Eleanor dutifully scribbled the answer—the space provided wasn’t big enough, and she had to turn the page and write in the margin, too. “What about the numbers?”
“What numbers?” Pip asked, looking at her.
Eleanor pointed. Halfway between the text and the ground was a tiny set of numbers carved carefully into the stone, each one no more than half an inch tall. 31313.
“Huh,” Pip said. “I never noticed those before.” She gave Eleanor a suspicious look, like maybe she’d stealthily carved them there herself. But then she just shrugged and added the numbers to her answer.
The rest of the students had wandered off, having finished with the first task, and were spreading out as they tracked down other entries on the worksheet. Pip skimmed the sheet and gave a decisive nod.
“‘A founder’s hands made these hands. What date is on my base?’ That means the clock tower—hands, get it? Bartimaeus Ashford built it. There’s a plaque on the side with the date it was built. And it is right next to Betty’s Bakery, which has the very best cocoa. We’ll do that one next.”
She grabbed Eleanor’s hand to pull her along. The instant their hands touched, that feeling shot through her again—except this time it was less like a bug crawling on her skin and more like a zing, a tingle that ran all the way from the bones of her hand to the socket of her shoulder. Pip looked down at their hands and then at Eleanor with a frown.
Had she felt it, too? But then she was off again, tugging Eleanor behind her, moving at a half run like it was the slowest setting she had. She leaped over a hay bale, and Eleanor was forced to follow, narrowly missing putting her foot down on the lumpy brow of a grinning pumpkin. Cheerful ghouls and glittering ghosts laughed from every window. It seemed like all the decorations were smiling. Smiling scarecrows, smiling spiders, smiling werewolves in overalls and straw hats. She’d never seen such a happy Halloween. It was a bit unsettling. And everywhere, the purple flowers grew, their petals peeling back from their centers like sneering lips.
“‘And even in the autumn and through the coldest winters the flowers bloomed,’” Eleanor whispered. Pip slowed down a bit, bringing the pace to a brisk walk, and looked back. She’d let go of Eleanor’s hand, but Eleanor still felt tugged along behind her.
“What was that from?” Pip asked.
“A fairy tale,” Eleanor said. That’s what the flowers reminded her of—her mother’s book of fairy tales. Thirteen Tales of the Gray, it was called. She’d read it to Eleanor every night when she was little.
A pang went through her, soft sorrow wrapped around sharp anger and neither of them right. The book had burned, with everything else in the house.
“Well, it’s true,” Pip said. “They bloom all year round, every year. And Eden Eld is the only place they grow.” She nudged one of the flowers, which was growing in the strip beside the sidewalk. Its head bobbed, and the gathered petals smacked against the toe of her shoe, the movement like a striking snake.
They’d reached Betty’s Bakery, Eleanor realized, a small, quaint building with the three-story clock tower looming behind it; that was why Pip had stopped. The smell of cinnamon and chocolate wafted out. A deep window seat at the front was filled with a Halloween display of intricately carved pumpkins. One read Betty’s Bakery in spooky script. The others showed a hissing cat, a wolf howling at the moon, and a bird with a wicked-looking eye. A man sat at a table out front, whistling as he carved a new one, a bucket of pumpkin guts beside him and newspaper covering the table.
“The clock tower’s right around the corner,” Pip said, somewhat unnecessarily. “If you go fill out the worksheets, I can get us cocoa. We can drink while we go find the other stuff.”
“Okay, yeah, you got it,” Eleanor said quickly and loudly, sounding like a complete weirdo, she was sure. She felt her ears go hot. She was, it turned out, really pretty terrible at being normal. But Pip didn’t seem to mind.
A wide, cobbled courtyard stretched between the bakery and the building next door, and exactly in the middle stood the steep stone walls of the four-sided clock tower. It was just a tower, with no building attached to it or anything, the base maybe ten feet by ten feet across. A wrought-iron gate blocked off the back of the courtyard. On the other side stretched an empty lot and then the tall, imposing shapes of the pines.
Eleanor hadn’t thought the trees were that close to town. From among the buildings, everything was so open and bright. Yet there the forest waited, just out of sight.
She crossed the courtyard to the mural of the clock tower. The side nearest her didn’t have anything on it. She walked all the way around the back and to the other side before she found the brass plaque that told the story of Bartimaeus Ashford, the youngest of the founders, who was an architect and clockmaker. The same Ashford who had built Ashford House, of course, and a bunch of other buildings in town. And the tower seemed just as strange as the house, in its own way. Ashford House had too many doors and stairs; the tower didn’t seem to have any. Wouldn’t it need to be repaired? Wound? Cleaned, even? But there were no doors on any of the four sides.
