The Somebodies Read online

  It was, of course, The Anybodies by, well, N. E. Bode. Me. And I can’t speak for Terry Pratchett or Neil Gaiman or Kate DiCamillo on how it felt for them to have that bit of their souls that they’d stitched into their own books ripped out. No, I cannot. But I can tell you that I was in a donut shop at the moment (disguised as a hefty mobster), and although I didn’t know what was happening, I felt something awful—as if a corner of my own soul, the one I walk around with day in and day out, went dark. I stumbled forward, like something alive in me had been snap-jerked out of my chest. Suddenly breathless, I leaned on the glass counter of the donut shop and wheezed, and stared at the glazed pastries without really even seeing the glazed pastries. The kid behind the counter asked if I was okay, and I said that I wasn’t. He started to call the paramedics, because I was so blanched. “No, no,” I told him, and I walked out of the donut shop and made my way dizzily onto the sidewalk.

  And you have to keep in mind that every time a reader finishes a book that they love, they know the writer’s soul. And so with each of the Blue Queen’s swallows, all of the readers who’d poured themselves into each of these specific books could feel the loss. (That copy of The Anybodies, for example, had been borrowed by a girl named Hayley Twyman from Mr. Flom’s fourth-grade classroom in Tallahassee and mistakenly left on a bus, where it was read by a girl from St. Bernadette’s who took it on a field trip to the Philly Zoo, where it dropped from her bag in the monkey house and did some time in the lost and found until one of the employees took it home to her daughter Ursula, who shared it with her friend Trevor Hobbs, who took it on vacation to Manhattan Beach, where a beachcomber in from Boston stole it—a nice enough kid making bad choices—and feeling guilty for having stolen it, put it on the shelves of the Lizard’s Tale, a bookshop outside of Boston, where a boy named Levi bought it and cherished it and took it everywhere he went—once namely to a certain spot near World’s End in Hingham, where it was lost along with the backpack that it was in…Let’s cut to the chase: eventually it ended up in the hands of an Anybody who brought it to the city beneath the city, where it was stolen by the Blue Queen for her evil purposes.) All those readers let out a sad sigh, right in the middle of what they were doing. It was a collective sigh that ran coast to coast. A gust of wind that stirred things up for a moment, maybe even created a little gustnado in China or somewhere. A loss. Not something they could name, but just a sense of something having been taken away.

  Fern sighed too. Deeply. And then she scrambled down to the foot of the bed—hard to do since the bed at this moment was a low cot on old, sagging springs. She had to see what would happen to my soul next. Howard tried to grab her arm to stop her, but she slid along and peeked out from under the haggard cot.

  The Blue Queen was breathing the souls in through her open mouth. Her lips grew redder, her cheeks so flushed they turned blue. In fact, all the veins that Fern could see glowed bright blue. Her throat seemed to expand with the intake of each bit of soul—Pratchett and Gaiman. She was going quickly from ghostly white and limp, to full, puffed, robust and blue. She swallowed and swallowed—DiCamillo and then Bode.

  Fern was horrified. She felt sick, and that’s when her hands began to flutter at her sides. She lifted them up. They were heavy and unwieldy. Howard glanced over and gasped. Fern’s hands had become books—two open books with flapping pages. Howard raised his own heavy hands, bookish in weight—his fingers, too, turning into pages. Their hands were being pulled, just like the others—pulled toward the Blue Queen. Fern felt as if she were being ripped from herself. Her own soul, shimmering and lit, appeared in the books’ pages. Howard reached over and shut her book-hands as fast as he could with his own. Fern slipped hers underneath her rump to keep them pinned shut. Howard followed her lead. Fern’s soul stopped. It bumped against the shut covers of the books but couldn’t escape. How? Fern thought. How had that happened? Howard was shaking, his eyes screwed shut.

  By then the Blue Queen had eaten enough souls, but she was still grasping each of the souls being drawn to her. Powerful and mighty from the consumption, she caught them and pressed them with her cupped hands till the glowing-egg souls were the size of egg-shaped pills. She was saving them, Fern realized, stockpiling souls for later. She put them into small jars that were already nearly filled with the same, compressed to a small glowing egg and popped into a jar—this bit of soul and the bit of soul after mine and the next soul and the next and on and on. The wind stopped. The sickly fog thinned. The room brightened again.

