by N. E. Bode
Fern and the Bone stared at each other. The Bone looked ashen, with beads of sweat on his forehead. “There are more books, Fern! I didn’t think it could happen, but she’s gotten more books! How will we ever find the one we need?”
“Do you think the guest is the Miser?” Fern asked.
“SSHHH!” the Bone said. “Of course, he is! Gosh, I’m hot. It’s hot in here, like a furnace. She’s gotten old, Fern. Much older than ever. How could she have gotten so old? Has that much time passed by? And the Miser is here!”
“This is good! Can’t you see it’s working?” Fern said, excited that her plan was taking shape.
“It’s like an oven in here. Don’t you think? Hot, hot, hot.” He sighed, stuffing one hand in the pocket of his sport coat so that his elbow stuck out, like someone in the middle of singing, “I’m a little teapot…”
Fern kept staring at him because his nose, which had been chubby and fat and red, was shrinking. It was thinning out, narrowing to the Bone’s naturally small nub. “Your nose!” Fern said. “Your…your nose!”
The Bone grabbed his nose. “No! No!” he said. “I can’t believe this!” He stared up at the ceiling, chiding himself, “Get it together, Bone! Get it together!”
“It’s okay,” Fern said. She could hear Mrs. Appleplum in the kitchen, the ping of spoons on china. “Don’t panic. Do you have a hankie?”
He nodded, pulling a crumpled one from a back pocket of his ugly polyester suit slacks—Mr. Bibb, it turned out, shopped at low-end discount stores.
“Keep sneezing,” Fern said. “I’ll distract her! And don’t forget your lisp!”
Mrs. Appleplum walked in and served them tea. Each cup handle had a string wrapped around it with a note that read: DRINK ME. Maybe you know the book about Alice, a girl who fell down a rabbit hole? Well, Fern thought of her right away, the fact that when the girl drank things labeled DRINK ME, she shrank.
“Are you going to drink it?” Mrs. Appleplum asked.
“Am I? I guess so. It says to drink it,” said Fern.
“Are you afraid to drink it?” Mrs. Appleplum asked.
“Do you mean, am I afraid I’ll shrink or something?”
“Humph!” Mrs. Appleplum said, a little disappointed. “Well, well. I didn’t know you’d pass that test.” Fern hadn’t known it had been a test. Mrs. Appleplum looked up with her bulgy fish eyes at Fern. “The sign at the end of the driveway says ‘Must be well read.’ I have my ways of finding these things out. There’s nothing worse than a poor reader.” And here she glared at the Bone, dressed as Mr. Bibb, hiding behind his hankie. She looked at him sharply, as if maybe she knew he wasn’t Mr. Bibb at all.
The Bone sneezed. “Dusst! I’m allergic to dusst!” the Bone said. “Can we take the tea up to our room to drink? It’ss been a long day!”
“Fine. Follow me.”
Mrs. Appleplum lead the way up the staircase, narrowed by books. The hallway was lined with books too. Fern was dizzied by all of the books. How would they ever find the one book they needed…how in the world?
When they passed the first door, Mrs. Appleplum put her finger to her pink poodle-bow lips to remind them that the whiskery guest preferred quiet. Fern passed by the closed door slowly. She listened hard and thought she heard a small scratching noise, then a cough, then nothing.
Mrs. Appleplum opened the second door. “Here’s your room. One room. The two of you will have to share,” she said. The room was small, book-cluttered, with two single beds separated by a small nightstand. Mrs. Appleplum cleared her throat. Her eyes got a bit glassy. “It used to be my daughter’s room, but she’s gone now. She passed away.”
Fern’s throat cinched tight. She thought she might cry. “I’m sorry to hear that,” Fern said, but she said it too convincingly. She said it with too much love. Mrs. Appleplum looked at her oddly. Fern busied herself with the room. She realized she was hoping it smelled of lilacs. She remembered the Bone telling her that her mother always smelled of that sweet perfume. But too much time had passed, Fern guessed. The room only smelled of books.
