Later that day he tried fighting her. He’d watched Alice face down Martin Chatwin himself, with a whole arsenal of magic that he’d never seen before, but that was a long time ago. Now he knew his way around a ward-and-shield or two. He could chuck a magic missile with the best of them. He was a damn one-man magic-missile crisis.
And Alice was playing with him. This was a game to her. Quentin had this advantage at least: he wasn’t playing. It made him feel sick, fighting somebody he wanted to love, but right now Alice was in no condition to love, or be loved.
He looked up the thickest, baddest-ass shielding spell he knew about and crudely attached a couple of hardening enhancements to it. Taking a deep breath, he stepped through the closet door and as quickly as he could cast the shield six times in a row, one after the other, six magic shields hanging invisibly in the air in front of him, or all but invisibly. Looking through six of them at once turned the air a little rosy-pink.
Any more than six and they would have started to interfere with each other. Diminishing returns. Plus he didn’t think he could do another one right now anyway.
Then the missiles. He’d made them in advance, with all the trimmings: treble-weight, electrically charged, armor-piercing, viciously poisoned. He wouldn’t have dared to even prep the spell on Earth, let alone cast it, if the house hadn’t itself been so heavily shielded. If he missed they’d go through the wall like paper, plus they were a long way from street legal. Technically he was going to cast them in another dimension, so maybe he’d get off on jurisdictional grounds.
Alice rose to meet him: feeding time. She never quite touched the ground, he noticed, though when she saw him noticing she gave a little kick with her legs, balletic almost, a joke—as if to say, remember when I used to walk with these things? Sure you do. Remember when I used to spread them for you, my darling?
Quentin tried to kill her. He knew he couldn’t, but he thought she might feel it, and as long as she was a niffin this was virtually the only interaction they could have together. He cast the magic missiles, full strength and then some; they practically took his fingertips off. They were green, seething things that darted at Alice like hungry fish.
But about ten feet from her they slowed to a crawl. She looked at them, pleased, as if Quentin had made her cookies. You shouldn’t have! Under her gaze the missiles lost the courage of their convictions. They formed a line, single file, and obediently encircled her waist in a sparking, fizzing green ring.
Then the ring burst out in all directions. Two of the missiles whanged resonantly off Quentin’s sextuple shield. He flinched. He wouldn’t have survived even one of them.
Then Alice was across the room and hanging in the air right in front of him. He couldn’t tell if she’d teleported or just darted straight at him, she was that fast. For the first time she looked pissed off. She bared her sapphire teeth. Was it being a niffin that made her this angry? Or had she been this angry all along? Maybe the rage had been inside her already, and becoming a niffin had just revealed it—burned away the protective shielding.
Either way she was Alice to the life, he’d know her anywhere; she was more than alive, she was humming and crackling with energy. Her eyes were the brightest, angriest, most magnificently amused eyes he’d ever seen. She reached out and put a hand on the first of his six shields, pressed on it with two blue fingertips, then put them through it. The shield flared and died.
The second shield buzzed angrily when she touched it. That should have killed her too; he’d laced it with a magical charge he’d only read about, and in a book he shouldn’t have been reading. She wiggled her fingers with sensual pleasure. Delightful! With both hands she grasped the third shield and picked it up—set it aside as if it were a physical object, an old picture frame maybe, and leaned it against a wall. It was a joke, magic didn’t even work that way, but if you were a niffin it worked however you wanted it to. She did the same thing with the next one, and the next, stacking them neatly like folding chairs.
Quentin didn’t wait around for the ending. He could see where this was heading. Ceding the field of battle, he stepped back through the doorway. Let her follow him if she could, but she couldn’t. It was hard and smooth as glass to her. She mushed her face and her breasts against the barrier, like a kid squishing her face against a window, and looked at him with one antic eye, blue on blue.
She was daring him, baiting him. Come on! Quit moping around! Don’t you want to have some fun? When she opened her mouth it was bright inside, like in a photographic negative.
“Alice,” Quentin said. “Alice.”
He closed the red door. He’d seen enough.
—
She was the madwoman in the attic. It was weirdly intimate, this one-sided duel, just her and him, one on one. Not like sex, but intimate. He was like a free diver trying for greater and greater depths, forcing himself down, lungs bursting, then kicking frantically for the surface with his puny human flippers, the big blue nipping at his heels.
Quentin kept records of his trips in a spiral notebook: where he went, where she went, what he’d done, what she’d done. There wasn’t much point to it, because the performance went more or less the same way every time, but it helped him fight off sadness. And he did notice one thing: Alice liked to herd him toward the front door of the house, like she was daring him to open it. That seemed like a dare he’d be better off not taking.
But if there was nothing else on offer? Their little dance was like the endgame of a disastrously bloody chess match, just a queen chasing a beleaguered king around an empty board, sadistically refusing to checkmate him. It was difficult to know what if anything was going on in the queen’s mind, but one thing was clear: Alice was better at this game than he was. Apart from everything else she knew him better than he knew himself. She always had.
So that night, close to midnight, when Plum was safely in bed, he reversed tactics again. Alice wanted him to open the front door? He was going to head straight for it. Give her what she wants, see what she does with it. He still didn’t know what he was looking for, but maybe he’d find out what she was looking for.
He prepped a couple of spells in advance, and cast the first one as soon as he’d stepped through the door. It created a reasonably lifelike image of him in every room in the house.
It didn’t confuse her, but it might have pissed her off, because Quentin barely made it to the stairs before she banished the illusion so harshly that he felt like somebody had scrubbed his brain with steel wool. Go on or go back? In an undignified panic he feinted for the stairs, dodged past Alice at close quarters, arching his body like a bullfighter, and locked himself in the half bathroom off the landing.
