Ophelia and the Marvellous Boy

by Karen Foxlee

  “Mr. Pushkinova has told me some. He is the keeper of the Queen’s keys, and while he has guarded this cell for many years, he has always been very kind to me. Also there is Mrs. V., who does the cleaning and sometimes brings me breakfast and supper. She never says much, but when she does, it is very useful. She has been coming for seventy years, almost as long as Mr. Pushkinova. And before Mrs. V., there were others. I have gathered the information over many years. You must go to the sixth floor and find the box and open it with this key. There will be another key inside.”

  “Seventy years? But you don’t look any older than me,” said Ophelia.

  “I am much older,” said the boy. “I began my journey three hundred and three years ago. It is only as a result of a blessing bestowed on me by a great magical owl that I shot through the heart with my arrow that I appear this way.”

  “Now you’re really being silly.”

  But she looked through the keyhole at his clothes. She had to admit they were very old-fashioned-looking. His coat was embroidered with gold birds with emerald eyes. It must have once been a splendid thing. Now it was unraveling at the sleeves.

  “The things I could tell you,” he said quietly.

  He was looking away, she could see, looking intently at his hands, perhaps to hide his disappointment. It made her feel terrible, such talk: wizards and magical owls and arrows through the heart. But he looked so sad and lonely.

  Ophelia Jane Worthington-Whittard crossed her arms. “Tell me, then,” she said.

  And so the boy began.

  I ran the way the wizards had always shown me. Well, I mean, they always showed me the way by walking—they don’t run, as such; their bones are too rickety. They always took me out through the south gate and then through the fields and into the forest. They said if I followed the compass south, I would pass through the belly of the mountain and then across the sea. I would go through the meridian, the point of no return. They never told me how I was expected to cross the sea, even when I asked. When I got to the other side, I would find a just and noble king.

  So that was the way I went, out through the south gate and through the fields, which were covered in frost. There were people everywhere that morning, people with their whole lives tied up and teetering on top of wagons, heading out of the kingdom to escape the Snow Queen’s invasion. And everywhere there were boys and men rushing this way and that with their horses and their newly forged swords. But that is another story.

  I didn’t want anyone to see me that morning. I didn’t want them to shout, “Ay, there’s the boy chosen by the wizards, running in the wrong direction, away from the Snow Queen. How will that help us, boy?” I slipped into the rows of frosted corn as quickly as I could and then soon into the forest.

  The quiver, even though it only held one arrow, hurt my back. And the sword! It was so heavy. It banged against my thigh and made it ache. And I stepped in a puddle and my shoes got wet, and I knew right away they’d dry and give me blisters.

  I ran the way the wizards and I had walked in the forest together. Keeping close to the stream and then crossing it where the great oaks stood. Running and running until I touched the first of the Herald Trees.

  Why are you looking at me like that, Ophelia? Surely they are in your scientific books? Herald Trees are the messenger trees, terribly magical. Wizards talk for miles through them.

  I stopped at the Herald Tree, trying to catch my breath, and when I stopped, all I could hear was my breathing. The whole forest was still, still, still.

  And I put my hand to the tree’s trunk as I’d been taught, and separated out all the parts of the day, the quiet grass whispering and the stream chattering, until I came upon the sound of emptiness. And in that space all I heard, suddenly, was the Great Wizard’s voice, shouting, “Run—you must run, boy!” And then the grating, scraping sound of a sleigh and the clamor of swords.

  So I began to run again.

  The Snow Queen’s army had arrived in the town. I knew it then, from the little I had heard. They would be meeting the first line of defense in the fields: the plodding brown farm horses; the young boys, their faces turned white with fear. In the legends the winter soldiers had pale blue eyes and skin like marble and hair the color of dead marsh reed. And now I imagined they would be drawing their swords and ending everyone they met, no matter how much they cowered and begged in the streets. Then they would begin to look for me. They would stand in darkened houses and sniff the air; they would pick apart locks with their fingernails.

