Geek Fantasy Novel (3 page)

“You’re Cecil?” Ralph finally prompted.

“Yup. Mother and Father were busy, and I’m the only one of the kids allowed to drive. Well, I don’t actually have a license, but they don’t worry about stuff like that. They’ll pay the fine or whatever if I get caught. I’ve
got
to have the car because I work at a clothing shop in town — I don’t think we should be out of touch with the laboring people, you know? Mother was all intent on having us secluded for the summer — she’s big into ‘family’ — but I talked her into letting me have a car. She didn’t even bother to ask about the license part. She’s totally daft.”

“I’m Ralph,” Ralph said after a pause, before remembering this was already traveled ground.

“Mmm-hmm.”

“What’s this castle like?”

Cecil shrugged. “It’s a castle. I dunno. We’re not heading there, anyway.”

“We’re not?”

This reaction was surprising enough for Cecil to lower his sunglasses. “You don’t know? Why did you fly in today, then?”

“I don’t know. Why did I?”

“We’re going to a funeral. I wondered why you were wearing trainers.”

Ralph nodded knowledgably.

“Those,” Cecil explained, pointing to Ralph’s feet.

“Oh. Sneakers.”

“Have it your way.”

Ralph had never been to any funeral before, especially not a British one. He knew little of what to expect, and had no idea whatsoever who had died. Funerals didn’t seem like something one could ask curious questions about, though. So instead he stared out the window and let the blasts of reggae water his eyes.

“What do you do at the clothes store?” Ralph finally yelled.

“I work there. I’m an em-ploy-ee.”

“Yep. Just wondering what that involved.”

“Oh. I do stock. I put in lightbulbs, change the mannequins’ outfits, all that.”

“No way. That must be kinda fun.”

“It’s the
working life.
It’s not supposed to be
fun.”

“Okay.”

Then: “So back-to-school season is starting, right? And I’m in charge of getting the mannequins ready for it. I’ve got this stack of just-shipped clothes, and I’m heading to the front of the store. There are these round windows, and the mall is so crowded because it’s back-to-school, and I have to undress the mannequins in front of everyone.”

“Huh. Weird.”

“That’s not the end. I’ve got to get right behind this girl and unbutton her blouse from behind, button by button —”

“This is on a mannequin, right?”

“Yes, on a mannequin, are you following me?”

“Totally.”

“And so then I have to wedge the jeans off her hips. All the kids from school and their mums are watching from outside. So now I’ve got this naked plastic woman in front of me, in this crowded little window, and I have to dress her somehow.” Cecil shook his head ruefully and bopped his fingers on the steering wheel.

“You got it done?” Ralph prompted.

“Yeah. It was so embarrassing.”

“Well, it can’t have been too embarrassing, if you’re telling me and I just met you.”

Cecil grunted and pulled up short at a red light that, judging by all prior evidence, he would generally have run. “Who
are
you?”

“I’m your cousin. We met before. A long time ago. I was seven.”

“And you’re what, hanging out with us for the summer?”

“Yeah. I’m helping set up your network.” Ralph laughed through a clenched silence. “Just helping set up the network.” He paused, waiting for Cecil to say something. “It’s not too hard, really —”

“It’s a little weird, don’t you think, to say I’m lying about my story being embarrassing.”

“Oh! Sorry.”

“No, it’s totally fine — but it’s weird, too. It’s like, someone’s really putting himself out there when he tells you something, you know? You have to respect that.”

“Okay. It’s different in America, maybe.”

“No, it’s cool. We’re going to be friends no matter what.”

With that, Cecil pulled into a damp cemetery. He placed a finger over his lips, though he did nothing to quiet his music. They bumped along a muddy willow-hemmed road until they arrived at a somber crowd surrounding a casket. Cecil parked at the end of a line of cars, respectfully removed his two baseball caps, placed them over his heart, and opened the car door.

A bass-studded measure of
rump, rump, iza gonna thump ya rump
blasted over the gathered mourners. They turned to glare and took in not Cecil, who was protected from view by the vehicle, but Ralph, jet-lagged and puffy, jabbing at the radio in alarm as he simultaneously placed one ragged trainer/sneaker and then the other onto the wet grass.

