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He could tell her the truth. She wanted him to tell her. That he’d never been afraid. That he only wanted his mother to leave the light on so he could read.
Monsters don’t live under the bed, Mom. Don’t be silly. It’s dirty down there.
He took a deep breath.
My clever son. Where do they live, then?
Thomas lifted his eyes to Tamburlaine’s, searching. What did she want? He’d seen her wounded—did she want to see what he looked like on the inside? It seemed suddenly that standing in this hallway talking about what lived under the bed was quite the strangest thing to happen to him today. A girl with sap for blood didn’t compete. He would tell her. He would.
“I wasn’t afraid of monsters under the bed because I was the monster on top of the bed,” Thomas confessed. His face burned in the half-light of the house.
Tamburlaine breathed relief. Her soapbox smile raced across her face. She nodded twice. “Okay. Okay. Do you want to see my room?”
Now, in the Kingdom of School, to be asked into another child’s room is like being asked inside their heart. Thomas knew that. It was Inspector Balloon’s Rule #309. Your room is where you keep yourself, or at least all the parts of yourself that live on the outside. It’s a shadowy lair, a thief’s den of favorite objects and pictures and books, toys you’re meant to have outgrown, as if you could ever outgrow a creature made only to love you and be loved by you. Your secret possessions—diaries and notes passed under desks and treasures hoarded from summer trips to the seashore, some few things your parents don’t know you have, a novel you’re too young to read, a pack of gum you swiped from the corner store last Autumn, too exciting to throw away, too shameful to chew. A child’s room is no different from a Wyvern’s nest—it is full of cloth and bone-trophies left over when the meat of music and reading and dreaming has been devoured, and all of it warms the egg of passions and pleasures and secrets waiting to become a Grown-Up Beast.
Thomas had never asked anyone into his room. He had played in Max’s and Franco’s and William’s, though they had too many toy soldiers and not enough of anything else. Would a girl’s room be different? Was it somehow more serious to play in a girl’s room? At least he was pretty confident she would have more books than soldiers.
Tamburlaine led him down a hall so swaddled in books he had to turn sideways to squeeze through. He almost apologized to the books for disturbing them, but caught himself in time. Tamburlaine’s house seemed more a place where books kept their people than where people kept their books.
The neat, dark door at the end of the hall stood shut. Thomas knew without being told that Vampire Law held sway here—he could enter only if invited. She’d said he could see it, she hadn’t asked him in. Suddenly Thomas’s heart beat very fast. He had no reason to feel nervous—this wasn’t a stranger’s room! He had known Tamburlaine since they were tiny children. But he had never been alone with her, not really alone. Grown-Ups talked about not leaving boys and girls Alone Together in quiet, concerned voices. As if something terrible might happen if a boy and a girl were brought too near each other without shields and swords. As if they were baking soda and vinegar and only the presence of other people kept them from becoming a volcano.
They were Alone Together now. Nothing had happened. The book-sodden air in the hall felt thick and hot. Thomas had the alarming thought that the books were breathing on him, blowing their thousands of words onto the back of his neck.
Tamburlaine laughed and shook her head—and the thick hotness broke, like a Summer storm.
“Come on, Thomas. It won’t bite you.”
But it did.
She had a bed and a desk and a lamp and a chest of drawers and all the usual things that make a bedroom a bedroom and not a kitchen. Her bed and her desk didn’t trouble him—it was everything else. Tamburlaine’s room had no books in it. She had made some sort of treaty with the rest of the house. The marauding books left this one place uncolonized. But really, really, Thomas thought, there was no room for books in here. They would only get in the way. Thomas felt thick and hot again—and thirsty and unsteady. He wanted to sit down, but where could he sit?
All over the walls, all over the floor, all over the ceiling and the window frames and the wardrobe door, Tamburlaine had painted a forest.
He knew she’d done it. The forest started on the back of the bedroom door, and the forest on the back of the bedroom door was not very good. It was a little kid’s idea of a forest: Stick-figure trees with big squiggly leaves splashed in splotches of screamingly bright green, a not-quite-round yellow sun, handprint flowers made by dipping little fingers in pink and blue and purple paint. But as the woods wound on around the room and over the floorboards, they grew deeper and wilder and thicker as the painter learned, the colors and shapes smoothing out, becoming more graceful, more deft, until the thicket around Tamburlaine’s bed looked so real you could fall into it.
But it wasn’t any forest Thomas had heard of. It wasn’t Sherwood or the Forest of Arden or the Shawnee National Forest. All Thomas could think was: It looks like Hansel and Gretel’s forest. Or Snow White’s. If they were real. Better than if they were real. Some of the trees had deep sapphire-colored leaves, with glowing fruit hanging from them like pale-blue lanterns. Some were startlingly white from root to leaf-tip, but swarmed with bloodred and blood-purple butterflies. Wide, curious green eyes stared from the backs of their wings, reflected in still pools and streams. Some of the trees burned with a beautiful scarlet fire, and f
rom the flaming trees flaming birds burst up like peacocks startled into fireworks. One pine bristled with delicate, decorated daggers, the kind Italian nobles hid in their coats when they had wicked business to do. Even the trees that looked like trees seemed to be hiding creatures in their green depths. Red tails snaked around dark trunks, bright, wicked eyes sparkled from shadows, spangled hooves danced just out of sight. Delicate wisps of smoke rose from invisible chimneys, drifting and coiling up to the ceiling, which glowed indigo and white, blazing with stars, with constellations Thomas did not recognize—and he was on social terms with Orion and Auriga and Taurus and Cassiopeia and both Ursas. The forest floor, the floor of the bedroom, clotted and boiled over with wildflowers. When Thomas looked down at the peonies and lobelias and snapdragons, he could see impossibly tiny little cities in their petals, all full of towers and alleys the color of Spring blossoms.
It was no place he had ever seen.
But how horribly, achingly, quiveringly familiar it shone! Looking into Tamburlaine’s wood was like looking at a photograph of your parents when they were young. Who are those strange people? Could they ever have been real?
Thomas wanted to look at his friend. He wanted to tell her she was awfully good at painting. He wanted to say it was the most wonderful room in the whole world. But he couldn’t stop staring into the wild, wandering paths of the wood, trying to peer in toward whatever they led to. The lime-green lady’s voice seemed louder, more insistent, closer. She’d finished her apple blossoms now and was on to green and yellow baskets.
“You did this,” he said at last. His voice was raspy and soft, like snagged wool. It was not a question.
“Yes,” Tamburlaine whispered. Anything but a whisper seemed wrong just now.
“By yourself.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Do you mean how do you draw something so it looks like it has depth and shadow, or how do you paint something this big? Daddy bought me the paint and the brushes. On Easter I get baskets of paint tubes. The brightest and darkest colors. I haven’t asked for anything for Christmas and birthdays since I was four other than painting lessons. I still need to learn how to do people. I can’t get it right. Mom says I can have the garden shed when she gets around to clearing it out. Because I’m almost out of room here. There’s just the inside of the wardrobe left. I never paint over mistakes—you can see the parts where I hadn’t got good yet. Okay, once I made a mountain just there, there—” She pointed at the wall around a tall window, which now showed a maple tree with leaves of delicate ice. A hundred little doors opened in the wood of its trunk. Out of some of the doors, elegant gloved hands stretched out, presenting porcelain pots of syrup on their palms. “A mountain with a big church window in it. But it wasn’t right, I knew it wasn’t right. It hurt me how much it wasn’t right. I couldn’t sleep. So I rolled Eggshell White over it and crawled back into bed and didn’t wake up for two whole days. I was more careful after that. To get it right.”
“How do you know what’s right?”
