The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [99]
“You’re doing it wrong, you know.”
Their heads turned in unison. It was a little kid’s voice, a boy. He was standing at the end of the corridor in his pajamas, watching them. He might have been eight years old.
“What am I doing wrong?” Quentin said.
“You have to set it going first,” the boy said. “It says in the book. But it doesn’t work anymore, I tried it.”
The boy had fine tousled brown hair and blue eyes. A more quintessential English moppet it would have been hard to find, right down to his having a spot of trouble pronouncing his l’s and r’s. He could have been cloned from Christopher Robin’s toenail clippings.
“Mummy says she’s going to send it to the shop, but she never does. I climbed the trees too. And I did a painting. Lots of them actually. D’you want to see?”
They stared at him. Not finding himself rebuffed, he walked over on bare feet. He had that dismal air of sprightly self-possession that some English children have. Just looking at him, you knew you were going to have to play a game with him.
“I even had Mummy pull me round in an old wagon we found in the garage.” He said it garage. “It’s not the same as a bicycle, but I had to try it.”
“I can see that,” Quentin said. “I can see where you would have to do that.”
“But we can keep looking though,” he said. “I like it. My name’s Thomas.”
He actually held out his little paw for Quentin to shake, like a tiny alien ambassador. Poor kid. It wasn’t his fault. He must be so chronically neglected by his parents that he had taken to press-ganging random party guests into paying attention to him. He made Quentin think of faraway Eleanor, the little girl on the Outer Island.
The really awful thing was that Quentin was going to go along with it, and not for the right reasons. He took the proffered paw. It wasn’t that he felt bad for Thomas, though he did. It was that Thomas was a valuable ally. Adults never got into Fillory by themselves, at least not without a magic button. It was always the kids. What Quentin needed, he realized, was a native guide to act as bait. Maybe if he let young Thomas here course along ahead of him, like a hound across the moors, he just might flush out a portal or two. He was going to use Thomas to chum the waters.
“Just get me a drink,” Quentin said to Josh as Thomas pulled him away. As they passed Poppy, Quentin firmly grabbed her hand. The misery train was leaving the station, and Quentin wasn’t going to travel alone.
It emerged, with remarkably little prompting from Quentin or Poppy, that Thomas’s parents had bought the Chatwin house a couple of years ago from the children of Fiona Chatwin; Thomas and his parents were themselves, through some connection that Quentin couldn’t follow, distantly related to Plover. Maybe that was where the money came from. Thomas had been simply mad with excitement when he heard the news. Weren’t all his friends at school jealous! Of course now he had all new friends, because before he’d been in London, and now they were in Cornwall. But his friends here were much nicer, and he only missed London when he thought about the Rainforest Life exhibit at the zoo. Had Quentin ever been to the zoo in London? If he could choose, would he be an Asian lion or a Sumatran tiger? And did he know that there was a monkey called a red titi monkey? It wasn’t rude, you could say it because it was a real kind of monkey. And didn’t he agree that, under certain extreme circumstances, the murder of children was completely ethically justifiable?
Towed by Thomas the tank engine, they toured the grounds. As a threesome they conducted a deep-cavity search of the top floor, including closets and attics. They made seven or eight circuits of the enormous green behind the house, with special attention paid to rodent burrows and spooky trees and copses large enough for a human being to infiltrate. Meanwhile Josh kept up an underground railroad of gin-and-tonics, handing them off to Quentin whenever he happened to pass by, like a spectator