by Paige Britt
“Yes — I mean, no!” Penelope shook her head fiercely. “It isn’t working
out at all! I need your help. Desperately. Something horrible has happened to
Dill. He’s trapped in the tower. If he stays there much longer he’ll turn into
a . . . a Clockworker.” She choked back a sob.
“Oh, my!” said the Great Moodler. She placed her arms around Penelope
and gave her a gentle squeeze.
“It’s not just Dill,” continued Penelope. “The whole Realm is in danger.
I thought I could help, but all my ideas are dried up. And now our friend the
Coo-Coo has probably lost his home! Chronos is destroying the Range of
Possibilities. It’s horrible!”
“Well, not quite destroying the Range,” the Great Moodler corrected her.
“More like disappearing it.”
Penelope’s jaw dropped. “You know?”
“Of course I know! Where do you think it’s disappearing to?”
“I have no idea . . .”
“Right here,” said the Great Moodler with a sweep of her hand. “Whenever
Chronos does away with a possibility it has to go somewhere. It doesn’t just cease
to exist. Not any more than you or I cease to exist when someone stops thinking
about us. What is is, and no decree from Chronos can change that.”
“So the possibilities come here?” Penelope looked around as if she might
see something.
“Exactly,” said the Great Moodler, nodding cheerfully.
“But where are we?”
“The Realm of Impossibility.” The Great Moodler took a sip of her tea.
“This is a Realm? But how can that be? I don’t see anything.”
“Nothing,” corrected the Great Moodler. “You see nothing. If anything is
possible, then nothing is impossible.” The Great Moodler opened her arms
wide. “Here’s your nothing.”
Penelope looked around. There was something familiar about the bright
nothing surrounding her, but she couldn’t quite place it. “So this is the Realm of
Impossibility,” Penelope said, letting the words sink in. “I think I’ve seen this
place before, though I don’t know when.”
“Understandable,” said the Great Moodler. “These days, people don’t
know anything about nothing. They don’t pay the least bit of attention to it. If
you can’t see it, taste it, hear it, or touch it, it must not be important. Did you
know that there’s not a thing in the world that didn’t start out right here?”
The Great Moodler pointed proudly at what would have been the ground
if they had been somewhere. “Back in my day, people popped between the
two Realms on a regular basis. Now few people even know the Realm of
Impossibility exists. That’s why Chronos banished me here. He knew no one
would figure out where I was. Which brings up the question: How ever did you
find me, dear?”
Penelope tried to focus on remembering, but it was all a blur. “I don’t
really know what I did,” she finally said. “All I know is that it had something to
do with no-time.”
A look of surprise crossed the Great Moodler’s face. “That’s not an easy
thing to bring about these days. Especially with the clock tower mucking things
up. How did you do it? And start at the beginning, if you don’t mind.” The
Great Moodler crossed her legs and leaned forward eagerly, eyes fixed on
Penelope.
The beginning? It hardly seemed possible to think back that far. “The first
thing that happened,” said Penelope, trying to collect her thoughts, “was that I
landed in the Realm of Possibility.”
“Ahhh . . .” said the Great Moodler knowingly.
“I didn’t know how I got there or how to get home,” continued Penelope.
“But then I met Dill, and he told me about you. We went looking for you because
he can’t find his way and I’m all out of ideas. I want to be a writer, but for some
reason I can’t moodle anymore. We thought you could help us.” By now
Penelope’s story had started to pick up speed.
“We met the Coo-Coo and he wanted to find you, too. He hoped you
could restore the Range of Possibilities. But as soon as we started our search,
Chronos’s police officers found us idling at an intersection and sent us to prison
in the clock tower. That’s where we met the Timekeeper. He’s the one who told
us how to create a no-time. He told me to hang on a second, so I did. I went
outside on the ledge of the North Clock and grabbed the second hand. Then
there was a storm. A giant storm. With lightning . . .”
The Great Moodler nodded her head slowly up and down. “Go on . . .”
Penelope took a jagged breath. “Well, I was hanging on a second when
a flash of lightning hit the tower. That’s all I remember. Next thing I knew I
was here.”
The Great Moodler put her cup down on an imaginary table with a firm
chink. “That’s impossible,” she said in a hushed and respectful tone.
“It is?” asked Penelope, but the Great Moodler didn’t seem to be
listening.
“That’s impossible!” she said again, but louder this time. Then she laughed,
leaping from the couch and clapping her hands together. She pulled Penelope
to her feet and began to dance around, dragging Penelope with her. She
was laughing and shouting at the same time. “That’s impossible! That’s
impossible! Absolutely, fabulously, wonderfully impossible!” She stopped to stare
intently into Penelope’s face. “Do you know what you’ve done?” she asked
breathlessly.
“No . . .”
