The Somebodies (17 page)

PINNED UNDER THE BLUE QUEEN’S MONSTROUS
arm, Fern held on tightly to Howard’s sample minibottle spray of Correct-O-Cure. She knew it didn’t work. She knew it! And yet she couldn’t let it go. Howard would want her to have some hope that it might help. Howard! Were the maids right? Could he be fixed? Fern was heartbroken and angry—at herself mostly, but also at the Blue Queen.

From her awkward view in the clutches of the Blue Queen, Fern seemed to be looking at the castle upside down. The castle had been left empty for eleven years, and so Fern wasn’t surprised that it was dark and cold and musty. She was surprised, however, that as the Blue Queen walked over the threshold and flung one arm
into the air, the wall sconces lit up, the dust and cobwebs fizzled away to nothing, and the marble floor and the gold walls took on a freshly scrubbed shine. The Blue Queen was still powerful even though she’d missed out on the souls of the Somebodies on the lawn.

“So good to be home again!” she said, leaning heavily against the door. “I’m going to put you down,” the Blue Queen said. “No need to run. The whole place is sealed up!”

As the Blue Queen flipped Fern over to stand her on her feet, the apple fell out of her pocket and rolled across the floor.

“What’s this?” the Blue Queen asked, picking up the apple.

“My last meal?” Fern said with a shrug, hoping that the Blue Queen wouldn’t register that it wasn’t an apple at all, but was really something quite valuable:
The Art of Being Anybody
by Oglethorp Henceforthtowith.

The Blue Queen tossed the apple high into the air. Fern watched it rise up and fall. The Blue Queen caught it. She was on to Fern now. She knew that the apple meant something to her. “This apple,” she said “sure looks sweet!”

“I guess so,” Fern said.

The Blue Queen led Fern to a parlor where, with a quick wave, the dusty, yellowed sheets flipped off the
plush wingback chairs and divans and love seats. Embroidered curtains dropped from gold rods above the windows and draped themselves. The room instantly gleamed. Fern wondered if the Blue Queen was already strong enough to take the castle straight up. Could such a thing be done?

Fern had been thinking about the castle for a long time. Did it belong to her? She was royalty, wasn’t she? She looked up into the oil paintings that hung on the wall: a pheasant hunt, a man in a captain’s suit, a woman with a wrinkled nose. It didn’t seem like home to her. Fern noticed the large windows. They were barred, and through the bars, the eager faces of Somebodies peered inside. She didn’t belong here at all.

She tried another tack. “Nice place,” Fern said calmly, even though she didn’t feel calm at all. She didn’t look at the apple.

“It is, isn’t it.” The Blue Queen looked at Fern. “Stop staring at me!” the Blue Queen said. “Stop gawking with those big, ugly eyes!” She fiddled with her larvae-moth brooch nervously with one hand, and then anxiously plucked the short stem out of the top of the apple.

Fern looked away, but liked how she’d made the Blue Queen uncomfortable. It gave Fern enough confidence to ask a question. “What are they doing out
there?” She pointed at the Somebodies.

“Who cares!” the Blue Queen said, peeling a small sticker off the apple. “I never intended to give them any real power. I only need them for a boost from a stolen soul now and then.”

“What about Lucess?”

“What about her?” the Blue Queen said flatly.

“Are you just going to leave her?”

“Lucess is too squeamish. Too weak. Like her father,” she said, tapping the fishbowl. “A loveless man, in the end. He turned me in to that awful sister of his!” She leaned in to look at the three fish spinning in the bowl. She said, “And now you’re paying for it, aren’t you!” She smiled at the fish devilishly and touched the brooch. The brooch. Fern hadn’t paid much attention to it until now. What was that brooch? Why did she touch it just then, in such a knowing way?

The Blue Queen turned back to Fern. “Lucess would be more of a problem than she’s worth. You’ve seen her with her sniveling love, with her
Wait for me.
She would only disappoint me, like her father.” She glanced at Fern again, and began rubbing the apple on her shirt.

Remembering what the Blue Queen had said to Lucess,
Don’t have friends
, Fern repeated the rest to herself out loud: “Have underlings! Friends only disappoint.”

“Correct!” the Blue Queen said, rubbing the apple
more vigorously.

“And that goes double for husbands and daughters.”

“Yes, of course!” She glared at Fern. “Is this a poison apple, Fern? Have you come here to try to kill me? Now, that would be disappointing!”

“Maybe it is,” Fern said. “I don’t know for sure.”

“Why don’t you eat it, Fern? Here. Go ahead.” She shoved the apple at Fern.

The Somebodies, alarmed and distraught that their leader had turned on them, had started banging on the windows. The Blue Queen ignored them. “Take a bite!”

“I once knew someone,” Fern said, stalling, hoping that among the faces popping up at the windows, she would see Fattler or the Brainkeeper, “who made Abstract Origami.”

The Blue Queen said, “Take a bite!”

“And,” Fern said, not sure where she was going with all of this, “and…” She ran to a large oak desk with a blotter and blank paper next to an inkwell. She grabbed a piece of paper. “And he made art from the paper by doing this.” She turned the paper, twisted it, bent it, tore it a bit and then presented it to the Blue Queen.

“Crumpled paper. So what? Stop wasting my time!”

“No, it isn’t bent-up paper. It’s a family,” Fern said. “It’s a mother and a father and a daughter in an open field, having a picnic. They’re happy. They love one
another, even though they won’t really be a family like that forever.”

The Blue Queen stopped and stared at the Abstract Origami. It seemed to have caught her attention. She was stalled.

“You weren’t faking being happy at your wedding, were you?” Fern asked. “You were actually happy.”

“Stop looking at me with those big, ugly eyes. I told you to stop!”

Fern didn’t stop. “You were actually in love with Merton Gretel.”

“Shut those awful eyes!” the Blue Queen shouted. “Take a bite!”

Fern pressed on. “And you love Lucess, too, don’t you? You just don’t want to risk showing it.”

“Bite the apple, Fern!”

And so Fern did bite the apple, a small bite. It tasted like dust and ink and binding glue. She chewed a bit. “Not bad,” Fern said, looking at the Blue Queen wide-eyed.

“I will fix those eyes,” the Blue Queen said, ripping the Abstract Origami of the family at the picnic. She walked to the curtains, bit into the cloth, then ripped a long narrow swatch with her teeth.

The Blue Queen grabbed Fern again by the arm and wrapped the cloth around Fern’s eyes. The room went
dark, everything slipped from view—the plush divans, the oil paintings, the eager faces of Somebodies staring sharply through the windows. And suddenly the Blue Queen was only a voice and a cold, hard hold on Fern’s arm. She pushed Fern into an armchair, and Fern could feel the room grow windy. The light slipping in at the edge of her blindfold went dim. Fern knew that the Blue Queen was raising her arms, preparing to swallow Fern’s soul—and not just a small piece of it. She was planning to swallow it whole. Fern at last swallowed the bite of apple with a panicked gulp.

Fern held tight to the arms of the chair and pushed herself back into it. “No,” she said. “You can’t!” But suddenly Fern wasn’t as scared as she had been. She knew, deeply, from the center of her being, that she would defeat the Blue Queen. The notion spread from her middle up to her brain, and she could see the words, read them: “Fern Defeats the Blue Queen.” Had she eaten that part of
The Art of Being Anybody
? Had she ingested history?

Fern knew she had only one way to defend herself. As if it had been written out somewhere, she knew to pick up Howard’s sample minibottle of Correct-O-Cure. She sprayed it in the direction of the Blue Queen’s whisper.

The Blue Queen only laughed. “Is that what royalty
has to resort to these days? Is that the best you’ve got?”

Fern pulled the spray bottle back to her chest. Her other hand was losing its grip on the arm of the chair. In fact, that hand was suddenly stiff and could no longer hold on. Fern lifted her hand up, and she could feel the two hard edges, and hear the light shuffling of pages.

Her hand was no longer a hand. It was a book, just as it had been under the bed in Willy Fattler’s Underground Hotel. Fern could feel her book-hand pushing open. She tried to shut it, to pull it in to her chest, but the Blue Queen’s pull was too strong. A small bit of her soul tore free of the book.

And that’s the moment when the castle started to rumble and shake.

The pictures fell off the walls, their glass shattered. Furniture jiggled against the floor. Windows broke. Some of the flooring in one corner tore away from the ground, leaving a jagged hole.

Fern felt another bit of soul rip away, and this time the castle grumbled and muscled upward, grinding through dirt and rock. She lost another bit of her soul and then another and each time, the castle inched its way up and up.

Fern panicked. She could feel herself growing weak.
No,
she thought,
it can’t be. My soul is mine. There is
something about me that never changes. There’s something about me that I can always count on.
She thought of Howard, broken to pieces on the dirt mound. Why had she jumped out of her hiding place to save him? Why had she shown up at the Secret Society of Somebodies at all?

The answers came to her: she wanted to save Howard; she wanted to save the Anybodies. They were real people.

She yelled out to the Blue Queen, “You’ll
never
be royal! Not really! Not ever! Because you rule over underlings, not people.”

The Blue Queen was growing stronger every second. Her rage seemed to fuel the castle, pushing its way up like a sharp tooth.

“We’ve broken ground!” the Blue Queen shouted joyfully.

And she was right. In the middle of Central Park, in an open field, the castle’s black spire needled through to the other side and was now poking up. It kept forcing its way upward, trembling the ground around it, until the very windows of the tower at the top of the castle were showing.

There was only one person in this part of Central Park, at this moment in the middle of the night: an anxious young man, who’d been feeling weak and feverish
ever since a mysterious incident in a donut shop. And now for the extremely coincidental part of this story—this anxious young man was, in fact, N. E. Bode, which is to say, me. I was cutting across Central Park to get to my favorite all-night pharmacy, where I was going to explain my maladies to the pharmacist, who doesn’t speak much English, but who is, nonetheless, a good listener. I was in disguise as a Canadian and was already feeling highly foreign myself. In fact, with all my disguises—the endless parade of N. E. Bode—I was starting to forget who I really was.

And so I was already asking deep questions when I happened upon this odd sight.
Is this art?
I wondered. The new kind that is meant to make people uncomfortable?
Is this reality television?
I wondered. (My newfound Canadian tastes made me resent America’s zeal for reality television.) Am I going to be embarrassed on national television? Have I wandered onto a movie set? Is Glenn Close about to pop out of a trailer and ask for a cup of coffee?

No. The answer to all of this is: No. I was sick, I reminded myself; I was fevered and hallucinating. I’d have to tell the pharmacist this. Maybe I’d draw a picture. But as I padded on across the park, I thought,
There is something very wrong here. Something terrible. Something truly awful,
and I felt a terrible coldness
seep up through the soles of my shoes, up my legs, and the coldness burrow into my heart.

Meanwhile Fern, with all the fragile breath in her lungs, pushed out one final phrase, “No, you’ll only be a ruler—never royal.”

She wasn’t sure of what happened to her after this. The sample minibottle of Correct-O-Cure grew thicker and heavier in her hand. It was long, like a pole, with more weight on one end. Fern could almost place the object, but not quite. She’d held this before, but what was it?

Fern could suddenly see dimly through the blindfold. In fact, the blindfold grew hard, stiff, and too loose to fit around her eyes. Weighty, too, it slipped off her face and landed on her chest. It was big and gold, and it sat like a giant ring around her neck. She glanced up and saw that the sample minibottle had turned into her scepter. The loose gold ring around her neck was, in fact, her oversized crown. Fern wasn’t sure what to do, but she felt stronger.

She could now see the Blue Queen, who was so big that her head was touching a chandelier. Fern held her scepter over her head, and she wished that the Correct-O-Cure weren’t a sham, that it was real. She thought,
You can’t count on that stuff working. You can only count on yourself in times like these.
And that’s when
Fern’s scepter let out a hissing steam that smelled like burnt plastic. It shot up over Fern’s head and clouded the Blue Queen’s face. She coughed and gagged. The castle came to a trembling stop.