by J. M. Frey
Aggravated, and without anywhere to turn for answers, I decide to join Pip and Alis downstairs, where they are currently making an unholy racket with one of the electronic noise-making toys our neighbors gifted Alis. How Pip can mark papers through the din is unfathomable.
Alis lights up when I walk into the room, bounces Library’s face off the blanket, swings him in the air, and shouts, “Daa!”
“Wow. Look at that poor plushie swing,” Pip says, looking up from her stack of paper, her red pen balanced on her upper lip like a comical mustache.
“I see more of Kintyre in her each day,” I admit.
Pip snorts so hard the pen drops. “Now that is terrifying.”
“Come on, sweeting,” I say to Alis. “Let us see if we can’t override those destructive Turnish tendencies and make of you a proper book-mouse?”
“‘Ook!” Alis agrees as I scoop her up and away from the dreadful noise-maker and move over to the book shelf. Nothing seems to be missing this time, for which I am grateful. Alis paws at her shelf, where we keep her board books, but nothing she pulls out seems to satisfy her. “‘Ook!” she shouts, louder and louder, getting frustrated when each book she inspects fails to meet her standards.
“Darling, darling,” I try to hush her, moving away from the shelf, but she just screams louder. I step back up to the shelf, and she sweeps every remaining book off of hers with all the dramatic flair my father had while raging. Oh, dear, there is such a lot of Turn in Alis.
Alis wriggles to get down, and I set her on her chair. She immediately scoots off that and over to the pile of books, tugging them each out of my hand as I try to re-shelve them and sobbing, “No, no, no!” And then she says a word I’ve never heard her use before: “Toto!”
Stunned, I drop onto my own rear end, on top of the pile of books, and stare at Alis with dawning horror and comprehension.
“Are you looking for The Wizard of Oz, s-sweeting?” I ask. Alis, miserable and frustrated, nods her head and sobs louder.
Oh, thank the Writer. I’m not the only one who remembers. I’m not going mad.
But then, what in the name of all that is wholesome is going on?
I can’t help but rage silently. Nothing makes sense. It makes my skin itch, and my teeth hurt, and my lungs clench. It makes me irritable and short of patience. I am a man written to be physically uncomfortable when I do not understand something. I literally need my world to make sense, and with this knowledge missing, gone, I am not only uneasy, I am in pain.
I must get to the bottom of this.
“What’d she say?” Pip asks, abandoning her marking. “Toto? What do you think that’s supposed to be?”
“It’s the d-d-dog,” I say, breathing deep to try to calm myself. “Fr-fr-from The Wizard of Oz-z.”
“Forsyth—” Pip begins, setting aside her stack of papers and red pen. She stands, scoops Alis up, and then juggles her against her shoulder in an attempt to calm our child. Pip looks like she’s going to say more, but instead she just shakes her head and sighs, long and frustrated.
“It’s re-real!” I snap, surging to my feet. “I’m n-not ma-mad! It is a-a-a re-real book, and th-there was a f-f-film adap-ta-ta-tion, and a musical p-play!”
“I don’t remember this book, Forsyth,” Pip says back, trying to keep her expression to something passive and even, but I can see her frustration bubbling up in the way she widens her stance, as if preparing to lunge or dodge. Her mouth thins, and her lips go white.
“Y-you t-told me it was your fa-favori-te-te s-s-story as a child because you always w-wuh-ished to be swept away into a magical re-realm. You told me t-this, Pip!”
“Yeah, well, look at how well that wish turned out for me.” She purses her lips and rolls her eyes.
“D-don’t laugh!” I grab her arm, turn her toward me, and get close so she can see just how concerned I am. “The Hobbit has v-vanished as well. And The Lord of the Rings. Cin-cinderella. Pip, b-books are dis-disappear-ring, and you will believe me!” I roar.
Pip goes entirely still, all the color draining from her face in an instant. Her gaze flickers down to where I’ve got a hold on her arm. Pip swings away, putting herself between Alis and my anger, and hisses: “Stop shouting!” She covers Alis’s ear with her free hand and presses the other side of our daughter’s head against her shoulder. “Let go!”
