“I don’t want it. That’s ghastly,” September said evenly, quietly.
Hushnow worried his feathers with his long black beak. “Everything good is also ghastly. Your lovely roast chicken dinner was once a live rooster singing up the dawn. Your toasty woolen jumper was cut off the back of a happy sheep. Even those pretty books I can see behind you—most of them got written by someone as dead as dust and you spend your afternoons dog-earing ghosts. You can ignore the ghastly, but it doesn’t go away. Might as well enjoy the good. Even the demented know that. And it’s such a nice pen.”
September knelt and picked it up. Its feather was deep indigo, its nib silver. She wanted to leave it where it lay. She wanted to go find an empty bookshelf to curl up in and forget the sight of the Headmistress fading to nothing. But instead, she put the quill in her pocket and stood up straight.
“Ta, then!” chirped Hushnow, and his image puffed out like a film ending.
Saturday sighed in relief. His breath ruffled, ever so slightly, the pages of The History of Fairyland: A How-To Guide.
“Ow!” he yelped, and snatched his thumb to his mouth.
A book bear rose up on its furry hind legs on the edge of the Reference Desk. It licked its chops, hungry for another chomp of Marid.
“What did I tell you?” sighed Greenwich Mean Time. “You’ve only yourself to blame. No breathing on the books!”
“It’s all right,” whispered Saturday. “It’s only a little bite. Good luck to that bear if he wants to start chewing through my history. He’ll never find his way out again! But, September, we have to go. We can’t stay. If the Headmistress got here so quickly, the rest must be far ahead.”
If we win, she will stay, the Marid thought desperately, and told no one how his thumb throbbed and hurt.
INTERLUDE
ABRACADABRA
In Which Aunt Margaret Shows Off
Parents never take quite the same path as their children through any country at all. This is good and right and proper, though it does make for heated arguments on holidays.
Aunt Margaret did not take Susan Jane and Owen through the Closet Between the Worlds. Nor did she lead them out into the wheat fields and cause them to trip over a stone wall into the Glass Forest. Nor did she show them the place in Mr. Albert’s weathered fence where the world gets thin and you can hop right through. She did as she had always done: twisted the silver rings on her finger into place, counted to three, said Abracadabra, and disappeared. Only this time, she was holding her sister’s hand when she did it, and her sister was holding her husband’s hand, and though they did not notice in the least, a small and amiable dog was chewing nervously on their shoelaces.
Strictly speaking, Margaret didn’t need to say abracadabra. She didn’t need to say anything at all. But she liked a little dash of theatrical flair in everything she did. She’d said it the first time she traveled under her own steam, and the second, and then never given it up. What our Miss Margaret did not know was that she’d been saying abracadabra as a joke for so long that it had become a magical word. It is certainly possible that, after all this time, the magic that took her to Fairyland had gotten so fond of her joke that it would refuse to let her in without its favorite password. For its own part, the word abracadabra very much enjoyed being taken seriously for once. It had had nothing to do but make rabbits go into and come out of cheap top hats for ever so long, even though it came from a language called Aramaic, and therefore had an extremely ancient and noble pedigree.
But Margaret had always said abracadabra and she said it this time. All four of them—Margaret, Susan Jane, Owen, and the dog—faded gently away from the farmhouse outside Omaha, Nebraska, and faded gently into an extraordinary forest throbbing with colors. The trees rose overhead in shades of crimson, tangerine, aquamarine, glittering gold, opal-black. One of the tree trunks was covered with little gloved hands politely offering pots of maple syrup. Bloodred and blood-purple butterflies swarmed over another. Wide, curious green eyes stared from the backs of their wing. Some of the trees burned with a beautiful scarlet fire, and from the flaming trees flaming birds burst up like peacocks startled into fireworks. One even had a Sunday dinner in its branches, porkcones glistening caramelly brown, its cornbread branches oozing butter and honey and mushed peas, its plum pie blossoms dripping crust onto their heads.