Greenglass House (5 page)

She held it up. “Pinhole camera.”

A camera? Made out of a cigar box? That was enough to distract him from both the empty mug in his hand and the book in his pocket. “What's a pinhole camera?”

“You can make a camera out of just about anything,” Georgie said as she handed the box to him. “As long as there's an opening for light and a surface to capture it and turn it into an image. Do you know anything about photography?”

“Nope.” Milo turned it over in his hands. Georgie had taped up all the edges, but there was a hole cut into the front of it. He tried to look inside, but all he could see was darkness.

“There's nothing to see right now,” Georgie told him. “When I'm sure I've sealed up all the light leaks, I'll put photo paper in there. That hole will be the aperture.” She took the box back and smiled at it. “I've always wanted to make one. I've just never tried before. Of course, this one isn't finished yet, but I think . . . yes . . . I think it'll work. It needs a name, though.”

Milo laughed. “A name? For a camera?”

“Sure. All the coolest ones have great names. Hasselblad, Rollei, Voigtländer, Leica . . .” She held up the box between them as if her palm were a pedestal and declared, “I shall call it the
Lansdegown.
” She gave Milo a sharp, mock-accusing look. “Unless you think it doesn't
deserve
a name. Unless, in your vast cigar-box-camera wisdom, you think it's not
good enough.
”

“No, no, it does, it does.” He forced himself to look solemnly at the box. “Lansdegown it is. What's it mean, though?”

“Lansdegown?” Georgie tilted her head. “Don't you know?”

He thought hard. “Nope.”

“I bet you do,” she said with a little smile. “I bet you've just forgotten. See if you can remember what
lansdegown
means, and then you can tell me if you think it's the right name for my camera.”

Milo reached into his pocket and held out the paperback. Surely she wouldn't be angry. She would understand it had only been a mistake. “I took this when we were cleaning up—I didn't realize I had it in my hand. I meant to bring it back to you earlier,” he said, “but I forgot. I'm awfully sorry.”

“Aha! I thought I'd forgotten to pack it.” Georgie smiled. “No problem. You ever read it?”

How odd. All that running around with this book, and he hadn't even noticed what it was called. The cover was plain, just heavy red paper with the title stamped on it in gray letters. “
The Raconteur's Commonplace Book,
” Milo read, pronouncing the unfamiliar word carefully. “I don't think so. What's a raconteur?”

“It's an old-fashioned word for a storyteller. This is a collection of folklore from hereabouts. You might know some of the stories.” Georgie took the book and flipped through it, then handed it back open to the second chapter. “Know this one?”

“‘The Game of Maps.'” Milo shook his head again. “I don't think so.”

He held it out to her, but the blue-haired girl just waved her hand. “Read a few. See what you think. My feelings won't be hurt if you decide you aren't into it.” She smiled again. “But maybe you wound up with it for a reason.”

“Like what?”

She shrugged. “Don't know. Read it, then you tell me. I think you'll at least like the way it starts.”

Milo looked down at the story Georgie had picked out and skimmed the first line.
There was a city that could not be mapped, and inside it a house that could not be
drawn.

Before he realized it, he'd read the whole page. He looked up to find Georgie Moselle grinning at him. “Good stuff, right?”

“Maybe.” He set the book aside just long enough to go into the kitchen and refill his cup of hot chocolate. Then he hunkered down in one of his favorite places to go when there were guests in the house: a high-backed loveseat facing one of the huge bow windows that overlooked the grounds beyond the front porch. When he sat there, the back of the seat made a sort of wall that separated him from whatever was going on in the rooms behind him and provided just a little bit of privacy. Curled into one corner, he started reading, this time from the beginning of the book.

The rain had not stopped for a week, and the roads that led to the inn were little better than rivers of muck. This, at least, is what Captain Frost said when he tramped indoors, coated in the yellow mud peculiar to that part of the city and hollering for his breakfast. The rest of the guests sighed. Perhaps today, they had thought. Perhaps today, their unnatural captivity would end. But the bellowing man calling for eggs and burnt toast meant that, for another day at least, fifteen people would remain prisoners of the river Skidwrack, and the new rivers that had once been roads, and the rain.

