Bliss (20 page)

Ty slapped Lily lightly on the shoulder. “Don't worry,
Tía
Lily.” He laughed. “We're hip to the lingo vis-à-vis the fists and flames and songs and stuff.”

“What on God's sweet earth is a
trouble boiler
?” Sage demanded, cocking his head to the side and tossing his arms stiffly in the air.

Aunt Lily stood straight, pointing out her toes as if she were a ballerina. “
That
,” she announced, “is where having a magical baker for an aunt comes in handy! I know exactly what a trouble boiler is, and also how to use one. Fear not, young ones—we will be serving up this Back-to-Before Blackberry Torte in no time!”

Lily extended one of her hands into the air and then lowered it. Quickly, Ty and Sage gathered round and put their hands on top of Aunt Lily's like they were football teammates about surge onto the field.

“Rose?” Aunt Lily said, raising an eyebrow and motioning to their hands in the circle.

But something in Rose still wasn't sure that she wanted to place her hand on top of Aunt Lily's. She knew that she needed help, and Aunt Lily certainly did seem capable. But she had seen the glow on Aunt Lily's face when she looked at the Cookery Booke—it was the kind of glow that meant Aunt Lily would do anything to have the recipes for herself. And Rose knew this because she had felt the same desire before.

Ty and Sage, though, were oblivious.

“Come on, Rose,” Ty said, wrapping his free arm around her shoulders and pulling her in close. “We need you.”

Rose looked at Sage, who was waiting for her to place her hand on top of his as well. She didn't want to let them down—not now, when they needed her the most. She'd already failed her parents. There was no way she was going to fail her family.

“We can't do it without you, Rose. We need your talents,” Aunt Lily said.

This was the final nail. For the first time in her life, Rose felt pretty. And important. And powerful. She didn't want those feelings to end—not yet.

And so, despite her hesitations, Rose placed her stubby fingers on top of Aunt Lily's long and elegant ones.

As soon as she did, they all pumped their hands up and down. Aunt Lily said, “All for one—let's get this done!”

And they were off.

Lily sent Sage and Ty off to Poplar's for one hundred dozen eggs, fifty pounds of chocolate, and every blackberry in town. “We need enough for everyone!”

“How will we pay for it?” Ty asked.

Aunt Lily pondered a minute. “Tell them that you are rival grocers. They'll do the opposite of what they're supposed to, which is give their food away for free! Do you have anything that looks like what a grocery clerk would wear?”

Before Lily could finish, Ty was shouting, “I worked at a grocery store for three days once and I still have the uniform!” And he ran up to his room and came down wearing a green apron with a visor on it that said
PIGGLY WIGGLY
.

Lily giggled and said, “Go forth and conquer, men!”

Ty looked at the tiny red wagon. “It's going to take a lot of trips,” he muttered. Then he and Sage rolled down the driveway to the road, leaving Rose and Lily alone in the kitchen.

Rose had to admit it: There was something sweetly outrageous about Aunt Lily, how beautiful and in control she was, with just a slight hint of danger. Today Rose felt closer to her aunt than she ever had before. Maybe she needed a role model like Aunt Lily around all the time, someone to help her become fabulous and respected.

They could hear Mrs. Carlson desperately trying to calm Leigh in her room. “Devil spawn! Stop your yapping! Why won't you sleep!”

Rose and Aunt Lily looked at each other nervously.

“There's not much time,” Lily said. “We need to build a trouble boiler, stat. I have never built one, but I saw one used once, at a family reunion. It was a giant cauldron set inside an even larger cauldron filled with boiling water.”

“How giant?”

“Giant.”

Rose wandered into the backyard and looked around at the refuse that lay near the shed. An old metal rowboat. The freshly torn trampoline. A huge metal satellite dish that had gotten fried in an electrical storm, which Albert had never had the heart to throw away.

After a minute, it all clicked. “I know!” said Rose.

What followed was this: Rose and Aunt Lily set to work rigging the biggest trouble boiler that had ever been rigged. They pulled the broken skin from the trampoline and made a fire underneath the frame, using some logs and old newspaper. They washed out the old metal rowboat and set it on top, and they filled it with water. And then they washed out the huge broken satellite dish that Albert had ordered and set that afloat on the water in the rowboat.

