Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories (27 page)

No little dogs or guinea pigs. Maybe I'll go out to California. Fran said, "I'm not the kind of people who go to college.

"Oh," Ophelia said. "I know you skip class and stuff, but you're a lot smarter than me, you know? I mean, you read books. And there was that time you corrected Ms. Shumacher in physics. So I just thought . . ."

"Turn here," Fran said. "Careful. It's not paved."

The dirt road wound up through beds of laurel into the little meadow with the nameless creek. Fran could feel Ophelia breathe in, probably trying her hardest not to say something about how beautiful it was. And it was beautiful, Fran knew. You could hardly see the house itself, hidden like a bride behind a veil of climbing vines: virgin's bower and Japanese honeysuckle, masses of William Baffin and Cherokee roses overgrowing the porch and running up over the sagging roof. Bumblebees, their legs armored in gold, threaded through the meadow grass, almost too weighed down with pollen to fly.

"Needs a new roof," Fran said. "My great-granddaddy ordered it out of the Sears catalog. Men brought it up the side of the mountain in pieces, and all the Cherokee who hadn't yet gone away came and watched." She was amazed at herself: next thing she'd be asking Ophelia to come sleep over and trade secrets.

She opened the car door and heaved herself up, plucked up the poke of groceries. Before she could turn and say thank you for the ride, Ophelia was standing in the yard. "I thought . . ." Ophelia said uncertainly. "Well, I thought maybe I could use your bathroom?"

"It's an outhouse," Fran said, deadpan. Then she relented. "Come on in, then. It's a regular bathroom. Just not very clean."

Ophelia didn't say anything when they came into the kitchen. Fran watched her take it in: the heaped dishes in the sink, the pillow and raggedy quilt on the sagging couch. The piles of dirty laundry beside the efficiency washer in the kitchen. The places where hairy tendrils of vine had found a way inside around the windows. "I guess you might be thinking it's funny," she said. "My dad and I make money doing other people's houses, but we don't take no real care of our own."

"I was thinking that somebody ought to be taking care of you," Ophelia said. "At least while you're sick."

Fran gave a little shrug. "I do fine on my own," she said. "The washroom's down the hall."

She took two NyQuil while Ophelia was gone, and washed them down with the last swallow or two of ginger ale out of the refrigerator. Flat, but still cool. Then she lay down on the couch and pulled the counterpane up around her face. She huddled into the lumpy cushions. Her legs ached; her face felt as hot as fire. Her feet were ice cold.

A minute later Ophelia sat down on the couch beside her.

"Ophelia?" Fran said. "I'm grateful for the ride home and for the help at the Robertses, but I don't go for the girls. So don't lez out."

Ophelia said, "I brought you a glass of water. You need to stay hydrated."

"Mmm," Fran said.

"You know, your dad told me once that I was going to hell," Ophelia said. "He was over at our house doing something. Fixing a burst pipe, maybe? I don't know how he knew. I was eleven. I was making one of my Barbies kiss the other Barbie. I don't think I knew, not yet anyway. I just didn't have a Ken. He didn't bring you over to play after he said that, even though I never told my mom."

"My daddy thinks everyone is going to hell," Fran said into the counterpane. "I don't care where I go, as long as it isn't here and he isn't there."

Ophelia didn't say anything for a minute or two, and she didn't get up to leave, neither, so finally Fran poked her head out. Ophelia had a toy in her hand, the monkey egg. She turned it over, then over again. She looked a question at Fran.

"Give here," Fran said. "I'll work it." She wound the filigree dial and set the egg on the floor. The toy vibrated ferociously. Two pincer legs and a scorpion tail made of figured brass shot out of the bottom hemisphere, and the egg wobbled on the legs in one direction and then another, the articulated tail curling and lashing. Portholes on either side of the top hemisphere opened, and two arms wriggled out and reached up, rapping at the dome of the egg until that, too, cracked open with a click. A monkey's head, wearing the egg dome like a hat, popped out. Its mouth opened and closed in chattering ecstasy, red garnet eyes rolling, arms describing wider and wider circles in the air until the clockwork ran down and all of the its extremities whipped back into the egg again.

"What in the world?" Ophelia said. She picked up the egg, tracing the joins with a finger.

"It's just something that's been in our family," Fran said. She stuck her arm out of the quilt, grabbed a tissue, and blew her nose for maybe the thousandth time. Just like a clockwork monkey. "We didn't steal it from no one, if that's what you're thinking."

"No," Ophelia said, and then frowned. "It's just — I've never seen anything like it. It's like a Faberge egg. It ought to be in a museum."

There were lots of others. The laughing cat, and the waltzing elephants; the swan you wound up, who chased the dog. Other toys that Fran hadn't played with in years. The mermaid who combed garnets out of her hair. Bawbees for babies, her mother had called them.

"I remember now," Ophelia said. "When you came and played at my house. You brought a minnow made out of silver. It was smaller than my little finger. We put it in the bathtub, and it swam around and around. You had a little fishing rod, too, and a golden worm that wriggled on the hook. You let me catch the fish, and when I did, it talked. It said it would give me a wish if I let it go. But it was just a toy. When I told my mother about it, she said I was making it up. And you never brought it back. You said we should play with my dolls instead."

"You wished for two pieces of chocolate cake," Fran said sleepily.

"And then my mother made a chocolate cake, didn't she?" Ophelia said. "So the wish came true. But I could only eat one piece. Maybe I knew she was going to make a cake. Except why would I wish for something that I already knew I was going to get?"

Fran said nothing. She watched Ophelia through slitted eyes.

"Do you still have the fish?" Ophelia asked.

Fran said, "Somewhere. The clockwork ran down. It didn't give wishes no more. I reckon I didn't mind. It only ever granted little wishes."

"Ha, ha," Ophelia said. She stood up. "Tomorrow's Saturday. I'll come by in the morning to make sure you're OK."

"You don't have to," Fran said.

"No," Ophelia said. "I don't have to. But I will."

When you do for other people (Fran's daddy said once upon a time when he was drunk, before he got religion), things that they could do for themselves but they pay you to do it instead, you both will get used to it. Sometimes they don't even pay you, and that's charity. At first charity isn't comfortable, but it gets so it is so. After some while, maybe you start to feel wrong when you ain't doing for them, just one more thing, and always one more thing after that. Maybe you start to feel as you're valuable. Because they need you. And the more they need you, the more you need them. Things go out of balance. The more a person needs you, the harder it gets for you to leave. You need to remember that, Franny. Sometimes you're on one side of that equation, and sometimes you're on the other. Y'all need to know where you are and what you owe. And where you are is beholden to the summer people, and unless you can balance that out, here is where y'all stay.

Fran wasn't sure what he thought about all that now that he was friends with Jesus, about how the question of eternal life and the forgiveness of sins balanced out. Maybe that was why religion made him so itchy. All she knew was that nobody, not even her daddy, had ever suggested Jesus was going to help her out of her particular situation.

Fran, dosed on NyQuil, feverish and alone in her great-grandfather's catalog house, hidden behind walls of roses, dreamed—as she did every night—of escape. She woke every few hours, wishing someone would bring her another glass of water. She sweated through her clothes, and then froze, and then boiled again. Her throat was full of knives.

She was still on the couch when Ophelia came back, banging through the screen door. "Good morning!" Ophelia said. "Or maybe I should say good afternoon! It's noon, anyhow. I brought oranges to make fresh orange juice, and I didn't know if you liked sausage or bacon, so I got you two different kinds of biscuit."

Fran struggled to sit up.

"Fran," Ophelia said. She came and stood in front of the sofa, still holding the two cat-head biscuits. "You look terrible." She put her hand on Fran's forehead. "You're burning up! I knew I oughtn't've left you here all by yourself! What should I do? Should I take you down to the emergency?"

"No doctor," Fran managed to say. "They'll want to know where my daddy is. Water?"

Ophelia scampered back to the kitchen. "How many days have you had the flu? You need antibiotics. Or something. Fran?"

"Here," Fran said, coming to a decision. She lifted a bill off a stack of mail on the floor and pulled out the return envelope. Then she reached up and pulled out three strands of her hair. She put them in the envelope and licked it shut. "Take this up the road where it crosses the drain," she said. "All the way up." She coughed miserably, a rattling, deathly cough. "When you get to the big house, go around to the back and knock on the door. Tell them I sent you. You won't see them, but they'll know you came from me. After you knock, you can just go in. Go upstairs directly, you mind, and put this envelope under the door. Third door down the hall. You'll know which. After that, you oughter wait out on the porch. Bring back whatever they give you."

