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“You only asked them to talk. You didn’t give them mouths. They’re like Scratch; they talk with the parts they have. Though Gertrude seems to know Morse code.”
The green glass lamp flashed gleefully: long, short, long, long.
Under her hands a chartreuse tree was growing. Its leaves unfurled in ultramarine, boiling hot colors dripping with light.
Thomas looked up at the chandelier in the parlor.
“Will-o’-the-wisp, if you come out today I shall love you until I am dead.”
Thomas wrote to the chandelier. He called her Citrine as he always had. I shall not tell you what he wrote, for some things that pass between a boy and a lighting fixture are secret and strange. He got up onto a ladder and coiled the note around one of the silver flourishes hung with crystal. He waited. His heart felt as though it were bursting and collapsing back and bursting again.
Nothing happened. No will-o’-the-wisp soared up out of the lights and settled on his shoulder. Thomas shook his head. It was the first disappointment of his new world. He tried to reason it out. To invent a rule, for rules give one a little kingship over disappointments. It was not, after all, Thomas’s fault if he had run afoul of a Law of the Universe. They weren’t posted; he hadn’t known.
“I think maybe I can’t make new things,” he called out to Tamburlaine, who was shading a stained-glass pinecone in maroon. “Just wake things up. Have you ever made anything new, something that wasn’t there before?” And in his heart he thought: Is this what a troll does? Is this troll magic?
But Tamburlaine did not answer. She was too full of her new trees.
Dear Arabesque, Who Is a Girl Dancing with Orchids in the Hallway Painting… Thomas began to write. He concentrated so fiercely that he did not see a pair of crystal legs bathed in daffodil-colored light unfold from the ceiling and pirouette down. He did not see the slender, gentle body of teardrop-shaped crystals, nor the hair of silver curling chandelier arms, nor the glowing eyes of round glass bulbs until he turned round to take his new note to the girl in the hallway painting. Thomas stared at Citrine. She stared back. Not a will-o’-the-wisp—alive all the same. She smiled with her glittering glass mouth and swept up Thomas into her arms, spinning him in a crystalline polka round the apartment, grabbing Tamburlaine as they passed the bedroom, clutching her with jeweled fingers, making a clumsy, hopping, lovely three-person step from corner to corner to corner. Scratch leapt along behind them, singing, moving his needle double-quick, back and forth across the record:
How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm,
After they’ve seen Paree?
But then, in the second hour, Thomas was compelled to teach the citizens of his new world a game, for Nicholas and Gwendolyn would not stay away forever. The wild objects of Apartment #7 gathered close round: the green glass lamp and the vase of irises leaned in, the woodstove strained to hear from the kitchen, the draperies swirled open and shut, the grandfather clock put his hands into his best attentive position. The girl in the painting put down her orchids and stood on tiptoe. The chandelier sat cross-legged on the parlor rug. Blunderbuss snoozed, uninterested, her yarn nose twitching.
“Everybody, please, listen, this is very important!” Thomas cried. “We must learn a game, all together. It’s a very easy game. It’s called Red Light, Green Light.”
The green lamp flashed delightedly.
“Yes, I expect you’ll be very good at it, Gertrude! Now, when I say Green Light, we can all do as we like and roll about and pounce and howl. But when I say Red Light, you must freeze, back in your old places, and hold your breath, and not move even a little. Red Light means someone is coming who wouldn’t understand why you are all suddenly interested in pouncing, and might take us all to the dump if they found out. Let’s try? Red Light!”
The house eagerly leapt to order. They practiced all afternoon, except Blunderbuss, who slept the hours away below Tamburlaine’s chartreuse pine, snoring up into the blue needles, each one a tiny rapier glinting under the stars of a faraway place.
In the third hour, Blunderbuss begged Thomas to take her to school.
“In the Land of Wom, we learn by fighting! If you spy a wombat who looks like he might know something you don’t, you sneak along behind him while he’s looking for grasses to eat and when he thinks he is very safe, you LEAP out and POUNCE on him! You bite his NECK and dig your claws into his RUMP! You hold him down till the things he knows start trying to wiggle out so that at least they can escape your wrath alive. Out of his furry wombat muzzle might shoot snowballs with the formula to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius written in the ice! Papayas with seeds who bear the faces of all the Prime Ministers of Wom, in chronological order! Painted eggs you can crack open and suck out the Code of Hammurabi! Did you know Hammurabi was part wombat? Well, children are ignorant these days. I want to go to this Kingdom of School and fight humans for their know-how! Who knows what I can pummel out of them?”
“Nothing,” Thomas begged her. “That’s not how it works here. You can’t pummel them at all. If I take you tomorrow, if I take you, you must stay completely silent. The Reddest of Red Lights! You must stay in my satchel and not come out until it is all over. Promise, Blunderbuss. Or you stay home with Gertrude and her flashing will give you a nasty headache.”
Blunderbuss reared up on her squat black-and-white hind legs. She held up one turquoise paw. “I solemnly swear on the soul of Wattle, the great wombat empress who stood up to the kangaroos and told them what’s what. I will stay in your satchel and not make so much as a snort.”
In the fourth hour, Tamburlaine began a new tree to the left of the stained-glass pine, a violently violet willow whose drooping branches sprouted all over with pocket watches. And Thomas got very close to Blunderbuss’s woolen ear and said: “You called me a troll.”
“What I see I say, and what I says I seen, I sawed,” nodded the scrap-yarn wombat.
“But I don’t look like a troll. I’ve looked at heaps of pictures of trolls, and they’re…they’re so-so much prettier than me.”
“A wombat also sees with her nose. And her teeth. You reek like a troll and you taste like a troll. Don’t worry, it’s a nice reek. Mossy and muddy and a little like a diamond. In the Land of Wom, we collect reeks like stamps. When I was a bub I had a book with twelve kinds of cockatrice reek in it. Would have knocked you down dead just to turn the page.”
Thomas tried to smell himself, but he only smelled like Thomas to his own nose. Is it true? Would a wombat lie to him? What if she was right?
In the fifth hour, Tamburlaine’s third tree sprang up, an applejack tree whose fruit were glassy green flasks sloshing with powerful cider. She worked so fast it made her pant and sweat. The way she stared at the forest on his wall made Thomas shiver. A gaze like that could set a poor unsuspecting wall on fire. He sat back while the apartment thundered around him, creatures running up every which ceiling, laughing and chattering in their many peculiar tongues. The girl in the painting waved at him; he waved back. Though he did not know it, A
partment #7 now looked very like a house in Fairyland. It was nearly an outpost of Fairyland itself, so thickly did it swarm with magic.
In the sixth hour, Thomas Rood cast about for some new thing to enchant. The icebox was too big, really. An icebox come alive was too close to a Yeti to keep in an apartment. The jewelry on his beloved coat seemed like a good prospect, but then he should not have the coat any longer, once the necklaces on its shoulders had minds of their own.
In the depths of his satchel, having waited patiently for its moment, Thomas’s baseball stirred.
