Martin’s disappearance made headlines all over England, pushing even news of the war below the fold. The English love a good tragedy, especially when it involves a child, and this one was a nine-days’ wonder. Detectives were dispatched to Fowey from Penzance and London and farther away. Dockery House was turned upside down, from attic to basement, and Plover’s house was too. Notices were circulated. Dogs were loosed. Gardens were dug up. Ponds and fountains were dragged. Men with slight builds were lowered into abandoned wells.
An amazing number of lost things were recovered: bicycles, pets, keys, odd items of silver, one or two petty criminals, in one case a rogue bassoon which had been stolen and then apparently abandoned in a ha-ha when it proved impossible to sell. The bassoonist having by that time pined for it and then passed away, the instrument was lodged temporarily and then eventually permanently by the police at Dockery House, as if by way of an apology—a sort of replacement for the child they never managed to find. Jane, in her inscrutable way, learned to play it passably well.
A cloud of suspicion settled on Christopher Plover, but over time it dispersed, as clouds will, pausing on its way to shadow a few of the less savory locals in turn, but always inconclusively. Truth to tell Plover was a little heartbroken when Martin disappeared. There was no evidence, and no arrests were ever made. We children knew where Martin had gone, of course, more or less, though I never told the others everything I knew. I never told them it was Umber who’d taken Martin’s offer. I didn’t have the heart to do it.
I think the adults knew we were keeping something to ourselves, but they could never put their big, clumsy, groping fingers on what it was. It was our shared secret.
But we didn’t all feel the same way about what he’d done. Helen in particular—always the arch-Ramsian—was scathing about it, excoriating Martin for defying Ember and Umber’s will, as she saw it. But I believe that we all understood it and even, on some level, admired it. I know that I did. It must have taken great will and resourcefulness to seek out Umber, to strike the deal and then to go through with it. He was many things, and God only knows what he is now, but Martin was not stupid, and he wasn’t a coward.
Though it was difficult to reconcile Martin’s escape into Fillory with the damage it caused in the real world. One of the secrets Martin must have learned down below the Northern Marsh was how not to care about some things, and there was power in that, the power to live as though his actions had no consequences. It fell to us to witness the consequences, and they were ugly. Our mother’s nerves were always fragile, and Martin’s disappearance finally and permanently annihilated her. We saw her more and more rarely, and when we did, in one or other dispiriting institutional setting, she never failed to accuse us of keeping Martin from her. Her own children seemed sinister and alien to her. She knew, somehow, that we knew. And she was right.
But I never saw Martin again. I always looked for him, though as time passed I became more and more worried about what would happen if I found him. He could or would not show himself to me. I’ve never understood why not.
He certainly had the chance. There were more adventures left for us in Fillory, most of which ended up in A Secret Sea and The Wandering Dune. I didn’t turn them down. Even after what I’d seen that day, even with my heart half broken, I still could never say no to Fillory.
And then Fillory said no to us. By the end of A Secret Sea I was twelve, and after that I was never asked back. One by one we became too old. Helen had one final adventure, in the company of Jane, and the two girls returned bearing a box of magical buttons which Jane claimed could have given them free entry to Fillory forever. But Helen considered the buttons to be a perversion of magic, she thought using them would be a blasphemy against the rams, and she disposed of them immediately and could not be persuaded to divulge their hiding place. Her arguments were very Ramsian indeed, and everyone sided against her, even Jane. It was a schism, and after it we Chatwin children were never as close again, and our integrity as a tribe was diminished even further.
Maybe the strangest consequence of Martin’s disappearance was that Plover started writing. Whatever went on between him and Martin, when that ended, the writing began, and one day Plover surprised us with a book. He’d had it privately printed. He called it The World in the Walls. The cover was his own charmingly amateurish drawing of Martin and the grandfather clock.
It will sound strange, but after the initial surprise the book never interested us much. We took one cursory glance at it, made fun of the illustrations—Plover had the most ignorant, sentimental ideas of what a dwarf looked like—but we already knew everything in it. People like to call the Fillory books magical, but they never seemed that way to us. If you’ve seen magic, then the Fillory books are very pale imitations indeed. Plover’s words were like dried flowers, stiff and crumbling, crushed flat between pages, when we’d had the living, blooming blossoms all around us.
Now all I can see is how simple he made everything sound. Reading the Fillory books you would think that all one has to do is behave honorably and bravely and all will be well. What a lesson to teach young children. What a way to prepare them for the rest of their lives.
We each of us on our own found ways to get on without Fillory. The real world was not as fantastical and brightly colored as Fillory, but it was very distracting nonetheless, and if it didn’t contain any pegasi or giants it was absolutely teeming with girls who seemed almost as magical and dangerous. Fillory was sweet, but this world was very savory. It was easy to let Fillory go when every football match and scholarship examination and furtive kiss told you to stop fighting, forget it, let it be, leave it behind. We talked about Fillory less and less among ourselves, and we went to Plover’s less and less, and the whole business began to seem less and less real.
