Orson Card - Magic Street

So he rested a little more, then jumped the stream and climbed up the other side. Then he just walked, trusting that he'd run across the path and know it when he saw it. And sure enough, he did.

It was still that faint light of earliest morning when he saw the back of the Skinny House. Mr.

Christmas was no longer standing at the door, of course, as Mack lightly ran along the mossy path until his feet touched brick. And in a few steps the house was itself again, and the patio was concrete with the rusty barbecue and the umbrella clothesline stand and the old screen door that stood just the tiniest bit ajar.

Mack opened it, and turned the knob and the door into the kitchen opened, and there was Mr.

Christmas, looking like himself again—or not like himself, depending on which version was really him.

The dirty dreads, anyway, and the clothes he was wearing, and he sat at the kitchen table sipping something that wasn't coffee but Mack didn't know what.

"Forget something out there?" asked Mr. Christmas.

"Somebody steal your pants or you give them to a beggar? Or have you decided to go au naturel today?"

So he wasn't going to answer, and Mack wasn't interested enough to keep pushing. "I need something to wear."

"As I was saying."

"Got anything that would fit me?" asked Mack. He looked at Puck's thickish body and said, "Or something that won't fit me unless I tighten a belt really tight and roll up the pantlegs?"

"I got nothing that fits me, if you haven't noticed," said Puck. "But you're welcome to look in the closet and see what I got. Seeing how this house responds to you a lot better than it does to me."

Mack walked into a bedroom that didn't look like anybody had ever slept in it, considering that there weren't even sheets or blankets or a pillow on the bed, and the bed was just a bare mattress on the floor.

He went to the closet and slid the cheap sliding door open and there were six pairs of pants hanging there on hooks, each one identical to the pants he had left behind on the wrong side of the ravine. Four of them were clean, but one was damp and muddy, and another was torn as if by savage claws and covered in half-dried blood.

"Guess things might have turned out a few different ways," said Puck.

"But they turned out this way," said Mack. He took one of the clean pairs of pants out of the closet and put them on.

"You know how these pants would have gotten so wet and muddy?"

"I almost fell into the stream at the bottom of a canyon," said Mack.

"So these torn and bloody ones..."

"The panther," said Mack.

"Panther?"

"The one guarding the lamps."

"Ah," said Puck. "Lamps."

"They just hanging there in the air."

"Oh, they got something holding them up," said Puck.

"Duh," said Mack. "Magic, of course."

"So if you come close, this panther..."

"You never gone there?" said Mack. "You never saw that dead man? With a donkey head?"

Puck chuckled and shook his head. "Once she loves you, you never forget, you never give up."

"He ain't trying no more," said Mack. "Whatever it is he was trying to do."

"He was trying to set her free."

"Set who free?"

"The queen."

"I don't know what you talking about. I got to go home now."

"Why you pretending you don't want to know?"

"Cause whatever I ask, you don't tell me nothing. But when I don't ask, you full of information."

"She's the most beautiful woman who ever lived," said Puck. "But her soul's been captured and locked in a glass cage."

"The queen."

"The Queen of the Fairies," said Puck.

"And the dead guy with the donkey head, he was in love with her."

"Shakespeare, that asshole, he never understood anything. About love or magic. Always had to

'improve' the story." Puck winked. "He couldn't take a joke."

"You don't like Shakespeare?" asked Mack.

"Nobody likes Shakespeare. They just pretend they do so they look smart."

"I like Shakespeare," said Mack.

"You never read Shakespeare in your life."

"Some college students, they put on a play for us. I liked it."

"Yeah, yeah, cause they told you to like it. And cause they didn't put on Othello with some white dude with his face painted black."

"So it was Shakespeare locked a queen's soul in a lantern in the woods?"

"No," said Puck scornfully. "Shakespeare wouldn't have the power to pick his own nose, he come up against the queen."

"Himself," said Puck. "If you think I saying his name in this place, you crazy."

"What about the queen. What's her name?"

"She has so many. Mab, some call her, and that's closer to her true name. But also Titania.

Shakespeare knew those names but he didn't think she was the same person."

"So why don't you go out into the woods and set her free? Guy can make a whole house disappear from the street, you got to be more powerful than a panther."

"How far off the ground was that lantern?" asked Puck.

Mack held his hand out, about shoulder high.

Puck laughed bitterly. "So he didn't shrink you."

"Shrink me?"

"I step off the bricks into the woods, I shrink down to fairy size. Small enough to ride a butterfly.

Only they's no flying across that ravine. You think you had a hard time climbing down and up again?

Crossing that water? How hard you think it be, you this high." He held up his hand, his thumb and fingers about four inches apart.

"You? That tall?"

"In those woods."

"And you can't do anything about it?"

"That my natural size," said Puck. "When I'm home."

"Is that home for you, in there?"

"It's part of home. A corner of home."

"So what's it called?"

"Faerie," said Puck. "Fairyland."

"Not Middle-earth, then," said Mack. "Not Narnia?"

"Made-up bullshit, that stuff," said Puck. "There's no lion in that place, making people be good.

There's just power, and those who got more of it and those who got less."

"And in that place, you're little." get me if I try to fly. I can't get in to set her free."

"But I could," said Mack. "I'm tall enough."

"But you scared of that panther."

"Only a little," said Mack. "What I'm scared of is dying."

"Same thing."

"Don't care how," said Mack. "Just don't want to do it. Panther no worse than any other way."

"What did she look like?"

"If it was her, and you not just shitting me, then she was this little bit of light bouncing around inside the glass. Bright, though."

"Couldn't look right at her, could you."

"Burned a spot in my eye, didn't wear off till morning. Saw her in my sleep."

"Ah," said Puck. "You had her dream?"

Mack shook his head. "Not like that. I just dreamed about that point of light."

"Ah," said Puck, clearly disappointed.

"So who's the other one?" asked Mack.

"Other one?"

"Two lanterns, two lights. One of them might be this queen, but who's the other?"

"A prisoner of love," said Puck, and then he started singing it.

When grownups started singing old rock songs, the conversation was over. Mack had his pants on, and he better get home.

"You going to set her free?" asked Puck.

"You get me a can of panther repellent and a big stick, I get that glass open."

"Is that a lie or a promise?"

"If she's really in one of those jars."

"That's a good point," said Puck. "What if you open the wrong one."

"I told you."

"You told me nothing. You always tell me nothing."

"I told you it was Queen Mab in that jar."

"That's probably just another lie."

"I don't lie," said Puck. "These days, I don't even spin." He demonstrated how slowly he moved when he tried to turn himself around.

Mack didn't wait to watch. He headed out of the bedroom and out of the house. When he reached the sidewalk, he turned around to look, and the Skinny House was gone.