Sometimes it is hard to see the shape of things. The world is frightfully big, and you can only ever see the part you’re standing on. Even if you could find a ledge or a tower so high up that you could see everything from New York to Budapest to Australia and back again, the cosmos is so much bigger and wider than that. You cannot see from your doorstep that the world is rolling along in space with its brothers and sisters, which we call Venus and Jupiter and Saturn and the Sun, but it is so. No matter where you stand, everything is always and forever so much bigger than you can tell.
If September had found such a ledge or tower, she might have seen herself, inside Aroostook the Model A, moving up that long silver road that led from the mountain to the Moon. And she might have seen the mountain itself, a great, gorgeous spire of rock rising out of the fiery cold sea in the shape of a woman with long flying hair and wings like a fish’s many fins on her back. She might have seen the woman’s craggy hand pointing up toward the sky and from the tip of her longest finger the road winding out and up like her own long breath. She might have seen the frozen face of the mountain pursing her lips a
nd puffing her cheeks, blowing Moonbound travelers off her hand like dandelion puffs after some secret stony wish.
But if our girl could have climbed the tallest ladder you or I can imagine and stood upon the topmost rung with her lunch in one hand and binoculars in the other, she might have seen something even stranger and more interesting.
The Moon over Fairyland is always waxing. Because of all I have just told you concerning the difficulty of seeing things as they are, it sometimes looks full to sailors on the Perverse and Perilous Sea or lovesick Physickists in the woolly towers of Pandemonium or young girls walking along intent on some goal or other. They see the vast curve of the crescent turned fully toward them, so vast it looks nothing at all like a crescent. It is on this outer edge that the folk of the Moon live and scheme and play the harpsichord. It is here the Whelk of the Moon looks out over the Sea of Restlessness. It is here the Hreinn once lived, where Moon-walruses practice one-tusk calligraphy and two-tusk billiards.
No one lives on the inner edge of the Moon.
Well, not anymore.
But there is someone there now. Rooting around in the ruins, sniffing at smashed-in statues and pawing at dark, broken houses where nobody is having supper. Somebody is walking around a shattered herald’s square, picking things up, turning them over, weighing them, staring at them with a terrible sharp eye. It’s a long job—no one bothered to clean up after themselves. Objects lie here and there and everywhere, very fine but very forgotten: sledgehammers, rakes, chisels, straight-edge razors, sickles and scythes, spades and hammers, jewelers’ glasses, telescopes, wheels, abaci, longshoremen’s hooks and seamstresses’ tape, wrenches, knives, swords, fishing rods and wrenches, shears and knitting needles and frying pans and brooms and axes and typewriters and film projectors and dead lightbulbs and clocks.
Somebody is investigating all of them, one by one. He is tall and handsome, with thick, curly black hair and a long, noble snout. He is alert and careful. His ears stick up straight so as to miss nothing. His nose is very wet.
His name is the Black Cosmic Dog.
In the middle of the square he pushes a pile of old spectacles aside and begins to dig, furiously, in the soft soil of the Moon.
CHAPTER VIII
WHERE THERE’S A WHELK
THERE’S A WAY
In Which September Walks on the Moon, Is Accused of Sundry Wickednesses by a Lobster and Two Jackals, Hails a Crab, and Meets a Very Unusual Mollusk
We have said before that the world is a house.
You and I have gone together into the basement where the underworlds are kept. We have lounged comfortably in the front room and shared our familiar tea with all things familiar: Omaha and Europe and cruel schoolmates and spy movies and airplane factories and amiable dogs. We have played such wonderful games in the upstairs bedroom, where Wyveraries and Marids and witches and giant talking cats peek out from behind the bedpost and the Lamp is always on. You might think that I will take you to the attic next, where the heavens of a house get bundled up with twine and draped with muslin and wait quietly for our footsteps. But it is not so. In the house of the world, the heavens are not in the attic.
They are on the roof.
Shall we crawl up there and see?
