Authors: N. E. Bode
The Somebodies (18 page)
Then the Blue Queen began shrinking. She grew smaller and paler until she was the size of a normal woman. She tumbled backward and caught herself for a moment on the edge of a chair before falling to the floor. Her skin was so pale that it seemed to shine. Fern lifted the crown off her chest and set it on the back of her head. She walked over to the Blue Queen.
“Hello?” Fern said. “Hello?”
The Blue Queen’s eyes were closed, her mouth open; and the first white moth crawled up from her lips slowly. It perched there for a moment and then flittered up and around the room. It surprised Fern, this white moth. She watched it flit around, and it made Fern think of the egg-shaped pills, the souls in the jars, and how they’d become caterpillars and then must have woven cocoons. Was this moth a bit of a soul?
More moths followed, lifting up from her mouth and batting through the cloud of Correct-O-Cure spray.
When Fern looked back at the Blue Queen, shrunken and pale, all the cocoons on the brooch pinned to her chest had broken open, setting loose even more moths. The one in the middle flitted its wings, and all of them,
one by one, skittered to the fishbowl, where they perched on the bowl’s lip. The goldfish who was Merton Gretel swam to the surface. He stared up at the ring of moths—all the lost bits of his soul—and he raised his fish mouth to the surface of the water. He opened his mouth as wide as he could. The moths rose up and sifted down into his mouth, and with each one, Fern said, “Merton Gretel!”
His face appeared first—a man’s face on a fish’s gold body. And then his front fins turned into hands. With them he reached up to the top edges of the bowl and pulled himself out. He grew and grew. His back fins flipped into feet. His scales turned into a goldish suit. The black spot under his fish eye turned into a mole. His glasses were the last thing to appear. He pushed them up on his bent nose, and Fern came into focus.
“Hello there,” he said. “Merton Gretel’s the name.”
Fern was too stunned to answer. She mustered a happy nod. She stared at the two remaining fish. Would they be saved too? Fern and Merton turned their attention to the Blue Queen. Moth after moth was rising up from her mouth. A burst of them made their dizzy path to the edge of the fishbowl, where Dorathea and the Bone took back their souls. And, like Merton, they sprouted arms, lifted themselves from the bowl and turned back into themselves. Fern was relieved. She
sighed with joy and weariness. Dorathea and the Bone’s mouths stopped pursing. They rubbed their dry arms. They were surprised to see themselves as themselves again.
Then they spotted Fern and nearly rushed to hug her, but they were stopped by the sight of a number of moths perched on Fern’s shoulders. These moths seemed to be familiar to Fern. Pieces of her soul? Could it be? Fern cupped one in her hand. She felt its wings brushing her fingers. When she raised her hand to look at the moth inside, the moth was gone, and Fern felt stronger. It was hard to explain. She did the same thing with the next moth perched on her shoulder, and the next…until they were all gone, until she felt all better.
The Blue Queen was still shrinking. Her eyes opened for a moment and she said one word:
“Picnic.”
And then, as if this were a final release, a stream of moths poured from her mouth—more and more, until moths filled the air like a snowstorm.
THE HOLE LEFT BEHIND
AND WHAT HAPPENED TO FATTLER, THE BRAINKEEPER
, the two maids, the miniature pony, Lucess Brine, the Somebodies, and the flying monkeys? What happened to Howard, broken into all those pieces still sitting on the grassy mound of the castle’s lawn?
Well, Fattler’s anger with the Somebodies grew. He hated their clamoring for the Queen who had betrayed them, tired of their bullying grips on his arms, tired of their snotty comments. He didn’t like the way they treated the Brainkeeper, who was a nice guy, after all—a better beekeeper than Brainkeeper, but sometimes people get miscast in life. And he didn’t like the way they treated the maids, as if the maids were servants,
which, Fattler supposed, they were. But that was no reason to treat them badly. He didn’t like the way they treated Lucess. She was just a child—a child whose mother was no good and who’d just abandoned her. Lucess was still crying. And one of the Somebodies was holding the pony roughly by his mane.
And so, after Fern was hauled inside by the Blue Queen and battling away, Fattler took care of the rest of the Somebodies, turning them all into a field of bronze statues.
The exploded-bun woman was the one to point out the problem. “Well, sir, you’ve frozen them while they’ve got hold of us. I mean I can’t get out of a bronze grip.”
“Sorry!” Fattler said quickly. He turned the bronze statues into rubber ones, and the maids slipped free.
Lucess stared up at the castle, tears streaming down her face. “My father!” she said. “My daddy!”
By this point the castle had ripped itself up from the dirt and was on the rise. The two maids, Fattler, and the Brainkeeper didn’t waste much time looking at the castle—Fern would have to handle that. They rushed to Howard-as-a-piggy-bank, knelt down and began trying to see if the pieces would fit back together.
“Can you fix this?” the Brainkeeper asked Fattler.
Fattler shook his head. “I’m not so sure that I can.”
The castle was shoving its way up, dropping parts of
itself on the way. It lost chunks of retaining walls. Wires dangled from it and quivered behind. It left a hole. A big one.
