by J. M. Frey
“One of these days, we’re gonna have to actually figure out where the nearest grocery store is,” Pip says, taking the menu and flipping it over to find the phone number before she dials. “If only because my father can’t keep driving to Victoria to give us his leftover root veggies and baby care packages.”
“I like his taste in diapers,” I say, patting Alis’s superhero-patterned bottom. “Besides, we have the Internet now. We can order groceries in.”
“You really hate the snow that much, eh?” Pip turns away from me then to talk to the person taking her order, not waiting for my answer. One isn’t required, anyway.
Lysse Chipping was a fertile bowl-valley, perfect for growing stone-fruit and large families, famous for its cheese and horses. Our winters lasted maybe three or four months, and the snow never went past my knees. This is my second winter in Pip’s world, the first outside of a large metropolis, and already the snow is deeper than I have ever seen in my life. She tells me that while Victoria is temperate, it does still see snow, and that the accumulation will most likely be worse in the next few weeks. I cannot even begin to fathom what that must mean. In Hain, I never went further north than Kingskeep, though my brother has been to the Dark Woods at Erlenmeyer, and out over the pack ice pans in search of the Bear Prince. I now have much greater respect for Bevel Dom, that he managed to keep the headstrong Kintyre from freezing to death up in the Northlands. Winter is harsher, the cold more unrelenting, than I could have ever anticipated.
Luckily, in this world, there exists such a thing as forced air heating, and hot-running water. Otherwise, I would be packing up my family and moving us closer to the equator. In a nation by the name of Japan, they apparently have things called kotatsu, and the moment my home office is complete, I plan to turn my considerable scholar’s mind toward recreating these little tables with built-in heaters and blankets for our living room.
While Pip orders our dinner, I take Alis into the living room and set her down amid the torn and crinkled paper she has hoarded. When she caught us tidying it away, she burst into fat, rolling tears, and would not be consoled with anything less than the paper snowing down over her head and drifting around her feet.
Alis returns now to the joy of crumpling and crinkling, while I make for the bookshelf. Each of us has a selection of our favorite books on the living room shelf, and there are two squashy chairs before the fireplace, each with their own lamps hanging above them to encourage our mutual love of reading. Between the two armchairs is a new, third chair, scaled to a child of perhaps ten and sporting its own festive bow. This was my gift to Alis—a reading place of her very own. It is too big for her now, but she will grow into it. And, I hope, grow to love it.
“Pip?” I call, scanning the bookshelf beside the mantel for the book I had been reading to Alis the night before. It has vanished. “Have you seen The Wizard of Oz?” The book is not on the floor, nor any of the chairs, nor on the coffee table.
“The what?” Pip asks, coming into the room.
“The Wizard of Oz. I can’t find it. I could have sworn I put it back on Alis’s shelf, but it is not here. I can’t find the book anywhere in the living room.”
Pip wrinkles her nose, thinking. It is an adorable habit. “The Wizard of Oz?” Pip repeats, lingering over the title as if it was exotic. “No, I haven’t seen it. Is it new?”
“New? No, it’s your old book, the big one? With the watercolor illustrations?” I reply, focused mostly on searching under the furniture now, so much so that I miss the little inflection of genuine curiosity that shades Pip’s answer.
“My old book?” Pip asks, coming to stand beside me. “Can’t have been. I’ve never heard of The Wizard of Oz.”
“Bao bei,” I reproach. “Honestly.”
“Honestly,” she says, and for the first time, the lack of humor in her voice catches in my brain and halts my search. I straighten, and see that Pip’s expression of confusion is genuine. She is not having a laugh.
“Pip,” I say slowly, standing from where I had crouched to peek under Alis’s chair. “The Wizard of Oz? Dorothy and the silver slippers? Traveling the Yellow Brick Road with an animated scarecrow, a tin woodsman, and a cowardly lion? They’re going to the Emerald City to beg boons from the Wizard?”
