The Poe Estate (11 page)

A Fictional Family

I
had no idea where to start.

“I found something kind of—I don't know. I couldn't figure out what to do with it. But you seemed to know about the broom and stuff, and I thought . . .” I trailed off and began again. “Well, to start with, what
is
this broom?”

Elizabeth and Andre looked at each other. “What do you know about it already?” Elizabeth asked carefully.

“Not much, really. I know you guys call it a Hawthorne broom—I don't know why. I know people really want it, especially that creepy guy with the pipe. I know it's been in my family for generations. Cousin Hepzibah gave it to me. And I know—” I took a deep breath. But I wasn't giving away any secrets. They knew this themselves already. It's why I'd come to talk to them. “I know it can fly. I flew down here on it.”

Elizabeth and Andre were nodding. “So that's why you're here? Because you discovered that flying broomsticks exist and you have one, and that's freaking you out, and you want us to tell you more about it?” said Elizabeth.

“Yes,” I said. “There's something else I want to show you too, but let's start with the broom.”

“Okay,” said Elizabeth. “Well, obviously, what you have is a witch's broomstick. Flying broomsticks are one of the more common types of supernatural fictional objects. You find them
all over, from Goethe to
The Wizard of Oz
. But judging from the age and style of yours, where your family's from, and the fact that it's been in your family for generations, we think it's probably one of the brooms from Hawthorne.”

I didn't understand. “Which Hawthorne? There are lots of towns called Hawthorne. Did you mean Hawthorne, Massachusetts? Or Hawthorne, New Hampshire?”

“Not where,” said Andre. “Who. Nathaniel Hawthorne, the American writer from the nineteenth century. He wrote a bunch of stories and novels about supernatural events. Some of them have witches' broomsticks in them. We think yours is one of those.”

“You mean Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about real-life magical flying broomsticks in his fiction?” I asked. “He based his stories on actual witches?” That made sense. Cousin Hepzibah had suggested that some of the old writers had gotten the names of their characters from our family; maybe they'd gotten the idea for witches' broomsticks from us, too. Did that mean my ancestors were not just pirates and ghosts, but witches, too?

Elizabeth and Andre looked at each other again. “Not exactly,” said Andre. “The stories are fiction. Hawthorne made them up. What you've got is a fictional broomstick.”

“No, it's not! It's real!” I picked it up and held it out to Andre and Elizabeth. “See—feel it! It's not made up. It's solid. It
really flew—it really carried me hundreds of miles.”

“Well, yes. We're not denying that,” said Elizabeth. “We're not denying that it's real
now
. We're just saying its origins are fictional.”

“How can something real have fictional origins?”

“You agree that something fictional can have real origins, right?” asked Andre.

“Yes, of course.”

“So this is just the same thing, only the opposite.”

I shook my head. “That doesn't make sense.”

“I know it's a little hard to believe when you first find out,” said Elizabeth sympathetically. “I remember I had trouble getting used to it myself in the beginning.”

“Look,” said Andre. “When you found out the broom could fly, were you surprised?”

“Of course!”

“Before that, did you think flying brooms existed?”

“No, of course not.”

“All right. So real objects with fictional origins, that's just another surprise—another thing you didn't think existed, but it does.”

“So what are you saying?” I asked. “Is everything in storybooks actually real?”

“No, not everything. Just some things,” said Andre.

“Which ones?”

“Lots of things,” said Elizabeth. “Most of the things in this room, for example.”

I looked up at the shelf spiraling around and around up to
the skylight. There were balls and bells and bowls and books, lamps and brushes, telephones, stuffed owls, hats, clocks, jars, sticks, stones, skulls, several complicated little machines, and a whole lot of boxes. I noticed one box labeled
DOORKNOBS
in Dad's distinctive writing.

“What story is that from?” I asked, pointing to an apple. “
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
?”

“Where? Did someone leave the Snow White apple in here?” Elizabeth looked around, craning her neck. “Oh, you mean
that
. That's not fictional, it's just left over from my lunch.”

“Okay, what about that clock? The big one next to the window, over the boar's head.” I pointed.

Elizabeth looked pleased. “Isn't that lovely? We just got it.”

“Here,” said Andre. “I'll get it down. See if she can guess what it is.” He stood on his fold-down chair and reached overhead. He caught the end of the rope ladder and scrambled up, swinging from side to side. With his long, thin arms and legs, he looked like a spider climbing up a clock pendulum. When he reached the clock, I saw it was enormous—taller than Andre. The perspective had made it look way smaller.

He pulled the pulley over to the clock and strapped it on with bungee cords, then scrambled back down.

Elizabeth lowered the clock on the pulley until it was hovering over her desk. “Take a look,” she said.

It was an enormous grandfather clock in an ebony case, with a brass face, hands, weights, and pendulum. The wood was as black as a raven, as ominous as a shadow. Reaching out to
brush its smooth surface, I felt that familiar coldness penetrating my fingers.

“I'll wind it,” said Andre, reaching out to attach the weights.

Elizabeth put a hand on his arm. “No, don't. Then I'll have to listen to that horrible ticking all day. And the chimes! They make my skin crawl.”

“That's the point,” said Andre, grinning. “Have you figured it out yet, Sukie?”

“No, I give up. What is it?”

“It's a Poe clock—Edgar Allan Poe—from ‘The Masque of the Red Death.'”

“The things in Poe stories are
real
?” Talk about skin crawling! Those stories are horrifying. They're full of the worst, most blood-freezing creepiness: people buried alive, instruments of torture, walking corpses.

“We have the world's leading collection of Poe objects here at the repository,” said Andre proudly.

“But who decides what fictional objects are going to be real?” I asked. “Because if it were me, I would definitely not choose Poe.”

“Oh, I would! One hundred percent! He's my favorite,” said Andre. “There's nobody creepier—nobody. Not even H. P. Lovecraft.”

“That's a really good question, actually, and nobody knows the answer,” said Elizabeth. “I don't think it will ever be solved in our lifetime. But the short answer is, nobody
chooses
, and it's not at all clear why some fictional objects exist in our world and some don't. Does it have to do with the quality of the writing? Its intensity? Its originality? Its popularity? Something else?
Some combination of factors? The field that studies this question is called literary-material philosophy, and it's a topic of great interest in our community. Some of the recent work suggests that copyright might play a role. Are we done with this?”

I nodded, and she hoisted the clock back up on the pulley. Andre reached for the rope ladder, but Elizabeth stopped him. “That's okay, Andre, you don't have to climb up again. I'll put it back later myself.” The clock swayed slowly and terrifyingly over our heads. I wished she would let him put it back on the shelf.

I looked at my broom. “So which story do you think this is from?” I asked.

“Like we said, one of the Hawthorne stories—there's lots of Hawthorne brooms,” said Andre. “There's Mother Rigby's broom, of course. And a bunch of the townspeople in ‘Young Goodman Brown' ride them. It could be Aunt Keziah's broom from
Septimus Felton
. Or it could be from
Fanshawe
or ‘Beneath an Umbrella.' Or maybe even
The Scarlet Letter
.”

“But probably not those last three,” said Elizabeth. “The brooms in those stories are metaphors and similes. I don't think they'd be strong enough to carry you all the way down the coast.”

“Wait—
what
? Metaphors and similes can be
real objects
?”

“Occasionally,” said Elizabeth. “They're generally pretty weak—much less vivid than actual plot points. But from time to time, one turns up.”

“How do you even know all this?”

“Because this is what I
do
,” said Elizabeth. “I'm the associate repositorian for acquisitions. Right now my job is acquiring
objects of fictional origin for the Special Collections here. Plus, I have a PhD in literature, which helps me figure out where objects might have come from. And where to look for them in the first place.”

I must have looked as stunned and confused as I felt, because she added, “Maybe we should start at the beginning. How much do you know about the New-York Circulating Material Repository?”

“Just what you told me,” I said. “That it's a private lending library of objects.”

“Right,” said Elizabeth. “Most people know that we have a large, diverse collection of objects that our members can borrow. What most people
don't
know is that some of our objects have their origins in fiction. And some of those objects have special powers, like your broomstick. Only a select group of people know about our Special Collections—and now you're one of them.”

“Welcome to the club! Usually you have to pass a lot of tests before you get to find out,” said Andre. “But you actually flew here on a broomstick, so that makes it kind of pointless to try to keep you in the dark.”

“Okay. So if all these things are fictional, what about that doorknob I sold you at the flea market?” I asked.

“From a haunted house,” said Andre. “We're not sure which one. Probably from a Mary Wilkins Freeman story. There's a bunch of haunted houses in
The Wind in the Rose-bush
. We were hoping
you
could tell
us
.”

Elizabeth took down the
DOORKNOBS
box. “Sometimes when we find these fictional objects without a good provenance,
we have a hard time narrowing down exactly which story they come from. Can you tell?” She took a doorknob out of the box and handed it to me.

It felt cold and tingly. I handed it back, shaking my head. “I didn't even know they were
from
fiction—how would I know
which
fiction they're from?”

“Yeah,” said Andre. “At first we thought you probably knew more than you do, I guess. You must have strong perceptions, though—you can obviously recognize stuff like these doorknobs and that house in New Hampshire you showed us.”

“Is that why the doorknob feels so . . . funny?” I asked.

“Probably,” said Andre. “Funny how?”

“Sort of . . . cold and tingly.”

“Yeah. I guess touch is your special sense. With me it's vision,” he said. “Fictional objects of power look kind of shimmery to me.”

“With me it's smell,” said Elizabeth.

“So you can
smell
when something's fictional? Is that why you're always sniffing things?” That explained a lot, I thought. Though not nearly enough.

Elizabeth nodded. She put the doorknob back in its box and stuck the box back on the shelf. “It's too bad we didn't find the actual house this came from before it got demolished,” said Elizabeth. “It would have made a great addition to the Poe Annex.”

“The what?”

“My pet project. We're putting together a collection of haunted houses from American fiction. Your dad's helping us with it. Well, so are
you
, actually—you're the one who called
us from that Flint house! We've collected over three dozen haunted houses so far.”

“Not just houses,” Andre put in. “We have gardens, too. And a vineyard and a schoolhouse from Charles W. Chesnutt stories. And a mill and a few castles.”

“Wait! You mean that house I found—the one you bought—is
fictional
?”

“Yes,” said Elizabeth. “It's from a story by Laetitia Flint, ‘The Bobbin Bones.'”

“But I just read that story! The one with the haunted sewing machine, right? Where the bobbin thread keeps breaking, and the heroine has to find the ghost's bones and rebury them or she'll never finish making her wedding dress?”

“Right,” said Elizabeth. “At that point in her career, Flint was trying to keep up with her literary contemporaries. You can see the influence of Mary Wilkins Freeman and even a little Edith Wharton in that story, with the focus on domestic details. But it still has Flint's signature sentimental melodrama. I'm surprised you've read it, actually. She's not that popular nowadays.”