Cloaked (17 page)
Authors: Alex Flinn
The king went so often to see his dear children that the queen was offended by his absence.
—“The Six Swans”
“Excuse me,” I say to the woman who opens the door. “Are you Caroline?”
She’s about my mother’s age, tall and slim with an unusually long neck. Could she really be the swans’ sister?
“Sure am.” She smiles. People are friendly in Key West. “Who’s looking?”
“Johnny.” I gesture toward Meg. “And Meg. We’re from Miami. We know some friends of yours, but you’d better sit down.”
She laughs. “You think I need to sit down, hon? You think you can tell me anything that would give me a shock?”
It’s clear she thinks my answer will be no. But she doesn’t know I’m about to tell her she has six siblings who’ve been transmogrified into swans. So I say, “Um, maybe. See. I saw your sign. It says someone here is the King of Key West.”
She sighs. “Oh, that was my crazy dad. I just keep it here for local color. My father is one of those weird Key West legends—that just happens to be true.”
“Okay, well—”
“Why don’t you have a seat?” She gestures toward a wrought-iron table. “And I’ll tell you the story.”
And before I can say that we’re in a hurry, she’s off getting a pitcher of lemonade for us and a beer for herself. Meg and I exchange looks and sit at the table. In the distance, I can hear people laughing, a band playing “Freebird
.
”
I look toward the cemetery.
Finally, Caroline sits and tells her story. “My father called himself the King of Key West because one year, at Fantasy Fest, he rode a float that showed the Conchs seceding from the United States and being ruled over by him.”
“Conchs?” Meg asks.
“A conch is a shellfish. They also call people from Key West Conchs, and call Key West the Conch Republic. Some people joke about Conch secession, but to my father, it was no joke. He was convinced that if Key West seceded, he’d be their king.”
I think I see something fluttering in the darkened cemetery, but when I look again, it’s only a leaf. Caroline continues her story, which I’m guessing she tells anyone who’ll listen.
“My father was a little crazy in other ways. He said when he was young, he went to the Ocala National Forest in the center of the state. He got lost there. It was close to dark, and he was afraid. Just as he was about to lie down for the night, he saw an old woman. She said she’d help him find his way out if he agreed to marry her daughter. Otherwise, he’d be doomed to wander forever.
“He agreed, figuring he’d escape later. But it turned out the daughter was beautiful. They got married and had me.
“My mom was beautiful, but it turns out that wasn’t enough. My parents hated each other. He said she was a witch. She said he was a fool. I know the second was true. He also said there was a curse on him. He did other weird stuff too.”
“Weird stuff?” I say, looking for an opening.
“Like one day, I saw my father wake early in the morning. He got in his truck, not realizing that I’d secretly hidden in the truck bed. He drove until he reached a beautiful park. At the park, there was a pond, and in that pond, there were six swans. Dad fed the swans, talked and sang to them. When he finally left, I saw him wipe a tear from his eye.”
A group enters the cemetery, maybe a ghost tour. The sky is dark except for the light of the full moon and their flashlights. I scan their faces. None is familiar.
“Turns out, he did this every day,” Caroline continues. “Once, my mother seemed mad that he’d gone, and I said, ‘Don’t worry. He’s only gone to feed the swans.’
“My mother turned away, but not before I saw her face turn pink. I knew I’d said the wrong thing. I told her not to be upset. When she turned, her anger had melted away, and she said, ‘I merely think he should spend time with you, not the swans.’
“The next day, I followed my father again. He drove quickly, and I was excited about seeing the swans. When we reached the pond, I wanted to shout with glee. I didn’t, though, because I knew it would alert my father to my presence. I shouldn’t have worried, though.” She stops speaking and stares ahead, remembering.
I know what’s coming, but I say, “What happened?”
She looks at me as though she’s forgotten I was there and says, “They were gone, the beautiful swans. My father called the names he’d given them as if they were children, but they didn’t come. I was crying then, and my father found me. I helped him look for the swans until finally, we couldn’t look anymore because the sun had set, and there was no moon. We went back every day for a month, but the swans were never there again.”
Caroline wipes a tear from her eye. “He made me promise that I’d look for them all my life, even if he was gone. He told me that once I was eighteen, I could break the curse.”
“Did he tell you what the curse was?” Meg asks.
Caroline shakes her head. “He died a year later. He was never the same after the swans left.”
“And your mother?” I remember Harry talking about the witch who’d turned them all into swans. I don’t have a good track record with witches.
But Caroline says, “She disappeared. The neighbors raised me, and when I was of age, I moved back here.” She gestures toward the King of Key West
sign. “Guess I’m part of Conch lore.”
I glance at Meg and say, “What if I told you I could find those swans?”
“I’d say you were crazy. I’m way more than eighteen. Swans don’t live that long.”
“But people do. And that’s what these swans were—your brothers and sisters.”
“I think you need to leave now.” Caroline points at the street.
“I know it sounds crazy,” Meg says, “but he’s talked to those swans. They live in the fountain at the hotel where we work.”
“Right.”
“They were turned into birds by their wicked step . . .” I stop, remembering I’m talking about Caroline’s mother.
“Go,” she says. “You may think I’m this crazy Conch, but I’m not that nuts.” She grasps my shoulder to lead me away.
“Please,” I say. “I told your brother Harry I’d find you.”
She stops walking. “My brother, who?”
“Harry. They’re all named after Key West things. There’s Harry and Truman, Ernest, Mallory, Margarita, and—”
“Johnny!” Meg’s voice cuts me off. She grabs my arm and points to the gray cemetery. “Look!”
I look. At first, I see nothing but moldering tombstones, but as my eyes adjust, I spot what Meg’s so excited about.
A frog.
I pull away from Caroline. “Okay, I’m going.”
“Wait!” she calls after me.
But I can’t wait. The frog hops closer to a group of tourists. I reach for Meg’s hand. “Come on!”
By some silent agreement, we don’t run. We don’t want to scare him. When we reach the cemetery, the tourists have moved on. All is silent. A chill ripples across my arms. All the while, I keep my eyes on the gray grass and gray dirt.
What was that? Something moving between two crumbling baby tombstones. I drop the backpack and take a step forward. Another. No movement. I stop, listening. Nothing but faraway music and an engine sputtering. Then, the engine stops, and there’s Meg’s breathing.
I hold my own breath, hearing what I’ve been listening for, the rustling of a small creature moving. I crouch low, still holding my breath, until I hear it again. I rise and touch Meg’s hand. She’s heard it too. With our eyes, we agree that I’ll go ahead.
I move my foot above a bare spot of grass. I stop. Silence. I slide sideways, my hand brushing the smooth coolness of granite. I lean over, scanning the grass for my prey. Meg has taken a side path around. Now she crouches low. In the shadows, she could be a panther, stalking a jackrabbit. For an instant, our eyes meet, and I silently thank God for Meg. Then there’s a rustling, and a bit of movement in a bunch of grave flowers. I lunge, feel the frog’s coolness beneath me. I close my hands around it, but catch only dead, dried petals. I look to Meg. She’ll get it. I know she’ll get it. But I gasp and stop. The catlike figure in the shadows isn’t Meg. The crouching figure rises, and it is tall, broad shouldered. Siegfried!
There’s movement. I drop the flowers. The frog hops farther away.
“Get it, you idiot!” A shrill voice behind a crypt. I look toward it and see Sieglinde, Sieglinde and Meg. They’re locked in some sort of combat, Sieglinde holding Meg at bay as if under some sort of spell.
“Get it, Johnny!” Meg says. “You can do it! It has to be you!”
That’s all I need. I lunge for the frog. Siegfried lunges at the same time. The frog hops away. We both miss catching it and are locked, arm in arm, for an instant. I see his face.
He’s a kid. A
big
kid, but a boy younger than I am. Maybe fourteen. Definitely not old enough to drive legally. I can take this kid.
Except, oh yeah. He’s got magical powers.
But maybe not. When I saw him at the port, he shot me with a gun.
Yeah, a gun is
way
less threatening than magical powers.
I see the frog again, hopping away past a tombstone that says
BELOVED WIFE
. For an instant, Siegfried seems to freeze. I run at the frog. I lunge. Siegfried recovers and dives through the air. The frog makes to jump again.
“You have to trust me, Philippe!” I say to him. “I’m here for your family. These guys want to kill you! One of us will get you, and you want it to be me.”
The frog stops midspring, and I tackle him, just as Siegfried finally reaches me.
I summon all my strength, more strength than I knew I possessed, and kick him in the stomach. He yells in pain. I wrap the frog in my shirt. At the same moment, Meg breaks free from Sieglinde’s spell-lock and rushes toward me. “The cloak!” she yells and pulls it from my still-open backpack.
Sieglinde’s right behind her, screaming, “You fool! Idiot!” at Siegfried, but he’s down for the count. She runs and lunges for the cloak just as Meg gets it wrapped around both of us.
“You have the frog?” she says.
“Yes.” I feel its cold frog heart beating against my stomach. It doesn’t struggle. “Yes!”
“I wish I was in my bedroom!” Meg whispers.
I feel the cloak being ripped away from me.
“Where are we?” Meg asks me.
Not her house, that’s for sure. The room is dark, lit only by moonlight, and strange objects surround us. And yet, as my eyes become more used to the darkness, I make out the mast of a pirate ship, a giant parrot, stuff I’ve never seen before.
“Ribbit!” In my hand, the frog croaks his indignation. I push myself up on my elbow and look out the window.
Tombstones. The cemetery. Sieglinde!
I hear a woman’s voice, shrieking. She’s out there. Right outside screaming at Siegfried for letting me get away. I realize the shapes around me are old Fantasy Fest floats. A jester’s mouth grins wide at me from a corner. The cloak took us to
a
bedroom, but not Meg’s.
“We’re at Caroline’s house,” I whisper to Meg. “But why . . . ?”
I tug at the cloak and look at it. It’s been ripped in half. Sieglinde must have the rest.
“I think we lost our transportation,” I say. “I guess it couldn’t take us that far.”
“But we have the frog,” Meg says.
“For how long, though? She’s right out there.”
A shadow crosses the moon.
“If only we could make him back into a prince,” Meg says. “It would be easier to keep track of him.”
“Good luck,” I say. “We need to find someone who loves him. And he’s a jerk.”
“Ribbit! Ribbit!” The frog hops and croaks in protest.
“There, there, little frog.” Meg pats him, and he calms down. “It would help if you could be nicer to him. What did the spell say
exactly
?”
I try to remember Victoriana’s words. “The spell can be broken . . .” I picture Victoriana’s balcony, the ocean, her blond hair streaming in the breeze. It was a week ago, but it seems like forever. “. . . by the kiss of one with love in her heart.”
“Love in her heart,” Meg repeats. She reaches over and puts her hand out for the frog. “Come here, little guy. You’re a cute little froggie.”
“What are you—?”
“Well, he
was
hot, and it’s not like I have a boyfriend or anything. Plus, he’s a prince.” The frog hops onto her hand. She places it in one of the few bare spots on the floor.
She kneels and leans toward him. “Let’s just see if it works.”
“Wait!” I grab her arm. “What are you doing?”
“This.” In the moonlight, I watch as she holds the frog down, stretches out her neck, and before I can speak again, she plants a kiss on his warty green head.
He was no frog but a king’s son with beautiful eyes.
—“The Frog Prince”
“
Mon dieu!
Where am I?” The man—because that’s what he is now—is in my lap, flailing his arms, and speaking with a French accent. “Who are you? And where . . .” He turns, squashing my knee as he does. “. . . where is ze fair maiden who has saved me?”
Meg laughs. “I’m afraid that’s me.”
“You?” Even in the darkness, I see surprise contort the Prince’s handsome face. He looks at Meg, wrinkles his nose, then looks back at me. “She?”
“Yeah, her. Would you mind shoving over, buddy? You’re sort of on my leg.” I’m trying to stay calm even though, in that one instant before Meg kissed the prince, I realized the truth, the wonderful truth that filled me with joy, the awful truth that struck me down with despair.
I love Meg. Not Victoriana. Definitely not Victoriana. Meg. Meg, who tried on my shoes and encouraged me. Meg, who showed me the parade route from the top of the Empire State Building, Meg, who saved me from Sieglinde. When I picture myself being with someone, maybe for the rest of my life, it’s not a glamorous blonde in thousand-dollar shoes. It’s a skinny, dark-haired girl in an apron. All those times, in New York, in the tree, at Mallory Square, I should have kissed her.
I realize I thought Meg loved me. And yet, she kissed the frog, and he became a prince. She did say he was hot when she saw his photo. Is that love? My only hope is that he won’t like her back. Then I’ll help her get over it.
But the prince stands and offers his hand to Meg. “Ah,
oui.
I did not recognize. I was so dazzled by ze beauty before me zat I did not see . . .”
And Meg, who never giggles or act girly, stares up at him. “Wow, you’re so . . . tall.”
“And I have an excellent physique. I lift weights on every morning, except in ze past few weeks, when I have been a frog. But now, I start again to please my beloved.”
Meg giggles. Giggles! “Aw, that is soooooo sweet.”
“No sweeter zan you, fair lady. You have saved my life and broken ze spell. Now you will haf your reward. I will take you back to Aloria to become a princess. A queen, even. You are a lucky girl.”
Lucky girl? Ha! I wait for Meg to tell this clown where to get off. But she doesn’t. She just sits, mouth slightly open, and stares.
And, I realize, he’s hot. It’s exactly like me with Victoriana. Meg’s seen this guy on the cover of magazines they sell in the lobby. He’s inches taller than me with a build you don’t get from repairing shoes. Meg might be immune to the hotness of a guy like Ryan, but Ryan’s not a prince. A handsome prince—isn’t that what every girl wants?
“Close your mouth, Meg,” I tell her.
“What?” Her eyes never leave the prince’s face. “Oh, sorry. I was just thinking about how lucky we are. Now we can both go to Aloria, me with my sweet prince, you with your princess.”
My princess. I think of Victoriana. Can I be happy with her? Do I have a choice?
“We should leave,” I tell Meg, who’s still drooling over Prince Philippe. I have to repeat it because she doesn’t hear me the first time. Or the second.
Finally, though, she says, “But how? I don’t think the cloak works.”
I wrap what’s left of the cloak around me and quickly wish I was home. I do wish that. I wish I was anywhere but here. But she’s right. It doesn’t work. Taking us a few yards away from the cemetery was the cloak’s last-gasp act. Now, we’re stuck here with no transportation, and this miserable prince, easy prey for Sieglinde.
“Hey! Who the heck is in here?” Someone else is in the room. “Meg, look out!” I pull Meg away from the prince, in front of me, and we start to run.
“I have a gun, and I’m not afraid to use it,” the voice continues. Caroline!
“Caroline, it’s us!” I start to stand, but she turns on the light, and I dive behind a papier-mâché SpongeBob so no one can see through the window.
“You coulda knocked on the door,” she says.
“I’m sorry. We’ll get out of here right now.” Though I have no idea how.
“Wait! Wait! I was looking for you anyway. You have to tell me about the swans!”
I look at her. She’s holding something strange in her hand, like fat Hawaiian shirts. She’s out of breath, but in between pants, she says, “I have to see the swans! I believe you now.”
I start to hatch a plan. “What changed your mind?”
“The names. That was what he called them. Harry, Truman, Ernest, Jimmy, Mallory, and Margarita. Those were their names. Key West names, like my name, Caroline.”
“Who is zis fool?” the prince asks. Meg takes his hand.
Caroline ignores him. “That’s what he was calling the day I saw him at the pond. My father was devastated when they left. He made me promise something.”
Beside me, Philippe and Meg hold hands. He murmurs something that sounds like “my dear leetle mongoose.” I wish he’d turn back into a frog and hop away. But I don’t want Sieglinde to stick me back in that hole, so I say, “Could we go in the other room, maybe? I’m a little worried about being seen through the window.”
“Sure. Absolutely.”
Once we get to the living room, and Caroline has closed the curtains, she shows me what she’s been holding.
Shirts made out of flowers.
That’s what Margarita said. Their sister had to find them and make shirts out of flowers! She did it. She knew.
“After the swans left,” Caroline says, “my father went on a long journey. He took me with him. I knew he was looking for the swans, but he never found them, and he returned home in despair. That summer, he sat me down. I was only a little kid, but he told me I had to remember what he said.”
“Which was?” But I know.
“That someday I must find the swans again. Before I did, I was to make six shirts of flowers to give to them. When I did these things, the curse would break. He never told me what the curse was.
“He died soon after. I didn’t make the shirts until I was grown-up. By then, I knew my dad was nuts, that I’d never see a swan in Key West again. But I still felt like I had to make them, as a sort of tribute to him.”
“He wasn’t crazy.” I examine the shirts. They’re made of bougainvillea and hibiscus. The flowers still have a lot of color, and I remember my mother, drying flowers and hanging them upside down. “The shirts were the way to turn them human again. But they had to come from you.”
“If you believe in witches and magic,” Caroline says.
“Oh, zere are witches, milady,” Philippe interrupts, and we all turn to look at him. “Witches are where you last expect them. I, like you, did not believe, and I have been a frog zese three months, until my leetle grackle . . .” He turns to look at Meg. “My leetle crow made me human again.”
Please let me slap this guy. Please. Just once. But I think I’ve figured out a way home, and I can keep my promise too. That’s good, at least. “If you drive us back to Miami, I’ll show you where the swans are.”
Caroline looks at the prince, then at me, and shrugs. “I guess it can’t hurt, but . . .” She looks the prince up and down. I look too. He must have been riding when he got enchanted. Either that, or he’s a pretentious jerk because he has on jodhpurs and a red riding jacket and carries a crop. “Is he going to wear that, though?”