Quentin didn’t hang on. He followed Alice.
At first he’d thought everything would be different between him and Alice. Then he thought everything was back to normal. Now he understood that he didn’t want things to be back to normal. He couldn’t stop looking at her, even after she’d looked at him, seen him looking at her, and looked away in embarrassment again. It was like she’d become charged in some way that drew him to her uncontrollably. He could sense her naked body inside her dress, smell it like a vampire smells blood. Maybe Mayakovsky hadn’t quite managed to get all the fox out of him.
He found her in one of the upstairs bedrooms. She was lying on one of a pair of twin beds, on top of the bedspread, reading. It was dim and hot. The roof slanted in at an odd angle. The room was full of odd, old furniture—a wicker chair with a staved-in seat, a dresser with a stuck drawer—and it had deep red wallpaper that didn’t match any other room in the house. Quentin yanked up the window halfway—it made an outraged squawk—and flopped down on the other twin bed.
“Can you believe they have these here? It’s a full set—they were in the bookcase in the bathroom.” She held up the book she was reading. Incredibly, it was an old copy of
“I had that exact same edition.” The cover showed Martin Chatwin halfway through the old grandfather clock, with his feet still in this world and his amazed head poking into Fillory, which was drawn as a groovy 1970s disco winter wonderland.
“I haven’t looked at them for years. God, remember the Cozy Horse? That big velvet horse that would just carry you around? I wanted one so badly when I was that age. Did you read them?”
Quentin wasn’t sure how much to reveal about his Fillory obsession.
“I may have taken a look.”
Alice smirked and went back to the book. “Why is it that you still think you can keep secrets from me?”
Quentin folded his hands behind his head and lay back on the pillow and looked up at the low, tilted ceiling. This wasn’t right. There was something brother-sister about it.
“Here. Budge over.”
He switched beds and lay down next to Alice, hip-checking her sideways to make room on the narrow bed. She held up the paperback, and they read together silently for a few pages. Their shoulders and upper arms touched. Quentin felt like the bed was on a train moving very fast, and if he looked out the window he’d see the landscape racing past. They were both breathing very carefully.
“I never got it about the Cozy Horse,” Quentin said after a while. “First of all, there’s only one of it. Is there a whole herd of Cozy Horses somewhere? And then it’s too useful. You’d think somebody would have domesticated it by now.”
She whacked his head with the spine, not completely gently.
“Somebody
“Like who?”
“I don’t know. A magician. Somebody in the past. Anyway the Cozy Horse is a girl thing.”
Janet stuck her head in. Apparently the exodus downstairs was general.
“Ha!” Janet brayed. “I can’t believe you’re reading that.”
Alice scooched an inch away from him, instinctively, but he didn’t move.
“Like you didn’t,” Quentin said.
“Of course I did! When I was nine I made my family call me ‘Fiona’ for two weeks.”
She vanished, leaving behind a comfortable, echoless silence. The room was cooling down as hot air ascended out through the half-open window. Quentin imagined it rising in an invisible braided plume into the blue summer day.
“Did you know there really was a Chatwin family?” he asked. “In real life? Supposedly they lived next door to Plover.”
Alice nodded. She unscooched now that Janet was gone. “It’s sad though.”
“Sad how.”
“Well, do you know what happened to them?”
Quentin shook his head.
“There’s a book about it. Most of them grew up to be pretty boring. Housewives and insurance magnates and whatnot. I think one of the boys married an heiress. I know one got killed in World War Two. But you know the thing about Martin?”
Quentin shook his head.
“Well, you know how he disappears in the book? He really did disappear. He ran away or had an accident or something. One day after breakfast he just vanished, and they never saw him again.”
“The real Martin?”
“The real Martin.”
“God. That is sad.”
He tried to imagine it, a big fresh-faced, floppy-haired English family—he pictured them in a sepia-toned family portrait, in tennis whites—suddenly with a gaping hole opening in the middle of it. The somber announcement. The slow, decorous acceptance. The lingering damage.
“It makes me think of my brother,” Alice said.
“I know.”
At this she looked at him sharply. He looked back. It was true, he did know.
He propped himself up on one elbow so he could look down at her, the air around him whirling with excited dust motes. “When I was little,” he said slowly, “and even when I was not so little, I used to envy Martin.”
She smiled up at him.
“I know.”