He beamed an apology to the indignant funeralgoers and then joined Cecil in crossing the lawn to assemble behind the rest of their huddled family. Gert — so serene as to be almost motionless, silver hair piled high — reached a hand out and pressed Ralph’s shoulder in much the same way one tests whether a roast beef has gone cold. The touch was soon over, and when he smiled at her, Ralph saw Gert pat her powdery hair with a liver-spotted hand. He nodded solemnly, stared at the shining casket, and wished he had a tie around his neck and a comb in his back pocket.

If any event calls for silent reflection, a funeral surely does. Ralph did his best to think tragic thoughts.

It appeared that the corpse was a close friend of the Battersbys, since they lingered while the other attendees shot their regards and rushed back to their cars. Eventually Ralph; Gert; a man he assumed to be her husband, Gideon; and their three children were the only mourners left. Once the last guest’s car door slammed shut, Gert dropped all decorum and rested her arms on Ralph’s shoulders.

“Welcome. Sorry about the funeral. Terrible timing. We’re so glad to have you. Everybody, this is Ralph. We all remember Ralph. His parents are Mary and Steve Stevens, who weren’t invited.”

Everyone murmured a greeting except Cecil and the taller daughter, who kept her dark liquid gaze fixed on the shovelfuls of black earth being tossed on the coffin.

The smaller daughter, a frilly little girl whose role in life was evidently to counter her older sister’s gloom, took Ralph’s hand and patted it as she bent into a mini-curtsy.

“Hello, Daphne,” Ralph said. “We’ve never met, but your mother told me about you. I’m your cousin, Ralph. Have you heard of me?”

“I’m Daphne!” she said, quite as if he hadn’t spoken. “Pleased to meet you. The sad girl is my sister, Beatrice. You drove in with Cecil. Those are Daddy and Mummy. I’m seven.” Daphne leaned closer and sparkled. “Some lady Daddy used to know
died.
And that dead lady, she’s Beatrice’s
real mummy.”

Gert’s husband inserted himself between them. “I’m Gideon Battersby. Remember me?”

“Your parents are Americans, aren’t they?” Daphne asked, peering at Ralph from around her father and pronouncing “Americans” like “Martians.”

“Uncle Gideon. It’s been some time,” Ralph said. He tried to dredge up a memory of this stuffed eagle of a man, but came up short.

“I swear,” Gideon said. “You were only a boy when I last saw you, and now look! I’m sorry I haven’t been over to the States very regularly. I tend to travel to the Far East when I go anywhere. Have you ever been, I wonder?” It sounded like the beginning of a speech, and sure enough, the rest of the family inched away, leaving Ralph alone when he politely answered that he hadn’t.

Gert lifted six silver inches of stiletto heel from the muddy grass, only to see it stab back into the earth when she lowered her foot. “Ooh!” she exclaimed with a twitch, effectively shutting down Gideon’s blooming oration on Indonesian politics. “Let’s go home and warm up. We’ll have some hot chocolate.”

“Yay!” Daphne squealed, taking her father’s hand and clapping it.

The family processed toward the two remaining cars.

Gert and Gideon managed to fold themselves into their vehicle without ever disengaging from Daphne, who hung from them like an oversize pendant. Her dress, Ralph noted as the ruffled seams disappeared within, was all pink crinoline: a Valentine’s cookie.

“Love your sister’s funeral outfit,” Ralph said as he slid into the passenger seat. Cecil was already inside, and the reggae had started pounding its rump poetry again. Beatrice took the back, her chin cradled on her palm as she stared out the window. Her torso was fully in the seat, but her face was pressed against the door, as though she were split by equally strong urges to exist fully in the car and to dash herself on the road. In her mind, she was writing rhyming verse full of gray adjectives and deep feeling, in which every crow is called a raven.

“That princess costume?” Cecil asked. “She bought it from British Home Stores. At first Mother refused to allow it in the house, but Daphne wants to be a princess, and, well, that means Daphne gets to be a princess. She’s got a chip on her shoulder because a lot of her friends actually
are
princesses. It was all Mother and Father could do to rip her scepter away for the funeral.”

The tides of conversation would have called for Beatrice to speak next. But when Ralph glanced back, he caught her staring at the dingy shopping centers outside the window, her plain face impassive, her marble eyes shining
and impenetrable under the sheaves of hair that almost covered her face. Perhaps she was trying to think of a word to rhyme with “anguish.”

“So she wears pink frilly stuff all the time?” Ralph asked distractedly.

“Sleeps in it, too, except when Mother puts her foot down.”

“Well, that’s good,” Ralph said.

Beatrice snorted, her first social interaction for the day.