No wonder Georgie had thought he might like it. Substitute
snow
for
rain
and subtract a few people and the author might've been writing about Greenglass House. In the book, however, one of the guests, a man named Phin, suggested that they pass the time by telling stories.

“In more civilized places, when travelers find themselves sharing a fire and a bottle of wine, they sometimes choose to share something of themselves, too,” Phin told them. “And then, wonder of wonders—no strangers remain. Only companions, sharing a hearth and a bottle.”

The wind and rain rattled the windowpanes as the folks gathered in the parlor looked from one to the next: the young girl in her embroidered silk stole; the twin gentlemen with the tattooed faces; the gaunt woman with her nervous gloved hands constantly moving; the other woman, gaunter still and hidden beneath two layers of voluminous shawls, whose red-brown skin showed in small flashes when her wraps did not quite move along with her.

“If you will listen,” Phin said, swirling his glass, “I will tell the first tale. Then perhaps, if you find it worth the trade, you will give me one of yours. Listen.”

The guests in the book agreed, of course, and in the next chapter Phin told the story of the Game of Maps.
There was a city that could not be mapped, and inside it a house that could not be
drawn.

Three stories later, the door flew open and a snow-covered Mrs. Pine tramped in, followed by more snow-people: Mrs. Caraway and her daughter Lizzie. Milo hunkered deeper into the loveseat and pretended to be so absorbed in his reading that he didn't notice them as they piled brown paper bags full of groceries on the dining room table and started peeling off coats and boots. He glanced at a little clock on the side table next to the loveseat: it was nearly midnight. The couch where Georgie Moselle had been sitting was empty. Sometime in the past hour and a half, while Milo had been reading about the Unmappable House and the Maker of Reliquaries, she had disappeared. Milo had been so absorbed in the stories he hadn't heard her going up to bed or his mother coming in from the cold and going back outside again.

“Milo!”

It would, he thought sadly, probably be the last time in a while that he'd be able to read in peace like that.

He set the book down, sighed, and levered himself up out of his seat. “Yes, Mom?”

“Merry almost, kiddo.” Mrs. Caraway, sock-footed, paused in the act of gathering up the bags again to give Milo a quick wave, then headed for the kitchen. Lizzie, who was twentyish, collected the rest of the groceries and followed her mother, giving Milo a smile and nod.

Mrs. Pine jogged into the kitchen after Mrs. Caraway. “Odette, I'll put that stuff away. You guys get some rest. Ben should have your rooms ready for you. Milo, can you take care of their suitcases?”

“Sure,” he called after her. Then, before he could get up, he realized he was being watched.

Another girl, one about Milo's own age whom he had never seen before, was peering curiously at him over the back of the loveseat. This had to be Lizzie's younger sister, Meddy. Milo had heard plenty about Meddy but had never met her. “Hi,” he said quietly, trying to tamp down his annoyance at being looked at so closely while he was in one of his special places. “You must be Meddy. I'm Milo.”

Meddy Caraway looked as though she was just about as happy with this arrangement as Milo was. “Hello.” She yanked off her knitted cap, and static electricity sent her short reddish-blond hair shooting out like a spiky halo around her red face.

Yay, vacation.

 

“So you're adopted, then?”

Arms full of suitcases, Milo paused on the second-floor landing and turned to stare at Meddy. “Excuse me?”

She looked at him curiously. “I heard you were.”

He snorted, which he hoped made it sound like he thought this was just a stupid question, but his face was already going red. She'd
heard
he was? Of course, all you had to do was look at Milo and his parents and you could make a pretty good guess that he wasn't their biological kid. But Meddy was implying that someone had specifically
told
her he was adopted. That meant Mrs. Caraway and Lizzie had been talking about his adoption. It felt like a betrayal. The idea that people, people he liked and trusted, were discussing his family, his past, behind his back—

“Well?” Meddy peered at him as if what she was asking was just—was just
no big deal.
Which was
not
the case.

