“I don’t think anyone lives here,” Aubergine said softly.
“But I used my ration card,” September insisted. “We have to be going the right way. This should be the Prince’s house.”
“Don’t worry, darling,” Saturday said, putting a warm hand on her shoulder. “I can wish us aright.” He paused, biting his violet-black lip. “But only if you want me to. We can even wrestle for it, if it will make you feel better.”
September ignored him for a moment. “Maybe we’re at the bottom of the world already. It’s certainly barren and empty enough.” She did not like to think of Prince Myrrh in that dreadful house. Even if he was wi
cked or lazy or brutish, no one should have to sleep forever in a place like that.
The door of the farm house cracked open. The owner of the house peered out, and then came into the gilded, misty light. It was a man, a tall man with skinny legs and arms. As the starlight dappled the roof and the furrows and the man, September saw that he was not just skinny; his long fingers were straw-colored bones with no skin on them. Stringy roots fell in fringes from his sleeves. The naked bones of his feet gleamed greenish and strong. His suit peeled and crinkled, made of delicate purple onionskins.
His head was an enormous golden onion with no eyes or mouth.
As they watched him, the Onion-Man began to dance, first to one side, then to another, holding his arms above his head and bringing them down with a sharp sudden snap, moving his hips to some unseen onion-music. He ducked his golden head and threw it back, spinning around three times before stopping to sniff the air, though he had no nose to sniff with.
A rumbling filled the night. A grinding, growling sound, growing near. Aubergine ducked behind September, who put her arms around the bird’s neck without thinking. A-Though-L looked down in surprise. Perhaps he expected, being very large and good for hiding behind, that September would turn to him for comfort. But she was bigger than she had been, and the older, wiser part of her thought first of comforting the Night-Dodo before comforting herself.
But when the Alleyman’s truck came around the skinny, stony black road they had not even seen winding around the farm’s crumbly edges, poor September did inch nearer—only a little, for she had not yet forgiven him—to the shadow of her Wyverary. She tried to be brave, tried not to be afraid of that glittering heap of candy-cane lights rolling toward them. Ell put his long blue-violet tail around girl and bird, coiling it tight. They kept silent and hunched down, holding their breath. Ell’s and Saturday’s shadowy bodies faded into the night, and Aubergine had already gone half invisible with standing so still and quiet. Only September stood out in the lightless field, in her wine-colored coat and her copper-colored dress.
The Onion-Man saw what had come for him. He danced anyway. Up went his arms, out went his graceful long bony legs, bending at the knee, pointing at the toe. He made a ballet dancer’s leap, and then spread his skeleton’s arms wide, nodding his onion-skull from side to side. The truck stopped. The dark door of the cab opened, and the red cap floated out, its twin feathers like knives stuck into the scarlet felt. The Onion-Man kept dancing, his steps growing more frantic, his leaps higher and more desperate.
“He’s going to take his shadow, isn’t he?” whispered September.
No one said anything. They all knew. Saturday and Ell stared at their feet.
The red hat bobbed and nodded in time with the onion-man, dancing with him. In his invisible hands, the Woeful Wimble and the Sundering Siphon gleamed. With every turn and pirouette, the red hat came closer. But September thought there was a reluctance to its movement. It approached slowly, though it didn’t need to; it dipped and shook from side to side as though the invisible head beneath it were shaking no.
The hard strange voice stood up inside September once more. It stood very tall and straight in her chest, and the voice also said, No. September let go of Aubergine and pushed Ell’s tail out of the way. She marched across the furrows and the crumbly dry soil, terribly afraid and terribly angry.
