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“How did you do that?”
And she said: “Magic.”
Thomas put his arms around her neck. He called her Mother and not Gwendolyn, because these were Normal things to do. And when his patchwork scrap-yarn wombat, who wore a little puff-yarn cocoa-barrel round her neck like a Saint Bernard, did not answer back when he asked her to tell him tales of the marvelous Land of Wom where everything was Biteable and Good, he did not tear her head off in his anguish, though he wanted to, very badly. Instead, he named her Blunderbuss and dreamed of holding her in front of him, wriggling and warm and alive, while she fired passionfruits and horseshoes and whiskey bottles out of her mouth at his enemies. He woke up with a guilty start—Normal wombats couldn’t do that. Thomas tried to be good and dream about something else.
Every day, even though it was Not Normal, and he knew it, Thomas Rood stood under the chandelier and whispered:
“Will-o’-the-wisp! If you come out today, I shall give you a kiss!” And after a moment, he added: “Please, please talk to me.”
But the chandelier did not want a kiss, and years went by, and the heart of Thomas Rood fired itself at all the quiet, still objects of our world, begging them, pleading with them to come alive.
CHAPTER V
THE ADVENTURES OF INSPECTOR BALLOON
In Which Thomas Meets a Book, a Desk, a Mud Puddle, and a Girl and Fights the Battle of Hastings Over Again
In the lower left-hand corner of his clothes dresser Thomas Rood kept a notebook whose cover was red and whose pages had no lines. The clothes dresser was called Bruno. The notebook was called Inspector Balloon for the six bright balloons and a big white moon like a magnifying glass painted on it.
Thomas named everything he could put his hands on. After all, he reasoned, nothing could really be real unless it had a name. How awful he would have felt if he had been called nothing at all and had to be summoned to dinner with cries of “Nobody in Particular!” He preferred strange-sounding and thorny names out of his books and his head, and secretly resented every day being called something as workaday as Thomas. He called their cantankerous oven Hephaestus, the laundry tub and washboard Beatrice and Benedick, the chandelier he dubb
ed Citrine, the standing radio Scheherazade. His bed was clearly an Amalthea; his toothbrush answered to no name but the Ivory Knight. He insisted upon calling their neighbors’ cats Henrys I through VIII, though they had their own names to which they had become quite accustomed. Thomas knew they weren’t really Patches or Moustache, but eight proud Kings, and he would not be moved on the subject. Names were a serious business and no mistaking. You couldn’t expect anything to talk to you if you didn’t call it by name.
When he saw the notebook in a shop window, Thomas had gotten very still inside. He recognized it like he would recognize his own hand. He sometimes had that feeling when he saw certain objects—that they were already his, only temporarily and embarrassingly separated from him due to some error in cosmic bookkeeping. He knew instantly what it was for, what it wanted to be when it grew up—a Real Live Book Owned by a Boy. Gwendolyn, thrilled that he wanted something so small and so Normal, had bought him an impressively businesslike silver-capped pen that spat blue ink to go along with it (called Mr. Indigo). The pen, unlike the book, was not cosmically his, but it would do. Thomas had rushed into his bedroom as soon as the door closed behind them, flung himself onto Amalthea, and opened Inspector Balloon to the first beautiful blank page, new and perfect as the head of cream in a glass milk bottle. Mr. Indigo’s ink carved thick purpley-blue rivers into the paper, dividing it into a fertile and well-watered countryside, every inch of white fed by those deep, generous streams.
Thomas Rood had excellent handwriting. All trolls are skilled in the Dark Arts of Penmanship, owing to the heroics of Tufa, one of the three Primeval Trolls. Tufa, shortly after solving the mystery of walking upright and making friends with bridges, hunted down a wild Alphabet and made it her pet. Alphabets are one of the longest-lived creatures in all the grand universe. The Troll Alphabet lives still in the Heliotrope Hills, grumbling to itself, devouring passing slang, and blessing, in the small ways an Alphabet can, the folk that tamed it when the world was young.
Thomas could sign his name in such a fashion as to make John Hancock weep.
But he quickly learned that the loops and flourishes of his letters disturbed adults, who did not think a six-year-old should be able to write quite so much like a medieval monk. He owned up immediately to having traced Happy Mother’s Day out of one of his fairy books even though he hadn’t. From then on Thomas wrote only carefully shaky, outsize letters with bad spelling and no punctuation at all.
But Inspector Balloon belonged to him, and where no one could see, he let himself make words as beautiful as pictures, words that would have made the consonants of that wild, ancient Troll Alphabet swell with pride.
In his book, Thomas wrote the Rules of the World. He wrote them down because he did not understand them. Other Children understood them easily. Normal Children. Normal Children grasped the baffling magics of Bedtime, Not Speaking Unless Spoken To, Sitting Quietly When You Don’t Want to One Bit, Eating Spinach Which Is Obviously Poison, Understanding Why Parents Serve Poison for Supper, and What Its Effects Will Be. For Other Children, for Normal Children, these things were as easy as dessert after dinner. Thomas’s father told him this over and over. It’s just Common Sense, son.
And yet, Thomas didn’t have that Sense. But if it was so Common, he was determined to get it. If he wrote down each Rule as he tripped over it, and wrote it in a way that made sense to him, he would learn them. He would remember that Furnaces Don’t Talk and the China Is Only for Guests Even Though It’s Prettier Than Our Other Plates and We Never Have Guests.
These are some of the things Thomas wrote:
The Honorable (I Guess) Laws of the Nation of Learmont Arms Apartments (Apt. #7)
If you break something that means it has to be Thrown Out, even if you still like the pieces.
Knives and scissors are sharp, but different than swords, and you can only use them to fight cucumbers and onions and packages from the postman, not Ancient Enemies from Beyond Time.
There are no such things as Ancient Enemies from Beyond Time.
Hot hurts and cold hurts but hot also feels nice and cold also feels nice. Further investigation a must.
If you smile, people smile back and usually start liking you. If you scowl, they scowl back and start unliking you. This is true even though smiling means showing your sharp teeth and even though you can smile at the same time as being angry or sad, so I don’t see why people should want you to do it so much, but they do.
Smiling is very complicated. Scowling is better but you are not allowed to do it except in private.
Mothers and Fathers have certain Words of Power that cannot be denied. So far, I have collected: Go to Bed! Go Play Outside! You Must Have Your Bath! Eat Your Vegetables! There may be others.
I am not a troll.
I am also not a wombat.
