by N. E. Bode
“Oh, my!” Mrs. Appleplum hooted.
The Book of Presidents was the next one that Mrs. Appleplum found in the mess. She grabbed it and shoved it at Fern. “This one! This one, too!”
Fern took the book in her hands. It was a very large book. “But, but…anything could come out!” Fern said.
“The Civil War could come out!” the Bone blurted.
This made the Miser smile in a twisted way. “Shake it,” he said.
“Just shake it lightly,” Mrs. Appleplum instructed.
And so Fern did. A big black top hat popped out. Fern gasped. “Do you think it’s Abraham Lincoln’s?”
“Could be! Could be!” Mrs. Appleplum squealed.
“What a mildly interesting little talent,” the Miser said. “What a nice little party trick.”
The Bone stared at the hat with his mouth wide open, and a grin spread across his face.
Mrs. Appleplum picked up a book off the floor, right in front of her feet. “The Wizard of Oz? Maybe this is the book that you shook!”
“It’s possible,” Fern said.
“Well, I’d say we were quite lucky. It could have been worse. It could have been those flying monkeys.”
“Well, everyone seems to have escaped without injury,” the Miser said. “How lucky indeed!” And he turned and left the messy room.
Mrs. Appleplum got right up close to Fern’s face, so close that her eyes were gigantic, two moons! “Oh, dear, you’ve made me so happy. So very happy.” She gave Fern a peck on the cheek. Fern was surprised. She touched the spot of the kiss with her fingers as if to make it stay right there. Then Mrs. Appleplum held up a warning finger. “Just don’t pick up any books about that blasted mouse on his motorcycle! He’s trouble, I tell you. A menace! And no pirates, please. They’re so surly.” She started shuffling out the door, down the hall, talking more to herself than to Fern. “And those science books on dinosaurs, no, no, no. Can’t have that! Oh, my! Oh, my.” She was singing now, joyfully, “It’s all coming back! It’s all coming back!”
6
GOLDFISH
“A WONDERFUL GIFT,” THE BONE SAID ONCE Mrs. Appleplum was gone. “A truly wonderful gift!” The Bone walked up to Fern, and she wondered if he’d hug her, if he’d give her a peck on the cheek as Mrs. Appleplum had. He looked like he might, but then he shook his head as if reminding himself that he wasn’t the type. He started picking up books.
Fern was a little disappointed, but she was too busy to dwell on it, thinking back now, her mind reeling. Had the spider been Fern’s imagination? She had a great imagination, you know, but wasn’t the spider trying to get at the Bone? Wasn’t it the Miser transformed?
Fern explained how the Miser said he had killed a spider earlier, in his room, and then she saw this spider. “It was coming after you!”
“It was the Miser’s doing, that’s the truth,” said the Bone.
“But, but…how? How could he have turned back into himself so quickly after having been a spider that was blown out the window? He was standing right there so calmly.”
“He hypnotized you, Fern, just ever so slightly. It’s called the power of suggestion. He suggested, very clearly, that you might see a poisonous spider tonight and that it might bite. He has a certain way with his voice, a singsong, that can make you believe something more easily.”
“Oh,” Fern said. She felt a little foolish. She didn’t like the idea that the Miser had gotten one over on her. She didn’t like to be tricked. But then she remembered that she knew something the Miser didn’t. The diary! “My mother used to keep a diary, when she was a little girl my age! If we find that, then it might lead us to The Art of Being Anybody!”
“Well,” the Bone said, “even if the diary would lead us to The Art of Being Anybody, it’s still just another book, another needle in this haystack.” He smoothed Fern’s windblown hair. “I think we should try to be safe, most of all. I’d die if anything, if anything ever…” Fern stood still, hoping he’d finish his sentence if she held on to the moment as best she could. She thought back to the spider hanging on its silver thread over the Bone, and how it had made her panic with fear that something might hurt him. But the Bone turned away from Fern, found the lamp shade on the floor and put it back on the light.
