The Somebodies

by N. E. Bode

  Fern and Howard stood and slowly turned circles to see where, exactly, they’d ended up. On the other side of the glass door, there were six wood panels. And looking through the glass walls to their left and right, Fern and Howard saw fur—thick, glossy, brown fur—which, I’m happy to report, did not seem to be attached to live bears. It was simply fur. Behind them there was, of all the strangest things, what looked like snow, falling softly, and a distant light. “Where are we?” Fern asked, feeling like the place was strangely familiar.

  “Six-oh-one,” the elevator operator said. “Like the clipboard said.”

  “Six-oh-one?” Howard asked.

  “Room Six-oh-one, of course,” the elevator operator said. He was holding the towel and Fern noticed his hands were shaking. He was talking to himself now, looking off into the distant snow outside the elevator. “Who do you think will ring us next? Who do you think? Will we survive the next one?” He pulled a Twinkie out of his jacket pocket and unwrapped it quickly.

  “I know this place,” Fern said. “I feel like I’ve been here before.”

  “Here?” Howard was astounded. “We don’t even really know where here is!” (Of course, I, N. E. Bode, your trusty narrator, know exactly where here is. I know exactly all the lovely and odd and scary things that lie before them. But they didn’t, so let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)

  “I can’t explain it, Howard. It’s just how I feel. There’s something about the fur and the snow and that light back there through the snow. And this, too, the wood.”

  “Well, I want to get out of here.” And then Howard paused. “I think.”

  With that, the elevator operator hit a button. The pony was sitting up in Fern’s pocket, its hooves hooked over the edge, looking around with its large eyes. Howard held the book and closed his eyes and waited. The elevator gave a weary bing, and the doors slid open. But the wood paneling was still blocking their way.

  “Oh, sorry about that,” the elevator operator said, his words muffled by a Twinkie. “You sure you want to go? I don’t mind kids. They don’t weigh as much. Less chance of, you know, disaster!” He opened a little hook on the wood paneling, and two doors swung away from each other. The miniature pony whinnied, and the sound bounced around the small room.

  “I think we’ve got to go,” Fern said. “You’ll be okay.”

  “Will I?” the elevator operator asked, opening another Twinkie.

  “I have a thing with sweets myself,” Howard said. “Might want to lay off them.”

  Fern wanted to help the elevator operator, to say the right thing, but she wasn’t sure what that right thing would be. He was a grown-up, she thought. Grown-ups should know how to take care of themselves. Fern wanted to take care of herself, for example. She wanted to prove that she could. She smiled. “You’ll survive,” Fern said, but that wasn’t what she wanted to say, not exactly, and so she added, “You know, if your perception of an elevator operator is that one doesn’t roll on the floor, why can’t your perception of yourself change too?”

  “I don’t follow,” the elevator operator said.

  “Why don’t you perceive yourself as the kind of person who doesn’t have to prove that he’s not afraid of elevators, and perceive yourself as an engineering student?”

  “Why don’t you?” the elevator operator said defensively.

  “I don’t want to be an engineering student; you do,” she said.

  The elevator operator stared at her hard. “I think you know what I mean,” he said.

  And Fern felt like he could see that she was on her own this time, that she couldn’t rely on the Great Realdo, that her grandmother was getting older now. Was he telling her to perceive herself as more able, more ready for battle? “I just think it would help you, that’s all, if you perceived yourself as you wanted to be…,” she said quietly.

  The elevator operator smiled shyly, fiddled with his buttons. “I don’t know why I don’t do that,” he said, lifting his chin up. “I’m not sure. I could, I suppose. I could.”

  Fern and Howard stepped out of the elevator and through the wooden doors, and down a step onto wall-to-wall carpeting. The wooden doors shut behind them. They heard the elevator doors bing, and then the muffled voice of the elevator operator talking to Charlie Horse. “Giddyap! Let’s go!”

  The room was filled with a plush four-poster bed, a writing desk, a tiny refrigerator, a wall-hung mirror, a painting of a farmhouse. Room 601 was a hotel room. Fern whispered to herself, “Willy Fattler’s Underground Hotel?” She turned around to see what they’d just stepped out of, exactly. She wasn’t completely surprised to see that it was a wardrobe.

