The Somebodies Page 13

Fern stood in the huge empty rectangle where the door used to be, and she found herself facing a giant machine that filled the giant room. The machine had long arms and shafts and conveyor belts that reached the high ceiling. Its massive body was made of gears and levers and typewriter keys and ancient adding machines and spinning fan belts and multiple motors. At the moment the machine was still. None of its parts were moving. Spools of thin, white paper—narrow as a fortune in a cookie, but unending—had spilled out of various slots throughout the machine and curled like ribbon in heaps on the floor. Small mirrors were positioned in and around the machine, giving angled views on its underparts and greasy innards. Fern thought back to the storage room, and it made sense that this machine would require all of those things down there, including the motor oil and the box of mirrors—all except, perhaps, the honey jars. And there was something else, too, that Fern noticed. Although the machine wasn’t on at the moment, there was still this humming buzz. It wasn’t as loud as it had been, but it was still there, a constant static. Fern tilted up Howard’s piggy-bank face so that he could get the whole view, in case he was still able to see through his ceramic eyes.

  “Well, well, then, you know exactly where you are and so you are not lost!”

  Fern had nearly forgotten about the voice, she was so taken by the hulking machine. She looked around in hopes of finding someone, but no one was there. She noticed now that there was a cot, a desk, a sofa with a rug, a minikitchen, and a door that must have led to a bathroom. It was a large factory-sized room with a row of smoked-over windows too grimy to see through. In faint, chipped paint above the windows was the sign HURLMAN AND SISTERS GLASS ELEVATOR FACTORY. It was the old factory that the elevator operator had mentioned. Fern pivoted this way and that. “Are you the Brain?” Fern called out, peering around.

  A head popped up—a man with small, round glasses and a bit of an overbite, so that you could see his front teeth even though he wasn’t smiling. He was, in fact, frowning bitterly. But this wasn’t the actual man. It was only a reflection in a mirror, and so Fern tried to trace the reflection to a real head, but she found only a reflection of the head again in another mirror, and again and again. The head kept appearing in mirrors and disappearing from them.

  Finally the voice was right next to Fern. “I’m not the Brain. I’m the Brainkeeper.”

  When Fern turned, the man was standing right next to her. “Oh,” she said, surprised. “You’re here.”

  There were some things about this man, this brain-keeper, that were fairly normal. He was wiping his grease-stained fingers on an old rag, which is normal for someone who works with machinery. He wore suspenders, which is normal for someone missing the necessary backside to keep up a pair of pants. He wore a silver whistle on a string around his neck, which is normal for a, well, for a gym coach. But even though he was a small, nonathletic Brainkeeper with a brittle little caved-in chest, this wasn’t too very strange. Obviously he used the whistle to operate the on-and-off of the machine, much like the big whistle that had probably sat atop Hurlman and Sisters Glass Elevator Factory a long time ago.

  The thing that was not at all normal about this Brainkeeper was this: He was abuzz, and the reason he was abuzz was because his arms were covered in bees. At first glance one might think, well, this is just a Brainkeeper with very furry arms who happens to like to hum in a deep register. But, no, you would be wrong. He stood there with his hands on his hips, and his arms were alive with bees crawling all over one another.

  “And you’re here too!” he said.

  “I know,” Fern said, trying not to stare at the bees. (It’s usually impolite to stare at someone’s oddity.) She assumed that the bees weren’t stinging him, because he was wearing a wry smile now.

  “And you’re not lost,” he said, almost cheerfully. “This is the Brain!” He pointed to the giant machine, as if that explained everything.

  There was a giant clock on the wall. She’d lost a lot of time in the passageway. It was 11:27—only thirty-three minutes to midnight! “Um, well, I need help. I’m supposed to be somewhere else. Very soon. I’m almost out of time.”

  “I can’t help you get somewhere else. I’m not from around here. I only know this room. I only know this machine!” He stared at the machine like it was his greatest enemy. “Let me explain how this baby works—”

  “Um, I don’t really have a lot of time. I have some questions….”

