Wood Sprites

33: Fortress Of Evil

“I feel like I’m trapped in Dracula’s castle.” Jillian sprawled in the loft bed, high above the bedroom floor. They’d been living at the mansion for ten days now, held by Louise’s promise to Aunt Kitty.

Although they bought the black dresses, in the end Anna refused to let them attend the funeral. She thought it would be too much for the twins to bear, and Louise was starting to wonder if Anna was right. Every time she fell asleep, she had vivid nightmares. Jillian rarely left the bed and had slept almost endlessly. Louise was worried that something might be wrong with her twin. Even Joy sensed that Jillian was somehow broken and kept her constant company.

“It seems more like Frankenstein’s castle than Dracula’s.” Louise paced the room full of steampunk furniture that could easily pass as the set to the legendary horror movie. The one filmed in black and white with Boris Karloff as the monster. The images were combining weirdly in her dreams: Edmond in a white lab coat, making little Anna-Bride monsters. Instead of two eyes, the miniature Annas had only one in the center of their foreheads.

“This place is full of them!” Jillian meant the hidden elves. “Haven’t you noticed? All tall and pale and beautiful and sparkling.”

Louise had counted two dozen secret elves moving quietly through the mansion, all of them looking like Paris models. She found a spyglass on Esme’s crowded bookcases. She used it to furtively study the estate’s extensive grounds from the windows of Lain’s empty bedroom. Entire herds of elf gardeners took care of the pristine gardens while armed guards patrolled the shadows. She’d been making lists of names and habits. She hadn’t thought Jillian had noticed the elves; all of Louise’s careful spying missions had been alone. Nor had she thought it wise to actually tell her twin how outnumbered they were. It was comforting, though, to know that Jillian wasn’t being as completely oblivious to her surroundings as she seemed. “I don’t think Dracula sparkled.”

“Ming does.”

After thinking of the male as Ming the Merciless for so long, it was nearly impossible to refer to him as “Edmond,” especially knowing that wasn’t his real name either.

Jillian rolled to peer down over the edge of the loft bed. “What does Anna see in him?”

Louise had been wondering herself. At breakfast, there was never a hint of warmth between the two. “I’m not sure if she loves him, or if she only likes that he gives her everything she wants. She likes being rich. Think about it: she comes to the breakfast table all made up even when she’s not going out. Mom always said she was a perfectionist. It’s like she defines her worth on being flawless. His money lets her be as perfect as she wants.”

“But what does he get out of it? She’s old, and he’s got all these beautiful secret elves.”

“He married her to make her loyal. He let her have his children so they would have common bonds. But I think that’s also why he won’t let Tristan stay here — she stops thinking about ‘the family’ as some nebulous whole and starts to think of only Tristan as an individual.”

“Why would it matter?”

“Because what Tristan wants isn’t the same as his father. Not deep down inside.”

Jillian retreated, and silence came from overhead for a long time.

They needed to come up with a plan to get them out of this mess. At first Louise didn’t ask Jillian what she thought they should do, because Louise had promised Aunt Kitty that they would be good. It was becoming obvious that Aunt Kitty wasn’t going to win custody of the twins. A small mountain of belongings arrived from their house without a promised visit. Jillian crumbled into a crying heap within minutes, leaving Louise to deal with the painful treasures.

Someday Louise would want it all; every little fragment of her parents that she could cling to. Each box, though, was filled with almost too much pain for her to bear. Even their toys were unexpected landmines of hurt. She culled out the things they could not live without — all their various printers, the tools they’d adapted to spell-casting, and their video-production equipment. The rest she stacked into the back of the bedroom’s big walk-in closet. She would deal with it later. Somehow.

She had to stay focused on what was important: protecting Joy and the babies.

She’d been sure Jillian would have a plan; asking would only start them barreling toward breaking her vow. Now she was afraid that Jillian didn’t have a plan.