“Dad had a special room constructed for Beatrice in her wing,” Cecil continued mutedly, after swerving around a loping tractor. “It’s got all her books. She’s big into trilogies with yellowed pages. She’s a total dork. Aren’t you, Ugs?” Cecil glanced at her and turned up the music. “I think she really wants to
be
the characters she reads about.”

“Well, I guess that’s the point of it all,” Ralph said, out of dork solidarity.

Beatrice nodded, glared at her brother, and snorted a second time.

“Yeah, I guess so,” Cecil said, moving quickly from wounded sniff to impassioned rant as the little car chugged up a rise. “But I’m like, there are bigger issues out there, you know? Sure, yeah, she’s just seven” — Ralph surmised they were back to Daphne now — “but should we really be encouraging her to be all fake? There are real people suffering out there, who aren’t princesses worrying about snagging princes but working mums trying to buy formula for their sickly infants, and because we have money we can afford not to think about these things. It makes me so mad. She’s in a
princess costume,
and there are kids in, like, Bangladesh who don’t have any costumes! Don’t have any clothes at all, for that matter! I’m just trying to say that — oh, this is our vale, by the way.”

Their vale. The car finally crested the top of a sunny hill and began to putter across a bumpy bridge, which crossed a river into a radiant bowl of trees. Cecil sped up and zipped along the lane as it threaded between the
trunks. The uneven road threw the car’s occupants against the doors and, on especially big bumps, the roof.

“I take it ‘our vale’ is home?” Ralph asked.

“Yeah. It’s an island of sorts.” Cecil turned off the radio.

The lane bent to follow a shelf of rock, and from this new vantage point Ralph could see a skyscraper of a tree at the center, throwing its great leafy umbrella over the glade. To one side of its circumference, a castle had been offhandedly placed. The castle would have been monumental in any other context; next to the tree it was a mere cake decoration.

The titan’s leaves permitted little sunlight, so Cecil had to turn on his headlights as they approached the center of the vale. The old car grumbled through the dim quiet, the only sound of their passage the squeaks the car’s tires made on the gravel, the pawfalls of small fleeing mammals, and periodic sniffles that might have been produced either by the radiator or by Beatrice.

“You live
here?”
Ralph asked.

It was on Beatrice’s third snort of the day that they pulled into the driveway before the huge, crumbling castle. Cecil wedged his car between two matching Mercedes. Beatrice threw herself out of the hatchback, then Cecil and Ralph eased over the gearshift and followed her. By the time Ralph got to his feet, Beatrice and Cecil were almost at the front door. “Hey!” Ralph called. “Wait a sec. I need to get my bag.”

Cecil looked back, startled. “I’m sure there’s a footman on duty, or something.”

“That’s okay. I want to get it,” Ralph said.

Cecil stood paralyzed until Beatrice plucked his keys from his hand and hurled them at Ralph. They landed on the gravel a few paces away. “You’re staying in the gatehouse. Silver key,” Cecil called. The last Ralph saw of him
was a large finger silhouetted in a hallway window, pointing in the direction of the giant tree.

“Thanks!” Ralph yelled.

Ralph re-opened the hatchback. The tidy wheeze of the pneumatics was so like that of his parents’ little car that he suddenly missed them. But once he heaved his old duffel out of the back and heard it hit the pure white gravel of the driveway, once the movement of slinging it over his back made him look up and take in the oddly-shaped manor and the monumental tree and the vale around it, Ralph was charged by the adventure of his new situation. What was this side of the family about? Where did his own room lie? He would make this a grand adventure better than any MonoMyth had ever conceived.

Ralph’s duffel was heavy and unevenly stuffed; when he moved toward the tree, he staggered. His building was a stone-walled affair, only modestly immodest compared to the stained-glass excesses of the castle. Though it was a separate structure, with two stories and painted wooden shutters, he couldn’t determine why it would be called the gatehouse, as that would seem to imply it protected a boundary — but there was no gate or fence. The only thing the gatehouse could possibly defend the castle from was the tree itself.

The silver key slid in and the door swung open under Ralph’s hand. The interior was sparely furnished, sporting only a wide wool rug, a sleigh bed, a large mirror, and an expansive fireplace. The first thing Ralph did was to place his pet rock Jeremiah under his mattress (he befriended any rocks that he considered neat looking). He then proceeded to unpack the rest of his belongings, which speak quite well for themselves: