Geek Fantasy Novel (21 page)

“Stop, stop,” Gert said, and sank to the floor.

“It’s over,” Chessie said, wrapping herself around her sister. “No more wishes.”

Chessie finally got to come to dinner that night. Ralph, Cecil, and Daphne were all overwhelmed to sit down to dinner with a bedraggled and humbled duchess who had most recently appeared to them as a blazing demigoddess. Gert and Gideon, in the throes of navigating a shameful history long repressed, found it hard to make even their usual polite conversation. Beatrice, evidently not hungry, sat and stared at her plate. It was, all in all, a very unpleasant affair.

Still, Ralph found a new somber camaraderie in the group. Gert and Gideon, if desolated, at least weren’t being insincere anymore. Gone, too, were Chessie’s dramatics; she carried herself like a normal middle-aged woman. Daphne and Cecil were tired and vulnerable rather than restless and impulsive. Ralph enjoyed the quiet dinner, or would have if it hadn’t been for Beatrice’s peculiarity.

She was still newly luminous, and Ralph found it hard to wrest his gaze away from her and toward his roast beef, bites of which kept missing his mouth and falling into his lap. But she also didn’t sit quite right in her chair anymore. He couldn’t place it; nothing was technically wrong, but the subtle details were off. It was as if she were sitting in a distant dining room chair
before a green screen and then edited in. She sank a little too far into her cushion, for example —

Beatrice noticed Ralph’s scrutiny and gave him one long wink.

Ralph leaned over a dish of whipped potatoes with mint sauce to whisper to her. “What’s going on?”

“I’m dead.”

Ralph almost spat out a mouthful of peas. “Sorry?”

“I’m dead. I’m a ghost. Here, watch.” She gracefully laid a fingertip on the back of Ralph’s hand — and passed right through it to the tablecloth.

She then pressed that same finger to her lips, asking for Ralph’s silence. Heart racing, he returned his focus to the roast beef.

After dinner, once the rest of the family had dragged themselves to bed, Ralph asked Beatrice to join him on a stroll through her wing.

“I died back at the end of Cecil’s wish,” she explained as they staggered their way along the swaying corridor. “And I’m in the Underworld.”

“The Underworld?”

“Yeah. It’s not too terrible, really.”

Ralph shook his head. “How does being dead feel?”

“I don’t know. You’d have to ask the real me. You’re talking to my phantom.”

“Oh!”

“I had no idea when I made my wish that I’d have my own ghost. It’s a nice perk, really.”

“Does Chessie know about this?” Ralph asked.

“Does she! She granted it. I wished to die, and I’ve been dead ever since, going about my wish the whole time you were helping Daphne.”

“You wished to
die?
Really?”

“Well, I wished to visit someone who was dead. My real mother, Annabelle, specifically. And apparently being dead was a prerequisite.” Beatrice wavered for a moment in Ralph’s vision, like a signal that had temporarily hit interference. “Ugh, I don’t know how long I can keep this up.”

“What do you mean?”

“I keep fading more and more. You saw me sink into the chair at dinner. I’m afraid … I’m afraid that the real me is in trouble. I’m losing her.”

“Are you sure?” Ralph asked. As he did, the spectral Beatrice stumbled, and when he tried to catch her, she passed through his arms and vanished.

Ralph knelt at the spot in the hallway where Beatrice had disappeared, staring stupidly into the stone floor. She was in need of aid; that was clear. He should go get help, whether from the Battersby parents or Cecil and Daphne. But could he really get them involved again? He had already risked their lives once, and they could have perished many times over back in the Snow Queen’s realm. No — it would be safest to enter the next wish alone.

He headed for the roof trapdoor, pausing every few steps to listen for Gert or Gideon. His guilt doubled as he realized that his parents must be worried sick. He had been intending to squirrel away a moment to contact them. But of course there was no reception at the top of a giant tree.

As he turned the corner, he bumped right into Chessie. She fixed Ralph with an inquisitive look. “Where do you think you’re going? And where’s Beatrice?”

“You granted her a wish,” Ralph said flatly.

Chessie nodded. “That was back in the heat of Cecil’s quest. I’m sure I wouldn’t have done it now, after that heartfelt reunion.”

“Were you going to tell Gert and Gideon?”