They had to do something. Joy had plowed through the food that Louise had stolen from the kitchen, and it was nearly gone. Every time that Louise had tried to bring food back from breakfast or lunch, Anna caught her. Sooner or later, hunger would drive Joy out into the open.

Humans might believe that Joy was some kind of exotic lizard. Even if humans understood what Joy truly was, they probably wouldn’t be able to hurt the baby dragon. At least, not while she had access to magic. But Edmond was an elf. He might be the very person that had trapped Joy in the nactka. Of all the treasures found on Earth, the only one that Yves truly wanted was the box with the eleven other baby dragons. What had the secret elves planned to do with them?

And what would Edmond do to Nikola? Louise was fairly sure her parents wouldn’t have believed that Nikola was a magical merger between the babies and the nanny robot. They would have insisted that they dispose of the embryos as a biohazard in one of their maddening “we know what’s best because we’re adults” moves. It was the main reason that the twins had kept him secret. Edmond would probably believe Nikola existed, but then what? Would he care? Would he see the embryos as biological waste or, worse, something to use to his advantage? He’d done something to Anna’s unborn daughters, Louise was sure of that, although she couldn’t prove it.

And what had happened to their older sister?

Had April’s cousin warned Alexander before the secret elves figured out that she used the name Tinker? Had the NSA secretly escorted her out of Pittsburgh during the last Shutdown? Was Alexander already enrolled in some kind of witness-protection program here on Earth? Or had the secret elves captured her and given her to “that idiot cat” which had killed the other scientists?

Louise shuddered at the thought. The next Shutdown was in two days. If they left in a few hours, they could get to Monroeville in time to sneak across the border while Pittsburgh was on Earth. Somehow. They could find Alexander or hide with Orville. Maybe. But if Alexander had been kidnapped and brought to Earth, the twins would be the only ones who had any hope of finding and saving her.

The only positive note in their life was that their video had influenced enough people that the UN vote was blocked long enough to render it moot. The world was holding its breath, waiting to find out if Windwolf had survived the attack, instead of blindly accepting that he’d been killed. If the viceroy had been killed, how could they hope to stop Ming again with a video?

There was no one the twins could turn to without endangering the person. They were all alone in this Fortress of Evil. The babies. Alexander. Windwolf. Elfhome. The sheer magnitude of responsibilities overwhelmed Louise.

“Jilly, what do we do?”

“I don’t know.” Jillian seemed too small, too young to be her twin. Somehow during the last few days, she’d become so much less than her real self. “Do you think they had anything to do with Mom and Dad’s accident?”

“I don’t think so,” Louise said with more confidence than she felt. The accident had been splashed across all the newsfeeds; a dozen people had been killed when a tractor-trailer truck had plowed through downtown traffic. The driver had been drunk and asleep in the back of the cab when the auto-drive failed. The truck had plowed through a crowded crosswalk before striking her parents’ car on the driver’s side, pushing it into the path of an oncoming bus. “If Anna killed someone, it would be neat and clean, like laser surgery. She wouldn’t be that messy.” She shuddered, thinking of the one victim that had been wedged up under the truck’s undercarriage and only discovered hours later. “Edmond might go for wholesale slaughter, but he sent his own son away so Anna wouldn’t be distracted.”

Despite all that, she had a small niggle of doubt. Jillian, though, wasn’t strong enough to hear anything else. Not now.

Louise wondered if Edmond would send them away, too, if they were a big enough distraction. A shiver went down her spine. No, that had “would not end well” written all over it. On the heels of the fear came a wash of anger. She was braver than this, wasn’t she? Yet the idea of having to do another pantry raid terrified her. She hated the fact that now that she knew what evil the house held, she didn’t want to leave their room by herself.

She felt safe in the bedroom. Esme had planned for them to search out April. She’d guessed that they would be entangled with Edmond and Anna. Louise was sure that Esme had known that they’d end up in her room. Surely she’d left them something; breadcrumbs to follow while lost in this dark place.

