“You will. Be bold,” Fran said, and did her best to look cheerful. “Like the girls in those ballads. Will you bring me another glass of water afore you go?”
Ophelia went.
Fran lay on the couch, thinking about what Ophelia would see. From time to time, she raised a pair of curious-looking spyglasses—something much more useful than any bawbee—to her eyes. Through them she saw first the dirt track, which only seemed to dead-end. Were you to look again, you found your road crossing over the shallow crick once, twice, the one climbing the mountain, the drain running away and down. The meadow disappeared again into beds of laurel, then low trees hung with climbing roses, so that you ascended in drifts of pink and white. A stone wall, tumbled and ruined, and then the big house. The house, dry-stack stone, stained with age like the tumbledown wall;, two stories. A slate roof, a long covered porch, carved wooden shutters making all the eyes of the windows blind. Two apple trees, crabbed and old, one green and bearing fruit and the other bare and silver black. Ophelia found the mossy path between them that wound around to the back door with two words carved over the stone linteclass="underline" Be bold.
And this is what Fran saw Ophelia do: having knocked on the door, Ophelia hesitated for only a moment, and then she opened it. She called out, “Hello? Fran sent me. She’s ill. Hello?” No one answered.
So Ophelia took a breath and stepped over the threshold and into a dark, crowded hallway with a room on either side and a staircase in front of her. On the flagstone in front of her were carved the words: Be bold, be bold. Despite the invitation, Ophelia did not seem tempted to investigate either room, which Fran thought wise of her. The first test was a success. You might expect that through one door would be a living room, and you might expect that through the other door would be a kitchen, but you would be wrong. One was the Queen’s Room. The other was what Fran thought of as the War Room.
Fusty stacks of old magazines and catalogs and newspapers, old encyclopedias and gothic novels leaned against the walls of the hall, making such a narrow alley that even lickle, tiny Ophelia turned sideways to make her way. Dolls’ legs and old silverware sets and tennis trophies and mason jars and empty match boxes and false teeth and stranger things still poked out of paper bags and plastic carriers. You might expect that through the doors on either side of the hall there would be more crumbling piles and more odd jumbles, and you would be right. But there were other things, too. At the foot of the stairs was another piece of advice for guests like Ophelia, carved right into the first riser: Be bold, be bold, but not too bold.
The owners of the house had been at another one of their frolics, Fran saw. Someone had woven tinsel and ivy and peacock feathers through the banisters. Someone had thumbtacked cut silhouettes and Polaroids and tintypes and magazine pictures on the wall alongside the stairs, layers upon layers upon layers; hundreds and hundreds of eyes watching each time Ophelia set her foot down carefully on the next stair.
Perhaps Ophelia didn’t trust the stairs not to be rotted through. But the stairs were safe. Someone had always taken very good care of this house.
At the top of the stairs, the carpet underfoot was soft, almost spongy. Moss, Fran decided. They’ve redecorated again. That’s going to be the devil to clean up. Here and there were white and red mushrooms in pretty rings upon the moss. More bawbees, too, waiting for someone to come along and play with them. A dinosaur, only needing to be wound up, a plastic dime-store cowboy sitting on its shining shoulders. Up near the ceiling, two armored dirigibles, tethered to a light fixture by scarlet ribbons. The cannons on these zeppelins were in working order. They’d chased Fran down the hall more than once. Back home, she’d had to tweeze the tiny lead pellets out of her shin. Today, though, all were on their best behavior.
Ophelia passed one door, two doors, stopped at the third door. Above it, the final warning: BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BUT NOT TOO BOLD, LEST THAT THY HEART’S BLOOD RUN COLD. Ophelia put her hand on the doorknob, but didn’t try it. Not afeared, but no fool neither, Fran thought. They’ll be pleased. Or will they?
Ophelia knelt down to slide Fran’s envelope under the door. Something else happened, too: something slipped out of Ophelia’s pocket and landed on the carpet of moss.
Back down the hall, Ophelia stopped in front of the first door. She seemed to hear someone or something. Music, perhaps? A voice calling her name? An invitation? Fran’s poor, sore heart was filled with delight. They liked her! Well, of course they did. Who wouldn’t like Ophelia?
She made her way down the stairs, through the towers of clutter and junk. Back onto the porch, where she sat on the porch swing, but didn’t swing. She seemed to be keeping one eye on the house and the other on the little rock garden out back, which ran up against the mountain right quick. There was even a waterfall, and Fran hoped Ophelia appreciated it. There’d never been no such thing before. This one was all for her, all for Ophelia, who opined that waterfalls are freaking beautiful.
Up on the porch, Ophelia’s head jerked around, as if she were afraid someone might be sneaking up the back. But there were only carpenter bees, bringing back their satchels of gold, and a woodpecker, drilling for grubs. There was a groundpig in the rumpled grass, and the more Ophelia set and stared, the more she and Fran both saw. A pair of fox kits napping under the laurel. A doe and a faun peeling bark runners off young trunks. Even a brown bear, still tufty with last winter’s fur, nosing along the high ridge above the house. Fran knew what Ophelia must be feeling. As if she were an interloper in some Eden. While Ophelia sat on the porch of that dangerous house, Fran curled inward on her couch, waves of heat pouring out of her. Her whole body shook so violently her teeth rattled. Her spyglasses fell to the floor. Maybe I am dying, Fran thought, and that is why Ophelia came here.
Fran, feverish, went in and out of sleep, always listening for the sound of Ophelia coming back down. Perhaps she’d made a mistake, and they wouldn’t send something to help. Perhaps they wouldn’t send Ophelia back at all. Ophelia, with her pretty singing voice, that shyness, that innate kindness. Her short hair, silvery blond. They liked things that were shiny. They were like magpies that way. In other ways, too.
But here was Ophelia, after all, her eyes enormous, her face lit up like Christmas. “Fran,” she said. “Fran, wake up. I went there. I was bold! Who lives there, Fran?”
“The summer people,” Fran said. “Did they give you anything for me?”
Ophelia set an object upon the counterpane. Like everything the summer people made, it was right pretty. A lipstick-sized vial of pearly glass, an enameled green snake clasped around it, its tail the stopper. Fran tugged at the tail, and the serpent uncoiled. A pole ran out the mouth of the bottle, and a silk rag unfurled. Embroidered upon it were the words drink me.
Ophelia watched this, her eyes glazed with too many marvels. “I sat and waited, and there were two fox kits! They came right up to the porch, and then went to the door and scratched at it until it opened. They trotted right inside and came out again. One came over to me then, with something in its jaw. It laid down that bottle right at my feet, and then they ran down the steps and into the woods. Fran, it was like a fairy tale.”
“Yes,” Fran said. She put her lips to the mouth of the vial and drank down what was in it. It tasted sour and hot, like bottled smoke. She coughed, then wiped her mouth and licked the back of her hand.
“I mean, people say something is like a fairy tale all the time,” Ophelia said. “And what they mean is somebody falls in love and gets married. But that house, those animals, it really is a fairy tale. Who are they? The summer people?”