The Somebodies (13 page)

“We can’t go back!”

“I have to,” Howard said. “I can’t go on. I’ll sit on
this chair. I’ll let them take me away. Gravers Military Academy! Fine! I can’t face the Blue Queen, Fern! I won’t!” Howard was gripping the sides of the chair, staring at the floor. Fern had never seen him this way. He was shaking his head. He looked hysterical.

“We’ve got to go forward,” Fern said. “Together.”

“No.”

“We’ve got the key. We have to hide it! Fattler told us to!”

“No.”

“What time is it?” she asked. The voices seemed so close now.

“Almost eight o’clock,” Howard said. “Why?”

“We have time. But I still don’t know where the meeting is. And how do I get to the Brain? Will it know anything? Midnight is when it begins.”

“It begins? The battle?” Howard was shaking. His mouth was still forming the word “battle,” over and over.

“I’m sorry,” Fern said.

“You should be sorry. Wait! Sorry about what?” Howard asked.

“Sorry about this,” she said, putting her hand on his shoulder. She gripped the key in her hand so tightly that its little teeth dug into her palm. She focused on Howard, though she wasn’t sure what she wanted him to turn into. Something small, that she could carry with her, light, hollow. Something that she could hide a key inside.

“Sorry about
what
?” Howard said.

She shoved the key into his pocket.

“Fern?” His voice was becoming a soft, high, distant echo. “Fern? I don’t feel quite right.”

Fern watched him go pale. He slumped in his seat or maybe he wasn’t slumping as much as he was actually smaller than before. He then began shrinking quickly. His skin took on a shine; his face plumped and then went snouty. He was sitting on the wooden chair in the size and shape of a pig.

But he wasn’t a live pig. No. He was ceramic and pink with a slit on his back.

In other words, he was a piggy bank.

The applause in the other room soared, complete with hoots and shouts, as if this were what they’d been waiting for all along.

“Howard?” Fern whispered. She felt guilty. “I’m so sorry.” His face still had a certain Howardlike expression, his look of shock frozen on his now piggy face. “Howard, I hate to tell you, but I’ve had to transform you. You’re now a piggy bank. And you’re hiding the key. I mean it’s inside you. You were hysterical. I couldn’t have gone on with you in that state. Plus I needed a hiding place for the key.”

He didn’t respond. He couldn’t. He was a piggy bank, after all.

Fern then shook him gently. The key rattled inside, along with something that was a little heavier. Maybe the Correct-O-Cure spray samples that had been in his pocket? Fern wasn’t sure, although he smelled faintly of burnt plastic, and she didn’t want to mention it. It wouldn’t be funny in any way to Howard that the Correct-O-Cure samples were now lodged inside his new form, where he wouldn’t be able to use the spray to try to reverse the situation, and Fern knew it wouldn’t work anyway.

“It’ll be okay,” she told him, even though she was pretty sure that it wouldn’t be. She tucked the piggy bank under her arm and headed back toward where she figured the door might be. She thought that she should go forward to some new place, soldier onward. It was the only way.

She’d reached into paintings before, sure, but never into a wall. She walked over to the spot where she’d seen the bee crawl out of the hole. The bee had come from a keyhole. Something had to be on the other side! She knew it wasn’t a real wall; it was undercover. It had been hiding the safe, so it might also be hiding the way to the Brain. But still she was hesitant. She shoved; the wall gave. And just as the wall had sprouted a safe, it now sprouted a doorknob. This one was trembling so hard that it made her hand feel buzzy and itchy—a
buzzing knob in her buzzing hand.

WHEN FERN OPENED THE DOOR, SHE FOUND A
narrow passageway, but it wasn’t what she’d expected. It didn’t have, for example, a well-crafted floor covered in shag carpeting, or wood-paneled walls like a normal passageway. No. It seemed carved out of rock and dirt and, well, geological matter. If I were a geologist and you were a geologist and we were just chatting amongst ourselves at a geology convention, I would use catchy geology catchphrases like “lithologically distinct” and “schistose sequences” and “calcite marble.” But I’m not and you’re not and we’re not. So, I’m just hoping that you have kept it in your head that they were in Willy Fattler’s
Underground
Hotel, and that this hotel
exists under New York City. It’s okay if you’ve let that slip from your mind for a while. Fern herself was so caught up in the fancy glam of flying monkeys and modern art that she was very surprised to find a passageway carved out of dirt and rock. But she was relieved to see that she’d found herself one step closer to the Brain. There was a small, crude arrow painted on the wall, with one word painted below it:
BRAIN
.

