by Wen Spencer
Louise whimpered. It hadn’t seemed completely real until her Aunt Kitty mentioned funerals.
“Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.”
“Can she really just keep us?”
Aunt Kitty was silent for a minute and then said reluctantly, “Lou, I know this is hard for you. I’m going to do everything I can so you two can come and live with me, but that doesn’t mean that your grandmother is a horrible person or that you shouldn’t love her. She wants you because she loves her daughter so much, and she wants to love you too.”
“You don’t think you can get custody.”
“I might not be able to.” Their mother always loved Aunt Kitty for her honesty. It wasn’t, however, what Louise needed right now. She really wished her aunt would lie to her, paint everything as something less frightening.
“After Grandma Mayer died, our parents changed their will. They made you our guardian if something happened to them. It’s in their will!”
“I know, but Anna has DNA test results proving that you’re her granddaughters. The clinic doesn’t have any paperwork showing that Esme donated her embryos. It means your father used his position to steal you and Jillian. Her lawyers can make what your parents did seem as if they had snatched babies out of the hospital.”
“It’s not the same. It was just a few little frozen cells. We would have gotten thrown away if they hadn’t used our embryos. We were leftovers that only our parents wanted.”
“I know, but it’s up to the courts to decide who you’ll live with.”
“Why do we have to live with her until they decide? Her husband is scary. We don’t like him.”
“What did he do?” Aunt Kitty growled, her voice suddenly full of fear and anger.
It would be an easy card to play to say that Edmond had somehow molested them. Aunt Kitty would come down on him like a she-bear protecting cubs. But what would he do in response? These were people that casually discussed killing people.
“He’s albino.” Louise tried to make her fear sound stupid. “He’s scary-looking. His hair is white and he’s really pale, like a vampire, and his eyes are weird.”
“That’s it?”
“And they eat weird food. We had a fish with its head and tail on it for breakfast. You had to peel the skin off it before you could eat it. It’s creepy. We’re going to starve to death.”
Aunt Kitty breathed out. “Oh, Louise, I’m sorry. I know you two have to be scared. I really wish that you didn’t have to go through this, but you’re going to have to be patient. Since I’m not your aunt by blood, I can’t do anything until a judge settles it. In the meantime, promise me you’ll try to be good.”
“We will.”
“Don’t run away. That will make things worse. And don’t blow anything up.”
33: FORTRESS OF EVIL
“I feel like I’m trapped in Dracula’s castle.” Jillian sprawled in the loft bed, high above the bedroom floor. They’d been living at the mansion for ten days now, held by Louise’s promise to Aunt Kitty.
Though they bought the black dresses, in the end Anna refused to let them attend the funeral. She thought it would be too much for the twins to bear and Louise was starting to wonder if Anna was right. Every time she fell asleep, she had vivid nightmares. Jillian rarely left the bed and had slept almost endlessly. Louise was worried that something might be wrong with her twin. Even Joy sensed that Jillian was somehow broken and kept her constant company.
“It seems more like Frankenstein’s castle than Dracula’s.” Louise paced the room full of steampunk furniture that could easily pass as the set to the legendary horror movie. One filmed in black and white with Boris Karloff as the monster. The images were combining weirdly in her dreams: Edmond in a white lab coat, making little Anna-Bride monsters. Instead of two eyes, the miniature Annas had only one in the center of their foreheads.
“This place is full of them!” Jillian meant the hidden elves. “Haven’t you noticed? All tall and pale and beautiful and sparkling.”
Louise had counted two dozen secret elves moving quietly through the mansion, all of them looking like Paris models. She found a spyglass on Esme’s crowded bookcases. She used it to furtively study the estate’s extensive grounds from the windows of Lain’s empty bedroom. Entire herds of elf gardeners took care of the pristine gardens while armed guards patrolled the shadows. She’d been making lists of names and habits. She hadn’t thought Jillian had noticed the elves; all Louise’s careful spying missions had been alone. Nor had she thought it wise to actually tell her twin how outnumbered they were. It was comforting, though, to know that Jillian wasn’t being as completely oblivious to her surroundings as she seemed. “I don’t think Dracula sparkled.”
