The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There(54)

The Fairy reached into her breast pocket and took out a measuring tape. She hooked the business end into September’s shoe and snapped out a length, all the way up to the crown of her head. She put her thumb on the measurement and peered at it.

“One hundred and twenty-odd centimeters,” B. Cabbage said to herself. “Thirteen years, born under the sign of the Bull, carrying 2.3 kilograms of hardship and sorrow, rather a lot for your age, second seasonal cycle, recent contact with harsh Q-rays. Missing .00021 of total body weight due to shadow surgery, memory excised via Ocean one hour, fifty-two minutes, and seventeen seconds ago, replaced by J?rlhopp Clutch one hour, fifty-two minutes and sixteen seconds ago, unit reads thirty-seven percent Gumption by volume.”

The Clutch! September’s hand flew to Gneiss’s pendant hanging around her neck. It pulsed warm in her hand. Saturday hadn’t known about it. He hadn’t guessed she had such a thing.

“You can tell all that about me from your measuring tape?”

“Well, I use the metric system. It’s the only way to get really exact numbers.” The Fairy stuck out her calloused hand. “Belinda Cabbage, Mad Scientist and Proprietor.”

“September. I’m … sorry about your roof.” Where had she heard the name Belinda Cabbage before?

Belinda Cabbage looked up over September’s head. The ceiling, though showing several alarming blast-scars, seemed no worse for wear and entirely hatchless.

“Looks all right to me.” The Fairy shrugged. All the same, she selected a piece of equipment from the table, one cluttered with delicate colorful antennae and ampules of liquid with varying numbers of bubbles in them. Several etched lines marked measurements on their surfaces. B. Cabbage shook it vigorously, then held the device up to the ceiling and waited for the bubbles to settle. The antennae spun—some of them looked like they might have once belonged to a snail or three.

“Wondrous strange!” Cabbage exclaimed. “Where did you say you came from?”

“I didn’t, but I came through a hatch at the bottom of the Forgetful Sea.”


Belinda Cabbage smacked her free hand against her forehead. It left a sooty print. “My foot! I must have left it there! What a menace that ocean is, I tell you what! The Forgetful Sea is miles and miles from here, girl. And then miles more! But I think, I think I might have collected samples, oh, it couldn’t have been more than a hundred years ago, and it was so much easier to open up a squidhole than to walk all that way. Ugh, who wants to walk when you can tentacle?”

“Squidhole?”

“Oh, well, you’ll be familiar with the basic Physicks of wyrmholes I’m sure. You need a frightful lot of equipment to manage one; the grocery list is hideous. Bee-souls, eel-hearts, about six liters of gnome ointment, a hair off of the head of Cutty Soames, and that old pirate never falls asleep, no matter how much gloamgrog he drinks—and that’s just for the preliminaries! Anyone with a beaker full of sense goes for squidholes instead. You need a Dread Device and several willing field mice, that’s all!” She gestured at a bluish, fleshy sort of engine the size of a bread box. It had been shoved absentmindedly on top of a stack of journals and manuals. Under its eerily undulating skin, toothy gears spun. Several long fleshy tubes extended from its face and hung limply down the stack of books to lie dormant on the table, their ends capped with glass. Inside the glass, tiny, sweet-faced mice slept curled up with their tails in their paws. “A wyrmhole just goes from one place to another place. Dull as a street. A squidhole starts in one place—like my shop here—and goes to five to ten other places, depending on how many field mice you managed to get. I suspect I left an end open, and I do apologize for that—sloppy of me, truly sloppy.”

September did not like the look of the Dread Device. She felt it prudent to change the subject. And suddenly, she did remember where she had heard the name before. She closed her Clutch in her hand. “I heard about you on the radio,” September said. “But I thought you lived in Fairyland-Above. ‘Belinda Cabbage’s Hard-Wear Shoppe, bringing you all the latest in Mad Scientific Equipment.’”

“That’s me!” The Fairy agreed with a wide, frank smile. “And I do, or I did. But my Narrative Barometer started reading Imminent Katabasis Event, and I knew it was time to go underground.” This time, Belinda Cabbage pointed at a smart brass dial on the wall, sealed in a glass bell. It had hands like a clock’s, though there seemed to be at least seven or eight of them, and possible readings of Katabasis, Anabasis, Incoming Hero(ine), Musical Thrones, Kidnapping, Locked Room Mystery, Coming of Age, Treasure Hunt, Epic, War Saga, Edda, and many others in concentric rings so small September could not read them. “I built it to track Pandemonium, so I could get home whenever I needed to. But then Pandemonium stopped moving around, and it seemed a bit useless—but I never throw anything away. Jolly way of behaving, no matter what my assistants might say! Want not, waste not! And a good thing too. Imminent Katabasis Event means something’s going on Down Below, because Katabasis means a journey to the underworld. It means put your business trousers on and head underground! I don’t mean to suggest you didn’t know that! It’s only that I am also a Mad Professor, and I often teach, so I’m used to explaining things. Just raise your hand if you don’t understand. Anysquid! I’ve been investigating the shadows and building and thinking down here. I think better by myself, anyway. Broke my heart to leave Eva Lovewool, my first assistant and an Extremely Mad Scientist in her own right. Heart of my heart, that girl. Handsome as an armoire and twice as useful! But she’ll keep the roof on the place till things sort themselves out.”