The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There(63)

September dashed upstairs to her own bedroom, where her own bed lay neatly made and her own clothes hung in the closet. Outside the window was nothing but a field of stars dropping down into nothing, no land, no moon, no sun, just stars flaming on as far as any eye could see.

“You’re both wrong,” Iago said behind her. The pair had followed her up into her room, just as hushed as air. The Marquess looked as though she might cry. She held her arms tight to her chest. “It’s my old house in Nephelo, where I was a kitten before I took up with the Red Wind and became a more cosmopolitan cat. There’s my cloud-bed with all the nice little cumulus pillows I loved, and my mist-mirror where I groomed myself to be so handsome, and I don’t know how either of you can have missed the lightning-hearth downstairs, with a nice fat cloud-roast turning over it.”

“Father will be home,” the Marquess said, and she sounded so small and afraid September could not believe this was the same girl who had ruled Fairyland with her gloved fists.

But September thought she had the puzzle licked. “If you see your own room, and I see mine, and Iago sees his, perhaps we are not really at home, any of us. There’s lizards in Africa that can change color whenever they like, to hide or to make other lizards like them better. Maybe this house is trying to get us to like it—or hiding from us what it really looks like. Maybe … maybe we’ve got here at last, and at the bottom of the world there’s a place that looks like everyone’s house all at once, because the world has got to have a house just like a person. And the house the world lives in would have to have every other house inside it! And outside…” September refused to look at the dizzying plain of stars again. “Outside all the bits of Fairyland-Below crowd in on top of it, because we’re under everything. Or maybe they’re not even Fairyland-Below, but other underworlds, like A-Through-L said. Underworlds all the way down.”

But the shadow of the Marquess was not listening to her. She looked out the bedroom door toward the stairs they’d come up, and before September had finished being very clever if she said so herself, Maud had started down the steps again. The Marquess said nothing, just went down the stairs and around the bannister and through the kitchen to the cellar door. September hurried after her, shivering with an eerie sort of familiarness. Even if she believed all the things she’d thought about the place, it was her house. She’d put up pickles with her mother in that cellar last fall. She’d left that pan soaking in the sink, and that teakettle ready for a nice pot. But it stood so empty and awfully dark, with no one inside and no sound, not even of the little dog scrabbling about looking for treats.

The Marquess put her hand on the doorknob. The radio crackled to life, and all of them jumped, startled, their hearts beating wildly. A voice crackled and popped from within.

“… missing in France after hostilities erupted outside Strasbourg. Early casualty reports are grim—”

September snapped it off. She barely heard the words, the blood in her face beat so hard and hot. No one said this was a bad place, she told herself. No one said the bottom of the world was somewhere terrible. It’s only dark, and dark’s not so frightening. Everything’s dark in Fairyland-Below. That doesn’t mean it’s wicked.

The Marquess—Maud—started down the cellar stairs. The old wood creaked loudly under her feet, and louder still under Iago’s paws as he padded after her. September wanted to just let the Marquess go. If she was going to be rude and wander off when any fool could see they ought to stick together, well, what did she expect from a girl like that? But the cellar, even back at home, with a good lantern and her mother at her side, still scared her a bit. So terribly dark and full of dust and spiders! And they were not at home, no matter how home-like it looked. And so September went down into the blackness, because she could not let another girl go alone.

This is what comes of having a heart, even a very small and young one. It causes no end of trouble, and that’s the truth.

*

The cellar of the house at the bottom of the world looked like any cellar you have ever seen. Full of old, forgotten things or else things put away for a cold, needful day. Jars of pickles and bottles of liquor and jams, each neatly labeled: Idun’s Apple Butter, Bacchus’s Best Blackberry Wine, Eve’s Blue Ribbon Fig Jelly, Kali’s Red-Hot Pickled Peppers. Stacks of old newspapers moldered away, their headlines growing dark moss. A hurricane lamp resting on a great sack of Coyote’s Extra-Fine Cornmeal Flour flickered, guttered, and flared up again, showing Brobdingnagian cobwebs and crowded shelves and the Marquess and her Panther—and a large, long steamer trunk in the middle of the floor. It sat up on wooden pallets, to keep it off the earthen floor in rains and snows. Brass studs stubbled all over it; a brass lock bigger than a hog’s head kept it locked tight.

“An unopenable box on an unbreakable bier,” September said softly. It just felt right, to whisper in such a cellar. “Though it doesn’t look very unbreakable to me, I must say.”

The Marquess stared at it. “I thought I heard something,” she said. “Something rustling down here. Something … chewing. But there’s no one here. Surely, we can’t get any lower than this. It’s the bottom of the bottom of the world.”

And then September heard it, too: a strange little mumbling chewing sound in the dark. Like a mouse gnawing at something far too big for it. Iago growled deep in his throat and wiggled down on his haunches, his eyes flashing. He crept forward on his belly, sniffing at a barrel labeled Ratatosk’s High-Yield World-Tree Seeds. His whiskers twitched; his tail snapped from side to side.