BOOK III
FILLORY
THEY HELD HANDS in a circle in the living room, packs on their backs. It felt like a dorm stunt, like they were all about to drop acid or sing an a cappella show tune or set some kind of wacky campus record. Ana?s’s face blazed with excitement. She hopped up and down despite the load on her back. None of last night’s drama had registered on her at all. She was the only person in the room who looked and sweatpantsR and inircumstances cacodemon happy to be there.
The funny thing was that it had worked. Quentin wouldn’t let it alone, he kept hounding them, and eventually, with surprisingly little resistance, they gave in. Today would be the day. Partly they were afraid of him, with his scary glittering pain-eyes, but partly it was because they had to admit he was right: it was time to go, and they’d just been waiting for somebody, even somebody as obviously drunk and demented as Quentin was, to stand up and call it.
Looking back, in a philosophical frame of mind, it occurred to Quentin that he’d always thought this would be a happy day, the happiest day of his life. Funny how life had its little ways of surprising you. Little quirks of fate.
If he wasn’t happy, he did feel unexpectedly liberated. At least he wasn’t hunched over with shame anymore. This was pure emotion, unalloyed with any misgivings or caveats or qualifications. Alice was no longer the alabaster saint here. It was not so hard to meet her eyes across the circle. And was that a flicker of embarrassment he saw in hers? Maybe she was learning a little something about remorse, what that felt like. They were down in the muck together now.
They had spent the morning gathering up and packing the gear and the supplies that were already basically gathered up and packed anyway, and rounding up whoever was in the bathroom or dithering over which shoes or had just wandered off out onto the lawn for no obvious reason. Finally they were all together in the living room in a circle, shifting their weight from foot to foot and looking at each other and saying:
“Okay?”
“Okay?”
“Everybody okay?”
“Let’s do it.”
“Let’s do this!”
“Okay!”
“Okay!”
“Let’s—”
And then Penny must have touched the button, because they were all rising up together through cold, black ink.
Quentin was first out of the pool, his pack weighing him down. He was sober now, he was pretty sure, but still angry, angry, angry and brimming over with self-pity. Let it flow. He didn’t want to touch anybody or have anybody touch him. He liked being in the Neitherlands, though. It was quiet and still here. If he could just lie down for a minute, just right here on the old worn stones, just for a minute, maybe he could sleep.
The expensive Persian rug they’d been standing on floated up after them in the black pool. Somehow it had come through by accident. Had the button mistaken it for their clothing? Funny how these things worked.
Quentin waited while the others straggled out of the fountain one by one. They bunched up at the edge, treading water and hanging on to each other, then heaving their backpacks out and crawling up after them over the stone rim.
Eliot looked around quickly, assuming command of the operation. “Okay. Let’s go to phase two.”
Penny had wandered off. He was studying an old ceramic tile set into a wall. “This is interesting,” he said. “Now what do you suppose—?”
“Hey. Asshole.” Quentin snapped his fingers in Penny’s face. He had no problem with naked hostility right now. He was feeling very uninhibited. “Are you listening? Phase two, asshole, let’s go.”?mime=image/jpg" class="imagefix" alt="images" height="bs soon as g
He hoped Penny would come after him, maybe they could have a rematch of their little fight club. But Penny just gave Quentin a calm, assessing look and turned away. He was taking full advantage of the opportunity to rise above, to be the bigger man, the gracious winner. He rattled a spray can of industrial-orange paint and circled the fountain with it, marking the ground with crosses, then set off in the direction he called palaceward, after the lavish white palazzo on that side of the square. It was no mystery where they were going: the scene in the book was written in Plover’s characteristically clear, unambiguous prose. It had the Chatwins walking three more squares palaceward and then one to the left to get to the fountain that led to Fillory. The rest of the group straggled after him, squelching in their wet clothes.
The last jog took them across a stone bridge over a narrow canal. The layout of the city reminded Quentin of a welters board, but writ large. Maybe the game reflected some distant, barely legible rumor of the Neitherlands that had filtered down to Earth.
They halted in a tidy square that was smaller than the one they’d started in, and dominated by a large, dignified stone hall that might have been the mayoral seat of a medieval French village. The clock set at the peak of its facade was frozen at noon, or midnight. The rain was getting heavier. In the center of the square was a round fountain, a figure of Atlas half crushed beneath a bronze globe.
“Okay!” Penny spoke unnecessarily loudly. The big ringmaster. He was nervous, Quentin could see. Not so tough now, loverman. “This is the one they use in the books. So I’m going through to check weather conditions.”
“What do you want, a drum roll?” Janet snapped. “Go!”
