“It’s true. It’s happened twice already.”
She stood up. “Will you do something for me, then, before David gets back?”
“What is it?” I rose from my chair and grabbed my cane, eager for any chance to get on her good side.
“Better to show you.”
She grabbed a key from a hanging plant by the window and headed out of the kitchen. I followed her to a home office, where she unlocked a decorative box containing another key. She took the second key and led me upstairs, where she stopped in front of a door at the end of the hallway.
“Would you like to see Arcadia?” she said coquettishly as she turned around.
I was surprised into a laugh. “What?”
“It’s not really Arcadia,” she said, smiling back at me. “It’s murals of Arcadia on four walls of a spare room, but Johnny’s done something to them. Honestly, they give me the creeps, and when David’s being reasonable, he admits that having magic things around will just make it harder for Johnny to—” She hesitated.
“It’s okay,” I said. “We’ve worked out that Johnny wants to stay here.”
“David keeps saying it will hurt Johnny to undo the spell, but I think he’s just putting it off, trying to keep some last souvenir of Johnny’s magic. But now here you are, and I think David would appreciate the hand of destiny in that.”
She turned the key in the door and then slowly pushed it open.
“Holy shit,” I whispered.
“I know,” she whispered back.
I was looking into a rain forest, on the second floor of a house in the Hollywood Hills.
Linda hung back, but I stepped inside. The air was thick and shadowy and warm, fragrant with nectar and rot. Frogs moaned a constant song, and somewhere a bird let out a shrill whoop that echoed through what sounded like miles of sky. I could hear the spatter of raindrops falling through the -canopy of leaves over my head, even feel them strike my skin, but when I looked at my arms, they were still dry.
A pale flower, struck by a fat drop of water, trembled on a vine near my elbow. Without thinking, I brushed the petals with my fingertips. Quickly I pulled back, but the flower was undamaged. “I don’t understand,” I said. “Are parts of this real?” I bent down, scooped up a handful of soggy loam, watched it fall through my fingers. I could feel its gritty richness in my hand, but no grains clung to my fingertips or lodged beneath my nails.
“Your mind is telling you what you should feel,” she said, still lingering in the doorway behind me as though she couldn’t bear to enter. “All of this is just painted on the walls; Johnny glamoured it so you think you’re standing in it. If he were here, he’d hear Arcadian birds; it would smell different to him. You’re hearing and smelling and feeling what you expect from a place that looks like the painting.”
“Walt Disney would be peeing right now,” I said. Of course, now that I thought of it, old Walt had almost certainly been to Arcadia himself.
“I know you can’t see the wall,” she said, “but the glamour is on the actual painting, so you have to touch that. Just put your hand here next to mine.”
I looked around and felt a little pang. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t have the heart to spoil this. Let Johnny do it, if you think it’s the right thing to do.” I turned to look at her and saw something change in her face. Damn it, I’d taken David’s side again.
“Well then,” she said. “Is there anything else you’d like to see while you’re here?” Meaning, before I kick you out on your ass and tell the woman at the gate never to let you back in?
She stepped back from the doorway, turning away to look down the hall. She seemed to be disappearing into a corridor of light surrounded by endless miles of tangled twilit wilderness. If she shut the door, I might be lost in there forever. I hurried toward her, feet squelching and crunching in the illusory undergrowth, and impulsively I slapped my hand against the tree that stood closest to the door frame.
Just as with the fey in the Seelie bar I felt nothing at all, no surge of power, no tingle on my skin. But the sounds stopped, and suddenly I was standing in an empty room. I looked around with an entirely different sort of amazement. Although the paintings were flat compared to the dream my mind had conjured from them, their colors were rich and bright, their detail spectacular. Even the ceiling had been painted to -resemble a forest canopy with fading daylight streaming erratically through.
Linda turned to me with a surprised smile.
“Even without the magic,” I told her, “this is an amazing room. Johnny could make a living doing this kind of thing.”