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“Why on earth did you pick Agatha Christie?” asked September, who thought murder mysteries were a little ghastly, though whenever her mother finished one, she snatched it right up.
Ell toed the sand bashfully. “Well … it sounded very exciting. And it had a lot of exclamation points in it, which is one of the signs of an excellent book. And I didn’t like how Mr. Gatsby talked to people, when I was flipping through it. But mostly, mostly everything was blue on the front. And I like blue.”
The Wyverary looked fondly at Saturday, who smiled uncertainly back.
“Don’t even try to get it off him. You’d think it was his egg.” The scrap-yarn wombat munched resentfully on a fresh coconut.
Ell raced on. “But don’t you see? We know how to solve a mystery now. We know the method. We know the rules. We’ve taken the case, Buss and me, and we mean to solve it. We’ll find the Heart of Fairyland before you can say denouement! It’s all in here.” He tapped the cover of The Mystery of the Blue Train with one claw—but gently, so as not to damage the dust jacket. “I’ve got everything we need: the pince-nez, the mustache, the patent leather shoes—well, I don’t know what patent leather is, but my claws are black and shiny and at the ends of my feet so I think that’s good enough, and I managed to make up for it with the turnip pocket watch.” He displayed the purple turnip hanging from his belt, which he’d sliced so that it could open on a hinge and stuck a piece of coconut shell into the meat of the turnip as a sundial. “That part seemed odd to me, but I was very careful to do just as Monsieur Poirot does. When it comes to magical talismans, you can never tell which bit does the heavy lifting. You can never leave anything out.”
September had never had a watch of her own, so she couldn’t tell her friend that people used to call certain kinds of pocket watches turnips on account of their shapes, and because turnip is more fun to say than watch. But let’s keep that to ourselves, shall we? Ell did his best—and I couldn’t bear to break it to him. Could you?
“We take turns with the talismans,” Blunderbuss said pointedly. “One of us might catch something the other missed.”
September shook her head in disbelief. “All right, I give in. What have you deduced, Mr. P? Where is the Heart of Fairyland?”
Blunderbuss and A-Through-L looked eagerly at each other.
“If we examine the evidence,” Ell began.
“And retrace our steps,” continued the wombat.
“The Marquess has it,” they said together, and with finality.
“What?” September cried. “She can’t! It’s too soon! I didn’t even get a chance! Do you know where she is? Can we get it back from her?”
Saturday blinked slowly in the sun. He hadn’t said a word for a long while. The Marid shook his head from side to side like a dazed bull. He sighed, sat down on the black sand, and put his hands in his lap. And then he said an awful thing:
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Who is the Marquess?”
September’s eyes widened and a whole rush of words scrambled over themselves to get out of her first, but she didn’t get a chance to say any single one of them. The black sand beneath them tilted sickeningly. The coconut trees began to swing wildly back and forth. Then the thirsthorn hedges burst into showers of fresh water. Then the floatberry brambles snapped and rolled down the beachhead. Ell and Blunderbuss began to run, and then lift off into the air. Whatever was coming, they did not want it to catch them!
A great dark shape broke the sands like a whale’s back breaking the waves. September could not think of anything to compare it to. As big as the Briary. As big as the Jarlhopp’s mines below the world. As big as a newborn moon. Chunks of hard, sharp red crystal covered the shape, a red so deep it looked black until the sun hit it and sent a dizzying dance of maroon prisms bouncing through the air. But beneath the red-black diamond nuggets, soft, sleek fur stuck out like grass breaking through cobblestones to grow in the sun. The shape shuddered and disappeared beneath the sand.
When it rose again, the Greatvole of Black Salt Cavern seized them all in its impossible mouth and dove deep down into the earth.
