“The Lowlands,” he continued, “are here.”
He thrust his left fist deep into the heart of the globe, breaking it open with such force that Jonah stepped backward and exclaimed, “Holy shit.”
X had never heard the phrase—the words didn’t seem to belong together—but Zoe’s mother found it unacceptable, and told Jonah so.
X had begun to perspire. He removed his coat—the left arm was encrusted with snow all the way up to the shoulder—and draped it over the low branch of a tree. Jonah and his mother, who’d crossed their arms and were shuffling their feet to stay warm, once again looked at him as if he were a lunatic. Zoe merely smiled. It pleased X to think that his ways were becoming familiar to her.
“The query that followed was, ‘What are the Lowlands?’” he said.
Zoe’s mother nodded.
X knelt beside the ruins of what had, until recently, been the earth, and gestured for Jonah to join him. Together, they used the snow to sculpt a tall, curving wall that ran along the edge of a plain.
Zoe’s mother stopped X as he was piling the plain with rocks, and drew him aside to say something only he could hear.
“I’m not sure I want Jonah to see this,” she said.
“I shall make it a game,” said X. “And I shall endeavor to hide from him what I say to you now: the Lowlands are an abomination.”
X told Jonah to imagine that the snow was black rock, porous and damp. He instructed him to carve a grid of holes into the wall—he called them “the rooms where we sleep” rather than “cells”—and to tuck a figurine into each of them.
“Guys or girls?” Jonah said.
“Either,” said X. “Both.”
“Civil War guys or World War II guys—or knights, maybe?” said Jonah.
“You may use any of them,” said X. “There are souls of every kind in the Lowlands, all of them in the clothes they died in. I myself reside here, among the bounty hunters”—he pointed to a cell in a row midway up the wall—“and have two neighbors. To my left lives a man I call Banger. I brought him to the Lowlands in 2012. To my right lives Ripper, whom I spoke of earlier. She drew her last mortal breath in 1832.”
“Are they your best friends?” said Jonah.
X considered this.
“Yes,” he said. “If I can claim any friends at all.”
He hadn’t meant it to sound self-pitying, but he noticed that Zoe frowned at the words, then came to sit next to him in the snow.
Zoe and her mother watched as the Lowlands came to life. When the cells were filled with “residents,” X told Jonah they required five or ten more figurines.
“To play the role of the guards,” he explained, before correcting himself and referring to them as “the helpers.”
Jonah asked him to describe the helpers. “So I can get a mental picture,” he said. X said that they were fat and simple-minded, more often than not—and that they had waxy skin and bulbous noses, and were highly pungent.
Jonah asked what “pungent” meant. Zoe spoke up and said, “They like puns,” which seemed to satisfy him.
X asked what sort of figures Jonah would suggest for the helpers, and Jonah scrunched his eyebrows down and made his thinking-cap face.
“What about orcs and dwarves?” he said.
X asked to see representatives of each species. Jonah pulled a few from the basket, and held them out to X, their ugly bodies lying on their backs on the chubby starfish of his palm.
“Well chosen,” said X. They placed the motley guards in a row atop the wall. “Now,” he continued, “we shall need a river and a tree.”
“I have a tree!” said Jonah. “It’s Pooh’s honey tree. I don’t play with it anymore. Obviously.”
He plucked it from the basket and handed it to X, who regarded it with a smile.
“This is a far lovelier tree than the one in the Lowlands,” he said. “Yet for our purposes it is perfect.”
He set it carefully on the plain, covering its base with snow so it wouldn’t topple, and then he and Jonah began discussing what might pass for a river. They were stumped, and were about to dig a long, snaking ditch through the plain when Zoe unwound the blue scarf from her neck and offered it up. X bowed his head in thanks—she thought he did it in jest, but he did not—and arranged the scarf so that it curved along the ground.
When X announced that their model was nearly complete, Jonah made a confused face and raised his hand, as if he were in school.
“Where does the devil live?” he asked.
X faltered.
“It’s said that some Higher Power rules the Lowlands,” he said. “Yet I have never seen evidence of such a presence, nor have I heard the same tale told about him twice.”
So X told Jonah about the lords. He’d delayed describing them because he didn’t know how to disguise how terrifying they were. In the end, he simply said that they were angry beasts, and that he and Jonah must use the fiercest of figurines to represent them.
Jonah’s hand shot up once more, his fingers wiggling excitedly.
“T. rexes?” he said.
Soon a half dozen dinosaurs were stationed in the miniature Lowlands. A few were raging on the plain, jaws agape, teeth flashing. Others were scaling the great wall and reaching into the cells.
“The lords are the ones who sent you here?” said Zoe.
“They are, indeed,” said X. “They put Stan’s name into my blood like a poison, along with the powers I needed to capture him. My powers are only a fraction of their own, however, and they will strip me of them when I return to the Lowlands.”