“You broke it.”
“The clock?” asked Penelope.
The Great Moodler squeezed Penelope’s arms and gave her a tiny shake.
“Oh, that was much more than a clock. What you broke, my dear, was a spell.
A spell that imprisoned me here and kept the Realm of Possibility under
Chronos’s control.” The Great Moodler flung her hands up in the air. “This is
glorious news. Glorious!” She clapped her hands abruptly and began to rub them
together. “Come along now! There’s not a minute to lose!” The Great Moodler
took off running.
“Wait!” Penelope called after her. “What spell did I break?”
“Follow me!” the Great Moodler shouted back.
Penelope ran after her, surprised by how far the little woman had already
gone. Once she caught up with her, the Great Moodler began to talk. “When
Chronos built the clock tower, he put a spell on it. The clocks of the tower do
more than mark time. Much more. They exert a hypnotic power that keeps
everyone locked in a horrible malaise.”
Penelope wondered what a malaise was. It sounded like a fancy sand-
wich spread.
“People are so stuck in the spell, they can’t think for themselves. After all,
the reason only 217 things are possible is because they believe only 217 things
are possible. The way to snap people out of their malaise is to show them that
anything is possible. And the best way to show them that anything is possible
is to do something absolutely impossible. Which is exactly what you did.”
“I did?”
The Great Moodler stopped. She turned to Penelope and fixed her with a
deep gaze. “Tell me: If only 217 things
are possible, as Chronos would have you
believe, what does it mean if something impossible happens?”
Penelope thought for a minute. “That 218 things are possible?”
“Well, yes,” said the Great Moodler, nodding. “But what if that new
possibility is so gloriously impossible it makes people stop and think for a
fraction of a second: If the impossible is possible, then just how many possibilities
are possible?” The Great Moodler gripped Penelope’s arm, her eyes staring at
some unseen horizon. “And in that moment, when this thought dawns on
them, they might, just might, snap out of their malaise and believe, even for
a minute, in the Realm of Impossibility. If —” Her eyes locked on Penelope.
“If they can see it. Now then, we really must get busy!”
Off she went again, running through the nothing.
“Where are we going?” Penelope called out, chasing after the Great
Moodler’s quickly disappearing figure. “I have to get back to Chronos City. I
have to find Dill!”
“We’re going to find the one thing that can free me and your friend —
that can free the entire Realm!” called back the Great Moodler. “The Fancies!”
The Fancies? Images of the drab little creatures floating aimlessly in prison
came to Penelope’s mind. “I hate to tell you this, but the Fancies are in
prison!” she shouted after the Great Moodler.
“Don’t be ridiculous!” the Great Moodler shouted back and then
immediately took a sharp left. Penelope hurried after her. She felt an incline
under her feet and noticed that the bright whiteness all around had faded ever
so slightly. The small incline turned into a steep rise. Penelope wasn’t gliding
anymore. She was trudging. The Great Moodler, however, made rapid progress
upward. Penelope wondered what would happen if they got separated. How
would she find the Great Moodler if there was nowhere to look?
“Just a little farther!” came a shout from above. Penelope looked up to see
the Great Moodler waving at her. “One foot after the other!”
Penelope took a few more steps, her breath coming in short gasps. The
white of her surroundings was getting thinner and so was the air. When
Penelope finally reached the Great Moodler, the little old woman patted
her back. “We’re almost there,” she said.
Where was there? By now the nothing had completely lost any sort of
solidity or color. It was more of a fog, with wisps of shimmering dust that
clung to Penelope as she walked. Penelope reached out her hand to move
the fog away, but it clung to her fingers.
The Great Moodler took Penelope’s elbow and whispered in her ear. “A
few more steps . . .” Then, just as Penelope decided they were truly going
nowhere, the Great Moodler gave Penelope’s elbow a sharp squeeze. “Here
we are.”
She felt a waft of air touch her face and realized that the Great Moodler
was blowing the glittering fog away. When the air cleared, Penelope could
see she was standing on what must have been a mountain peak. Above her
the sky was blue and full of hope. But below her, nestled right up to the
mountain of bright nothingness, closer than she had ever imagined it could
be, was something. Something massive, cold, and dark. Something that raised
the hair on the back of her neck and brought a pang of fear to her throat.
The Shadow was so close Penelope could almost touch it. Almost, but not quite.
It was as if an invisible wall separating the two Realms held it back. It swirled
around and around, breaking apart and reforming, pressing against the bright
nothing with an intensity that could only be described as hunger.
Penelope shivered as a thousand icy spiders ran up her neck. “I thought we
were going to see the Fancies,” she said through chattering teeth.
“And we are!” trilled the Great Moodler, completely unperturbed by the
chilling darkness. “The little darlings should be here any minute. I really can’t
imagine anything tickling the Fancies more than you breaking Chronos’s spell.”