  “I knew there was a reason I felt like I’d been there before,” she said. The wardrobe is part of a book that’s also about a lion and a witch. Fern knew the book quite well—so well, in fact, that it seemed like she’d really experienced it, which is why this had felt so familiar. (One day you might come across something that reminds you of this book—a certain teacher’s hairdo, a certain vice principal’s origami, a certain elevator operator’s vest buttons—and you might have the very same familiar feeling. I certainly hope so.) “The fur was just from coats,” she explained to Howard. “And the snow is in Narnia.” It crossed Fern’s mind to step into the wardrobe and have an adventure somewhere else, but Fern is Fern, and she belongs right here. She felt needed here. She was going to battle the Blue Queen.

  Howard peered around the room. He coughed and patted down his mussed hair. “Hello?” he said softly. “Hello?” There was no answer. The room was empty. “Do you think this is somebody’s room?” Howard asked. He pulled out his wallet and rummaged. “I can’t pay for a hotel room,” he said.

  Fern ran to the bathroom. It was white and glistening. White fluffy towels sat in metal racks attached to the wall. There were miniboxes of soaps, minibottles of shampoo. When Fern lived with the Drudgers, they’d stayed in the hotel at Lost Lake, and because the lake was lost and the place was dismal, Fern had liked the minibottles of shampoo most of all. There was a little plastic circular container of shoe polish and a stack of toilet paper rolls. The toilet seat was wearing a paper sash that read SANITIZED FOR YOUR PROTECTION. She picked up one of the bottles and read it. “It’s really true!” Fern said, bounding back into the room. “We’re here! We’ve made it!”

  She tossed the bottle to Howard, who dropped it, then picked it up off the floor and read it aloud: “‘Compliments of Willy Fattler’s Underground Hotel.’ What does this mean?”

  Just at that moment, a gauzy netting suddenly dropped from the ceiling and down over the bed, including Howard sitting on it. The room then groaned into unfinished wood and bamboo furnishings. It became more primitive. The wardrobe became a little leaning cupboard, and a large net of bananas grew from a knob on the wall. The telephone turned into a parrot. The wall-to-wall carpeting disappeared from one side of the room to the other, crumbling into dusty sand on a wood floor.

  Howard had stopped breathing. “What?” he said weakly. “What happened?”

  “It’s Willy Fattler’s! It’s an Anybodies hotel! It’s always transforming! That’s what! Isn’t it great!”

  “Not great!” Howard said, batting his way out from under the mosquito netting, shooing the parrot circling his head. “Not great!”

  Fern ran to the front door of their room.

  “What are you doing?” Howard asked.

  “Taking a look!” she said. She turned the knob and opened the door just enough to poke her head out. The hallway was empty, lined with numbered doors. At first it seemed like a normal hallway in a normal hotel, but then the nubby oatmeal carpeting swirled into a Persian print, and the flowered wallpaper turned golden and satiny. “Imagine that!” she said.

  “Let me see,” Howard said.

  Fern dipped lower so that he could peer out over her head. “Someone’s coming.”

  They closed the door except for a small crack, and watched an elderly couple shuffle up to the room directl
y across from theirs.

  “Ever-changing cocktails!” the old man said.

  “Yes, but you didn’t have to try them all, Gerald!” the old woman chided him.

  Between the couple, Fern and Howard had a good view of the doorknob, which was gold then crystal then ancient-looking, and the old man’s key changed three times too—from a card key to a key with a metal tag to an old black skeleton key—before he slipped it into his pocket.

  “Did you see that?” Howard asked.

  “Yep!” Fern said.

  When they shut the door and turned back to the room, everything was Egyptian. The bed a gold sleigh with a pillow-stuffed mattress, hieroglyphics on the walls, a lot of asp and cat art.

  “Don’t you love it?”

  “I prefer predictability, regular patterns. I like things to be reliable.”

  Fern grabbed The Art of Being Anybody. She flipped to the page with her entry. She read it quickly, looking for new information. There it was:

  …Fern arrived withly Howard, in whole, at Willy Fattler’s Underground Hotel, and withwhile in the City Beneath the City, they held slumber in an everchanging environ to prepare for the Battle with the Blue Queen at Midnight on Day Two of the convention.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  Howard checked his watch. “Just about midnight,” he said. “Why?”