The problem was that the room was stuffed to the brim with Esme’s childhood. The bookcases alone spanned thirty feet of the bedroom, floor to twenty-foot-high ceiling. Esme apparently deemed them sacred, as the cherry built-ins were the only furniture in the room that hadn’t been spray-painted black. The ladder connected to a rail via a wheel mechanism that let it glide back and forth the entire length of the bookcase. When the twins first arrived it had been pushed to the far end, and there it had stayed.

Every morning, while they were at breakfast, a team of maids descended on the room to clean. The dust vanished like entropy in reverse. Despite the bric-a-brac, all the lower shelves had been carefully dusted.

The bookcases held everything from obviously beloved picture books like Harold and the Purple Crayon to all fourteen of the Oz books to high school textbooks. (Esme must have left home to go to college and never come back, for there was no sign of anything past the age of eighteen.) On low shelves there were worn toys and on a shelf only reachable by the ladder were seemingly new and apparently unwanted toys. Between the two were random machine parts, interesting rocks, a scattering of seashells, and an animal skull or two. Esme had to have been one odd kid.

Louise paced the length of the bookcases, studying them. Thousands of hiding places, yes, but Esme would have known that the bookcases would be systematically cleaned by the maids the moment her children arrived. Louise pulled out a worn paperback version of Escape to Witch Mountain and flipped through it. Nothing was written on the blank inside covers. There was no scrap of paper tucked between the pages. No, Esme wouldn’t have trusted something so easily found. She would want something like the box she’d left with April, a puzzle to be solved before unlocking its secrets.

Louise slowly turned, studying the entire room. To hide something you wanted found but only by your clever children and no one else. It would be something that would draw the curious person to it, but defeat anyone not smart enough to figure it out. Her gaze fell on the princess vanity that had been spray-painted black and remodeled with an old video screen and dozens of antique knobs and switches into a steampunk spaceship console. She’d tried a few of the controls and nothing seemed to happen, so she’d assumed that they were simply for display. What if Esme had made the controls functional? They could require a combination of settings to get results.

Louise sat down at the vanity and considered all the dials, knobs, buttons, and switches. The number of combinations was daunting. She memorized the initial settings of all the controls. Cautiously, she started to experiment.

There were three banks of controls. A set of simple on-off switches across the top monitor frame activated a Jacob’s Ladder, a hidden mirror-ball light, three of the airships suspended from the ceiling, and finally the monitor itself. There was a webcam built into the frame so that the monitor essentially acted as the vanity’s “mirror.”

The webcam suggested that there was a computer linked to the monitor. The rightmost set of controls was a number keypad from some vintage machine and beside it the keys from a manual typewriter labeled A through F. At a glance they would seem like two separate sets of controls, but a dull black line had been painted around them. It was nearly invisible, but it definitely paired up the keys. They combined to form a hexadecimal keypad. Progress, but it just made the possible combinations go astronomical.

The third set of controls was on the left and was a toggle control and two buttons that Louise guessed to be a stand-in for a mouse.

Assuming that the computer had booted up after so many years of being idle, what was the password to unlock Esme’s secrets?

If Esme thought that Alexander might end up stuck here, then maybe she’d keyed the password to her.

Louise used the hexadecimal keypad to type in “Alexander.”

The monitor flickered, and Esme gazed steadfastly at Louise. Judging by the background, the footage had been filmed with Esme sitting at the vanity. Esme looked too old, however, for the video to be something recorded while she lived in the room. Her hair was cut short and dyed purple, exactly how it was just before she left Earth. Esme looked worriedly into the camera, yet it seemed as though she were looking beyond the lens and seeing Louise.

“Hi, kiddo. I really hope you’re not watching this, but if you are, I’m so sorry this is how this all turned out. I’m recording this on what will be my last time in this house. I just. .” She paused and glanced over her shoulder, as if she realized that she might be overheard. “I just put my affairs in order. In Manhattan.” She meant having the embryos created that would be Alexander, Jillian, Louise, and Nikola. “Tomorrow I go back to China, and in a few months I’ll pass through the orbital gate and leave Earth forever.

