Ophelia passed one door, two doors, stopped at the third door. Above it, the final warning: BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BUT NOT TOO BOLD, LEST THAT THY HEART’S BLOOD RUN COLD. Ophelia put her hand on the doorknob, but didn’t try it. Not afeared, but no fool neither, Fran thought. They’ll be pleased. Or will they?
Ophelia knelt down to slide Fran’s envelope under the door. Something else happened, too: something slipped out of Ophelia’s pocket and landed on the carpet of moss.
Back down the hall, Ophelia stopped in front of the first door. She seemed to hear someone or something. Music, perhaps? A voice calling her name? An invitation? Fran’s poor, sore heart was filled with delight. They liked her! Well, of course they did. Who wouldn’t like Ophelia?
She made her way down the stairs, through the towers of clutter and junk. Back onto the porch, where she sat on the porch swing, but didn’t swing. She seemed to be keeping one eye on the house and the other on the little rock garden out back, which ran up against the mountain right quick. There was even a waterfall, and Fran hoped Ophelia appreciated it. There’d never been no such thing before. This one was all for her, all for Ophelia, who opined that waterfalls are freaking beautiful.
Up on the porch, Ophelia’s head jerked around, as if she were afraid someone might be sneaking up the back. But there were only carpenter bees, bringing back their satchels of gold, and a woodpecker, drilling for grubs. There was a groundpig in the rumpled grass, and the more Ophelia set and stared, the more she and Fran both saw. A pair of fox kits napping under the laurel. A doe and a faun peeling bark runners off young trunks. Even a brown bear, still tufty with last winter’s fur, nosing along the high ridge above the house. Fran knew what Ophelia must be feeling. As if she were an interloper in some Eden. While Ophelia sat on the porch of that dangerous house, Fran curled inward on her couch, waves of heat pouring out of her. Her whole body shook so violently her teeth rattled. Her spyglasses fell to the floor. Maybe I am dying, Fran thought, and that is why Ophelia came here.
Fran, feverish, went in and out of sleep, always listening for the sound of Ophelia coming back down. Perhaps she’d made a mistake, and they wouldn’t send something to help. Perhaps they wouldn’t send Ophelia back at all. Ophelia, with her pretty singing voice, that shyness, that innate kindness. Her short hair, silvery blond. They liked things that were shiny. They were like magpies that way. In other ways, too.
But here was Ophelia, after all, her eyes enormous, her face lit up like Christmas. “Fran,” she said. “Fran, wake up. I went there. I was bold! Who lives there, Fran?”
“The summer people,” Fran said. “Did they give you anything for me?”
Ophelia set an object upon the counterpane. Like everything the summer people made, it was right pretty. A lipstick-sized vial of pearly glass, an enameled green snake clasped around it, its tail the stopper. Fran tugged at the tail, and the serpent uncoiled. A pole ran out the mouth of the bottle, and a silk rag unfurled. Embroidered upon it were the words drink me.
Ophelia watched this, her eyes glazed with too many marvels. “I sat and waited, and there were two fox kits! They came right up to the porch, and then went to the door and scratched at it until it opened. They trotted right inside and came out again. One came over to me then, with something in its jaw. It laid down that bottle right at my feet, and then they ran down the steps and into the woods. Fran, it was like a fairy tale.”
“Yes,” Fran said. She put her lips to the mouth of the vial and drank down what was in it. It tasted sour and hot, like bottled smoke. She coughed, then wiped her mouth and licked the back of her hand.
“I mean, people say something is like a fairy tale all the time,” Ophelia said. “And what they mean is somebody falls in love and gets married. But that house, those animals, it really is a fairy tale. Who are they? The summer people?”
“That’s what my daddy calls them,” Fran said. “Except, when he gets religious, he calls them devils come up to steal his soul. It’s because they supply him with drink. But he weren’t never the one who had to mind after them. That was my mother. And now she’s gone, and it’s only ever me.”
“You take care of them?” Ophelia said. “You mean, like the Roberts?”
A feeling of tremendous well-being was washing over Fran. Her feet were warm for the first time in what seemed like days, and her throat felt coated in honey and balm. Even her nose felt less raw and red. “Ophelia?” she said.
“Yes, Fran?”
“I think I’m going to be much better,” Fran said. “Which is something you done for me. You were brave and a true friend, and I’ll have to think how I can pay you back.”
“I wasn’t—” Ophelia protested. “I mean, I’m glad I did. I’m glad you asked me. I promise I won’t tell anyone.”
If you did you’d be sorry, Fran thought but didn’t say. “Ophelia? I need to sleep. And then, if you want, we can talk. You can even stay here while I sleep. If you want. I don’t care if you’re a lesbian. There are Pop-Tarts on the kitchen counter. And those two biscuits you brung. I like sausage. You can have the one with bacon.”
She fell asleep before Ophelia could say anything else.
The first thing she did when she woke up was take a bath. In the mirror, she took a quick inventory. Her hair was lank and greasy, all witch knots and tangles. There were circles under her eyes, and her tongue, when she stuck it out, was yellow. When she was clean and dressed again, her jeans were loose and she could feel her hip bones protruding. “I could eat a whole mess of food,” she told Ophelia. “But a cat-head and a box of Pop-Tarts will do for a start.”
There was fresh orange juice, and Ophelia had poured it into a stoneware jug. Fran decided not to tell her that her daddy used it as a sometime spittoon. “Can I ask you some more about them?” Ophelia said. “You know, the summer people?”
“I don’t reckon I can answer every question,” Fran said. “But go on.”
“When I first got there,” Ophelia said, “when I went inside, at first I decided that it must be a shut-in. One of those, you know, hoarders. I’ve watched that show, and sometimes they even keep their own poop. And dead cats. It’s just horrible.
“Then it just kept on getting stranger. But I wasn’t ever scared. It felt like there was somebody there, but they were happy to see me.”
“They don’t get much in the way of company,” Fran said.
“Yeah, well, why do they collect all that stuff? Where does it come from?”
“Some of it’s from catalogs. I have to go down to the post office and collect it for them. Sometimes they go away and bring things back. Sometimes they tell me they want something and I have to go get it for them. Mostly it’s stuff from the Salvation Army. Once I had to buy a hunnert pounds of copper piping.”
“Why?” Ophelia said. “I mean, what do they do with it?”
“They make things,” Fran said. “That’s what my momma called them, makers. I don’t know what they do with all of it. They give away things. Like the toys. They like children. When you do things for them, they’re beholden to you.”
“Have you seen them?” Ophelia said.
“Now and then,” Fran said. “Not very often. Not since I was much younger. They’re shy.”
Ophelia was practically bouncing on her chair. “You get to look after them? That’s the best thing ever! Have they always been here? Is that why you aren’t going to go to college?”
Fran hesitated. “I don’t know where they come from. They aren’t always there. Sometimes they’re . . . somewhere else. My momma said she felt sorry for them. She thought maybe they couldn’t go home, that they’d been sent away, like the Cherokee, I guess. They live a lot longer, maybe forever, I don’t know. I don’t think time works the same way where they come from. Sometimes they’re gone for years. But they always come back. They’re summer people. That’s just the way it is with summer people.”
“And you’re not,” Ophelia said. “And now I’m not, either.”
“You can go away again whenever you want,” Fran said, not caring how she sounded. “I can’t. It’s part of the bargain. Whoever takes care of them has to stay here. You can’t leave. They don’t let you.”
“You mean, you can’t leave, ever?”
“No,” Fran said. “Not ever. My mother was stuck here until she had me. And then when I was old enough, she told me I had to take over. She took off right after that.”
“Where did she go?”
“I’m not the one to answer that,” Fran said. “They gave my momma a tent that folds up no bigger than a kerchief, that sets up the size of a two-man tent, but on the inside, it’s teetotally different, a cottage with two brass beds and a chifforobe to hang your things in, and a table, and windows with glass in them. When you look out one of the windows, you see wherever you are, and when you look out the other window, you see those two apple trees, the ones in front of the house with the moss path between them?”
Ophelia nodded.
“Well, my momma used to bring out that tent for me and her when my daddy had been drinking. Then my momma passed the summer people on to me, and one morning after we spent the night in the tent, I woke up and saw her climb out that window. The one that shouldn’t ought to be there. She disappeared down that path. Maybe I should have followed on after her, but I stayed put.”
“Where did she go?” Ophelia said.
“Well, she ain’t here,” Fran said. “That’s what I know. So I have to stay here in her place. I don’t expect she’ll be back, neither.”
“Well, that sucks,” Ophelia said.
“I wish I could get away for just a little while,” Fran said. “Maybe go out to San Francisco and see the Golden Gate Bridge. Dip my toes in the Pacific. I’d like to buy me a guitar and play some of those old ballads on the streets. Just stay a little while, then come back and take up my burden again.”
“I’d sure like to go out to California,” Ophelia said.
They sat in silence for a minute.
“I wish I could help out,” Ophelia said. “You know, with that house and the summer people. You shouldn’t have to do everything, not all of the time.”
“I already owe you,” Fran said, “for helping with the Roberts’ house. For looking in on me when I was ill. For what you did when you went up to fetch me help.”
“I know what it’s like when you’re all alone,” Ophelia said. “When you can’t talk about stuff. And I mean it, Fran. I’ll do whatever I can to help.”
“I can tell you mean it,” Fran said. “I just don’t think you know what it is you’re saying. I ought to explain at least one thing. If you want, you can go up there again one more time. You did me a favor, and I don’t know how else to pay you back. There’s a bedroom up in that house, and if you sleep in it, you see your heart’s desire. I could take you back tonight and show you that room. Besides, I think you lost something up there.”
“I did?” Ophelia said. “What was it?” She reached down in her pockets. “Oh, hell. My iPod. How did you know?”
Fran shrugged. “Not like anybody up there is going to steal it. Expect they’d be happy to have you back up again. If they didn’t like you, you’d know it already.”
Fran was straightening up her and her daddy’s mess when the summer people let her know that they needed a few things. “Can’t I just have a minute to myself?” she grumbled.
They told her that she’d had a good four days. “And I surely do appreciate 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.
She tidied away all of the toys, not quite sure what had come over her to take them out.
When Ophelia came back at five, she had her hair in a ponytail and a flashlight and a thermos in her pocket, like she thought she was Nancy Drew.
“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 any 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. “Lately, 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.”
That afternoon, she’d had to drive over to Chattanooga to visit a particular thrift store. They’d sent her for a used DVD player and all the bathing suits she could buy up. Between that and paying for gas, she’d gone through seventy dollars. And the service light had been on the whole way. 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.
“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 ebony 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.”
They took off their shoes when they got to where the road crossed the drain. The water was cold with the last of the snowmelt. 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 okay 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 okay.”
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 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.”
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. Come on in. 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 ole 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 accumulate 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.”
“The queen’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 little bitty bit. It’s awful sweet stuff.”
“Are they, uh, are they listening to us right now?”
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, scrap metal held down with two-penny nails. Molded forms lay on the floor representing scaled-down mountains, forests, and plains where miniature armies fought desperate battles. There was a kiddie pool over by the big picture window with a machine in it that made waves. There were 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.
The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012 Edition Page 45