  “That was too many!” the girl said, out of sight, her voice frantic.

  “Soon I won’t need books anymore! Oh, how much easier it will be to steal souls directly from the living! How much easier! And all at once, my dear. All at once!”

  The girl sighed. She sounded tired, having chased the books, or maybe she was tired the same way Fern was, from having seen something awful. She wondered what the girl looked like, but Fern couldn’t risk being seen. She tucked herself deeply under the bed.

  The Blue Queen snapped at the girl. “Don’t be weak. We’re close. All that’s left is to get the ivory key from Fattler. All I need is that key!”

  The ivory key—a key to what? What would she have broken into by now? Fern stared at the box springs, knowing that this, too, was very bad.

  “I will get what I want! Do you hear me?”

  “That hurts,” the girl said. “I’ll have a bruise there.”

  The woman’s voice turned now. “Oh, princess,” she said. “Oh, rightful princess, dear. Soon you won’t have to be disguised, no, no. You won’t have to hide in plain sight anymore! It will all be worth it in the end. You’ll have what you deserve and want.” Fern looked at Howard, and he looked back, wide-eyed and shaken. Fern felt sweaty all over, and now chilled. Rightful princess? Hide in plain sight?

  “I’ve got a beautiful plan all laid out. This window of the anniversary of my defeat, I will take advantage of it, my dear. This time I will be victorious. I have enough power this go-around.”

  “What I want is my father back,” the girl said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous! Most of poor Merton’s soul is long gone. Poor, poor Merton!” Her voice didn’t sound sympathetic, however. It seemed she hated Merton more than she felt sorry for him. “He doesn’t have enough soul left to power a bigger human body. He’s fine as he is. And he’s still of use. He spied very well on Fern, spied quite nicely. Hand me my moth brooch! And I’ve got to powder my face so I don’t look so ravenously blue.”

  He didn’t have enough of his soul left? He was with them in a smaller form? He’d spied on Fern? Could it be that the girl’s father—Fern’s great-uncle Merton—was the goldfish who’d watched her from the painting? Was Merton Gretel alive—not dead at all, but alive in the form of a fish? He’d been alive all this time. Merton Gretel. The faint letters of the name were still legible on Fern’s palm. She felt a hardening in her chest at the sound of that name spoken with that voice.

  Fern could hear the Blue Queen clicking through a makeup bag. The girl knelt beside the bed and reached into a suitcase propped there. She pulled out a large, shiny, blackish-greenish brooch. She ran her thumb over it gently. Fern looked at the brooch carefully. It was made of ten shellacked cocoons, delicately spun—ten of them arranged around one center moth, with a shiny pin stuck to the back. The girl paused there, touching the pin.

  “I miss school, too,” the girl said. “I miss my friends.”

  “I’ve told you a million times!” the Blue Queen said. “Don’t have friends! Have underlings! Friends,” she said, “friends only disappoint.”

  This sounded like very bad advice to Fern. But the girl seemed to accept it as fact. “I know,” she said, quietly. “I know.”

  “Good. Now where’s my fur? I can’t leave it here or the help will steal it.”

  The girl stood. “In the wardrobe,” she said.

  Through a crack in the doors of the wardrobe, Fern could see the trim of a fur. It began to s
hake and bounce. It pushed its way off the hanger and landed on the floor on its paws. Fern could see a few pairs of eyes, raccoon eyes. It scrambled to the Blue Queen, out of sight, but Fern could imagine the coat of animals clambering up her legs and arms, resting themselves on her shoulders.

  The door opened, and the Blue Queen’s voice called down the hall. “You two! Yes, you! With the feather dusters! I’m Fattler’s special guest speaker, Ubuleen Heet!”

  Fern froze. Ubuleen Heet? So that’s what she meant by hiding in plain sight! The Blue Queen was in disguise as the motivational speaker! Her invitation had been sent by the Blue Queen! The Blue Queen was the head of the Secret Society of Somebodies.

