A smoldering glow hung just before the kitchen sink, a seam of dripping light like a zipper in the fabric of reality. He stared at it for a stupefied moment, then flung aside his broken guitar.
"Hurry up!" Applecore screamed, but Theo hesitated. Where did it lead? Anywhere would be better than here, now… but…
Suddenly, he knew. He bent to snatch up his great-uncle's book. "Come on!" he shouted at the fairy.
"Don't be daft — the passage's about to close," she cried, although she had little breath to spare. "Just go! I'll keep it busy!" For a moment she wheeled up above the thing's head, into the full glare of the phantom doorway or whatever it was, and he saw that the fairy magic she was wielding against the undead beast was Theo's own corkscrew, as big in her arms as a painter's ladder. She spun again and dove, jabbing the sharp point at the thing's ruined face. It flinched back, perhaps out of some forgotten reflex — there was not much there worth saving — but did not seem very alarmed.
Theo's heart felt as though it were about to explode out of the top of his head like a Polaris missile. He leaped toward the glowing seam and scrabbled at the opening with his fingers. It tingled strangely but did not burn. He turned for one last look. A rotting paw just missed grabbing Applecore, but tipped her wing and sent her spinning. She landed on the floor and crouched there for a moment with her head down, clearly stunned. The thing gave a kind of squelchy huff of triumph and staggered toward her. Theo threw himself onto his knees, scooped up the fairy just ahead of the reaching cat jaws, then turned and clambered across the floor toward the door made of light.
He fell through in a most ungraceful way, into nothingness, into a colorless void that crashed like ocean waves and sparkled like stars.
Part Two
LAST EXIT TO FAIRYLAND
10
LARKSPUR'S LAND
He was not simply traveling, he was stretching, somehow — as though a part of him were still rooted deep in the reality he had just left while an increasingly attenuated Theo-ness was being drawn out through thousands of miles of noise and light. All that he was seemed to be getting thinner and more insubstantial, until he felt himself to be a near-infinite, near-invisible line of consciousness, each mote of thought touching nothing but the single beads of comprehension directly on either side, and all of them pulling farther and farther apart. He was like a rubber band in the hands of God, and God was spreading His mighty arms as wide as they would go…
And then the rubber band snapped.
When he came back to himself, half his vision was filled with what at first seemed to be a smeary abstract painting of green lines. Grass. He was lying on his side in long grass, and something was moving.
He regained his focus in time to see Applecore, who was kneeling a few inches from his nose, bend at the waist and decorously throw up. Despite her appearance and proximity, watching didn't trigger his own reflex as it might have with another human being. He sat up.
That did trigger the reflex.
As Theo finished emptying his stomach, spitting over and over into the grass, Applecore took a deep breath and groaned. "Oog. It's worse coming here than going to your side."
"Glad… to hear that." He wiped his chin with the back of his hand. His head was thumping like a timpani solo and he would have sold his soul without hesitation for a bottle of mouthwash. "Because I don't ever want to feel like that again." He raised his head and looked around. "Oh, God."
It wasn't so much that anything looked expressly different, or wrong — in fact, it all looked very right in a sort of romantic, pre-Raphaelite kind of way: close-standing trees and shadowy grassy dales, beams of midday sunlight diving straight down through the forest roof like glowing plumb lines, sparked with dust and the bright flicker of flying insects. His nausea had faded, but still the colors around him were almost too strong, the edges too crisp; it made his eyes water to look at anything for more than a few moments. It reminded him of the way a dose of psilocybin made the colors of everyday objects leap out like neon.
"Where are we?"
Applecore bent again and spat an almost invisible streak of light. "Home. Well, home for me. What would you call it? I was never up with all that book-learning shower of shite, and Faerie can't translate what you can't say." She frowned, then brightened. " 'Course. Faerie. That's what it's called."
"So I was right. No, Uncle Eamonn was right." Theo stretched his legs out in front of him, listened to the almost subliminal fluting of birds. His headache and nausea had all but disappeared. He could almost forget that he had just been through the weirdest and worst half hour of his life. "It's… it's beautiful here."
"That's why they saved this piece," the little fairy told him. "Don't think this is the whole story, boyo."
He nodded slowly, although he had no idea what she meant. It was hard to think, almost exhausting: spending time in the midst of such overwhelmingly powerful scenery was hard on mortal senses. So strange, all so strange…
He turned back to Applecore. "What the hell was that… thing that came after us?" The unearthly scenery suddenly felt different, even threatening, especially the shadowy depths behind the closest trees. "Will it come here? Is it coming now?"
"Will it come? Likely." Applecore sniffed. "Now? Couldn't say, but I doubt it'll find you again so fast. Eventually, though. So is it a good idea to laze around in the woods like a fat gobshite? Likely not."
"What was it?" It took a moment. "Hold on, find me? What do you mean, find me?"
"Start walking first." She was up and away, quick as a dragonfly, twenty yards in a couple of seconds, then back just as swiftly to hang in midair before him, a grim little half smile on her face. "Just curious. You standing there with your mouth open — do you have to do that for a bit before your legs start workin'?"
He shut his jaw and let her lead him through the psychedelic forest.
"I'm not being difficult," she said as they came out of a stand of trees and into an open dell. "I just don't know much. I'm a messenger, me — strictly hired help. All I can tell you is that just like Tansy sent me after you, someone else must have sent that falling-apart thing. Doesn't take much in the brains department to figure that out. You said you've never seen anyone like me before, not in real life. Ever seen anything like that?"
"God, no!"
"There you are, then. It came from one of the in-between places, must have. If I could find you, then it could too."
He shook his head. He was tired of the adventure already. He wanted to lie down and sleep, but instead all he did was put one foot in front of the other, following this irritating little flying woman, on and on through what had changed from a magical landscape into a fatiguing nightmare, as though he were being forced to do a survival trek through a Disney film. The sheer visual intensity of the forest, the glittering motes of dust, the bumblebees bright as spun coins, the snaking, tangled roots and colorful toadstools in all their profusion, even the vivid green of the grass, was hallucinatory, and it was getting to be like an acid trip that wouldn't end. It made his head ache. "But why me? I'm nobody! I'm… boring!"
"Am I arguing? Just save some of the questions for the old fella — he'll probably be able to tell you a good whack more than I can."
"Tell me about him. You said his name was… Tansy?"