What I Wore to Save the World (12 page)

Four rings. Five—

“Hello! You've reached the Rawlinson household. We're not at home right now, so please leave a brief, clear-ly ar-tic-u-lat-ed message. If you mum-ble, we may not know who you are!”

This was the way my mom talked on the phone. So em-bar-ras-sing.

“If you're calling for Morgan, please note that she is currently on an
extremely
prestigious, invitation-only campus tour of Ox-ford U-ni-ver-si-ty, in En-gland. She will call you back when she returns from a-broad. Now wait for the beep!”

I faced away from Mr. McAlister to give myself some privacy, but he was sitting three feet away from me so it was kind of a futile gesture. “
Mom!
Oh my God, I can't believe you put that on the answering machine, that is totally humiliating. Look, I just wanted to call and tell you that I'm here at
Ox-ford
”—I couldn't help mocking her e-lo-cu-tion—“and everything's fine. Oxford is really . . . well, I would say it has a lot of authenticity.”

I heard a snicker from Mr. McAlister, which I ignored.

“It seems like a great school and everything. I'm really busy so I'll call again in a day or so, and please,
don't
call me back at this number because I'll get in huge trouble for using the admissions office phone, we're not supposed to, bye.”

Breathless, I hung up and tossed the phone back to Mr. McAlister like it was a very hot hammered-copper potato.

“So, your parents think you're at Oxford.” He sounded rather smug.

“It's a long story,” I grumbled. “Hey—did you already know that? Is that why you offered to lend me the phone?”

“Let me put it this way,” he said, sounding totally full of himself. “Special Admissions Applicants are not chosen at random. As an Oxford alumni I sit on several important committees. Special Admissions is one of them. The truth is, I know a great deal about you, Miss Rawlinson.”

“You do?” I felt my face turning red. “Enough to maybe tell me what I'm doing here? Because I really would like to know.”

“It's difficult, I completely sympathize,” he said kindly. “Not being able to tell your loved ones the whole truth. I often find myself in the same predicament; think of my little fib earlier about Colin's grandfather not feeling well. But I thought it best if we spoke privately.”

He adjusted his nightcap then sat calmly, his hands folded in his lap. “But from now on I
will
tell you the truth, as plainly as I can. I fear it would be dangerous not to.”

This was getting awfully confusing. “I wish I knew what you're talking about, Mr. McAlister,” I said firmly. “But I don't. Maybe you should start at the beginning.”

He leaned back in his chair and smiled more broadly, revealing his yellowed teeth. “The beginning? Ah, dear Morganne! If you only knew how long ago that was!”

eleven

“let me ask you a question,” mr. mcalister said. “How old do you think I am?”

I wanted to grab him by the nightshirt and shake him to make him spill all this mysterious “truth” he'd just promised, but now that I knew he was actually on the Oxford admissions committee I figured I'd better play along.

I remembered that Colin's grandfather was eighty-two. Mr. McAlister seemed slightly younger, but really, who could tell with old people?

“I dunno.” I shrugged. “Seventy-sixish, more or less?”

He laughed, a smug, “gotcha” kind of laugh. “Seventy-six years ago, when you imagine me as a newborn, I was a grown man at the height of my profession. In fact, I was overseeing one of the first major renovations to Castell Cyfareddol: the addition of the reflecting pool.”

“Shut
up
!” I exclaimed. “So you're not the grandson of Devyn McAlister at all. You
are
Devyn McAlister!”

He nodded modestly. “Indeed I am. That little flourish of putting ‘the third' at the end of my name is yet another example of a necessary, though I hope harmless, deception—in order to avoid confusion, suspicion, ceaseless medical examinations . . . You can understand that, can't you?”

“I definitely can.” I did the math in my head. “No offense, Mr. McAlister, but shouldn't you be, like, dead by now?”

He sighed. “No doubt I would be, if my career as an architect had taken a more traditional route. Bank buildings, stately homes, the occasional monument to fallen war heroes—a nice, normal career followed by a nice, normal demise.” He sounded almost nostalgic for the missed opportunity to croak. “But instead, I devoted myself completely to this.”