  “Oh, Miss Heet! What can we do for you?” a voice shouted down the hall.

  “Come in here and tidy this, will you? It stinks of smoke and the awful odor of livestock, like an old barn! I have a speaking engagement, as you may know, and I can’t tolerate a room like this!”

  “Yes, ma’am!” they said. “We’ll get to it! Right away!”

  Fern tried to work out the names in her head:

  THE BLUE QUEEN

  UBULEEN HEET

  There was only a single letter missing. “Q.” Her middle initial?

  So Ubuleen Heet was famous. She was the speaker! How could this be? Didn’t anyone know that she was evil? That she was the Blue Queen returned, the one responsible for the dead books? That she was using the anniversary of her defeat as a soft spot in time so that she could return? Fern kept her book-hands pinned under her body, too afraid to budge.

  The girl was still in the room. In fact, she was just feet away from Howard and Fern. She stood at the box, putting some of the books back into it. There was the unmistakable scent of rot, something soured or, worse, dead. She was talking to herself, repeating, “It will all be worth it in the end. It will all be worth it.”

  Her mother called once more, “Don’t forget your red hat, Lucess, dear.”

  Lucess? Brine? Fern’s stomach looped as if she were still on the glass elevator. She grabbed Howard’s arm. He was already rigid with fear. He looked at Fern, his eyes watery. Her mind couldn’t help but line up letters again.

  LUCESS BRINE

  BLUE

  She came up with that quickly. What letters were left? “C-E-S-S R-I-N”…She flipped them. RINCESS. Again, she was only missing one letter.

  “And, please,” the Blue Queen shouted. “Don’t forget to feed your father!”

  Lucess walked to the fishbowl. Fern and Howard listened to her unscrew a cap and tap it on the side of the bowl.

  “Here you go, Daddy,” she said, and then she added in a whisper, “Soon you’ll be with us. It will all be worth it!”

  Then she walked to the other side of the bed and started rummaging through her suitcase, for her red hat, no doubt. The red hat tumbled to the floor just beside Howard’s head. When she bent down to retrieve it, Howard gave a small gasp.

  Lucess whipped up the dust ruffle. Her sharp face appeared beneath the bed. She stared at Howard and Fern, dazed. Fern was ready to scream if necessary. She was already stiffening for Lucess’s attack.

  But Lucess’s face went soft. “You’re here,” she said.

  “You?” Fern said. “It was you trying to shut the books? Your mother is—”

  “Ubuleen Heet,” Lucess said.

  “The Blue Queen?”

  She nodded.

  “Middle initial ‘Q’?” Fern asked.

  She nodded again.

  “And yours starts with, let me guess, the letter ‘P’?”

  “My middle name is Princess,” she said. “I was the one who planted the invitation, and I was supposed to make you want to be a Somebody, and I was supposed to find out your weaknesses and report them.”

  “And what did you report?” Fern asked.

  “I reported that you didn’t have any real weaknesses. I kind of admired you back in Mrs. Fluggery’s class,” she said.

  “Really?” Fern said.

  Lucess whispered, “Don’t come to the secret society meeting.”

  “I don’t know where it is, even,” Fern said.

  “The news will find you, but ignore it. Listen, whatever you do, don’t come.”

  “Lucess?” the Blue Queen’s voice thundered down the hallway.

  And then the dust ruffle dropped back into place and she disappeared.

  “I’ve got it! Coming!” Lucess called to her mother. Her shoes clicked across the now-slate floor and out the door.

  5

  PONY ON THE LOOSE

  FERN AND HOWARD STARED AT THEIR HANDS. The pages had disappeared and shrunk back into fingers, but faint ridges still existed where the bindings had been.

  Howard was tight-lipped with concentration. “What just happened?”

  “I think she almost got our souls,” Fern said, still dazed. She opened and closed her hands to make sure they still worked.

  “Lucess Brine is here! How did you know her initials?”

  “I was working some things out in my head. That’s all. The letters almost added up.” Fern said, “Her mother is the Blue Queen. She’s awful, Howard. She could take over the Anybodies again. She ruled once for eleven days, and that’s when they thought that she killed Merton Gretel, but he isn’t dead. He’s the fish in the bowl on the nightstand—or, well, almost all of him is the fish in the bowl on the nightstand. A good bit of his soul is gone.”

