“If you will listen,” Phineas Amalgam said, swirling his glass, “I will tell the first tale. Then perhaps, if you find it worth the trade, you will give me one of yours.”
“Hear, hear.” Mr. Haypotten passed Amalgam a cup of coffee. “Let’s have a good one, Phin.”
“Could you tell the one about the house in the pines?” Petra asked. Amalgam glanced at her, surprised. “I read it in one of your books,” she explained.
“Oh.” The folklorist had collected hundreds of stories into books. It was perhaps not terribly surprising that he did not immediately remember that the story Petra had asked for was not actually in any of them. “Yes, I suppose I could tell that one.”
It can be hard to keep one’s stories straight.
“Thank you,” said Petra.
Unable to restrain himself any longer, Captain Frost turned the half-hour glass, and Phineas Amalgam said again, “Listen.”
TWO
THE GAME OF MAPS
The Folklorist’s Tale
LISTEN.
There was a city that could not be mapped, and inside it a house that could not be drawn. It stood at the bottom of a hill on a street called Fellwool, a lane with broken pavement that had been overgrown and mostly hidden by ancient, knotty pines. It was the kind of house that, in simpler times, might have been called enchanted or haunted or cursed. These houses appear now and then in towns and cities that will tolerate them. Sometimes they survive. Sometimes they do not.
This house, the house in which this tale takes place, had survived for many, many years. It had copper pipes that reached down into the earth like roots; its woodwork had taught its stonework how to breathe in exchange for lessons in strength; and the ironwork that chased the eaves and climbed the walls and curled along the windows danced in the sunset. It allowed its rooms to roam like cats. It had permitted residents now and then, when the endless march of the years got lonely, but it never kept them long. It was a crafty dwelling, and it had ways of regaining its solitude when visitors overstayed their welcome.
A truth I have noticed—I believe it’s a truth, at any rate—is that the extraordinary calls to the extraordinary. Over time, little by little, spoon by spoon and cup by clock, one cupboard and one key and one battered hat at a time, this singular house collected things to it: things remarkable and peculiar and marvelous and uncanny. When the house was occupied, this led to occasional . . . let us call them adventures, although by adventures I don’t mean only the cheerful and happily ending sort of occurrences. When it was empty, the house and its collection of wonderful and terrible furnishings whispered to one another. What happened this time? Well, I’ll tell you. It was wonderful. Or, It was terrible.
Sometimes people ventured in uninvited. The house and its denizens dealt with this in different ways, depending. Much of that community was inclined to be more curious than annoyed, but some of the rooms were antisocial or easily insulted or worse, and some of the furnishings had questionable senses of humor or were inclined toward troublemaking or were simply malicious. The house itself came to dislike visitors simply because they caused so many tensions between the spaces and items the structure contained. Eventually it began to really discourage intruders, both for their own good and to keep the peace.
And to limit the amount of damage. Sometimes there was fallout when the more malevolent rooms and objects really got going, and the tools and brooms and mops in the house resented being made to clean up everyone else’s messes.
One autumn, a man came to town. Though he was a peddler by trade, he was in town that year not to sell, but to acquire. The peddler had lost a thing belonging to his employer, and he had been tasked with the almost impossible duty of replacing the mechanism in question. The first of the many arcane pieces the reconstruction required was among the most important: a keyhole. Not a key, not a lock, but the actual keyway belonging to a particular sort of cabinet—the sort that formed an adit-gate, which is a technical term for what you might otherwise call a portal. And not just any portal, but the sort of portal that could bridge space and time, for the mechanism the peddler was attempting to build had to be able to manipulate both.
The peddler had traveled widely, and in his travels he’d read tales of this sort of portal: adit-gates hidden in wardrobes, and in looking-glasses; in clocks, in wells, in bedknobs. But it wasn’t every building that would tolerate the presence of border furniture within its walls; buildings, after all, are mostly meant to keep the world out, not let other worlds in. And though he was a foreigner, he knew the city of Nagspeake well, and he suspected that if such a thing as an adit-gate was to be found there at all, it would be found in the peculiar house on
