by Lev Grossman
“Only people who are alive have them. They come and go as people are born and die; this shelf goes on for miles in all directions, it must jut into some separate subdimension. I don’t know where they go when you die. Remaindered, I suppose.”
He tittered at his own joke.
“What’s in them?”
“About what you’d expect. The story of your life, start to finish. Who you are and what you did and what you’re going to do. Eliot’s is in two volumes. Here’s yours.”
Penny put his hand on a squat navy blue book, as chunky as an unabridged thesaurus, with Quentin’s name stamped on it in gold.
Quentin hesitated.
“I know,” Penny said, more quietly. “Not as tempting as you’d think, is it? I’ve never opened mine. There are those in the order who have looked, and I’ve seen their faces.”
Plum slid her volume off the shelf and held it cradled in her hand like a baby. The urge to read it was almost overpowering. Almost, but not quite.
“You spend your whole life trying to understand yourself, what your story is about,” Penny said, “and then suddenly it’s all there. All the answers, spelled out in black and white. Some of them are indexed even. Look at Quentin’s, it’s alphabetized.” It was true: there were little half-moons cut into the pages, labeled A–B, C–D and so on, in a diagonal ladder down the side.
Slowly, reluctantly, Quentin handed his book back to Penny.
“I guess I’m supposed to be writing it,” he said. “Not reading it.”
Penny reshelved it—a little cavalierly, Plum thought. Plum replaced hers with appropriate care. You can’t unread a book. She was dying to look, but she supposed that if she lived her life properly then by the time it was over she’d know what was in it. That was sort of the whole point, wasn’t it? To understand your own story? Reading the book now would just be cheating. And what kind of jackass cheats at life?
“Hang on,” Eliot said, “this raises a lot of questions. Does this mean we don’t have free will? And if you burn somebody’s book do they die?”
“Keep moving!” Penny shooed them out into the hall. “There’s a lot to see! I thought you were in a hurry.”
He hustled them along as far as a plain unmarked door, which he opened. It was the first room they’d seen that was completely empty of books. There was nothing on the walls, not even a picture. It had no windows either, only a desk with a leather chair behind it. In fact it was rather gloomy.
“Let me guess,” Plum said. “Invisible books. Or no, microscopic. Like they’re in the air, and we’re breathing them.”
“This is my office.”
Penny sat down at the desk, facing them, and steepled his eerily luminescent fingers.
“The system notified me as soon as you entered the Neitherlands. There’s a reason I brought you here.”
“You have literally three minutes,” Eliot said. He was practiccally fidgeting with impatience.
“You have something of mine,” Penny said. “Quentin.”
“I do?”
“A page. From one of my books.”
“Oh.”
Everybody looked at Quentin. Plum hadn’t thought of that, but she guessed it made sense. Probably technically Quentin had stolen that page from the Neitherlands. But even so Penny was being kind of scoldy about it.
“Fair enough.” Quentin extracted it from his coat pocket. “I took good care of it for you, I promise.”
The page, with what seemed to Plum like a certain lack of sentimentality, slipped out of Quentin’s hand of its own volition and through the air and onto Penny’s desk like a toddler rushing to embrace its parent.
“Thank you.”
Instantly a door opened and a robed woman entered, eyes on the floor as if to avoid gazing directly at Penny’s magnificence. She took the page, bearing it in both hands as gingerly as if it were a limb in urgent need of reattaching. Which Plum supposed in some sense it was.
Penny leaned over and pulled up one of the floor tiles next to his chair, which turned out not to be a tile at all but the cover of a large book. It was embedded in the floor. Plum looked around: they were standing on books, big, dusty, thickly bound tomes fitted together like flagstones. Penny leafed through the tissue-thin pages, which contained columns of minute numbers, nodded, and then let the cover fall closed with a thump.
“Now,” he said, “there is the matter of the fine.”
“A fine?” Quentin said. “You mean like a late fee?”
“I do. You will be detained here for one year to work in the stacks until your debt is repaid.”
Oh my God, what an ass!
“Don’t be an ass,” Plum said.
“You’re not going to detain me,” Quentin said. “Penny, Fillory is dying. We might be able to save it, but it can’t wait. We have to go.”
“There are thousands of worlds. They live and they die. But knowledge is power, Quentin, and wisdom is eternal.” He actually talked like that. “You took some of ours.”
“I gave it back.”
“But you had the use of it for a year. A page from the Arcana arcanorum, in the hand of the Zwei Vögel scribe herself. Think what we could have done with it in that time.”
“Almost certainly nothing. You have like a dillion books here, probably nobody would have even looked at it.”
Penny stood up and walked around from behind the desk, raising his hands. His fingers—hey, those were spellcasting positions!
“The books must be balanced, Quentin. You always did have trouble accepting that. We will also have to remove from your mind the memory of what you read—”
He was going into Quentin’s head now? No. Plum took a step back and raised her hands too. Everybody did; in one second they went from a loose clump of people with complicated feelings about one another to a single defensive phalanx. Quentin moved the fastest: he held up a hand and a tight, blinding shaft of light shone out of his palm, straight into Penny’s face.
