by Lev Grossman
“Too soon?” She grabbed the front of his shirt and kissed him again. His stubble scraped her. She smelled him; it wasn’t like bacon, but it was still good. “You do this to me and then you tell me it’s too soon?”
He was trying to get up! The little shit! Anger came so easily, still, with all those lovely anger-words too. Rage combined with the pleasure but it couldn’t dispel it.
“Hang on. Alice. This isn’t how it works.”
“Then show me how it works.” She got up too, advancing on him. She felt like an animal—a predator. She wanted to pin him and devour him. “Does my body disgust you as much as it disgusts me? Too bad. You brought me back, you show me it was worth it.”
She was wearing one of his shirts, and it was big enough that she could pull it over her head in one angry swipe and drop it on the floor, leaving her naked except for a pair of underpants. Alice kissed him again, pushed herself against him, felt the electric roughness of his shirt on her breasts. He stumbled back until his head knocked against the door. With her hand she found his crotch and massaged it. Yes, that’s how it went. He used to like this.
He still did. He was getting hard under her hand.
“Isn’t this why you brought me back? So you could fuck me like you used to?”
Even she didn’t believe that, but it was the cruelest, bitterest thing she could think of. She wanted to do violence to him, the kind of violence he’d done to her, but he didn’t waver.
“I didn’t bring you back for me.”
And then he did kiss her. Not hard, but gently and firmly. That was it, you could do it that way too. He wrapped his arms around her, fitting her body against his, her head beneath his chin, and just held her. Memories inundated her, human memories. The night they walked out from Brakebills in the snow, and he’d put his arm around her shoulders. The day in Antarctica when they were foxes and he chased her the way she’d wanted him to do when they were human. The way he looked at her as if there was nothing else in the world for him but her. As if he loved her as much as she hated herself. He was looking at her that way now.
Suddenly she felt desperate to connect with him again. She’d been alone for so long. She needed this. Along with so many other things, she’d forgotten what it was like to need.
She put her hand up under his shirt, felt his smooth skin. Something strange had happened to his shoulder. She rested her head flat against his chest.
“It hurt, Quentin,” she said. “It hurt so much when I died.”
“I know. But this is going to feel good.”
—
Afterward they lay next to each other on the bed. It had worked, for now, her body had gotten what it wanted. Not once but twice, which if she remembered correctly had been rather a rarity in the old days. But then again Quentin had had some practice since then. Poppy, why had she watched him with Poppy? It had seemed so funny at the time, but now it hurt her. She wished she could forget it.
She scooched away from him. She wanted to go away again. She let herself fall into herself, falling and falling, pulling away, into the inner darkness, dreaming of flying. She withdrew inside her body like a timorous crab inside an enormous whelk. She had felt so human before, so her old self, but she was losing it, and she let it go. She had thought for a moment that it was simple, but she was remembering that it wasn’t.
He sat up and started putting his clothes on.
“I have to go,” he said. “To the Neitherlands. To find Ember. Come with me.”
She shook her head. She wanted him gone. It was so much easier this way. He was gathering up her clothes too.
“Alice.” She didn’t react. She would sleep now. “Alice. I want you to know that I mean it in the kindest possible way when I say that you are being the most unbelievable pussy.”
He took her hand again and they vanished, both of them together.
CHAPTER 28
They were going to all go together, and from a tactical perspective Plum thought it would have been a better idea, but Eliot was getting impatient, and then there were the noises. From upstairs. Quentin and Alice. Plum and Eliot exchanged looks and nodded; no words were needed. It was probably a good development for all involved, on balance, but seriously: they were not going to hang around and listen to that.
Eliot made a big show about how interdimensional travel was really no big whoop to him anymore, but Plum was not going to let him ruin it for her. This was radical magic, world-expanding stuff, and even under the present grimmish circumstances she was a complete nerd for that shit. She could hardly wait. He held out his hand, in a foppish kind of a gesture, and she took it, and he put his other hand in his pocket and—oh.
Clear cold water. They were floating in it, floating upward. In spite of herself she laughed with pleasure and as a result almost choked on magic water. They rose up toward light, points of it, glittery and diffuse above them but getting more focused all the time, and then their heads broke the surface.
It wasn’t what she was expecting, not based on what she’d heard. They were inside somewhere, in a vast room lit by two chandeliers, treading water in what looked more like an indoor swimming pool than a fountain.
“What the hell?” Eliot said. He seemed if anything more surprised than she was.
The pool was sunk level with a marble floor. Water trickled into it from the open mouth of an angry stone face at one end; at the other end steps led up and out like a Roman bath, blue water graduating stair by stair up to clear. They stroked over to them in sync.
“This isn’t right,” Eliot said. “This isn’t the Neitherlands, I don’t think. We’ve been hijacked. Button-jacked.”
Magic water streamed out of their clothes as they climbed out, leaving them instantly dry. Awesome. The walls of the room were covered in bookshelves.
“Who puts a fountain in the middle of a library?” Plum said. “It can’t be good for the books.”
“No. It can’t.”