Pip frowns. “Are you sure this is a book from my world? This isn’t a Syth Story?”
“No,” I say. “No, it’s definitely not.”
Pip shrugs. “Well, I’ve never heard of it, and I don’t know where the book is. Read her some Hobbit, if you want a quest-narrative book.”
I feel my fingers curl into the back of my reading chair and a cold, mercurial horror slide into my gut. Something, though I do not yet know what, is deeply, terribly wrong.
✍
The cold dread spreads upward all through dinner, wrapping tightly around my throat. Even the heat of the curry fails to dull it, making it hard to read to Alis. As Pip suggested, I read Alis the first chapter of The Hobbit after her bath, and then put her down to sleep. My wife remains downstairs, tidying away the wrapping while Alis is out of visual range with the hope that she will have forgotten the bounty of crackling paper come the morning. But my unease is far less easy to forget.
Lucy Piper loves The Wizard of Oz. She promised that once I finished reading the storybook to Alis, we would rent the musical film version. She sings “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” as Alis’s lullaby. She had even once dressed as the witch on Halloween because a girl in her school told her she wasn’t white enough to be Dorothy, and Pip, in her stubborn righteousness, had then adopted the witch as her favorite character because she was convinced they were both mistakenly outcast; they weren’t “normal” like other girls.
So how, suddenly, did it come to be that she is convinced the book does not exist? Either something is horribly wrong with my wife (please, Writer, let that not be the case), or something is wrong with this realm. It is easier to check the latter than the former with an internet search, so that is what I do.
It feels wrong to be relieved when I find exactly zero search returns for The Wizard of Oz, but the terror releases my throat all the same, and whooshes out of me in a sigh.
It is not Pip. Thank the Writer, it is not Pip.
But if it is not Pip, then what is it?
✍
Several days after Christmas, Pip has an appointment with her therapist. She is scheduled to see the woman once weekly, and has done so since we returned to her world; the traumas of her time in mine made it impossible for her to sleep or feel safe in her own home. Sometimes, I attend the sessions too, which has helped me understand the ongoing process of coming to terms with my own part in Pip’s ordeal, and with some of my own feelings and insecurities as well.
Sensing an opportunity to go into a library without Pip hovering and becoming suspicious, I suggest that Alis and I accompany her downtown, on the promise of a lovely family lunch once she is done. Pip agrees, and we all set off, bundled tightly against the winter chill.
The weather is obliging. Though the snow is deep, the sky is clear, and the light crust of ice covering the snow banks glitters in such a way that I am reminded of the wings of the fairies who unwisely used Turn Hall’s fish pond for a mirror. Alis and I slip and skid our way to the campus library after leaving Pip outside her therapist’s office, ostensibly to browse the shelves for an illustrated copy of The Hobbit. Alis seemed to have enjoyed our reading the night before, and I certainly enjoyed the story, for though I have never heard of such a creature as a hobbit, I find the notion of a culture so wholly devoted to the wholesome pleasures of home and hearth appealing. Besides, Alis always prefers having pictures to peruse while she listens to her Da’s voice.
Of course, my ulterior motive for this outing is to question the librarian on duty about the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of The Wizard of Oz from social consciousness.
But when I ask, the young woman at the desk protests that she’d never heard of the book, nor the author
, nor of the film or stage play, though I was certain there had been both. There are photographs of Pip dressed as the Wicked Witch of the West in the albums on our bookshelf—I know this for a fact; my questions about her green face paint had been the whole reason she had produced her battered, well-loved copy of The Wizard of Oz storybook in the first place.
Alis has begun to pick up on my distress, and starts fussing in her carrier, arching and wriggling so that the crown of her head bashes against my chin, frustrating us both. The clerk gives me the sort of pitying look that men with young children often receive in this realm—the expression that says, “Oh, your wife is too busy?” Which infuriates me even more. I heartily do not understand this mentality that men are incapable of being supportive co-parents. Why, by the Writer, would I ever want to foist my daughter solely onto my wife and have no involvement in her upbringing? She is my daughter.