Penny took the white button out of his pocket and gripped it in his fist. Taking a deep breath, he mounted the lip of the pool and stepped off, straight-legged, into the black ink. At the last moment he reflexively held his nose with one hand. He dropped in and disappeared. The liquid had swallowed him up.
There was a long hush. The only sound was the splashing of the fountain. A minute passed. Then Penny’s head broke the surface, sputtering and blowing.
“It worked!” he shouted. “It’s warm! It’s summer! It’s summer there!”
“Was it Fillory?” Josh asked.
“I don’t know!” He dog-paddled over to the lip of the pool, breathing hard. “It’s a forest. Rural. No signs of habitation.”
“Good enough,” Eliot said. “Let’s go, everybody.”
Richard was already going through the packs, tossing out the winter gear, the brand-new parkas and woolly hats and electric socks, in an expensive multicolored heap.
“Line up sitting along the edge,” he said over his shoulder. “Feet in the water, holding hands.”
Quentin wanted to say something sarcastic but couldn’t think of anything. There were heavy rusted iron rings set into the edge of the pool. They had stained the stone around them a dark ferrous brown. He lowered his feet into the inky darkness. It felt slightly thinner than water, more the consistency of rubbing alcohol. He stared down at his submerged shoes. He couldn’t make them out.
Some tiny sane part of him knew he was out of control, but that wasn’t the part of hi glance passed between and the cacodemongm that had its hands on the wheel. Everything anybody said sounded to him like a nasty double entendre calculated to remind him of Alice and Penny. Atlas appeared to be leering at him. He was dizzy from lack of sleep. He closed his eyes. His head felt huge and diffuse and empty, like a puff of cloud hanging above his shoulders. The cloud began to drift away. He wondered if he was going pass out. He would dearly love to pass out. There was a dead spot in his brain, and he wanted the dead spot to spread and metastasize over the whole of it and blot out all the painful thoughts.
“Body armor?” Eliot was saying. “Jesus, Ana?s, have you even read the books? We’re not walking into a firefight. We’re probably going to be eating scones with a talking bunny.”
“Okay?” Penny called. “Everybody?”
They were all sitting, all eight of them, in an arc around the edge of the fountain, scooched forward so they could drop in without using their hands, which were tightly clasped. Janet lolled on Eliot’s shoulder, her white neck exposed. To Quentin’s right, Josh was studying him with concern. His huge hand squeezed Quentin’s.
“It’s okay, man,” he whispered. “Come on. You’re okay. You got this.”
Probably everybody took a last look around, locked eyes, felt a frisson. Eliot quoted Tennyson’s “Ulysses” about seeking new worlds and sailing beyond the sunset. Somebody whooped—maybe Ana?s, the whoop had a Francophone quality. But Quentin didn’t whoop, and he didn’t look. He just stared at his lap and waited for each successive second to impose itself on him in turn like an uninvited guest the way the previous one had. On Penny’s signal they dropped into the fountain together, not quite in sync but almost—it had a Busby Berkeley feel to it. Janet more or less face-planted forward into the ink.
It was a falling down, a plunge: outbound from the Neitherlands meant descending. It was like they were parachuting, only it was too rapid for that, somewhere between parachuting and straight free-falling, but with no rushing wind. For a long silent moment they could see everything: a sea of flourishing leafy canopies extending all the way to the horizon, pre-industrially verdant, giving way to square meadows in one direction that Quentin tentatively tagged as north, as reckoned by a pallid sun in a white sky. He tried to keep an eye on it as they went in. The ground rushed up to slam them.
Then, just like that, they were down. Quentin flexed his knees instinctively, but there was no impact or sense of momentum absorbed. All at once they were just standing there.
But where was there? It wasn’t a clearing exactly. It was more like a shallow ditch, a trench running through a forest, the bottom clogged with dead leaves and loam and twiggy arboreal detritus. Quentin steadied himself with one hand on the sloping bank. Light trickled down thinly through the massed branches overhead. A bird chattered and then left off. The silence was deep and thick.
They had been scattered by the transition, like a freshly deployed stick of paratroopers, but they were still in sight of one another. Richard and Penny were fighting their way out of a huge dead bush. Alice and Ana?s were seated on the trunk of a colossal tree that had fallen athwart the ditch, as if they’d been carefully placed there by a giant child arranging dolls. Janet was sitting on the ground with her hands on her thighs, taking deep breaths.
The whole scene had a deeply uncurated feel to it. This was not an. He sneezed.
was the way trees lived when they were left to their own devices.
“Penny?” Josh stood on the edge of the ditch, gazing down at the rest of them, hands in pockets. He looked incongruously natty in a jacket and a nice shirt, no tie, even though they were all soaked to the bone. “It’s cold, Penny. Why the fuck is it cold?”