  “Nothing,” Fern said. They had twenty-four hours before the battle. Only that. Why wasn’t The Art of Being Anybody telling her what she needed to know? She decided she should follow its plan—slumber in an everchanging environ—here.

  “We should slumber,” she said.

  “Slumber? How can you sleep on a bed that is going to turn into different beds all night long!”

  “I don’t think we should sleep on the bed,” Fern said.

  “You don’t?”

  “We can’t. What if this isn’t our room? What if someone comes to claim it in the middle of the night and finds us sleeping in it?” Fern said.

  Fern climbed under the bed—a tall Victorian bed with lots of lace.

  “A bed under the bed? In the city under the city?” Howard said quietly.

  “It’s better than getting caught,” Fern said. “And kicked out onto the street.”

  Howard shrugged and joined her. He used The Art of Being Anybody as a hard pillow. They both wiggled to get comfortable. They could only really lie on their backs, but they both put their hands behind their heads and stared upward the way you would in a field, looking at stars—if you were the type of person comfortable with that kind of thing, which I’m not. With the pony curled between them, they gazed at the ever-changing bedsprings, which groaned in one direction and then a few minutes later in another. Dust ruffles at their sides came and went.

  Howard promptly fell asleep, but Fern lay awake, thinking of the gold-trimmed invitation. Was the secret location of the meeting going to be revealed to her? How, exactly? When? She would battle the Blue Queen. That was all she could think about under an ever-changing bed in an ever-changing room in an ever-changing hotel in the city beneath the city.

  4

  DEAD BOOKS

  WHEN FERN WOKE UP, SHE WAS SURPRISED TO find herself under a bed with a small pony nestled next to her. It took a minute for the day before to come clear. But once it did, she was surprised again to note that there was morning sun coming in through a window on one side, and a bright light on in the hotel room coming from the other side. Hadn’t they only left on the bathroom light? She was surprised to see a slight dimple in the mattress above her—a dimple that didn’t go away even as the bed changed from one kind to another. And even more surprising—or should I say alarming?—was the snoring. There were two snorers, to be exact: one light and puffy, the other one sickly and whistling, like a dying bird.

  She put her hand over Howard’s mouth and gave him a little shove. His eyes opened widely, and he jerked his head back and forth. Fern put her finger to her mouth and then pointed up to the mattress. His eyes went wild for a moment. Then he nodded, and she took her hand off his mouth.

  Just then the dying-bird snore sputtered and turned into a rattling cough. A pair of feet appeared beside Howard’s head. But they were only barely recognizable as feet. They seemed boneless, more like something that had slid up from the dirt. And they were white, a horribly pale, bloodless, ghostly white, like large, blind, albino slugs. (Are there such things?)

  “Wake up. Wake up! Help me out of this bed!” It was a woman’s voice, sickly, quavering, but with a cold and metallic tone.

  “I’m up,” a young girl responded.

  Two slim feet, about the size of Fern’s, swung to the floor beside the other pair. Fern took this moment to peek out in the other direction. She could only see the top of the night table, which was covered in a doily. It just had three objects on it: a tall, thin lamp with a dainty fringed shade, an old-fashioned telephone—the tall kind with the earpiece sitting in a cradle—and a large goldfish bowl with a large orange goldfish swimming circles inside. Did the goldfish have a darker orange spot under his one eye? Yes. Yes, it did. Fern shrank back under the bed.

  The girl was walking the woman away from the bed.

  “Did she arrive?” the girl asked.

  “Do you see her?” the woman said harshly.

  “Why hasn’t she gotten here?”

  “She’ll come. The invitation was designed to bring her here, directly. Get dressed. Red, please. Wear the red dress.”

  Her invitation? Someone had designed it to bring her here directly? Were these two people part of the Secret Society of Somebodies? Fern still didn’t know what that was. But she knew she didn’t like the way they were talking about the whole thing, as if she were a package they were expecting in the mail. The pony still asleep, Fern and Howard listened to shuffling, water running, the flush of a toilet, the sounds of someone brushing teeth—the comings and goings of a morning routine. But through it all, the woman was barking at the girl.

