She looked at Ophelia and saw she’d said too much. “Well, they’re used to me. They know I don’t have no choice but to put up with their ways.”
That afternoon, she’d had to drive over to Chattanooga to visit a particular thrift store. They’d sent her for a used DVD player, riding gear, and all the bathing suits she could buy up. Between that and paying for gas, she’d gone through seventy dollars. And the service light had been on the whole way. At least it wasn’t a school day. Hard to explain you were cutting out because voices in your head were telling you they needed a saddle.
She’d gone on ahead and brought it all up to the house after. No need to bother Ophelia with any of it. The iPod had been lying right in front of the door.
“Here,” she said. “I brought this back down.”
“My iPod!” Ophelia said. She turned it over. “They did this?”
The iPod was heavier now. It had a little walnut case instead of pink silicone, and there was a figure inlaid in ebony and gilt.
“A dragonfly,” Ophelia said.
“A snake doctor,” Fran said. “That’s what my daddy calls them.”
“They did this for me?”
“They’d embellish a bedazzled jean jacket if you left it there,” Fran said. “No lie. They can’t stand to leave a thing alone.”
“Cool,” Ophelia said. “Although my mom is never going to believe me when I say I bought it at the mall.”
“Just don’t take up anything metal,” Fran said. “No earrings, not even your car keys. Or you’ll wake up and they’ll have smelted them down and turned them into doll armor or who knows what all.”
They took off their shoes when they got to where the road crossed the drain. The water was cold with the last of the snowmelt. Ophelia said, “I feel like I ought to have brought a hostess gift.”
“You could pick them a bunch of wildflowers,” Fran said. “But they’d be just as happy with a bit of kyarn.”
“Yarn?” Ophelia said.
“Roadkill,” Fran said. “But yarn’s okay.”
Ophelia thumbed the wheel of her iPod. “There’s songs on here that weren’t here before.”
“They like music, too,” Fran said.
“What you were saying about going out to San Francisco to busk,” Ophelia said. “I can’t imagine doing that.”
“Well,” Fran said, “I won’t ever do it, but I think I can imagine it okay.”
When they got up to the house, deer were grazing on the green lawn. The living tree and the dead were touched with the last of the daylight. Chinese lanterns hung in rows from the rafters of the porch.
“You need to come at the house from between the trees,” Fran said. “Right on the path. Otherwise, you don’t get nowhere near it. And I don’t ever use but the back door.”
She knocked at the back door. BE BOLD, BE BOLD. “It’s me again,” she said. “And Ophelia. The one who left the iPod.”
She saw Ophelia open her mouth and went on hastily, “Don’t. They don’t like it when you thank them. It’s poison to them. Come on in. Mi casa es su casa. I’ll give you the grand tour.”
They stepped over the threshold, Fran first.
“There’s the pump room out back where I do the wash,” she said. “There’s a big ole stone oven for baking in, and a pig pit, though why I don’t know. They don’t eat meat. But you prob’ly don’t care about that.”
“What’s in this room?” Ophelia said.
“Hunh,” Fran said. “Well, first, it’s a lot of junk. They just like to accumulate junk. Way back in there, though, is what I expect is a queen.”
“A queen?”
“Well, that’s what I call her. You know how in a beehive, way down in the combs, you have the queen and all the worker bees attend on her?
“Far as I can tell, that’s what’s in there. She’s real big and not real pretty, and they are always running in and out of there with food for her. I don’t think she’s teetotally growed up yet. For a while now I’ve been thinking on what Ma said, about how maybe these summer people got sent off. Bees do that, too, right? Go off and make a new hive when there are too many queens?”
“I think so,” Ophelia said.
“The queen’s where my daddy gets his liquor, and she don’t bother him none. They have some kind of still set up in there, and every once in a while when he ain’t feeling too religious, he goes in and skims off a little bitty bit. It’s awful sweet stuff.”
“Are they, uh, are they listening to us right now?”
In response came a series of clicks from the War Room.
Ophelia jumped. “What’s that?” she said.
“Remember I told you ’bout the reenactor stuff?” Fran said. “Don’t get spooked. It’s pretty cool.”
She gave Ophelia a little push into the War Room.
Of all the rooms in the house, this one was Fran’s favorite, even if they dive-bombed her sometimes with the airships, or fired off the cannons without much thought for where she was standing. The walls were beaten tin and copper, scrap metal held down with twopenny nails. Molded forms lay on the floor representing scaled-down mountains, forests, and plains where miniature armies fought desperate battles. There was a kiddy pool over by the big picture window with a machine in it that made waves. There were little ships and submersibles, and occasionally one of the ships sank, and bodies would go floating over to the edges. There was a sea serpent made of tubing and metal rings that swam endlessly in a circle. There was a sluggish river, too, closer to the door, that ran red and stank and stained the banks. The summer people were always setting up miniature bridges over it, then blowing the bridges up.
Overhead were the fantastic shapes of the dirigibles, and the dragons that were hung on string and swam perpetually through the air above your head. There was a misty globe, too, suspended in some way that Fran could not figure, and lit by some unknown source. It stayed up near the painted ceiling for days at a time and then sunk down behind the plastic sea according to some schedule of the summer people’s.
“I went to a house once,” Ophelia said. “Some friend of my father’s. An anesthesiologist? He had a train set down in his basement and it was crazy complicated. He would die if he saw this.”
“Over there is a queen, I think,” Fran said. “All surrounded by her knights. And here’s another one, much smaller. I wonder who won, in the end.”
“Maybe it’s not been fought yet,” Ophelia said. “Or maybe it’s being fought right now.”
“Could be,” Fran said. “I wish there was a book told you everything that went on. Come on. I’ll show you the room you can sleep in.”
They went up the stairs. BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BUT NOT TOO BOLD. The moss carpet on the second floor was already looking a little worse for wear. “Last week I spent a whole day scrubbing these boards on my hands and knees. So of course next thing they go and pile up a bunch of dirt and stuff. They won’t be the ones have to pitch in and clean it up.”
“I could help,” Ophelia said. “If you want.”
“I wasn’t asking for help. But if you offer, I’ll accept. The first door is the washroom,” Fran said. “Nothing queer about the toilet. I don’t know about the bathtub, though. Never felt the need to