I take a step back, all fury extinguished in a cold splash of realization and dread. My knees and fingers shake as I unwrap my hand from around Pip’s arm. Her shirt is sleeveless, and I watch with sickening, nauseous horror as the skin where I was grabbing immediately changes from a bloodless white to an angry, abraded red. It will bruise, of that I am certain.
I have hurt my wife. I look to Alis, whose face is turned into her mother’s neck, and finally register that my child, my baby, is screaming. I have scared my child.
“Oh,” I say, small and weak, devastated. My legs crumble and I drop into my reading chair. “Oh, Pip. I am f-f-foul. I-I-I am so-so-so-sorry. I am . . . how c-c-could I?”
For the one thing I have always promised myself is that I would not be my father.
Pip bundles Alis closer to her own chest as she takes a step back. And then, furious, she shakes a sharp finger in my direction. “This is the second time you’ve lost your shit over things that don’t exist. So you either need to figure this out or you need to go take a really long look at yourself, Forsyth! I don’t know if all the men from your realm go batshit when they become fathers, or if this is a Reed thing, but you are never going to fucking threaten me or Alis again!”
Perhaps Alis is not the only one of us with too much Turn in them.
I swallow hard, nodding, and feel desperately like I want to both vomit and sob at the same time. Alis whimpers and squirms, and Pip puts her down on her blanket with Library before coming back to kneel in front of my chair. She places her hands firmly on my knees and looks up into my face, concern and hurt written large in her brown eyes, and that is it, that is enough. I cannot hold back the wave of self-loathing and reproach.
“Oh, Pip!” I say, reaching out to touch, gently, the red mark on her arm. Her name crackles and hitches in the middle when the tears come.
“Okay,” she says softly. “Okay, c’mere.” She rises up and I fold down. She wraps her arms around my waist and it is perfect. It is home.
She does not forgive me, for what I did was unforgivable, and I do not ask for it. But in her arms, with my nose in her hair and my mouth against the little puffed scar shaped like a leaf on her neck, there is a kind of closure.
“I wuh-wi-will not,” I say gently. I kiss the scar and hold Pip close, willing the worry out of my limbs so that I don’t crush my wife. “Never again. I sh-shall not.”
“God, you’re more scared than I am,” Pip says softly, voice a waft of breath against my ear and filled with worried awe. “You’re shaking.”
“Pip—I’m s-sorry. I’m just so confused. It is no excuse, but I cannot . . . I cannot bear not understanding.”
“Where the books have gone?”
I nod, miserable, and she sits back to study my face.
“You mean it,” she says, reaching up to cup my cheek in her palm. I lean against her, nuzzling. “You really do think that books are disappearing.”
I nod again, not trusting my tripping tongue with such a grave pronouncement.
“Are you fading?” Pip asks, voice tremulous. “Is it you? Are you just . . . phasing out of existence?” She grabs my face in both hands now, and hers are shaking just as much as mine when I lay my hands over hers. Tears pool at the bottom of her eyes, thick but not falling. “Oh my god. Forsyth. What if you can’t live in this realm? What if your mind is going first, like Alzheimer’s? Is that why you’re getting weird and violent?”
This is a possibility that I have not yet entertained, and it fills me with an even greater flood of terror than the revelation that books are vanishing.
What if it is as my wife says? What if it is
I who is sick, who is wrong, who is broken? But no, no! Alis remembers the books. Unless Alis is in just as much danger as I?
A quick glance at my daughter, clutching Library and grumbling, eyes red-rimmed and posture miserable, curled in on herself, assures me that she still breathes. That she is still here. Pip follows my line of sight and freezes, her whole body going tense. She launches herself at Alis, flopping down beside the baby and cuddling her close.
Her motherly instincts must be screeching at her, but there is nothing to fight here. There is nothing to defend her child against. Nothing tangible, at least.
Either one of two things is happening.
The first: that I cannot exist outside of my book, and that I am breaking down, slowly, bit by bit, rotting away or fading like mist under a strong sun. And Alis might be equally in danger of the same.