They all looked up at the castle. The bottom floor glowed bluish. They could see the Blue Queen growing bigger and broader through the barred windows.
“Do you think Fern can do it?” Fattler asked.
“I have faith in her,” said the Brainkeeper.
The maids nodded in unison. “Me too.”
The pony was shaking. The exploded-bun maid picked it up and cradled it like a baby.
And just at that moment, the blue room filled with a kind of steam, and the blueness of the room faded. The castle nudged another inch and then stopped. The steam formed a cloud that floated out the windows and over the lawn, and settled on the grassy mound, on the pieces of Howard scattered there. It was the spray from the Correct-O-Cure bottle that had turned into Fern’s scepter, and it stunk of burnt plastic.
Howard’s pieces began to seal together, and then the whole pig began to grow and soften and become fleshy. His snout shrunk to his normal nose. His hair sprouted on his head. The slit on his back disappeared. His clothes wove over him.
And that was when the moths started to pour from the windows of the first floor of the castle. A fine dusting of
moths lighting down. They flitted to the pile of dead books left on the mound. They burrowed into their pages, one after the other. And there was another batch of moths that headed across the wide lawn and flitted above the fishpond, where the fish rose to the surface—ten of them, in fact. They swallowed the moths and grew back into people.
Fattler was the one who started recognizing them. “That’s Olaf Chang! And the Borscht Duo, Todd and Irv!”
“And Ernst Flank,” the exploded-bun maid said. “And Marilynn Partridge, Carlita Cole, Marge ‘the Boss’ Carter.”
The wrestler maid continued. “Jive McMurtry, Erma Harris, Albert Jones-Jones! They’re all alive!”
It was the rest of those on the list of the dead from the Eleven-Day Reign. But they weren’t dead after all.
“Maybe she didn’t have the heart to kill them,” the Brainkeeper said.
“They’re back!” Lucess said, her voice brimming with hope.
Fattler, the Brainkeeper, the maids, and Lucess all stood there in silence, waiting for what might happen next. They turned their attention back to the castle, where two legs appeared—Fern’s two legs. She jumped from the first floor doorway and landed on the ground.
“Lucess,” she called. “Lucess!”
Lucess looked up. “What?” she asked.
“Your father!” Fern shouted. “He’s here!” A man jumped down from the doorway. It was Lucess’s father. Used to swimming, he walked unsteadily. Lucess pulled free of the frozen Somebodies and ran to him.
“Daddy!” she cried. “You’re back!”
“Lulu,” her father said. “My Lulu!”
Then Fern saw Howard, standing there with his arms folded on his chest proudly. He stepped toward Fern, favoring his bee-stung leg. And he said, “Well, well, well. Correct-O-Cure.”
Fern grabbed him and hugged. “I had to have faith in something,” she said.
DEAR READER
,
Not all of the mothy souls flittered back to their respective books. No, no. Some of them dithered upward to the top of the castle, straight up to the room situated beneath the spire. It was a small, circular room, its windows now broken. The spire had pierced through the rock and dirt, bullying its way so that the high windows in the small circular room were above ground, with a view of a field and some large rocks and trees and a distant bike path. The mothy souls escaped through these windows and floated off on gusty breezes.
They had homing abilities too, but instead of finding their authors by way of books, they took the bolder approach of just trying to find the authors themselves. I was still disguised as a Canadian, and was walking home from my all-night pharmacy with a bottle of aspirin. My pharmacist always suggested aspirin. I’d already uncapped the bottle and pulled out the fluffy cotton. I was standing there, thinking,
Who is N. E. Bode? Is his life no more real than this fluff of cotton? Has his fear of being found out by his insanely jealous creative writing professor come to rule his life?
And then I let the cotton go and watched it land in the gutter, where it slipped
down a grate. Some Canadians were approaching and, afraid that they’d want to talk to me about Canadian things, I turned in the opposite direction.
I turned quickly, and that’s when I saw the moth for a brief second. It had been following closely, and so there it was right in front of my face. Right in front of my mouth, in fact. I gasped. By which I mean, I swallowed it. Straight down the gullet. It tickled a bit, sure. But as soon as it was down, I felt better. I felt like I’d been missing something without knowing it and now it was back! And, of course, that was exactly what had happened.
My soul was mended—whole again.
But!
This probably doesn’t answer all your questions.
Let’s take it from the top.
Did Dorathea and the Bone and Fern and Howard ever get to grab each other and hug each other as tightly as they could and say all the things they needed to say?
Yes, yes. Once Fern had hugged Howard there on the front lawn, they turned and looked at Dorathea and the Bone, who’d made it out of the castle as well. And they did heartily grab each other and hug each other, and they started crying, all of them, quite messily.
“You saved us!” the Bone said to Fern.
“You’re brave, Fern,” Dorathea said. “You saved the Anybodies because of your good, strong soul—so pure and true! That’s the most royal part of you!”
Fern and Howard were, at this point, swallowed up in Dorathea’s and the Bone’s arms. Fern’s face was right next to Howard’s face. She smiled at him, and he smiled back. It was one of those moments when you couldn’t hold in a smile if you tried your mightiest to do so.
The Bone said to Howard, “You were brave, too!”
Dorathea added, “We’re so proud of you both!”
Was Dorathea happy to have found that her brother wasn’t dead, that he’d been brought back from the form of a goldfish? She was. Again, there was relief, joy and messy crying. She walked up to her brother, closed her eyes, cupped her hand to his ear and whispered something.
He smiled, pushed his glasses up his nose and said, “Me too.” Had they said they missed each other, that
they loved each other? Probably yes to both.
The Blue Queen? Yes, yes. You’ll want to know about the Blue Queen. Not dead. She was once again stripped of all of her powers and is now recuperating in an Anybody hospital where she is undergoing treatment by a therapist who specializes in issues about lost love and egomania and soul-swallowing.
And Fattler. It turns out that he is a genius, but he’s ordinary, too. An ordinary genius. And like all people, he did need help. He made a team—the exploded-bun maid, the wrestler woman, the Brainkeeper—who set up with his own beekeeping apparatus to manufacture Willy Fattler’s Sweet Honey, available in jars for $6.99 in the gift shop.
What about the Somebodies he turned into rubber statues? The transformations wore off slowly. They turned back into themselves, one at a time. They each looked around, noting the castle with its bottom hanging in the dirt sky, and they decided to brush off their pants, take off their SSS robes, and return to their lives. A little disenchanted, but a little relieved, too.
Now, one of you wants to know whether the miniature pony made it back to Mrs. Fluggery’s hairdo. No. The miniature humpbacked pony became Fern and Howard’s pet.
And speaking of those two, did they have to go to Gravers Military Academy?
Well, did they?
Gravers Military Academy does have some standards. They draw the line at runaways.
Sorry,
the officials said,
we just won’t take them
. Too much of a liability.
As for all those other people we met along the way?
Fern thinks of them often. As it turns out, she learned an awful lot from them. If I were the kind of writer to try to teach my readers lessons, I’d say something like: suffer fools gladly, because a bad example can be as valuable as a good one. I’d say something about the importance of sticking with your dreams.
The elevator operator with his shiny buttons, he’s stopped letting his fears rule him and he’s in engineering school. Here is a photo of him with his slide rule! He’s already designed some new glass elevator lines. And Hyun-Arnold has had success as well. He’s set up a counseling service called Sage Advice in the back of Hyun’s Dollar Fiesta. He can’t hang up the Korean accent—it makes him think more clearly, as it turns out—or the pricing (all advice is one dollar), but he feels like he’s being truer to his talents.
Now, there’s one more nagging issue, isn’t there?
You want to know the answer to this question: If you go deep into Central Park to a certain spot, will you find a spire pointing out of the ground and, beneath it, a tower room with broken windows?
Fattler and Dorathea teamed up to fix this. They went
to Central Park the night of the battle with the Blue Queen. They were cloaked in darkness, as they say in those kinds of books where people go about cloaked in darkness. They considered turning the spire into a giant tree with a massive base, but they didn’t want to tamper with the castle. It seemed historic really, this moment of the city beneath the city crossing into the city above the city. And so instead they used their Anybody’s powers to cover the spire and the tower room with the giant hull of a massive tree. If you go to Central Park and find this certain tree, you will recognize it by a ring of knotholes. Inside the knotholes there is the ring of windows around the tower, so that light can still stream inside it.
In the city beneath the city, on the grounds below, where the uprooted castle dangled, they worded a plaque—
THE BATTLE OF FERN AND THE BLUE QUEEN
—and they etched in the date. The plaque showed up in Fern’s book
The Art of Being Anybody,
which, once transformed back into itself, still smelled like apple for quite some time and had a few permanent teeth marks on the binding. It had to regrow the section on Fern’s battle with the Blue Queen, but it did eventually come back—a full account in Henceforthtowith’s confusing prose.
And what about me? What about N. E. Bode? How is he now? Isn’t someone asking that question?
Well, no more disguises necessary. Oddly enough, I’ve found the perfect hideout. It has a view of Central Park—some trees, some rocks, a distant bike path. The light streams in through the windows. I think you know the spot I mean. I go to Jubber’s Pork Rind Juke Joint on Wednesdays for their All-U-Can-Eat Pork Rind special. I get my shirts starched at Melvin’s Laundromat and Dry Cleaner’s, and I recently won seventeen dollars playing bingo at Blessed Holy Trinity Church and Bingo Hall. When I’m feeling fancy, I order a duck in blue cream sauce, now available at Willy Fattler’s Undergound Hotel dining room. And I buy my items—invisible flower pots, tins of smelts, musical filing cabinets—at Hyun’s Dollar Fiesta, where I also purchase sage advice, often in bulk.
If you happen by such a giant tree in Central Park, noting the ring of knotholes, you might want to knock on the bark. If I’m in, I will knock back. In fact, let’s have a secret knocking code. You knock twice fast then three times slow then fifteen times in stutter order, hard, soft, hard, soft. And I’ll knock back the same way. This way you can be sure that you’re communicating with me—and not some other person living beneath a spire in a tower room hidden in a giant tree with knotholes, halfway in the city beneath the city and halfway in the city above.
On second thought, a normal knock might do.
Sincerely (and I mean that!),