He waved a hand loosely around, in a way that encompassed far more than the Tip of the Iceberg cottage. “Castell Cyfareddol was—and is—my life's work. But there came a fateful moment when the place took on what one might literally call a life of its own.” He leaned forward, an excited gleam in his eye. “Have you noticed how reality seems so
fluid
around here?”

I frowned. “You mean, like the waterfall?”

“That?” He gestured dismissively. “Pure stagecraft. A fancy bit of plumbing, really. No, I mean how reality is heightened—almost to the point of feeling like make-believe.”

I thought of the unicorns. “And how things that ought to be make-believe start to seem—or be—real?” I asked hesitantly.

“Precisely. Now, make no mistake: Even as I originally designed it, Castell Cyfareddol was unprecedented! A vision of all the architectural styles of the world, living together in peace and harmony, nestled in a veritable paradise of nature's glory, with a color palette so varied, so uninhibited—”

“It looks like a pack of Starbursts,” I offered.

“Well put! I love Starbursts,” he agreed. “But the critics scorned my creation. They called it ‘McAlister's folly,' the vanity project of an overreaching architect who simply didn't know when to stop.”

“I bet they wouldn't like Disneyland, either,” I said, trying to be nice.

Mr. McAlister shrugged. “None of that bothered me. My vision was beautiful and strange, and the public appreciated it even when my colleagues failed to understand. But something happened when I added the reflecting pool. Something profound.”

I thought of the disorienting way the hotel was reflected in the pool. “It's hard to know which one is which,” I murmured.

“Yes. The world of reality, the world of reflections—the pool makes them interchangeable. To my great surprise, the pool revealed itself to be a kind of doorway.”

“To where?”

He smiled indulgently. “Do you have to ask, Morganne? The dimension of magic and dreams has many names, but I believe you know it best as the faery realm.”

I shivered, suddenly cold. How did he know so much about what I knew? But he wasn't finished.

“When I realized what I had inadvertently done by adding the pool, I was frightened, but fascinated. I did countless hours of research trying to understand the properties of these types of places—places where the two worlds intersect.”

Like me,
I thought.
He's talking about me.

“There are many other doorways, of course. Some are famous, like Stonehenge or the Bermuda Triangle. Some are known only to the local residents who still believe in such things: faery mounds, enchanted lagoons and so forth. Bodies of water and mirrors both tend to loosen the veil between the two worlds. So does any environment where the imagination has been allowed to run particularly free.”

“Lucky Lou's!” I blurted, suddenly understanding.

He looked puzzled. “Lucky whose?”

“Lucky Lou's. It's a supermarket. A very imaginative supermarket,” I explained, thinking of all the animatronic creatures in the store. “I had a kind of magical experience in there once.”

“Interesting. And of course, because they live so much in the imagination, young children are often ‘doorways' too, though generally in a minor, playful way.”

Tammy in the bathtub,
I thought.

He furrowed his silvery eyebrows in concentration. “Somehow, the pool, which is, of course, filled with water and designed to act as a mirror to the hotel, combined with the highly imaginative ambience of Castell Cyfareddol, and perhaps even the fact that we have so many children as guests—it's quite a popular family vacation destination, you know—created an ‘open border' between our world and theirs. Or theirs and ours, depending on how you look at it.”

I had so many questions I didn't know where to start. “But, Mr. McAlister—I mean, you were a normal human person, originally, right? So what happened? I mean, obviously you've aged, so it's not like you've become—”

“Immortal? Hardly!” He laughed. “Most portals to the faery realm are like doors: they stay shut except when someone or something is passing through. The reflecting pool is more like a window that's been left half-open. Because of it, the whole of Castell Cyfareddol is half-magic, all the time. If I were living in faery time, I'd be immortal. In normal human time, I'd be dead. But I've lived my whole adult life in this half-magic place—”

“So you're living twice as long as you should?”

