Greenglass House (3 page)

Fun? Why on earth would anyone want to walk up three flights if she didn't have to? Also, Milo knew from experience, having camped out in every room at some point or another, that it was pretty creepy being the only person on a floor. The inn made noises: floorboards creaked, old windowpanes rattled, hinges groaned . . .

But of course his mother was not about to tell a guest she couldn't hike up an extra flight of stairs if she wanted to. So they kept on going, up to the fourth floor.

While the stained-glass window on the third floor was done in shades of pale green, the one here was mostly blue: cobalt and robin's-egg and navy and powder and turquoise, with a few bits and pieces here and there that seemed, with the dark sky behind them, to match the guest's hair precisely.

Georgie Moselle beamed at it. “Look at that. Obviously I belong here.”

Mrs. Pine waved an arm. “Any room you like, then. I forgot to ask, how long do you think you'll be staying?”

“Not sure. A week, maybe two?” After a quick look inside each, Georgie chose a room at the far end. Milo followed her to 4W and set the carpetbag on the folding luggage rack just inside the door. Or at least, that's what he meant to do. Instead, he dropped the bag into thin air and it fell three feet or so to the floor with a thud.

There was no mistaking the crunch of something breaking inside it.

Georgie was kneeling next to the bag before Milo had even decided whether to apologize or scream. “I'm so sorry,” he babbled, staring from the bag to the luggage rack, which, for some inexplicable reason, stood to the right of the door rather than to the left, where it should have been. Every room with a W had a door that opened inward and to the right, so the luggage rack was always on the left.

“It's fine,” Georgie was saying. “Don't worry about it.”

“But something broke,” Milo protested. Georgie was busy throwing clothes and toiletries that appeared to have been shoved randomly into the bag out onto the floor in search of whatever had broken. Milo stared in horror as the pile grew: jeans, pajamas, a jar of face cream, underwear. “I'll get . . . I'll get a towel or something,” he said helplessly.

A book with a bent cover, a water-stained journal with loose pages escaping to flutter across the room, a plastic zipper bag of makeup and lipsticks, and then there it was. Georgie lifted two dripping pieces of broken pink faceted glass. The smell hit Milo a fraction of a second later: alcohol and something spicy, flowery. He'd broken a bottle of perfume.

“Oh, my God!” Mrs. Pine exclaimed from the hallway. “Oh, I'm so—” She gagged involuntarily and ran down the hall. A moment later she returned with a waste bin from one of the other rooms. “Throw it in here. We'll replace it, of course. I'm so sorry. I'll take anything that needs washing and do it up right away.”

Georgie sighed and dropped the glass carefully into the bin. “It's not a big deal. Please don't trouble yourself about it. I don't know why I shoved the bottle in the bottom of the bag like that, anyway.” She gathered her clothes up in her arms, dumped them on the yellow knitted blanket on the bed, and began to sort them into piles.

Milo's mother gave him a sharp, questioning look. He paused in the act of picking up the rest of Georgie's belongings. “The luggage rack's on the wrong side,” he protested, jabbing an accusatory finger at the offending piece of furniture. “They're always opposite the way the door opens! Who moved it?”

“Milo.” Mrs. Pine held out the waste bin expectantly. He sighed and deposited Georgie's things on the desk, which, fortunately, was right where it was supposed to be. Then he took the bin and escaped down the hall.

He'd gotten all the way to the utility closet on the second floor, where he emptied the bin of its flowery, vile-smelling, eye-burning contents, when he realized he still had Georgie Moselle's book under one arm. Great.

Well, he'd have to face her again sooner or later. Milo sighed and tried not to dwell too much on how the luggage rack not being where it was supposed to be, on top of vacation not happening the way it was supposed to happen, made it seem kind of like the world was trying to drive him crazy. He started back up the stairs.

Which was when the bell rang for the third time.

Milo turned abruptly and sprinted down the staircase to the main floor, past a staring Mr. Vinge, narrowly avoiding plowing into both his father and the silver coffeepot he was holding. “I'll get it!” he shrieked at the top of his lungs.