  I could not know it then, but that very moment, they were releasing three great magical owls from their chains. Ibrom was among them. He was the owl that would take my finger and put the charm on me. I could not know it, for I was in the forest running. I was running, and my back was aching, and my thigh was aching from where the sword hit me every step. There were blisters forming on my feet. I ran and ran and ran.

  It isn’t fair was what I thought. I hadn’t even eaten breakfast. I hadn’t said goodbye to my mother, not properly. Why hadn’t I said, I love you? I thought of the biscuits Petal had packed me and then of the food my mother had placed in the satchel. The bread and cheese. That’s such a simple thought, isn’t it? In a world about to be torn apart by the Snow Queen. But it made me stop. That thought stopped me in my tracks. I stopped running; I sat down on the ground. I began to cry. I cried for the wizards who had chosen the wrong person, and I cried for the town folk, who would surely be meeting their end, and I cried for my mother. How I cried for her. The tears fell down my cheeks and onto my hands. I wiped my nose on my sleeve. The spell that coated me began to wash away. And high above the forest, the great magical owl, Ibrom, caught my scent.

  Ophelia looked through the keyhole at the boy then. She bit her bottom lip. It was terrible to imagine him all alone in the forest, crying, the spell dripping from him with his tears. But even worse to imagine something hunting him.

  “How did the Snow Queen’s soldiers know about you?” she asked, to change the subject. “I mean, how did they know to look for you in particular?”

  She liked her stories to be factual and very organized.

  But he didn’t answer. “It’s getting late. See, the sun is starting to set,” he said. “If you’re to find the second key, you must go soon or it will be too dark in the forest.”

  “Forest?” said Ophelia, and when the boy didn’t answer again, she added, “It wasn’t right of them anyway. To send you off like that. And to take your name. Everyone needs a name.”

  “I got used to it after a while.”

  “Have you tried going through the alphabet?”

  “Yes.”

  “I tried it earlier,” said Ophelia. “I only did A and B. I’m sure we could find your name if we did that. I’ll bring some paper and pencil next time.”

  “So, the second key,” said the boy.

  Ophelia looked at the mural of the boy. He was holding his raised sword out in front of him. It was a large sword with a wooden hilt, and it was otherwise plain, except for a little carving of a closed eye. It didn’t look very magical.

  What will you do? She heard her mother’s voice clear in her ear.

  “The problem is I’ve already stolen once today,” said Ophelia, who had never stolen before. The first key burnt in her left-hand pocket.

  She saw the boy smile through the keyhole, and she noticed the dimple again. When he moved a little, she caught a glimpse of the dim room. A small bed. A plain table with a bowl and pitcher. A small, high window with a thin slant of late-afternoon light and snow.

  “Did you look at the Wintertide Clock?” the boy asked.

  “There was a number three,” said Ophelia.

  “Three days!” said the boy. “That soon? We don’t have much time.”

  Ophelia took off her smudgy glasses and began to clean them on her coat hem. “What happens in three days?” she asked tentatively, although she would rather not have asked at all.

  “Unless we find the
sword and the One Other,” said the boy, “in three days’ time, I will die and the Snow Queen will be victorious. I am a boy chosen by a protectorate of wizards from east, west, and the middle to deliver this sword so that the Snow Queen may be defeated.”

  Ophelia looked at the floor. She looked at the snow falling outside the window. She felt embarrassed. Apart from his golden coat, he really looked like only a scruffy boy.

  “Well, I’ve probably been gone a long time,” she said. “My father will be looking for me.”

  “Ophelia,” said the boy. He said it very quietly. She didn’t like the way he said that at all. He sounded sad and as though he expected more from her.

  “And how do you know my name anyway?” she said. “I never told you it, not once.”

  “I heard it once, a long time ago.”

  He was full of mysterious sentences like that. She pulled down on her braids.

  “I really should be going. Alice gets so cross nowadays,” she said.

