two plain wooden chairs, the kind of old chairs that might have gotten exiled to the porch because they were too shabby for the dining room, but were still too good and sturdy to throw away. They didn’t match; one of them had a wicker seat. In the chairs sat a man and a woman. The man was tall and thin, fiftyish, with a stern, narrow face. He wore a black dinner suit, complete with tails. He looked a little like Lincoln on his way to the theater.
The woman was younger by a decade or so, pale and lovely. As they stepped onto dry land she raised a hand to greet them. It was Elaine, the Customs Agent from the Outer Island. She looked a lot more serious than she had the last time he’d seen her. She had something in her lap: the Seeing Hare. She was petting it.
She stood up, and the hare jumped down and skittered off down the beach. Quentin watched it go. It made him think of little Eleanor and her winged bunnies. He wondered where she was, and who was taking care of her. Before this was over he would ask.
“Good evening,” Elaine said. “Your Majesty. Your Highnesses. Good evening, all of you. I am the Customs Agent. I tend to the borders of Fillory. Borders of all kinds,” she added pointedly, to Quentin. “I believe you met my father? I hope he didn’t inconvenience you too greatly.”
Her father? Ah. More fairy tale. He supposed that fit together neatly.
“Bother, it’s almost time,” the man said. “The gods are finishing their work. Magic is almost gone, and without it Fillory will fold up like a box with us in it. Do you have the keys?”
Quentin looked to Eliot.
“You do it,” the High King said. “It was your adventure first.”
Eliot held out the ring with the seven keys, and Quentin took it and walked over to the big wooden door. He kept his back straight and his gut sucked in. This was the moment, he thought. This was the triumph. People would tell this story forever. Though they might leave out how melancholy the twilit beach seemed, like all beaches in the early evening, when the fun is over. Time to slap the sand off your feet and pile into the station wagon and go home.
“Smallest to largest,” said the man in the tuxedo, sternly but not unkindly. “Go ahead. Leave them in the locks as you go.”
Quentin slipped each one off the key ring in turn. The first, tiniest lock turned easily—you could feel a mechanism of fine, well-oiled gears meshing and interlocking and turning inside the door. But each successive key put up more resistance. The fourth one was set so high up that he had to stand on his tiptoes to turn it. He could barely budge the sixth, and when he finally got it going, his fingers bending back and his knuckles white with the effort, light flashed inside the keyhole, and it spat out sparks that stung his wrist.
The last one wouldn’t turn at all, and in the e
nd Quentin had to ask Bingle for his sword, which he stuck through the metal ring at the end of the key and used as a lever. Even then the man in the formal suit had to get up from his chair and help him.
When it finally gave and began to move, it was like he’d fitted a key into a hole in the hub at the center of the universe. Together he and the man put their backs into it—Quentin’s face was crushed into his shoulder. His suit smelled faintly of mothballs. As the key turned, the stars turned overhead. The whole cosmos was rotating around them, or maybe it was Fillory that was turning, or maybe there was no difference. The night sky spun above them until the day sky replaced it overhead. They kept turning, and the day sky sank below the horizon again, and the stars rushed back out.
Full circle. They were back where they started. There was a deep click that seemed to echo forever, the sound bouncing off the outer walls of the world, a bank vault opening in a cathedral. The door swung slowly inward. Behind it, through the doorway, was empty space, black sky, stars. Quentin took an involuntary step back. Everybody on the beach, even Bingle, even the sloth, let out a breath they didn’t know they’d been holding.
“Well,” Elaine said shakily. She was flushed, and she even laughed a little. “I have to admit, I wasn’t sure that would work.”
“Did it work?” Quentin said. He looked around for a sign that things were different. “I can’t tell.”
“It worked.”
“It worked,” Julia said.
Somebody caught Quentin from behind in a huge bear hug. It was Josh. They fell down on the chilly sand together, Josh on top.
“Dude!” Josh yelled. “Look at you! We just saved magic!”
“I guess we did.” Quentin started laughing, and then he couldn’t stop. It was all over. Magic wasn’t going to leave them after all. They had their own magic now, and it was safe. Not just in Fillory but everywhere. Nobody could take it away from them. Probably a little more dignity befitted the Saviors of All Magic, but fuck it. Poppy whooped and piled onto them too.
“You losers,” Eliot said, but he was grinning his crazed, jagged grin. “We should have brought champagne.”
Quentin lay back on the sand and looked up at the darkening sky. He could have fallen asleep right then and there on the sand, and slept all the way back to Whitespire. He closed his eyes. He heard Elaine’s voice.
“If you like,” she said, “you can go through it.”
Quentin opened his eyes again. He sat up.
“Wait,” he said. “Really? Through the door? What’s back there?”
“The Far Side of the World,” the Customs Agent said simply.
“The Far Side,” Eliot said. “We don’t know what that means.”
“I should explain,” she said. She settled herself back on her chair. “Fillory is not a sphere, like the world where you were born. Fillory is flat.”
“So not a Klein bottle?” Josh said.
“I have so many questions,” Poppy said. “Like how does gravity work?”
“As such,” Elaine went on, ignoring them, “Fillory has another side. A verso, if you will.”
“What’s on it?” Quentin asked. “What’s over there?”
“Nothing. And everything.”
When this was over Quentin was ready for a long vacation from gods and demons and all their cryptic utterances.
“There is another world there, waiting to be born. A world for which Fillory was in a sense merely a rough draft. You might make an analogy: the Far Side is to Fillory as Fillory is to your Earth. A greener place. A realer, more magical place.”
