The Rebirth of Wonder (16 page)

Art looked at his watch, and found it was
blinking “12:00” up at him. He stared at it.

Maggie noticed the gesture. Her mouth twisted
wryly. “Digital watches, it would seem, don't work in Faerie,” she
said. “Nobody knew that before.”

Art looked at her. “They didn't have digital
watches last time anyone went there, huh?”

Maggie nodded. “I hope we only lost the
night, and this is still Sunday morning,” she said, looking out
toward Thoreau Street.

Art blinked, and stared out at the pale
sky.

“
It's a good thing
you didn't eat anything,” Maggie remarked as she started down the
porch steps.

“
Why?” Art
asked.

She glanced up at him. “Don't you know?” she
said, startled. “If you eat anything in Faerie, you can't return.
The door would have vanished, and you'd have spent the rest of your
life there.”

“
The
rest...”

“
Good night, Art.
Call tonight is for seven again – at least, if it's still
Sunday.”

He stood watching as she stepped gracefully
over a broken chunk of rock and vanished around the back corner of
the theater.

A car cruised by, and in old man Christie's
field Spanner whinnied.

Magic, Art thought. Real magic. Witches.
Fairies.

Real
magic.

Real magic, either about to die forever, or
about to be reborn.

He felt a chill of terror at the thought –
and a stirring of something else, of excitement, of desire. He
quickly suppressed it.

The whole situation was too much to absorb
right away, he decided. He would, as he had told Maggie, need time
to think about it.

He stared at his blinking watch as he
descended the steps and started home.

Chapter Sixteen

He slept until 4:00 p.m.

When he finally came downstairs the radio was
on, and a newscaster was describing the new comet that was gracing
the southern skies, talking about how astronomers were puzzled by
the suddenness of its appearance.

“
Hi there,
sleepyhead!” his father called.

Art waved.

“
Those folks keep
you up late?” the elder Dunham asked.

Art nodded as he passed through on his way to
the kitchen.

“
What time did you
get in?”

“
Seven,” Art said,
as he got a gallon jug of milk from the
refrigerator.

His father made a wordless noise of
sympathy.

Art wasn't sure just what meal he was eating,
but whatever it was, breakfast or lunch or dinner or just a snack,
he decided a microwave pizza would do just fine. He found one in
the freezer.

He watched the timer on the microwave oven
count down, square blue numbers changing as if by magic.

Microwave ovens were pretty magical, weren't
they? Art considered that.

His life was full of miracles, really –
everyday, commonplace miracles he accepted without a second
thought. Frozen pizza, microwave ovens, digital clocks, he didn't
know how any of them worked, they all might as well be magic. Why
couldn't he learn to live with a little more, if the Bringers
brought their ritual off?

But those things
weren't
real
magic.

That fairy meadow
was
real
magic.

At least, if all that had happened, if he
hadn't just dreamed the whole thing. He glanced through the living
room door. The Sunday paper, immediately recognizable by the
presence of four-color comics, was strewn about.

“
It's Sunday,
right?” he called. “I mean, I didn't sleep a whole day or
anything?”

“
It's Sunday,” his
father replied.

That was reassuring; it fit with his
memories. He hadn't lost whole days in Faerie – and he hadn't
dreamt all of Saturday, either.

At least, he didn't think so. If he had
dreamt it, wouldn't it still be Saturday now?

But the whole thing was
beginning to have the
feel
of a dream; that field, the long, slow sunset,
the conversation with Maggie Gowdie, it was all starting to seem
unreal, like a story he had once heard, or a daydream.

Was
it real?

He slugged down milk, straight from the jug.
The microwave beeped, and he found a potholder with which to take
out the pizza.

The Return of
Magic
, they called it, and they meant just
that – if it was all true. If Maggie hadn't lied, if the
conversation had happened, if the meadow was real, if the door was
there, if he hadn't imagined the whole thing.

He tried to straighten his
thoughts as he ate, but they wouldn't come straight. He couldn't
make himself certain of anything at all about anything that had
happened since the end of July. The final performance of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, the cast party, cleaning the theater – that all seemed real
enough, there was no reason to doubt it, but then Mr. Innisfree had
turned up...

A wizard, more than a thousand years old?

A dozen magicians, the last magicians in the
world, come to Bampton to put on a play that would cast a spell –
there was a pun in that, the cast of the play casting a spell.

“
I think I'll go
over to the theater,” he said, brushing crumbs from his
lap.

His father looked up. “Okay,” he said.
“When's call for tonight?”

“
Not until six,” Art
said, shading the truth, “but I wanted to look at
something.”

“
Suit yourself,” his
father said, returning to his book.

Art took the keys from the hook and left the
house.

The air had a heavy, damp feel to it as he
clattered down to the sidewalk; he thought it might rain a little
later, though you never knew.

The sky was darkening by the time he opened
the stage door; rain was now clearly far more likely than not. He
flicked on the light and stepped inside.

The chalk circles, white with red symbols,
were on the stage, just as he remembered them; the Bringers of
Wonder were real, not just a dream, then.

He found his way down the basement stairs,
down the central passage, and around the corner at the end. And
there, past the water meter and the secondary fuse box, was the
door, black and ancient.

He stood in the passageway for a long moment,
just staring at it.

Finally, he stepped forward and took the knob
gingerly in his hand. He turned it and pulled, half expecting, half
hoping, that it would be locked.

