Then we hit something and slammed to a stop. I pushed the gas pedal down to the floor, and the car roared but didn’t move. The Camry rattled closer. “Crap,” I said. “Crappity crap crap. We’ll have to run for it.”
I stopped the car and opened the door. “Come on,” I said.
Thankfully Beatriz didn’t ask any questions. We got out and hurried through the forest.
I heard a car door slam behind us, then the sound of branches cracking. “She’s still following us,” Beatriz said.
I knew where we were, though, and she didn’t. We were near the river and the bridge, the place we’d found while looking for Amaranth. I looked for somewhere we could break away.
She came closer. I could hear her panting now, and I grinned to think that she was tiring. But I was having a tough time making my way through as well; trees were crowding around us, making it hard to see.
Then, under the sounds of our harsh breathing and stumbling footsteps, I heard the rush of water. We came out of the trees and saw the bridge in front of us.
“Stop!” Ms. Burden called behind us. “Look!”
I kept going, heading for the bridge. There was no way I’d listen to her, become enmeshed in her games again. “No, wait,” Beatriz said. She pointed across the river. “Look.”
The moon was starting to rise. More trees stood on the other side, white leaves picked out by moonlight and black leaves in shadow, and a path ran beneath them. Then, as I watched, the moon painted some of the trees white, so slowly that I couldn’t see the moment when they changed.
The white trees formed two rows, in lines so straight they had to have been planted that way. They looked like pillars, like the ruins of an unroofed temple. The moon floated on the river like a ship at sea.
Ms. Burden came up to us, breathing hard. “The way—the way into Pommerie Town,” she said.
“Really?” I said, putting as much contempt as I could fit into the two syllables. “Pommerie Town is fiction, it isn’t—”
“What are those trees then?” she asked.
“And remember the part about Fo’c’sle Flynn?” Beatriz said. “He went across a river, he said, and then between some pillars that looked like ivory. There wasn’t a full moon the last time we were here—that’s probably why we didn’t see this.”
“Well, of course,” Ms. Burden said. She was still panting, not from fatigue this time but from eagerness, the culmination of all her years of searching.
I looked back at the pillars. There they were, a real thing. What else could they be but the way into Pommerie Town?
Ms. Burden started toward the bridge and we hurried after her. I was sure that Beatriz and I had the same thought, that no matter what lay beyond those pillars we had to watch her closely, make sure she didn’t do any damage.
Beatriz and I caught up with her, and we crossed the bridge together in silence. Partly this was because the river was running loudly now, making it hard to hear anything else. Another part, though, was that we had nothing to say to each other. How had it come to this, that I was keeping company with my worst enemy as if nothing had ever happened between us? We were like the travelers in The Wizard of Oz, if Dorothy had wanted to kill the Tin Woodman.
The wood of the bridge was worn through in places, so much that I had to watch my steps. I looked over at Beatriz to point them out and saw that she was being careful as well, and so, unfortunately, was Ms. Burden.
We came to the end and walked between the pillars. They were a muted white, the color of the moon or a wax candle, more ivory than marble. The path between them was silvered with light.
I wanted to touch them, to see what they were made of—they couldn’t possibly be ivory, not unless the land beyond boasted giant elephants—but I was afraid of doing anything except following the directions. I was only too aware of what happened in fairy tales when someone stepped off the path.
We reached the end of the row. The forest grew sparser, and the ground sloped away in front of us. We worked our way down the incline, slipping as we went. Another path lay at the bottom, and we continued on.
Fo’c’sle Flynn had reached the town by this point, but we saw only a patchwork of land stretching out ahead of us, silent in the moonlight. We passed a farmhouse, a small wooden cottage with white walls and a red roof, then another, then four or five clustered together. Wisps of smoke rose from the chimneys, and dogs barked in the distance.
I tried to make myself believe that we were still in the real world, that these farms lay just beyond Maeve’s house, even though we had never seen anything like them before. As we walked, though, a large shadow began to loom in front of us.
“Oh, my God,” Beatriz said. For some reason she was whispering. “Is that the town?”
“Of course it’s the town,” Ms. Burden said. She looked very different: her dissatisfied expression was gone, and she seemed dazed, transfixed.
“I’ve done it,” she said, awe filling her voice. “All those times I wrote to Adela Madden, begging her for directions. All those form letters she sent back. All those theories, those people who claimed to know the way and turned out to have no idea.”
All that time you spent making us suffer, I thought. But she seemed so naked, so changed, that I couldn’t bring myself to say anything.
As we came closer we saw a constellation of lights glimmering within the shadow of the town. A tower lifted high above it.
The town reached out and took us in gradually. We passed more houses, taller and wider than the ones at the farms. They seemed placed at random, as if a child had thrown them in a game of jacks, and the path wound between them, broader now and paved with cobblestones. Tall trees grew in and around the houses, and gas lamps made of iron filigree showed glimpses as we passed, a front door here, a lawn filled with flowers there.
“What do you want to do?” Beatriz asked, still whispering. “Everyone’s asleep.”
A dog barked, somewhere far away. Ms. Burden set off down one of the paths, moving quickly, and we hurried after her.
