by Ian Richards
That night he slept alone in his bedroom as lightning danced across the sky. He found it unusual, being inside the shop by himself. The shrieking wind and groaning timbers of the house conspired to give him nightmares. In the past, with Martell in the next room, he had never minded the creaks that regularly played out at night. That was what old buildings did: they made noises, especially when it was windy outside. But with his memories of the fire so fresh in his mind he found it impossible to stop his imagination from interpreting each squeak of floorboards as something far more terrifying.
Mr. Krook, hiding himself amongst the antiques …
The Rag-and-Bone men, creeping along the hallway outside …
Ebenezer’s frazzled corpse dragging itself up the stairs, one hand over the other, smelling of barbecued meat and rain, coming for revenge, coming for him, inching itself closer, yellow eyes burning with rage …
He slept very badly that night, and the lights remained on throughout.
By morning the horrors had passed. He made himself breakfast in the kitchen, where the welcome sight of daylight helped settle his nerves further. Through the window looking out onto the courtyard he saw the rising rooftops of the neighborhood, and beyond them, the subtle shades of a grey November sky.
He was alone. Utterly alone. No Martell, no Vanessa, no Ebenezer. Trina gone to stay with her mother up north. Martell’s Antiques closed for the foreseeable future. For a boy who had always thought he led a rather lonely life, it was only now, when those he had counted on were no longer there, that he realized how unsettling true loneliness was.
He didn’t like it. Being alone with his thoughts, having no-one to share a joke with, no-one to talk to. The silence weighed upon him.
So did the question of what to do next.
He had to find a way into Marshwood, that much was certain. But how? And what would he do when he got there? He was a small boy with a knowledge of antiques, not a mighty warrior. How could he possibly take on Firefox, Krook and Kepler, and the Rag-and-Bone men? Even the heroes from his books would have struggled with such a task. A lesser character might have resigned himself to failure right there. But not Tony Lott. Not with his uncle and his best friend being held against their will. Not with the screams of Ebenezer still ringing in his ears.
He had no-one to turn to for help, but that was all right. He still had his books. There were the ones Ebenezer had brought round to teach him magic, Martell’s collection upstairs, the antique ones on sale in the shop. There were encyclopedias, maps, old newspapers, yellowing magazines, spoken word albums by occultists recorded in the 1960s. There would be answers in there somewhere. There had to be. That was what Martell always said, ‘Books are the key, my boy. You can understand anything if you find the right books.’
And so he kept the sign hanging in the door turned to ‘CLOSED’, pulled up a chair in the middle of the shop and started reading.
*
It took a lot of work, but by the time the end-of-the-day shadows had begun creeping across the floor towards him, things seemed to be coming together. The books were dense and often cryptic, but bit by bit the world of Faerie and its inhabitants began to reveal itself to him. He found two books particularly useful. Faerie Lands by Elizabeth Foot pieced together information from assorted poems, songs and stories to create as accurate a depiction of Faerie as possible. From the descriptions offered, Tony saw it as a land of luscious forests, rolling hills and sparkling oceans—pastoral in nature, with market-towns dotted across the countryside and grander palaces situated on the coast. Ms. Foot described fairies themselves as ‘tricksy and cunning.’ She made note of their magical prowess (‘some have frightening abilities’) and listed several examples of their ruthlessness when it came to swindling each other out of land or money. Roger Wilson’s Gateways was a grimmer proposition, what with the author’s propensity for rambling footnotes and text printed in a font so small Tony had to hold it up to his face in order to read it. Though aesthetically unappealing, the content of the book was dynamite. It described in detail the relationship between England and Faerie, specifically the passageways that had once linked the two worlds. At one time there had been many of these passageways spread across northern Europe. Interaction between the two worlds had been commonplace. Fairies would come to London to sell potions and charms at market, ‘often with mischievous intent’ according to Wilson, who listed numerous examples of gullible peasants trading in cattle or farming equipment in exchange for vials of river-water or pouches containing no more than dry leaves. At the time of the Renaissance the crossover between the two worlds had been at its peak. This had been the age of Spenser and Shakespeare, a time when humanity’s fondness for magic and art had reached its apex. Though Tony searched the book for references to any gateways that might still exist today, Wilson believed that as time had passed each of them had closed up, never to be opened again. By the Victorian era, human interest had moved on to the occult: spiritualists, séances and talking with the dead in low-lit theatres. If there were any gateways remaining at this time, which he doubted, they eventually disappeared altogether due to lack of use.
