I woke up, yawning as I was still tired from the long sleep, but awake enough to get up. I looked around the room, and for a scary few seconds, I forgot where I was and what I was doing here. But then, I remembered and sank back down onto the cushions with a sigh of relief.

"Oh, good, you're awake! I thought that you'd gone into a coma because you were sleeping so deeply. I tell you, Mally came in here shouting the house down because she was worried about you and you still didn't wake up!"

I could tell from the relentless babble of words that Tarrant knew I was up, and adamant to keep me that way. I saw him walk down the stairs and sit down on the sofa next to me.

"I had to keep watch over you all night, because you never know when a person might wake up and decide to just run away into the Tulgey wood. You could have gotten hurt, and we couldn't have that, now, could we?" His voice was getting faster and faster, and I could tell that he was fighting to keep it under control.

"Tarrant!" I yelled, sitting up abruptly so that I could look him in the eye. "Stop!"

"Fez… I'm fine." He stammered, looking back up at me and seeing the concern in my eyes. "Your grandmother used to look at me in that exact same way." He smiled. I attempted a smile, but it was quickly thwarted by what I had to say next.

"Tarrant… I want to go home." I said quietly, breaking the news as easily as I could.

"Oh." He said. "I thought you would stay. I mean, your grandmother didn't, so I don't know why I expected you to." He stood up, his eyes now almost white with just a swirl of blue coming from the middle. "The jabberwocky took my clan, Alice, and now I suppose that it's indirectly taking you from me."

"Tarrant, I…"

"Save it." He said, almost inaudibly. "Have a nice life." He walked dejectedly towards the stairs, and began to climb them.

"Tarrant!" I yelled, again. "I want you to come with me." He stopped halfway up the stairs and turned to look at me. His eyes filled with green, it still looked heavily diluted, but it was definitely green. I knew what that meant.

"What?" He asked, presumably because he wanted to be certain of what he had just heard.

"I want you to come home with me." I repeated, hoping against hope that I would get the answer that I had been looking for.

"Are… are you sure?" He asked, stuttering, but smiling. "I mean, will there be a place for me up there? I've seen how you and Alice are dressed, and how you look, and you don't look like me."

"If you're worried about your appearance, personally I like it and there are millions of people wearing weirder clothes than you up in Aboveland." I thought of all the Goths and hippies that I'd passed in London, and frankly, I preferred Tarrant's appearance to theirs.

"Alright, then," He smiled massively, "I'll do it." I squealed with excitement and then jumped off the sofa and threw myself at him in a huge hug. He hugged me back, laughing heartily and tears of joy ran down both our faces.

I spent the next day with Tarrant, telling him all about Aboveland and Mother and the house and what cars were and all sorts of things that he was curious about. Mally came around at one point to ask what all the shouting was about (I'd been showing him how to attract a Taxi driver's attention in the middle of London, just in case he ever needed to use one) and we had to tell her about our plans to return to the Aboveland. She was massively upset to start off with, but then he solemnly swore to return with expensive pieces of cheese, so she relented slightly, and went off to spread the news.

Tarrant packed a small fabric bag with some necessities and memories, including the only picture of my grandmother that had been included in the envelope. He also took a ring out of his set of drawers, and slid it into his pocket. I really wanted to ask what it was, but I only saw him do this because I was peeking around the edge of the door when he thought that I had been restoring my hat, which had become muddied and ripped from being left outside. Plus, the blue cat had taken a liking to it as a scratching post, so if you have a cat you will know what it looked like after that incident.

Also, I happily realised that the hat had been made by Tarrant, (I'm sure that you lot already worked that out, but I was a bit preoccupied by asthma attacks, dead grandmother, new grandfather, being shrunk, being stretched and throwing my first hissy fit that resulted in throwing up in a bush and blacking out for thirteen hours to notice. I hope you'll forgive me) and this meant that he could probably make me a new one exactly like it when he had the time, but we expected to be quite busy for the first few weeks sorting everything out. Tarrant seemed to expect to be able to walk into the house and be accepted immediately, but I knew mum and expected that she would take a bit of persuading.

At midday we set off to the room of doors. Tarrant had absolutely no idea where that was, so I had to lead him there myself. We wandered across the field and into the Tulgey wood. Somehow, the darkness seemed a little less intense and the path seemed a little wider when Tarrant was there, but it was still quite scary. Tarrant's eyes flashed a protective orange colour as I flinched when a branch suddenly came out of nowhere to half an inch in front of my face. We talked about nothing in particular for the half hour that it took us to hike the Tulgey wood.