The Bone and Fern untangled the covers on top of the dresser and started clearing the books off their mattresses. Luckily, the tornado had taken a lot of books with it, and the spider, too, although it probably hadn’t really existed. Fern began at the bottom of the bed and worked her way up. She found her pillow across the room and was about to put it back at the head of her bed, but there was one more book to be found. This one was very small, leather bound. It had a small golden lock. It was in the exact spot where Mrs. Appleplum had been standing. Had she been standing on it in her orthopedic shoes?
“Look,” Fern said, “it’s a diary. Do you think it could be…?”
The Bone stopped and turned. “But I went through every book in this room. Each and every one, and I never saw that. I know I didn’t,” he said.
“It must have been hidden in some way. The tornado must have knocked it loose!” Fern said.
The lock would need a tiny key, and Fern, it just so happened, had one. She sat down on the bed and lifted the necklace from her neck. She untied the string. She fit the key into the lock. It turned and the latch fell open.
Fern was feeling completely magical now. She held the diary close to her heart. She wasn’t ready to open it. Not yet. She looked at the painting on the wall. She stood up and walked to it. She remembered the painting in the parlor of a bowl, the kind usually filled with fruit, but it looked like the fruit had been taken away, and the bowl had been refilled with books. Was it possible to reach into a painting? Was it possible to reach into a painting and pull fruit out of the bowl?
The Bone watched quietly as Fern closed her eyes. She wished that something would happen, something unexpected. She lifted her hand to the painting. She inched her hand closer and closer until she felt something give, and then she gently glided her hand inside of it.
She touched a lily first.
“What’s it like, Fern?” the Bone asked.
Fern kept her eyes shut tight, afraid that if she opened them it would all disappear. “The petals are soft, velvety soft,” she said. And they were. She rubbed them with her fingertips, the way someone would to test a fine silk. She thought, Things aren’t always what they seem, are they? No, no they aren’t.
Fern squeezed her eyes shut even tighter. She felt her way gently along an outline of wet rocks and then reached into the pond. It was wet and cool and the goldfish swirled around her hand so closely they brushed her with their fins. She opened her eyes, slowly, slowly.
The Bone was transfixed, amazed. “It’s a beautiful thing!” he said.
There she was, Fern Drudger, up to her elbow in a painting, rings rippling out across the small pond, in the middle of a messy room—a tangle of bed linens and a thousand books, curtains, shoes, pansies, a top hat, her three hateful barrettes lying on the floor—and do you know what she was thinking? She was thinking a thought that only she could think with half her arm inside of a painting after a tornado. She was thinking that this was what home must feel like, this or something very close to it.
PART 4
THE DIARY
1
DECODING
HOPEFULLY YOU WERE PAYING ATTENTION IN Part 2, Chapter One. That’s where I reported that the Bone told Fern that even Eliza’s grocery lists were in some kind of code. Remember? And that meant, of course, her diary was, too. There was only one word that wasn’t in code in the diary, and that was Eliza’s name, written in curlicue letters on the first page. The rest was a mess of lines, squiggles, and some numbers. At first, Fern spent her evenings trying to decode the diary. She’d had no luck. Then she decided to use her fledgling powers to try to shake the diary, in hopes that—you guessed it—The Art of Being Anybody would slip out. This hadn’t p
roduced results either, but she was hopeful.
Her days were spent under Mrs. Appleplum’s wing, out of doors, which is the best place to shake a book if you aren’t exactly sure what’s going to come out. Mrs. Appleplum was trying to teach Fern—well, Ida—how to shake a book with concentration so she could better control the outcome.
Fern was getting better and better. She’d wanted white dinner gloves to fall out of a book of manners, and that’s exactly what she got. There were still problems—on a book about baby bunnies, she’d only been able to shake out a sprinkling of tiny turd pellets. But all in all, she was improving, and this made Mrs. Appleplum very happy, and making Mrs. Appleplum happy made Fern happy, because deep down Fern wanted Mrs. Appleplum to love Ida Bibb. One day Fern hoped that she would be able to come clean about being Fern, her granddaughter, and she wanted this to come as a pleasant surprise to Mrs. Appleplum.
One afternoon, they toted their books to the cool shade of the giant peach. (I don’t have time to describe the peach in detail. I’ve got to get on with Fern’s story. But if you’d like a description of what exactly this peach looked like, you should consult Mr. Roald Dahl’s book on the subject. It’s quite good.) From this spot, Fern could hear the hobbits’ hushed, polite chatter in the brambly front yard—“Do, please.” “After you.” “Most kind.” “Thank you.” And twice she thought she saw a mouse skittering through the grass, but on second look, she saw it was the fairy. She was wearing a small gray dress. It was the same dress Mrs. Appleplum had been sewing the night Fern read her the three books. (And how had that come about exactly? Fern didn’t know.) Once she thought she caught the fairy shaking her fist in Fern’s general direction, which was unusual because one usually thinks of fairies traipsing around maypoles or playing the lute.
Mrs. Appleplum was being demanding, but tender. “Try again,” she told Fern. “Try harder.”
Fern was concentrating. Her tuft of unruly hair was waving in the wind. She’d woken up one morning to glimpse a very small person hauling her barrettes and pansies away in a basket. Fern remembered Mrs. Appleplum telling her to report any thefts, but Fern didn’t need the pansies, and she didn’t want those old barrettes anyway. She let the little person take them away. Was it a Borrower? It was highly unexpected to wake up and see a miniature person stealing your things, but Fern was starting to expect the unexpected. Once, while taking out Mrs. Appleplum’s garbage, she’d seen a snarling rat that stuck his tongue out at her for no apparent reason.
“Were you able to do this when you were younger?” Fern asked.
“I give my gifts away as often as I can,” Mrs. Appleplum said. “I gave this gift to my daughter, who passed away.”
Fern had been waiting for a chance to ask a question about her mother. She tried to sound casual. “What was she like?” Fern asked. She wanted to ask if she smelled like lilacs, but that might be suspicious.
“She was loving. She was smart. She was funny, too. She was the kind of person you always wanted to be with. It was like she had a light that shined out from her face, and when she looked at each person, they shined in her spotlight and flowered into their own most wonderful attributes and deepest good intentions. She looked at each person as though they were the best person in the world.”
“Oh,” Fern said.
“She was a good bit like you, Ida. A good bit.”
This made Fern swell with pride, although she felt guilty that Mrs. Appleplum still thought she was Ida Bibb. She wanted desperately to tell her that she wasn’t an encyclopedia salesman’s daughter, but Mrs. Appleplum’s very own granddaughter. She could barely contain the secret. It seemed to burn in her, a horrible lie. She wanted to tell Mrs. Appleplum the truth so that Mrs. Appleplum could take Fern in her arms and hug her tightly. Fern remembered the exact spot on her cheek where Mrs. Appleplum had kissed her the night she’d shaken her first book. Fern thought, I’m like my mother, my wonderful mother! She shook a book on pruning fruit trees, and a hundred apples fell out. Beautiful shiny apples as red as hearts.
The daily lessons were good because they distracted Mrs. Appleplum, allowing the Bone time to pretend to look through books in the kitchen or the living room or the hall closet, while really he was trying to decode the diary. You see, Fern and the Bone had to keep looking through books, or the Miser would get suspicious and know they were on a different scent. The Miser also liked the distraction that Fern caused Mrs. Appleplum. It gave him time to look for the book, as well. And it was always possible that the Miser would get to the book first, by random luck.
In the evenings, Fern would also try to help the Bone get better at becoming Mr. Bibb. The Bone had brought his gold pocket watch and his bells. Fern would sway the watch back and forth. She would say, “You are Mr. Bibb. Mr. Bibb. Mr. Bibb.” At the end of the series, she’d ring one bell like crazy. How could they ring the bell, you might ask, without alerting the household? Well, Fern had told Mrs. Appleplum that she was trying to learn to play the bells. That she was part of a Christmas chorus at school in which she was crucial to “Jingle Bells,” and had to keep practicing or she’d get rusty. And they always waited until the Miser had gone out, which he did every night. “For a walk,” he claimed as Mr. Haiserblaitherness, but really he was working his way steadily through the books in the barn. Late at night, after Mrs. Appleplum was fast asleep, they’d seen him out there with a small crew of his spies put to work sorting books. The spies drove up in the red van, the gold letters easily readable—HAISERBLAITHERNESS LIGHTS, PLASTICS, AND TOILETRIES. Fern found it suspicious, a company as weirdly made-up sounding as the last name Haiserblaitherness. And who specializes in lights, plastics, and toiletries all at the same time?