Aunt Lily patted Rose on the back. “As they say in England, Rose—brilliant.”

All the dark suspicions that Rose harbored about Aunt Lily this past week dissolved in the light of her praise.

Eventually, the boys pulled into the driveway with their last wagonload filled with eggs and chocolate and blackberries. Sage got to work dumping the pounds of chocolate into the satellite dish and cracking hundreds of eggs. Aunt Lily controlled the head on the fire, and Ty and Sage alternated stirring with one of the old oars from the rowboat. Rose mostly just watched as little sparks from the fire crackled up into the dark of the warm night sky. Trouble boilers were one thing, but she and her brothers baking together, laughing together, on a Thursday night in July? Now
that
was magic.

After all the ingredients had been combined and Rose had stuffed the enormous mound of eggshells into a garbage bag, it was time to pull out the big guns.

“Let's go get that dwarf,” Rose said.

Rose turned the rolling-pin handle. The floorboards detached, and a musty stench rose up into the chill of the refrigerator.

“The dwarf is down there,” Rose said, leading Aunt Lily by the hand. When they were down in the chamber, Lily waved her flashlight past jars of earth, wind, and fire, flapping butterfly wings, and talking mushrooms.

Rose felt the wet mist from the grate lap at her ankles.

Lily must have felt it too, because she stepped in the direction of the grate and knelt in front of it. Rose couldn't hear it saying anything, but then again, when the thing beneath the house spoke to her, it hadn't really made a sound.

Aunt Lily scrambled away a moment later and looked gravely at Rose.

“Are you all right?” Rose asked.

“Sure. It's just a little cold in here.” Lily turned her attention to the collection of jars on the walls, each of which glowed a little brighter as she passed. She approached a jar with a giant dragonfly inside labeled
FLIGHT
. The dragonfly cowered at the back of its jar as she passed. “This is quite the impressive collection. Not all magic is wands and spells and potions, you know. Some of it—the best kind, I think—is much subtler. Like this.”

Rose was elated by what Aunt Lily said. She'd put into words exactly what Rose felt. Her parents never talked about magic at all; they just did it. But maybe Aunt Lily was right: Maybe it
was
selfish of Rose's parents to keep the Cookery Booke locked away in a tiny bakery in a tiny town. What good could it do here? Maybe there was magic that needed to be done beyond Calamity Falls—subtle magic, gentle magic—that could make the world a better place.

And maybe Rose could be the one to work that magic.

Aunt Lily let the flashlight settle on the jar where the Dwarf of Perpetual Sleep sat inside, snoring. “
Look
at him! He's
gorgeous
!”

Rose wouldn't go so far as to call him gorgeous, but he certainly was interesting to look at. He wore a pointed green cap on his head, and fuzzy white hair exploded from beneath it like the head of a dandelion. Lily handed Rose the flashlight and gingerly took the jar from the shelf, cradling it in the crook of her arm like a newborn, then she tiptoed up the stairs, whispering all the time to the jar, “Don't worry, little one! No harm will come to you! My little dwarf! My wonderful little fellow!”

Lily set the jar on the chopping block and stared into it. “Have you ever seen anything so marvelous?”

Rose stared through the tinted blue glass of the mason jar at the withered old face of the dwarf. He was wearing a little coat made of brown felt and tan long johns. He was about the size of a Cabbage Patch Kids doll. His eyes were squeezed shut, yielding an explosion of crow's-feet at the corners.

Rose held the jar while Lily slid her hands under the dwarf's armpits and gently lifted him out. The air inside the jar was stale, and it seeped from the jar and filled the kitchen. Lily sat him on the chopping block. He continued to snore, and, in his slumber, slowly leaned too far to the right and—
thwap!
—bonked his head on the chopping block.

That woke the dwarf right up.

He shook his head out and righted himself crankily, then raised his little arms in the air and yawned, revealing a spotted tongue and toothless old gums.

His breath was nearly impossible to describe. It was rank. It smelled like garbage and old fish and poop.

The Bliss children all gagged and backed away as far as they could as the putrid wind from the yawning dwarf filled the room. Rose pinched her nose as hard as she could until the smell died down.

When Rose managed to open her eyes again, she found the dwarf staring at her, arms crossed in front of his chest, one foot tapping. “I suppose you've woken me from my slumber because you need me to whisper a
secret
into some
batter
.”

“Yes…,” Rose admitted. He was a quick one, this dwarf.

“Which one?” he snarled.

Aunt Lily said, “The secret of time?”

The dwarf scratched his chin for a minute, thinking deeply. “The secret of time … the secret of time…” Then he snapped his head up and announced tragically, “I have forgotten the secret of time!”

Rose's heart sank. After all the work they'd done, to have their dreams of Blackberry Tortes dashed because of an old dwarf's faulty memory.

Then the dwarf snickered. “Ha! I had you! I'm kidding. Of
course
I know the secret of time. Puh-lease.”

“Oh, thank you, Dwarf of Perpetual Sleep!” cried Rose. Under normal circumstances she would have hugged him, but he smelled too foul to be approached.

“I have a name,” he said crossly. “Rude.”

“I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to be.”

“No, my
name
is Rude. Rude Dingherwurst.”

Rude spotted Aunt Lily staring lovingly at him from the corner. “I will whisper the secret of time if
she
,” he pointed at Lily, “will hold me over the batter.”

Aunt Lily bowed. “
Anything
for you, Mr. Dingherwurst.”

“If you drop me, you will have to marry me,” he said, snickering. “No, seriously.”

Lily laughed. “I just may drop you, then!” And she picked up the dwarf under his arms and strolled outside.

Rose and her brothers gathered around the steaming satellite dish, while Aunt Lily held Mr. Rude Dingherwurst over the molten chocolate.

“Ow!” he winced. “Steam in the face! A little farther away, darlin'!”

Aunt Lily moved him back a few inches.

“Ready?” Aunt Lily said. Rose could tell that she was trying to be as sweet as possible.

“Almost.” He coughed. “I'd love a foot rub first. And a shot of whiskey. Whatever you have is fine, although I'd prefer an audience with Mr. Johnny Walker.”

That was enough. Rose was not about to let the rudeness of Mr. Rude Dingherwurst spoil their whole operation. She couldn't flirt like Aunt Lily, but she could give him a piece of her mind.

Rose went up to the molten chocolate bowl and put her nose just one inch from Mr. Rude Dingherwurst's. “Pardon me, Mr. D. We are in some serious trouble right now. We're sorry we've interrupted your nap, but that's no reason at all to waste our time. If you're not going to help us, that's fine. Because I'd rather live in a town where everything is upside down than have to rub what I'm sure are your very, very smelly feet.” Rose had always wanted to make a dramatic speech like that but never had occasion to before. “If you don't mind.”

Rude didn't say anything; he just grumbled and turned back to the batter. Then he whispered something in a language Rose didn't understand.

Maireann croi eadrom I bhfad
.

Then he pulled his head back and said, “There. Now may I go back to sleep, please?”

His whisper hung in the air over the trouble boiler in a stream of bloodred mist that spilled over the chocolate and became like the two hands of a clock, seeming to stir the batter like paddles as they whirred counterclockwise. They turned and turned around within the satellite dish, whooshing and gurgling and ticking, like a clock made of goopy chocolate was being wound backward.

Around them, the world shivered and rippled, the air warping like melting plastic. Rose realized her breath was caught in her chest, and try as she might, she couldn't open her mouth—the moment of time seemed to stretch out and stretch out until she thought she'd suffocate if she couldn't breathe—when with a
snap!
it was over, and she took in a long, raggedy wet breath.

She gasped, “What happened?”

Sage and Ty both coughed. “Beats me,” Ty said.

And with that, Aunt Lily carried Mr. Rude Dingherwurst back to his jar and dunked him into the murky fluid (he winked as his head was submerged); then Rose set him on the shelf downstairs, but not before hearing the sinister voice from beneath the grate.

If you find the Tincture of Venus unappealing
, it said,
just clutch the apron strings of your aunt Lily. She knows the ways to fame and fortune and glamour beyond compare
.

Rose shivered and rushed back upstairs, sensing that the thing beneath the house somehow knew more than it was saying. Maybe Rose would return later and ask it what to do. But before she could do that, there were Blackberry Tortes to bake.