“I knew I would have to tell them once Beatrice’s phantom disintegrated. But surely you can understand if I’m reluctant to approach them.
Disintegrating phantom daughters are upsetting, and I’m already on shaky footing with them.”

“You promised — no more wishes.”

“Ralph, stop this prudishness. I have perfectly good reasons for granting it, reasons which I have no obligation to share with you. And you must remember that, once Beatrice’s wish is finished, you get one of your own. Surely you haven’t forgotten our bargain.”

“They’re right not to trust you.”

Chessie sighed. “If you’re going to be so tiresome, I’m heading off to bed.”

“Surely you can call this off somehow.”

Chessie dusted her hands. “That’s it. I’m through trying. I expected more of a sense of adventure, after all you’ve been through.”

“Will you come with me to help?” Ralph asked resignedly.

Chessie shook her head. “I’m pooped. It’s fully under control, I’m sure. The narrator has gotten the hang of things.”

Ralph glanced up at the trapdoor.

“I’m tired of telling you not to interfere, so I won’t,” Chessie said. “But I do ask that, if you get yourself killed, do it in the wish, rather than jumping off the wrong side of the castle. There are legal precedents for dying within a wish — it gets so much more complex if you perish on your way there.”

Ralph shook his head in confusion.

Chessie sighed and pointed to another spot on the ceiling. “You’re going the wrong way. Take the other trapdoor.”

“Ah,” Ralph said. “Thank you.”

What kind of narrator is this, you might wonder, who can’t prevent a lame-o geek — a kid who once read
1001 Ways to be Funny
in order to make more friends, who was once rejected from an Oz convention, who once attended a
Lord of the Rings
marathon dressed as a hobbit — from worming his way into the last wish?

Truth be told, I probably could have. But I didn’t see much of a need. Sure, I would have loved it if Cecil’s and Daphne’s wishes had been pure quest stories of the old variety. But that wasn’t how it worked out, and so be it. I figure, what will it matter if Ralph wanders through one more wish? I’ll be able to handle whatever he pulls.

BOOK IV:
BEATRICE’S WISH
THE UNDERWORLD

Beatrice died back in Chessie’s castle, when a ton of fairy-propelled stone shards fell on her.

Done.

BOOK V:
THE PRIVATE LIVES
OF NARRATORS

You might be surprised to learn that I was born on a partly cloudy day in March. There must have been a twinkle in the sun’s light, though, to mirror the twinkle in my mother’s eye as she held me, swaddled as I was —

Are you listening?

Fine. As you wish. Back we go.

BOOK IV:
BEATRICE’S WISH
THE UNDERWORLD

Forgive me if I skip some of the early events in Beatrice’s wish. Trust me, I’m not going to tell you what happened in the first months for the same reason I haven’t informed you of every snack and every poo. It’s simply not crucial.

The vital facts:

When Ralph hopped off the roof, he found himself back where he had finished Daphne’s quest, in the Melted North. His trek out took a long time. He passed by the cottage where Regina had once imprisoned Cecil, and there he fell into a wonderful story full of wolves and witches and animated glass monkeys.

Until he ran across a wily demon and died.

Why does it matter that the demon was wily? Did Ralph put up a fight? What are demons’ preferred methods of killing, and did the demon have a criminal history or a social worker who should have been working to prevent such an act? All good questions. For now, though, we’ve left Beatrice alone for far too long, and as she is my favorite character in this book, I’m keen to rejoin her.

Ralph ran across a wily demon and died.

Okay, fine, a brief sketch of the wily demon, since you may not care enough about my delightfully sullen Beatrice until we’ve settled exactly what happened to our “hero.” Here we go.

Note that I never wrote that he was killed by a wily demon, I wrote that he “ran across a wily demon and died.” This particular demon wasn’t suited to slaying, as he was only a couple of inches tall. He crawled into the back of Ralph’s shirt and proceeded to insult him, observing (rather aptly) that he was a classless, good-for-nothing brat. When the demon finally leaped out of his shirt, Ralph chased after him. The hunt for the imp took weeks, led him through a desert and around the inner rim of a volcano, finally culminating in a sojourn through the canopy of the speckled nimbus cloud forest.