  “Like this!” she’d scream. “Stop it! Help me!” “Pay attention!” “Get my other shoes!”

  Now the pale and boneless feet appeared again. Fern and Howard could see the girl’s legs, kneeling beside the feet. Her hands worked hard to stuff the pale feet into a pair of high heels.

  Fern could feel her back prickling. It was hot under the bed, stuffy and stifling. Fern wanted to grab hold of Howard’s arm. She was scared. The hotel room had a sour smell and an electrified feeling of something gone very wrong.

  “Help me to the vanity! I’m feeling weak again. Get the box over here!” the woman said.

  The girl walked her away. And then walked back, dragging a box to the side of the bed. She reached inside and pulled out a stack of books. “Let’s just have breakfast first,” the girl said nervously. Her voice sounded slightly familiar, as if her voice were wearing a disguise—a nervous disguise.

  “I don’t need breakfast. You know that. Breakfast doesn’t do me any good. Be of some use. These books aren’t yet dead. I can still draw more from them.”

  Fern and Howard exchanged a look of fear. Dead books! She remembered the way Dorathea and the Bone had talked about them and about the Blue Queen. Was this the Blue Queen? Right here in Willy Fattler’s hotel? Were they going to kill books?

  Fern knew it was the Blue Queen. She knew because she could feel it. Even though the Blue Queen was too weak to get out of bed without help, too weak to put on her own shoes, there was something terrifying about her—the ghostly feet, the cold ring to her voice. She seemed to have a certain power, even in her weakness, like a coiled snake.

  The girl brought over a stack of books. She was wearing white socks and shuffled her feet nervously.

  The room grew dark as if it were suddenly dusk. The sour smell grew to a sour wind, old and medicinal and fog-thick. It rippled through the dust ruffle, making Fern think of the words “ether” and “poison gas” and “evil.” Fern and Howard both covered their noses and mouths in the crooks of their a
rms. The pony woke up and buried his face in Fern’s sweatshirt. The room seemed almost yellowish now, sickly. The wind churned, and the goldfish jerked and splashed in his bowl, sloshing water till it spilled onto the floor.

  The Blue Queen began laughing. “Souls,” she hissed. “I’ll just take a bit. Just enough to get me through the day.”

  “Not too many,” the girl said.

  “I’m not foolish. I know that I need to save them for tonight.”

  And the wind grew so strong that the books on the floor tipped and began sliding toward her, their pages splayed open, rattling. Howard was on his side, watching. The Art of Being Anybody, which Howard had stuffed under a towel to make a bigger pillow, started to be dragged forward too. It bumped into Howard’s back. Fern put a hand on it. Howard turned, grabbed it, and rolled on top of it. He looked frantic. Fern felt frantic too.

  “That’s enough,” the girl shouted above the whipping wind. She bent down to grab some books, but she couldn’t keep hold of them all. Fern and Howard could only see the girl’s knees and fast-working hands. The books were gliding away from her, and things were being pulled from them. A glowing breath, a rising misty, sunlit cloud—they were hard to describe. But they were egg shaped, like airy, glistening eggs. The girl was desperately trying to keep them inside of the books. She kept shutting the covers as quickly as she could, but it was hard to keep up.

  “Not too many!” the girl shouted. “You have to save them! Remember?”

  “Let go of them! I need!” the Blue Queen shouted, as if she’d forgotten what she’d said before. “I need them!”

  Fern knew somehow that she was watching the souls of books being lifted out of them. She was watching books die. The Blue Queen was unable to stop herself. She was supposed to be hoarding the souls—like Dorathea had guessed—but she couldn’t stop. Fern could see the titles of a few of the books. Flipping past was a copy of a Terry Pratchett book with those nomes on the cover trying to steer a truck; that eerie book about a girl named Coraline; the book about the smiling dog that had made Fern cry; and then her heart skipped wildly, because she saw a book that she knew better than all the other books combined, a book with a picture of a girl on the cover, a girl with big eyes and a roosterlike lock of hair, a girl named Fern.