Or the second, and more terrifying possibility: I am not going mad. Books really are vanishing, and Alis and I are the only ones who can remember them because we are not of this realm.
And if that is the case, what happens if The Tales of Kintyre Turn are next?
I ponder on this, silent while Pip attends to Alis in an effort to calm herself. Eventually, I return to my office to double check my list and ruminate further. To make plans.
In the end, the most cool-headed, logical thing to do turns out to be, unfortunately, the thing I want to do the least. But I pride myself in my cool-headed logic; I would be too much like my brother if I relied on instinct and attacking first. And, as Pip has pointed out, my patience has been much too thin as of late.
So the cool-headed, logical thing prevails.
I therefore barricade myself in my office and make a phone call that I never, in the whole of my life, would have expected to make.
“Hello?” says the hated voice on the other end when he picks up.
For a moment, the words stick in my throat, and I am ashamed of my own cowardice. But finally, I force myself to speak. For I am the Shadow Hand of Hain, am I not? I am Lordling of Lysse. It is my duty to act with courage, to act in defense of my kingdom, my king, my Chipping, and my family.
“Mr. Reed. I . . .” I swallow hard, begging my tongue to stay limber. Through the phone, I hear him gasp, no doubt recognizing my peculiar accent. “I need your help.”
Furnishings
Solinde licks Words of Finding out of the mouth of a traveler on the road, a young man with a cow to sell at market, sent out by his mother. Solinde has no use for a dried up heifer and seduces the boy instead, lays down with him in the thorns, and laughs when he begs for her name and proposes marriage in the same breath.
She was trapped once by giving up her name to a young farmer with stars in his eyes; she won’t do it a second time.
Words don’t last long on Deal-Maker lips, so Solinde casts the spell over a map she plucked from the boy’s pocket as soon as he and his milky white waste of grain have vanished behind the bend of the road. The spell indicates that she must cross the water to the north, and so she sings a great turtle up from the depths of the channel and compels it to ferry her across on its wide back.
On the sandy beach, she considers killing the turtle, eating the meat and keeping the shell for potions-work, and then decides that it would be too impractical. She is mortal no longer; she does not need to eat. She is a Deal-Maker; she no longer needs to craft weak potions out of herbs like a common hedge-witch. She sends the turtle away, never knowing how close it came to its own demise.
On the beach, she uses up the last of the boy’s Words of Finding, and follows the pull of the spell up into Nairn. It is a sleepy seaside village on the southern coast of Gadot, filled with small cottages and treasure shops crusted with antique bottles of sea glass and knickknacks made from painted shells. The Words lead her to a shop filled with antique furniture. It is all sturdy and plain, made in an age when functional was more important to mortals than beautiful, and the great chores of farming and manufacture took twice as much time because no human had yet discovered the Words that made life easier.
As with the shoes, Solinde cannot decipher which particular item amid the jumble of dust-grayed furniture shoved in a pile of tripping hazards in the back corner is the totem for which she came. It is either the listing wardrobe, or a wide chair made entirely of iron ore, or an old lamp post with a shattered glass pane. Magic wafts from the pile like a rotten odor, but she cannot pinpoint its origin.
The proprietor asks if something has caught her eye and offers to help her unearth whatever it is she wants. Frustrated, Solinde calls down the lightning instead. The proprietor screams and flees. The shop is filled with such wonderfully old, dry wood that it goes up around her like a bonfire on Solsticetide.
Outside, and above, a handful more stars wink out.
Four
By the time Elgar Reed has driven to Victoria, The Chronicles of Narnia and all the attendant dramatic adaptations and audio books have dissolved. Even the copy of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, which I had left on Alis’s shelf, has vanished. I photographed it with my cell phone, along with the covers of every other book Pip and I own, and it is now gone from the digital album. The photo is just black.