"I sprinted that." I said matter-of-factly as we came out and into the garden.

"You ran, flat out, right through the Tulgey woods?" he asked, giving me a look that made me think that he didn't believe me.

"I did!" I replied my voice rose with insistent pitch. "That's why I very nearly died when I came out the other side."

"Hmm." He considered. "Perhaps." Then he turned his attention back to where he was walking.

We walked in silence for a while, it wasn't awkward, it was just that we had been talking to each other all day so far, and neither had any pressing questions on our minds at the moment.

Then, a pressing question appeared.

"What was that liquid that you were staring at?"

"What?" He asked, looking down at me.

"The stuff in the bottle, you were staring at it when I burst dramatically out of the forest into the clearing."

"Oh." He realised. "You mean the stuff that makes you small."

"Yes." I clarified.

"It was pishalver." He answered.

"And why were you staring at it?" I asked.

He went quiet for a moment and looked guilty when he answered, "I was going to kill myself." I stopped walking suddenly, and turned to face him fully.

"Why?" I asked, shrieking at him.

"Your grandmother had left when she was nineteen, promising to return. She said, 'I'll be back before you know it'. Doesn't that sound like a promise to you?"

"Yes, it does."

"Well she did visit. Once." He continued. "And I foolishly thought that she would come back again, but she never did. She completely forgot that I even existed." He started walking again, and I joined him, eager to hear the rest of his story. "I couldn't bear that thought, and Mally suggested that she might have… passed away. Well, that made much more sense, as I was sure that she couldn't have forgotten me so suddenly, but I couldn't bear the thought of a world with no Alice, so I wanted to join her in eternal peace." He stopped talking for a moment, and then went on. "I see now that I was wrong, and that it is indeed possible to live in a world without her, at least now that I know she didn't forget about me." He smiled at me, and I smiled back. "Plus, I have you now, so all the more reason for me to keep on living." I giggled at this, and then realise something.

"But wouldn't that have just made you really, really small?"

"Supposedly, yes, but I've heard that pishalver works by killing off cells, so if you drink too much of it you have no cells left to kill, you just disappear."

"Oh."

"Yes."

"How does the other one work?" I wondered.

"We think that it works by speeding up the natural process of cell division that occurs in any living being." He waved his hand, dismissing the idea as too complicated to discuss. "It's magical." He concluded.

We walked on, coming up to the room of doors. "Here we are!" I called to him, running up to the small door, and then realising that I was now too big to fit through it. "How are we going to…?" I started, but then stopped as Tarrant pulled two small vials of Pishalver out of his bag. I smiled, and took one from him. I grimaced from the idea that parts of me were being killed while I drank it, but then I finished the vial, so there was no more reason to worry.

I stopped shrinking when I was just a few inches smaller than the doorway, and ran through, clasping the shirt as I ran through. Tarrant's clothes shrunk with him, and he saw me looking at them strangely.

"I embedded them with pishalver and upelkuchen a while ago; in this land you never know when you might be growing or shrinking." He ran through the door to meet me, and then dug some Upelkuchen out of his bag, handed me some, then took a bite out of his and started growing. "Just take one bite!" He warned, now thrice my size. I took one bite, and shot up to my normal size, the ribbon that had been tied around my waist was now too loose, so I readjusted it and looked up at the ceiling, then the floor, then the ceiling again before giving in and wondering aloud where the hole had gone.

"What hole?" Tarrant asked. "Where do we go from here?" I jumped up and down on the floor, but it didn't give way. "Why are you jumping?" He asked, now sounding rather frustrated. I was frustrated too, but then saw a glass table from the corner of my eye. I ran over to the table, and picked it up, delighted by its weight and density. I walked back over to where I had been before, and hurled it down at the floor. The floor gave slightly, a huge crack appearing in the tiles. I lifted the table above my head again, and threw it down at the floor. This time a large section of the floor fell away, the tiles falling down the endless hole that now stretched out beneath us, followed by the table, swirling gracefully after them. Tarrant's mouth hung open, looking from the hole to me and back again about seven times.

"Close your eyes and jump." I told him, grinning widely and stepping off the edge and into the swirling darkness waiting for me inside.