What-The-Dickens: The Story of a Rogue Tooth Fairy Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2007 by Gregory Maguire

  Cover illustration copyright © 2009 by Sarah Coleman

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.

  First electronic edition 2010

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Maguire, Gregory.

  What-the-Dickens : the story of a rogue tooth fairy /

  by Gregory Maguire. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: As a terrible storm rages, ten-year-old Dinah and her brother and sister listen to their cousin Gage’s tale of a newly hatched, orphaned skibberee, or tooth fairy, called What-the-Dickens, who hopes to find a home among the skibberee tribe, if only he can stay out of trouble.

  ISBN 978-0-7636-2961-8 (hardcover)

  [1. Tooth fairy — Fiction. 2. Orphans — Fiction. 3. Storytelling — Fiction.

  4. Storms — Fiction. 5. Cousins — Fiction. 6. Fantasy.] I. Title.

  PZ7.M2762Wha 2007

  [Fic] — dc22 2007024186

  ISBN 978-0-7636-4147-4 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-0-7636-4307-2 (reformatted paperback)

  ISBN 978-0-7636-5171-8 (electronic)

  Candlewick Press

  99 Dover Street

  Somerville, Massachusetts 02144

  visit us at www.candlewick.com

  TWILIGHT

  What-the-Dickens

  MIDNIGHT

  Hidden Forbidden

  THE WITCHING HOUR

  The Tooth Fairy Bites Back

  DAWN

  BY EVENING, WHEN THE WINDS ROSE yet again, the power began to stutter at half-strength, and the sirens to fail. From those streetlights whose bulbs hadn’t been stoned, a tea-colored dusk settled in uncertain tides. It fell on the dirty militias of pack dogs, all bullying and foaming against one another, and on the palm fronds twitching in the storm gutter, and on the abandoned cars, and everything — everything — was flattened, equalized in the gloom of half-light. Like the subjects in a browning photograph in some antique photo album, only these times weren’t antique. They were now.

  The air seemed both oily and dry. If you rubbed your fingers together, a miser imagining a coin, your fingers stuck slightly.

  A fug of smoke lay on the slopes above the deserted freeway. It might have reminded neighbors of campfire hours, but there were few neighbors around to notice. Most of them had gotten out while they still could.

  Dinah could feel that everything was different, without knowing how or why. She wasn’t old enough to add up this column of facts:

  power cuts

  the smell of wet earth: mudslide surgically opening the hills

  winds like Joshua’s army battering the walls of Jericho

  massed clouds with poisonous yellow edges

  the evacuation of the downslope neighbors, and the silence

  and come up with a grown-up summary, like one or more of the following:

  the collapse of local government and services

  the collapse of public confidence, too

  state of emergency

  end of the world

  business as usual, just a variety of usual not usually seen.

  After all, Dinah was only ten.

  Ten, and in some ways, a youngish ten, because her family lived remotely.

  For one thing, they kept themselves apart — literally. The Ormsbys sequestered themselves in a scrappy bungalow perched at the uphill end of the canyon, where the unpaved county road petered out into ridge rubble and scrub pine.

  The Ormsbys weren’t rural castaways nor survivalists — nothing like that. They were trying the experiment of living by gospel standards, and they hoped to be surer of their faith tomorrow than they’d been yesterday.

  A decent task and, around here, a lonely one. The Ormsby family made its home a citadel against the alluring nearby world of the Internet, the malls, the cable networks, and other such temptations.

  The Ormsby parents called these attractions slick. They sighed and worried: dangerous. They feared cunning snares and delusions. Dinah Ormsby wished she could study such matters close-up and decide for herself.

  Dinah and her big brother, Zeke, were homeschooled. This, they were frequently reminded, kept them safe, made them strong, and preserved their goodness. Since most of the time they felt safe, strong, and good, they assumed the strategy was working.

  But all kids possess a nervy ability to dismay their parents, and the kids of the Ormsby family were no exception. Dinah saw life as a series of miracles with a fervor that even her devout parents considered unseemly.

