CHAPTER VIII
WHERE THERE’S A WHELK THERE’S A WAY
In Which September Walks on the Moon, Is Accused of Sundry Wickednesses by a Lobster and Two Jackals, Hails a Crab, and Meets a Very Unusual Mollusk
We have said before that the world is a house.
You and I have gone together into the basement where the underworlds are kept. We have lounged comfortably in the front room and shared our familiar tea with all things familiar: Omaha and Europe and cruel schoolmates and spy movies and airplane factories and amiable dogs. We have played such wonderful games in the upstairs bedroom, where Wyveraries and Marids and witches and giant talking cats peek out from behind the bedpost and the Lamp is always on. You might think that I will take you to the attic next, where the heavens of a house get bundled up with twine and draped with muslin and wait quietly for our footsteps. But it is not so. In the house of the world, the heavens are not in the attic.
They are on the roof.
Shall we crawl up there and see?
Why, here is everything that soared up high and got lost, everything that wanted to keep safe from marauders below. The tenderhearted old world catches everything thrown too far and too hard, keeps everything fragile whole: baseballs and stuffed bears and birds’ nests and last autumn’s leaves, zeppelins and Icarus and Leonardo’s flying machine, Fairies and pterodactyls and cherubim and hot air balloons and a Russian dog or two. It’s hard to get up there, harder than the stairs down into the basement. It takes longer; you must climb out a window and shimmy up the chimney and pull yourself over by your fingernails without breaking the gutters. Gravity is involved, and unbreakable spells concerning escape velocity. After all, anyone can go down into the cellar if they are not afraid of the dark. Any tale you care to tell calls for a quick trip to the underworld to bring up another bag of flour and a working knowledge of your darker nature. The surface of the world is like a great black net; any moment you could fall through and fall deep. But for every underworld there is an overworld, an upper world just as strange as the lower, just as bright as its cousin is brooding. The snow that falls in one splashes down as rain in the other-and brightness is not less perilous than shadow. An Italian poet got himself a ticket good for both shows once and came back to tell us all about it, which shows excellent manners.
Everything that goes down must come up again.
When you leave the world, the going gets tough, whether you are a chemical rocket or a little girl. Take my hand, I know the way. Narrators have a professional obligation not to let their charges fall onto the pavement.
Aroostook and September idled, each in their ways. The Model A’s rumble mellowed into a thick purr as Ballast’s soda-gas flowed through her insides. The light of the sun on the Moon blazed pure white; the pearly sand beneath those four piebald tires sparkled sharply, purposefully.
September stared. Specifically, she stared up. She could not quite put a name to what she saw towering above her. Even after climbing out of the car and putting the handbrake carefully on, she still could not get her head all the way around it. Her hands shook even though the Moon had stilled some time ago. In the end they had only fallen a few, embarrassing feet. The off-ramp hung miserably behind her, broken off in midair, jumbled and cracked and twisted by the quake. Bits of ivory briar crumbled away into the starry black; an awful metallic whine wheezed out of the silver paving stones. B.D.’s Moondock Salvagation drifted back downroad, righted and ruddered, looking for wrecks. But September barely heard the sounds of the barge and the creaking road. What clanged behind her could not possibly be important.
In front of her yawned the mouth of a seashell the size of a mountain.
It lay on its side, a sea-snail shell tapering for miles into a slender point on one end and a massive knobbly spiral crown on the other. Along its spine rose great prongs tipped with glowing white flame. It seemed to be every color at once, jade-green and amethyst and quicksilver at the crown, swirling into deep blue and indigo and bright fuchsia, and then into white-orange and copper and gold as its tail swept away up the shore. For the off-ramp emptied out not only directly into the giant shell but onto the shore of a scarlet, frothing sea, its waves washing the curve of the sea-snail and leaving pink rinds of salt behind. The height of the thing made September dizzy. Polished mother-of-pearl lined the shell’s wide mouth. It opened gracefully inward like a smile. A steep coral staircase led up to the lip of the entrance and what could be inside September would have ventured no guesses.
“It’s all right to gape, girl. I love it when people gape! Means they recognize the spectacular when they see it.”
September startled. The great snail shell had so swallowed up her attention that she’d noticed nothing else, not even the trio of creatures guarding that steep staircase. On the left side of it crouched a black jackal with great dark ears and bright silver eyes. On the right side perched a white jackal with a long, pale snout and piercing dark eyes. Between them, a large, muscular, and very green lobster stood watch. In her thick, powerful claw she clamped a long, two-pronged fork whose tips glittered as if to assure September of their sharpness. Her antennae and the jackals’ tails wafted to and fro in the same rhythm. Two of the shell’s fiery prongs framed the three of them. It was the white jackal who had spoken.
“If you need more time to be amazed, just give us an estimate, love,” said the black jackal. Their voices were quite high and human-like.
“What is this place?” whispered September. The shushing sounds of the sea seemed to rub against her, making her skin feel prickly and hot.
The lobster cleared her throat-do lobsters have a throat? September wondered.
“Welcome to Almanack, the All-In-One! Sanctuary, Safehouse, Home of the Stationary Circus and the College of Lunar Arts, Number One Tourist Destination on the Heavenly Circuit and Capital of the Moon! These are my associates Rushe and Waite, Knights of the Crepuscular Girdle, and I am Nefarious Freedom Coppermolt the Third, Lobster of the Watch.”
“This is Almanack? There’s…a city in there?”
The white jackal laughed, a shrill yip and cry.
“What else would it be? The highway leads here, after all.”
“But highways might lead anywhere!”
Nefarious Freedom Coppermolt the Third stamped her fork. “They might, but they don’t. King Crunchcrab decreed that in a proper Empire, all roads lead to capitals, and they couldn’t have rogue roads just lying about leading anywhere they pleased. A road has to go to a city at the least, or else it will be arrested and sent to the countryside for rehabilitation.”
September could not quite believe this, but she could not quite disbelieve it, either. She thought she ought to visit Charlie, and sooner rather than later.
“Of course, the Moon isn’t strictly speaking part of Fairyland,” Rushe, the white jackal, growled.
“No it is not,” harrumphed the lobster. “My great-great-grandmother, for whom I am named, would pinch her own gravestone rather than see it happen. She fought in the Battle of the Whelk when the Moon washed its hands of Fairies and threw away the bucket. Wrestled a basilisk to a standstill, my gran! Lost her claw in a Fairy’s mouth, but it was mostly turned to stone anyway. Lived to lay her eggs and shed her shell and show no mercy to collaborating crayfish. Now I serve in her name and in her place! Nobody throws a fork farther. I also juggle better than you might expect,” she added confidentially. “Just to pass the time.”
“But the Road starts in Fairyland, so it’s theirs, too, and they get to order it about and tell it its shortcomings and send it to sit in a corner and think about what it’s done,” finished the black jackal Waite.