The Somebodies (8 page)

WHEN FERN WOKE UP, SHE WAS SURPRISED TO
find herself under a bed with a small pony nestled next to her. It took a minute for the day before to come clear. But once it did, she was surprised again to note that there was morning sun coming in through a window on one side, and a bright light on in the hotel room coming from the other side. Hadn’t they only left on the bathroom light? She was surprised to see a slight dimple in the mattress above her—a dimple that didn’t go away even as the bed changed from one kind to another. And even more surprising—or should I say alarming?—was the snoring. There were two snorers, to be exact: one light and puffy, the other one sickly and whistling, like a dying bird.

She put her hand over Howard’s mouth and gave him a little shove. His eyes opened widely, and he jerked his head back and forth. Fern put her finger to her mouth and then pointed up to the mattress. His eyes went wild for a moment. Then he nodded, and she took her hand off his mouth.

Just then the dying-bird snore sputtered and turned into a rattling cough. A pair of feet appeared beside Howard’s head. But they were only barely recognizable as feet. They seemed boneless, more like something that had slid up from the dirt. And they were white, a horribly pale, bloodless, ghostly white, like large, blind, albino slugs. (Are there such things?)

“Wake up. Wake up! Help me out of this bed!” It was a woman’s voice, sickly, quavering, but with a cold and metallic tone.

“I’m up,” a young girl responded.

Two slim feet, about the size of Fern’s, swung to the floor beside the other pair. Fern took this moment to peek out in the other direction. She could only see the top of the night table, which was covered in a doily. It just had three objects on it: a tall, thin lamp with a dainty fringed shade, an old-fashioned telephone—the tall kind with the earpiece sitting in a cradle—and a large goldfish bowl with a large orange goldfish swimming circles inside. Did the goldfish have a darker
orange spot under his one eye? Yes. Yes, it did. Fern shrank back under the bed.

The girl was walking the woman away from the bed.

“Did she arrive?” the girl asked.

“Do you see her?” the woman said harshly.

“Why hasn’t she gotten here?”

“She’ll come. The invitation was designed to bring her here, directly. Get dressed. Red, please. Wear the red dress.”

Her invitation? Someone had designed it to bring her here directly? Were these two people part of the Secret Society of Somebodies? Fern still didn’t know what that was. But she knew she didn’t like the way they were talking about the whole thing, as if she were a package they were expecting in the mail. The pony still asleep, Fern and Howard listened to shuffling, water running, the flush of a toilet, the sounds of someone brushing teeth—the comings and goings of a morning routine. But through it all, the woman was barking at the girl.

“Like this!” she’d scream. “Stop it! Help me!” “Pay attention!” “Get my other shoes!”

Now the pale and boneless feet appeared again. Fern and Howard could see the girl’s legs, kneeling beside the feet. Her hands worked hard to stuff the pale feet into a pair of high heels.

Fern could feel her back prickling. It was hot under the bed, stuffy and stifling. Fern wanted to grab hold of Howard’s arm. She was scared. The hotel room had a sour smell and an electrified feeling of something gone very wrong.

“Help me to the vanity! I’m feeling weak again. Get the box over here!” the woman said.

The girl walked her away. And then walked back, dragging a box to the side of the bed. She reached inside and pulled out a stack of books. “Let’s just have breakfast first,” the girl said nervously. Her voice sounded slightly familiar, as if her voice were wearing a disguise—a nervous disguise.

“I don’t need breakfast. You know that. Breakfast doesn’t do me any good. Be of some use. These books aren’t yet dead. I can still draw more from them.”

Fern and Howard exchanged a look of fear. Dead books! She remembered the way Dorathea and the Bone had talked about them and about the Blue Queen. Was this the Blue Queen? Right here in Willy Fattler’s hotel? Were they going to kill books?

Fern knew it was the Blue Queen. She knew because she could feel it. Even though the Blue Queen was too weak to get out of bed without help, too weak to put on her own shoes, there was something terrifying about her—the ghostly feet, the cold ring to her voice. She
seemed to have a certain power, even in her weakness, like a coiled snake.