  “No, Santa Claus has no website staffed by underground Nordic trolls. No, there is no flight school for the training of apprentice reindeer. No to Santa Claus, period,” her mother always said. “Dinah, honey, don’t let your imagination run away with you.” Exasperatedly: “Govern yourself!”

  “Think things through,” said her dad, ever the peacemaker. “Big heart, big faith: great. But make sure you have a big mind, too. Use the brain God gave you.”

  Dinah took no offense, and she did try to think things through. From the Ormsby’s bunker, high above the threat of contamination by modern life, she could still love the world. In a hundred ways, a new way every day. Even a crisis could prove thrilling as it unfolded:

  Where, for instance, had her secret downslope friends gone? Just imagining their adventures on the road — with their normal, middle-class families — made Dinah happy. Or curious, anyway.

  For another instance: Just now, around the corner of the house, here comes the newcomer, Gage. A distant cousin of Dinah’s mom. A few days ago he had arrived on the bus for a rare visit and, presto. When the problems began to multiply and the result was a disaster, Gage had been right there, ready to help out as an emergency babysitter. Talk about timely — it was downright providential. How could you deny it?

  Therefore, Dinah concluded,

  A storm is as good a setting for a miracle as any.

  Of course, it would have been a little more miraculous if Gage had proven to be handy in a disaster, but Dinah wasn’t inclined to second-guess the hand of God. She would take any blessing that came along. Even if decent cousin Gage was a bit — she tried to face it, to use her good mind with honesty — ineffectual.

  Hopeless at fixing anything. Clumsy with a screw driver. Skittish with a used diaper. (“As a weather forecaster,” Zeke mumbled to Dinah, “Gage is all wet: where is the clear sky, the sunlight he’s been promising?”)

  Yes, Gage Tavenner was a tangle of recklessly minor talents. Who needed a mandolin player when the electric power wouldn’t come on anymore?

  But he was all they had, now. An adequate miracle so far.

  “Zeke,” Gage called, “get down from that shed roof! Are you insane? We want another medical crisis?”

  “I was trying to see where the power line was down. . . .”

  “And fry yourself in the process? Power is out all over the county. Up there, if the winds get much stronger, you’ll be flown to your next destination without the benefit of an airplane. Down. Now. And Dinah, get Rebecca Ruth off that picnic table before it blows over. I’m going to make another go at jump-starting the generator.”

  If Zeke had been the type, he would have cursed. Instead, h
e obeyed with a lot of stomping and slamming, while Dinah snatched up their baby sister. They all stood inside the sliding glass door of the breezeway. They watched their cousin make no headway whatever with the generator. Without a word they moved aside when he gave up and came back in.

  Aimless and cross, they milled about in the kitchen. Dinah shook the Cheerios box for the tenth time, but there was nothing in it but shaken darkness. The spoiled milk had been flushed down the sink yesterday morning. The spoiled meat had been thrown out the back door last night. Today they’d wolfed down the last of the bread for lunch, with two teaspoons of peanut butter made to spread on six slices. There wasn’t much left to eat but furniture polish. Still, trusting in providence, the Ormsby kids kept looking through the cabinets.

  The storm resumed its own sound track — the droning wind swelled, and flotsam blew against the house. This for the third night running. Then a new sound. A whistle, or was it more of a wail?

  “Preserve us,” said Zeke, as if he feared the opposite.

  “Banshees,” said Dinah helpfully. She wasn’t trying to be mean, nor in any way impious. She thought if she made it sound worse than it could possibly really be, this might comfort Zeke. (Daily her brother, more literally than their parents, expected an apocalypse of Biblical scale.) “Starving coyotes? No. Something better. Vampires blown off course.”

  “Said with such enthusiasm, Dinah,” observed Gage. “It’s probably only wind coming in at a new slant. Forcing itself through some chink in the chimney. The hens down at — what did you say her name was, Mrs. Golightly? — at Golightly’s place are going to be relocated to Mexico, where they’ll have to learn a new chicken language.”

