“Welcome.” The voice seemed to come from all over, an echo of an echo. “I am Almanack.”
September could not tell if Almanack was a man or a woman. The creature had long, silken hair the color of rosewater candy, and a delicate, pointed face. Long, peach-pale tendrils uncoiled everywhere, looping like vines around draped satin and gauze that covered its body, dipping into the bowls wherever they found them. Almanack had at least six hands, four folded gracefully and two open, held out toward September.
“I beg your pardon,” she said shyly, a little out of breath and a little overcome. “I thought the city was Almanack.”
Almanack smiled; its lips colored deeper to a dusky ginger. It spoke very kindly. “The city is Almanack, little one, but Almanack is me. It is my shell; it grows out of me, more and more and longer and wider each year. When one of my folk needs a thing, I provide. I squeeze shut my eyes and push out a house for them, or a mountain, or a museum for umbrellas. Almanack,” it said softly, “takes care of all your needs before you know you have them. I am the Whelk of the Moon. What is it you need, little rushing bashful two-legged beast?”
“All of this, all of it, the circus and the college and the lawns and the river-it’s all you? Your…your body? People are living inside you?” After a moment, September added: “And I am not a beast.”
A rosy ripple moved through Almanack’s cotton candy hair. “A Whelk will grow as big as it’s allowed before it is eaten or crushed or starved. Give it a little crystal bottle and you will have a little crystal Whelk. Give it an ocean and who knows where it will end? Give it a moon and you get…me. I have never been eaten or crushed or starved.” One of its tendrils found a fresh bowl and sank into the burgundy liquid there. Almanack shut its eyes in joy. “Forgive me, I am hungry. I am forever hungry. It takes so much to feed me now. I am vast. Vastness longs for vastness, don’t you find?” After a moment, the Whelk added: “And we are all beasts.”
September nodded shyly, perfectly willing to defer to the Whelk’s opinion on such things, not being very vast herself.
Almanack opened its four folded hands, holding them out, pearly palms showing. “I was once unvast, like you. I dimly remember it. But even then, barnacles and mussels lived on the outside of me and little marine mites lived in me, so tiny you couldn’t see them-but I could hear them, their invisible briny holidays and squabbles over philosophy. We are safe in the shell; outside the shell we are not safe. There is not much to a mite’s mind, but what there is, is gentle and uncomplicated. As I grew, I could hear them less and less, and I became lonely. One day a bishop-fish walked into me-I’d grown so large she thought I must be empty and available for a nice hermitage. She wore a miter on her trouty head bigger than she was, and her legs were a jumble of fish-hooks with but a little skin left. We got on very well. Her philosophy had more starch in it, dialectics and philippics and things, but it came to the same in the end: We are safe in the shell; outside the shell we are not safe. More and more came, and they needed so much. The first time I made a hut grow I thought I would die from happiness. I watched my bishop-fish fall asleep in it and I sang to her. Haven’t you ever wanted to give someone everything they needed, to make them safe within your own arms, to feed them and keep all harm outside?”
September thought of her father and the soreness in his leg and his heart and his memory. She thought of her mother, so worried and tired all the time. And she thought suddenly of Saturday, who had once been locked into a cage so small he could not stand up.
“As I got bigger, that feeling got bigger in me until it was big enough for all,” Almanack went on. “My heart is a house with room to spare. I wanted to make the marine mites’ philosophy true. Perhaps my philosophy is not so sophisticated. It goes: Come inside. I love you. A Whelk’s love will grow as big as it’s allowed.” Almanack sipped a distant bowl of inky black syrup with one of its tendrils. “There. I have turned the lights on in the college dormitories. A whole bank of lamps in the shapes of their least favorite professors, just to make the students laugh.”
“Aren’t you afraid they’ll use you all up? There’s so many people, and only one of you!”
Almanack closed its pink eyes. “They are all hungry, too, you know. At the bottom of philosophy something very true and very desperate whispers: Everyone is hungry all the time. Everyone is starving. Everyone wants so much, more than they can stomach, but the appetite doesn’t converse much with the stomach. Everyone is hungry and not only for food-for comfort and love and excitement and the opposite of being alone. Almost everything awful anyone does is to get those things and keep them. Even the mites and the mussels. But no one can use you up unless you let them.” Almanack gave a great and happy sigh. “The whole point of growing is to get big enough to hold the world you want inside you. But it takes a long time, and you really must eat your vegetables, and most often you have to make the world you want out of yourself.”
September’s eyes tingled with tears. Of all the Fairy strangeness she had known, this seemed suddenly both the strangest and least strange of all. How she would have liked to be looked after like that, cared for and watched over. And yet at the same time, she understood the Whelk, and wished she could grow big enough to hold on to everyone she loved at once. To keep them safe and with her always and know their secret needs well enough to answer them. When she spoke, her throat had got thick and tight.
“And what do you eat?”
“I eat their hunger. When a soul inside me longs for something, a bowl fills. As I make a hut or a streetlamp or a hippodrome or a cabaret, I drink up their need and am satisfied when they are satisfied. I am sustained by Being Necessary.”
“That’s very strange.”
Almanack’s deep green eyes shone. “Is it? Have you done a long, hard thing for the sake of someone you loved, so long and so hard that your body shook with the difficulty of it, that you were thirsty and aching and ravenous by the time it was done, but it did not matter, you did not even feel the thirst or the pain or the hunger, because you were doing what was Necessary?”
“Yes,” September whispered. She could feel the salt of the Perverse and Perilous Sea on her skin as if it still caked there. As if she were still sailing around Fairyland to save her friends.
“Then it is not so strange. Being Necessary is food no less than cabbages and strawberry pies. And surely if you have come all this way, you need something from me. Say it and I will do my best. I cannot do everything, but folk who can do everything are terrible bores.”
September’s heart sang out inside her: I need to find Saturday and A-Through-L, I need to touch them and see them and smell them and hear them and to not walk in Fairyland alone. I want a lovely adventure where no one carries a hurt around with them like a satchel or tries to force a country like a door. But she did not say it. She remembered her errand. You do your job and you mind your work. Besides, she did not live in Almanack. She was not one of its folk-it would not be right to go about bellowing demands, and selfish demands at that. September held her heart down while it trumpeted its desires and bit her cheek until she felt she could speak safely without blurting it out.
Oh, September! It is such hard work to keep your heart hidden! And worse, by the time you find it easy, it will be harder still to show it. It is a terrible magic in this world to ask for exactly the thing you want. Not least because to know exactly the thing you want and look it in the eye is a long, long labor. How I long to draw the curtain through this grotto, take September by the serious and stalwart shoulders and tell her the secret of growing up! But I cannot. It is against the rules. Even I am bound by some rules.