The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(77)

“All right,” he said. “I’ll get in myself.”

Martin was determined to get some comic material out of this empty clock, one way or the other. As the eldest I think he felt responsible for entertaining us. He began stuffing himself into the clock’s wooden body. I don’t think he expected to succeed—his shoulders were filling out even then—and I remember his curious frown when he reached an arm in and couldn’t find the back. He ducked whole upper body inside. It looked like stage magic, one of Houdini’s trapdoor boxes.

I saw him hesitate, but only for a moment. He put one foot in, then the other, then he was gone. We all looked at each other. Fiona, irritated at the idea that a trick was being played on her, put her head in next. Only seven and small for her age, she barely had to duck. She disappeared inside too.

Helen and I stared.

“Jane,” I called, for she was still busy fooling with the wallpaper. It seems impossible to me now, but she can only have been five years old. “Jane.”

She came trotting over, incurious.

“Where’s Fi?” she said. It was a lengthy soliloquy by her standards.

At that moment first Martin and then Fiona came spilling back out of the clock, Martin spitting mad, Fiona in something like a blissful daze. The first thing I noticed, even before their clothes, was that they both looked suntanned and fit, and their hair had grown by an inch. They smelled like fresh grass.

Time runs differently in Fillory. To them, a month had passed. Just like that Martin and Fiona had had their first adventure there, which Christopher Plover would later write about in The World in the Walls. That was the beginning of everything for us Chatwin children, and it was the end of everything for us too.





CHAPTER 17


Much of what follows has already been described by Christopher Plover in Fillory and Further, his beloved series of novels for children, and ably enough too as far as it goes. I don’t take issue with his work. I’ve made my peace with it. But as you will see his story was not the whole story.

One difference I must insist upon, before and above all else, is that what Plover naively presented as fiction was, apart from some details, entirely true. Fillory was not a figment of our imaginations, or his, or anyone else’s. It was another world, and we traveled to and from it, and we spent a good part of our childhoods there. It was very real.

Rupert had stopped and traced and retraced these last letters—very real—over and over again, until the paper had begun to shed little shreds of itself, as if it couldn’t support the full weight of the meaning he wanted it to carry, the burden he wished to unload onto it. And onto Plum.

At first Plum couldn’t have put her finger on what exactly it was that was freaking her out about this story. But that was it: she’d expected Rupert’s memoir to be a typical upperish-crust jolly-hockey-sticks account of an English boyhood, enlivened by a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the Fillory series. But it was dawning on her that Rupert was going to persist with the joke. He was going to stick to his story, and the story was that Fillory was real.

Maybe this was the Chatwin legacy: full-on insanity. There was madness in the family. Plum put a finger on the wounded paper and felt its roughness. She wanted to heal it.

But she couldn’t. She could only keep reading.

It is difficult to write those words, knowing that they will not be believed. If I were in your place I wouldn’t believe them. I would stop reading. But they are the truth, and I can’t write anything else. I am not a madman, and I am not a liar. I swear it on everything I hold sacred. I suppose I ought to say that it is God’s truth, and it is. But perhaps not the god you are thinking of.

After Martin and Fiona went into Fillory through the grandfather clock, I went through with Helen, and that is how all the events described in The Girl Who Told Time came to pass, more or less—a lifetime’s worth of adventures, all of which happened in the space of five minutes in a dusty back hallway of an old house during the first war. By then Jane was awake and alert again, so all five of us went through together.

Already I can see you shaking your head: no, you’ve got it wrong, they always went by twos. Well damn you and damn Plover too. We often went together, all of us. Why wouldn’t we have?

The truth is, there were many adventures we never told Christopher Plover about, and many more that for his own reasons he didn’t see fit to include in the books. I suppose they must not have fit neatly into the plot. I can’t help but feel that I myself was somewhat slighted in Fillory and Further. It’s petty of me to say it, but I do say it. I stood vigil at the gates of Whitespire during the Long Evening. I claimed the Sword of Six, and then broke it on the peak of Mount Merriweather. But you wouldn’t know any of that from reading Plover.

I was perhaps not a pretty young man. I wasn’t as appealing as Martin. I didn’t make good material, as they say in the literary business. But I suppose if he didn’t write about me at my best, he didn’t write about me at my worst either. He never knew the worst. None of them did, except Martin.

Regardless, all of our lives split that night. They became double. A more alert guardian than Aunt Maude would have noticed the change—the whispered colloquies, the tanned faces and uncut hair, the extra half-inch or so of height we would gain during an especially long trip to Fillory. But she didn’t notice. People are very determined to see only what they can explain.