  “Hungry vampires might be glad to intercept some flying chickens in the night. . . .” Dinah said. At this point, she supposed, she would almost be glad to do so herself.

  Vampires? Zeke scowled at his sister, to say, Don’t go all Goth on me. Superstitious, for one thing, and you’ll only scare yourself worse.

  “‘Wild nights are my glory,’” said Gage. “Who said that?”

  Dinah couldn’t answer. And Zeke only knew scripture verses.

  “Mrs. Whatsit.” Gage answering his own quiz. “A Wrinkle in Time.”

  “Never read it,” said Zeke in a definitive tone, meaning: And mostly likely won’t.

  “Let’s hunker down in the living room,” said Gage. “It’ll be cozier there.” The kids knew he meant to get them away from the reality of empty cupboards. They obeyed him.

  Dinah was glad that they’d pushed the sofa against the front door as a protection against burglars. This left plenty of space in the middle of the room to play picnic or Israelites in the desert or the Donner dinner party.

  “Come on, Rebecca Ruth,” said Dinah, lugging her little sister into the front room. “Tomorrow’s your big day. Tomorrow you’re the birthday girl.”

  “Birfday cake,” remarked Rebecca Ruth, who paid a steely attention to her own desires. “Birfday cake. Birfday cake.” Rebecca Ruth was ready to be two. She didn’t want to wait one more day for her cake.

  “Rebecca Ruth,” said Dinah brightly, “I made you a present out of modeling clay. A pretend cake. Do you like it?” She took her surprise off the mantelpiece and showed her sister.

  Rebecca Ruth pursed her lips, unsure, but Dinah was still proud of her work. Since there was no real cake in the house (or sugar or eggs or flour with which to make one), Dinah had searched all morning and she had scrounged up one lone birthday candle at the back of a pantry drawer. She had stuck the candle in her statue of a cupcake.

  She turned it in a circle so her sister could admire it all.

  “Cake,” said Rebecca Ruth, sounding unconvinced.

  “You’re not one year old anymore, not after tomorrow,” sang Dinah with big-sister bossiness. “You’re two. Let’s practice. One plus one equals —”

  “Cake,” answered Rebecca Ruth, dismissing it. “Prezzies?” she said, more insistently. “Real prezzies.” She meant with wrapping paper and ribbons.

  “The cake is your present. A pretend cake!” But Dinah knew her present was a failure, and she couldn’t maintain the false cheer. “Don’t you like it?”

  “You should’ve let me check out the store, Gage, when I suggested it,” said Zeke. “I might’ve found us a packet of stale bagels or something.”

  “I wanted to go myself,” said Gage, which was true enough. But the hour had never arrived that seemed safe enough to leave the children alone. Nor would Gage allow Zeke to make a solo foray to the stores on the commercial strip a half mile downhill from them, to see if the looters had left a cupcake behind. Not when the reservoir was cresting its rim.

  Zeke said, “Sometimes no present is better than the wrong present.”

  “Now you tell me,” said Dinah, tossing the fake cupcake into the fake fireplace.

  As Rebecca Ruth began to sulk at the lack of decent birthday tribute, the gale wind smacked the house squarely. Through the picture window they watched the picnic table lift first one leg, then the other three, and fly off in the direction of a happier picnic ground.

  “Rock-a-bye, sleepy-bye,” said Gage Tavenner to the toddler, gathering her up. To Dinah’s eye, Gage didn’t have the right equipment to make a small kid comfortable; his chest was too stringy and his chin had gone scratchy with stubble. But Rebecca Ruth didn’t complain. “Shall I get out my mandolin again and try a lullaby?” murmured Gage.

  Politely, Dinah and Zeke avoided voicing an opinion.

  “Dinah, you should’ve gotten some food from Brittney and Juliette when you went to say good-bye to them,” groused Zeke.