“It’s a nice room,” Fern said. But really it was hard to tell if it was a nice room. It was a dark room, because books were lined up blocking the one window that would have given a nice view of the front yard, the old jalopy, the red barn and the long driveway to the road. Fern tried not to think about it, but she couldn’t help herself; this was her mother’s bedroom, her mother’s! On the wall facing the bed was a painting—yes, hung in front of a wall stacked with books—of goldfish in a small pond, and she imagined that when her mother used to lie down at night, that painting is what she saw—plump goldfish trolling the water, the lily pads lush, purple, dreamy. Fern couldn’t think about it anymore. She could feel herself wanting to blurt questions at Mrs. Appleplum about her daughter. A million questions.
Fern turned her attention to the Bone. It was clear he didn’t want to think about Mrs. Appleplum’s daughter, either. He was trying desperately to stay in character. He’d already lost his nose! He flicked the light switch off and on, a test, and wiggled the bedroom doorknob. He opened a closet door. It was bricked solid with books. He opened the dresser drawers—more books.
“Where will we put our clothesss?” he asked.
“On your body, of course!” Mrs. Appleplum responded, as if the Bone were dense.
Now Fern’s stomach lurched. The Art of Being Anybody could be anywhere! What if it had fallen behind a row of books? What if it was hidden inside another, bigger book?
“You can pay me for two weeks, up front,” Mrs. Appleplum said. “Put the money in an envelope and leave it on the kitchen table.”
The Bone sneezed and nodded.
Mrs. Appleplum was going over house rules. “No extra guests. Only quick showers. Breakfast at 8 A.M. Lunch on your own. Dinner at 6 P.M. Sharp. Always sharp.” Fern started picking up books—The Rules of Baseball and Salsa Recipes. She picked up a third book off the table. It was leather bound with no words on the cover. Maybe it’s this one, she thought. She had to start somewhere. Fern turned to the first page, but, no, this one was called The Official Book of Fairies. Mrs. Appleplum was still going: “Watch out while walking the grounds. A fellow from the insurance company fell down a rabbit hole and was lost for some time.” She stopped, glancing around the room, as if she’d forgotten something, something. “Oh, and there’s one more thing…,” she said. “What was it now? What was it?” Her eyes found the painting and then opened wide—I should say wider, since her eyes were always wide. “Oh, yes!” She pointed her finger in the air and then at the painting. “Don’t feed the goldfish, please!”
Fern and the Bone looked around for a fishbowl, then their eyes came back to the painting.
“In the painting?” Fern asked. “Don’t feed the goldfish in the painting?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Appleplum answered. “Please don’t. If you do, they’ll only grow used to it and forget how to take care of themselves!” She turned to go, adding over her shoulder, “And don’t pick the lilies off the lily pad either! I like them just the way they are!”
3
THE WINK
“SHE’S STRANGE,” THE BONE SAID AS HE AFFIXED a bulbous fake nose from a kit he’d brought with him for just such an emergency of failing confidence. He was pasting and readjusting while looking into a small mirror, which stood on a dresser he’d found behind some stacked books. “Sometimes I think her brain is made of pie filling. Did you notice how she just prattles on and then walks off? Odd. The whole place is strange. I warned you, didn’t I? And her name is Dora, Dorathea Gretel. Why wouldn’t she just use her real name?”
“We didn’t,” Fern said, thinking of the name Eliza Gretel, her mother’s name when she was Fern’s age.
“Yes, well, but, you know…”
“What do you think is living in the yard?”
“Could be anything!” the Bone answered.
Fern pushed her suitcase against the foot of the bed. She set her tea
on a stack of books on the nightstand. She glanced at the painting of the fat goldfish. She suddenly had the intense desire to try to reach her hand inside of it, run her hand around in the water, maybe even throw bread crumbs to the goldfish and pick one of the lilies from the lily pads. Has it ever happened to you that you had no desire to do something until someone told you not to? Don’t poke your finger into the cake! your mother tells you, and although it hadn’t dawned on you to poke your finger into the cake, you suddenly want to do it, desperately. This was Fern’s thinking, and she was above it. I’m not above it. I’d poke my finger in the cake and I’d try to reach into the painting, but not Fern. She’s tougher than that and she had a mission.
She started pulling books off of piles. “We’ve got to start looking! No time to waste!” She picked up a safari book, a medical book, and The World of Bats. This one she put in a special spot beside her bed. She wanted to look at it later. She wondered if she’d learn something about bats, probably not that they could turn into marbles at indoor swimming pools, but something.
The Bone was pacing in the narrow alley between the beds. “I want to see the other guest. I want to look him in the eye and wink. If he winks back, well, then, case closed. It’s him all right.”
“Not exactly case closed. Some people wink back if you wink at them, you know. The new guest could be an ordinary person.” (Didn’t I tell you Fern was smart?)
“Hmm,” the Bone said. “Well, the wink will point us in the right direction.”
Fern looked around the room. She was trying to imagine her mother as a young girl, Fern’s own age. “Do you think my mother liked it here?”
The Bone stopped pacing. He ran his hand over the lamp shade. He sat down on the bed and placed his hand tenderly on the pillow. “Yes, yes.”
“Could she shake books?”
“She could do much, much more. She could do almost anything. She was a wonder!” He looked over at the window. “I once leaned a ladder against this house. Right up to that window. It was the Great Realdo who’d helped me then, too. That was the other time I called on him. A butterfly appeared. It led me to the ladder and perched on my shoulder. It stayed there. Eliza appeared at the window. She climbed down the ladder with me, and the butterfly disappeared. Off we went. I saw the butterfly again, just before they called me out of the prison yard. It sat on my shoulder that time too. I thought it would be good news, but it had come to comfort me. The Great Realdo.” His eyes pooled with tears, but he didn’t cry.
Fern gazed at the painting. She imagined how cool the water would feel. “Why didn’t her mother like you, really, why?”
“Even though Eliza wanted to go with me, well, her mother wanted her to stay. She had big plans for her daughter, I guess, better than settling down with a mischief maker like me.”
Just then there was a loud noise, a cross between a bang and a thump. It came from down the hall. It made Fern jump, but the Bone didn’t notice it at all. He’d started humming that song again: “Sweet, sweet, my sweet darling angel…”
“The Miser!” Fern said. “You know, I think I should be the one to see him first, not you. You’re emotional about him and I’m not. I mean, I’ve never met him. Maybe I can get more information from him. He might be nice to me. Polite. He might politely answer questions.”
The Bone didn’t seem to want to be pulled away from his dreaminess. “I guess,” he said eventually, not sounding too convinced.
“How about I go open his door and tell him I thought it was the bathroom.”
The Bone nodded, cautiously. “But be careful!” he said. “Be very careful!”
Fern walked out the bedroom door and down the hall, but she stopped abruptly when she saw a man walk out of the first bedroom. He had a key and was locking his door. He was a tall, thin man with gray bushy hair.
“Excuse me, I was on my way to the bathroom. Do you know…” she said, and the man turned toward her. He had a white beard, mustache, and enormous eyebrows that hung down over his eyes. In fact, she couldn’t see his eyes at all, which distracted her. “Did you hear a loud noise?”
The Miser nodded. “I was killing a spider with a book,” he said in a grim whisper.
“Oh,” Fern said. And then because she couldn’t think of anything else, she said, “Mrs. Appleplum told us to tell you that she wants to be called Mrs. Appleplum.”
“Who’s Mrs. Appleplum?”
“Well, that would be Mrs. Appleplum. You know, the woman who runs the house. I’m Ida Bibb. I’m staying here with my father, Mr. Bibb, who sells encyclopedias.”
“Very original.”
“Thank you,” Fern said, though it was obviously not a compliment. “What’s your name?”
“Mr. Haiserblaitherness.”
It was an obviously fake name. She wanted to say Very original! but didn’t want to make him angry. “What do you do?” Fern asked.
“I’m busy. I don’t have time to talk to children.” He was about to leave, but then he turned back to Fern. “Be careful of the spiders. The one I killed was poisonous. You wouldn’t want to be bitten and die in the night.”
“No, no,” Fern said, standing there awkwardly.
“The bathroom is in the opposite direction,” he said.
“Thanks,” Fern said, and she gave a wink, just a little quick one. But if Mr. Haiserblaitherness winked back, Fern couldn’t see it under his enormous eyebrows.
Mr. Haiserblaitherness walked away, turning down the stairs. Fern ran back to her room. She ran to the window, pulling down the books, and opened it wide.
“What happened?” the Bone asked.
Fern didn’t say a word. She looked out at the yard. Two rabbits seemed to be chatting together like old friends—was one of them wearing a blue jacket and the other white gloves? Could that be right? They hopped away as soon as the front door slammed. Mr. Haiserblaitherness marched out, cutting across the yard. Fern knew he was the Miser. She just knew. Some people just know things. I’m not one of them. The first time I heard The Beatles, I said, “Oh, they’ll never last.” I thought that the slogan “Pork, the other white meat,” would revolutionize the pork industry. I thought by now we’d be flying everywhere in motorized jet-backpacks. But Fern isn’t like me, or most people for that matter. She really can just know things, and she knew she was watching the Miser. He was heading to the barn.
“You don’t think…,” Fern whispered.
“What?” the Bone asked.
Mr. Haiserblaitherness lifted the barn door’s latch and swung open the barn’s wide hinged doors, and there, right there before him, was a solid wall of books. The barn was packed tight. Fern and the Bone watched Mr. Haiserblaitherness curse and spit, his whole body shaking with anger. He kicked the ground, his shoes pawing the dirt until a thin cloud of dust rose up and, when it settled, the only thing standing there was an angry, snorting bull.
4
THE TEST
THE KITCHEN HAD PATHS RUNNING THROUGH the stacked books. Mrs. Appleplum zipped around the maze. Fern and the Bone were sitting at the kitchen table. The Bone slowly, gently pushed a tower of books that sat in the middle of the table to one side so he and Fern could see each other. There were four places set, but no sign of the Miser.
The grandfather clock bonged six times, and it was clear that Mrs. Appleplum wasn’t going to wait for the Miser to arrive. She buzzed over to the stove and back to the table. “I’ve got more tests!” she said, smiling at Fern. “More tests for Ida Bibb! Are you ready?”
Fern almost didn’t recognize her name—Ida Bibb? But after a second’s hesitation and a small kick from the Bone under the table, she piped up, “Oh, yes! Yes!”
“First, we’ll begin simply,” Mrs. Appleplum said. The kitchen was hot from the hardworking stove. A moist steam made some of the books look puffy. Mrs. Appleplum’s cheeks were flushed. She uncovered a dish with a flourish.
The eggs were under-fried. Their greasy yolks jiggled. They were dyed a bright, bright green, like
the ham. This was easy. Fern knew all of the Dr. Seuss books, all the silly rhyming, the furry, skinny-legged creatures. “No thank you,” Fern said. “I do not like green eggs and ham.”
The Bone said, “I’ll passs too,” but it was obvious that Mrs. Appleplum didn’t care about his likes and dislikes. Fern had gotten the answer right. Mrs. Appleplum buzzed away and back again. This time she held out a dish with four pieces of wrapped bubble gum. “Your entire meal!” she said. “It will taste like an entire meal, one course after the next!”
The Bone picked up a piece and began to unwrap it. “Really? That’sss amazing,” he said. “Where did you get thisss?”
Fern swiped it out of his hands and placed it back on the tray.
“No thanks. I’m afraid that I might turn into a blueberry if I ate this for dinner.”
Maybe you know about a boy named Charlie who won a trip through a chocolate factory owned and operated by Willy Wonka and about a certain Violet Beauregarde who loved bubble gum much too much for anyone’s good health.
Mrs. Appleplum smiled, whizzing back through the maze of books.
The Bone whispered, “Hey, I would have liked to have tried that!”
Mrs. Appleplum appeared again. “That leaves me only with this.” She whisked off another lid. “Turkish Delight!”
Now this was hard to resist. It was a beautiful Jell-O-like extravaganza covered with powdered sugar. Fern could smell the sugar and rose water. The Bone had already lifted his plate, hoping someone would fill it up. “I cssertainly am getting a real appetite!” he said.
Fern looked up at Mrs. Appleplum. Fern was thinking of a book in which kids had walked into a wardrobe and gotten into quite a bit of trouble in another world altogether. She said, “That would be lovely, but I’m afraid, very afraid, that once I started eating it, I wouldn’t be able to stop.”