“Ming does.”
After thinking of the male as Ming the Merciless for so long, it was nearly impossible to refer to him as “Edmond,” especially knowing that wasn’t his real name either.
Jillian rolled to peer down over the edge of the loft bed. “What does Anna see in him?”
Louise had been wondering herself. At breakfast, there was never a hint of warmth between the two. “I’m not sure if she loves him, or if she only likes that he gives her everything she wants. She likes being rich. Think about it: she comes to the breakfast table all made up even when she’s not going out. Mom always said she was a perfectionist. It’s like she defines her worth on being flawless. His money lets her be as perfect as she wants.”
“But what does he get out of it? She’s old and he’s got all these beautiful secret elves.”
“He married her to make her loyal. He let her have his children so they have common bonds. But I think that’s also why he won’t let Tristan stay here; she stops thinking about ‘the family’ as some nebulous whole and starts to think of only Tristan as an individual.”
“Why would it matter?”
“Because what Tristan wants isn’t the same as his father. Not deep down inside.”
Jillian retreated and silence came from overhead for a long time.
They needed to come up with a plan to get them out of this mess. At first Louise didn’t ask Jillian what she thought they should do because Louise had promised Aunt Kitty that they be good. It was becoming obvious that Aunt Kitty wasn’t going to win custody of the twins. A small mountain of belongings arrived from their house without a promised visit. Jillian crumbled into a crying heap within minutes, leaving Louise to deal with the painful treasures.
Some day Louise would want it all; every little fragment of her parents that she could cling to. Each box, though, was filled with almost too much pain for her to bear. Even their toys were unexpected landmines of hurt. She culled out the things they could not live without—all their various printers, the tools they’d adapted to spell casting, and their video production equipment. The rest she stacked into the back of the bedroom’s big walk-in closet. She would deal with it later. Somehow.
She had to stay focused on what was important: protecting Joy and the babies.
She’d been sure Jillian would have a plan; asking would only start them barreling toward breaking her vow. Now she was afraid that Jillian didn’t have a plan.
They had to do something. Joy had plowed through the food that Louise had stolen from the kitchen and it was nearly gone. Every time that Louise had tried to bring food back from breakfast or lunch, Anna caught her. Sooner or later, hunger would drive Joy out into the open.
Humans might believe that Joy was some kind of exotic lizard. Even if humans understood what Joy truly was, they probably wouldn’t able to hurt the baby dragon. At least, not while she had access to magic. But Edmond was an elf. He might be the very person that had trapped Joy in the nactka. Of all the treasures found on Earth, the only one that Yves truly wanted was the box with the eleven other baby dragons. What had the secret elves planned to do with them?
And what would Edmond do to Nikola? Louise was fairly sure her parents wouldn’t have believed that Nikola was a magical merger between the babies a
nd the nanny robot. They would have insisted that they dispose of the embryos as a biohazard in one of their maddening “we know what’s best because we’re adults” moves. It was the main reason that the twins had kept him secret. Edmond would probably believe, but then what? Would he care? Would he see the embryos as biological waste or worse, something to use to his advantage? He’d done something to Anna six unborn daughters, Louise was sure of that, although she couldn’t prove it.
And what had happened to their older sister?
Had April’s cousin warned Alexander before the secret elves figured out that she used the name Tinker? Had the NSA secretly escorted her out of Pittsburgh during the last Shutdown? Was Alexander already enrolled in some kind of witness protection program here on Earth? Or had the secret elves captured her and given her to “that idiot cat” which had killed the other scientists?
Louise shuddered at the thought. The next Shutdown was in two days. If they left in a few hours, they could get to Monroeville in time to sneak across the border while Pittsburgh was on Earth. Somehow. They could find Alexander or hide with Orville. Maybe. But if Alexander had been kidnapped and brought to Earth, the twins would be the only ones who had any hope of finding and saving her.
