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 sit in it.”
She opened the second door.
“Here’s where you sleep.”
It was a gorgeous room, all shades of orange and rust and gold and pink and tangerine. The walls were finished in leafy shapes and vines cut from all kinds of dresses and T-shirts and what have you. Fran’s ma had spent the better part of a year going through thrift stores, choosing clothes for their patterns and textures and colors. Gold-leaf snakes and fishes swam through the leaf shapes. When the sun came up in the morning, Fran remembered, it was almost blinding.
There was a crazy quilt on the bed, pink and gold. The bed itself was shaped like a swan. There was a willow chest at the foot of the bed to lay out your clothes on. The mattress was stuffed with the down of crow feathers. Fran had helped her mother shoot the crows and pluck their feathers. She thought they’d killed about a hundred.
“Wow,” Ophelia said. “I keep saying that. Wow, wow, wow.”
“I always thought it was like being stuck inside a bottle of orange Nehi,” Fran said. “But in a good way.”
“I like orange Nehi,” Ophelia said. “But this is like outer space.”
There was a stack of books on the table beside the bed. Like everything else in the room, all the books had been picked out for the colors on their jackets. Fran’s ma had told her how once the room had been another set of colors. Greens and blues, maybe? Willow and peacock and midnight colors? And who had brought the bits up for the room that time? Fran’s great-grandfather or someone even further along the family tree? Who had first begun to take care of the summer people? Her mother had doled out stories sparingly, and so Fran had only a piecemeal sort of history.
Hard to figure out what would please Ophelia to hear anyway, and what would trouble her. All of it seemed pleasing and troubling to Fran, in equal measure after so many years.
“The door you slipped my envelope under,” she said, finally. “You oughtn’t ever go in there.”
Ophelia looked interested. “Like Bluebeard,” she said.
Fran said, “It’s how they come and go. Even they don’t open that door very often, I guess.” She’d peeped through the keyhole once and seen a bloody river. She bet if you passed through that door, you weren’t likely to return.
“Can I ask you another stupid question?” Ophelia said. “Where are they right now?”
“They’re here,” Fran said. “Or out in the woods chasing nightjars. I told you I don’t see them much.”
“So how do they tell you what they need you to do?”
“They get in my head,” Fran said. “It’s hard to explain. They just get in there and poke at me. Like having a really bad itch or something that goes away when I do what they want me to.”
“Oh, Fran,” Ophelia said. “Maybe I don’t like your summer people as much as I thought I did.”