It was a library, maybe the grandest one Plum had ever seen. She would have known it was a library with her eyes shut: the hush of it was enough, like a velvet nest in which she’d been carefully nestled, and the smell, the heavy spicy aroma of slowly, imperceptibly decomposing leather and paper, of hundreds of tons of dry ink. Every square foot of the walls was bookshelves, and every foot of every shelf was full. Creamy spines, leather spines, knobby and ribbed spines, jacketed and bare, gilded and plain, blank spines and spines crammed with text and ornament. Some were as thin as magazines, some were wider than they were tall.
She ran her fingers along them, one after the other, as if they were the long back of some giant, friendly vertebrate that she was petting. In three or four places a book had been taken down and the one next to it was left slightly aslant, leaning its head against its fellow, as if in silent mourning for its absent neighbor.
Even the beams and buttresses had been fitted with shelves—rows and arches and fans of books. In the corners of the room, up near the ceiling, there were little book-sized doors like cat doors. As she watched one of them swung open with a squeak and a book came through, floating in midair, sailed the length of the room, and left through a cat door on the other side.
“I take it back,” Eliot said. “I think this must be one of the libraries of the Neitherlands. I’ve never been inside one.”
“I thought normal people weren’t supposed to be allowed in them.”
“You’re not.”
The voice came from a doorway behind them. It belonged to an odd-looking man: thirtyish, shaved head, his face round and doughy as an unbaked biscuit. He had a goatee that was maybe growing into something that was more than a goatee, which made him look like an angry barista at an indie coffee shop whose dreams of becoming a successful screenwriter were dwindling by the hour. He wore what looked like a monk’s robe, and sandals, but the oddest thing about him was his hands. They were magical constructs of some kind
, golden and translucent, and they gave off their own warm honey-colored light. He held them clasped in front of him.
“Penny,” Eliot said. It wasn’t so much a greeting as a statement of fact.
“The rest of your party should be arriving momentarily.”
Sure enough, up popped Quentin and Alice, her sputtering and blowing and apparently furious, big surprise. She favored Quentin with a disdainful look, then swam breaststroke over to the steps, at which point it became apparent that she was completely naked. What, did they roll over onto the button halfway through?
Best not to think about it. Alice didn’t seem at all self-conscious. Quentin followed and handed her clothes, which she put on clumsily.
“Hi, Penny,” Quentin said. “Good to see you. Did you just kidnap us?”
“That was my question,” Eliot said.
“I diverted you. All the ways of the Neitherlands are now mine to command. You are here as my special guests.”
Plum was getting the impression they all knew each other already.
“Isn’t the water bad for the books?” Plum said.
“We have taken precautions. Shelf space is a precious resource here. Nothing is wasted.”
“That’s great, Penny,” Quentin said, “but we’re actually in kind of a hurry. Important business. Really time-sensitive.”
“I require your presence. I will explain.”
“Well, thanks,” Quentin said. “But, you know, be quick. Nice hands.”
“Thank you. I made them myself.”
The dime dropped: the people who’d jumped them in Connecticut had had golden hands too, exactly the same. Maybe it was a coincidence, maybe there had been a sale, but Plum doubted it. In which case she had a bone to pick with this Penny, maybe several bones.
“This is our friend Plum,” Quentin said. “Plum, this is Penny. And you remember Eliot. And Alice.”
“Hi,” Plum said. Alice said nothing.
“Pleased to meet you.” Plum was a little bit relieved that he didn’t try to shake her hand. “It’s good to have you back with us, Alice.”
While saying nothing about it Penny somehow managed to convey that he and Alice had once slept together.
“Penny,” Eliot said, “you should know that we really—”
“Walk with me.”
Penny turned and strode into the next room without waiting to see if they were going to follow him.
“Who is this guy?” Plum whispered to Quentin.
“We went to college together.”
They followed him. The next room was if anything even grander: a vaulted hall, also full of books but with soaring high windows that were dark and flecked with light rain. Through the lower panes Plum got her first look at the Neitherlands, a gray warren of broad squares and narrow alleys and Italianate palaces. It was night.
Penny walked with his magic hands clasped behind his back.
“The past year has been good to me,” he said—the gracious tour guide. “My work defending the Neitherlands and safeguarding the flow of magic brought me to the attention of my superiors in the order—we take care of the Neitherlands, Plum, in case they haven’t told you. At the same time we suffered significant losses of personnel, which created gaps in the leadership. I was advanced rapidly.
“The promotion was gratifying, of course, but the challenges have been non-trivial. The Neitherlands was changed irreversibly in the late catastrophe. Much of the old magic no longer works, or works differently. Things grow here now. There is time here.”
He said it irritably, like they had a case of bed bugs.
“You cannot imagine the inconvenience of it. But the upshot was that I was awarded the position of Librarian. It is one of the most prestigious titles a member of my order can hold.”
“Congratulations,” Quentin said. “I’ve always wondered though, what happened to the dragons? The last time I saw them they were getting ready to fight the gods.”
