Ha ha, Puck. Very funny.

What fools these mortals be my ass. I heard your teeny weeny little voice, Puck, and dragged you out of Fairyland and took you to the hospital and then you somehow sucked healing out of me then what? Any thanks? Any favors? No, you just disappeared.

Though now that Mack thought about it, maybe not getting a favor from Puck was the best favor he could think of. Because fairy favors always took away more than they gave.

"Mack, this thing you've got with Shakespeare," said Miz Smitcher one morning, "I'm delighted, I'm happy for you, you're smart as I always thought you were. But you got to sleep at night, baby.

Look at you, hardly keeping your eyes open. It's a miracle you don't put your Rice Krispies in some other hole."

And because he was tired, Mack answered almost honestly. "I got to find out about him," he said. "He's like me. In a lot of ways."

Miz Smitcher touched his forehead. "Oh, I know, baby. He was white, you black. He had long hair like a white girl, you got hair so nappy your head could rub the paint off a Cadillac. He was English, you American. He was a brilliant writer, you can't spell. He made up plays, you wander around the neighborhood like a stray dog eating at anybody's back door who'll feed you. Who could miss the resemblance?"

Mack sat up straighter and finished his Krispies and didn't talk about being like Shakespeare again.

"I can spell okay," he mumbled.

"I know. But you don't spell like Shakespeare."

"Nobody spells like Shakespeare anymore, Miz Smitcher. He couldn't spell worth... spit."

That was an old game between them, and Mack took it up. "Tastes so bad I got to lick up the puke just so I can have something to puke out again."

"Now you going to make me puke," said Miz Smitcher. She got up from the table and started rinsing off her dish to put it in the dishwasher.

So the game was over before it began. Or maybe it never was a game. Maybe she really was mad at him. But why? He didn't actually say "shit." So she was probably really mad about something else.

About Shakespeare. About Mack reading all the time and staying up late looking stuff up on the web.

Don't you see, Miz Smitcher? This stuff is about me. I'm a changeling myself, and Shakespeare wrote about fairies and changelings because he met them, he must have, he knew the answers. Only he's dead and I can't ask him. So I got to find the truth in his plays.

Ariel, for instance, in The Tempest. He was a fullsize fairy or spirit because he had been rescued by Prospero and so he was bound to serve him for a certain period of time and...

And I rescued Puck. There in the woods, I rescued him, and he's bound to serve me.

That's why he's never there at Skinny House. That's why I never see him on the street. He's hiding from me, so I won't realize that he's my slave.

Not that I want a slave.

But if I'm his master, then I can ask him questions and he's got to answer.

But as long as he can't hear me giving him any kind of command, he doesn't have to obey.

Cheater.

That afternoon Mack slipped into Skinny House and out the back door and went to the ruins on the hill above Olympic Boulevard and with spray paint wrote in big letters, one letter per column, PUCK YOU CHEATING FAIRY GET BACK HOME!

Two days later there was a story in the paper that he heard Mrs. Tucker read aloud to Miz Smitcher. "Can you imagine such bigotry in this day and age? Right there in huge letters across the face of the Olympic overpass."

"At least it said 'fairy' instead of 'nigger,' " said Miz Smitcher. "Maybe that's progress, maybe it ain't. The way it used to be for us in this country, I don't wish that on anybody."

Mack heard this and he called Ceese and pretty soon the two of them were parked at Ralph's just down from the overpass, looking at the big letters that said PUCK YOU CHEATING FAIRY

GET BACK HOME!

"I wrote it but not here. I wrote it in Fairyland. I was sending a message to that lying cheater Puck."

"Puck?" asked Ceese.

"Mr. Christmas. Bag Man."

"You're saying he is Puck?"

"I asked the house what his real name was, and It made a hockey puck appear."

"It doesn't look like it says Puck, actually."

"That's what it says."

"That P looks more like an F. See how it's not really a loop there?"

"It says Puck, dammit!" said Mack.

"Don't get excited. But you can see how it got folks talking. They aren't going to think somebody's writing a message to a real fairy named Puck. They're just going to think it's a message from a bigot so dumb he can't make an F right."

"Don't you get it, though, Ceese? I wrote that at a ruined circle of stone columns in Fairyland, and it appeared on the overpass here."

"On both sides, too," said Ceese. "You only wrote it once?"

"Only once."

"So what you do in that place changes things here," said Ceese.

"I've peed and pooped all over Fairyland," said Mack. "You think that stuff pops up in our world, too?"

"Now that's a pretty thought. Right in the middle of somebody's kitchen table."

"Right in the office of some studio bigshot."

"A pool of piss."

"A steaming pile of—"

"You're going to make me puke."

"I puked once there, too."

"You a regular shitstorm, boy. Somebody got to get you under control. I got to find out if there's a serial burglar who breaks into people's houses, takes a dump, and leaves without stealing nothing."

"I'd like to see you prove it."

"We could do DNA testing."

"Shit don't have no DNA," said Mack.

"Did somebody here ask Mr. Science?"

"I wrote that sign in Fairyland," Mack said, returning to the subject. "And come to think of it, stuff that happens here changes the world there, too. I mean, the terrain is pretty much the same. So when we have an earthquake, maybe they have an earthquake, too. Maybe they get mountains because we get mountains."

"That's God's business," said Ceese. "Not mine. I'm a cop, not a geologist."

"You not a cop yet."

"Am too. Been a cop for two weeks now."

"And you didn't tell me?"

"I'm still a trainee. Probationary, kind of. I don't want to make some big announcement yet because I still might wash out. But I got a badge and I'm going out on calls."

"You a cop. I can't believe that."

"Now you can't mess with me anymore," said Ceese.

"I never messed with you before," said Mack. "Now I got to start."

"I'll arrest your black ass and give you such a Rodney."

"It takes six cops to give somebody a Rodney."

"It takes six white cops," said Ceese. "Takes only one black cop."

"Who the bigot now?"

"Just stating the obvious," said Ceese. "I been practicing Eddie Murphy's speech from Beverly Hills Cop. His 'nigger with a badge' speech."

"Only cop I ever saw was Baldwin Hills."

"That's one long movie."

"The name of the movie is... stop messing with me, Mack. I come clear over here cause you want to check out the graffiti they wrote about in the paper, and now you telling me you wrote it in Mr. Christmas's back yard."

"It's a big back yard, Ceese."

"Well, I got to give you credit. It's the first graffiti I seen in years that I could actually read. But you can't make a P worth shit."

On the way home Ceese took him to the Carl's Jr. on La Cienega so it turned into a feast, but the whole time, they both knew that something strange and important and maybe terrible was bound to happen one of these days, and they wished they had some idea of what.