The Somebodies (9 page)

“I’ve got a beautiful plan all laid out. This window of the anniversary of my defeat, I will take advantage of it, my dear. This time I will be victorious. I have enough power this go-around.”

“What I want is my father back,” the girl said.

“Don’t be ridiculous! Most of poor Merton’s soul is long gone. Poor, poor Merton!” Her voice didn’t sound sympathetic, however. It seemed she hated Merton more than she felt sorry for him. “He doesn’t have enough soul left to power a bigger human body. He’s fine as he is. And he’s still of use. He spied very well on Fern, spied quite nicely. Hand me my moth brooch! And I’ve got to powder my face so I don’t look so ravenously blue.”

He didn’t have enough of his soul left? He was with them in a smaller form? He’d spied on Fern? Could it be that the girl’s father—Fern’s great-uncle Merton—was the goldfish who’d watched her from the painting? Was Merton Gretel alive—not dead at all, but alive in the form of a fish? He’d been alive all this time. Merton Gretel. The faint letters of the name were still legible on Fern’s palm. She felt a hardening in her chest at the sound of that name spoken with that voice.

Fern could hear the Blue Queen clicking through a makeup bag. The girl knelt beside the bed and reached into a suitcase propped there. She pulled out a large, shiny, blackish-greenish brooch. She ran her thumb over it gently. Fern looked at the brooch carefully. It was made of ten shellacked cocoons, delicately spun—ten of them arranged around one center moth, with a shiny pin stuck to the back. The girl paused there, touching the pin.

“I miss school, too,” the girl said. “I miss my friends.”

“I’ve told you a million times!” the Blue Queen said. “Don’t have friends! Have underlings! Friends,” she said, “friends only disappoint.”

This sounded like very bad advice to Fern. But the girl seemed to accept it as fact. “I know,” she said, quietly. “I know.”

“Good. Now where’s my fur? I can’t leave it here or the help will steal it.”

The girl stood. “In the wardrobe,” she said.

Through a crack in the doors of the wardrobe, Fern could see the trim of a fur. It began to shake and bounce. It pushed its way off the hanger and landed on the floor on its paws. Fern could see a few pairs of eyes, raccoon eyes. It scrambled to the Blue Queen, out of sight, but Fern could imagine the coat of animals clambering up her legs and arms, resting themselves on her shoulders.

The door opened, and the Blue Queen’s voice called down the hall. “You two! Yes, you! With the feather dusters! I’m Fattler’s special guest speaker, Ubuleen Heet!”

Fern froze. Ubuleen Heet? So that’s what she meant by hiding in plain sight! The Blue Queen was in disguise as the motivational speaker! Her invitation had been sent by the Blue Queen! The Blue Queen was the head of the Secret Society of Somebodies.

“Oh, Miss Heet! What can we do for you?” a voice shouted down the hall.

“Come in here and tidy this, will you? It stinks of smoke and the awful odor of livestock, like an old barn! I have a speaking engagement, as you may know, and I can’t tolerate a room like this!”

“Yes, ma’am!” they said. “We’ll get to it! Right away!”

Fern tried to work out the names in her head:

There was only a single letter missing. “Q.” Her middle initial?

So Ubuleen Heet was famous. She was the speaker! How could this be? Didn’t anyone know that she was evil? That she was the Blue Queen returned, the one responsible for the dead books? That she was using the anniversary of her defeat as a soft spot in time so that she could return? Fern kept her book-hands pinned under her body, too afraid to budge.

The girl was still in the room. In fact, she was just feet away from Howard and Fern. She stood at the box, putting some of the books back into it. There was the unmistakable scent of rot, something soured or, worse, dead. She was talking to herself, repeating, “It will all be worth it in the end. It will all be worth it.”

Her mother called once more, “Don’t forget your red hat, Lucess, dear.”

Lucess? Brine? Fern’s stomach looped as if she were still on the glass elevator. She grabbed Howard’s arm. He was already rigid with fear. He looked at Fern, his eyes watery. Her mind couldn’t help but line up letters again.

She came up with that quickly. What letters were
left? “C-E-S-S R-I-N”…She flipped them.
RINCESS
. Again, she was only missing one letter.

“And, please,” the Blue Queen shouted. “Don’t forget to feed your father!”

Lucess walked to the fishbowl. Fern and Howard listened to her unscrew a cap and tap it on the side of the bowl.

“Here you go, Daddy,” she said, and then she added in a whisper, “Soon you’ll be with us. It will all be worth it!”