“Your room's this way.” Milo spent the rest of the walk trying to decide how to answer if Meddy didn't get the hint.

There were two special guest rooms on the second floor that were only used for visiting friends and family. Milo opened the east-facing guest room, the one with the twin beds, and set Lizzie's bag down at the foot of the bed she usually took. “Did you bring a suitcase?”

Meddy gave him a long look, then shook her head. “Just threw my stuff in with hers.”

“Okay, then.” He waved his arm weakly in a vague gesture of welcome and left Meddy to make herself at home while he dropped off Mrs. Caraway's suitcase across the hall.

When he emerged, he found Meddy standing in the doorway of her room with folded arms. “You didn't answer me.”

“Yes, I'm adopted,” Milo said, exasperated. “It's none of your business.”

She rolled her eyes. “Don't tell me it's a secret. It's pretty obvious. You don't look anything like your parents.”

“I know exactly what I look like and what I
don't
look like!” he retorted. “It's personal.”

Meddy shrugged, then turned and unzipped Lizzie's bag. “Where are you from?” she asked, peering inside.

“I'm from
here,
” Milo said evenly. “I've lived in Nagspeake my whole life. I was adopted when I was a baby.”

“Yeah, but before that. Before you were adopted.”

Honestly. It was as if he hadn't just told her this was personal. “I was adopted here,” he said coldly, “from an agency here in town.” He didn't mention having been a foundling. That was
really
none of her business.

“Yeah, but aren't you Chi—”

“
Yes,
I
am,
” he hissed. “And I said, it's
personal!
”

Milo turned and left her staring after him as he stalked back down the stairs to the loveseat by the window, where he'd left Georgie's book. He sank as far back into the cushions as he could, studiously ignored the adults in the kitchen, and tried to get back into the story.

A few minutes later, Mrs. Pine squatted down next to him. “Everything okay?”

“Fine.”

“We thought we might have heard—”

“Everything's fine.”

She nodded slowly. “What are you reading?”

Milo held it out so that she could read the title. “Georgie, the one with the blue hair, lent it to me. It's folktales about Nagspeake.”

“I remember reading that book as a kid,” Mrs. Pine said. “I remember liking it a lot.”

“Yeah, it's pretty good.”

“Are you sure you don't want to talk about anything?”

Milo stared at a paragraph he'd reread about three times. “Positive. I'm just going to stay up and finish this story.”

His mother nodded and squeezed his hand once before straightening and turning back to the kitchen. Milo shifted, and in turn he felt the leather wallet shift in his pocket. “Mom?”

“Yep?”

“You didn't see anybody out for a walk when you went out again? The person I saw? Because nobody came in while you were gone.”

She shook her head. “Not a single, solitary soul. Whoever it was, we probably just weren't paying attention when he or she came back.”

 

“If you beat the Devil,”
the tattooed twin called Negret began over the torrential rain beating upon the windows of the inn in the story,
“you can win your heart's desire. Everyone knows that, and some foolish folks probably think they could do it, too. But the Devil is a master gambler, and he makes his living off that sort of fool. It takes arrogance to dream of challenging him, but arrogance rarely helps anyone win; and the Devil, who is not usually arrogant, almost never
loses.

“Still, it's happened, though it's a rare and peculiar thing when it does. This is the tale of one of those occurrences, when the Devil got the worse of a deal.

“On the road between two remote towns, the Devil was walking alone at twilight when he came to a crossing of ways. And there, stopped under the finger post, was a scavenger's wagon. As the Devil approached, it occurred to him that this scavenger was a bit on the small side. Then, as the Devil's shadow fell across the ground before the scavenger and announced his diabolic presence, the small figure turned, and the Devil noticed two things. First, the scavenger had eyes the silver-gray of half-dollars or the full moon on the right kind of night. Second, the scavenger was small because it was a child—and not only a child, but also a
girl.”