  The Brainkeeper ignored her. “Well, I was contracted to build the Brain to help Fattler keep up with all his work. He isn’t a genius like we thought, you see. He’s ordinary. Ubuleen Heet enlightened him. And so the Brain is necessary to keep all his transformations going. Do you think Fattler’s Underground Hotel works all by itself? It can’t possibly! And since Fattler obviously can’t do it, someone’s got to keep it going and keep it all straight! Perfectly, perfectly straight!” The Brainkeeper’s face crinkled up as if he’d smelled something sour. He paced a circle. “Perfectly straight…not so muddled!” He scratched his head in a befuddled way, and then lifted the silver whistle from his chest and blew into it, holding a note for three seconds.

  Before Fern knew it, the elaborate machinery started up. It buzzed and ticked and clacked. It jittered and wheezed and rattled. From various locations, it spit out ticker tape—long strands of paper with small words and numbers written on them. In its herky-jerky motion, the contraption reminded Fern of the Bone’s old jalopy—though the jalopy was just a very small contraption by comparison—and she suddenly missed her father deeply. Although she didn’t miss school, not in the least, and although she was happy not to be doing Mrs. Fluggery’s twenty pages of homework, she did miss home, and she did miss Howard being Howard with all his Howard ways.

  The Brain belched small puffs of smoke up into the air, as if the machine were smoking cigars. The Brainkeeper had scurried away from Fern while she wasn’t looking, and now he was on his hands and knees crawling on the floor while staring up at some parts under the machinery that were puffing away.

  Fern caught up with him. He was a very quick crawler, and he was hard to keep up with. “I’ve got an emergency,” Fern explained loudly. “I need help!”

  “So what?” the Brainkeeper shouted. “Everyone needs help!” Then he corrected himself, “Except me! I don’t need any help!” The bees on his arms took on the shape of muscles as the Brainkeeper beat a pipe with a wrench again and again, then pouted.

  “Is something wrong?” Fern shouted.

  The Brainkeeper stood up and put his hands on his hips. “I used to be a beekeeper, if you can imagine that.”

  Fern nodded with a shrug. She could imagine that, quite easily.

  “But there isn’t much money in honey. I even went into bee training!” On cue, the bees formed a top hat on his head, leaving the Brainkeeper’s skinny arms bare. “But there isn’t much money in that either. So when I got the call to set up a system here for Mr. Fattler, well, I had to say yes.”

  “Who called you?” Fern asked.

  “Miss Heet, of course. She’s Fattler’s counsel. She’s taking care of him. She told me that I could do it. She can be very persuasive.”

  Fern huffed. “Has this Brain ever worked?”

  “My grandfather warned me that I should stick to what I know. But no, no. I had to go and believe that building a brain and a hive weren’t so different. Turns out”—he let his hand run over his bee beard and spoke to his bees—“he warned us, didn’t he, my little engines?”

  Fern was fairly sure that the Brainkeeper was crazy. She was embarrassed for him—a grown man talking to bees. She looked at the clock again. She was losing time. Why had Hyun-Arnold given her this clue? The Brain! Some help.

  He stared at Fern. “You’ve got your piggy bank there, full of money, no doubt. You don’t know what it’s like to only eat honey, day after day. I can’t go back! I’ve got to make this work!” He grabbed a handful of ticker tape. “It’s supposed to track every transformation in this hotel! Thi
s is gobbledygook! Junk! Nothing!” He stomped over to another section. “You’re supposed to be able to put a question in this slot here. It runs through the machine and spits out its answer here.” He pointed at another slot.

  Fern pulled out the invitation. “I have a question!” Fern said. “Could we test it?”

  The Brainkeeper put his hands to his face. The bees formed a shawl over his shaking shoulders. Was he crying? He wiped his face, and red-eyed, bleary, he said, “It won’t work. I’m a fake! A failure!”

  “Let’s just try it,” Fern said. She took a piece of paper from his desk and scribbled on it: Where is SDOOF KROY WEN? How do I get there? Then she slipped it into the first slot.

  The question zipped and twanged and bulleted and popped all around the Brain and then zipped back again.

  “That part was good!” Fern said. “Impressive!”

  The Brainkeeper shook his head. The machine spit out the piece of paper on his shoes.

  Fern didn’t have to pick it up. She could see that no answer had been written on it. The piece of paper was just as she’d written it. She could see herself holding Howard, and the Brainkeeper next to her, crawling in bees, reflected in the many mirrors in various spots all over the Brain. They were a sad group. The clock on the wall read 11:46. Fourteen minutes to midnight. The Secret Society of Somebodies meeting was about to begin.

