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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.
“Well, this is new!” exclaimed Aunt Margaret. And it was, for a young girl called Tamburlaine had painted it alive only a little while ago. “This whole forest used to be the very edge of the Tattersall Tundra. I always come out here. How alarming for my poor puppies! They’re used to eating nothing but mice and moss. I’ll bet they’ve gotten fat.” She put two fingers in her mouth and whistled.
The small and amiable dog felt personally insulted by this remark, and yelped indignantly. Now, it is far past time for me to tell you the dog’s name, so I shall do it now and the poor beastie will not have to spend any more pages feeling desperately unimportant. Fenris is a very ferocious name for a pug with a curly tail. But September had given it to him out of her book of mythology when he was a pup and he was very proud of it. There—we’ll have no more sad eyes from you, Fenris!
“Oh, Fenny,” said Susan Jane, and picked him up, which he liked much better than sitting down in the mud where he could get stepped on. Owen scratched the pug behind his ears. Both September’s parents tried not to look too agog at the Painted Forest. They had been to New York City. Owen had seen London and Paris. They were not country rubes. They could handle a tree full of thin Italian daggers. They could handle two moons in the sky. And of course, every girl wants to look just as cosmopolitan as her older sister, even when she is thirty-nine years old and her older sister is forty-three. Susan pocketed a few of the daggers off the tree, for she was a practical woman who liked, better than almost anything, to be prepared.
They could even handle Margaret’s puppies—almost.
A team of six hippopotami pulling a grand sled behind them crashed through the brightly colored woods. Yet not a one of them could be called a proper hippo—one was made all of lavender leather with gold stitching, one all of twisted glass and wire, one of hundreds of brass buttons with flowers and anchors stamped on them, one of tarnished silver with a hinge along her back like a scruff of fur, one of deep red cake with white icing, and one that was all over pictures of bones and muscles and diagrams of knee and elbow joints. They bounded toward Margaret and tackled her in a heap, licking her face and making happy, contented hippopotamus noises. The sleigh managed to keep itself out of the mud, but only barely.
“Maggie,” September’s father cried out. “Are they hurting you?”
September’s mother laughed. “Mags always made friends with monsters. Once she found a scorpion hiding in the mailbox and named it Oscar.”
Margaret snuggled all the hippos and kissed their noses. “I do miss Oscar sometimes,” she said, laughing. “But these aren’t monsters. I made them.” Margaret could not help feeling proud that her family could see at last that she was not the barmy old scatterbrain they took her for—though Susan had never really thought that at all. “An old thaumaturge named Thimbleneed taught me how. Thaumaturges change things into other things, by and large. But you can’t make something out of nothing. There aren’t so many laws here, but that’s one. And all I had were the things in my school satchel when the Golden Wind brought me over on his jaguar. I named them all after the most mysterious and forbidden things I knew at the time—the bottles in Papa’s liquor cabinet.” She giggled as though, somehow, she still thought it was a bit naughty. She patted the hippopotamus made of lavender leather. “Vermouth here I made out of my old diary. She’s got a lock on one side, see? I cut all the brass buttons off the wool coat Grandmother sewed for me to make Beefeater, who is such a worrywart! I always come back, love, and I always will. Blackstrap is my glasses—Mama was so angry when she thought I’d lost them! But I could hardly say I’d turned them into a hippo. Old Kentucky is quite the fiercest one of the lot—I conjured her up out of a slice of your seventh birthday cake wrapped up in wax paper. I’d saved it to eat after school. Do you remember my old silver locket? I kept a little painting I’d done of you and me and Mama inside. Well, that’s Schnapps here, with the hinge on her back. And I suppose it’s time to admit I stole Papa’s anatomy book. I was fascinated by it. All the pictures! They looked like black magic to me. And in the end I turned it into my darling Pálinka.”
The hippos seemed enormously pleased to hear their names and even more pleased to see their Margaret. They rumb
led and cooed and whined at her, and she rumbled and cooed and whined back, for Margaret was entirely fluent in hippopotamus. They sniffed Susan Jane’s and Owen’s hands and Fenris barked a great deal and in a moment or two they were all packed into her sleigh and ready to be off.
My daughter has been here, Susan Jane thought. My daughter has been here and survived because she is brave and smart. I shall be, too.
“Where are we going?” asked September’s father.
Margaret smiled. “There’s a Derby on. We’re going to Mummery.” She snapped her fingers. “Abracadabra!”
Vermouth, Beefeater, Blackstrap, Old Kentucky, Schnapps, and Pálinka sprang up and dashed out of the forest faster than clouds across the sky.
CHAPTER X
JOURNEY TO MUMKEEP REEF
In Which Saturday Goes Home, Leaves a Wombat and a Wyverary Alone, Though on a Very Nice Beach, While September Meets Both a Bathysphere Named Fizzwilliam and an Alarming Number of Octopuses
Blunderbuss dug in her woolly heels.
“Nope. No, thank you! Not an inch farther till we eat! I know it’s a race but we won’t go far if we start skipping meals. Top athletes eat more than anybody, that’s the truth. If you don’t have dinner, you don’t have anything!”
