The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [59]
“You do not have a plan, do you?” Julia stared straight ahead.
“No.”
“I do not know why I thought you would.” That haughty anger was back. She was waking up again. “You have never really been here. Out here in the real world.”
“Well, I’ve visited.”
“You think magic is what you learned at Brakebills. You have no idea what magic is.”
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s say I don’t. What is it?”
“I am going to show you.”
Julia stood up. She looked around, as if she were sniffing the wind, then set off abruptly across the street at a scary angle. A silver Passat honked and scritched to a stop to avoid hitting her. She kept walking. Quentin followed more cautiously.
She led them away from Chesterton’s main drag, such as it was. The neighborhood turned residential fast. The din of traffic and commerce died away, and big trees and houses bloomed on either side of the street. The sidewalk became bumpy and irregular. Julia was paying a lot of attention to the telephone poles for some reason. Every time they passed one she stopped and studied it.
“Been a while since I did this,” she said, mostly to herself. “Has to be one around here somewhere.”
“One what? What are we looking for?”
“I could tell you. But you would not believe me.”
She was full of surprises, was Julia. Well, he happened to have some free time just now. Five more minutes went by before she stopped at one particular telephone pole. It had a couple of blobs of fluorescent pink spray paint on it, which might have been left there by a sloppy lineman.
She stared at it, her lips moving silently. She was reading the world in a way that he, Quentin, could not.
“Not ideal,” she said finally. “But it will do. Come on.”
They kept walking.
“We are going to a safe house,” she added.
They walked for literally two miles through the suburban afternoon light, in the process crossing the town line from Chesterton into the less posh but still desirable town of Winston. Children trailing home from school eyed them curiously. Sometimes Julia would stop and study a chalk mark on a curb, or a stray spray of roadside wildflowers, then she would press on. Quentin didn’t know whether to feel hopeful or not, but he would wait for Julia’s plan to unfurl itself, especially since he didn’t have any suggestions of his own. Though his feet hurt, and he was on the point of suggesting they steal another car. Except that that would have been wrong.
Like Chesterton, Winston was an old Massachusetts suburb, and some of the houses they passed were not just colonial-style but genuinely colonial. You could recognize them because they were more compact than the other kind, denser and set back from the road in damp, rotting pine hollows, where raggedy grass lawnlets were locked in an endless running battle with encroaching rings of pines armed with their acid needles. The newer houses, by contrast, the colonial-inspired McMansions, were bright and enormous, and their lawns had gone completely shock-and-awe on the pine trees, of which one or at most two examples still stood, shivering and traumatized, to provide compositional balance.
The house they stopped at was the first kind, authentically colonial. It was starting to get dark out. Julia had logged another couple of telephone-pole paint blobs, one of which she’d stopped and studied quite closely using some kind of visual cantrip that he hadn’t caught because she hadn’t wanted him to catch it—she actually hid it with one hand as she cast it with the other.
The driveway dived down sharply into the hollow. Generations of kids must have murdered themselves on skateboards and scooters trying to go down it and stop before they slammed into the garage. Student drivers must have martyred themselves on it practicing hill starts in standard-transmission cars.
They clomped down it on foot. Quentin felt like a Seventh-Day Adventist, or an overaged trick-or-treater. At first he thought the lights were off, but when he got close enough he saw that they were in fact all on. The windows were papered over with butcher paper to keep them dark.
“I give up,” Quentin