She put the toad back in her pocket and felt the weight of the book Diseases of the Sheep.
When she pulled it out, she heard a sigh go up from the assembled pictsies.
They think words are magical….
She opened the book at random, and frowned.
“Cloggets,” she said aloud. Around her, the pictsies nodded their heads and nudged one another.
“Cloggets are a trembling of the greebs in hoggets,” she read, “which can lead to inflammation of the lower pasks. If untreated, it may lead to the more serious condition of Sloke. Recommended treatment is the daily dosing with turpentine until there is no longer either any trembling, or turpentine, or sheep.”
She risked looking up. Feegles were watching her from every stone and mound. They looked impressed.
However, the words in Diseases of the Sheep cut no ice with magic doorways.
“Scrabbity,” said Tiffany. There was a ripple of anticipation.
“Scrabbity is a flaky skin condition, particularly around the lollets. Turpentine is a useful remedy—”
And then she saw, out of the corner of her eye, the teddy bear.
It was very small, and the kind of red you don’t quite get in nature. Tiffany knew what it was. Wentworth loved the teddy-bear candies. They tasted like glue mixed with sugar and were made of 100% Artificial Additives.
“Ah,” she said aloud. “My brother was certainly brought here…”
This caused a stir.
She walked forward, reading aloud about Garget of the Nostrils and the Staggers but keeping an eye on the ground. And there was another teddy bear, green this time and quite hard to see against the turf.
O-kay, Tiffany thought.
There was one of the three-stone arches a little way away; two big stones with another one laid across the top of them. She’d walked through it before and nothing had happened.
But nothing should happen, she thought. You can’t leave a doorway into your world that anyone can walk through, otherwise people would wander in and out by accident. You’d have to know it was there.
Perhaps that’s the only way it would work.
Fine. Then I’ll believe that this is the entrance.
She stepped through and saw an astonishing sight: green grass, blue sky becoming pink around the setting sun, a few little white clouds late for bed, and a general warm, honey-colored look to everything. It was amazing that there could be a sight like this. The fact that Tiffany had seen it nearly every day of her life didn’t make it any less fantastic. As a bonus, you didn’t even have to look through any kind of stone arch to see it. You could see it by standing practically anywhere.
Except…
…something was wrong. Tiffany walked through the arch several times and still wasn’t quite sure. She held up a hand at arm’s length, trying to measure the sun’s height against the horizon.
And then she saw the bird. It was a swallow, hunting flies, and a swoop took it behind the stones.
The effect was…odd, and almost upsetting. It passed behind the stone and she felt her eyes move to follow the swoop…but it was late. There was a moment when the swallow should have appeared, and it didn’t.
Then it passed across the gap and for a moment was on both sides of the other stone at the same time.
Seeing it made Tiffany feel that her eyeballs had been pulled out and turned around.
Look for a place where the time doesn’t fit….
“The world seen through that gap is at least one second behind the time here,” she said, trying to sound as certain as possible. “I thi—I know this is the entrance.”
There was some whooping and clapping from the Nac Mac Feegle, and they surged across the turf toward her.