Steampunk! Part 15

They told her that she'd had a good four days. "And I surely do 'preciate it," she said, "considering I was laid so low." But she put the skillet down in the sink to soak and wrote down what they wanted.

For a while Fran had tried real hard to get along with Joanie. It seemed possible that Joanie and her daddy might have a baby, and then maybe Fran would be free. But then Joanie mentioned her hysterectomy, and that was that. In any case, Joanie was plumb ugly. Nice as pie, but as far as Fran could figure, the summer people wouldn't settle for an ugly guardian. Sometimes she thought about taking a knife to her face but couldn't quite bring herself to do this. She didn't really want to cut off her nose to spite her face, even though once her daddy had suggested that might do.

She'd tidied away all of the toys, not quite sure what had come over her to take them all out. Maybe it was that they reminded her of her momma, how she would come down the mountain with them, to make up for leaving Fran by herself all day. Once she got older, she helped her momma out some, but by then she wasn't as interested in their gadgets and trinkets. Her momma used to tell her how her own granny had made her husband choose a house from the Sears catalog because she didn't want one of theirs, no matter that it could have been a palace. That was one of the early lessons, that you could take their presents, but there was always a cost to pay.

When Ophelia came back at five, she had her hair in a ponytail, and a flashlight and a thermos, like she thought she were Nancy Drew. "OK," she said. "I almost chickened out, but then I couldn't stand not to come back. When can we go up?"

"Just as soon as we get ready," Fran said. "I made up some jelly sandwiches to take along."

"It gets dark up here so early," Ophelia said. "I feel like it's Halloween or something. Like you're taking me to the haunted house."

"They ain't haints," Fran said. "Nor demons or ary such thing. They don't do no harm unless you get on the wrong side of them. They'll play a prank on you then and count it good fun."

"Like what?" Ophelia said.

"Once I did the warshing up and broke a teacup," Fran said. "They'll sneak up and pinch you." She still had marks on her arms, though she hadn't broken a plate in years. "For the last two years, they've been doing what all the people up here like to do, that reenacting. They set up their battlefield in the big room downstairs. It's not the War Between the States. It's one of theirs, I guess. They built themselves airships and submersibles and mechanical dragons and knights and all manner of wee toys to fight with. Sometimes when they get bored they get me up to be their audience, only they ain't always careful where they go pointing their cannons."

She looked at Ophelia and saw she'd said too much. "Well, they're used to me. They know I don't have no choice but to put up with their ways. They won't bother you none. They put up with all of my daddy's nonsense and don't never bother him none."

That afternoon she'd had to drive over to Chattanooga to visit a particular thrift store. They'd sent her for sequined shoes, a used DVD player, an old saddle, and all the bathing suits she could buy up. Between that and paying for gas, she'd gone through seventy dollars of what her daddy had left her. And the service light had been on the whole way, though her daddy had sworn he'd already taken the car in. At least it hadn't been a school day. Hard to explain you were cutting out because voices in your head were telling you they needed a saddle.

She'd gone on ahead and brought it all up to the house after. No need to bother Ophelia with any of it. The iPod had been a-laying right in front of the door Fran never wanted to have to open.

"Here," she said. "I went ahead and brought this back down."

"My iPod!" Ophelia said. She turned it over. "They did this?"

The iPod was heavier now. It had a little walnut case instead of pink silicone, and there was a figure inlaid in ebon and gilt.

"A dragonfly," Ophelia said.

"A snake doctor," Fran said. "That's what my daddy calls them."

"They did this for me?"

"They'd embellish a bedazzled jean jacket if you left it there," Fran said. "No lie. They can't stand to leave a thing alone."

"Cool," Ophelia said. "Although my mom is never going to believe me when I say I bought it at the mall."

"Just don't take up anything metal," Fran said. "No earrings, not even your car keys. Or you'll wake up and they'll have smelted them down and turned them into doll armor or who knows what all."

Ophelia emptied her pockets on the kitchen table and took off her hoops. "OK if I leave it all here?"

"Sure," Fran said.

"I guess I'm ready, then," said Ophelia.

"Let's walk up," Fran said. "I can fill you in on anything else you were wondering 'bout."

They took off their shoes when they got to where the road crossed the drain. The water was cold with the last of the snow melt. Ophelia said, "I feel like I ought to have brought a hostess gift."

"You could pick them a bunch of wildflowers," Fran said. "But they'd be just as happy with a bit of kyarn."

"Yarn?" Fran said.

"Roadkill," Fran said. "But yarn's OK, too."

Ophelia thumbed the wheel of her iPod. "There's songs on here that weren't here before."

"They like music, too," Fran said. "They like it when I sing."

"What you were saying about going out to San Francisco to busk," Ophelia said. "I can't imagine doing that."

"Well," Fran said. "I won't ever do it, but I think I can imagine it OK."

"I meant what I said," said Ophelia. "Maybe you don't have to do all this by yourself. We could wait until you trusted me, and then see if they'd let me take care of things for a while."

"Hard to picture," Fran said. "We can talk about it down the road."

When they got up to the house, there were deer grazing on the green lawn. The living tree and the dead were all touched with the last of the sunlight. Chinese lanterns hung in pearly rows from the rafters of the porch.

"You always have to come at the house from between the trees," Fran said. "Right on the path. Otherwise you don't get nowhere near it. And I don't ever use but the back door."

"Oh, boy," Ophelia said. "This all just feels like a dream."

"I know what you mean," Fran said. "But it's real, as far as I can tell."

She knocked at the back door. BE BOLD. BE BOLD. "It's me again," she said. "And my friend Ophelia. The one who left the iPod."

She saw Ophelia open her mouth and went on hastily, "Don't say it, Ophelia. They don't like it when you thank them. They're allergic to that word."

"Oh," Ophelia said. "OK."

"Come on in," Fran said. "Mi casa es su casa. I'll give you the grand tour."

They stepped over the threshold, Fran first. "There's the pump room out back, where I do the wash," she said. "There's a big ol' stone oven for baking in, and a pig pit, although why I don't know. They don't eat meat. But you prob'ly don't care about that."

"What's in this room?" Ophelia said.

"Hunh," Fran said. "Well, first it's a lot of junk. They just like to acc.u.mulate junk. Way back in there, though, is what I think is a Queen."

"A Queen?"

"Well, that's what I call her." You know how in a beehive, way down in the combs you have the Queen, and all the worker bees attend on her?

"Far as I can tell, that's what's in there. She's real big and not real pretty, and they are always running in and out of there with food for her. I don't think she's teetotally growed up yet. For a while now I've been thinking on what my momma said, about how maybe these summer people got sent off. Bees do that, too, right? Go off and make a new hive when there are too many Queens?"

"Honestly?" Ophelia said. "It sounds kind of creepy."

"I don't think of it that way," Fran said. "It's just how things are. I guess I'm used to the quareness of it all.

"'Sides, that's where my daddy gets his liquor, and she don't bother him none. They have some kind of still set up in there, and every once in a while when he ain't feeling too religious, he goes in and skims off a liddle bitty bit. It's awful sweet stuff."

"I tried 'shine once at a party," Ophelia said. "That was back in Lynchburg. Yuck." She hesitated. "Are they, uh, are they listening to us right now?"

"Yeah," Fran said. "They're awful eavesdroppers."

Ophelia turned around in a circle in the cluttered hall. "Um, hi?" she said. "I'm Fran's friend Ophelia? I'm pleased to make your acquaintance."

In response came a series of clicks from the War Room.

Ophelia jumped. "What's that?" she said.

"Remember I told you 'bout the reenactor stuff?" Fran said. "Don't get freaked out. It's pretty cool."

She gave Ophelia a little push into the War Room.

Of all the rooms in the house, this one was Fran's favorite, even if they dive-bombed her sometimes with the airships or fired off the cannons without much thought for where she was standing. The walls were beaten tin and copper, sc.r.a.p metal held down with twopenny nails. Molded forms lay on the floor, representing scaled-down mountains, forests, and plains where miniature armies were fighting desperate battles. There was a kiddie pool over by the big picture window, with a machine in it that made waves. Little ships and submersibles, and occasionally one of the ships sank and bodies would go floating over to the edges. There was a sea serpent made of tubing and metal rings that swam endlessly in a circle. There was a sluggish river, too, closer to the door, that ran red, and stank, and stained the banks. The summer people were always setting up miniature bridges over it, then blowing the bridges up.

Overhead were the fantastic shapes of the dirigibles, and the dragons that were hung on string and swam perpetually through the air above your head. There was a misty globe, too, suspended in some way that Fran could not figure, and lit by some unknown source. It stayed up near the painted ceiling for days at a time, and then sank down behind the plastic sea, according to some schedule of the summer people's.

"It's amazing," Ophelia said. "Once I went to the house of some friend of my father's. An anesthesiologist? He had a train set down in his bas.e.m.e.nt, and it was crazy complicated. He would die if he saw this."

"Over there is a Queen, I think," Fran said. "All surrounded by her knights. And here's another one, much smaller. I wonder who won, in the end."

"Maybe it's not been fought yet," Ophelia said. "Or maybe it's being fought right now."

"Could be," Fran said. "Anyway, sometimes I come and sit and try and take in all the changes. I wish there was a book that told you everything that went on.

"Come on. I'll show you the room you can sleep in."

They went up the stairs. BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BUT NOT TOO BOLD. The moss carpet on the second floor was already looking a little worse for wear. "Last week I spent a whole day scrubbing these boards on my hands and knees. So of course they need to go next thing and pile up a bunch of dirt and stuff. They won't be the ones who have to pitch in and clean it up."

"I could help," Ophelia said. "If you want."

"I wasn't asking for help. But if you offer, I'll accept. The first door is the washroom," Fran said. "Nothing quare about the toilet. I don't know about the bathtub, though. Never felt the need to sit in it."

"My mom always tells me not to sit down in the bathtub when we stay in a hotel," Ophelia said. "I think she thinks you get AIDS that way."

"Far's I know, all you'd get is wet," Fran said. "Here's where you sleep."

She opened the second door.

It was a gorgeous room, all done up in shades of orange and rust and gold and pink and tangerine. The walls were finished in leafy shapes and vines cut from all kinds of dresses and T-shirts and what have you. Fran's momma had spent the better part of the year going through stores, choosing clothes for their patterns and textures and colors. Gold-leaf snakes and fishes swam through the leaf shapes. When the sun came up in the morning, Fran remembered, it was almost blinding.

There was a crazy quilt on the bed, pink and gold. The bed itself was shaped like a swan. There was a willow chest at the foot of the bed to lay out your clothes. The mattress was stuffed with the down from crow feathers. Fran had helped her mother shoot the crows and pluck their feathers. She thought they'd killed about a hundred.

"I'd say wow," Ophelia said, "but I keep saying that. Wow, wow, wow. This is a crazy room."

"I always thought it was like being stuck inside a bottle of orange Nehi," Fran said. "But in a good way."

"Oh, yeah," Ophelia said. "I can see that."

There was a stack of books on the table beside the bed. Like everything else in the room, all the books had been picked out for the colors on their jackets. Fran's momma had told her that once the room had been another set of colors. Greens and blues, maybe? Willow and peac.o.c.k and midnight colors? And who had brought the bits up for the room that time? Fran's great-grandfather or someone even farther along the family tree? Who had first begun to take care of the summer people? Her mother had doled out stories sparingly, and so Fran only had a piecemeal sort of history.

Hard to figure out what it would please Ophelia to hear anyway, and what would trouble her. All of it seemed pleasing and troubling to Fran in equal measure after so many years.

"The door you slipped my envelope under," she said finally. "You oughtn't ever go in there."

Ophelia yawned. "Like Bluebeard," she said.

Fran said, "It's how they come and go. Even they don't open that door very often, I guess." She'd peeped through the keyhole once and seen a b.l.o.o.d.y river. She'd bet if you pa.s.sed through that door, you weren't likely to return.

"Can I ask you another stupid question?" Ophelia said. "Where are they right now?"

"They're here," Fran said. "Or out in the woods chasing nightjars. I told you I didn't see them much."

"So how do they tell you what they need you to do?"

"They get in my head," Fran said. "I guess it's kind of like being schizophrenic. Or like having a really bad itch or something that goes away when I do what they want me to."

"Not fun," Ophelia said. "Maybe I don't like your summer people as much as I thought I did."

Fran said, "It's not always awful. I guess what it is, is complicated."

"I guess I won't complain the next time my mom tells me I have to help her polish the silver or do useless c.r.a.p like that. Should we eat our sandwiches now, or should we save them for when we wake up in the middle of the night?" Ophelia asked. "I have this idea that seeing your heart's desire probably makes you hungry."

"I can't stay," Fran said, surprised. She saw Ophelia's expression and said, "Well, h.e.l.l. I thought you understood. This is just for you."

Ophelia continued to look at her dubiously. "Is it because there's just the one bed? I could sleep on the floor. You know, if you're worried I might be planning to lez out on you."

"It isn't that," Fran said. "They only let a body sleep here once. Once and no more."

"You're really going to leave me up here alone?" Ophelia said.

"Yes," Fran said. "Lessen you decide you want to come back down with me. I guess I'd understand if you did."

"Could I come back again?" Ophelia said.

"No."

Ophelia sat down on the golden quilt and smoothed it with her fingers. She chewed her lip, not meeting Fran's eye.

"Phew," she said. "OK. I'll do it." She laughed. "How could I not do it? Right?"

"If you're sure," Fran said.

"I'm not sure, but I couldn't stand it if you sent me away now," Ophelia said. "When you slept here, were you afraid?"