Theodore & The 7 Layers of Space, Book 1: Brick & Bird

CHAPTER 2: Up the Stairs

Confusing and contradictory things are often true.

Up, down, through, and in-between are all relative concepts. But it gets even stranger when you think too hard about The 7 Layers of Space.

***

It is difficult for us to accept that so-called grown-up people can be dumb and wrong, particularly when we are smaller than they are, and therefore largely dependent upon the dumb and wrong things that they often do. Alas, for the fragile moment, Theodore trusted and admired the Magician Detective with all of his small heart. For him, The Magician Detective's word was still the shimmering golden standard of unbroken truth. He once again felt rather defeated, but he accepted the loss without question and left the matter of The Bird behind him.

With the door to the Forbidden Office closed and the matter resolved, Theodore once again foot-grabbed his glasses from the floor and returned to their repair. He perched them, minus one lens, back on his nose and experimented opening and closing alternate eyes. His experiment brought an imposing wrought iron bookcase in and out of focus.

The bookcase overflowed with rebellious chipped spines, many of which held scratched-out titles and were conspicuously missing large sections or whole chapters. He'd read what was left of every book at least eleven times. Most of them were volumes from the collected and annotated Chronicles of the Ancient Order of Magicians, the rest were a mixture of Nanaface's recipe books and a curious array of mail-order catalogues in unknown languages. Through his independent studies (and no explanation whatsoever from the adults he lived among), he'd happily pieced together an altogether incomplete and desperately inaccurate version of the world he existed in.

While there were some long-winded sections, the texts he had access to weren't all boring. Generally, they recalled a bounty of heroic tales, deeds, and highly technical inventories of Magician Professors, Magician Barristers, Magician Librarians, all walks of The Seven Magician Protectors from The Ancient Order of Magicians. But his favorites – the stories he pored over, scrutinized (and often secretly illustrated in the margins) – were those of the position he was closest to, the thrilling tales of The Magician Detectives. Each glorious mini-drama fed his hopes that he would one day join their ranks and help stamp out the scourge that were the Travelers of The 7 Layers of Space.

He crouched down low and some one-eyed investigation on all fours revealed the stray glasses lens hidden under the rusty bookshelf. A bulbous black spider winked six of its seven eyes at him and skittered away, and he recoiled. He closed his eyes, snatched the lens, and popped it into his pocket between a cracker and a box top.

Despite his relatively unproductive conversation with the Magician Detective, he felt somehow emboldened by the morning's excitement – any interchange with his hero felt like progress. With no other plans in his typically meandering and unstructured day, he made a snap decision to head up the main staircase to find a fix for his glasses. Normally such a journey would frighten him to do by himself, but his courage had bloomed, at least for the moment, and he headed to The Roof.

One of the many confusing and contradictory things about the 7 Layers is that, for pretty much everything and everyone everywhere, they overlap – one on top of the other, co-existing simultaneously without interfering. It's all a kind of great big reality sandwich. Or casserole. Or complicated seasonal dip. But certain rare places, like The House of The Magician Detective, sort of stretch out and cut across all of the Layers at once, as if your delicious dip got spread out across a piece of paper rather than put inside a bowl. What a mess you made! Places and spaces like this are known in many technical circles, confusing manuals, and this book, as Thru-spots.

Here's that map again in case you already forgot: