Tamburlaine got up and went to the gramophone, stroking it like a German shepherd scolded for barking too loud. It turned its bell up to her lovingly. She looked back over her shoulder at him, plum blossoms falling down her back, her face framed by the spires of a distant city beyond the forest she’d drawn, a city of many colors, a city that looked as though it might just be made all of cloth.
“Say it, Thomas. It’s not a bad word, it’s not. Say what we are.”
The troll in Thomas Rood laughed and wept and wrote the word over and over on the walls of his heart, on his ribs, on the insides of his eyelids.
“Please?” Tamburlaine begged. “Tell me I’m not wrong.” Green tears welled in her eyes. “Tell me I’m not alone.”
Thomas put his hands over his face. From beneath them, he whispered:
“Changelings.”
“Changelings,” she answered, and the gramophone shuffled its brass feet, singing over and over:
Ain’t we got fun?
CHAPTER VIII
PLEASE BE WILD AND WONDERFUL
In Which Thomas Summons a Guest (and Her Dog), Learns How a Piece of Wood Became a Daughter, Writes Out a Recipe for Wombat, and Becomes the Legal Property of a Marsupial
Time ran differently in the Empire of After School. If you didn’t go home, it could almost stretch on forever. It wasn’t like the Kingdom of School. It wasn’t a particular place. The great clanging bell could ring at three o’clock and you could play on the swingset and throw a ball against the brick wall of the schoolhouse and still, somehow, not find your way to the Land of After School. But you could drag your feet walking home, spend a precious dime on a strawberry pop, cut through the park, kicking a pinecone down the grass while thinking about what it would feel like to be a hippopotamus and take your baths in the Nile and suddenly find yourself there, in the long orange hours before supper, where a hundred games and a thousand jokes can squeeze in.
The trick to making it last, as Thomas faithfully reported to Inspector Balloon, whose cheerful cover had grown a bald spot and many wrinkles, as befits an old scholar, was to avoid the Enemies of the Empire, which is to say, anyone bigger than you. Teachers would tell you to get on home and remind you to read the longest book they could think of just at that moment for a surprise quiz tomorrow. Big Kids, if they had suffered one of the strange and mystic sorrows that plagued their kind and had a mood on, would probably wallop you one or trip you flat. Parents would flex their magic and you would find yourself boiling spaghetti or sweeping the porch or doing math problems at the kitchen table no matter how much you struggled and strove.
But the best part of the Empire of After School was coming home to an empty house all to yourself, knowing your parents have got to be away visiting their own exotic countries: the Duchy of Dinner Parties, the Commonwealth of Overtime, Dance-Hall County, the misty and mysterious nations where Grown-Ups venture alone, like the dancing princesses disappearing at night.
On this particular evening, Nicholas and Gwendolyn Rood had mounted an expedition to the Marshes of Politics, attending a rally to benefit men like Nicholas, who had gone away to war and felt that things ought to have been better when they got back. The Country of War was so distant and dreadful that Thomas could hardly think about it, could not begin to make a section for it in Inspector Balloon. His father had been there, had lived there, but he would not talk about it. Thomas understood that the Country of War casts a spell of silence when you leave it, so that it can keep its awful secrets forever. Thomas never wanted to go to the rallies—and today would not be the day he changed his mind. Tamburlaine was coming, and thus a herd of Egyptian hippos could not drag him out of his house before she arrived.
It was his turn to l
et her into his house, his room, his little Nation of the Learmont Arms Apartments, #7. He raced home and tried to think of the rituals his mother used to summon a visitor: sweep the floor, put flowers in the vase on the dining table, turn up the lights, put the kettle on, make little miniature sandwiches. Thomas always vanished into his room when his mother’s friends arrived, so he did not know that the kettle meant tea. It only seemed important to fill it with water and make it whistle. Nor did he see why the sandwiches had to be so tiny and thin when people were always hungry in the afternoon and those wouldn’t feed a doll, but he did it anyway, slicing cheese and radishes carefully with the big knife. He made his bed, which he never did, preferring to keep it as more of a nest or a cave than a bed. He brushed out all the cobwebs in his room and shoved his clothes into his chest of drawers till it was packed so tight it groaned. He made sure all his troll and fairy-story books were lined up neatly on his bookshelf where Tamburlaine would see them straightaway. And he waited. The kettle screamed—and the summoning seemed to work, for a knock rapped at the door.
Tamburlaine was wearing her wig and her skin again. Behind her she pulled a huge red Irish setter with chocolatey, warm eyes. Thomas hadn’t heard a dog when he’d visited her house! Perhaps he lived outside. Tamburlaine seemed strange to him, now he knew what she really looked like. Like somebody wearing clothes she had outgrown years ago. But she didn’t take them off or shake out her plummy hair as she had before. She looked around politely, thanked him for the sandwiches, and munched on one with a thoughtful expression. The Irish setter sat on his rear and yawned. Out of her own house, Tamburlaine seemed much less sure of everything in the world.
“I didn’t know you had a dog,” Thomas ventured.
“A dog? Oh! Silly me.”
Tamburlaine reached up a hand and smacked him hard on the side of his head. It made a loud thwack in the quiet. And it hurt like fire.
“Ow! Hey!”
Thomas’s eyes crossed a little—and when they came uncrossed, the Irish setter had vanished. The gramophone stood hesitantly behind Tamburlaine, shifting bashfully on its long brass legs, tilting its bell this way and that.
“He wanted to come,” Tamburlaine explained. “He likes you. Thomas, this is Scratch. I made him, and he’s just the most marvelous thing there is. Do you have anything for him to eat? He likes ragtime and jazz and torch songs…but it has to have lyrics. He doesn’t have a mouth, you know. He can only say what’s on his turntable.”
Scratch arched the neck of his bell in pleasure. He wound up his crank and dropped his needle. The lime-green lady’s voice poured out:
Now the curtain is going up
the Entertainer is taking a bow!
Thomas thought he might cry again. But his face decided to grin instead. Scratch was an alive thing. A talking thing. Alive and talking the way he’d always wanted everything, just everything, to be. Thomas went over to his parents’ gramophone, which seemed rather shabby and dull just now, and pulled a record out of the cabinet where his parents kept them. It had a great handsome fat man in a sky-blue suit on the cover, his mouth wide open to let the music out.
“And…and sometimes he’s a dog?” Thomas handed it over and tried to sound casual, as if he already knew that sometime gramophones could be dogs.
Scratch shook his bell and moved his needle to a different groove on the spinning black record. He sang again: