Wood Sprites

by Wen Spencer

  “This is Esme’s old room.” Anna moved through the large room, flicking on lights. It was a great cave of a room with a twenty-foot ceiling. At one time it had been decorated in the same tween princess-style as Elle’s bedroom. Apparently it was the set of furniture that rich people bought their little girls. In the Pondwaters’ case, it was an effort to mold their daughter into a demure princess. Whatever reason had moved Anna to purchase the furniture, it obviously had been a complete failure. Every piece had been attacked, defiled, and remodeled by someone who was as whimsical as she was angry.

  The four-poster bed had been sprayed high-gloss lacquer black and fitted in what looked like a steampunk elevator cage so it could be raised up to a loft area. The other pieces had also been sprayed black and trimmed with silver, and random gears and cogs had been added. The mirrored vanity had been merged with obscure antique electronics so it looked like the control console of an ancient spacecraft. One wall was floor-to-ceiling bookcases with a tall library ladder on a brass rail. Another wall had faux windows installed and painted so they seemed like they were looking out over eighteenth-century Paris with airships drifting past a half-built Eiffel Tower. There was no sign of real windows, as if Esme had drywalled over them. An odd assortment of furniture crowded the room, from a half-disassembled pinball machine to model airships strung from the ceiling.

  “You’ll have to share Esme’s bedroom tonight.” Anna opened a door and turned on another light, revealing a Jack and Jill bathroom that had been spared the steampunk makeover. “Lain’s bedroom is connected through here, but it’s empty. Lain moved all her things to Elfhome, but Esme just walked away from everything.”

  “Everything” included old paper books and toys and gadgets crowding the bookcase shelves.

  Anna threw a huge wall-mounted knife switch, and the bed lowered down to the ground. “We’ll get some furniture for the other room and—which one of you is the oldest?”

  “We’re twins,” Louise said. “We’re the same age.”

  “One of you was born first.” Anna started to strip the comforter and sheets from the bed. Dust scented the air as if no one had touched the bed for nearly twenty years.

  Louise welcomed the flare of anger. “Mom and Dad said that there isn’t an ‘oldest’ and ‘youngest’ for us.” Since their father had fainted during the delivery, there had been a lot of confusion in the birthing room, and it was possible that their parents simply hadn’t known.

  “We’ve always shared a bedroom,” Jillian whispered and clung to Louise as if Anna was about to force them apart.

  Anna sighed, dropping the comforter and sheets onto the floor. “I suppose, for now, it won’t hurt for you to share a room.”

  There was a knock on the door. It opened, and a tall, elegant woman swept into the room with fresh linens in her hands. She had that same hidden elf look that Ming had, as if everything that said “elf” had been carefully erased, and yet nothing could hide the tall, willowy build and the unearthly beauty.

  “I’m sorry,” the non-elf said. “I only had time to dust and run a mop around the room. The vacuum cleaner threw another hissy fit. I wish we could find a good old-fashioned one without any sensors or filters or computers.”

  “This is Celine.” Anna dipped a hand toward the female. “She’s been our housekeeper since she was very young.”

  Louise eyed the female. If Tristan was nearly forty and looked ten, then how old was Celine? The housekeeper seemed unaware of the twins’ stares. She unfurled the bottom sheet and then expertly tucked the corners around the ends of the mattress.

  Anna stripped the pillowcase from one of the pillows and gave it a tentative sniff. “These are too musty.” She gazed about the room. “I don’t know why I left everything this way. Esme’s not coming back. Even if she could, she wouldn’t. She hated this house.”

  Celine took the pillows, carefully keeping whatever she thought of Esme off her face. “I have good goose down ones stored in plastic for guests. They’ll be good for tonight—unless the girls are allergic to down.”

  Louise flinched under the women’s joint gaze. “No. At least, I don’t think so. Our father was allergic to them, so we never had them in the house.”

  “George Mayer was allergic?” Anna asked to clarify whom Louise meant by “father.”

  “Yes, our father!” Louise snapped.

  Anna pursed her lips against whatever she wanted to say in reply. “Are you allergic to anything? Are there any medicines you should be taking?”

  “No. No,” Louise said.

  Celine gathered up the dusty bedding. “I’ll get the pillows and a blanket.”

  “I can’t sleep without Fritz,” Jillian mumbled, leaning against Louise.

  Louise whimpered in dismay. Jillian had never slept without her security blanket. Even when they stayed over at their Aunt Kitty’s, they took it with them. If they forgot it, Jillian couldn’t get to sleep. “Fritz is her blanket. Our Grandma Mayer made him for her. He’s at our house. Can—can we go get him?”

  “I’ll have someone go get it. What does it look like? Where does she normally keep it?”

  Louise stared at her for a minute in confusion. Surely Anna didn’t mean that a stranger would walk into their house and go through their things. And then in a wave of horror Louise realized that soon strangers were going to go through all their stuff. “Can’t we just go ourselves?”

  “No, you’re both too upset. Just tell me where it is.”

  Jillian pressed against Louise and whispered, “I want Fritz.”

  “On her bed.” Louise fought not to cry as she gave up. “It’s inside the blue flannel pillowcase.”

  “I’ll send a driver to go get it.”

  * * *

  Within an hour, Fritz had been fetched from their house. In the meantime, the twins had been fed a dinner of hot oatmeal and given a hot bath. They were dressed in long white nightgowns, obviously brand-new and still warm from the dryer.

  Every moment of Anna or Celine fussing at them was like sandpaper against Louise’s nerves. Finally she could take no more. She pushed Anna toward the door, crying, “We just want to be alone!”

  Louise got Jillian into the bed with Nikola and fiddled with the controls she found in the headboard to close the elevator doors and raise the bed up to the loft. In the small fortress, she undid the storage lid and let Joy out.

  The baby dragon whimpered in distress and cuddled against Louise’s chin.

  “We’re all together,” Louise whispered the only comfort that they had. “We have each other.”

  She found the light switch and turned off the lights. In the darkness, familiar stars spread across the ceiling. Strangely, some forty years earlier, Esme had painted her ceiling with glow-in-the-dark paint, a low-tech equivalent of their holographic star field.

  Between the familiar constellations were words visible only to someone who knew which dots were out of place.

  “Don’t give up hope.”

  * * *

  Louise had felt weirdly hollow, like she’d been filled nearly to bursting with burning grief and then slowly drained. The residue of unbearable pain coated her, but every thought and action now dropped into a vast, echoing pit. Jillian could not stop crying. Joy sat on the pillows and stroked Jillian’s hair. Jillian wept even in her sleep.

  Nikola lay beside Louise. “What is happening? Why are we here? Why didn’t we go home?”

  “Something happened to Mom and Dad.” Louise felt the words tumble through her, burning as they struck sides, to vanish into the emptiness. The darkness swallowed everything up, leaving nothing but the remembrance of pain.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means they’re gone away and they’re never coming back.” Louise had been little when Grandma Johnson and Grandma Mayer had died, but it set a pattern. Each time there had been a tiny funeral, sparsely attended by Aunt Kitty and old people that Louise didn’t know. They would clean out the house, taking first the trea
sures. The old photographs. The family Bible. The beloved Christmas ornaments. Then there would be the mountain of unwanted things to be given away to Goodwill.

  After that—nothing. No calls. No visits. No cards in the mail. A painful emptiness that at first was constantly tripped over but slowly healed to nothing.

  As much as Louise wanted to go home, she dreaded it. It would be another step along the familiar road. The house would be too still. Too silent. They would gather up what they wanted, constrained by common sense, and be forced to throw out everything else. Their mother’s beloved shoes. Their father’s wine cork collection. The everyday dishes.

  The house would be emptied, and then it would be gone and there would be nothing left at all of their parents.

  The grief came flooding back, surging up through her throat, hot and burning, to spill out as fiery tears.

  Nikola gave a raw whimper of pain. “Why do we feel so bad? What’s wrong with us? Are we going to die?”

  She scrubbed away her tears and hugged him tight. “No, no, you’re just sad. You’re okay. It will go away.”

  “This is sad? Sad is horrible.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “How do you stop being sad?”

  “You think of something happy.”

  “Like being real and able to hug back? And being able to smell flowers? And eat cake?”

  Louise hugged him tighter. “Yes, think of being real.”

  * * *

  She tried to sleep. She knew that she did a little, in that she became aware that she had been dreaming, and thus must have been asleep. Alexander haunted her dreams, pursued by monsters. At four in the morning, she gave up and cautiously lowered the bed.

  “What are you doing?” Nikola whispered as she stripped off the long white nightgown and dressed in her stage ninja clothes.

  “Joy is going to wake up hungry. I’m going to find her something to eat.” She pulled the pillowcase off her pillow.

  “Okay.” Nikola padded to the door and waited expectantly for her. Much as Louise didn’t want to creep around the big scary house alone, she knew that there was less of a chance of her getting caught if she didn’t take Nikola. He just wasn’t built with sneaking in mind.

  “Stay here,” she said.

  “We want to come with you.”

  “You need to stay here and keep Jillian and Joy safe.”

  “Joy never listens to us. She says we’re just a dumb babies.”

  “You’re not dumb.” Louise responded to the part she could positively address. “There are things about the world that you know a lot more about than she does. Like the Internet and robotics.”

  “Hmm.” Nikola sounded unconvinced.

  “I don’t want Jillian to be alone while she’s asleep, so please, just stay here with her.”

  “Okay.”

  Louise was filled with sudden certainty that Jillian would try to come looking for her and get caught. “And don’t let her come looking for me! Sit on her.”

  * * *

  The house was huge and dark and quiet. She used her stage manager flashlight to pick her way through the seemingly endless halls, trying to quietly find the kitchen. Downstairs, every room she peered into could swallow her parents’ entire home. They were vast Cinderella palace rooms with marble and crystal that echoed the slightest sounds.

  The kitchen was tucked in the corner, behind a great dining room with a table that could sit dozens of people. There were two massive gas ranges, a granite countertop island nearly fifteen feet long, and an entire wall of cabinets.

  The far door led to a service entrance facing the massive detached garage. Since no one seemed awake in the house and she would be able to see a car drive up, the kitchen seemed safe to ransack at will.

  Louise opened a door to what she thought might be the pantry and discovered an entire room of dried beans, sacks of flour, sugar, and cartons of salt. A locked door in the back of the pantry suggested a way down to a wine cellar. Bins along bottom shelves held three types of potatoes and four types of onions. The elves apparently were preparing for nuclear winter. Despite the abundance, there was little she could carry back to the room and feed Joy. She loaded one of each potato into the pillowcase just in case she found nothing else. Did these people not have anything that could be eaten instantly?

  She moved through the kitchen, opening and closing doors as quietly as she could. Finally she discovered a cabinet full of sardines, smoked oysters, herrings, mackerels, kippers, cod liver, and something called tonno all in flat little cans. Luckily the hockey puck cans featured pull-tab lids. It meant that she wouldn’t have to take a can opener, but Joy would be able to open the cans and gorge. They would also have to figure out a way to dispose of the smelly cans afterwards.

  How were they going to keep Joy hidden and fed?

  There was a huge freezer and a big walk-in refrigerator. The latter was a jackpot of fresh fruit, from oranges to pineapples. Louise took one of each. One shelf held wheels of cheeses. She found a knife and cut thin slices from every single block. When she was done, she washed the knife and returned it to its drawer. Another shelf had jars of opened jellies of types she’d never heard of before. Lingonberry. Black Currant. Cloudberry. Wild Chokecherry. Confit of Violet Petals. Rose hip Jam. Lilikoi Jelly. She eyed them with intense curiosity, but they were small single jars and would probably be missed. There were also several jars of more mundane strawberry and grape. She took a large jar of Smucker’s strawberry jam plus the thing of honey and tracked down a stack of fresh baked breads on the counter and stole a loaf. Her pillowcase was now bulging with food, but how long would it last?

  Somewhere in the house, she heard a door close. Someone was awake and moving around, and she was suddenly sure they were coming to the kitchen. Louise scanned the room for a hiding place. It was all cabinets and stainless steel appliances; a gleaming trap. She hurried back to the dining room and pulled out one of the center chairs. As she hoped, the table was wide enough that underneath there was a tunnel of space down the middle.

  She ducked under the table and turned off her flashlight. She was just pulling the chair back into place behind her when she heard the voices and footsteps of people coming down the hall.

  The lights went on in the room.

  “I brought an orchid for my mother. I wanted to give it to her on Mother’s Day, but he had me searching for crows.”

  “Sire is not happy that you only located Shoji.” Celine went into the kitchen, the door swinging back and forth behind her.

  “They’re very clever birds.” Tristan raised his voice so that Celine could continue hearing him in the kitchen. There was a thump on the table as he apparently put the flowerpot down. “No one else was able to find him. Did Yves manage to capture Shoji after I found him?”

  “You don’t need to know that,” Celine called.

  Apparently Tristan was used to this type of answer. He only huffed and pulled out a chair. He sat down, swinging his legs as his feet didn’t touch the floor. “I’m really not good with plants. It nearly died once.” And then in a quiet voice, he asked, “Do you think she’ll like it?”

  “It’s pitiful.” Celine set a dish on the table with the clink of china and silverware. By the smell, she’d made him toast.

  “Can I have something else?” he asked.

  “What is wrong with this?” Celine asked.

  “I’m sick of toast and cereal for breakfast. I’ve tried to make kippers and eggs like Nattie makes it, but I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong.”

  “I am not a cook,” Celine stated flatly. “You will have to wait until Nattie rises.”

  “She won’t show me how to cook them.” Tristan kicked the leg of the table.

  “You should be able to find a place that cooks that kind of thing in the morning. He gives you money enough to buy breakfast at a restaurant. You should be getting proper amounts of protein.”

  “I hate eating out alone.” Tristan slumped down onto the tab
le. “Always getting the same questions. Where are my parents? Why am I there alone? Don’t I have someone to take care of me?”

  “The monkeys are too damn curious,” Celine muttered.

  “Why can’t I have a cook? I could say that they’re my guardian.”

  “We can’t afford for the monkeys to learn our secrets,” Celine stated.

  “I mean one of us!”

  “To live away from the manor is a slow death sentence. You are young enough that you do not suffer from the lack of magic. The rest of us grow sick without it.”

  “I know, I know, supposedly I will grow up faster. I wish it would just hurry up and happen already. Everyone else grew up already. Lain. Esme. Adele. Bethany. Chloe. Felicie. Danni.”

  “Shh!” Celine hissed loudly. “You’re not to mention the inbreeds in this house.”

  “You said my mother was still asleep.” He was unrepentant.

  “You must always be vigilant with our secrets. It is the only way for us to stay safe.”

  “Why can’t one of them be with me? They all grew up.”

  Celine went to the door and glanced down the hall before whispering. “Your half sisters are all wholly human, and they will die before you are even adult. In a very short period of time, you will be the caregiver, not them. You will grow up. You must be patient.”

  “I’m tired of waiting.” He kicked at the table leg again.

  Half sisters? He’d named at least six or seven girls. Louise only recognized Lain and Esme. Who were the others? How were they related? Lain and Esme were his half sisters because they shared the same mother. Ming was Tristan’s father, and he was an elf. If the girls were true humans, it meant that the other girls couldn’t be Ming’s children, so the parent that they all shared had to be Anna. But at the gala, Anna had said that she had two daughters. Did this mean that somehow she wasn’t aware that the others existed? And who was their human father? Why had Celine called them “inbreeds?”

  He kicked the leg again. “Where is Bethany? No one talks about her anymore.”

  “I told you, do not mention them in this house.”