In Which Thomas Finds Himself in a New Suit of Clothes, Tamburlaine Meets Several Familiar Trees, a Baseball Throws a Tantrum, and a Wombat Imitates a Gatling Gun
It is a little-known fact that when one jumps through a bedroom wall, one does not so much land on the other side as spill. And when the five of them spilled into the bright, sunny day beyond the bedroom, they found themselves running, running already before they had any earth at all underneath them, not even knowing why it was so vital that they must run, their legs working in the air like fish gasping on a countertop. They spilled, running, into a forest so vivid and sore with color that the many little scratches and scrapes Thomas and Tamburlaine had got on the trip, dirty and stinging with bits of drywall and insulation, bled a little more freely and redly just to match. Trees stretched up in throbbing crimson, tangerine, aquamarine, glittering gold, opal-black. Their branches thatched a stained-glass roof over their heads, filtering the sun into prisms and silvery darts. They ran through mud like swirling paint, clingy and sticky and striped like candy.
A tree whizzed by on one side, a tree with a hundred white-gloved hands reaching out of it, offering little clay pots of syrup. Tamburlaine skidded to a stop. Blunderbuss ran headlong into her, knocking her flat into the mud. Thomas and Scratch wheeled round, suddenly unable to remember why they had been running so fiercely in the first place. The great thing Thomas’s baseball had become stopped too, shaking his head like a bear troubled greatly by bees.
“It’s my forest,” Tamburlaine yelped.
But Thomas was not listening. The moment he stopped running, he looked down at himself, and even if a marching band made entirely of tubas and drums and brass bombs struck up next to his ear, he wouldn’t have heard a single note.
Have you ever bundled up in a snowstorm? Piled on so many layers of scarf and sweater and parka and snow pants and mittens and great stomping boots that you could hardly move? Suddenly you are quite a lot bigger than before! You bang against bannisters and bounce off cabinets and tumble about in the icy drifts like a panda bear and not like a little human at all.
Then you may have some idea of how Thomas felt. He felt his old body padded up and stuffed and cushioned in a thick, heavy suit, so thick and heavy he couldn’t feel anything the way he used to and would certainly go whanging and pranging into everything in sight if he wasn’t careful.
But he was not wearing a snowsuit. Not even mittens. His hands were quite bare. And big. And strong. With knuckles the size of crabapples. Thomas squinted in the sunlight—a sunlight unlike any Chicago could boil up in her pots—warm, pumpkin-gold sunlight that dripped, that poured, that fizzed, that tasted, actually had a taste, and the taste was the taste of home. Thomas’s eyes grew big to gobble up that sunshine. But the rest of him was big, too. So much bigger than he had been on the other side of his bedroom wall. His shoulders felt vast and bony and tough within his old jeweled jacket, which now squeezed uncomfortably tight. His legs wanted to run again, as though they had never run before—Let us go fast, they seemed to scream, bursting the seams of his trousers. We’re good for anything you can think of! His chest gulped down champion breaths, so much air at once that it felt like drinking a whole pint of milk in one go. Thomas touched his hair. Thomas touched his nose. Thomas touched his jaw.
Only he knew, the minute he landed, feet squelching in churning rainbow mud, the moment his nose filled with sparkling, spiced air, that his name wasn’t Thomas. It never had been. His name was Hawthorn. And he was a troll.
“It’s my forest,” Tamburlaine repeated. She was pointing at something in the distance. She tasted a dollop of mud from her thumb. Her wooden thumb—Tamburlaine’s human skin and her wig were gone. She was a carved girl, her grain dark and rich and fine, her hair no longer flowers or even branches, but hard, chiseled waves cut deep into her wooden skull and wooden neck and wooden shoulders.
The monstrous baseball stared down at his four captives, sprawled out in the shimmering mud. He seemed suddenly not to know what to do with them. He panted, his fuchsia eyes blazing, his breath reeking of belladonna and mandrake and despair and other poisonous things. His truck-engine chest heaved; his shoulders arched. Thomas’s stomach tried to hide behind his spine. No one moved. In the end, it was Scratch who was bravest. He wound his crank, set his needle down, and sang out in the big, boom-barrel voice of the man in the sky-blue suit on an album cover they might never see again:
Take me out to the ball game
Take me out to the crowd…
“Silence,” the baseball-thing snarled. His voice sounded like a barrel of skulls and iron nails rattling all together. “How dare you speak to me, you blasted worms? How dare you?”
“Excuse me, sir,” said Tamburlaine, her voice tight and thin as a toy aeroplane’s rubber band, “but who are you? I should think we’d dare to speak to anyone unless we knew they were a principal or a president or a fellow in the movies.”
“He’s not any of that lot,” grumbled Blunderbuss, shaking twigs out of her yarny ears. “Unless he’s President of Being Left in the Backyard and Forgotten All the Time Because a Baseball’s Only Good for One Thing and That Thing’s Boring.”
The creature blinked several times.
“Besides, this is my forest. If anything, he shouldn’t be daring to speak to me!” Tamburlaine grinned a marvelously bossy grin. “Look, Tom—it’s mine! My trees, the ones I painted. And look there!” She pointed into the distance again. The half-finished tree of frogs rose up on a little hill, its branches still only sketch lines, thin, wispy strokes where the leaves and burls remained unfinished. A wind kicked up and the gray outline of half a tree swayed. The baseball-beast opened his gold-plated mouth as though he wanted to bellow and call them worms again, but it couldn’t quite come out. He shut it, and opened it, and shut it once more. When he spoke his fearsome voice shook a little, as though he were not quite sure of what he’d meant to holler.
“It’s not your forest,” the creature said. Wrinkles rolled from the nape of his rune-covered white neck around to his forehead. “You just got here.”
“That’s my butterfly tree there! And my eyeball tree up on that ridge, and my fireworks tree, and my dagger tree, and all of them! I thought I was remembering them but I wasn’t, I wasn’t! It’s better than remembering! I made a forest! I’m its mum! Which is a flower, you know! I should have made more of those!” Tamburlaine fell over in the mud, laughing madly. “And you! Look at you, Tom! You look amazing! The handsomest warts I’ve ever seen on a troll! Your nose is spectacular! What can you do? Can you smell thoughts? Can you talk to the dirt? I feel dizzy.” She lay down in the dirt and laughed again.
“Is it time for physical education?” the great pale beast said slowly, as though he’d been asleep all afternoon.
“Yes,” chirped Blunderbuss. “Bend down and we’ll whack you with a stick.”
“What’s your name?” Thomas said softly, holding up his hand to his old baseball. “I’m—” Half his heart wanted to holler out Hawthorn as loud as it could, to feel its own name again, and hear it, too. The other half had got quite used to being Thomas, and thus it was just the littlest bit faster. “Tomthorn,” he stuttered. Tamburlaine stared. “Tom Thorn. That’s fine for now. Tom Thorn. You were my baseball for a long time but now you’re not. Isn’t that nice? Not to be a baseball?”
The giant’s magenta eyes kindled with some deep flame, beyond words and names and niceties.
“I’m hungry,” he growled. “I’m starving.”
“There’s fruit everywhere,” Tamburlaine said nervously. “I know I made a nice Sunday dinner tree when I was little. Roast pork pinecones, cornbread trunk, mushed pea sap, and plum pie blossoms. I’m sure I can find it.”
“Sunday…” the giant whispered, spreading his massive, rune-scribbled hand across his chest.
“Is that your name?” barked Blunderbuss. “Who’s named after a day of the week?”
Faster than falling, the giant grabbed Thomas in his fist again, hauling him up toward his glistening golden teeth. Slowly, horribly, he began to push his fingers into Tom’s mouth like a cruel dentist. What’s he doing? Tom thought wildly. His fingers are too big, they’ll never fit. But they did. Tom felt a wretched stretching in his new, strong jaw, as though it were nothing but taffy. His lips and his teeth stretched, too, into a horrid, bone-cracking yawn. Those terrible huge fingers worked their way down his throat, searching for something, reaching for something, prodding, prying, and it hurt, it hurt so awfully much, he could feel himself coming apart, like a leg tearing off a roast turkey—
The giant screeched. He yanked his fingers away as though Tom had burned him. The stretching snapped back, the pain split in half, and Tom splashed down into the wet paint-mud of the forest floor as he was unceremoniously dropped on his back. Perhaps troll-flesh was poisonous to baseballs. Or giants.