From this Tony drew the only conclusion possible.
The only one way left for a mortal to pass from England to Faerie, or vice versa, involved the use of magic.
For dinner that evening he bought himself a bag of chips from the shop down the road. He understood more about the task ahead of him now, and though the answer to his problems remained in hand—the lamp, which now shone a bronzy-gold, trapping the last of the daylight—he felt unwilling to summon the genie until he had exhausted all other possibilities. With two of his three wishes used up, he knew that the next time he spoke to the creature it would be expecting its freedom. Could he do that to him? Could he go back on his word after promising he wouldn’t? He finished his food, put the wrappings in the bin, and washed his hands in the sink. There were still several more books to read—Forgotten Worlds by Alan Webber, Titania Unbound by Fleur Dowsleydale—and he dutifully began flicking through them, albeit sensing that he had already found all the information available to him. History was no good now. He needed magic. He needed specific instructions on how to transport himself to Marshwood. Unfortunately the best place to look for such books had been The Wand, which was now nothing more than a mound of burnt furniture and rubble. The few books in Martell’s Antiques that did discuss magic approached the matter from a dreary, academic perspective. A History Of Medieval Magick by Arthur Atkins. England In The Age Of Merlin by David. M. Nwando. He wandered through the darkening shop, looking at bookshelf after bookshelf for anything that might help him, anything that jumped out and demanded to be read.
Nothing sustained him beyond a chapter list and a couple of dull opening paragraphs.
That night, before going to bed, he went into Martell’s bedroom to look through his uncle’s bookcase. It consisted mostly of well-thumbed paperbacks, but he managed to find a couple of hardbacks that held some promise. He guessed they were throwbacks to Martell’s days as the Black Magician. Each one seemed to focus on some facet of the occult. Bermuda Dreams by Anna Young told the history of lost pirate treasures in the Atlantic. The Illuminati by Ada M. Haupi-West discussed conspiracy theory and stolen paintings. In the end he selected the only book that looked as if it might possibly relate to Marshwood—To The Shadowlands And Beyond by Humphrey Dickinson—and took it to bed with him.
‘Right then, Push’ he said. ‘Last one tonight.’ The cat lay next to him, curled up in a furry ball. ‘Let’s see what Humphrey Dickinson has to say for himself, shall we?’
He opened the cover—and what he saw inside stopped him cold.
There, written on the title page in scrawled blue ink, was a message.
Dear Thomas,
Happy birthday, my love. I know you’ve been looking for this one for a while so I had Joseph order it for me from an antiques dealer in Belfast. I hope you enjoy it.
I love you, my beautiful husband.
Emily
There was a date too, written beneath in the same scrawling hand.
His father’s birthday.
Three months before his mother had died.
Emily Lott.
Mum.
For the longest time he could do nothing but stare at this note, overcome with a combination of voyeur’s guilt and downright astonishment. These few lines struck him like a message from another world. Reading them now, tracing his fingers across the words, it was as if his mother had momentarily come back to life. He could sense her love, her kindness, her personality, it all came through, shining as brightly as a star. His heart ached.
Mum. Here she was, a handful of lines, inscribed in ink and preserved on the page. And yet somehow this felt more real than all the photographs and all the stories in the world.
He turned the page, saddened that such a painful part of his past should be resurrected now, when he needed to be at his sharpest. The rest of the book had been marked with annotations that he presumed had been made by his father. Thomas Lott wrote in a small, crabby hand that lacked the finesse of his wife’s. There were scribbled mentions of faerie roads and moonstones, but these references were disappointingly vapid. Emily’s note had shown him more of his mother in a handful of lines than an entire book of frantic commentary did for Thomas. Once again his father was absent: an anonymous presence, hidden away from him.
And yet there had to be something good about the man. From what Martell had told him, his mother had been a strong, intelligent woman. She wouldn’t have married Thomas if he had been a complete wretch. No, that was impossible. Look at her note. She had loved him. It came through in every line. She really loved him.
So what had happened?
How could he have disappeared so suddenly? Why had he never come back?
He thought back to what Mr. Kepler had said on the night The Gnarled Wand burned. He claimed to know Thomas Lott personally. To still be in touch with him. Tony looked again at the book, this time concentrating on the content, not the commentary. ‘There are rumored to be spells that allow passage into the Shadowlands through mirrors …’ And: ‘Only the most adept of magicians may succeed in travelling between worlds, but they should be warned, there are no guarantees that they will be able to find their way back …’
He lowered the book. His hands were trembling now; his heart had begun pounding like a kick-drum. Things were coming together at a frightening pace. Thomas Lott had been interested in finding a way to Faerie, too. And if Mr. Kepler and Mr. Krook were working for a fairy, as they claimed, that suggested they had been in the Shadowlands themselves. Recently.
Where they had seen Thomas Lott.
Had he done it then? Had his father found a way into Faerie? Tony struggled to contain his excitement. That was why Thomas Lott had disappeared. It wasn’t by choice. He had found a way into Faerie, but hadn’t been able to find a way out again. His father hadn’t abandoned him. It had all been a mistake. Martell had spun him a story about Thomas Lott being selfish and unpleasant because he hadn’t known any better.
He stayed up late that night, reading the book and trying to find any clues that might allow him to follow in his father’s footsteps and travel into Faerie. To his annoyance, there were none. Several pages towards the end of the book had been torn out and many of his father’s notes were indecipherable. After a certain point it seemed that Thomas Lott had stopped writing words altogether and instead simply doodled in the margins. Tony recognized boredom when he saw it. And there was no denying that the text had become extremely waffly. If he had been forced to read the whole thing, he thought, then he’d probably fill up the margins with pictures of boxes and creepy houses, too.
The following morning he took a walk to think through all he had learnt and how it affected his present situation. Fundamentally, of course, nothing had changed. He still needed to get to Marshwood, and there was still no way to do that without the genie. The difference now was that rescuing Martell and Vanessa was no longer enough.
He needed to find his father, too. He needed to bring Thomas Lott home.
He walked for hours. Where he was going didn’t seem important. He savored the air in his lungs and the crunch of morning frost beneath his feet. He passed down residential streets, across the park, along the banks of the canal where he picked up pebbles and tossed them one after the other into the weed-ravaged depths.
Everything kept coming back to the lamp. No matter how much he wished otherwise, he knew he had no way of getting to Marshwood without the genie’s assistance. Yes, there was a chance there were other routes into Faerie, he didn’t doubt that. But how long would it take him to find them? How long could he afford to leave Martell and Vanessa in the Shadowlands on their own?
Eventually he found a quiet spot on the bend of the canal shaded by overhanging willows. Taking a seat on a bench he removed the lamp from his coat pocket and tentatively touched his fingers to its side. The moment held itself, balanced precariously between two different possibilities. To rub the lamp or to keep searching? Each action would unleash a myriad of consequences, some good, some bad, but as he sat there, buttoned up against the cold, he knew that if he was going to call out the genie, the time to do so was now.
In front of him the canal rippled softly in the wind. The sunlight slanting through the trees overhead spotted the water with patches of gold.
Tony rubbed the lamp.
For a moment nothing happened.
Then, suddenly, a fine red mist began spiraling up from the spout in great loops. At once Tony smelt paprika, chili peppers, cumin, saffron; an array of spices so rich it made the inside of his nose tingle. The cold, characterless morning melted away in an instant. In its place was a swirling, smoky sea, from which the genie slowly emerged.
‘Master.’