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” Howard said, patting the pony. “And you can’t go to that meeting!”

  There wasn’t time for further discussion. The door banged open, and the room filled with the sound of a badly squeaking wheel, and, above it, a woman speaking. “Well, wait till I tell my Artie that I talked to Ubuleen Heet!”

  Fern peeked out to see two women wearing gray dresses with white stockings and aprons, pushing a cart of supplies with a hanging bag full of laundry. The woman with the high-pitched snippy voice was small and tough-looking, like a little wrestler (if wrestlers wore gray dresses with white stockings and aprons). The other woman was heavyset and looked like she’d been shoved into her dress with excessive force—a kind of excessive force that had dislodged most of her bun. It looked like she had suffered a mighty explosion on the back of her head.

  Fern wondered if they would notice the little jars on the desk—the jars filled with the compressed souls, those little glowing eggs. The Blue Queen had left out a row of five jars, all filled to the brim. Fern wanted to rescue those souls. And she wanted to save Merton, too. But how?

  The exploded-bun woman said, “And she’s right about the smell of this place! How awful! Worse than the flying monkeys’ rooms!”

  At the mention of flying monkeys, Howard grabbed Fern’s arm and squeezed with full-panic force. Fern wasn’t afraid of flying monkeys. I mean, perhaps she would have been, but now she could only think of the Blue Queen’s voice, the awful laughter, the way she said the word “souls,” and the souls themselves being tugged from their pages.

  “Well, I told Fattler I didn’t want to clean up after them flying monkeys anymore, but he says that them flying monkeys make good bellhops. ‘Can’t ask for better speed.’ And I gave a huff and then, you know what he says next?”

  “What?” the exploded-bun woman asked.

  “He says that them flying monkeys are the least of his problems.” The wrestler woman added in a whisper, “You notice how the stairs in the lobby were all sopping wet. I heard it’s ’cause the stairway transformed into a waterfall.”

  “Do you think Fattler made a mistake?”

  “Well, some are saying he’s just lost his touch. But do you know what else I heard? Someone told me he said he never was a genius, that it was all a big mix-up and he’s just ordinary.”

  Fern shut her eyes tight. Fattler. He couldn’t be ordinary! She’d read all about how he was a legend in a long line of legends, famous for grand Anybody hospitality and innovations. He didn’t need to rely on anyone but himself. What wou
ld he think of what had just happened in this room, in his very own hotel? He needed to know that Ubuleen Heet was the Blue Queen, was killing books, was probably bound to ruin his hotel, and worse. Fern had to get to Fattler before the Queen did.

  The exploded-bun woman said, “I heard some computers turned into tortoises and waddled into the swimming pool.”

  “Yes, yes, a whole school of tortoises, and when Fattler tried to transform them back, they short-circuited.” The wrestler woman went on, “But Fattler’s keeping a lid on it. He doesn’t want people to know.”

  Was Fattler really in trouble? Fern thought back to her grandmother’s warning: Fern will be a target. A target for what? Fern wondered now.

  The two women pulled out aerosol cans and started spraying the air. One revved the vacuum, and that made the pony stir and then wake up. He tottered to a stand, then shook his mane. He started to bolt out from under the bed.

  Fern grabbed him and said, “No, come back,” just at the same moment that the vacuum cleaner plug popped from the wall. The vacuum died, and Fern’s voice rang across the room.

  “What was that noise?” the exploded-bun woman said.

  Fern clamped her hands over her mouth, which meant that the pony was free. He bounded out from under the bed. The wrestler screamed like she’d seen a mouse. Fern watched the pony dodge the exploded-bun woman’s broom and slip out the door to run loose in the hotel.

  “It come from under the bed,” the wrestler screamed.

  The exploded-bun woman marched to Howard’s side of the bed with her broom in hand. She took the stick end and was about to drive it into Howard’s belly when Fern grabbed his arm and pulled him. Howard clutched the book and they both rolled out the other side. Howard scrambled back over the bed, the wrestler woman reaching for him.