CHAPTER XIV
A DETOUR THROUGH VOLEWORLD
In Which September Rides a Greatvole under the World, Saturday Cuts His Hair, and Blunderbuss Loses Several Toes
You and I have traveled together often, to places both odd and outlandish—and sometimes spectacular. We are no strangers to the underground! We have run headlong down to Fairyland-Below and learned to like it there! We danced in the capital and had tea with a Minotaur. We have no fear of the dark or the deep! I’d wager you didn’t even gasp when the Greatvole snatched up September and her friends and dove beneath the sand! Instead, you clapped your hands and said: Oh, I am glad! Fairyland-Below is a very exciting place and I shall be happy to see it again!
But voles, even Greatvoles, do not live in Fairyland-Below.
Let us think of Fairyland as a staggeringly magnificent cake, one with three layers and far too many frosting flowers and glacé strawberries and fondant ripples and flaming plums all over it. Let us take a great swaggering knife between us—it will take both our hands—and slice it open to see what we can see inside. For that is all a story is, my dears: a knife that cuts the world into pieces small enough to eat.
All that icing and candied madness on top is the land we’ve wandered through so far, Pandemonium and the Autumn Provinces and Meridian and even the Whelk of the Moon. Below that we should find a scrumptious dark slab of cakey chocolate earth where fol
k can plant their carrot seeds and pear trees. If we cut deeper, we should find another slab, thick and moist and full of shadowy sugar and delicious adventures, and that is Fairyland-Below. Further and farther than that, we should at last come to the last morsels of cake: the rock and magma and the very sort of hot, spinning core you’ve seen in your geography classes. Of course, in Fairyland, the core is not only a superheated ball of magnetized metals, but also the Nickelodeon, a red-hot city of lavalings living the lavish life.
Perhaps you have now realized that voles and other creatures of the Digging Class would not dive all the way down to the sparkling cities of Fairyland-Below. They chew through the earthy cake where seeds sprout and worms and beetles and pill bugs and ants and grubs and anything else that loves to crawl crawls their best. The Greatvole of Black Salt Cavern swam through the earth like a cuttlefish through the water. Her paws paddled gracefully through the loam and the clay. Her tail swept back and forth with the powerful rhythm of a shark. The Greatvole moved so fast you and I would hardly glimpse her passing, the way subway trains clip by in the dark so quick that all you catch is a long stripe of light. And so September opened her mouth to scream—and only got a single horrid gulp of dirt before the dark, wet mud vanished and they could all see and breathe quite easily again.
For you cannot bake a three-layer cake with nothing at all to stick them together! Between those wonderful layers of Fairyland’s geographical trifle lie ribbons of berries and syrup and still more frosting: the secret caves and grottoes of Voleworld.
Voleworld is a paradise for all who love to dig—wide enough and high enough for any bulldozing beast. Friendly work lamps twisted into chandeliers light the shadows into a warm, homey glow. Mudpaintings of great diggers dot the walls: Grundler the Mad Mole, Electro-Hare the Holy Holer, Whistlepig the Grandhog, Spadeheart the Bombastic Bilby Rat. Here is where the diggers come to rest. You’ll find a thousand taverns made of shovels and picks battened together, bathhouses hammered out of gold pans and roofed in dud dynamite sticks, and drill-bit dance halls playing all the underground hits on a dirt bottle organ. And, most importantly, Voleworld lies beneath the whole of Fairyland, connecting each acre with each county. Get down into Voleworld and you can get anywhere else you like quicker than an earthworm’s wriggle. Which is why the devoted diggers tell no one about their home, and make certain that no exit or entrance is labeled sensibly.
September, Saturday, Ell, and Blunderbuss opened their eyes to see everything I have just told you streaming past on either side. The portrait of Electro-Hare, the Shovel and Headlamp Inn, the Ruby Rake Night Club, the tunnels leading every which where which wheres can wind. All four of them had the same urgent idea at once: Somebody else’s mouth was no place to be. The Greatvole had September by the back of her emerald smoking jacket, Saturday by his topknot, Ell by his turnip pocket watch, and Blunderbuss by her little fuzzy woolen tail and one hind leg. The emerald-colored smoking jacket split hurriedly down the back so as not to be the cause of its owner’s death. Coats have a strict honor code, and any one failing to protect its owner from rain, snow, hail, or ravening rodents shall be made into overalls at once.