By this time the books had begun to sell, too, and a miraculous rain of money began to fall upon us. We wouldn’t have said it out loud, or even to ourselves, but it was as if we had sold Fillory itself—or rather we’d sold its realness, reduced it to the status of a children’s fantasy, in exchange for regular and startlingly large payments into accounts which would come under our control when we were twenty-one. By the time I was seventeen and sitting an entrance examination for Merton College, Oxford, I’m not entirely sure I believed in Fillory at all anymore.
Jane did. She never stopped looking for the buttons that Helen hid, and when she disappeared at thirteen I believe that she found them. But she knew better than to try to take me with her, and none of us tried to follow her. When she did not return, I could only assume that she went down the same path that Martin did.
It has been years now since Helen or Fiona or I have mentioned Fillory to each other, except as it pertains to our finances. We don’t talk about Martin or Jane—in their way they’ve come to seem as fantastical to us as the Cozy Horse. Without those things we’ve got very little to talk about at all, and I would pay any price not to have to suffer any more of Helen’s glittery-eyed, American-accented chatter about Jesus. It’s as though we three are the survivors of a great disaster—like the bombing of a city, the way London is being bombed to pieces now—and to even mention what happened would be to risk calling back the planes to blast us to pieces all over again.
—
I wouldn’t even have written this much had it not been for the events that have overtaken Britain and the world in the past three years. They have driven me to extremes of desperation I would never have thought possible. There is no telling now who will triumph in the present conflict, and there is every chance that the Germans will overrun England itself before it is all over.
Perhaps help will come. Perhaps Martin is able to perceive events in this world, from wherever he is, and he will come back; if he doesn’t care to I would think that at least Jane would. If they are unable to intervene in the affairs of this world, perhaps Ember or Umber could. That would be a welcome sight: my long-lost brother and sister and the two Great Rams of Fillory, aflame with power, marching abreast on Berlin to chivvy Hitler out of his bunker like a stoat.
But they haven’t come. And I am beginning to think that they are not going to come.
And that is why I am writing these words. This book is a memoir, a secret history, but it is also an act of calculated provocation. I am at present with the 7th Armoured Division in Tobruk, in Libya, preparing for a battle tomorrow with Rommel and his Panzers. I, Rupert Chatwin, a king of Fillory, who rode a griffin against the armies of the Whispering King, who beat the Wight of the West in single combat and broke his back, will fight the Germans in an obsolete Crusader tank full of lice and the stink of me and my comrades-in-arms, that has already leaked oil across half of northern Africa.
If I survive I will send this home with instructions that it be published six months from now unless word arrives from me. The news that Fillory is real will be splashed across every paper in Britain—unless you agree to take me and my family back. Yes, I address you directly: Ember and Umber, Martin and Jane. If not me then save my wife and my child, your only nephew, that is all I ask. Surely it is within your power. Surely you can find it in your hearts.
But if that is still not enough, then I offer you goods in trade. I was not completely honest before: when I left Castle Blackspire that day I did not leave empty-handed. Blackspire is Whitespire’s twin, and I knew where the treasure room was, and I knew how to open it. Even in my fear and grief, I was still selfish enough and spiteful enough to plunder it for whatever I could carry. I wasn’t an adept like Martin, but even I could recognize power when I saw it. I took a blade, and a spell, and I believe they are very powerful indeed. They are of the old workings. The very strongest stuff.
You can come and try to take them from me, but I think you will not. Here: I offer them to you freely if you will do this thing.
For the love of God, Ember and Umber, Martin and Jane, or for the love of whatever it is that you hold sacred, if you are reading these words, take us back to Fillory. For all the ways I have betrayed you I beg your forgiveness. I will atone for my sins any way you like, if you will open the door again, one last time, for me and my family. I was once a king of Fillory, but I will return as your lowliest servant if you will only open the door. I am begging you now. When I turn this page I want you to open the door.
—
The book ended there.
Plum let it lie open on her lap. It felt like it weighed approximately one thousand pounds. She couldn’t look at Quentin. She didn’t want to share this moment with him. Maybe she would in a moment, but not yet.
They hadn’t come. They hadn’t saved him, and Rupert’s stolen goods had stayed stolen, and he’d died there in the desert. Though his wife and child—Plum’s grandfather—had survived anyway. The blade: that was what Betsy took. At first Plum wondered about the spell, but it was there too, cut up and bound into the notebook at the end, on lumpy parchment slightly smaller than the pages around it: a dozen leaves of close writing in a foreign script.
Then it all went blurry, because Plum’s eyes were full of tears. She had denied it all her life, that any of it was real, but not anymore. Not after this, and not after what the girl in the mirror had shown her. It had really happened. It wasn’t just a story, it was a true story. It had found her, drawn her into its pages, and now it was time for her to play her part in it. Fillory had chewed up her ancestors and spat them out. Now it was hungry again and coming for her, and she would have to find a way to face it.
She put her head in her hands and leaked some more tears, there in the lobby of the Amenia train station. After five minutes she got up and went to the snack bar for some napkins to blow her nose on.
“Quentin,” she said when she got back. “I think Fillory was real.” It was hard to force the words out. They didn’t want to be said. “I know it sounds crazy, but I think he was telling the truth. I think it was all real.”
Quentin only nodded. He didn’t look surprised. If anything she suspected him of having dabbed away a tear or two when she wasn’t looking.
“It is real, Plum,” he said. “I’ve been there.”