‘Hello genie.’
‘How are you feeling, master? I trust you were satisfied with your second wish?’
‘Of course. You saved my life.’ He sighed and looked at his feet. ‘Look, I’m sorry I haven’t spoken to you since but … well, things have been difficult, you see.’
The genie bowed. ‘I understand. Some of your friends are missing. Another has perished. You are understandably upset.’
Perished. The word stabbed at him like the dwarf’s dagger.
‘It shook me up, genie, I won’t deny that.’
‘I cannot blame you, master. I have seen many friends pass into darkness during my time. It is not pleasant.’
Once again Tony thought of Ebenezer. That final, desperate scream. The pounding heat. The charred remains of the bookshop. A sickly nausea rose in his belly.
‘Are you ready to make your final wish now, master?’ The genie’s voice remained soft and gentle. ‘I presume that is why you summoned me. Ask and I swear it shall be granted.’
Tony pressed his hand to his forehead. It was so tempting, to say the words and find himself reunited with Martell and Vanessa. He could be with them in seconds. Maybe even his father, too. And all he had to do was the break the heart of the sad creature floating in front of him.
The smoke seemed to be becoming thicker now. Tendrils of red vapor wound themselves around the genie’s body like snakes. The aroma of chilies and spices began to sting his eyes.
‘Genie, I don’t know if I can release you—’
If there was any change in the genie’s demeanor he didn’t see it. As the smoke continued to swirl, the genie merely nodded his head, as if to say, this is as expected.
‘I’ve got to get to Marshwood, you see. And the only way I can do that is by using my last wish. If there were any other way to get there I would. But there isn’t, and I’m desperate. If I don’t do this then I might never see my uncle or my best friend again.’
‘I understand, master.’ His voice was soft and authoritative; faraway thunder rolling across faraway mountains. ‘Do not feel bad. Others have broken their promises before you. I have no doubt others will do the same in th
e future. It is as I foretold. Humans will always need one more wish. It is in your nature.’
‘Genie, I promised I would release you … I gave you my word.’
‘You did, master.’
‘I can’t go back on that. It goes against everything Martell taught me.’
‘You are my master, Tony Lott. Whatever you decide I must abide by it. What you said or did not say in the past is irrelevant.’
Take me to Marshwood. The words hovered on his lips, every part of him longed to say them aloud. But he couldn’t, not with the genie in front of him. Those sad, oil-black eyes. That lonely smile. For all the creature’s talk, Tony sensed that he had let himself believe that this time might be different. He had really thought that he might finally have been released. Something about the genie’s happy-to-help expression reminded him of the poor souls who were forced to stand outside shopping centers and hand leaflets to passers-by. There was a desperation there. A resignation.
‘Make your wish, master’ the genie said. ‘Please do.’
Put me out of my misery.
Break the last bit of faith I had.
Condemn me to a few more centuries of servitude.
‘No.’ Tony shook his head. Before the genie could say anything—already its eyebrows had risen in surprise—Tony tapped his finger against the lamp. ‘I’m not making any wishes yet. You get yourself back inside, genie. We’ll have this conversation another time.’
Unsure whether to be pleased or disappointed, the genie obeyed the instruction. In a swirl of rose-red fog he was gone. The world became still and silent once more. The canal water rippled gently in the wind, dark with shadows from the trees overhead.
Tony took a deep breath. He couldn’t do it. Not yet anyway. There had to be another way into Marshwood. There had to be.
But as the days slipped away from him, he found himself no closer to a breakthrough. He spent the weekend in a reading room at the British Library, but could find nothing about Marshwood or Faerie amongst its masses of books. He wrote to a group of self-proclaimed fairy experts in Hastings, The Cottingly Society, but received no reply to his request for information. In desperation he even tried venturing into other occult bookshops in London, places like Magic Words in Hackney, and Spell-Seekers in Brixton. The shop-owners here were nothing like Ebenezer and Trina. They were grim, menacing men who eyed him suspiciously and were unwilling to offer any assistance beyond pointing him to the door.