The path led farther into town. Scenes passed as we hurried on: white roses in front of a red-brick house, an oak butting up against a stone fence, pots of geraniums flourishing on either side of a blue door.
A flight of stone steps rose ahead of us. They were all different sizes and covered in moss, and we picked our way up them in the moonlight. At the top was a row of shops, with hanging signs that showed pictures of tobacco pipes and eyeglasses and mugs of beer.
Ms. Burden slowed and walked past them, looking into each storefront as she came to it. I could see more of the buildings now, with their gables and mullioned windows and window-boxes filled with flowers. Timber-framed balconies hung out over the road, nearly touching the balconies on the other side. The owners seemed to live on the second floors, above their work.
“What are you looking for?” I asked Ms. Burden.
“Hmmm? Nothing really, just taking it all in.”
I didn’t believe that for a minute. Why had she headed off so confidently, as if she’d known where she was going?
She yawned. “God, I’m tired. It’s been a long day.”
I was tired too, and more tired now that she’d mentioned it. She lay down on a wooden bench and closed her eyes.
Beatriz and I moved away from her. “What do we do now?” she asked in a low voice.
“Keep an eye on her. She wants something here, I’m sure of it.”
“But we have to sleep too. She’s right, it was a long day.”
“Leave it to her to take the only bench in sight.”
Beatriz just went over to a fat tree and leaned against it. She didn’t complain as much as I did about Ms. Burden; I’d noticed that before. “Well, if you’re going to sleep, I’ll keep watch,” I said. “I’ll wake you up when I get tired.”
She was already breathing regularly, a sound I knew from sharing a room with her. I sat down next to her.
I woke up in a world washed with green, the sun shi
ning through leaves. A moment later I remembered where I was.
My next thought was not about Pommerie Town but Amaranth, the same worry that visited me every morning on awakening. How was she? Had she gotten worse? Had Maeve been able to cope?
We had to get back to her. Or were we supposed to find something to help her in Pommerie Town? Ms. Burden seemed to have some knowledge we didn’t—but did it have anything to do with us, with Amaranth?
Ms. Burden. I sat up quickly and looked for her. There she was, still on the bench, still asleep.
A man appeared at the far end of the road, carrying a long pole. He lifted it high above him at the first lamp and doused the light, then continued on to the next. People were moving behind the ground-floor windows now, or coming outside to sweep their doorsteps.
Ms. Burden stood and stretched and looked around her. She smiled, an expression I hadn’t seen in years, since she’d played all those games with us. “I’m still here,” she said. “It wasn’t a dream.”
She seemed new-made, a different person, almost as if she had something of Piper about her. And she was right—we should be delighting in every moment, every impossible sight. But it was so strange to be agreeing with her, to find wisdom in what she said, that my mind wobbled a bit, and I nearly missed seeing her set off.
I glanced around for Beatriz, who was standing up and getting ready to leave, then hurried up next to Ms. Burden. I wanted to confront her about Amaranth, but she seemed so open that for once I couldn’t bring myself to argue with her.
“What are you looking for?” I asked again, as we headed down the path.
“I told you,” she said. “Nothing.”
“I don’t believe you. Look, just tell me the truth. If you know anything that could help Amaranth—”
“Amaranth?” She’d been looking in the windows as we passed but now she turned to me, her gaze focused to a point. “What happened to her?”
“Don’t you know? You were the one who told her I could give her Piper.”
“Piper, is it?” she said, looking thoughtful. “And did you? Do you still have your muse, or is he gone?”
I didn’t want to answer her, of course. But I had to, I needed to know if she could help us. I told her what had happened to Amaranth, her nonsense, her moments of terror, the times when I sensed that Piper was struggling to get free.
“I honestly didn’t know that could happen,” she said. She used to say “honestly” whenever she lied about something, but this time I thought she might be telling the truth. “I told her she could ask you for Piper, and then she and I might convince your aunt to lend me her muse—what’s his name, by the way?”
“Never mind. What do we do about Rantha?”
“I don’t know. I could try to talk to her when we get back, see if I can think of something.”
“You can’t talk to her. That’s what I’ve been telling you. She doesn’t make sense, she’s lost and confused all the time, and it’s because of you. You were the one who told her to do this.”
“I didn’t tell her anything. All I did was explain how she might get a muse for herself.”
“And why do you think you’ll manage any better than she did?” I asked spitefully. “None of them wanted you so far.”
So much for not arguing, I thought. I wouldn’t get any answers now. She turned away from me and looked around us. The shops had given way to houses; red ivy twined up the wall of one, and a carved wooden dragon perched on the gable of another. A bird lifted off a branch and sang a quick two-note phrase into the silence, high-low, high-low.
Then she looked back at me, and I saw that she wasn’t angry but unhappy, that I’d gone too deep and hit bone. I cast around for a neutral topic, something that wouldn’t remind me of Amaranth, or her of her failures. “How did you know that Pommerie Town was real?” I asked.
“Of course it’s real,” she said. “It had to be.”
“Well, but why? I never thought so, and my aunt is—” I had to hesitate here, so ingrained was my habit of secrecy. “My aunt wrote the book.”
She said nothing for a long while. “My mother didn’t let me leave the house a lot,” she said finally, looking straight ahead. “She needed someone to talk to. Well, to talk at—she didn’t actually want me to say anything. I was just supposed to nod and shake my head in the right places. Look at that!”
We’d come to a broad park. It was the first thing I recognized from Ivory Apples, and it cheered me to see it. The park had the trellised pavilions and meandering paths Maeve had described, the grass as green as the sea. At the far end stood the statue of the man and woman who had founded Pommerie Town.
From this angle we couldn’t see their dog Oscar. According to the book, Oscar would stand up and bark if anyone threatened the town.
Ms. Burden ran toward the statue. She was going to check on Oscar, I knew, and I felt a strange kinship with her, someone who knew Ivory Apples as well as I did. I pushed the feeling away, and Beatriz and I hurried after her.
We reached the statue and saw Oscar between the two founders, his head on his paws. “I guess the town is safe, then,” Ms. Burden said.
I wanted to get back to what she’d been telling me. “Why didn’t your mother want you to talk?” I asked.
In her excitement, she’d forgotten our conversation, and she had to take a while to find her way back to it. “Well, she needed someone to echo her. I think that was how she convinced herself she was real. There’s a reason, you know, that Narcissus is paired with Echo in the myth.”
“What do you mean? She had to know she was real, didn’t she?”
“She had no center, no core—she needed people around her to know how to act, how to be. She didn’t care what I was doing, though, so I immersed myself in books, and every so often I’d look up and say something, to show her I was listening. She had no idea what happens when you read, how you go away into other worlds—she thought I was still in the room with her. We had a library, but that was only because she thought she should have one.
“And of all the books we had, the best one was Ivory Apples. I could hide myself inside it and never come out, never have to face her. So I knew it had to be real. I needed it to be real.”
I didn’t think that proved anything. We left the park and went back to the road. The town hall should be a few paces down and across the street—and there it was, just as the book had promised. It was long and low, the space of an entire block, and made out of marble instead of wood. A clocktower rose high above it.
She stood for a while, watching people go up and down the stairs to the entrance. God, she wasn’t going to wait until the clock struck the hour, was she, when all the figures, large and small, came out and performed their play? The clock read 10:37, and I felt an agony of impatience; we had to move, had to get back to Amaranth.
Thankfully, she started walking again. We passed more houses, more shops, more stands of trees. “I’m getting hungry,” Beatriz said. “Where’s that tavern, the one Fo’c’sle Flynn went to?”
I couldn’t remember. I turned to ask Ms. Burden. She wasn’t there.
CHAPTER 26
“WHAT—?” I asked.
Beatriz turned too. “Where’d she go?”
Three paths branched off from where we stood. We looked down them but couldn’t see her anywhere.
I took the middle path at random, running as fast as I could, and Beatriz followed me. A while later we came to several houses standing close together, blocking our way through.
We hurried back to the crossroads and chose another path. This one turned and twisted on itself, and my hopes rose as I went around each bend, wondering if I’d see Ms. Burden on the other side. Gradually, though, the air grew colder, and weeds and grass started to encroach on the path, and we still hadn’t seen her anywhere. We slowed down and finally turned and headed back.
“We should think about this,” Beatriz said. “Where would she go? What does she want?”
“Well, s
he wants a muse,” I said.
“Do they have muses here?”
I didn’t know. A muse had helped create this place, Maeve’s muse, but would that muse make more muses?
It was the only thing I could think of, though. “Maybe we should look for a grove, or a lake.”
The path became wider, then joined the main street. We passed more places I knew from the book, and several times I wanted to stop and go inside: the bakery with its croissants that waxed and waned with the phases of the moon; the school, where Matilda Spottiswood would sometimes forget that she had died, and come back to teach her history class.
One place we did visit was the library. We wanted to see if the creek had appeared there yet, and to check if it flowed down from a lake, or into one. The creek was there, but I felt an irresistible urge to go the shelves first. They were filled with rows of seductive titles: The Troll’s Daughter, Other Wise, Practicing the Piano in the Land of the Dead.
Beatriz came over and tugged me away. We made note of where the creek came into the library and where it flowed out of it, and we went back outside.
As we left I noticed how carefully everyone stood, with their backs toward the creek and the bridge. I thought of Piper, who would at the very least shout, “Hey, look at that river!”, and I felt the empty place where he should have been.
We searched all the way around the library but the ground was dry and bare, not a trickle or rivulet anywhere. The creek seemed to rise from nowhere and go nowhere, another of the town’s mysteries.
We set off again. A few minutes later I saw that we were approaching the town hall, this time from the opposite direction. Bells boomed out from the clocktower, telling the hours.
I watched the figures glide out one by one, the allegory of the seasons, the procession of astrological signs, the displays of corn and carrots and other farmland produce. The clock had run backward once, along with all the other clocks in town. So much of the book was about clocks, watches, keeping time. And then, suddenly, I knew where Ms. Burden had gone.
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