Ophelia gave her a look that said Fran was delirious. "Just go," Fran said. "If there ain't a house, or if there is a house and it ain't the house I'm telling you about, then come back and I'll go to the emergency with you. Or if you find the house and you're afeart and you can't do what I asked, come back and I'll go with you. But if you do what I tell you, it will be like the minnow."

"Like the minnow?" Ophelia said. "I don't understand."

"You will. Be bold," Fran said, and did her best to look cheerful. "Like the girls in those ballads. Will you bring me another glass of water afore you go?"

Ophelia went.

Fran lay on the couch, thinking about what Ophelia would see.

From time to time she raised a pair of curious-looking spyglasses — these something much more useful than any bawbee — to her eyes. Through them she saw first the dirt track, which only seemed to dead end. Were you to look again, you found your road crossing over the shallow crick once, twice, the one climbing the mountain, the drain running away and down. The meadow disappearing again into beds of laurel, then low trees hung with climbing roses, so that you ascended in drifts of pink and white. A stone wall, tumbled and ruined, and then the big house. The house, dry stack stone, stained with age like the tumbledown wall; two stories. A slate roof, a long covered porch, carved wooden shutters making all the eyes of the windows blind. Two apple trees, crabbed and old, one green and bearing fruit and the other bare and silver black. Ophelia found the mossy path between them that wound around to the back door, with two words carved over the stone lintel: BE BOLD.

And this is what Fran saw Ophelia do: Having knocked on the door, Ophelia hesitated for only a moment and then she opened it. She called out, "Hello? Fran sent me. She's ill. Hello?" No one answered.

So Ophelia took a breath and stepped over the threshold and into a dark, crowded hallway, with a room on either side and a staircase in front of her. On the flagstone in front of her were carved these words: BE BOLD, BE BOLD. Despite the invitation, Ophelia did not seem tempted to investigate either room, which Fran thought wise of her. The first test a success. You might expect that through one door would be a living room, and you might expect that through the other door would be a kitchen, but you would be wrong. One was the Queen's room. The other was what Fran thought of as the War Room.

Fusty stacks of old magazines and catalogs and newspapers, old encyclopedias and gothic novels leaned against the walls of the hall, making such a narrow alley that even lickle tiny Ophelia turned sideways to make her way. Doll's legs and old silverware sets and tennis trophies and Mason jars and empty matchboxes and false teeth, and stranger things still, poked out of paper bags and plastic carriers. You might expect that through the doors on either side of the hall there would be more crumbling piles and more odd jumbles, and you would be right. But there were other things, too. At the foot of the stairs was another piece of advice for guests like Ophelia, carved right into the first riser: BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BUT NOT TOO BOLD.

The owners of the house had been at another one of their frolics, Fran saw. Someone had woven tinsel and ivy and peacock feathers through the bannisters. Someone had thumbtacked cut silhouettes and Polaroids and tintypes and magazine pictures on the wall alongside the stairs, layers upon layers upon layers, hundreds and hundreds of eyes watching each time Ophelia set her foot down carefully on the next stair.

Perhaps Ophelia didn't trust the stairs not to be rotted through. But the stairs were safe. Someone had always taken very good care of this house.

At the top of the stairs, the carpet underfoot was soft, almost spongy. Moss, Fran decided. They've redecorated again. That's going to be the devil to clean up. Here and there were white-and-red mushrooms in pretty rings upon the moss. More bawbees, too, waiting for someone to come along and play with them. A dinosaur, only needing to be wound, a plastic dime-store cowboy sitting on its shining shoulders. Up near the ceiling, two armored dirigibles, tethered to a light fixture by their scarlet ribbons. The cannons on these zeppelins were in working order. They'd chased Fran down the hall more than once. Back home, she'd had to tweezer the tiny lead pellets out of her shin. Today, though, all were on their best behavior.

Ophelia passed one door, two doors, stopped at the third door. Above it, the final warning: BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BUT NOT TOO BOLD. LET THAT THY HEART'S BLOOD RUN COLD. Ophelia put her hand on the doorknob but didn't try it. Not afeart, but no fool, neither, Fran thought. They'll be pleased. Or will they?