The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)(60)
The landscape had, if anything, gotten more monotonous. Far behind him were the moments when streaks of dark frozen schist occasionally marred the white snow. Once he’d passed what he was fairly sure was a fallen meteorite stuck in the ice, a lump of something black, like a lost charcoal briquette. But that was a long time ago.
He was far gone. After days without real sleep his mind was a machine for monitoring spells and moving his feet, nothing else. But while he was checking off anomalies, there was something screwy going on with his compass wheel, too. It wobbled erratically, and it was getting kind of distorted. The N had grown vast and swollen; it was taking up five-sixths of the circle, and the other directions had withered away to almost nothing. The S he was supposed to be fo wraith, a wisp of warm flesh and the right nowgllowing had shrunk to a tiny squiggle in microscopic jewel type.
The black spot was taller than it was wide, and it bobbed up and down with his stride the way an external object would. It wasn’t corneal damage then. And it was growing larger and larger, too. It was Mayakovsky, standing by himself in the powdery nothingness, holding a blanket. He must be at the pole. Quentin had completely forgotten where he was going or why.
When he got close enough Mayakovsky caught him. The tall man grunted, wrapping the heavy, scratchy blanket around him, and swung him down to the snow. Quentin’s legs kept moving for a few seconds; then he lay still, panting, on his side, twitching like a nerble from wher
ALICE
QUENTIN DIDN’T SPEND any time in Brooklyn that summer because his parents didn’t live there anymore. Abruptly and without consulting him, they’d sold off their Park Slope town house for a colossal sum and semiretired to a faux-Colonial McMansion in a placid suburb of Boston called Chesterton, where Quentin’s mother could paint full time and his father could do God only knew what.
The shock of being severed from the place he grew up in was all the more surprising because it never really came. Quentin looked for the part of him that should have missed his old neighborhood, but it wasn’t there. He supposed he must have been shedding his old identity and his old life all along without noticing it. This just made the cut cleaner and neater. Really, it was probably easier this way. Not that his parents had made the move out of kindness, or any logic other than the obvious financial one.
The Chesterton house was yellow with green shutters and sat on an acre of land so aggressively landscaped that it looked like a virtual representation of itself. Though it was trimmed and detailed in a vaguely Colonial style, it was so enormous—bulging in all directions with extra wings and gables and roofs—that it looked like it had been inflated rather than constructed. Huge cement air-conditioning bunkers hummed outside night and day. It was even more unreal than the real world usually was.
When Quentin arrived home for summer vacation—Brakebills summer, September for the rest of the world—his parents were alarmed at his gaunt appearance, his hollow, shell-shocked eyes, his haunted demeanor. But their curiosity about him was, as always, mild enough to be easily manageable, and he started gaining weight quickly with the help of their massive, ever-full suburban refrigerator.
At first it was a relief just to be warm all the time, and to sleep in every day, and to be free of MayakovskyAbsolutely notbv graduation he got and the Circumstances and that merciless white winter light. But after seventy-two hours Quentin was already bored again. In Antarctica he’d fantasized about having nothing to do except lie on his bed and sleep and stare into space, but now those empty hours were here, and they were getting old amazingly fast. The long silences at Brakebills South had made him impatient with small talk. He had no interest in TV anymore—it looked like an electronic puppet show to him, an artificial version of an imitation world that meant nothing to him anyway. Real life—or was it fantasy life? whichever one Brakebills was—that was what mattered, and that was happening somewhere else.
As he usually did when he was stuck at home, he went on a Fillory binge. The old 1970s-era covers looked more and more dated every time he saw them, with their psychedelic Yellow Submarine palette, and on a couple of them the covers had come off completely and been tucked back between the pages as bookmarks. But the world inside the books was as fresh and vital as ever, unfaded and unironized by time. Quentin had never really appreciated the cleverness of the second book before, The Girl Who Told Time, in which Rupert and Helen are abruptly shanghaied into Fillory straight out of their respective boarding schools, the only time the Chatwins cross over in winter instead of summer. They end up back in an earlier time period, one that overlaps with the storyline of the first book. With the aid of foreknowledge, Rupert dogs Martin’s and Helen’s footsteps—the earlier Helen’s—as they repeat the action of The World in the Walls, note for note. He keeps just out of view, dropping clues and helping them out without their knowledge (the mysterious character known only as the Wood One turns out to have been Rupert in disguise); Quentin wondered if Plover wrote The Girl Who Told Time just to shore up all the plot holes in The World in the Walls.
Meanwhile Helen embarks on a hunt for the mysterious Questing Beast of Fillory, which according to legend can’t be caught, but if you do catch it—all logic aside—it’s supposed to give you your heart’s desire. The Beast leads her on a tricksy, circuitous chase that somehow winds in and out of the enchanted tapestries that adorn the library of Castle Whitespire. She only ever catches a glimpse of it, peeking coyly out at her from behind an embroidered shrub before vanishing in a flicker of cloven hoofs.