 

There were two of them this time. It was hard to tell who was least happy about that fact—the guests uncomfortably sharing the railcar bench as they got coated little by little with snow, or the
Whilforber Whirlwind
itself, which was definitely not meant to carry so much weight and was squealing abnormally as it approached the platform.

It wasn't that the guests themselves were exceptionally heavy. The boot of the car was stuffed full of so much . . . so much
stuff
that the pile of it was actually taller than the smaller of the car's passengers. It had to have been packed in there by a master, because Milo couldn't rightly see how it hadn't all spilled out and tumbled straight down to the bottom of the steep incline. There were suitcases, briefcases, garment bags, something that looked like a telescope case . . .

Guests number three and four were scrambling to get out of the car before it had even come to a stop. They made Milo think right away of characters from a nursery rhyme, something out of Mother Goose or
Aunt Lucy's Counterpane Book: On a dark and rainy night, side by side, Mr. Up and Mr. Down had to share a ride.

And much like Mr. Up and Mr. Down in the rhyme, these two looked like they'd be at each other's throats if they shared that ride even a minute longer.

The man Milo thought of as Mr. Down was short and dark-haired and looked like an angry schoolteacher. The other one, if Milo was honest about it, was probably too angular to really stand in properly for Mr. Up. Also, she was a woman. But she looked like an angry schoolteacher too, white-haired and haughty. Why did everyone look like schoolteachers while he was supposed to be on vacation?

Nonetheless, Milo raised a hand in greeting, regarding the two newcomers cautiously as they disembarked. They both looked about ready to snap. “Welcome to—”

Mr. Down pulled something from the car and the entire mass came undone. Baggage—most of it expensive-looking mauve brocade luggage—spilled down, bouncing across the platform and clunking onto the steel rails.

Mrs. Up, who had been about to come around to where Milo stood, froze for a second. Her face went still; then it got red, then purple, then a shade something between gray and blue. Then she started yelling. Mr. Down straightened to his full diminutive height, his face already turning pink, and then he started yelling too. They continued bawling at each other, louder and louder, standing amid the ruins of the luggage tower. Milo wasn't even sure they were shouting in English. If they were, they didn't seem to be bothering to use real words.

“Excuse me,” he said tentatively. The shouting went on as if he weren't there. “Excuse me,” Milo said again, louder. Then, “EXCUSE ME!”

Without a pause, the two of them whirled on Milo and directed their yelling at him. He tried to listen. Then he tried to interrupt. Finally, he did what his mother did whenever Milo went on what she called “a tear” and couldn't be calmed down. He clasped his hands behind his back, made a face as if he was paying really close attention to whatever incomprehensible things these two were saying, and waited.

Amazingly, it worked. Little by little, Mr. Down and Mrs. Up ran out of steam. As the torrent of angry words subsided, Milo realized the whole argument seemed to be a matter of whose luggage had been taking up too much space in the boot. At last, they stood there silently on either side of the railcar, he with his arms folded across his chest and she with her hands balled into fists at her sides.

Milo smiled a big, welcoming smile and pointed to the path that led up to the inn. “Right this way,” he said, as if he hadn't just had to wait out a storm of screeching. “Come right on up.”

They each shot one last crabby look at the other; then Mrs. Up gave a noise like a growl and turned to the mess of gear strewn across the pavilion floor. She picked out an armful of mauve carry-on bags and strung them across her shoulders until she had mostly disappeared under them. “Young man, could I trouble you to bring my suitcase and my garment bag?”

Milo nodded and she made a face that was pretty close to a smile, then stamped out of the shelter, wincing with each step as her patent-leather heels sank into the snow.

Mr. Down waited with his arms still folded until she was out of earshot, then gave a giant, displeased sigh. “I was under the impression that this would be a quiet sort of place at this time of year,” he said, looking at Milo as if he, personally, were responsible for giving out wrong information.

Milo shrugged. “You and me both. I'm supposed to be on vacation. Inn's that way. Can I help you with those?”

“No, thank you, I'll manage.” The short fellow gave another sigh and collected the rest of the gear piece by piece. Then, looking like a pack animal, he started down the path too.