Why, here is everything that soared up high and got lost, everything that wanted to keep safe from marauders below. The tenderhearted old world catches everything thrown too far and too hard, keeps everything fragile whole: baseballs and stuffed bears and birds’ nests and last autumn’s leaves, zeppelins and Icarus and Leonardo’s flying machine, Fairies and pterodactyls and cherubim and hot air balloons and a Russian dog or two. It’s hard to get up there, harder than the stairs down into the basement. It takes longer; you must climb out a window and shimmy up the chimney and pull yourself over by your fingernails without breaking the gutters. Gravity is involved, and unbreakable spells concerning escape velocity. After all, anyone can go down into the cellar if they are not afraid of the dark. Any tale you care to tell calls for a quick trip to the underworld to bring up another bag of flour and a working knowledge of your darker nature. The surface of the world is like a great black net; any moment you could fall through and fall deep. But for every underworld there is an overworld, an upper world just as strange as the lower, just as bright as its cousin is brooding. The snow that falls in one splashes down as rain in the other—and brightness is not less perilous than shadow. An Italian poet got himself a ticket good for both shows once and came back to tell us all about it, which shows excellent manners.
Everything that goes down must come up again.
When you leave the world, the going gets tough, whether you are a chemical rocket or a little girl. Take my hand, I know the way. Narrators have a professional obligation not to let their charges fall onto the pavement.
Aroostook and September idled, each in their ways. The Model A’s rumble mellowed into a thick purr as Ballast’s soda-gas flowed through her insides. The light of the sun on the Moon blazed pure white; the pearly sand beneath those four piebald tires sparkled sharply, purposefully.
September stared. Specifically, she stared up. She could not quite put a name to what she saw towering above her. Even after climbing out of the car and putting the handbrake carefully on, she still could not get her head all the way around it. Her hands shook even though the Moon had stilled some time ago. In the end they had only fallen a few, embarrassing feet. The off-ramp hung miserably behind her, broken off in midair, jumbled and cracked and twisted by the quake. Bits of ivory briar crumbled away into the starry black; an awful metallic whine wheezed out of the silver paving stones. B.D.’s Moondock Salvagation drifted back downroad, righted and ruddered, looking for wrecks. But September barely heard the sounds of the barge and the creaking road. What clanged behind her could not possibly be important.
In front of her yawned the mouth of a seashell the size of a mountain.
It lay on its side, a sea-snail shell tapering for miles into a slender point on one end and a massive knobbly spiral crown on the other. Along its spine rose great prongs tipped with glowing white flame. It seemed to be every color at once, jade-green and amethyst and quicksilver at the crown, swirling into deep blue and indigo and bright fuchsia, and then into white-orange and copper and gold as its tail swept away up the shore. For the off-ramp emptied out not only directly into the giant shell but onto the shore of a scarlet, frothing sea, its waves washing the curve of the sea-snail and leaving pink rinds of salt behind. The height of the thing made September dizzy. Polished mother-of-pearl lined the shell’s wide mouth. It opened gracefully inward like a smile. A steep coral staircase led up to the lip of the entrance and what could be inside September would have ventured no guesses.
“It’s all right to gape, girl. I love it when people gape! Means they recognize the spectacular when they see it.”
September startled. The great snail shell had so swallowed up her attention that she’d noticed nothing else, not even the trio of creatures guarding that steep staircase. On the left side of it crouched a black jackal with great dark ears and bright silver eyes. On the right side perched a white jackal with a long, pale snout and piercing dark eyes. Between them, a large, muscular, and very green lobster stood watch. In her thick, powerful claw she clamped a long, two-pronged fork whose tips glittered as if to assure September of their sharpness. Her antennae and the jackals’ tails wafted to and fro in the same rhythm. Two of the shell’s fiery prongs framed the three of them. It was the white jackal who had spoken.
“If you need more time to be amazed, just give us an estimate, love,” said the black jackal. Their voices were quite high and human-like.
“What is this place?” whispered September. The shushing sounds of the sea seemed to rub against her, making her skin feel prickly and hot.