Eventually, those voices found other things to rage about.
During those long months, Sara and her father found a new peace. The relationship would never be perfect, but Sara felt sure that things like that, like the perfect father-daughter relationship, were the real myths. She loved him, and he loved her. Whatever Ted Halliwell had endured, he had awoken to a new life in which the choices his daughter made in her life troubled him not at all. Her happiness was all that mattered to him. Sometimes they bickered, but there was a tenderness even in that.
Sara had spent the late summer and early fall in Atlanta, packing up her studio and meeting with former clients, hoping to get leads on new business in the northeast. Her new photography studio in Boston wouldn’t open until January or February, but already she had work lined up.
Yet the idea of photographing fashion models and advertising layouts again left her cold. She kept it to herself, but there were so many new beauties, so many bits of breathtaking magic in the world now, that those were the things she wanted to capture with her camera.
Still, a girl had to eat.
The road ahead curved to the right and she followed it, the car buffeted by the November wind. The weatherman had predicted rain, but so far she had not seen a drop. She glanced at her odometer, trying to figure out how far she’d gone since getting onto the Old Post Road. If the directions her father had given her were accurate, she ought to be almost there by now.
Almost as the thought occurred to her, she caught sight of the house looming up on the right. Beyond the pine trees and bare oaks, situated at the peak of a distant hill, stood a massive, sprawling Victorian. On that grim day, the lights in its many windows were warm and inviting. Smoke rose from two separate chimneys.
Sara caught her breath and put her foot on the brake, slowing to turn into the dirt path that led up through the trees. She drove carefully up the hill until she arrived at the front of the house, where she parked and climbed out of the car.
Her keys dangled from her hand as she stared up at the house.
It had been built entirely out of sand.
The front door opened and her father stepped out, wearing that long coat that he so favored but thankfully without the silly bowler hat.
“Hello, sweetheart,” said the Dustman.
Sara ran to him and threw her arms around him. She kissed his rough cheek. The sand was warm.
“Did you bring your camera?” he asked.
“Oh, right.” She went back to the car and popped the trunk, pulling out her camera bag and slinging it over her shoulder. When she returned to him, he stepped aside to let her into the house.
“What’s the big mystery, Dad?” Sara asked.
Her father smiled. “Come in.”
She went through the door. He followed and closed it behind her. Sara gazed around, mouth open in wonder. The house was vast inside. A long corridor led away on either side of the grand staircase in the midst of the foyer. The stairs split, both sides leading up to a balcony on the second floor, overlooking the entryway. The place felt a bit chilly, but she could smell the woodsmoke from the fireplaces, and the oil lamps that seemed to be everywhere gave the house the feeling of an age long gone by.
“Follow me,” he said, starting for the stairs.
“Dad?”
Ted Halliwell turned and smiled at his daughter. “Sara, follow me.”
She did, up the stairs to the second-floor balcony. The wide corridor there led deeper into the house. Both sides of the hall were lined with doors, and the corridor seemed impossibly long, as though it might go on forever.
“Magic,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
Sara turned to her father. Adjusting the strap of her camera bag over her shoulder, she stared into his eyes. “What is this? Where does it go?”
“Not ‘it.’ They. Every one of these doors opens into a different part of the world, some ordinary and some legendary. We can go anywhere in the merged world, see everything with our own eyes, or through the lens of that camera.”
She stared at him, shaking her head, speechless.
The Dustman shrugged. “You’ve got no plans for the next couple of months, until you open your new studio. You said so yourself.”
He reached out for his daughter’s hand. “So, where do you want to go first?”
Sara laughed, stared down that long corridor at all of those doors, fighting disbelief. But there was no room in the world now for disbelief.
She took his hand.
“Surprise me.”
On a cold, crisp night during the first week of December, Oliver Bascombe sat in the familiar chair in his mother’s parlor and stared into the fireplace. The logs roared and crackled with flames. He’d built himself up quite a blaze and sat, now, reading Jack London’s The Sea Wolf. The book brought him comfort. Since childhood, he’d read it many times, always in this room, in this chair. In his imagination, he had sailed aboard The Ghost with Wolf Larsen, traveling into danger and adventure.
Oliver slipped a finger into the book and reached up to rub at his eyes. The fire flickered ghostly orange on the walls. He might be getting tired, but he thought, perhaps, something else troubled him beyond the heat of the fire getting to his eyes.
The Sea Wolf had lost some of its magic. Danger and adventure no longer had the allure for him that they had when he’d been a boy.
A gentle knock came at the door, and then it swung open. Unbidden, Friedle entered the room carrying a small tray, upon which sat a steaming mug of the thick cocoa the man had been making for him ever since his mother had died. Oliver knew memory could play tricks, but it seemed to him that Friedle always got the cocoa exactly right. Nobody else had ever been able to duplicate it.
“Good evening, Oliver,” said the fussy little man.
Oliver smiled. “Friedle, your timing is incredible. You have no idea how much I needed this right now.”
But of course he did. Friedle had been watching out for Oliver and Collette for years, keeping them out of too much trouble. He seemed always to know what they needed, and to be there when it mattered most.
“Thank you,” Oliver said, taking the tray from him and setting it on the coffee table.
“You’re very welcome.”
Oliver took a sip from his cup. A smile creased his lips. Perhaps Jack London’s stories were no longer enough to transport him back to his childhood, but here in this room-which he would forever think of as his mother’s parlor-with the fire burning and the taste of that cocoa on his lips, he remembered what magic felt like.
Not the magic in his hands, or that which had returned to the world…the magic that only existed on the inside.
Friedle started to withdraw. Oliver glanced at him. They knew, now, that Friedle had never been his real name. The goblin who had served the legendary Melisande-his mother-was called Robiquet. But from the moment they had returned to the house on that high, craggy bluff overlooking the ocean, Oliver and Collette had persisted in calling him Friedle. For his part, the fussy man seemed to prefer it. Friedle behaved as if nothing had changed, save for the absence of his former employer, Max Bascombe.
“I miss him,” Oliver said.
“Pardon?”
“My father. It’s strange, don’t you think? I spent so many years wishing for the courage to get out from under his shadow, and now that he’s gone, I want him back.”
Friedle nodded. “We all miss them, when they’re gone. He wasn’t a bad man, your father. He was just afraid for you.”
Oliver took another sip. “I never thought of him as afraid of anything.”
“For himself, of course not. The only thing that frightened Max Bascombe was the idea of something happening to one of his children.”
The cocoa tasted sweet as ever, thick on his tongue. In his entire life, he had never invited his father to join him in the parlor on one of those long nights when he would retreat here. The old man would have declined, he was sure. Still, Oliver wondered.