This is what Fattler had been talking about. The Brain and the Brainkeeper. Fern wanted to know if the Brain was really brainy. Did it know, for example, that Ubuleen Heet was the Blue Queen? Did it know that Merton Gretel wasn’t dead? Did it know the whereabouts of the rest of Merton Gretel’s soul? Would it know that Howard held the key and would it know what the key could open?

With Howard-as-a-piggy-bank tucked under her arm, she walked down the passageway.

The passageway is hard to explain. It was dank and dimly lit with more bare bulbs. In this way, it was simple. But the passageway had a feel to it that was charged. There was the electric charge of the buzzing—but it was more than that. There was an electricity in the air that was foreign to Fern. It wasn’t like anyplace she’d ever been before, not even the city beneath the city or the hotel or the stuffy storage room. Although it
was made of rock, it seemed flimsy in a way that Fern couldn’t put her finger on. It seemed like it barely existed—more imagined than real.

Fern was still haunted by that moment when she’d thought that she herself was being stored in a box, her own face swimming up to the surface of that mirror. She was scared; the passageway encouraged fear. She told herself that there was nothing to be scared of, but she didn’t really believe that. It was the kind of thing she’d have told Howard just minutes before, and now he was made of ceramic and had a snout! She was sorry about that, but she’d had to do it. Every once in a while she would say this to Howard, “Sorry, Howard. Really, but it had to be done.”

The ground was uneven. Fern steadied herself with one hand on the passageway’s cool, damp wall. Soon the passageway began to turn, left and right and left again. It tilted upward and there were crude steps—grooves, really, in the rock. Fern followed the steps, which only got steeper and steeper.

At one point she heard applause again, a distant uproar amid the deep buzz of the passageway. Ubuleen Heet’s speech wasn’t over. Her voice seemed to be coming from under Fern’s feet. Fern assumed that the passageway led over the amphitheater. Ubuleen Heet’s voice was just a distant warbling. She couldn’t under
stand the words. But she could tell that the audience loved her. Ubuleen had them chanting something over and over. Fern wasn’t sure what it was.
Encase your critter’s meaty opacity? Emblaze your rimmer middle oglevary?
What was an oglevary? Then it came to her:
Embrace your inner mediocrity!
That was what Ubuleen was preaching! Mediocrity? Hugging the truly lackluster parts of yourself? So it wasn’t just Fattler she was after. She didn’t want anyone to strive. She didn’t want anyone to try to be better versions of themselves. She wanted people to give up and be happy about it.

But why?
Fern thought. Because it was easier to conquer other people if they didn’t think too highly of themselves, starting with Willy Fattler. Because she wanted to get at their souls? Is that what the Secret Society of Somebodies was about?

“We’re missing the speech,” she told Howard-as-a-piggy-bank. “There’s one thing we have going for us!” She kept climbing and winding along the passageway unsteadily.

The applause rang out from the amphitheater. She didn’t want to hear people cheering for the Blue Queen. She sprinted jaggedly, the buzz building all around her. She ran hard, up and up until she was finally out of breath. When she came to a landing, she took a break. She put Howard-as-a-piggy-bank down on the step
ahead of her and sat with a sigh. She wished that she could ask Howard what time it was. She had no idea how long she’d been climbing. Time seemed to have slipped away from everything. Had it been minutes? Hours?

She looked in the direction she’d come. At first she was confused. She’d traveled up one narrow passageway. But now when she looked down there were three, all leading to her spot on the stairs. She looked up.

There was only one passageway ahead of her. This seemed strange. How could she have not noticed that three passageways came together at this spot? She picked up Howard and again climbed the stairs. She was in just one passageway, as she’d been before. But when she looked back again, the three passageways seemed to have followed her.

Now she started to panic. It was one thing to walk into a single passageway. She’d known that she would always be able to just turn around, if she needed to, and go back the way she came. But now how would she know which of the three passageways behind her was the right passageway, the one that had lead her here?

Fern’s heart started beating fast. She climbed again, faster this time, running and tripping and running some more. And when she looked back there were five passageways staring up at her, no longer just three.

She ran again, and quickly turned. This time there were ten passageways.

And the walls began to shift ever so slightly. Small black long beads rose up from the walls, but they weren’t beads. They had legs, and fine hairs. They were black with a greenish shine.

Caterpillars.

They were caterpillars, and the high-pitched chorus of their voices rose. They roved the walls, and one dropped from above, landing on Fern’s shoulder. “Thank you, Fern,” it whispered. “Thank you for saving us!”

“I didn’t save you,” Fern said. “I don’t know you.”

“Where do caterpillars come from, Fern? How are we born? And how will we find our many ways home?”

These caterpillars weren’t ordinary caterpillars. They could speak and think, and they had a certain shine to them, nearly a glow. And then Fern remembered that she’d learned once that caterpillars are born from eggs. “Eggs?” she asked quietly, and she thought of the egg-shaped pills, the souls that the Blue Queen had compressed, the ones Fern had stolen and then scattered by accident.

The caterpillar inched down her arm to the rock below. “Thank you!”

Fern watched the caterpillars as they slipped out of cracks in the passageway—the ground beneath and the
walls on either side. They were scrabbling quickly toward her.

Fern grabbed Howard-as-a-piggy-bank and pushed herself away from the caterpillars. Were they souls? How was it possible? Fern supposed that the Blue Queen got her power from eating souls, and then she could store the ones she’d need for later—store them in this form. But Fern had set them loose when she broke the jars. What would happen to them now?

Fern ran up the grooved stairs, up and up and up. Each time she looked back, the passageways behind her had multiplied, and, within each passageway, there were more passageways to be seen. She’d never find her way back, so she kept running. The caterpillars became a far-off echo, and the buzzing grew louder and louder, until she could feel it vibrating in her own chest.

But then she heard the tune. It was the same tune that her invitation to the Secret Society of Somebodies meeting had played. It was coming from her pocket, just as it had the last time. She didn’t want to open her pocket. She didn’t want any more messages from the Blue Queen.

The tune was growing louder in her sweatshirt pocket, more insistent. It was an awful song, strung along on what now seemed to be a sickly melody. How could it have gotten there? She looked down at her
pocket. It was baggy and stretched out. She remembered the man that she’d run into at the corner of the hotel, the Somebody who’d held on to her by her pocket and then, for no reason at all, seemed to just let her go. Had he put something in there?

Fern peeked in the pocket and then slowly opened it. There was the sharp corner of an invitation. She pulled out the envelope, opened it and unfolded a gold-trimmed piece of paper. It had four words written on it:
SDOOF KROY WEN. HURRY!

Another mystery? She didn’t want another mystery. She was lost. She didn’t know what time it was. She had to hurry, of course. But she didn’t know where she was hurrying to. What help was it to tell her to hurry! She was sure that she was failing. She thought of her grandmother and the Bone, how worried they must be.

She’d come too far to chicken out.

Fern put Howard-as-a-piggy-bank down beside her. She looked at the gold-trimmed piece of paper with the mysterious
SDOOF KROY WEN
written on it, and this time Fern wasn’t impressed. She didn’t care about the gold trim. She didn’t care about how fancy the Secret Society of Somebodies sounded. She didn’t want to be royal, not really. No. She didn’t want to have to go on and prove to her grandmother that she could do it, that she didn’t need her grandmother’s help as the Great
Realdo. She looked down at the apple in her pocket. She didn’t care about making history. What did she really want? She wanted to be a daughter. She wanted to know what her mother would tell her at a moment like this. She closed her eyes and cupped her hands to her mouth. She whispered, “Was I made royalty too soon? Am I not ready for this? Should I just go home?” Tears began to roll down her face and collected at her chin. “I’m scared,” she said. “I don’t think I can do it.”

She listened for a moment and then let her hands slip to her lap. Her mother was dead. Her mother’s voice was gone. She was alone.

And then there wasn’t so much a voice as there were words, a string of them playing in her mind, and Fern knew that her mother was answering her.
The world is always changing, but there’s a part of you that never changes. It’s essentially you, and you can always rely on it to be true.

Fern knew that her mother was right. There was something about Fern herself that was true and unchanging. It was good and strong, and she could rely on it. Couldn’t she? Even now after everything that had gone wrong? Fern remembered what Howard had said while he was trying to spray the burnt-plastic-scented Correct-O-Cure on his beans.
Everyone has to have faith in something.
And Hyun-Arnold had told her
something like that too, hadn’t he? He’d lost his accent completely and said,
You’ve really got to be yourself in this life. You have to rely on something deep inside.
It had seemed like a contradiction at the time, coming from him, but now it seemed like it fit with all the others.

“I’ll fix this, Howard,” Fern promised, scooping him up. She’d have to keep Howard safe. She’d have to find this place called
SDOOF KROY WEN
and face the Blue Queen and do her best. “I’ll find a way,” she said.

She stood and looked down through the passageways—more and more passageways every moment. And then she ran the other way. She ran up and up until she was breathless and had come to a door, a single, enormous door with a sign on it, a sign jiggling fiercely with vibrations. It read
YOU ARE HERE. WELCOME TO THE BRAIN!