This was a new wrinkle. He and Poppy and Josh got up from the sand, feeling a little silly. They brushed themselves off and stood at attention.
“Each of you has a choice, whether to go or to stay. I cannot guarantee that anyone who passes through the door will be able to return here. But if you do not go now, there will never be another chance.”
“But what’s really there?” Quentin said. “What’s it like?”
She looked at Quentin, calmly and directly.
“It’s what you want, Quentin. It’s everything you’re looking for. It is the adventure of all adventures.”
There it was. The real end of the story, the happy ending. All he could think was: Alice. She could be waiting for him there. Elaine surveyed the group, where they stood in a loose half circle in front of the door. Her eyes met Eliot’s first. He shook his head slowly.
“I’m High King.” His voice was as serious as Quentin had ever heard it. “I can’t go. I’m not going to leave Fillory.”
She turned to Bingle, who still had the sloth on his back, peeking over his shoulder like a baby koala. Bingle closed his hooded eyes.
“It was never my destiny to return,” he said. He stepped forward. So he was right after all. Quentin supposed that by now Bingle had earned a free pass on the dramatics.
“I also will go,” the sloth said over his shoulder, in case anybody had forgotten about her.
Elaine stood aside and indicated that they should proceed. Without hesitating Bingle walked up to the doorway and opened it all the way.
He was silhouetted against the immense twinkling emptiness. In the night sky beyond him a comet rocketed past, sparking and sputtering merrily like a cheap firework. This was what passed for outer space in Fillory, Quentin supposed. At the bottom of the doorway he could see just the tip of one of the silver moon’s horns. It was rising, on its way to its regular appearance in the night sky of Fillory.
It felt like you could be sucked out through the doorway if you got too close, like through an air lock. But Bingle just stood there, looking around.
“It’s down,” Elaine said. “You have to climb.”
There must have been a ladder. Bingle turned to face them, got to his knees, moving slowly to avoid dislodging the sloth, and felt around with his foot till he evidently got it on a rung. He nodded goodbye to Quentin and began to climb down, step by step. His narrow olive face disappeared below the edge.
“Once you get halfway gravity turns around,” Elaine called after him. “And you start climbing up. It’s not as tricky as it sounds,” she added to the rest of them.
She turned to Quentin.
Two times before Quentin had made this same decision. He’d stood on the threshold of a new world and then stepped over it. When he’d arrived at Brakebills he’d thrown his whole life away, his whole world and everyone he knew, in exchange for a shiny magical new one. It had been easy, he’d had nothing worth keeping. He’d done it again when he came to Fillory, and it wasn’t much harder the second time. But it was harder now, the third time, very hard. Now he had something to lose.
But he was stronger now too. He knew himself better. It turned out his journey wasn’t over after all. He wasn’t going to go back. He looked at Eliot.
“Go,” Eliot said. “One of us should.”
God, was he that easy to read?
“Go,” Poppy said. “This is for you, Quentin.”
He put his arms around her.
“Thank you, Poppy,” he whispered. Then he said it to all of them: “Thank you.”
His voice caught on the phrase. He didn’t care.
Standing in the doorway, he took a deep breath as if he were about to climb down into a pool. He could look out and survey it all: he was backstage at the cosmos. Far below he could see Bingle and the sloth, tiny, still climbing down what looked like an endless column of iron rungs. The entirety of the moon was hanging right there in front of him, bright and glorious in the abyss, glowing with its own light. It looked like he could jump to it. It was smooth and white, no craters. He hadn’t realized the tips of the horns were so sharp.
He knelt down to start his climb.
“That’s odd.” The Customs Agent frowned. “Wait a moment. Where’s your passport?”
Quentin stopped, on one knee.
“My passport?” he said. This again. “I don’t have it. I gave it to the kid in hell.”
“In hell? The underworld?”
“Well, yes. I had to go there. That’s where the last key was.”
“Oh.” She pursed her lips. “I’m sorry, but you can’t go through without a passport.”
She couldn’t be serious.
“Well, but hang on,” Quentin said. “I have a passport. Eleanor made it for me. I just don’t have it on me. They have it in the underworld.”
Elaine smiled, a tired smile that wasn’t completely devoid of sympathy, but wasn’t exactly brimming over with it either.
“Eleanor can only make you one passport, Quentin. You’ve used yours. I’m sorry. I can’t let you through.”
This couldn’t be happening. He looked past her to the others, who were standing watching him blankly, the way the passengers in a car look at the driver when he’s been pulled over for speeding. He tried to make his face communicate something, something on the order of, can you believe this shit? But it wasn’t easy. He was being asked to be a good sport, but this cut deeper than that. This was his destiny here, and she wasn’t going to take it away on a technicality.
“There has to be a loophole.” He was still kneeling on the threshold, looking up at her, halfway out the door. He could feel the Far Side pulling at him, bright and joyful, with its own gravity. This was where his story led. “Something. I had no choice, I had to go to the underworld. And not to put too fine a point on it, but if I hadn’t we never would have opened the door. We wouldn’t be here. The world would’ve ended—”
“That is what makes this all the harder.”
“—so you know,” Quentin kept talking, louder, “if I hadn’t gone to the underworld there wouldn’t be any going to the Far Side of the World.” He knew if he stood up it would be over. “There wouldn’t be any Far Side left. All of this would be gone.”
Her expression didn’t change. The woman was psychotic. She wasn’t going to give in, no matter what he said.
“All right,” he said. He waited as long as he could, then he stood up. He held up his hands. “All right.”