The girl brought over a stack of books. She was wearing white socks and shuffled her feet nervously.

The room grew dark as if it were suddenly dusk. The sour smell grew to a sour wind, old and medicinal and fog-thick. It rippled through the dust ruffle, making Fern think of the words “ether” and “poison gas” and “evil.” Fern and Howard both covered their noses and mouths in the crooks of their arms. The pony woke up and buried his face in Fern’s sweatshirt. The room seemed almost yellowish now, sickly. The wind churned, and the goldfish jerked and splashed in his bowl, sloshing water till it spilled onto the floor.

The Blue Queen began laughing. “Souls,” she hissed. “I’ll just take a bit. Just enough to get me through the day.”

“Not too many,” the girl said.

“I’m not foolish. I know that I need to save them for tonight.”

And the wind grew so strong that the books on the floor tipped and began sliding toward her, their pages splayed open, rattling. Howard was on his side, watching.
The Art of Being Anybody
, which Howard had stuffed under a towel to make a bigger pillow, started to be dragged forward too. It bumped into Howard’s
back. Fern put a hand on it. Howard turned, grabbed it, and rolled on top of it. He looked frantic. Fern felt frantic too.

“That’s enough,” the girl shouted above the whipping wind. She bent down to grab some books, but she couldn’t keep hold of them all. Fern and Howard could only see the girl’s knees and fast-working hands. The books were gliding away from her, and things were being pulled from them. A glowing breath, a rising misty, sunlit cloud—they were hard to describe. But they were egg shaped, like airy, glistening eggs. The girl was desperately trying to keep them inside of the books. She kept shutting the covers as quickly as she could, but it was hard to keep up.

“Not too many!” the girl shouted. “You have to save them! Remember?”

“Let go of them! I need!” the Blue Queen shouted, as if she’d forgotten what she’d said before. “I need them!”

Fern knew somehow that she was watching the souls of books being lifted out of them. She was watching books die. The Blue Queen was unable to stop herself. She was supposed to be hoarding the souls—like Dorathea had guessed—but she couldn’t stop. Fern could see the titles of a few of the books. Flipping past was a copy of a Terry Pratchett book with those nomes
on the cover trying to steer a truck; that eerie book about a girl named Coraline; the book about the smiling dog that had made Fern cry; and then her heart skipped wildly, because she saw a book that she knew better than all the other books combined, a book with a picture of a girl on the cover, a girl with big eyes and a roosterlike lock of hair, a girl named Fern.

It was, of course,
The Anybodies
by, well, N. E. Bode. Me. And I can’t speak for Terry Pratchett or Neil Gaiman or Kate DiCamillo on how it felt for them to have that bit of their souls that they’d stitched into their own books ripped out. No, I cannot. But I can tell you
that I was in a donut shop at the moment (disguised as a hefty mobster), and although I didn’t know what was happening, I felt something awful—as if a corner of my own soul, the one I walk around with day in and day out, went dark. I stumbled forward, like something alive in me had been snap-jerked out of my chest. Suddenly breathless, I leaned on the glass counter of the donut shop and wheezed, and stared at the glazed pastries without really even seeing the glazed pastries. The kid behind the counter asked if I was okay, and I said that I wasn’t. He started to call the paramedics, because I was so blanched. “No, no,” I told him, and I walked out of the donut shop and made my way dizzily onto the sidewalk.

And you have to keep in mind that every time a reader finishes a book that they love, they know the writer’s soul. And so with each of the Blue Queen’s swallows, all of the readers who’d poured themselves into each of these specific books could feel the loss. (That copy of
The Anybodies
, for example, had been borrowed by a girl named Hayley Twyman from Mr. Flom’s fourth-grade classroom in Tallahassee and mistakenly left on a bus, where it was read by a girl from St. Bernadette’s who took it on a field trip to the Philly Zoo, where it dropped from her bag in the monkey house and did some time in the lost and found until one
of the employees took it home to her daughter Ursula, who shared it with her friend Trevor Hobbs, who took it on vacation to Manhattan Beach, where a beachcomber in from Boston stole it—a nice enough kid making bad choices—and feeling guilty for having stolen it, put it on the shelves of the Lizard’s Tale, a bookshop outside of Boston, where a boy named Levi bought it and cherished it and took it everywhere he went—once namely to a certain spot near World’s End in Hingham, where it was lost along with the backpack that it was in…Let’s cut to the chase: eventually it ended up in the hands of an Anybody who brought it to the city beneath the city, where it was stolen by the Blue Queen for her evil purposes.) All those readers let out a sad sigh, right in the middle of what they were doing. It was a collective sigh that ran coast to coast. A gust of wind that stirred things up for a moment, maybe even created a little gustnado in China or somewhere. A loss. Not something they could name, but just a sense of something having been taken away.

Fern sighed too. Deeply. And then she scrambled down to the foot of the bed—hard to do since the bed at this moment was a low cot on old, sagging springs. She had to see what would happen to my soul next. Howard tried to grab her arm to stop her, but she slid along and peeked out from under the haggard cot.

The Blue Queen was breathing the souls in through her open mouth. Her lips grew redder, her cheeks so flushed they turned blue. In fact, all the veins that Fern could see glowed bright blue. Her throat seemed to expand with the intake of each bit of soul—Pratchett and Gaiman. She was going quickly from ghostly white and limp, to full, puffed, robust and blue. She swallowed and swallowed—DiCamillo and then Bode.

Fern was horrified. She felt sick, and that’s when her hands began to flutter at her sides. She lifted them up. They were heavy and unwieldy. Howard glanced over and gasped. Fern’s hands had become books—two open books with flapping pages. Howard raised his own heavy hands, bookish in weight—his fingers, too, turning into pages. Their hands were being pulled, just like the others—pulled toward the Blue Queen. Fern felt as if she were being ripped from herself. Her own soul, shimmering and lit, appeared in the books’ pages. Howard reached over and shut her book-hands as fast as he could with his own. Fern slipped hers underneath her rump to keep them pinned shut. Howard followed her lead. Fern’s soul stopped. It bumped against the shut covers of the books but couldn’t escape. How? Fern thought. How had that happened? Howard was shaking, his eyes screwed shut.

By then the Blue Queen had eaten enough souls, but
she was still grasping each of the souls being drawn to her. Powerful and mighty from the consumption, she caught them and pressed them with her cupped hands till the glowing-egg souls were the size of egg-shaped pills. She was saving them, Fern realized, stockpiling souls for later. She put them into small jars that were already nearly filled with the same, compressed to a small glowing egg and popped into a jar—this bit of soul and the bit of soul after mine and the next soul and the next and on and on. The wind stopped. The sickly fog thinned. The room brightened again.

“That was too many!” the girl said, out of sight, her voice frantic.

“Soon I won’t need books anymore! Oh, how much easier it will be to steal souls directly from the living! How much easier! And all at once, my dear. All at once!”

The girl sighed. She sounded tired, having chased the books, or maybe she was tired the same way Fern was, from having seen something awful. She wondered what the girl looked like, but Fern couldn’t risk being seen. She tucked herself deeply under the bed.

The Blue Queen snapped at the girl. “Don’t be weak. We’re close. All that’s left is to get the ivory key from Fattler. All I need is that key!”

The ivory key—a key to what? What would she have
broken into by now? Fern stared at the box springs, knowing that this, too, was very bad.

“I will get what I want! Do you hear me?”

“That hurts,” the girl said. “I’ll have a bruise there.”

The woman’s voice turned now. “Oh, princess,” she said. “Oh, rightful princess, dear. Soon you won’t have to be disguised, no, no. You won’t have to hide in plain sight anymore! It will all be worth it in the end. You’ll have what you deserve and want.” Fern looked at Howard, and he looked back, wide-eyed and shaken. Fern felt sweaty all over, and now chilled. Rightful princess? Hide in plain sight?