by N. E. Bode
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.
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.
5
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.
EPILOGUE
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.