“Exactly. You might have heard that celebrities like to vacation at Castell Cyfareddol? That's because they feel oddly refreshed by their visits here.”

“Because as long as they're here, they're aging at half the rate they ought to be—is that it?”

He nodded. “The outward evidence is too subtle for the human eye to see, but the experience of aging at half-time creates an indefinable sense of well-being. The more sensitive ones have figured it out. Madonna comes twice a year,” he confided.

“Whoa,” I said. “And I thought she just used a lot of Botox.”

This was a lot of mind-blowing information to take in. The idea of aging at half-time was kind of awesome to think about, but many creepy possibilities suddenly came to mind. For instance, what if I stayed here and Colin left? Twenty years from now I'd look twenty-seven, and he'd be forty, which (even though I'd still love him madly) would be slightly
ewww.
And how long would it take for Tammy and I to look the same age?

“The ‘fountain of youth' aspect of Castell Cyfareddol is a strictly guarded secret, and it needs to stay that way.” Mr. McAlister sounded stern. “Imagine the insanity—the tabloids—the hordes of desperate, youth-crazed people sneaking onto the grounds day and night!”

“Is that what the message was all about?” I said it without thinking.

“The one asking you to come here and save the world?” He smiled sadly. “No, my dear. I wish it were that simple. Controlling the publicity ‘spin' of Castell Cyfareddol is a relatively simple matter. I have it well in hand.”

My hands flew to cover my big, ginormous blabber mouth. “Wait. So you already know about the message Colin received?”

“I know what the message said. I don't know where it came from, or what it means.” He saw the confusion on my face. “Morgan, I may be ridiculously old, exceedingly well-educated and occasionally deceitful, but I'm only human. I have no power to read minds. Or do magic,” he added.

“Then how do you—”

“I saw the picture on his cell phone. Quite by accident, I assure you! I misplaced my oPhone while at the Seahorse Cottage to play cards with William and—oh dear, this will make me sound rather senile, I'm afraid—I wanted to call my own number so I could find the phone by its ring.”

“It's not senile. I do that all the time,” I confessed.

“Colin handed me his phone, I pressed the wrong button and, voila! There was the picture. Because of my long study of these types of phenomena, I recognized it at once as a message from the faery realm. And I knew who
you
were. I studied you at school, you know!”

My face started to feel hot.

“The half-goddess Morganne,” he went on, clearly enjoying himself. “Heroine of myth and legend. When the faery realm is in danger, Morganne always comes back to save the day.”

“There are other people named Morgan, you know,” I protested lamely. “Morgan Fairchild. Morgan Freeman.”

“Perhaps. But the way Colin spoke about you, I knew you must be no ordinary girl. And you fit every description I've ever read—and I've read them all.”

He saw the puzzled look on my face. “My dear, you are speaking to an Oxford graduate! During my quest to become expert in the lore of faeries I have had access to the finest library of ancient and esoteric texts ever assembled on either side of the veil. Haven't you heard of the Bod?”

Now he was losing me. “You mean, J.Lo?”

“Heavens, no! ‘The Bod' is what scholars call the Bodleian Library, at Oxford. Dear old Bod! It was always one of my favorite haunts on campus. The treasures it contains! Shakespeare's first folio. The Magna Carta. The Gutenberg Bible. And other, rarer books as well.” He lowered his voice, though there was no one to hear us. “Books that are beyond ancient. Books that come from . . . the other side.”

“So you're saying there are actual books from the faery realm in the library at Oxford?”
Try to beat that, UConn,
I thought.

He nodded. “It's called the Special Collection. Only a handful of students and faculty have ever been given access. You might be surprised to learn which of your favorite authors were ‘inspired' by actual faery texts. Of course, there are many works attributed to humans—Shakespeare, for example—that experts believe actually did originate in the other realm. It's a fascinating topic of study.”

All this information was making my head spin, so much so that I was starting to feel queasy. Or maybe I was getting seasick. But I couldn't be—I mean, we were in a cottage on land, not an actual ship at sea, right?