The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [89]
And sure enough, just past Throop (pronounced “troop”) Avenue, there it was. It was not a pretty house, but it wasn’t a crack house, either. It was a two-story lime-green clapboard house with an antique rabbit-ears antenna on top and a surly gang of aluminum garbage cans in the cracked cement yard out front. The front door was an eight-paned glass affair. One pane, the top left corner, had been punched out and plastic-wrapped, thereby completing the series.
And that was that. It was finished. The sight of that final pattern, the initial state, released Julia from the spell. The dream logic had iterated itself out. She looked around like a sleepwalker awakened, wondering where the hell she was, exactly. Somebody was still babbling in her ear in a computer-generated voice about Hofstadter. Exhaustion broke over her in a wave. She must have walked for miles, and the sun was setting. She sat down on the stoop.
She needed a ride home. A car service would be expensive, but being mugged and/or assaulted would be even more expensive. Plus she felt like she would literally drop in her tracks if she had to take another step. She killed the FTB app and took out her earbuds, and the voices died away. Silence. Reality.
Behind her she heard the door open. She got up again and held up a hand—okay, okay, she was going. She didn’t suppose that a lecture on cellular automata would really pass for an excuse for trespassing with the residents of some random lime-green shitbox house on Throop Avenue.
But the guy in the door wasn’t shooing her away. He was a white guy, owlish-looking, maybe thirty, in a vintage blazer and jeans and an insta-annoying porkpie hat.
He just looked at her, assessing. Behind him she could see other people in the house, sitting and standing, chatting and moping, and doing things with their hands. Only they didn’t have anything in their hands. A weird acid-green light flared for a second in the doorway, from somewhere she couldn’t see, like there was welding going on in there. Somebody gave an ironic cheer. The air absolutely reeked of magic. You could barely breathe, it was so thick.
Julia squatted down on her haunches on the sidewalk, like a toddler, and put her head in her hands and laughed and cried at the same time. She felt like she was going to pass out or throw up or go insane. She had tried to walk away from the disaster, to run away from it, she really, truly had. She’d broken her staff and drowned her book and sworn off magic forever. She’d moved on and left no forwarding address. But it hadn’t been enough. Magic had come looking for her. She hadn’t run far enough or fast enough, or hid herself well enough, and the disaster had tracked her down and it had found her. It wasn’t going to let her go.
It was about to start all over again.
CHAPTER 16
During everything that followed, all the time while he nearly got creamed by a vaporetto as he swam to shore, while he dragged himself up some ancient stone steps out of the water (the Grand Canal was well-appointed with means of egress for those who fell or flung themselves into it) and trudged back to Josh’s palazzo alone—Josh having had his hands full keeping Poppy out of the clutches of the carabinieri, who showed up shortly after Quentin went under—Quentin’s mind was on fire with the only piece of useful information the dragon had given him: that there was still a way back to Fillory. They weren’t going to get the button, but he could let go of that