But the light didn’t reach his face. With one weird magic hand Penny stopped the beam—his hand seemed to eat the light. With the other he grasped the beam like it was a solid thing and bent it 90 degrees downward so that it shone harmlessly at the floor. It stayed there. Too late Eliot weighed in with some kind of electric bolts, but those golden hands plucked them out of the air, one-two-three-four-five, in sequence and with inhuman quickness and accuracy. It was like a stage magician’s bullet catch.
Plum was frantically weaving a shield in front of Quentin. She was still weak on this kind of magic, nobody at Brakebills taught it, but Quentin had showed her a thing or two, and she was nothing if not a quick study. But she already knew it wasn’t going to be ready in time.
“I’ve waited a long time for this,” Penny said.
“Then this is going to be kind of an anticlimax,” Alice said, and she punched him in the face.
Boom! Oh my God. It was beautiful, just like in a movie: straight from the shoulder, feet planted, hips rolled, follow-through, the works. Penny never saw it coming. Do people really do things like that?
People like Alice did, apparently. Penny didn’t fall down, but he bent over double, clutching his face with both hands.
“Ahhhhhh!”
He said it quietly but with real feeling.
“We’re done,” Alice said. “Let’s go.”
Quentin looked at Alice with an expression Plum had never seen on him before. Love, she guessed it was. It was as bright as that beam he’d shot out of his hand.
“Penny,” Quentin said, “I don’t know what you would have done with that page, but I’ll tell you what I did with it: I made Alice human again. In case you were wondering how that happened. You’re a great magician, you always have been, and I’m sure you’re a pretty great librarian too. Magic and books: there aren’t many things more important than that.
But there are one or two. We saved Alice, and now we’re going to save Fillory. Please don’t get in our way, that’s all I ask.”
Penny was bent over, working his jaw, both hands pressed to his cheek. He raised his face at them blearily as they filed out, Alice in the lead. She was studying the knuckles of her right hand.
“For a second there,” she said, “I saw the point of being alive.”
“I’m glad you are,” Quentin said. “You’re pretty good at it.”
“Can we get out of here now?” Eliot said.
But Plum had a thought.
“Hang on,” she said. “Somewhere in this building there must be everything there is to know about Fillory, don’t you think? Maybe before we go we should do a little research.”
Penny came running up behind them, with a reddening scuff-mark on his cheekbone but otherwise steady on his feet. Plum would say this for him: he was impervious to embarrassment.
“Don’t say anything,” Eliot said, before Penny could speak. “Just listen. We need information. You have it. Where are the books about Fillory?”
“There’s a whole room of them!” Plum deplored physical violence on principle, but it did seem to have a remarkably positive effect on Penny. “Large one. Come on, it’s in the other wing!”
They never would have found it on their own; even with Penny leading the way it took ten minutes to walk there, up and down stairs and through a maze of passages. On the way Penny explained about his hands: they were a form of spectral prosthetic, quite groundbreaking in their own way, the theory was very elegant but the concepts were likely beyond what most of them, except for Alice, were capable of understanding. His fingertips could move at several times human speed, and they had a number of extra senses, including the ability to feel magnetic fields and refract light and gauge temperature to within a hundredth of a degree.
He had something of a cult of personality going among the sublibrarians, Penny went on, and a number of them had arranged for their own hands to be—painlessly, hygienically—removed and replaced with magical prostheses to match his. Plum was finally on the point of asking him about Connecticut when they arrived at a room that could have been a ballroom at Versailles, an immense expansive space with windows along one wall and the wall opposite paneled in books, two stories high, traversed by one spindly rolling ladder.
Penny was back to playing the host. It was a role he obviously enjoyed.
“Stand back against the windows. That way you’ll get the full effect.”
They did, and they did. Taken as a whole the spines of the Fillory books formed a faint, ghostly outline which even Plum recognized as a map of Fillory itself, the size of the entire wall. Each book did its part; the blues were the ocean, and the pale greens and browns were the land. Up close Plum never would have seen it, but now looking at them all together she couldn’t see anything else.
“Beautiful,” Quentin said.
“So can we look at the books?” Plum asked.
It was a measure of how much the power had shifted since Alice punched him that Penny pursed his lips with distaste but then nodded, reluctantly.
“Just . . . don’t reshelve them. Please. Leave it to the professionals.”
It was hard to know where to begin. Eliot didn’t even move.
“Penny,” he said, “you’re the expert on the Neitherlands. What happens when a world ends?”
“Pretty much what you’d expect. The land dies. Over time the world disintegrates and ceases to exist.”
“What happens here? I mean, what happens to the fountain?”
“Oh, it dries up. Falls into disrepair. It’s a mysterious process, but consistent with the integrity of the Neitherlands as a whole, so we allow it to happen.”
“Here’s what I’m wondering: could the tail wag the dog, so to speak? What if you repaired the fountain? Rebuilt it or replumbed it or what have you? Would that bring a dead world back to life?”