“On Elfhome, my dreams are so clear and sure. Here, I have dreams but also nightmares, and sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which. I don’t know if it’s because the magic here is screwy, as if leaking through the cracks in reality messed it up, or what. I just woke up from a doozy that I really hope is just a nightmare. You need to get out of this house. Get as far away as possible. Now. Before it’s too late. In my dream, he found you when you were much too young. Too small. Too helpless.”

Tears filled Esme’s eyes. “God, I wish I could stay now. I know I’ve never laid eyes on you, but I do love you. I’ve seen reflections of you in my dreams; heard the echoes of your laughter. But I have to go and do what I need to do.” Esme pressed her hand to the glass. “Oh, baby, I hope you never see this. You need to find a way out of here and go. Quickly. Be safe.”

Esme had dreamed of them. She’d known that they were going to be here.

Louise stared at the screen, barely able to breathe. She was seeing the future. Her dreams had started when they got the magic generator and had gotten stranger since coming to the mansion.

“That’s it?” Jillian cried when Louise replayed the video for her. Jillian dropped her pitch to parrot Esme. “I have to go and do what I need to do. And do what? Go to a colony a zillion million miles away? What so freaking important about that?”

“I don’t know.” Louise studied the image closely. “She’s afraid that this recording might be found, so she’s trying to be as careful as possible. If Ming had found this, there’s not much to lead him to us or betray anything else she’s trying to keep secret.”

Now that Louise examined the video carefully, she noticed that the angle was off. Instead of showing the middle of the bookcase, it was showing the far end and one corner of the false window looking out at the fantasy Paris landscape. Esme sat off-center, so that the window’s edge dominated the screen.

Had Esme hidden something in the window frame? Louise walked across the room to examine the window. The mural had been painted on a panel that was inset into the wall. The trim covered the seam, but as she peered closely, she could tell that there was a small gap on all four sides.

“I think this is a door,” Louise whispered. She gave it an experimental push, but nothing happened.

Joy bounded over and phased through the mural. Louise pressed her hand against the painted wood. It was solid. No wonder they couldn’t keep Joy trapped anywhere; she could walk through walls!

The baby dragon bounced back through the solid panel a moment later. She had clutched in her hands a foil-wrapped packet. “It says cookie! Is it food?”

Jillian took the packet and squinted at it. “Peach cookie crumble? It’s freeze-dried emergency food. Oh, I think it’s expired. Shelf life is only seven years, and Esme left eighteen years ago.”

“Open it!” Joy clapped her tiny hands together. “I’m so hungry! Gimme! Gimme! Nom, nom, nom!”

Jillian gave Louise a questioning look. Louise wasn’t sure when she got to be the one that decided everything. Had it always been this way and she hadn’t noticed before? She shrugged.

“I think it should be okay. I think when it’s freeze-dried that shelf life means that it’s still at the same nutrient level.”

“I can check.” Nikola sounded eager to help. The last few days had been hard on him.

“Yes, could you?” Louise searched the mural for how the door opened as Jillian dealt with the hungry baby dragon. “There must be some kind of room behind this panel. Esme wanted us to find it. She must have left some kind of clue as to how to open it.”

“You’re right, Lou,” Nikola said. “The food loses its nutrient value after it expires, but it continues to be eatable in an emergency as long as it’s stored correctly and the package isn’t compromised.”

“Wait!” Jillian cried as she tried to keep the packet out of Joy’s reach. “It needs water.”

There didn’t seem to be any type of keyhole. It was possible that the lock was operated from a switch hidden elsewhere. Louise scanned the room. If she were going to hide a switch or a key, where would she put it? She wouldn’t use anything like a light switch. With the mansion’s cleaning staff poking around, someone was sure to notice it eventually. Certainly she could understand not putting in a straightforward lock — a keyhole invited lockpicks.