  Fern had been through a lot. She’d been expelled. She’d jumped into a giant invitation and landed in a crazy elevator. She’d seen the Blue Queen swallow bits of souls from books. She’d nearly had her own soul taken. She’d lost bits of souls from cracked jars. She’d turned herself into a dog and Howard, her near-brother, into a piggy bank. She’d run through a terrible passageway and talked to caterpillars, and now she was here. It was all so overwhelming, and now, the Brain—the one thing she thought would help—was useless.

  And then her eyes settled on one of the many mirrors attached to the machinery, and there was her piece of paper, but this time it was reflected in the mirror and so it was backward. It read, quite plainly:

  3

  CHAOS BELOW!

  NEW YORK FOODS! IT HAD BEEN SO SIMPLE. YOU probably figured it out right away, because you’re astonishingly (almost freakishly) bright. We should give Fern a break for not figuring it out. Remember she was under great stress—the caterpillars, the multiplying passageways, that odd Brainkeeper and his ever-rearranging bees! But did you see this coming: surly flying monkeys? An allergic reaction? Fire? Chaos? Mayhem? I bet you didn’t! Fern certainly had no idea. But it’s all on its way.

  Also, New York Foods—is it any less mysterious forward than it is backward? Not a whole lot!

  “Where is this place?” Fern asked the Brainkeeper.

  The Brainkeeper said, “I bet it’s in New York and has something to do with the sale of food items.”

  “Thanks,” Fern said. The Brainkeeper had a gift for the obvious.

  “I wouldn’t suggest trying to find it by going back the way you’ve come.”

  “How do we get out of here?” Fern asked.

  “What you need is a back door.”

  “Do you have one?”

  “Nope.”

  “Or a way of shooting out that row of old windows and making your way to the ground safely.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “Nope.”

  “What you need is a glass elevator.”

  Fern didn’t want to ask again, but she had little choice. “Do you have one of those?”

  “Sure!” the Brainkeeper said. “Just push one of those buttons there.”

  Well, there it was: a panel with two plastic buttons, one with an up arrow and one with a down arrow. There didn’t seem to be an elevator door, but Fern took this in stride. The last elevator she’d been in had dropped her off inside a snowy wardrobe. Fern ran over and hit the button.

  But this seemingly quiet moment—Fern and Howard-as-a-piggy-bank awaiting the glass elevator—is when things began to go crazy. And the craziness began with a knock on the door. A high-pitched voice shouted out, “Housekeeping!”

  Fern didn’t trust the voice. “Don’t answer it!” she said. “Just wait till I get out of here.”

  “We’re a bit out of the way, you know,” he said to Fern. “That elevator might take a while.”

  “How long?”

  “Hard to say.”

  Fern held on to Howard-as-a-piggy-bank tightly. She muttered, “Hard to say. We have an emergency.” She pushed the button again, as if this would help hurry the elevator along.

  The Brainkeeper headed for the door himself this time, his bees arranged as a lapel with a huge corsage on his overalls. “I’ve got to open the door. If I didn’t, people would think that there’s something wrong up here with the Brain.”

  “Something is wrong with the Brain!”

  “Shhh,” the Brainkeeper said. “I shouldn’t have told you that!”

  “Don’t open the door!” Fern said, but the Brainkeeper wasn’t listening. Fern feared that Fattler, Dorathea and the Bone, and the Blue Queen herself were at the door. She squatted with Howard-as-a-piggy-bank behind the old sofa. But as it turned out, it was none of these.

  Instead there were two women in gray uniforms bustling into the room. Fern recognized them straightaway. The one like a wrestler was pushing a cleaning cart with a bum wheel; the other with her exploded bun was pushing an upright vacuum cleaner. It was of course the maids who’d chased them out of Ubuleen Heet’s room.

  “Housekeeping!” the exploded-bun maid said in an anxious scream.

  “Do you have to clean right now?” the Brainkeeper asked.

  “Yes!” the wrestler maid shouted. “Everything’s gone strange down there! The flying monkeys are scaring everyone to death! Circling, eyeing everyone like hawks,” she said with a shiver. “They’ve gone bad, I tell you. They’re on the hunt!”

