The Magician King

chunked shut in the stillness. He felt the others’ eyes on his back as he crossed the road.

There was something on top of the stone post: buttons. They were scattered in the grass around it too. Big ones, small ones, pearly ones, tortoiseshells. It must be a fan ritual. You come by, you leave a button, the way people left joints on Jim Morrison’s grave.

Still, he stopped and touched each of them, one by one, just to make sure none of them were genuine.

The camouflage spell was unbelievably crude. He picked up a big leathery oak leaf, snapped off a shingle of bark from a tree, plucked a blade of the scanty grass, and collected a granite pebble from the edge of the road. He whispered a rhyming chant in French over them, spat on them, and—the glamorous life of the modern sorcerer— stuffed them in his pocket.

Further up and further in. He stayed off the gravel driveway and picked his way through the trees for five minutes, until there were no more, and then he was looking at Aunt Maude Chatwin’s house.

It was like he was looking back through time. The unpromising driveway had been a feint, a hustle. It really was a grand house; it probably would have qualified as magnificent if they hadn’t just come from Plover’s house. As Quentin got closer the gravel track pulled itself together and became a proper driveway, which clove in two and formed a circle with a modest but still entirely effective fountain at the center. Three rows of tall windows adorned the front, and the gray slate roof was a beautiful profusion of chimneys and gables.

Quentin hadn’t known what to expect. A ruin, maybe, or some appalling new Modernist facade. But the Chatwin house was perfectly appointed and restored, and the lawns looked like they’d been trimmed that morning. It was everything Quentin had hoped for, except for one thing. It wasn’t empty.

That well-maintained lawn was littered with cars. They were nice cars that made the rental Jag look poky by comparison. Yellow light spilled out of the lower floors and out into the mellowing dusk, chased by some nicely judged, not-overamplified early Rolling Stones. Whoever’s private hands the house was in, they were having a party.

Quentin stood there, on the outside looking in, as a little convocation of evening gnats began to gather over his head. It seemed sacrilegious—he wanted to barge in and order everybody out, like Jesus ridding the temple of moneylenders. This was ground zero for the primal fantasy of the twentieth century, the place where Earth and Fillory had first kissed like two cosmic billiard balls. Over the chatter a roar went up, and a woman shrieked and then laughed uncontrollably.

But looking on the bright side, it was a tactical windfall. It was a big enough party that they could mingle in, the girls especially. They wouldn’t sneak in at all, they would walk in the front door. Brazen it out. Then when any suspicions had been allayed they would slip upstairs and see what they could see. He walked back to the car to get the others.

They found a spot for the car on the lawn. They weren’t the least plausible bunch of partygoers imaginable. Quentin had invested in some nice clothes in Venice, charged to Josh’s bottomless credit card.

“If anybody asks just say John brought you.”

“Good one. Dude, are you gonna . . . ?” Josh gestured at Quentin’s appearance.

Oh, right. Probably better not to show up looking like a pile of mulch. He killed the camouflage spell. Crossing the threshold, Quentin closed his eyes for just a moment. He thought of little Jane Chatwin, still alive and at large somewhere. Maybe she would be at the party too.

Josh made straight for the bar.

“Dude!” Quentin hissed. “Stay on mission!”

“We’re in deep cover. I’m getting into character.”

For all that it was a party at Maude Chatwin’s house, it was also just a party like any other party. There were pretty people and unpretty people, drunk people and undrunk people, people who didn’t care what anybody thought about them and people standing in corners afraid to open their mouths lest somebody look directly at them.

Deep cover notwithstanding, Josh revealed himself to be conspicuously American by asking the bartender for beer. He wound up settling for a Pimm’s Cup, which he consumed with an air of disappointed bafflement. But he and Poppy made themselves agreeable to the other guests with an ease and skill that Quentin found awe-inspiring. Genuinely social people never ceased to amaze him. Their brains seemed to generate an inexhaustible fund of things to say, naturally, with no effort, out of nothing at all. It was a trick Quentin had never figured out.As an unattached American male among English strangers, he felt inherently suspicious. He did his best to affiliate himself with small groups and nod along politely in response to people who weren’t especially talking to him.

Julia found a wall to put her slender back against and looked decorously mysterious. Only one man dared to approach her, a tall Cantabridgian type with a half-grown beard, and she sent him packing in terms so uncertain he had to salve his wounds with cucumber sandwich. After a half hour of this Quentin felt he could begin a slow drift toward the stairs—not the grand Tara-style ones in front but a more unassuming, utilitarian staircase toward the back of the house. One by one he caught the others’ eyes in turn and inclined his head. We were just looking for a bathroom? All four of us? Too bad they didn’t have drugs; that would have made a better cover story.

The staircase performed a tight switchback up to the second floor, a hushed and darkened maze of white walls and parquet. The rumble and tinkle of the party was still clearly audible, but hushed now, like distant surf. There were a few kids up here, helling along the hallways and racketing in and out of rooms, laughing a little too hysterically, playing some game nobody knew the rules of, flopping down on the coats when they got tired, the kind of forced pack of one-shot friends that exists on the margins of all grown-up parties.

The World in the Walls wasn’t a how-to manual, and it was irritatingly vague as to the precise location of the famous clock. “One of the back corridors of one of the upper floors” was all the detail Plover gave them. Maybe it would have been better to split up, except that would have violated the basic teaching of every movie ever made. Quentin would have worried that everybody else would slip through into Fillory without him, leaving him behind in reality like the last man standing in a game of Sardines.

Whoever lived here now didn’t use the top floor at all, and it had gone unrestored. Another piece of luck. They hadn’t even refinished the floors—the varnish had worn off them, and the walls were old wallpaper, with even older wallpaper showing through in places. The ceilings were low. The rooms were full of mismatched and broken furniture under sheets. The quieter it got the realer Fillory began to feel. It loomed in the shadows, under beds, behind the wallpaper, in the corner of his eye, just out of view. Ten minutes from now they could be back on the Muntjac.

This was the place. This was where the children played, where Martin vanished, where Jane watched, where the whole terrible fantasy began. And there in the hallway, the back hallway—as it had been written, as the prophecy foretold—stood a grandfather clock.

It was a beast of a clock, with a big fat brass face orbited by four smaller dials tracking the months and the phases of the moon and the signs of the zodiac and God knew what else, all framed in plain, uncarved dark wood. The works must have been hellishly complex, the eighteenth-century equivalent of a supercomputer. The wood was the wood of a Fillorian sunset tree, it said in the book, which shed its flaming orange leaves every day at sundown, endured a leafless winter overnight, and then sprouted fresh green new ones at dawn.

Quentin, Julia, Josh, and Poppy gathered around it. It was like they were re-enacting a Fillory book—no, they were in one, a new one, and they were writing it together. The pendulum wasn’t moving. Quentin wondered if the connection could still be live, or whether it had broken after the children went through. He couldn’t feel anything. But it had to work, he would make it work. He was going back to Fillory if he had to cram himself into every fucking piece of cabinetry in this house.

Even so it was going to be a tight fit. Maybe if he breathed out all his air and wriggled through sideways. Not how he planned to make his triumphant return to Fillory, but at this point he’d take whatever worked.

“Quentin,” Josh said.

“Yeah.”

“Quentin, look at me.”

He had to tear his eyes away from the clock. When he did he found Josh watching him with a gravity that didn’t suit him. It was a new-Josh gravity.

“You know I’m not going, right?”

He did know. He’d just let himself forget in all the excitement. Things were different now. They weren’t kids. Josh was part of a different story.

“Yeah,” Quentin said. “I guess I do know. Thanks for coming this far. What about you, Poppy? Chance of a