Actually a magnetic lock would make sense. Esme could keep the key with her and yet the lock would stay hidden from search. Unfortunately, Joy wouldn’t be able to open a magnetically locked door from the other side. Esme created the secret room when she remodeled her bedroom. Esme would have hidden the card somewhere in the room before leaving Earth. She knew that they were going to be trapped here.

“Oh, you little monkey!” Jillian cried as Joy shoved fistfuls of the now wet dessert into her mouth. “You better wash your hands before getting into our bed!”

“Mish nummy.” Joy looked like a squirrel, her cheeks puffed out with food.

“Wish I could eat,” Nikola said wistfully. “It looks fun.”

“You’ll be able to eat after you’re born.” Jillian patted Nikola on the head. “You just have to be patient.”

Okay, so maybe Esme hadn’t known they were going to be there. She had obviously been expecting one kid, not twin girls and four unborn children inside a robotic dog. Apparently she’d thought Alexander would be her only child.

Where would she hide something for Alexander? The room presented a mind-bogglingly large number of hiding places.

“You’re about to leave Earth.” Louise slowly turned in circle, scanning the room. “You’re never coming back. You’re only here because you want to keep up appearances; you don’t want your evil stepfather to guess you have some grand scheme. It’s natural to say good-bye to your mother, so you’re here, saying good-bye. But then you have a glimpse of the future — your daughter is going to be dragged to this mansion and locked up by the man you fear the most.”

“We’re not locked up.”

Yet, Louise thought but didn’t say. “Your ace in the hole is a secret room that you’ve stocked with food and God knows what. Where do you hide the key?”

Jillian snorted as she attempted to keep Joy from stuffing all the food into her mouth. “Chew first! Nobody is going to take the rest.” Once Joy actually paused to chew, Jillian glanced around the room. “Considering Esme’s ‘clues’ so far, it’s not going to be anywhere sane. I say we just forget about finding it and pick the lock.”

There was the possibility that Esme would have made the hiding place too obscure, going on some weird trust that they’d be able to figure out the clues in time.

Jillian continued, “If I was going to leave a key for a kid I’d never met but was fairly sure they were going to be smart, I’d put it someplace famous. Someplace literary. I’d put it in a bottle labeled ‘drink me’ like Alice in Wonderland. Or inside a seaman’s chest, like Treasure Island.” Jillian pointed at the steamer trunk that served as a dresser.

They searched the trunk while trying to think of other famous hiding spots.

“This is Esme. It’s not going to be obvious,” Louise said once they had pulled out drawers and checked the lining. “Still, she was under a time restraint. She couldn’t get too elaborate and still expect us to find it.”

“April, Tim Bell, and Lain all were on Elfhome, so she couldn’t give anything to them,” Jillian said.

“She didn’t trust her mother or Ming or anyone that we know of.”

The only clue she seemed to have left regarding the secret door was the video, which showed the mural. Louise went back to examine it closely again. Obviously the mural had been painted ages prior to Esme filming her warning, so whatever clue she would have left would have been added. The mural was a busy landscape of a Paris that never existed. Odd steam machines labored through a Victorian-period city landscape while great airships drifted overhead.

Was there anything added? Louise peered at all the tiny little details. The little windows of the houses. The storefronts. The people in Victorian dress.

“The Dahe Hao.” She read the name written on the gondola of one of the airships. “That was Esme’s spaceship, wasn’t it?”

Louise frowned at the mural for a minute, thinking. “Let’s go with the assumption that this is one of Esme’s stupid clues. She realized that we were going to be here and would need to get through this door. She shifted the vanity so the door would be in the video she left and then she wrote this name here. She couldn’t have written it when she was a teenager because she wouldn’t have known it was the name of her ship.” Scratch that if Esme was a precog; magic skewed the normal odds. “Probably didn’t know.”

“The models!” Jillian cried. “I bet it’s one of the airship models.”

They looked up at the models hung from the twenty-foot ceiling.