The only positive note in their life was that their video had blocked the UN vote long enough to render it moot. The world was holding its breath, waiting to find out if Windwolf survived the attack, instead of blindly accepting that he’d been killed. If the Viceroy had been killed, how could they hope to stop Ming again with a video?
There was no one the twins could turn to without endangering the person. They were all alone in this Fortress of Evil. The babies. Alexander. Windwolf. Elfhome. The sheer magnitude of responsibilities overwhelmed Louise.
“Jilly, what do we do?”
“I don’t know.” Jillian seemed too small, too young to be her twin. Somehow during the last few days, she’d become so much less than her real self. “Do you think they had anything to do with Mom and Dad’s accident?”
“I don’t think so,” Louise said with more confidence than she felt. The accident had been splashed across all the newsfeeds; a dozen people had been killed when a tractor-trailer truck had plowed through downtown traffic. The driver had been drunk and asleep in the back of the cab when the auto-drive failed. The truck had plowed through a crowded crosswalk before striking her parents’ car on the driver’s side, pushing it into the path of an oncoming bus. “If Anna killed someone, it would be neat and clean, like laser surgery. She wouldn’t be that messy.” She shuddered, thinking of the one victim that had been wedged up under the truck’s undercarriage and only discovered hours later. “Edmond might go for wholesale slaughter, but he sent his own son away so Anna wouldn’t be distracted.”
Despite all that, she had a small niggle of doubt. Jillian, though, wasn’t strong enough to hear anything else. Not now.
Louise wondered if they were a big enough distraction if Edmond would send them away too. A shiver went down her spine. No, that had “would not end well” written all over it. On the heels of the fear came a wash of anger. She was braver than this, wasn’t she? Yet the idea of having to do another pantry raid terrified her. She hated the fact that now that she knew what evil the house held, she didn’t want to leave their room by herself.
She felt safe in the bedroom. Esme had planned for them to search out April. She’d guessed that they would be entangled with Edmond and Anna. Louise was sure that Esme had known that they’d end up in her room. Surely she’d left them something; breadcrumbs to follow while lost in this dark place.
The problem was the room was stuffed to the brim with Esme’s childhood. The bookcases alone spanned thirty feet of the bedroom, floor to twenty-foot-high ceiling. Esme apparently deemed them sacred, as the cherry built-ins were the only furniture in the room that hadn’t been spray-painted black. The ladder connected to a rail via a wheel mechanism that let it glide back and forth the entire length of the bookcase. When the twins first arrived it had been pushed to the far end, and there it had stayed.
Every morning, while they were at breakfast, a team of maids descended on the room to clean. The dust vanished like entropy in reverse. Despite the bric-a-brac, all the lower shelves had been carefully dusted.
The bookcases held everything from obviously beloved picture books like Harold and the Purple Crayon to all fourteen of the Oz books to high school textbooks. (Esme must have left home to go to college and never came back, for there was no sign of anything past the age of eighteen.) On low shelves there were worn beloved toys and on a shelf only reachable by the ladder were seemingly new and apparently unwanted toys. Between the two were random machine parts, interesting rocks, a scattering of seashells, and an animal skull or two. Esme had to have been one odd kid.
Louise paced the length of the bookcases, studying them. Thousands of hiding places, yes, but Esme would have known that it would be systematically cleaned by the maids the moment her children arrived. Louise pulled out a worn paperback version of Escape to Witch Mountain and flipped through it. Nothing was written on the blank inside covers. There was no scrap of papers tucked between the pages. No, Esme wouldn’t have trusted something so easily found. She would want something like the box she left with April, a puzzle to be solved before unlocking its secrets.
Louise slowly turned, studying the entire room. To hide something you wanted found but only by your clever children and no one else. It would be something that would draw the curious person to it, but defeat anyone not smart enough to figure it out. Her gaze fell on the princess vanity that had been spray-painted black and remodeled with an old video screen and dozens of antique knobs and switches into a steampunk spaceship console. She’d tried a few of the controls and nothing seemed to happen, so she assumed that they were simply for display. What if Esme made the controls functional? They could require a combination of settings to get results.