Then she walked to the other side of the bed and started rummaging through her suitcase, for her red hat, no doubt. The red hat tumbled to the floor just beside Howard’s head. When she bent down to retrieve it, Howard gave a small gasp.

Lucess whipped up the dust ruffle. Her sharp face appeared beneath the bed. She stared at Howard and Fern, dazed. Fern was ready to scream if necessary. She was already stiffening for Lucess’s attack.

But Lucess’s face went soft. “You’re here,” she said.

“You?” Fern said. “It was
you
trying to shut the books? Your mother is—”

“Ubuleen Heet,” Lucess said.

“The Blue Queen?”

She nodded.

“Middle initial ‘Q’?” Fern asked.

She nodded again.

“And yours starts with, let me guess, the letter ‘P’?”

“My middle name is Princess,” she said. “I was the one who planted the invitation, and I was supposed to make you want to be a Somebody, and I was supposed to find out your weaknesses and report them.”

“And what did you report?” Fern asked.

“I reported that you didn’t have any real weaknesses. I kind of admired you back in Mrs. Fluggery’s class,” she said.

“Really?” Fern said.

Lucess whispered, “Don’t come to the secret society meeting.”

“I don’t know where it is, even,” Fern said.

“The news will find you, but ignore it. Listen, whatever you do, don’t come.”

“Lucess?” the Blue Queen’s voice thundered down the hallway.

And then the dust ruffle dropped back into place and she disappeared.

“I’ve got it! Coming!” Lucess called to her mother. Her shoes clicked across the now-slate floor and out the door.

FERN AND HOWARD STARED AT THEIR HANDS
. The pages had disappeared and shrunk back into fingers, but faint ridges still existed where the bindings had been.

Howard was tight-lipped with concentration. “What just happened?”

“I think she almost got our souls,” Fern said, still dazed. She opened and closed her hands to make sure they still worked.

“Lucess Brine is here! How did you know her initials?”

“I was working some things out in my head. That’s all. The letters almost added up.” Fern said, “Her
mother is the Blue Queen. She’s awful, Howard. She could take over the Anybodies again. She ruled once for eleven days, and that’s when they thought that she killed Merton Gretel, but he isn’t dead. He’s the fish in the bowl on the nightstand—or, well, almost all of him is the fish in the bowl on the nightstand. A good bit of his soul is gone.”

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Howard said, patting the pony. “And you can’t go to that meeting!”

There wasn’t time for further discussion. The door banged open, and the room filled with the sound of a badly squeaking wheel, and, above it, a woman speaking. “Well, wait till I tell my Artie that I talked to Ubuleen Heet!”

Fern peeked out to see two women wearing gray dresses with white stockings and aprons, pushing a cart of supplies with a hanging bag full of laundry. The woman with the high-pitched snippy voice was small and tough-looking, like a little wrestler (if wrestlers wore gray dresses with white stockings and aprons). The other woman was heavyset and looked like she’d been shoved into her dress with excessive force—a kind of excessive force that had dislodged most of her bun. It looked like she had suffered a mighty explosion on the back of her head.

Fern wondered if they would notice the little jars on
the desk—the jars filled with the compressed souls, those little glowing eggs. The Blue Queen had left out a row of five jars, all filled to the brim. Fern wanted to rescue those souls. And she wanted to save Merton, too. But how?

The exploded-bun woman said, “And she’s right about the smell of this place! How awful! Worse than the flying monkeys’ rooms!”

At the mention of flying monkeys, Howard grabbed Fern’s arm and squeezed with full-panic force. Fern wasn’t afraid of flying monkeys. I mean, perhaps she would have been, but now she could only think of the Blue Queen’s voice, the awful laughter, the way she said the word “souls,” and the souls themselves being tugged from their pages.

“Well, I told Fattler I didn’t want to clean up after them flying monkeys anymore, but he says that them flying monkeys make good bellhops. ‘Can’t ask for better speed.’ And I gave a huff and then, you know what he says next?”

“What?” the exploded-bun woman asked.

“He says that them flying monkeys are the least of his problems.” The wrestler woman added in a whisper, “You notice how the stairs in the lobby were all sopping wet. I heard it’s ’cause the stairway transformed into a waterfall.”

“Do you think Fattler made a mistake?”

“Well, some are saying he’s just lost his touch. But do you know what else I heard? Someone told me he said he never was a genius, that it was all a big mix-up and he’s just ordinary.”

Fern shut her eyes tight. Fattler. He couldn’t be ordinary! She’d read all about how he was a legend in a long line of legends, famous for grand Anybody hospitality and innovations. He didn’t need to rely on anyone but himself. What would he think of what had just happened in this room, in his very own hotel? He needed to know that Ubuleen Heet was the Blue Queen, was killing books, was probably bound to ruin his hotel, and worse. Fern had to get to Fattler before the Queen did.

The exploded-bun woman said, “I heard some computers turned into tortoises and waddled into the swimming pool.”

“Yes, yes, a whole school of tortoises, and when Fattler tried to transform them back, they short-circuited.” The wrestler woman went on, “But Fattler’s keeping a lid on it. He doesn’t want people to know.”

Was Fattler really in trouble? Fern thought back to her grandmother’s warning:
Fern will be a target.
A target for what? Fern wondered now.

The two women pulled out aerosol cans and started spraying the air. One revved the vacuum, and that made
the pony stir and then wake up. He tottered to a stand, then shook his mane. He started to bolt out from under the bed.

Fern grabbed him and said, “No, come back,” just at the same moment that the vacuum cleaner plug popped from the wall. The vacuum died, and Fern’s voice rang across the room.

“What was that noise?” the exploded-bun woman said.

Fern clamped her hands over her mouth, which meant that the pony was free. He bounded out from under the bed. The wrestler screamed like she’d seen a mouse. Fern watched the pony dodge the exploded-bun woman’s broom and slip out the door to run loose in the hotel.

“It come from under the bed,” the wrestler screamed.

The exploded-bun woman marched to Howard’s side of the bed with her broom in hand. She took the stick end and was about to drive it into Howard’s belly when Fern grabbed his arm and pulled him. Howard clutched the book and they both rolled out the other side. Howard scrambled back over the bed, the wrestler woman reaching for him.

“Vermin! Stowaways!” she screamed. “Get ’em!”

While the wrestler woman screamed and the exploded-bun woman swung her broom around like a bat at
Howard, Fern dashed to the desk. She grabbed two jars and shoved them quickly into her sweatshirt pockets. Howard swayed this way and that, until he got a straight shot out of the room. Fern turned to go grab the fishbowl, but there was no time. She jumped onto the cart, rolled across the room, then hopped off. Fern and Howard both ran as fast as they could down the blue then pink then orangey hall.

SOMETIMES I FORGET THAT YOU’RE STILL YOUNG
. This is because you are such a wise and thoughtful reader. But the fact is, that despite your maturity, you are not a grown-up and you probably do not sell flood insurance or condos in Florida. You probably do not dress up in itchy wool pants, carry a musket and do Civil War reenactments. And you probably do not belong to the High Order of Hairless Persian Cat Breeders. And because you are not shouldering the burdens of grown-up life (as if kid life doesn’t have its own burdens! Ha!), you have probably never been to a convention.

Conventions can be big, sprawling, ugly ordeals that
take place mainly in hotels. Much like any good birthday party, a convention always has a theme, but unlike a good birthday party, it often has little joy (and rarely cake with cursive lettering and candles). Amid meetings and booths (of freebie pencils with slogans printed on them in tiny letters), there’s often a motivational speaker, who sometimes gets so lathered up about the theme (which might be floods, or condos in Boca, or muskets, or hairless cats) that he or she spits when speaking loudly into a microphone.

Ubuleen Heet was this year’s speaker at the Anybodies convention.

Fern and Howard ran down flight after flight of stairs. When they got to the bottom, Fern said, “Hand me the book.” She held on to its heavy binding and concentrated. There in the empty stairwell,
The Art of Being Anybody
shrank and hardened and reddened until it was the size and shape of an apple. Fern shoved it into one of her sweatshirt pockets, which bulged because it now held not only a jar of souls but an apple, too.

“We can’t have
The Art of Being Anybody
paraded around in this crowd,” she said.

“Good thinking. And it was heavy, too. My arms are tired.”

They took a deep breath and opened the door at the bottom of the stairs to find themselves in a wide corridor,
right in front of a life-sized picture of Ubuleen Heet. They both jumped back, and then realized she was only life
like
—not real. It was simply announcing the time of her speech in the amphitheater later that evening.

To get to the lobby, Fern and Howard had to pass down the wide corridor. It was filled with booths manned by people in smart suits. Fern and Howard had stopped running. Instead they strode along in a purposefully rushed way. Fern knew that if you look purposefully rushed, you don’t have time to answer questions like,
Do your parents know you’re walking around loose like this? Do you kids even have a room in this hotel? Could you please show me your key?

Still breathless from their escape, they took this time to whisper to each other.

Howard asked, “Do books have souls? Was she dragging the souls out of books and and…?”

“Leaving the books for dead?”

“Do you think?”

Fern nodded.

“Why?” Howard whispered. “Why would someone do that?”

“They’re her power source, I think. Dorathea said the Blue Queen needed a power source because she’d been stripped of her powers after the eleven-day rule.”

“Do you think she could take over again?” Howard
asked nervously. “She makes me feel like I’m going to throw up. She’s worse than that elevator ride.”

“I don’t know,” Fern said. “We’ve got to find Fattler and warn him. She can’t get that key—whatever it is.”

“How will we find Fattler and tell him what’s going on? I mean, we aren’t even supposed to be here, Fern,” Howard said.

“We still have to warn him somehow,” Fern said.

“Let’s just disappear. Slink off. Hide out. It’s safer.”

“Do you want to head to Gravers? The Drudgers have court orders, you know.”

“You’re right,” Howard said.

Fern zipped up, put on her hood and pulled the strings. “And keep an eye out for Dorathea and the Bone. They’ll be looking for us everywhere, I’m sure.”

Howard hunched up his shoulders and looked around. “Court orders,” he muttered. “Court orders.”

They shuffled quickly through the brisk crowd. It seemed like a good spot to be, lost in all the people. They listened to bits of conversation:

“Target market,” she heard.

And, “Tom Hanks was at the bagel table.”

“In full animation?” someone else asked.

Fern wanted to see Tom Hanks, fully animated or not. She didn’t hear the answer. The people bustled by.

Another group was talking about the motivational speaker: “She’s going to teach us to embrace our inner something. I can’t remember. But isn’t that wonderful?”

“I don’t want her telling me to embrace anything,” Howard said. His eyes darted all over the lobby, taking everything in.

“You like it here, don’t you?” Fern asked.

“Of course not,” Howard said.

A woman idling by a booth offering Peace and Tranquility—“a soap that works right into your skin, transforming you to a place of pure calm”—caught Fern’s eye and gave a wink. And because it’s a natural instinct for an Anybody to wink back at an Anybody
who’s winked at them, Fern felt her eye snap shut for a split second. The woman was wearing a smoking jacket, with fancy overlapped letters stitched onto its chest pocket. Fern didn’t like the woman, and she stuck closer to Howard because of her.

One young woman was selling Anybody Water supplies. “You just buy the bottle, fill it with tap water, and it will instantly transform into fresh mountain spring water from the Alps.” There were bankers claiming they could transform stock portfolios. Marriage counselors, beauty consultants, body coaches, dentists—all with transforming products.

Most people were gathered around one booth. Howard pulled Fern toward the crowd.

“What do you think they’re selling?” he said.

The salesman seemed like he had no need of any of the other booths, or like he’d already benefited from what they had to offer. He looked smiley, fit, beautiful, in love, rich and well hydrated. He said, “This is revolutionary! It’s proven to be completely effective! The Correct-O-Cure spray. When sprayed liberally on a person or object that has been transformed, it destabilizes and returns the person or object to its original state, fixing any wrongs incurred during the period of change. In other words, transformations are reversed!”

“That can’t be right,” Fern said.

“Yes it can,” Howard said. “That’s the best thing I’ve ever heard of. It gives you a break, at least, from all that crazy Anybody behavior! A break! That’s the product for me!” Howard waddled through the crowd and got two small sample spray bottles.

“It’s probably a scam. It can’t work!” Fern said, keeping an eye on the salesman.

“You never know.” Howard shoved the minibottles into his pocket.

The salesman winked at Fern with a crooked smile. Fern winked back, of course. She had no choice. She noticed that the salesman had the same looping letters stitched onto his blazer. Fern stared at them more closely while he went on with his spiel, all sugary, do-good and fake. Fern stared until the letters became distinct from one another: SSS.

“The Secret Society of Somebodies,” Fern whispered, backing away.

“What?” Howard said.

“C’mon,” Fern said. “Let’s keep going.”

They pushed their way through the crowd and found themselves on a golden-railed landing with two sets of turning staircases on either side.

“The lobby,” she said. “The grand lobby of Willy Fattler’s Underground Hotel.”