The Boy Who Lost Fairyland (12 page)

CHAPTER VII

T
HE
M
ONSTER
ON
T
OP
OF
THE
B
ED

In Which Thomas Finds Himself Alone with a Girl, Sees Her Without Her Clothes on, Obeys Vampire Law, Comes Face-to-Face with a Gramophone, and Says a Very Important Word

Tamburlaine's house stood dark and quiet. Thomas raised his hand to knock. He hesitated. It looked as though no one was home. He clutched her note in his hand like a gentleman's calling card, though that seemed silly now that he was here. It's not like she would demand proof before she let him in. She'd written:
Meet me at my house After School. 5 Ginger Road
. She wanted him to come. She wasn't angry, or she wouldn't have used capitals:
After School
. They always did that, all of them, when they wrote notes in class, to show that they were part of the secret elite who knew the truth about the world. All Countries are proper nouns; they get to wear the big letters like medals on their chests.

Tamburlaine asked him to come. He was supposed to be here. But the house was tall and thin and it seemed to be holding its breath, one birch tree in a long row of other birch trees just like it, only this one had a squirrel in it he desperately needed to talk to.

Thomas Rood held his breath, too. Something Awfully Big was about to happen. He felt it like an old fisherman feels tomorrow's storm in his knee. He knocked.

The door creaked open and Tamburlaine was there. Her big eyes, her long hair, her nervous way of standing—the Fleeing Stance. He could hear music far within the house. He knew the record; his parents had it, too. It had a lady in a lime-green dress and lime-green diamonds on the cover, singing to a bluebird she held in her hand. That lime-green lady sure loved her old ragtime-y songs. Just then, in the snuggling depths of warm, brown-gold house-shadows, she was singing about apple blossoms.

“Hi,” Thomas said.

“Hi,” she answered.

She reached out her hand and drew him inside, quick as a hiccup. Was she afraid someone might see him there? Would her parents be mad if they caught her alone with a boy?

The shadows of the house closed on them. Tamburlaine had all the lights shut off, but the late-afternoon sun danced with the dust below the windows. It smelled nice in her house. Like paper and new milk and trees growing close together. As his irises opened up to let all that dusky softness in, Thomas saw that Tamburlaine's house was a house of books.

It was not the house of someone who
liked books
. It did not have a
well-stocked library
. It was not even
stuffed with books
. Thomas could not see any part of the house that was not mostly
book
. Books rose from the floor to the ceiling in unruly, tottering towers. Books held up tables and chairs—and sat in the chairs, at the tables, as though quite ready for supper to be served, so long as supper was more books. They sprawled over the dining table like a feast of many colors. Books climbed the stairs, ran up and down the hallways, curled up before the fireplace, were wedged into the cabinets beside cups and saucers, held open doors and locked them shut. They left no room on the sofa to sit, nor in the kitchen to stand, nor on the floor to lie down. Books had already taken every territory and occupied it. Where the books were content to rest on shelves, like other, less ambitious of their cousins, they had been squashed in so tight their spines bulged, and then bowed under the weight of the books stacked up on top of their sagging rows. Brick and wood only peeked through in a few places, and where they did they looked positively embarrassed, apologetic.
It's only that someone is borrowing
The Picture of Dorian Gray
at the moment, you see.
The Thousand and One Nights
has had an accident involving grape juice and has gone on a little trip to the binder's; please don't think anyone left this space empty on purpose, goodness no!

“Is your mom home?” Thomas asked, dumbfounded. His voice sounded too loud in his own ears. He had books, of course, and so did his parents. But their books … their books
behaved
. They didn't grow and sprawl and soar. They didn't gobble up a house like they were hungry.

“She's at a Ladies Auxiliary meeting,” Tamburlaine murmured. “We have a couple of hours. Maybe you can stay for dinner.”

For some reason, this struck her as unreasonably funny, and Tamburlaine laughed shakily, her laugh bursting free of her like bubbles from a soda bottle. She laughed too long, holding her stomach. Thomas waited. He thought maybe she was laughing so that she could put off whatever came next just a little longer. But laughs, even the best and most dearly needed of laughs, have a natural life span, and hers finally died on the battlefield of her nerves. She had nothing else to stand between her and having to explain what had happened on the baseball field that day. So she just sighed, walked straight up to her trouble, and asked it in for cake.

“When you were little,” Tamburlaine said carefully, “were you ever afraid of the monster under the bed?”

“Sure,” Thomas said. “Everyone is. It's Normal.”

Tamburlaine narrowed her eyes. “Yes, thank you. But … were you
really
afraid? Did you really think it could get you and eat you up in the dark?”

Thomas felt sweat bead up behind his ears. There was no breeze in the house of books. Not enough air. That lime-green lady on the gramophone wouldn't shut up about her apple blossoms, either. He remembered Gwendolyn lifting her pretty hand to turn out the light before bed. Begging her not to.
Please, Mom! Leave the light!

“No,” he whispered. “Not really.”

“Why not?”

Thomas remembered his mother laughing in a warm, thick, encouraging way, in the back of her throat. She saved that laugh for the rare occasion when he said something a Normal child might say.
Oh, darling, are you afraid of the dark? Shall I check for monsters under the bed? Will that make you feel better?
And the look on her face when he answered, like he'd just unzipped his skin in front of her. He couldn't bear the thought of Tamburlaine's face twisting into that same expression.

“Thomas, why weren't you afraid? Did you not believe in monsters?”

“No, I believed in monsters.”

Tamburlaine had wooden bones. He'd
seen
it. He'd seen her blood oozing sticky sap.

“Then why not? Like you said, everyone's afraid of them. It's normal.”

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 from 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.