Penny thought for a minute, his lips moving silently. He walked the length of the ballroom and then back to where the rest of them stood.
“It’s not as stupid as it sounds,” he said, “but no. You couldn’t bring it back that way. You could wag the tail, but the dog would still be dead.”
Eliot nodded sadly.
“That was my last idea. I didn’t really expect it to work.” The fire had gone out of him. “Look, this is going to take forever. Let’s just go straight to the fountain.”
“I need to do something first,” Plum said. “Watch this: a magic trick.”
She’d seen it almost as soon as they walked in, she was just waiting for her moment. Plum walked right up to the enormous wall of books, feeling very small with the ranks of them towering above her. There was one narrow gap, a thin space where a single volume was missing. She took her great-grandfather’s memoir out of her bag.
Penny’s face went slack when he saw it.
“The Door in the Page,” he said, in a childlike voice. “It’s the Holy Grail of Fillory books. The last and rarest one. I’ve been hunting it for so long.”
She went to slide it in, paused, reflected, turned it the other way up, then shelved it. It fit perfectly, not just the size but the pattern: the spine was the perfect shade of a pale green, with a band of light blue near the top to fill in the last bit of the Lower Slosh, and a sliver of the Burnt River to go with it. It was so satisfying, like finishing an enormous jigsaw puzzle, that her fingers tingled, and she involuntarily let out a breath.
She was playing her part in the Chatwin story now. No more lingering in the wings, she was onstage, in the thick of it. She’d done what she could: she had brought Rupert home, or as close as he would ever get.
“Hey—Penny, is it?” Plum said. “That ought to pay for Quentin’s library fines, don’t you think? Or Alice could just punch you again, it’s all good.”
But Penny’s attention was completely occupied by his new acquisition. He went trotting up to it—half running across the shiny ballroom floor—and slid it gingerly out again, touching only the upper edges of its pages in order to spare the spine. He let it fall open and sniffed the paper.
“How did you get this?”
“Stole it.”
“We tried to steal it too.”
“I know,” Plum said. “From us. Next time try harder.”
The failure didn’t appear to sting Penny. He looked like a little boy with a new puppy. It was weird: he was obviously an asshole, but he wasn’t a sociopath. He had feelings—in fact from the way he held the book it looked like he had an enormous capacity for love. He just wasn’t very good at loving people, apart from himself.
Only Eliot looked grave.
“I just thought of something,” he said. “That was the last book. The wall’s full. The map is finished. That must mean the story’s over, Fillory’s history has been written. The apocalypse must have already come.”
“You don’t know that,” Quentin said.
“Yes, I do,” Eliot snapped. “And don’t try to make me feel better.”
Could it be true? The idea made its way through Plum in a cold ripple. All this time, all her life really, she’d been thinking about Fillory, dithering about it, hiding from it. Fillory and the Chatwins and the fatal longings they represented had been her dark side, and she’d tried to pretend they didn’t exist. She’d wanted to have one side only, like a Möbius strip. A Möbius person.
But that was a mistake. She was starting to suspect that facing up to the nightmare of the past is what gives you the power to build your future. She was ready to face it, thought perhaps she might even quite like to face it, that there might be not just danger but joy and love in facing it—and just like that she’d lost it forever. She should have done what she’d told Quentin to do with Alice (totally correctly by the way): she should have met it head-on and made her peace with it when she co
uld. Now she’d never have the chance. The books in front of her looked subtly different now. They’d gone from being about the present to being about the past.
Or had they? Maybe they had. But maybe that was giving up too easily. Fillory didn’t feel dead to her, that was the thing. She could still sense it out there, just the other side of the thin partition that stood between this reality and the next. If she pressed her ear to it she could still hear Fillory singing to her, however faintly.
“The wall isn’t actually full, you know.” She cleared her throat—it was dusty in this damn library. “Not necessarily. You could run another row of books under there, along the floor.”
She pointed. There was still space under the lowermost shelf.
“You certainly could not,” Penny said.
“Well, you actually could, if you wanted to.”
Fillory! she thought. We’re coming! Just hold on a little longer! It was as if just by convincing Penny she could keep Fillory alive.
“I think you’re looking at this too literally,” Eliot said.
“Maybe you’re not looking at it literally enough,” Alice said, startling everybody, possibly including herself. “Those two walls are empty. And there’s space between the windows too.”
“It would be very irregular.” Penny folded his arms, his gilded hands glowing with indignation. “But more to the point it makes no sense. The map is complete. There is no more Fillory.”
“That’s not completely true,” Quentin said. “There’s a whole bunch of outlying islands. Like Outer Island would be over there”—he pointed—“if you wrapped it around the corner of the room.”
“And Benedict Island, I suppose,” Eliot said, reluctantly picking up the thread. “That’s way the hell over there. And who knows what there is on the other side, the west side.”
“There’s a whole other continent,” said Quentin.
Plum couldn’t tell if they were arguing for the sake of arguing or if she had a real point, but Penny was looking around the room uncertainly, as if the walls were crawling with insects. She even felt a little bad for him.