“Oh, she has to be nuts,” Louise murmured.

“How would she even get up to them without everyone in the mansion knowing?”

“She’s an astronaut. She has to be smart.”

“And how are we going to get it down?”

Louise studied the models. “Same way.” She pointed to the one that most closely matched the Dahe Hao in the mural. It nearly touched the bookcases. “She used the library ladder.”

The twins rolled the ladder to under the model airship, and Louise climbed up to the top. The maids hadn’t started on the top shelves yet; they were thick with dust. There was one faint smudge in the dust, as if someone had put out their hand to balance themselves after a first layer of dust had settled. Had it been Esme? Or someone searching for the key?

Louise turned to study the nearest airship model that was still two feet from the bookcase. Like most of the room, the airship was steampunk in design, a cobbling of improbable and might-have-been. A brightly striped balloon held up a wooden pirate ship complete with five small bronze cannons. It had been crafted with amazing detail. The balloon was stiffened so it looked plump with hydrogen. Hemp ropes like sailing ships’ rigging wove a net around it and fastened it to the wooden hull with dozens of miniature knots. Tiny sandbags and an anchor dangled over the sides. Instead of a wooden rudder there was a massive airplane prop. The original name had been scratched off the bow and “Dahe Hao” had been printed in its place with a Sharpie.

If this was indeed where Esme hidden the key, she’d done a good job for something seemingly spur of the moment. Louise couldn’t see anything resembling a key on the ship.

“Well?” Jillian had lost patience. She stood with her hand on the ladder like her curiosity was going to overwhelm her common sense.

“It’s well hidden, but I’m sure this is it.” Louise couldn’t shake that feeling even as she stared at the model. Since they couldn’t find a keyhole, she was fairly positive that the key had to be to a magnetic lock. How well hidden it was depended on when Esme started to use the airship as a hiding spot. Had she originally carried the card with her or kept it stashed someplace lower? No, that would be too dangerous. Esme had no more privacy than they did. The model was a perfect long-term storage area. The location wasn’t improvised, but the clues pointing to it were.

So there was probably a hidden trigger or switch that opened up the airship. There were all the little sandbags and such dangling from the side, but pulling on one seemed risky. It would be too easy to pull the entire model down. So a switch or a knob. The five cannons seemed the most obvious choice. Of course if she was wrong, she might be snapping off delicate pieces. It occurred to Louise that as far as Esme knew, there were five children in her family, thus the nicknames for the flying monkeys. Esme was number three or the middle cannon.

Louise carefully twisted the center barrel. It turned easily. There was a small click and the floor of the quarterdeck flipped up, revealing a small compartment built into the stern of the ship. Inside was a key card.

The method to Esme’s madness was revealed in the secret room beyond the door. By covering the windows and creating the framed steampunk cityscapes, she’d been able to disguise the fact that she had actually created a fake wall four feet out from the real wall. It created a long, tall, narrow treasure room stuffed full of things that Esme wanted to keep hidden from Edmond and his staff. Louise couldn’t imagine, however, how Esme had managed to get everything past the elves unnoticed. There was a huge supply of freeze-dried food, both in packets like Joy had carried out and in large cans.

“Food?” Joy danced on the shelf in front of the large cans.

Jillian picked up one. “Turkey tetrazzini. Yes, it’s food. Twenty-five-year shelf life — and it’s still good. Makes ten one-cup servings. It’s a lot of food. Diced turkey, asparagus, and gourmet pasta noodles in a flavorful sauce. I wonder what kind of sauce is tetrazzini.”

“Is it yummy?”

“I’m not sure.” Jillian sorted through the cans. “There might be something more familiar. Spaghetti with meat and sauce. Chicken teriyaki with rice. Blueberry cheesecake.”

Joy squealed, making them all wince. “Cake! Cake! Cake!”

Louise laughed, suddenly giddy with the sense of relief. Esme’s spirit was here in this secret room, strong and protective. They weren’t totally alone.