Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy by Karen Foxlee Read Free Book Online

Ophelia had crept into her study each morning and sat in her mother’s writing chair. She’d touched her desk, her pen, the vampire teeth. She’d taken the
Encyclopaedia of Ghosts and Spirits
from her mother’s bookcase. Each morning she opened it to a different page. There were fetches and bhoots and doppelgängers. Spooks and wraiths and gjengangers. Intelligent hauntings, shadow ghosts, funnel ghosts, poltergeists. Wouldn’t her mother try to contact her, if it was all true? Wouldn’t she come and sit on the end of her bed or lift a curtain or hide her toothbrush?
    Her mother did none of these things. When Ophelia sat in her mother’s chair, there was just a light-filled emptiness. A nothingness. A silence that made her so sad that she couldn’t even cry. A sadness that sat on her chest and crushed the air out of her with its weight.
    Ghosts, Ophelia thought again, in the pavilion of wolves. She looked at the poor things, with their mangy, moth-eaten coats and their dull glass eyes. An ancient guard watched her without any interest and went back to eating a very old apple.
    Ophelia looked at the silver elevator in the corner of the room. She chewed on a fingernail for a while before taking a puff on her inhaler. She pressed the up button then and tried to ignore the sinking feeling in her stomach.
    The first thing Ophelia noticed about floor six was a giant polar bear standing on its hind legs, its mouth open in a silent roar. Her heart stopped momentarily and then started beating again. The second thing she noticed was that the sixth floor was not really part of the museum at all but a place where everything that didn’t have a home was kept.
    She squeezed herself past the polar bear, picked her way past a tower of sewing machines, several large printing presses, a locomotive, two huge jars filled with buttons, a pile of suitcases, fountains of gowns draped over antique chairs, mounds of handbags, and several merry-go-round horses staring at her with their melancholy eyes.
    “Ghosts,” she said aloud with disdain.
    It wasn’t a frightening place at all. It was just a forgottenplace. A little like a box of old toys pushed under a bed, only on a grander scale. These strange, mismatched collections stretched as far as she could see. There were flags of the world, snow shakers, artwork stacked in teetering heaps, newspapers, books, and three grand pianos. There were grandfather clocks, a Morse code machine, a ship’s huge anchor, a century of golfing attire, several stuffed parrots. There were display cabinets without displays, displays without display cabinets.
    Ophelia found a bridal veil and placed it on her head.
    She pressed the letter
O
three times on an ancient typewriter.
    She took the veil off. She retrieved the key from her pocket.
    “Okay, a box, a box that this key opens,” she said into the gloom. Her shoulders slumped.
    She worked her way back to the polar bear and started again. She looked for locks of any sort. She tried the key inside an antique sewing box, a toolbox on the floor of the locomotive; she tried several stout writing desks. She was briefly excited when she came upon a small pile of lacquered jewelry boxes, but the key opened none of them. It was too big, by far.
    She started again. It was a room full of objects, but almost none of them were locked. Almost none of them were boxes. It was very, very frustrating.
    Slow down
, she heard her mother say, quite close to her ear.
Slow down and really look
.
    Ophelia waved her hand as if at a worrisome fly. She could sense the sun was setting now. The light had changedbehind the grimy windows. Her stomach grumbled. Alice would be quite mad. She’d be waiting on the throne with their ice skates and a frown on her face. Ophelia longed for her old sister, the old Alice, who was carefree and funny and who never frowned.
    Ophelia stopped and looked exceedingly slowly. Immediately she noticed the door near a silver carriage strung with