Reed and I have coordinated his arrival so that Pip is at the school when he rings the doorbell. I have worried her enough with my behavior; to invite over a man I had professed just three weeks prior was my enemy and who would never be welcome in my house would be enough shock to have Pip seriously questioning my mental health. And she is already concerned as it is, worried that I am falling apart in this world I was not Written to inhabit.
As am I.
I fear that perhaps I am losing more than the books. Or that the world is destabilizing around me, and that is why I am imagining stories that Pip and the rest of the denizens of this world have never known, stories that I have been telling to Alis. So that is why I have called upon my creator. If anyone will know that I am wrong, it must be the man who invented me, yes? My wife knows me as I am now—Syth Piper—but Elgar Reed knows Forsyth Turn.
Or, at least I hope he does. I have no illusions about the fact that I was written to be a secondary character, with fewer than twenty spoken lines in the whole of the eight-book epic that follows my brother, my greatest passions convenient throwaway lines to him. As much as it galls, it is something I must labor to come to terms with. My Writer may have invented me as a supporting character in Kintyre’s life and world, but I am a person, whole and entire unto myself, and that is what keeps me shielded from any sort of philosophical existential trauma. I am a man. I am complete.
When the doorbell rings, Alis pops her head up and cranes around to look down the stairs. “Ma ma ma?” she asks from her jumper seat in the doorway of my office.
“Not even remotely, sweeting,” I say, brushing by her and dropping a kiss on her head as I go. She is safe enough in the jumper seat for now, and I will be bringing my guest back up to the office right away. “But a very good guess based on sound deductive reasoning. I applaud you.”
Alis swivels in her chair to watch as I head downstairs, chanting “Dah da dah da daaa!” as if she is a cheerleader waving pompoms instead of a slightly soggy Library. I appreciate her support, for my heart is in my throat and I can feel my hand starting to shake as I reach for the door knob.
“Thank you for calling me,” Elgar Reed says when I pull open the door. Neither of us extends a hand to shake. There is a small case by his feet, for Victoria is not so close to Seattle that he’ll be able to easily travel back at the end of this evening. I have offered my Writer the guest room while he is here, as a good lordling ought. It is bad manners to ask for someone’s help and then make them lodge in an inn. Though, to be truthful, the length of his visit depends on Pip’s reaction when she gets home.
Not trusting my tripping tongue, I gesture for Reed to enter, and then offer to take his coat. True to Pip’s prediction, the snow outside is nearly knee-high where I have shoveled it off the walk. And she threatens that
it will only get deeper.
Silent, probably nervous, and clearly unsure of his actual welcome—his eyes dart to my hands to assure himself that they are indeed free of Smoke, I can only assume—Reed follows me to the kitchen. I have the tea set already laid out. We stand there in awkward and stilted silence as the electric tea kettle does its job. Upstairs, Alis chatters to herself.
When we both have our mugs prepared to our liking, I show him upstairs. As I feared, instead of coming directly into the office, Reed stops and bends down to shove his jowly face into Alis’s line of sight. For a moment, my daughter regards him with wide eyes and skepticism of an amount that I would call entirely healthy.
“Hello, my lady . . .”
“A-Alis,” I supply, grudgingly. Pip and I had been trying to keep our daughter as much a secret from Reed as possible. Sharing her with my creator is one of the prices, unfortunately, of trying to get to the bottom of all this. I couldn’t have invited him over on the sly had I asked Martin and Mei Fan to take Alis today; Pip would have wanted to know why.
“Alis Turn,” Reed says, reaching out to, I assume, pinch her cheek.
“Alis P-Pie-Piper,” I correct, and then smile as Alis intercepts Reed’s unwelcome and uninvited touch by smashing the hard button-eyes of Library on his arm.
Reed makes a face at the drool-damp fabric and straightens, and I hold Alis’s jumper to the side to allow him to pass into my office. He is less openly hostile toward its contents this time around, though he trundles straight to the wall where Smoke is hanging and stares hard at the hilt of my blade.
“This is beautiful,” he breathes, and I’m not certain if he means to praise me, the elves who forged it, or his own imagination for thinking it up. I bite back my snort all the same, because—and I must remind myself of this—I am the one who invited him here.