Louise sat down at the vanity and considered all the dial, knobs, buttons and switches. The number of combinations was daunting. She memorized the initial settings of all the controls. Cautiously, she started to experiment.
* * *
There were three banks of controls. A set of simple on-off switches across the top monitor frame activated a Jacob’s Ladder, a hidden mirror-ball light, three of the airships suspended from the ceiling, and finally the monitor itself. There was a webcam built into the frame so that the monitor essentially acted as the vanity’s “mirror.”
The webcam suggested that there was a computer linked to the monitor. The rightmost set of controls was a number keypad from some vintage machine and beside it the keys from a manual typewriter labeled “A” thru “F”. At a glance they would seem like two separate sets of controls, but a dull black line had been painted around them. It was nearly invisible, but it definitely paired up the keys. They combined to form a hexadecimal keypad. Progress but it just made the possible combinations go astronomical.
The third set of controls was on the left and was a toggle control and two buttons that Louise guessed to be a stand-in for a mouse.
Assuming that the computer had booted up after so many years of being idle, what was the password to unlock Esme’s secrets?
If Esme thought that Alexander might end up stuck here, then maybe she keyed the password to her.
Louise used the hexadecimal keypad to type in “Alexander.”
The monitor flickered and Esme gazed steadfastly at Louise. Judging by the background, the footage had been filmed with Esme sitting at the vanity. Esme looked too old, however, for the video to be something recorded while she lived in the room. Her hair was cut short and dyed purple, exactly how it was just before she left Earth. Esme looked worriedly into the camera, yet it seemed as though she was looking beyond the lens and seeing Louise.
“Hi kiddo. I really hope you’re not watching this, but if you are, I’m so sorry this is how this all turned out. I’m recording this on what will be my last time in this house. I just�
��” she paused and glanced over her shoulder, as if she realized that she might be overheard. “I just put my affairs in order. In Manhattan.” She meant having the embryos created that would be Alexander, Jillian, Louise, and Nikola. “Tomorrow I go back to China, and in a few months I’ll pass through the orbital gate and leave Earth forever.”
“On Elfhome, my dreams are so clear and sure. Here, I have dreams but I also have nightmares, and sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which. I don’t know if it’s because the magic here is screwy, as if leaking through the cracks in reality messed it up, or what. I just woke up from a doozy that I really hope is just a nightmare. You need to get out of this house. Get as far away as possible. Now. Before it’s too late. In my dream, he found you when you were much too young. Too small. Too helpless.”
Tears filled Esme’s eyes. “God, I wish I could stay now. I know I’ve never laid eyes on you, but I do love you. I’ve seen reflections of you in my dreams; heard the echoes of your laughter. But I have to go and do what I need to do.” Esme pressed her hand to the glass. “Oh, baby, I hope you never see this. You need to find a way out of here and go. Quickly. Be safe.”
* * *
Esme dreamed of them. She knew that they were going to be here.
Louise stared at the screen, barely able to breathe. She was seeing her future. Her dreams had started when they got the magic generator and had gotten strange since coming to the mansion.
* * *
“That’s it?” Jillian cried when Louise replayed the video for her. Jillian dropped her pitch to parrot Esme. “I have to go and do what I need to do. And do what? Go to a colony a zillion million miles away? What so freaking important about that?”
“I don’t know.” Louise studied the image closely. “She’s afraid that this recording might be found, so she’s trying to be careful as possible. If Ming had found this, there’s not much to lead him to us or betray anything else she’s trying to keep secret.”
Now that Louise examined the video carefully, she noticed that the angle was off. Instead of showing the middle of the bookcase, it was showing the far end and one corner of the false window looking out at the fantasy Paris landscape. Esme sat off-center, so that the window’s edge dominated the screen.