It opened easily and silently, and he found
himself looking out at the meadow.

It was night in Faerie; the dim glow of the
corridor light spilled past him onto dew-moistened grass. Stars
shone above the meadows; he leaned forward for a quick look, then
hastily pulled back.

Stars, millions of stars, more stars than he
had seen since a childhood vacation in the mountains, the Milky Way
a white path across the heavens – but all wrong, all in impossible
places, the constellations twisted and distorted.

Slowly, carefully, he closed the black
door.

It was real.

But was Maggie's story, her explanation of
what was happening, was that all true?

What if the Bringers were
all the
black
magicians of the world? What if this was some
plot?

What if it wasn't really magic at all, what
if they were extraterrestrials, and that door was some sort of
teleportation device, and they were going to invade and conquer the
world? After all, hadn't someone said that any sufficiently
advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic?

He reached out and ran his
fingertips over the door, feeling the crazed and beaded finish.
It
felt
like the
remains of antique varnish, but maybe it was all really some sort
of alien microcircuitry.

But the world beyond
wasn't alien – it was a
meadow
, with grass and flowers and
insects, with Earth's air and gravity...

Well, Earth's gravity, anyway; the air might
be a trifle richer, might have a different mix of inert gasses for
all he could tell.

But what would alien invaders be doing
putting on a play? Why would they conjure up birds and flames and
winds and flowers? Why would their portal come out in a meadow, and
not a city or staging area?

The alien-invader hypothesis had a certain
appeal – Art had never even believed in UFOs or psychic phenomena
or any of the New Age stuff, let alone full-blown traditional
magic, witches and wizards and spells, so any sort of scientific
explanation would be welcome, but still, he couldn't really make
himself believe it.

It looked like magic. It
felt like magic. Even if it was really some sort of super-science,
he might as well
treat
it as magic.

Slowly, thinking deeply, he turned away from
the door and ambled back down the central passageway.

When he reached the prop room he glanced at
the door, but didn't open it.

The box of lost things – that was magical,
wasn't it? They were all things that had felt magical to him once,
all things that had been inexplicably lost, and now magic had
brought them back to him.

White magic, surely. Even when he had had no
idea what was going on, even when he had been furious that someone
was playing tricks on him with his own lost treasures, he had felt
a reawakening of childlike wonder when he had handled those
trinkets, all that outgrown junk.

The bone-handled knife – that must be magic,
too. He frowned. A knife didn't seem like a good omen.

He opened the sliding door and turned on the
light for the big room, then stood there looking in, looking at all
the fragments of old sets, at the wooden floor and stone walls.

Why here?

The other magical places he had heard of all
had distinctive features to them – the standing stones at
Stonehenge, the pyramids of Egypt, whatever. Was this new mystic
power source just going to have a ramshackle little theater?

A theater with a
mysterious pit under the basement? Maybe
that
was responsible for all
this.

But really, it was just a theater.

It had been a church once, but it was a
theater now.

He looked around at the stone walls with new
insight. He had always known the building had its history, its
idiosyncrasies, but he had always just accepted them. Now, for the
first time, it occurred to him that the theater could be seen as a
mysterious place, a magical place, quite aside from the plays
performed there, and aside from the special, personal magic it had
always held for him. Stone walls over a century old, an
inexplicable and unexplored hole beneath it, a history that blended
the sacred and the profane...

A few days ago, he knew he would have
dismissed all that as nonsense, but now he wasn't sure.

If he refused to join the
Bringers in their ritual, if he let magic die out completely, would
the theater still have that special magical quality, when he was
here alone? Was that actually magic? Was it inherent in the
theater, a trace of its magical potential? Or was it just in
him
, just a matter of
psychology, something that had nothing to do with
real
magic and wouldn't
be changed?

A few days ago, he would have chosen the last
without a moment's hesitation.

Now, though – even if
it
was
just
psychological, even if no true magic was involved, what would he
think if he let the Bringers fail, and eleven of them actually did
die? Could this place still be magical for him?

Somehow, he didn't think so.

He frowned. Did they have to die, then, if he
didn't help?

The answer to that
depended on several other questions. Had Maggie lied? If she had
said what she believed to be true, was it
in fact
true, or had she been
misled?

And was his choice really a simple either/or,
between eleven deaths and unleashing wild new magic on the
world?

Whatever the truth, he wanted to think it
over and decide for himself, without getting anyone else involved
yet; even if he couldn't settle the big questions, he could settle
that. He really didn't need to add any more complications, as it
was all quite complicated enough.

And that, he decided, meant that he wouldn't
be calling Arnie Wechsler, or any other locksmith, in the morning;
he wasn't ready to find out what was behind that other door. If his
father asked, he'd say that the door had turned out to be just a
closet.

Maybe, when he was a bit more confident that
he understood what was going on, he could get a locksmith out here
and see what was in there, but there wasn't any hurry. He really
needed to think through what he had already learned. Whatever was
behind the other door – Faerie or something else – was far more
likely to provide more problems than to show him any solutions.

So it could wait. Everything down here could
wait while he thought it all through.

He closed the sliding door and went
upstairs.

He was sitting on the edge of the stage,
still thinking, when the Bringers arrived.

That night he saw the play through, beginning
to end, as the Bringers rehearsed. He saw them working their
spells, warming up, practicing for the big night, when the moon and
stars would be right, when they would have an audience, when they
would have to perform the entire thing nonstop, without break or
flaw.