  “On the hunt for what?” the Brainkeeper asked.

  “Don’t know! They just circle and sometimes haul someone away. It’s awful. Everyone’s running off. It’s chaos!”

  “What else can we do but clean?” said the wrestler maid, pulling out her Windex with a shaky hand. “It’s what we’re paid for.”

  “Where’s Fattler?” the Brainkeeper asked, panic-stricken.

  “Gone!” the wrestler maid and exploded-bun maid said in unison, staring blankly like lost children.

  “Gone where?” the Brainkeeper asked.

  They shrugged.

  “You should know. Doesn’t that contraption know everything?” the exploded-bun maid asked.

  “Who’s in charge?” the Brainkeeper asked.

  “Flying monkeys,” the exploded-bun maid said, nervously folding ticker tape. “Haven’t you been listening?”

  “But,” the wrestler maid said with a smile, “we did finally catch what we’ve been looking for!”

  “This!” said the exploded-bun woman, pulling something from the pocket of her gray uniform, something white and wriggling, and, well, hoofed.

  Fern popped up from behind the sofa. “My pony!” Fern said.

  “Your pony?” said the exploded-bun woman.

  “Yes,” Fern said. “He’s made out of Mrs. Fluggery’s hair,” Fern said, even though this wouldn’t make any sense to them.

  “Here, then,” the exploded-bun woman said. “You take him.”

  “I know you,” the wrestler maid said as if something terrible had just gotten worse. “You’re one of them stowaways!” She shoved the pony at Fern.

  “I was invited here,” Fern said.

  The wrestler woman said, “See”—she turned to the Brainkeeper—“more trouble. Stowaways getting invited here! It makes no sense!”

  Fern held the pony tight to her ribs. It was so good to see him again. It was as if she’d forgotten that she’d ever been in normal school with Mrs. Fluggery’s Rules and Regulations. But now she had proof that she’d had another life, and she wanted to get back to it—back to the Bone a
nd Dorathea and Howard as Howard.

  “Flying monkeys!” the Brainkeeper said. “They’re no good when they turn evil!”

  Fern held tight to Howard-as-a-piggy-bank. “I think I know what they’re after,” Fern said.

  “What’s that, hon?” the wrestler maid asked.

  Fern ran to the elevator and pressed the buttons again and again. They lit up just as screeches echoed up the passageways. Monkey screeches.

  4

  FLYING MONKEYS TURNED EVIL

  “LISTEN!” THE WRESTLER MAID SAID, HOLDING her breath, a bottle of Windex shaking in her hand.

  “Furry foul creatures! They’re coming!” The exploded-bun woman started crying while trying to sweep up a pile of endless ticker tape. “Don’t look at them!”

  “I won’t!” the wrestler maid said.

  The pony in one arm, Howard-as-a-piggy-bank in the other, Fern flattened herself against the wall next to the elevator buttons and slid down behind the sofa. “Hurry up,” she said to the elevator. “Hurry, hurry!”

  “No, no,” the Brainkeeper said. “I’m not ready. I mean, if I could have just a few more weeks to get all the kinks out, to get this thing up to speed!” He stared at Fern. “They’ll find me out! I’ll be back to eating honey!”

  A pair of flying monkeys swooped into the room through the open door. Their broad wings created an updraft. They were hairy, their wings leathery like those on bats. They stunk, too. They landed on the floor, dropped to all fours and started stalking the room.

  “Hey!” the Brainkeeper said, the bees turning into a hat of various fruits on top of his head. “Good to see you!” The Brainkeeper tried to chat up one of the monkeys. “So, you’re a monkey and you fly. Interesting.”

  The monkey scratched his armpit and waddled off, but the Brainkeeper followed him, keeping up his attempt at distracting banter.

  The maids kept cleaning.

  The other monkey was sniffing the air, his wide nostrils tensing. He walked toward Fern, who sat as still as possible. She closed her eyes. If she’d had them open, she would have noticed a bee crawling over Howard’s hoof and up his leg. Howard, in his piggy-bank state, could feel the bee on his leg. He had sensations still, albeit weakened, and Howard was afraid of bees. He was allergic, remember?