Milo walked once around the pavilion to make sure there were no forgotten bags or cases hiding in corners or lying on the rails before following the two combatants toward the inn. He slung Mrs. Up's garment bag over his shoulder by its hook and grasped the handle of her rolling suitcase. Then, just at the edge of the woods where the path reached the lawn, he paused and listened. There was a sound behind him, coming from the wooded hill. But not from the railway. This was a hollow sound, not a mechanical one. Even muffled by the snow, it was familiar, though Milo couldn't quite believe he was hearing it.

Someone was coming up the stairs. And, from the pace of the footfalls, that someone was coming up fast, practically sprinting up the last dozen steps. Milo jogged back to the edge of the platform and peered down into the snow swirling through the trees.

By the uneven glow from the occasional lamppost and the twisted strings of fairy lights, he saw that a dark figure was, in fact, approaching. And that figure was not merely sprinting up the stairs; he or she was taking them two at a time. Which, apart from being a fairly dangerous thing to do on snow-slick steps, seemed as though it ought to be physically impossible. There were, after all, more than three hundred of them. It was an exhausting climb under the best of circumstances.

He waited for the person to slow down. It didn't happen. The newcomer jumped the last three steps to land at the top, looking fresh as a daisy. A snow-covered daisy in a black knit cap, carrying a truly gigantic backpack on its shoulders. And wearing pink lip gloss.

“Hey there!” she said, grinning at Milo with only a little flush on her cheeks. “Didn't mean to startle you. Looking for the Greenglass House, supposed to be somewhere hereabouts.”

“Yeah.” Milo stared down the incline, still trying to figure out how she wasn't red-faced and dying of exhaustion. “Yeah. Right this way. Er—I'm Milo. My folks run the inn.”

“Clemence O. Candler,” she replied, holding out a hand with gray-painted fingernails. “My friends call me Clem.”

 

Inside the inn, chaos had taken over. Mr. Down and Mrs. Up were still yelling at each other, only now they were doing so in the middle of the living room, he gesturing angrily with a telescope case held as if it were a sword, she with an embroidered bag clutched to her chest like a shield, and both with their wet shoes dripping slush onto the rag rug. Mr. Vinge stood in the corner, holding his mug defensively in front of his chest. Georgie Moselle sat on the hearth with her elbows on her knees and her eyebrows drawn up high on her forehead. It seemed they couldn't possibly go up any higher, but when Clem Candler trailed inside after Milo, they did.
Yes,
Milo thought grouchily,
another one.
Get used to it. If I have to, you have to.

Mr. Pine was trying unsuccessfully to get in between the two shrieking newcomers, and Milo's mother was pacing at the bar between the dining room and the kitchen with the phone to her ear. Clem Candler hung up her coat and arranged her shoes next to Mr. Vinge's without taking her eyes off the yelling duo in the next room. She took off her cap and shook out a headful of short red hair. “Pretty lively crowd,” she muttered.

Meanwhile, Mr. Pine had had enough. Milo saw it coming, and braced himself. His father could yell when he wanted to. “ALL RIGHT!” Mr. Pine bellowed. His voice ricocheted off every surface in the room. Somewhere in the dining room a glass fell from its shelf and shattered on the hardwood floor. “That's enough from both of you!”

Mr. Down and Mrs. Up fell grudgingly silent.

“That's better. Behave yourselves like adults or I may just discover we're all booked up,” Mr. Pine continued, fixing them, one by one, with a severe glare. “Do I make myself clear?” He waited for a reluctant nod from each, then gestured toward the wooden stand in the foyer where the guest register lay open. “You first, madam. Your name?”

“Mrs. Eglantine Hereward.”

“And yours, sir?”

“Dr. Wilbur Gowervine.”

“And you, miss?”

“Clemence Candler.”

“And how long is everyone planning to stay?” The three new guests hesitated. Just like the first two, none of them seemed to have made up his or her mind. Mr. Pine sighed. “No matter. Milo, you want to do the honors?”

“'Kay.” Milo kicked off his boots, picked up Eglantine Hereward's suitcase and garment bag again, and led the way up the stairs. Clem followed silently but cheerily in her stocking feet. Mrs. Hereward gave a grandiose sniff and trailed after them. Wilbur Gowervine made a big production of collecting his gear, then he followed as well, the long telescope case bouncing off the banister with each step.