  “Will you come back?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “One thing,” said the boy as she started to turn. “If you go to the sixth floor, be careful. There are ghosts there, dangerous ghosts.”

  Ophelia rolled her eyes. She didn’t turn back.

  “Be careful not to tell them too much about yourself!” he shouted as she left the room.

  Which, as far as she was concerned, didn’t make any sense at all.

  4

  In which Ophelia decides she does not believe in ghosts and visits the sixth floor

  Ghosts, thought Ophelia. She went out through the stone angels and across the sea monster mosaic. She walked down the long gallery of the gloomy paintings of girls, past Amy Cruit and Millie Mayfield and Paulette Claude. She stopped reading their names after that.

  Ghosts, she thought again. Where was the evidence for ghosts?

  After her mother died, Ophelia had crept into her study each morning and sat in her mother’s writing chair. She’d touched her desk, her pen, the vampire teeth. She’d taken the Encyclopaedia of Ghosts and Spirits from her mother’s bookcase. Each morning she opened it to a different page. There were fetches and bhoots and doppelgängers. Spooks and wraiths and gjengangers. Intelligent hauntings, shadow ghosts, funnel ghosts, poltergeists. Wouldn’t her mother try to contact her, if it was all true? Wouldn’t she come and sit on the end of her bed or lift a curtain or hide her toothbrush?

  Her mother did none of these things. When Ophelia sat in her mother’s chair, there was just a light-filled emptiness. A nothingness. A silence that made her so sad that she couldn’t even cry. A sadness that sat on her chest and crushed the air out of her with its weight.

  Ghosts, Ophelia thought again, in the pavilion of wolves. She looked at the poor things, with their mangy, moth-eaten coats and their dull glass eyes. An ancient guard watched her without any interest and went back to eating a very old apple.

  Ophelia looked at the silver elevator in the corner of the room. She chewed on a fingernail for a while before taking a puff on her inhaler. She pressed the up button then and tried to ignore the sinking feeling in her stomach.

  The first thing Ophelia noticed about floor six was a giant polar bear standing on its hind legs, its mouth open in a silent roar. Her heart stopped momentarily and then started beating again. The second thing she noticed was that the sixth floor was not really part of the museum at all but a place where everything that didn’t have a home was kept.

  She squeezed herself past the polar bear, picked her way past a tower of sewing machines, several large printing presses, a locomotive, two huge jars filled with buttons, a pile of suitcases, fountains of gowns draped over antique chairs, mounds of handbags, and several merry-go-round horses staring at her with their melancholy eyes.

  “Ghosts,” she said aloud with disdain.

  It wasn’t a frightening place at all. It was just a forgotten place. A little like a box of old toys pushed under a bed, only on a grander scale. These strange, mismatched collections stretched as far as she could see. There were flags of the world, snow shakers, artwork stacked in teetering heaps, newspapers, books, and three grand pianos. There were grandfather clocks, a Morse code machine, a ship’s huge anchor, a century of golfing attire, several stuffed parrots. There were display cabinets without displays, displays without display cabinets.

  Ophelia found a bridal veil and placed it on her head.

  She pressed the letter O three times on an ancient typewriter.

  She took the veil off. She retrieved the key from her pocket.

  “Okay, a box, a box that this key opens,” she said into the gloom. Her shoulders slumped.

  She worked her way back to the polar bear and started again. She looked for locks of any sort. She tried the key inside an antique sewing box, a toolbox on the floor of the locomotive; she tried several stout writing desks. She was briefly excited when she came upon a small pile of lacquered jewelry boxes, but the key opened none of them. It was too big, by far.

  She started again. It was a room full of objects, but almost none of them were locked. Almost none of them were boxes. It was very, very frustrating.

  Slow down, she heard her mother say, quite close to her ear. Slow down and really look.

  Ophelia waved her hand as if at a worrisome fly. She could sense the sun was setting now. The light had changed behind the grimy windows. Her stomach grumbled. Alice would be quite mad. She’d be waiting on the throne with their ice skates and a frown on her face. Ophelia longed for her old sister, the old Alice, who was carefree and funny and who never frowned.