“The dragons succeeded. If they hadn’t, you would not have lived to play your part in the crisis. Fighting the old gods, even distracting them, is of course a chancy business. There’s an art to it: they don’t really counterattack so much as just delete you from reality. But some of the dragons survived. They will repopulate, if they can remember how. I believe it has been several millennia since any of them had sex. We in the order have been assisting them with the research.”
Plum guessed it stood to reason that out of all these billions of books at least one of them had to be dragon porn.
They left the great hall and entered a low labyrinth. Even there the walls were books, even the ceiling; they hung spine-down somehow, over their heads, like bats in a cave. Every once in a while large swaths of books shifted themselves over, grudgingly, like sleepers in a crowded bed, to make room for some new addition further down the line. This Penny guy was a bit of a pill, but she had to admit she was loving his library. Loving. If anything Quentin had undersold this place.
It made her wonder if they’d undersold Fillory too. She felt herself very close to Fillory now, just one fountain away, closer than she’d ever been. When she was kicked out of Brakebills Plum thought her life had gone straight off the rails, right into the muddy and unsanitary ditch by the side of the tracks, and maybe it had—like Quentin said, there’s no one to tell you what would have happened, after the fact. But it had also brought her here, to Fillory’s very threshold. She wanted to see it. It was time.
Plum spotted a narrow, olive-green volume with silver type on its spine dangling above her. It was so tempting, like ripe fruit . . .
“Ah ah ah!”
Penny practically slapped her hand away. It was a measure of how out of her depth she felt that she actually blushed. But Penny was off and away again.
“I’ve already instituted some improvements that have been very well received. I don’t know if you’ve noticed . . . ?”
He pointed up at one of the cat doors, through which books were entering and exiting at irregular intervals.
“Yes, very nice,” Eliot said.
“Some of your best work,” Quentin chimed in.
Plum was picking up a significant frenemy vibe off the Quentin-Penny dynamic.
“They’ve been adopted by several other libraries.”
“Good for cats, too,” Plum said. “Though they’d have to be flying cats.”
“No animals, domestic or otherwise, are allowed in the building,” Penny said, without humor.
“We really have to go,” Eliot said. “Really.”
“I’ve set aside a special room here for problem formats.”
Curious in spite of herself, Plum poked her head in through the open door. It was the weirdest bibliographical menagerie she’d ever seen. Books so tall and yet so narrow that they looked like yardsticks; she supposed they must be illustrated guides to snakes, or arrows, or maybe yardsticks. One book was kept in a glass terrarium—a librarium?—the better to contain the words that kept crawling out of it like ants. One lay slightly open on a table, but only slightly, so you could see that its pages emitted an intolerably bright radiance; a welding mask lay next to it. One book appeared to be all spine along all of its edges. It was unopenable, its pages sealed inside it.
“Honestly, you wonder who publishes these things.” Penny shook his head, and they kept walking.
It was a little like touring a chocolate factory, except with books, and starring Penny as a wonky Willy Wonka. Other adepts wearing robes that were similar to Penny’s but not as nice bustled by them, nodding deferentially to him as they passed. Some of them had the golden hands too. Hm. She would wait for the right moment.
“There are catacombs underneath the library,” Penny said. “That’s another special collection: it’s all the novels people meant to write but didn’t.”
“Ooh!” Eliot brightened up. “Ca
n I go see mine? I’ll be honest with you, I’m pretty sure it’s going to be amazing.”
“You’re welcome to try. I spent far too much time looking for mine. You can’t find anything down there!” He sounded exasperated. “But here’s something people always want to see.”
This room had only one bookcase in it, on the back wall, but that proved to be deceptive because apparently it was infinitely extendable: Penny took hold of one of the shelves and gave it a sideways shove, and it zipped along like a conveyor belt at amazing speed, frictionlessly, while the shelves above and below it stayed still. It reminded Plum a little of the motorized racks at a dry cleaners. Then Penny stopped it and pushed up on it, only lightly, just a touch, and the whole business began scrolling upward, shelf after shelf after shelf, as if it went on and on beyond the room in all directions, for unknown leagues.
“What is this?” Plum asked.
“These are everybody’s books. Or rather, the books of everybody.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Hang on, I’m looking for ours.” They spun by, thousands and thousands of them, until Penny stopped the bookcase with one hand. “These are the books of our lives. Everybody has one. See, here we are. All together, as it happens, one book for each of us.”
“You must be joking,” Quentin said quietly.
Not that Penny ever joked, as far as Plum could tell.
“Not at all. Here is Plum’s.”
He put a finger on one spine. The book had, appropriately enough, a plum-colored dust jacket.
“Mine.”
Penny’s was tall and thin and bound in smooth pale leather, with his name clearly etched in black up the spine in a no-nonsense sans-serif font. It looked like a vintage technical manual.
“They’re next to each other?” Plum said. “Please tell me that doesn’t mean we get married.”
“I don’t know what it means. Nobody knows much about these things.”
“Your middle name is seriously Schroeder?” Eliot said, like that was the surprising thing here.
“You’re not going to tell me there’s one of these for every person who ever lived,” Quentin said.