“The Wizard of Oz,” I repeat, pulling the library clerk’s attention back to my inquiry, instead of my parenting abilities. “I am certain that is the correct name.”
“And yet the system says no,” the clerk replies. She gives me an insolent little smirk. If she’d been my apprentice, I would never have allowed her such cheek.
I am starting to wonder if I should be saving my breath to blow away pixies.
I long for a good searching spell, and perhaps the Lost Library, or, failing that, Words of Revelation so I can at least comprehend the full scope of this weirdness’s weavings. I sigh, rubbing first my brows, and then my abused chin, and then finally the top of my daughter’s head.
“Very well,” I say. “Forget about that book. I would like a copy of The Hobbit, if you have one that is illustrated.”
The clerk frowns, straightening from her casual slump, and types what I assume is the title into her computer. “Hm,” she says, returning to her slump. “Don’t have that one either. But the kid’s section is that way.” She points, clearly ready to dismiss me entirely and eager to be rid of my troublesome inquiries.
I sigh again, annoyed to have been stymied yet again. “May I leave my name, so you may call me when the book is returned?”
“No,” the clerk says. “We don’t have one.”
“No illustrated copies at all. . . .” I muse.
The clerk thumps her hand on the desk to emphasize her reply: “No, we don’t have The Hobbit.”
The way she says it gives me pause. “But . . . surely you . . . I am told it is one of the great modern classics of children’s literature. You mean to say this library does not have any copies?”
“Can’t be much of a classic if I’ve never heard of it,” the clerk says. “I major in children’s lit.”
“The Hobbit,” I insist, a sweep of déjà vu pricking up my spine. “Recently adapted into a film trilogy? About a young creature of the kindly west traveling with thirteen dwarves and a wizard to reclaim a kingdom under a mountain from a dragon?”
“No,” the clerk says stubbornly. “I’ve never heard of it. Sounds a bit like the Narnia books, though, if that’s what you mean.”
“It is not,” I say, my ire mounting to the point where I know I am being rude but cannot help it. “And you cannot be much of a scholar if you’ve never—”
“Hey!” the clerk says. “Buddy, chill.”
Chill, I snarl to myself. In the face of incompetence? Hardly!
But knowing that a fit of temper would do me no good, and sensing that the clerk’s patience has now reached its end, I thank her for her time between clenched teeth and take Alis and myself off to the Children’s section. I waste several minutes searching for J.R.R. Tolkien’s work and find no trace of Middle-earth on the shelves. I do, however, find the first of the Narnia books, illustrated with small black-and-white ink sketches, and check this book out for Alis’s bedtime reading.
That evening, after our daughter is abed, I cannot find our copy of The Hobbit. I left it, open to the second chapter, on the arm of Alis’s chair, of that I am certain. But a thorough search turns up nothing, and prompts my wife to ask me if I am feeling perhaps a bit ill, as I am forgetting things recently.
I wonder if the lost books are due to a spate of bad luck—bad luck I earned when I turned away a guest on Solsticetide? Perhaps I should not have threatened my Writer with Smoke, after all. But that does not explain why the librarian, majoring in children’s literature, would be wholly oblivious of the books’ very existence.
I shout that I have forgotten nothing, and that I do not appreciate being patronized. My reply is so heated that it startles Alis awake, and above our heads, our daughter wails. Pip stares at me in reproach, disappointed to have been on the receiving end of what was clearly—to her—an overreaction. When I attempt to walk around her to go up to Alis, she blocks my path.
“You’re in no state to take care of Alis. I’ll do it.”
Fear high, and anger roiling, I force myself to stay still, unclench my fists, and breathe.
I let Pip go up alone. I have far too many memories of my father, similarly angry and puce-faced, blowing like a bellows above my bed, looking for a reason to punish a little boy when he had done nothing more than cry out in his sleep. I will not give my own child similar memories.
