The Left-Handed Booksellers of London, стр. 16
Merlin stayed on the road, running alongside the car ahead, but stopped suddenly as even more of the weird, frightening children poured into the street, gyrating and tumbling and leaping about.
At that moment, Susan realized with horror that all the other pedestrians had vanished, all the colorful umbrellas were gone, the turned-up collars on sensible coats, the fast-moving coatless optimists. There were only dozens and dozens of these children, who were clearly not children, a great crowd of them dancing closer and closer, reaching out to join hands. But their hands had only three fingers, their thumbs were in the wrong place and bent backwards, and their nails were horribly long, all in all more like the taloned foot of a hawk than a human hand.
The dancers had already formed a second, wider handfast ring around the empty cab, Merlin, and Susan, this one made up of forty or fifty dancers, all moving in a counterclockwise direction. They made no noise save the shuffle of their rag-wrapped feet, though their mouths were open to show their fangs and rotten gums, and their breath was fetid. Around and around they went, shuffling and capering, shuffling and capering. . . .
Merlin drew Susan close, his right hand tight on her left, and held the stick down at his side.
“Too late,” he said. “They’ve got us in a May Dance. Don’t let go.”
“Where did everyone . . .” Susan started to say, but she stopped, staring around in bewilderment more than fear. Beyond the circling ring of urchins, not only had all the ordinary people vanished, but now the street and the cars and buildings were fading away as well, replaced by open fields to the north, and close to them, a huddle of tents, shanties, barrows, and stands. Even the clouds and rain had disappeared, the sky was a vivid blue, and it was hot, like a prime August day, though it was—or had been—only the nineteenth of May.
“Don’t accept anything anyone gives you freely,” warned Merlin. “Particularly food or drink.”
“But there’s no one—” Susan started to say, but she stopped as suddenly there were people, a great crowd of them. People dressed in medieval clothes, jerkins and smocks and hose, boots and simple leather shoes. Sound suddenly came back as well, sellers calling out their wares, people talking and laughing, musicians in the distance, pipes warbling above a constant drum. Smells wafted across—sweaty, unwashed people stink and earthy farmyard stench, overlaid with cooking meat and fat, and smoky, burning smells.
The circling dancers stopped, laughed in unison, and suddenly broke apart, individuals racing off in all directions through the crowds, ducking and weaving to disappear among the larger people.
“Where are we?” asked Susan. She blinked several times. There was something wrong with how everything looked, but she couldn’t quite work out what it was. . . .
“The May Fair,” said Merlin shortly. “Or more precisely, a mythic resonance of the fair that was held here for centuries, with the obvious lending of its name to the place later. It’s a trap. The urchins . . . who you might know better as goblins . . . have danced us here. Which is extraordinarily unlike their usual behavior. They’re tricksters, but usually fairly harmless. They never kill, for example, not on purpose—”
“Give us a kiss, darling,” roared a drunken man clad only in a rough smock hitched too far above his knees. He leaned in close to Merlin, who dodged aside and smacked him across the back of the knees with the blackthorn stick, sending him crashing down to the muddy ground. Holding Susan’s hand all the tighter, the bookseller led her away as the man lay in the puddled track that had been Curzon Street, laughing his head off as if he had wanted to land there all along.
“They’re real,” said Susan, aghast, as she was brushed by the corner of a tray of small steaming pies being carried past by a woman whose face was transformed by the most delighted smile. “And all weirdly happy.”
“It’s real for us, for now,” said Merlin. “They’re happy because, like I said, this is an idealized version of the best days of the fair. The urchins have trapped us here. But they have to follow tradition and give us a chance of getting out—”
He jerked aside to avoid a skipping child—a human one, not one of the pinch-faced, sharp-canined urchins—and Susan had to jump after him to avoid letting go of his hand.
“Like the Shuck, the goblins have to follow the rules of the legend. Apart from the two of us, there’ll be something here that doesn’t fit, that isn’t right. They have to show it to us three times. If we don’t claim it, we’ll be stuck here forever; we’ll forget who we are, become archetypes, caught up in the mythic fair.”
“Something that doesn’t fit?” asked Susan slowly. She was distracted because a bear was ambling towards them along the right-hand alley between the closer tents. A glossy-furred bear on a flimsy chain, dancing as if it was enjoying itself, the bear ward by its side mimicking the bear steps, in a way that made it look as if they were happily dancing together.
“It could be an object, a person, anything that looks wrong, out of place,” said Merlin. He pulled on Susan’s hand, dragging her out of the way of the bear, in front of a sausage table heavily laden with pyramidal piles of different kinds of fat sausages below a cloud of flies. Dozens more were cooking behind on a grill laid over a charcoal firepit.
“Sausages! Best sausages! Fit for a king . . . or for a queen!” roared the vendor. A small woman with a very loud voice, she bowed low before Susan and extended her cooking fork, a section of sausage steaming on the end.