Get in Trouble: Stories Read Free Page A

you find the house, and you’re afeared and you can’t do what I asked, come back, and I’ll go with you. But if you do what I tell you, it will be like the minnow.”
    “Like the minnow?” Ophelia said. “I don’t understand.”
    “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 curious sort of spyglass—something much more useful than any bawbee—to her eye. Through it 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, the one climbing the mountain, the drain running away and down. The meadow disappeared again into beds of laurel, then trees hung all over with climbing roses, so that you ascended in drifts of pink and white. A stone wall, tumbled and ruint, and then the big house. The house, dry-stack stone, stained with age like the tumbledown wall, two stories. A slate roof, a long slant porch, carved wooden shutters making all the eyes of the windows blind. Two apple trees, crabbed and old, one laden with 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 lintel: BE BOLD .
    And this is what Fran saw Ophelia do: having knocked on thedoor, 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 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 magazines and catalogs and newspapers, 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 silverware sets and tennis trophies and mason jars and empty matchboxes and false teeth and still chancier things 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: B E 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 onthe 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, needing only to be wound up, a plastic dime-store cowboy sitting on its brass-and-copper shoulders. Up near the ceiling, two armored dirigibles, tethered