After the bell rang, the Bone would open his eyes. He would walk to the mirror. He almost always had a Mr. Bibb nose. Sometimes he had the black hair—no need for slicking it with shoe polish—and more and more often the mustache was real. And, occasionally, he’d find himself drawn to the topic of encyclopedias and the importance of a set in every American home.
After all of this, Fern would turn her attention to the diary. She spent the hours after dinner shaking the book with as much concentration as she possibly could. The Bone would pace. So far, they’d gotten a movie ticket stub, two pieces of toffee, and a hairbrush. “Is this a diary or a pocketbook?” Fern complained.
The Bone couldn’t watch. When something new fell out, he’d whisper, “Is it…Is it…?” But when Fern told him “No, it isn’t,” he’d walk to the window. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to see.”
Fern understood. It was a mix of sweetness and sadness to have her mother’s things suddenly fall into her lap. The hairbrush was especially hard to take, because a few strands of her mother’s long dark hair were woven through the brush. Fern put all of her mother’s things in her bag. But the brush was progress, Fern felt. It seemed like the items were getting bigger, heavier—from movie stub to toffee to hairbrush…so a book didn’t seem impossible. Sometimes, when she was alone in the room, she would walk over to the painting of the goldfish and slip her hand inside and try to recapture that feeling she’d had the first time she’d done it. She wanted to feel like she was getting closer to feeling like she was home, but each time she did it now—her hand fanning and swirling around the goldfish—she felt dishonest. She felt guilty. How could she really feel at home if she was pretending to be Ida Bibb? How could she?
One night after about two weeks, an odd thing happened. The Bone was at the window, keeping watch over the Miser, who had a ladder and a flashlight and had disappeared up the ladder into a tunnel he’d dug through the wall of books in the barn. His spies were with him, their small muscular bodies digging, shuffling. They were whistling, which is a stereotype, really. It’s what you think little people would do while they’re working—like the seven dwarves—and I don’t like stereotypes, but, in this case, the spies were, in fact, whistling, so I must include it. And really they have every right to whistle. There’s nothing wron
g with whistling while you work, for goodness sake. I’ve done it. In fact, I’m doing it right now while I’m writing this! (And what would my old writing teacher think of that, ha! Could he write and whistle at the same time? I don’t think so!) I knew a boy who whistled all of the time, and his mother said, “Stop whistling. What are you gonna be, a professional whistler when you grow up?” He didn’t stop. He learned how to hum melody while whistling harmony and was on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson many times. This has nothing to do with little people, but it is a good lesson to learn.
Fern was shaking the diary. She was frustrated because nothing had fallen out in a couple of days. It was as if something were stuck. Fern shook hard, as hard as she could. She felt the book’s heaviness. It was as heavy as she’d ever felt a book to be. She shook and shook, and then she saw something poking out. Black leather. She grabbed it with both hands. It had a rubber underside.
“What is it?” the Bone asked, unable to look over at Fern.
Fern pulled and she pulled and she pulled some more, until out popped an orthopedic lace-up shoe complete with a foot and thin, knee-high stockings. Mrs. Appleplum’s foot!
Fern let out a yelp. Then she heard a scream.
“What in holy heck!” Mrs. Appleplum cried out from the bathroom. “Help me!”
Fern flipped the diary around. She shook and jiggled until the foot disappeared. The Bone ran to the bathroom and knocked loudly on the door. “Are you okay in there?”
Fern closed the diary and ran to join the Bone. Everything was silent a moment. Mrs. Appleplum opened the door and poked her head out. “I just had the strangest sensation that someone was pulling my leg!” She stared at the Bone, then at Fern.