✍
The next morning, I log onto my computer and hack. Delving deep into the darkest parts of the Internet, I search out any schemes, cyber-attacks, or viruses that could be causing these books to be removed from the vast expanse of the interweb. Though this would not, of course, explain the way they have also been lost from library shelves and the memories of people. In my quest, I realize that not only are The Wizard of Oz and The Hobbit missing, but so too are all of their derivatives and sequels, as well as the various and many dramatic adaptations.
The cold, mercurial panic returns, and to combat it, I do what the Shadow Hand does best —I make lists. I make a list of every missing work, as far as I’m aware, with a paper and pen, not trusting my computer, in case this is some sort of elaborate, digital virus. Then I make a list of every book we have in the house, as well as every film and television box set, and from there, I add a grid and every other tale I can recall having read or watched with Pip. I fill every line, as Pip once showed me how to do when she was compiling the Excel for our quest. Then I begin the cross-referencing Internet searches.
Cinderella has vanished, as well as the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale The Red Shoes. So has Thackery’s The Rose and the Ring, and Wagner’s Ring Cycle, an opera of which I am quite fond.
Shoes and rings.
It could be more than shoes and rings, but without a full survey of the vanished tales, I have no way to see the pattern, to know if anything else is lost. I rack my brain, but I cannot decipher what the connection may be. Then another thought, worse than the first, occurs to me: there is no way to catalog what is missing in its entirety.
Were I in Turn Hall, or Kingskeep, I would have had the power not only of the Shadow’s Mask and the magical knowledge preservation within it to be able to create a fairly encompassing survey of the literature of Hain, but also the Shadow’s Men on which to rely to gather information from the libraries and private collections all across the kingdom. But here, I have no Mask, no Men, and more books are published annually in this realm than could fit within the Lost Library.
What infuriates me most, though, is that in not having been reared as a denizen of this realm, I have no clue what other stories are vanishing, stories that I have yet to encounter or hear. Stories that, now, I will never know.
Pip told me once of the Great Library of Alexandria. She had been emotional from the pregnancy, and a great maudlin, melancholy mood had settled upon her like a damp, woolen blanket as she recounted the ingenuity of how the Greeks had seized books at ports and copied them. She wept that night for the stories the world had been made bereft of, the scrolls and books swallowed by flame and ash, for the truths and knowledge and wonders her realm had lost forever in a single night.
Now, I am near weeping f
or the same reason, myself. And Pip appears to have no idea that it is happening.
✍
When I return to my office after stepping out for a quick lunch and a cup of coffee, there is a gap in my list.
Something shifted in the fabric of reality while I was downstairs finishing the last of the Indian-food leftovers. Judging by the context of the titles listed around it, I realize that the missing book is The Magic Ring. I look to my list of vanished books and, noting that none are missing, decide that whatever strange power is pulling tales out of existence must only erase information that already exists, is already set down, and that the process is slow. It takes time for the fingers of whatever power is doing this to leak into all the corners of this realm.
Taking up a red pen, I rewrite The Magic Ring onto the master list. It does not fade away, though I watch it for what must be full on twenty minutes while my coffee goes stone cold.
So, whatever is happening only affects that which exists physically. It does not take my own memories away, does not re-erase the information after the original vanishing. But it can steal the memory from others, from the denizens of this place, like Pip and the children’s lit major librarian. What an odd spell. If it is indeed a spell, in this realm of no magic.
A ghastly thought occurs to me: what if this is common, in Pip’s world? That stories regularly fade out of existence? Perhaps there are others, like me, whose realms fracture and dissolve when they cross the borders of reality? But no, that’s ludicrous; The Tales of Kintyre Turn have gone nowhere.
And the world would certainly be more populated with other fictional characters, like myself. Though, it’s not as if we have a support group or private message board online in which to discuss the woes of coming out of a book. I have no way of knowing if there are others like me here in the Writer’s realm.