Magic Street Page 0,60
to the back yard of Skinny House.
At Skinny House, it was late afternoon.
Mack raced home, desperately trying to think of some plausible lie to tell Miz Smitcher about where he'd been for two whole days.
She was sitting in the living room, having coffee with Mrs. Tucker. "Well, Mack," she said, "did you forget something? Or did you just miss my cooking?"
Mrs. Tucker laughed. "Now, Ura Lee, you are a wonderful woman but you're no kind of cook."
"Mack likes my food just fine, don't you, Mack?"
That's when Mack realized that no matter how long he spent in Fairyland, it was never more than an hour and a half in the real world, though he found through experimentation that it could be much less. The only exception was that first night in Fairyland. And he couldn't think why that time should have been different.
He could bring food and tools into Fairyland - he couldn't resist writing his name with a felt-tip pen on the inside of one of the columns at the Century City Stonehenge - but he couldn't plant anything and have it grow, and when he tried to take things out of Fairyland, they were transformed.
He had thought of trying to get his science teacher to identify some of the berries and flowers he found, but when he came out, they had dried up and crumbled in his pocket so that it was impossible to tell what they had ever been.
He immediately turned around to try to restore it to life by returning it to Fairyland, but it didn't work. It was still dead. Mack never again tried to carry any living thing back with him from Fairyland.
Yet fairies themselves could make the passage. And anything at all from our world could go the other way.
Or could it?
Mack had never had a problem with any of his tools - a spade, scissors, the Magic Marker, his notebook, his pencils. But he found that he couldn't strike a match in Fairyland. He couldn't set a fire of any kind. He never saw a fire there - not even lightning.
So things that depended on fire wouldn't work there. Not guns, not cars. If he wanted a cooked meal, he'd have to bring it with him. If he somehow managed to kill an animal there, he couldn't roast the meat, he'd have to eat it raw.
What did fairies eat? Were they vegetarians? Or could they magically cook their food instead of using fire?
Those were trivial questions, he knew, compared to the big ones: Why did such a place as Fairyland exist in the first place? Were there other lands besides Fairyland and reality? Why was there a connection between the worlds right here on Mack's street? When he hiked through the place, why didn't he ever see an actual fairy? He hadn't seen one since he found Puck, injured.
Who were Puck's enemies? Were they Mack's enemies, too - or was Puck his enemy?
Who was screwing with Mack's neighborhood, and why were they doing it?
Mack struggled through Midsummer Night's Dream one time, and couldn't keep track of the lovers and who was supposed to be with whom. Maybe it was easier if you could see actors play the roles so you could tell them apart by their faces. But it didn't matter. The second time through, Mack read only about the fairies. Titania and Oberon. What a pair. And Puck - he seemed to be Oberon's servant but also he enjoyed causing trouble for its own sake.
Again, though, the real question was much more fundamental: This was a play, not history. How could he possibly learn anything from a made-up story?
He went online and learned that Midsummer Night's Dream was the only one of Shakespeare's plays that didn't come from somebody else's story. One site said that he probably got his fairies, his
"forest spirits," from oral folk traditions.
Fairies cropped up elsewhere in Shakespeare. Changelings and baby-swapping came up in Henry IV, Part I. Mercutio talked about Queen Mab - which made Mack wonder if she was the same person as Titania or if there were two queens, or many, and lots of fairy kingdoms, or maybe just one.
Only Mack couldn't figure out why they thought Shakespeare's fairies were cute. They weren't evil, either, not exactly. They just didn't care. They had no compassion for humans. People merely amused them. "Oh what fools these mortals be," Puck said - which to Mack sounded like Shakespeare already knew that Puck was a black man, saying "be"