The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [164]
In front of it stood someone who looked too small to be standing in front of the entrance to hell. He might have been eight years old. He was a sharp-looking little boy, with short black hair and a narrow face. He wore a little-boy-sized gray suit with a white shirt, but no tie. He looked like he’d gotten fidgety in church and come outside for a minute to blow off steam.
He didn’t even have a stool to sit on, so he just stood in place as well as an eight-year-old boy can. He tried and failed to whistle. He kicked at nothing in particular.
Quentin thought it prudent to slow down and stop about twenty feet from the bottom of the slide. The boy watched him.
“Hi,” the boy said. His voice sounded loud in the silence.
“Hi,” Quentin said.
He slid down the rest of the way and then stood up, as gracefully as he could.
“You’re not dead,” the boy said.
“I’m alive,” Quentin said. “But is this the entrance to the underworld?”
“You know how I could tell you were alive?” The boy pointed behind Quentin. “The slide. It works much better if you’re dead.”
“Oh. Yes, I got stuck a few times.”
Quentin’s skin prickled just standing there. He wondered if the boy was alive. He didn’t look dead.
“Dead people are lighter,” the boy said. “And when you die they give you a robe. It’s better for sliding than regular pants.”
The bulb made a bubble of light in the darkness. Quentin had a sense of towering emptiness all around them. There was no sky or ceiling. The brick wall seemed to go up forever—did go up forever, as far as he could see. He was in the subbasement of the world.
Quentin pointed behind him at the double doors. “Is it all right if I go inside?”
“You can only go inside if you’re dead. That’s the rule.”
“Oh.”
This was a setback. You’d think Abigail the Sloth would have briefed him on that wrinkle. He didn’t relish the thought of trying to climb back up that long slide, if that was how you got back to the upper world. He seemed to remembered from being a kid that it was possible, just about, but that slide must have been half a mile long. What if he fell off? Or what if somebody died and came sliding down it while he was going up?
But it would also be a relief. He could get back to business. Back to the search for the key.
“The thing is, my friend Benedict is inside. And I need to tell him something.”
The boy thought for a minute.
“Maybe you could tell me, and then I’ll tell him.”
“I think it should come from me.”
The boy chewed his lip.
“Do you have a passport?”
“A passport? I don’t think so.”
“Yes, you do. Look.”
The boy reached up and took something out of the shirt pocket of Quentin’s pajamas. It was a piece of paper folded in half. It took Quentin a beat to recognize it: it was the passport the little girl had made for him, what was her name, Eleanor, all the way back on the Outer Island. How had it gotten into his pocket?
The little boy studied it with an eight-year-old’s version of intense bureaucratic scrutiny. He looked up at Quentin’s face to compare it with the picture.
“Is this how you spell your name?”
The boy pointed. Under his picture Eleanor had written in colored pencil, all capitals: KENG. The K was backward.
“Yes.”
The boy sighed, exactly as if Quentin had just bested him at a game of Chinese checkers.
“All right. You can go in.”
He rolled his eyes to make sure that Quentin knew that he didn’t really care if Quentin went in or not.
Quentin opened one of the doors. It wasn’t locked. He wondered what the boy would have done if he’d just barged in past him. Probably he would have transformed into some unspeakably horrible Exorcist thing and eaten him. The door opened onto a vast open space dimly lit by banks of buzzing fluorescent lights overhead.
It was full of people. Stale air and the muttering roar of thousands of conversations washed