Penelope watched the Shadow throw itself against the nothing, pummel-
ing it with unsettling power, then retreating only to rush back again. “Is it safe
here?” she asked.
The Great Moodler dismissed the writhing darkness with a wave of her
hand. “Of course we’re safe! Completely beyond the Shadow of Doubt.”
“The Shadow of Doubt?” cried Penelope. “Is that what that is?”
The Great Moodler looked at Penelope in surprise. “What did you think
it was?”
Penelope shrugged. “I — I didn’t know.”
chapter seventeen
“Used to be the Realm of Impossibility was visible to everyone. All it took
was a little moodling and — ping! — there it was. But then Chronos appeared
and cast doubt in everyone’s mind. Now the Shadow hovers over everything in
the Realm of Possibility and nobody knows the impossible is within reach, just
beyond the Shadow of Doubt. That’s why we’ve got to get those Fancies.”
“But what can the Fancies do?” asked Penelope. As far as she was con-
cerned, the Fancies could hardly stay awake, much less fend off the Shadow.
“Oh-ho,” said the Great Moodler, wagging her finger at Penelope. “Never
underestimate the power of a Fancy. They can do anything. To start with, they
can lift the Shadow.” The Great Moodler cupped one hand around her right eye
and stretched out the other hand as if she were holding a spyglass. She moved
the hand in front of her eye back and forth, like she was focusing a lens. “I think
I see one now!”
“Where?” Penelope scanned the sky.
“Along the far horizon,” said the Great Moodler. “Oh, dear, they’re
shrunken and half-starved. Just as I expected.” She put her arms down and
looked at Penelope, nodding toward the Shadow. “See for yourself.”
Penelope stared at her.
“Go on then.” The Great Moodler nudged Penelope with her elbow.
“Give it a try.”
Penelope lifted her hands as if she, too, were looking through a spyglass.
She closed her left eye and squinted with her right, until . . . “Oh!” There it
was. The Shadow seemed so close it was as if Penelope were standing right in
it. A soft, silvery haze directly above the Shadow wavered and then moved. “I
think I see something . . .” Penelope said.
“That’s it! Keep looking!” urged the Great Moodler.
Penelope kept her eye on the movement. It glimmered like dust caught in
a shaft of sunshine. Small black dots swam here and there in the dim light.
Suddenly a pair of the black dots blinked. They were eyes!
“I see one! I see one!” Penelope cried. Then she saw another. And another.
The haze above the Shadow wasn’t a haze at all! It was a swarm of Fancies. They
moved like a flock of birds skimming over a dark sea. “There must be thousands
of them,” said Penelope breathlessly. As she watched, the Fancies came to a halt
and then, as if they had choreographed the movement, they dove into the
Shadow and vanished. Penelope staggered back. “Wh-what happened to them?”
The Great Moodler took a long look through her telescope. “Thank
goodness,” she muttered. “They’re doing exactly what I hoped they would.”
Penelope couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You wanted them to dive
into the Shadow? They’ll die!”
“They aren’t going to die,” said the Great Moodler in a soothing voice.
“Take a look for yourself.”
Looking at the Shadow made Penelope feel like it would suck her in, but
she did as she was told. She raised her hands to her face and used her spyglass
to search for any sign of the Fancies. Nothing disturbed the Shadow’s surface
until she saw, out of the corner of her eye, a large chunk of darkness float
past and fade into the light of the sun. To her surprise a hole in the Shadow
appeared, and streaming out of it were the Fancies! They were pushing and
tugging at the Shadow as they flew. Some had it by their toes; others were
butting it with their heads.
Penelope turned to look at the Great Moodler. “They’re lifting the
Shadow!” she said in shock.
The Great Moodler smiled an I-told-you-so smile. “Never underestimate
the power of a Fancy,” she repeated. “There’s nothing they can’t do. Of course,
they’ll wear themselves out with all that work, the little sweeties, but we’ll just
have to fatten them up so they can go back out and finish the job. If we both
moodle on whatever tickles our Fancy, we’ll have a feast for them in no time.”
“Moodle?” Penelope squeaked.
“But of course. It’s the best way to feed your Fancy.”
“I — I can’t,” Penelope blurted out.
“Nonsense,” said the Great Moodler in the most matter-of-fact voice.
“I’m sorry, but it isn’t nonsense,” insisted Penelope. “I used to be able to
moodle all the time. But I told you, all my ideas disappeared. They dried up or
something . . .” Penelope’s voice trailed off.
“My dear,” countered the Great Moodler, “anyone who can break Chronos’s
spell isn’t just full of ideas, she’s full of possibilities.”
Penelope’s heart skipped a beat.