  “Their parents had already boarded up their house. If you had any friends, you could ask them.”

  “You know we’re not supposed to go downslope without permission.”

  “I was being charitable, Zeke. Comforting the sick.”

  “I’ll say sick,” said Zeke. He snickered with a degree of superiority unusual for him.

  “They were sick. Sick with worry!” insisted Dinah.

  Gage just kept humming to Rebecca Ruth. He knew that sniping among children was a kind of unstoppable natural force, like winds and tidal waves. But, though Gage was a first-year English teacher, he was too recently a grown-up to tell the difference between the normal antagonisms of kids and this new misery of hunger and waiting in the dark.

  Gage suspected that if Dinah considered him a miracle, Zeke would probably settle on the term “trial.” Or “handicap.” Gage could hardly blame him. Three days now. Three days going on four. How much longer would he be able to manage to keep their spirits up?

  But then Zeke seemed a skittish sort. At the best of times he was a jagged-eyed kid. (Dinah thought her big brother often had the look of a battery-operated toy that had been left on all night: frayed, overjuiced, imprecise in its behaviors. Ritalin candidate, Dinah’s secret friends had mused wonderingly, with perhaps a tinge of admiration. Dinah wasn’t sure.)

  Zeke defied Gage’s suggestion that they all stay put by going to rummage noisily in the breezeway storage cupboard. The faithful had nothing to fear, he knew. But did that mean that the presence of fear in his heart was a sign of his failure at faith?

  As the garden shed door banged a final time against its wall and tore from its hinges, Dinah sighed. Within reason, she was almost enjoying herself. Considering . . . well, considering what she could bring herself to consider — admittedly, she couldn’t imagine things that were beyond her imagination.

  Like where their parents were, by now.

  “What a mess in the morning — practice for Armageddon,” she said, using a phrase of her mother’s to change the subject. “We’ll be cleaning up all day long. That is, if the looters don’t break in tonight and slit our throats while we sleep.”

  “Dinah.” Gage’s voice was suddenly testy. “I know my job as a language arts teacher hasn’t prepared me to head up the local chapter of Emergency Management. But let’s not talk about thr
oat slitting in front of the baby, okay? She’s at a tender age. For that matter, I’m still at a tender enough age, too, though it doesn’t show.”

  “I’m only trying to make conversation,” said Dinah, and there was some truth to this. What were they supposed to talk about? The weather?

  Zeke arrived from the breezeway with a can opener in one hand and a surprised look on his face. “Hey, what do you know? In the cleaning cupboard I found a small sack of groceries Dad must have forgotten to unpack. A while ago, maybe, but it’s canned goods, and they never go bad. A can of cling peaches, and a jar of creamed carrots, and some tuna fish. We can open a restaurant.”

  “Western civilization is saved,” said Gage. “Good going, Zeke.”

  “Tuna Peach Surprise with a side of creamed carrots?” said Dinah. “I believe in miracles, but that’s stretching it.”

  “I’m only trying to help,” said Zeke. “If you’d bothered to scrounge up some supplies when you were out gossiping with those bubblebrains you idolize —”

  Dinah opened her mouth to protest — what really was so wrong about having downslope friends? — but just then the oldest tree on the property shrieked and split. It fell in slow motion, and the air instantly smelled greener and raw. The cloud of branches mashed up against the picture window. Ten thousand wet leaves faced them, as if pleading for entry. Luckily, Gage had duct-taped the window, so the broken glass only spiderwebbed; it didn’t fall inward.

  “That’ll help,” said Gage. “It’ll provide a barrier against any stronger winds.” He didn’t sound as if he meant it, really.

  Rebecca Ruth started to cry.

  “‘Wild Nights! Wild Nights!/Were I with thee/Wild Nights should be/Our luxury!’” Gage spread a blanket out before the fake fireplace, and he sat cross-legged on it, and held the toddler on his lap and rocked her while she bucked and resisted. “Ah, sweetie, you don’t care for Emily Dickinson?”