At which point the demon mistakenly set off a trap laid centuries earlier by a now-extinct tribe, releasing a forty-ton walnut that brought down a dozen trees and squashed flat a nearby orphanage. Ralph was lucky enough (if we can attach the word “luck” to any part of this sorry episode) to have been knocked to one side and land in a giant spider’s web, where he was advanced on by the only web-spinning tarantula demigod ever believed to exist.

Don’t worry: Ralph will die in eight pages, but not yet. Considering the imp had just fallen over the tripwire that released the second walnut, which would have pulverized Ralph and the web-spinning tarantula demigod as well, the “disaster” that occurred next was actually an auspicious turn of events.

I don’t know if you have ever come across a melting frozen tower. Even if you have, you certainly haven’t witnessed an entire frozen continent melting. Once its tectonic core heats up, a massive tidal wave of water is released that washes out everything it comes across. Now, the melt of the continent happened a few months earlier and was initially contained in the Carp-Carpathian Mountain Bowl, but eventually it swept away the mountain range that contained the bowl, resulting in a tidal wave that spoiled the map, much like a toddler running amok with her daddy’s blue highlighter.

This tidal wave roared through the cloud forest precisely as the spider was advancing and the second walnut was rolling. The imp drowned, and though the spider survived
(n.b.:
arachnid demigods are highly buoyant), it was swept far away. Ralph would have soon been killed had he not been caught in the web, which the water’s force wrapped about him. His cocoon contained a nice-sized air pocket and floated, so Ralph bobbed through the world-flooding waters like a bath toy.

As reclining in a spider’s web was comfortable (particularly without the spider attached), he wasn’t sure he ever wanted to leave. Not being able to rid himself of the gruesome image of the walnut-flattened orphanage, he was convinced, perhaps accurately, that the world was cruel and not worth facing.

But eventually Ralph had mourned unknown children long enough and remembered that he still hadn’t found (and saved) the dead Beatrice. He struggled to pick open a hole in his web shell, strand by strand (spider silk
becomes much less cohesive when waterlogged), sat on top of his makeshift canoe, and looked around.

There wasn’t much of anything to see, as there was no dry land anywhere on the horizon (nor, though he couldn’t know it, anywhere at all). The sea was choppy and unending, its color gone gray for all the various rocks and swords that had been swept into it. Ralph munched the legs of a drowned beetle that had been trapped in the web (sure, eating a soggy insect is gross, but this was a survival situation) and wondered what to do.

At first, he tried paddling with his hand, but each time he leaned over the cocoon’s side it rolled, threatening to dump him into the iron sea. Not sure what fearsome creatures might be lurking beneath the surface, Ralph decided that dehydration was at least a more distant death than being eaten.

He spent a day reclining in his spiderweb canoe, gazing at the sun and wondering when someone would come along to rescue him, or at least set him on a course of some sort. He started thinking of how little he knew of what might happen, and how he wished the narrator in the catwalks would fill him in.

Filling him in would be a gross breach of storytelling rules.

What did happen was that a robed skeleton approached on a boat.

Its dirty gray bones were covered in a silk robe, which it held tightly closed in its elegant metacarpals. The boat was a flimsy thing that would have rolled in the waves had it not been passing magically through and between them, cutting a straight line through the chop. Ralph watched the skeleton’s approach with as much fear as his brain could muster, that emotion being recently much taxed.

The skeleton spoke. Skeletal voices are gender-nonspecific, and since Ralph couldn’t get a good look at its hip bones, he hadn’t a clue as to its sex.
Not that skeletons mate with any regularity, so gender is fairly moot even to them.

“You are Ralph?” it intoned. Ralph nodded.

“Are you aware that you are the last being alive in all the land?”

Ralph shook his head.

“You are. Are you willing to perform the duties required of you as said last being alive?”

Ralph shook his head.

“Are you willing to perform the duties required of you as said last being alive?”

Ralph shook his head.

“Are you willing to perform the duties required of you as said last being alive?”

Ralph nodded.

“Brilliant,” said the skeleton as it sat down on the edge of its boat, momentarily flailing its arm bones to maintain its balance. “It makes all of our lives so much easier when everyone’s assigned to a purgatory. Having someone not yet dead wandering around makes all the paperwork so much more difficult, all sorts of exemptions to file and such.”