This wasn't gossip to excite or scandalize people in the neighborhood. This wasn't entertainment.
From what Mack let slip today, some terrible things had happened in the neighborhood—the worst being Tamika Brown's near-drowning, but there were others, and the danger of more bad things happening. Wishes always being turned against the wisher.
Who was doing it? Or was it simply the way of the world, that all desires exacted their price?
Ceese wanted to talk to somebody about it. But who? Not his mama, that was certain. She'd blab to his brothers, at the very least, and then they'd taunt him for the rest of his life about how he believed in magic and wishes. Dad? He wouldn't even understand what Ceese was talking about.
Ura Lee Smitcher? Maybe. She was a hardheaded woman and not prone to believe in strange things, but she knew how to keep her mouth shut. The only reason not to talk to her was that it would worry her that Mack was tied up in all this. And maybe that was her right, to know what her adopted son was involved in so she could worry.
But wasn't it Mack's place to tell his mama what he was going through? Those... what did he call them?... cold dreams. Skinny House. That big Rastafarian fairy. Man, who could possibly believe that if they hadn't held his tiny body in their hands out in Fairyland? If they hadn't seen his wings?
So Ceese kept it to himself. But he still thought about it.
He read Midsummer Night's Dream over and over, at least the fairy parts, and came to the conclusion that he didn't like any of the magical creatures. They were vicious and petty and used their power for stupid and selfish things.
Then again, to be fair, ordinary humans did the same thing. Nobody knew how to use power for good.
Not even me. Why do I think I should be given a gun and a nightstick and a badge and sent out onto the streets as a cop? Because I'm so good that I'll never use my power for evil? Isn't that how all the evil people in the world get started?
No. They know they're doing something bad, or they wouldn't hide what they did and lie all the time. And when I'm a cop, I'll be protecting the weak people from the powerful ones.
Only how do I protect a kid like Tamika from her own wishes? From the malevolent force that will twist those wishes into something dark and terrible?
Over the next few weeks, Ceese started paying attention in church. Then he gave up on the sermons—they were all about working people up to feel the Spirit, but Ceese had seen real magic and he wasn't interested in feelings, he was hungry for understanding. So he spent his time in church reading the Bible, trying to make sense of how Jesus fit into the world that Ceese now understood he lived in.
Mack didn't know he could heal people, but it was obvious in the hospital that day. He held on to Mr. Christmas or Bag Man or whatever his name was, and the man got better. His bones knitted up, his skin smoothed over without a scar, even his clothes changed. So there was healing in Mack's touch even if he couldn't control it himself. Heck, at the age of thirteen maybe Jesus didn't know what he could do, either. Wasn't that the age when Jesus went and talked with those wise men in the temple? Wasn't thirteen when Jews believed a boy became a man?
So what would that mean, if Jesus and Mack were the same kind of creature? That God the Father was a malevolent fairy king? Ceese thought back to the scary woman on the motorcycle—what was she, Satan? Tempting him to kill the boy? But then was it God who played these cruel tricks on people in the neighborhood? What kind of universe would that be?
No, these fairies were the opposite of God. Instead of tricks, he healed people. Instead of bringing them grief, he forgave their sins. And if I'm to serve Jesus in this world, thought Ceese, then I have to find a way to fight these fairies.
Except... if Mack was the creation of something evil, why was he so good? Why was his heart so full of love and hope and joy? Nothing made sense. Maybe things couldn't be sorted out into good and evil.
So Ceese did nothing, because he couldn't even figure out which side he ought to be on, let alone how he could possibly take on magical beings and defeat them.
And he had this memory: I was a giant in that place.
It had felt so good to be unassailably large. What could hurt him there?
The fairy tales were full of giant-killers.
And if he were a giant here, in this world, the real world (though that other one certainly felt real, while he was in it!), he wouldn't be able to help other people using his great size and strength. They'd be terrified of him. They'd shoot him down, like in King Kong and The Iron Giant.
So Ceese trained to be a cop so he could do some good in the world, and read the Bible to figure out what "good" actually was, and did his best to watch over Mack and make sure nothing bad happened to him.
And now and then he walked past that place on Cloverdale Street, carefully looking straight ahead, but without Mack at his side, he never saw a glimmer of Skinny House, and he never saw either Mr. Christmas or that black-clad motorcycle woman on the street.
Word got religion, too. He had seen real power twice in his life now—when Bag Man came out of his parents' bedroom with an impossible baby in a bag, and now in that hospital room when Bag Man was healed just by holding on to Mack Street.
It began to haunt his dreams.
Mack went back to Skinny House the first chance he got. He wanted to find Puck and ask him all the questions that were burning him up inside. But the house was empty, no furniture, no food, no sign that anyone but Mack was ever there. Mack found that if he brought stuff there, it stayed. Real things that he carried into this passage between reality and Fairyland stayed put and didn't pull disappearing acts. So he kept a notebook there, and wrote down all his thoughts. He also brought food—stuff that wouldn't rot without a fridge. Cans of beans and mandarin oranges and little plastic containers of applesauce. He used his allowance to buy a cheap metal can opener and some plastic spoons.
That way he could take expeditions into Fairyland and carry some food with him. Mack didn't know what was edible and it wouldn't matter anyway—in Fairyland, anything might be poisonous. He didn't want to end up like that donkey-headed man.
Though if something did go wrong, what would happen? If there were six ways he could die, and one way he could live, would the one version of himself that lived come back to Skinny House and find six pairs of pants hanging from the hook again? Or was that splitting of time just a one-shot deal? Did it happen because that's just how things worked, or was it something Puck did, toying with him?
Fairyland was a huge place, Mack discovered, but it followed the terrain of the real world.
Mack could sort it out, if he made a rough kind of map and kept his eye on the sun to keep track of east and west, north and south. The mountain of Baldwin Hills and Hahn Park was more forbidding and dangerous than in the real world, but that's because no one had tamed it. There was more water everywhere, too—streams wherever the ground was low, and it rained often when he was there.
Right in the middle of summer, he'd come out soaking wet and from the windows of Skinny House he'd see bright sunlight and bone-dry ground.
He ranged far and wide. There were ancient ruins atop the hills of Century City, a huge stone structure with pillars surrounding a central table that was open to the sky. The handiwork looked Greek or Roman, but the arrangement made him think of Stonehenge. It sat right on the crest of the hill that had been cut in two to put Olympic Boulevard through. Only there was no Olympic Boulevard, and so no cut in the mountain, though where the road would have been a spring burbled up from the earth and started a stream that tumbled over clean rounded stones.
Time worked differently in Fairyland. The first time he went in, he slept the night and when he came out it was also morning in the real world. But ever since then, it was different. If he went to Fairyland for a few hours and came out, in the real world only an hour or so would have passed. So for a while he thought that time went half as fast in Fairyland.
The trouble with swamps is they're easy to get lost in, and Mack found that out the hard way.