Now he’d trapped himself, but good. He fumbled in his pocket and whipped out a Sharpie he’d been keeping on him in case of emergency. Scribbling at top speed he wrote an inscription in Swahili across the door, then sketched a big rectangle around the whole frame, with fiddly ornaments at the corners, all executed in one unbroken line. It was just a ward to insulate against magic, because, he reasoned hopefully, Alice was made of magic now. It was all he could think of.
The door shook with an impact, bulged visibly inward, air puffing in around the edges as if a grenade had gone off behind it. It held, but immediately it began warping in its frame, and the paint started to blister. It wasn’t going to hold for long. It wasn’t meant to be a magic barrier, it just wanted to be a bathroom door.
He turned around and his eye fell on the medicine-cabinet mirror, in which it continued to snow. Experimentally he put a hand through it—no resistance. Another portal. He put one foot on the toilet, planted his knee on the sink and fed himself through the narrow opening.
It was cold in the other bathroom—the other-other bathroom. He crawled desperately down off the sink and half fell onto the bathroom floor, which was slick with slush. Where was he now? Two worlds removed from reality now, a land within a land. Another level down.
What would he do when the door failed? He might be able to slip past her again, get back through, but then what had he gained? He didn’t want to leave empty-handed, not again. This free diver was going to touch bottom, even if it meant he wasn’t coming back up. There must be something interesting down here. At this depth maybe some of the rules would start breaking down.
Slipping and sliding to his feet, he half walked, half skated out into the hall and into the mirror-image of the mirror-image of the workroom. The lights were out in this one, and he hastily summoned some illumination—the palms of his hands glowed like flashlights. Something was different here. He could almost feel the increased pressure of the multiple layers of reality above him. This land was heavier somehow: like it had been put through a photo filter that saturated the colors and made the black lines thicker and darker. It tried to push into his eyes and ears. He couldn’t stay here long.
But where to? He went over to the windows and heaved one up and open.
The street was recognizably their street, or almost: there was a road, and streetlights, but there were no other houses. It was like a desert housing development that had suffered some financial calamity just as construction began. All around in the distance cold sand slid silkily, hissing, over more cold sand. It was night, and instead of light the streetlights poured down rain as if they were weeping. The sky was black, no stars, and the moon was flat and silver: a mirror, reflecting a ghost earth. This wasn’t something he was supposed to see. It was an unfinished sketch of a world, a set that hadn’t been properly dressed.
He shut the window. This workroom had a red door too. He opened it and stepped through.
Now he was getting close to the heart of something, he could feel it. Three levels down, the innermost chamber, the littlest Russian doll—a tiny wooden peg with smeary features, barely a doll at all. This room looked nothing like anything in the townhouse, but he recognized it anyway. The hushed carpet, that warm, fruity smell—a stranger’s house, that he’d only been in once, and that for about fifteen minutes, but it was like he’d never left it. He was back in Brooklyn, thirteen years ago, back at the house where he’d come for his Princeton interview.
It was like he was burrowing deeper into his own mind, back in time, back into his memory. This was where it all began. Maybe if he stuck around he could finally have his interview after all. He could go back and get his master’s degree. Was this really it, or just a simulacrum? Was there another, younger Quentin waiting just outside the door, getting even more depressed than usual as he stood there fretting in the cold rain? And his friend James, young and strong and brave-o? The loops were getting stranger, the time lines were in a Gordian knot, the thick was plottened beyond all recognition.
Or was this a second chance? Was this how to fix her? Change it all so it never happened—rip up the envelope and walk away? He heard the sound of cracking wood, a long way off, in another reality. Two realities up. Last time he was here he went for the liquor cabinet. Lesson learned. He looked around: yes, a grandfather clock, just like in Christopher Plover. It was so obvious now. He opened the case.
It was full of shining golden coins. They poured out onto the floor like a Vegas jackpot. They were like Mayakovsky’s coins, but there must have been hundreds of them. God, the amount of power here was unthinkable. What couldn’t you do with it? He had his master’s now, he was a master magician. He could fix Alice. He could fix anything. He stuffed his pockets with them.
Speaking of whom: Alice came drifting through the doorway behind him, slow-rolling languorously onto her back like an otter. Time to go. He juked past her and back through the door the other way.
In the workroom the snow was turning to rain, and the parquet had an inch of gray slush on it, and he half fell sprinting across it, his pockets heavy with treasure. He slammed shut the bathroom door but then fumbled the Sharpie and dropped it. No time. He spat out a spell that doubled his speed and scrambled up and over the sink and felt the hot prickle of way too much magic way too close on his trailing ankle. Alice was a blue blur behind him, and he wasn’t faster than she was but he was fast enough, just, to make it back across the landing and through the workroom and the red door and out into the real world.
She hadn’t gotten him. Not today. Not today. He stood there for a minute, puffing and blowing and pulling himself together, hands on his knees. Then he dug his hands in his pockets and spilled the gold out on the table. Show ’em what they’ve won.
He should have known. It was fairy gold, like in the stories—the kind that turns to dead leaves and dried flowers when the sun comes up. That’s what he’d found. The coins had turned to ordinary nickels.
It was never going to be that easy. This wasn’t working. There had to be another way. He needed sleep. His ankle was starting to burn where his close call with Alice had scorched it.
“Quentin.”
Eliot was standing in the doorway, looking in his Fillorian court finery like he’d just detached himself from a Hans Holbein painting. He held a tumbler from the kitchen in one hand, full of whiskey, which he raised in greeting.
“You look like you’ve just seen a ghost,” he said.