Mr. Pacifaker’s House
Garnet Manon pictured boys running through Mr. Pacifaker’s house, breaking the windows and frightening the rats.
“I will,” she promised.
“What happened then?” said Sarcastic Talking Horse.
“Then,” she said, “the room went black, and cold, and totally silent. Except that I didn’t have eyes to see the blackness, or a body to feel the cold, or ears to hear the silence. I floated like a thought in the back of somebody’s mind, halfway between expression and oblivion. I knew that if the somebody forgot me, I’d be gone forever. But I was afraid that they’d speak me, because I didn’t know how I’d come out.
“Then there came a blinding light, like a bright headlight on a wet blacktop road, on a night when clouds smother the sky. It sped toward me fast than anything imaginable. I couldn’t move. I didn’t have time. It collided with me, and I came out the other side, with a scream that split me in two and fused me back together in a single heartbeat.
“When I opened my eyes, I was back in the vermilion room, on the black bed. The air was still hot, hotter than before, and the fan still spun it around the room.
“But each of the thousands of scissors had disappeared.”
Garnet Manon had a spiral-bound notebook that she kept between her mattress and her box-spring. She had a special pen that spun smoothly across the pages, leaving perfect black words behind it. She used this pen to fill this notebook with speculations about Mr. Pacifaker’s life, his house, and his horse.
Mr. Pacifaker had never invited her into his house, so there was nothing to contradict her fantasy. She imagined rooms larger than the house itself, paved in marble tiles of black and white and rose and green. She imagined a reflecting pool beneath a faceted crystal dome, the water shot full of prismatic sparks and darting silver serpents. She imagined arches and columns, spiral staircases, draperies of velvet and samite and silk. She imagined doors no higher than her waist that opened into broad and secret chambers. She imagined a half-moon balcony suspended over an abyss, where she would lean over the railing, picking pearls from a silver bowl, holding them between thumb and forefinger, dropping them into the abyss, listening, listening, yet never hearing them bounce and skitter against the bottom, because there was no bottom at all.
She imagined Mr. Pacifaker, the old fairy, as a mad builder, adding wings and chambers and secret passageways for her eventual delight. She imagined him storing his treasures there for her, arranging and draping and sequestering them in such a way that only she could find them.
And since, at that time, she devoured every fantasy novel she could lay her hands on, she imagined that Mr. Pacifaker’s horse could talk, and that it was, as all talking horses, invariably sarcastic. She imagined that it would be her companion, carrying her through the ballrooms and chambers, up and down the stairs; and that it would watch after her and protect her after Mr. Pacifaker had journeyed to fairy heaven.
If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride. If horses were wishes, then Mr. Pacifaker was saving his for her.