“You stop it!” she cried, and the onion-dancer stopped. The red hat stopped. They both turned to look at her in dumbfounded amazement. “He’s never done anything to you, Mr. Red Hat, and that makes you a bully. Don’t you touch him!” The red hat did not move so much as a feather. “Oh, I know I’m not terrifying like you and I can’t order people about like Halloween, but I’ll have you know my dress is very fierce indeed, and I’m mad enough to burst! I’m the one who put a stop to the Marquess, and she scared me much worse than you do, so if you know what’s good for you, you’ll just turn around and go back where you came from!” This was not true at all, but it sounded very fine, so September stuck by it. The red hat looked back toward his truck uncertainly. Then it turned back to September. She could almost feel the invisible body beneath it staring at her. She felt suddenly ridiculous in her ball gown and her fine coat and the great jewel at her throat and her blue-and-lilac-streaked hair. But she would not let the Alleyman make her feel small. She would not.
And then she felt her Ell’s great strong presence beside her, and Saturday slipped his hand in hers. Oh. Oh. They would not abandon her. Of course, they would not. How silly she had been. They were her friends—they had always been. Friends can go odd on you and do things you don’t like, but that doesn’t make them strangers.
“Oh, I hate you!” September cried, her voice deep and loud with the strength of her folk around her. “Get out of here, you dreadful thing!”
And, somehow, for some unfathomable reason, in the face of them all, the Alleyman did. The red hat recoiled from her like a struck animal. It shook from side to side as if trying to clear its invisible head. The red hat dropped suddenly, and September knew, somehow, that the Lutin under that cap had fallen to his knees in some private trouble. It trembled below her gaze for a long moment.
Then, without a word, it simply rose and floated back inside the truck. The Alleyman’s truck ambled away down the skinny stony road, and September tried to calm her hammering heart. Aubergine came slowly into sight, the wired stars reflecting on her huge beak. The Onion-Man stood, for once, quite still. September tried to guess his thoughts, but his faceless head offered no sign.
Suddenly, she felt a lurching commotion in the pockets of the wine-colored coat. September reached in to see what was the matter. The flaps of the coat rustled and shook as the three small onions she had taken so long ago from the Upside-Downs leapt past her hands and out of the coat, landing joyfully on the ground.
Three little lavender-and-yellow onions rolled to the dancer. They ringed him in a circle, rolling through the dark earth, spinning with plea sure. The onion-headed man bent down and put his bone-hands to them, full of affection, brushing the tuft of onionskin at their heads. They rolled over like round puppies so that he could stroke their plump bellies. Finally, they bounced up and toddled into the gray house.
“I didn’t know they were yours,” September said by way of apology.
The Onion-Man bent down, for he was awfully tall. He took September’s cheeks in his skeletal hands and pressed his onion-face to her forehead. September’s eyes filled up with burning tears—as they always did at home when she chopped onions for Sunday soup. The Onion-Man began to move his feet from side to side again, dropping his shoulders and fanning his fingers against her cheeks, tapping out a rhythm. She found that though bones were certainly a little unsettling, they were warm and smelled like growing things and not dead things at all.
“You seem very nice, Mr. Onion,” she said. “But I do wish I knew why my ration card sent me here. I said I wanted to get to the Prince, and I don’t suppose you are anything of the sort.”
“But he is a Prince, a bit,” said Saturday. “The way Teatime is a Duke and his wife’s a Vicereine. The onions love him—and look!”
Beneath the Onion-Man’s tapping feet, tiny pale green shoots were wriggling up out of the dark soil, swaying a little to the pattern of his dance.
“You have to be very specific when it comes to magic,” A-Through-L said sheepishly. “You must say things as carefully as you can. Magic is like a machine that only does exactly what you tell it to do. So you have to speak to it in a way it can understand. And magic only understands you if you spell it out slowly. And use small words. You didn’t tell the card which Prince or how quickly you wanted to go. For all we know this is the shortest path—or it thought you meant our fragrant friend here! Or perhaps the Alleyman is some sort of Prince, too. The word Prince is very open-ended. You can’t really trust anything that far down in the alphabet.”
“I do believe everyone in Fairyland-Below is royalty!” September exclaimed. “Q
ueens and Princes and Vicereines and Emperors—it’s like visiting Europe!”