  Ophelia stopped and looked exceedingly slowly. Immediately she noticed the door near a silver carriage strung with spiderwebs. It was at the very back of the huge room. Of course, she thought, there wouldn’t be only one room on the sixth floor. There would be several rooms. Behind this door there were probably many boxes. There would be boxes in piles, heaps, mountains, oodles of boxes stacked up in pyramids. She reached out for the doorknob and opened the door.

  Behind the door there were no oodles of boxes. There were no boxes at all. Ophelia stepped into a room that was vast and almost in darkness. There was nothing in this room but huge pillars, evenly spaced, disappearing into the dark above her.

  It was like a forest, that room, but it didn’t sing and rustle like an ordinary forest. It was quiet and the only noise was the slight creaking of the floor beneath her feet. It was much colder in that room than in the first. She pulled her coat collar up as she began to walk and wished she had a flashlight. There was something falling from the heights above her. Dust, she thought at first, white dust, and she put her hand out to catch some. The stuff was wet on her palm, which was confusing, and if she’d been outside, she would have said straightaway that it was snow.

  Ophelia Jane Worthington-Whittard did not consider herself brave, but she had always been very hopeful. “Anything is possible if you have a plan” was her motto. “Anything is possible if you think scientifically.” It made her smile now, in the darkened room.

  Of course, behind this room, there would be another room filled with boxes. She would search it in a grid pattern, which was exactly how archaeologists and police officers found things. She would search it slowly and methodically. She might even find the old sword while she was there. And the One Other, whoever that was, if it was even someone at all. Some more of the wet white stuff fell from the ceiling, but it didn’t dampen her enthusiasm. There was a strange smell tickling her nose, a singed kind of smell, a little like burnt popcorn.

  She walked through the forest of pillars. She walked and walked, and there did not seem to be an end to that room. She thought of the boy’s name to pass the time. Colin, she thought. No, not Colin, that was silly. Christopher. Crawford. Conan. Clyde, Clive, Cameron, Carl, Cassidy. Surely one of the names would jump out at her, and she would know. There was a noise. A whispering, rustling type of sound and it seemed to come from beneath her feet. She bent down and felt with her hands i
n the dim and picked up a pile of dark leaves.

  “That’s very strange,” said Ophelia.

  And at exactly the same time, she heard another sound. It might have been the wind or the sighing of snow through the leaves, only it was very close to her ear. And the sound that might have been the wind or the sighing of snow through the leaves suddenly became a multitude of girls’ voices, whispering very close to her.

  You are safe here, they said. The wolves do not like us, the owls do not like us. The white horses will not come here, nor the white lions. They will never, ever, ever, ever enter here. They are afraid of us. Are you here for the box with the second key?

  It was the soft, rushing, sighing, singing, whispering of voices.

  “Who are you?” shouted Ophelia, spinning around, the leaves falling through her fingers.

  No answer. In the silence she heard someone giggle.

  What is your name? the voices asked, a blustery, blowing circle of voices. What is your name? No one has tried for so long. We have been waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting.

  “Who are you?” shouted Ophelia again.

  We are many, said the voices. We are the children. We belong to the Queen.

  “Can one of you speak alone?” demanded Ophelia. “You’re hurting my ears.”

  The voices sped away then. She felt the breath of their departure. She didn’t know that those ghosts couldn’t bear to be apart. That all night they lay in tangles, waiting, combing each other’s hair with their fingers, touching each other’s words and stories, going over and over them, whispering into each other’s ears.

  She felt them move away from her, pacing, then running, barreling at breakneck speed, and then they were turning, rushing back toward her.

  We are Millie, who liked to run; we could run like the wind, said the voices. We are Katie, who liked to climb in the apple tree. We are Paulette, and our mother had hands that were pink and soft. They sat in her lap, just like this. We are so lonely. They wept suddenly.