Weird. She shook her head and reminded herself that she wasn’t just sightseeing: she had to fill out the worksheet.
Pip had said that the date on the plaque was the date the clock tower was built, but she must have remembered wrong. The only date was Bartimaeus’s birthday: September 28, 1842. The date of Bartimaeus Ashford’s death is unknown, the plaque added. That, Eleanor thought, was odd as well. If he was so famous, shouldn’t they know when he’d died?
The skin on the inside of her wrist prickled, and she glanced to her right, not quite knowing why. She froze.
There, in the empty lot, stood a giant black dog. It panted, huge clouds of mist rolling out over its red tongue. Its eyes were red, too, and stared straight at her. It took a step toward her, its head dropping, its tail stiff and straight out behind it.
“I got you extra whipped cream,” Pip said loudly, coming around the corner. Eleanor’s eyes stayed locked on the dog. It growled, the sound vibrating through the air until it rattled her teeth in their sockets. “Here you go. Eleanor? Earth to Eleanor, we’ve got cocoa, come in, Eleanor.”
“Don’t you see the—” Eleanor started. Pip couldn’t have missed the dog. It was standing right there. But it was like she didn’t see it at all. Which meant . . . which meant Eleanor was definitely seeing things that weren’t there.
It had started again.
She forced herself to turn away from the dog. She smiled. “What do I owe you?” she asked.
“Nothing. My mom gives me a ton of allowance to make up for the fact that she has the maternal instincts of a sea slug,” Pip said, and handed over the cocoa. “Shall we go discover what kind of tree adorns the sign in front of the library?”
Don’t turn around. Don’t look at things that aren’t there.
“Let’s go,” she said with feeling. Pip grabbed her hand again and led her back around the front of the building, moving with enough speed that Eleanor had to be careful not to spill her cocoa. She listened for a growl, or the rattle of huge paws hitting an iron gate, but nothing came.
And then they were out of the alley and back in front of the bakery, where the man carving the pumpkin sat with a puzzled look on his face, scratching his chin and staring at what he’d made. He’d carved the pumpkin with words, and around them were ragged marks, like he’d plunged his knife into the pumpkin again and again without any artistry. Thirteen ragged marks, and two words.
GET OUT.
As they walked down the street, she almost thought she heard him crying.
Four
Back at the town square, Ms. Edith collected their worksheets and, with a skeptical look at the empty cups of cocoa, declared Pip and Eleanor the winners, being the only ones with completely correct answers. As they walked back toward school, Eleanor kept glancing side to side, expecti
ng to see that huge black dog again, and hoping desperately that she wouldn’t—or that someone else would, and prove that she wasn’t seeing things that didn’t exist.
It wasn’t the first time that Eleanor had seen something no one else could. No one else had seen the man at the bus stop back home, either. Or the others that she’d learned not to talk about. That she had, eventually, stopped seeing.
They reached the classroom just as the period ended, and the students dispersed to their next classes. Pip hesitated at the door. “Eleanor,” she said, and let the word hang. Then she shook her head. “Never mind. It was nice to meet you. We can hang out again tomorrow, if you want.”
“I’d like that,” Eleanor said. She was surprised to find the smile she gave Pip was entirely genuine.
“I have to get to gym class,” Pip said. “Be careful, okay?”
“What do you mean?” Eleanor asked, startled, but Pip only shrugged and dashed away, leaving Eleanor staring after her.
* * *
• • •
ELEANOR DIDN’T SEE Otto on the bus home, and she rode alone in the back, pulling her feet up on the seat. She’d had exactly one goal today: get through it with everyone thinking she was normal. And could she really say she’d failed? She hadn’t done anything weird. Weird things had happened around her, but that didn’t count, did it?
Except that she was the only one that had noticed. Which meant it was happening again. Just like it had before, when she was little. Just like it had right before her mother set the fire that burned down their house and nearly killed Eleanor.
She felt wobbly, almost dizzy, her thoughts fuzzy the way you got when you didn’t have enough water and stayed outside all day in the sun. She’d expected that coming to Eden Eld meant leaving this kind of thing behind her.
Eleanor still wasn’t sure what this kind of thing was, except that it made her smell smoke again, and feel ash clinging to her skin. It made her start coughing, until the bus driver glanced up at the rearview mirror to look at her.
She’d been lucky to get out. When she’d seen the stairway all up in flames, she’d covered her mouth and dropped to the floor and crawled to the bathroom, which overlooked the garage. She’d climbed onto the garage roof and scrambled down the gutter, and then she’d run back to the front door to try to get in, because her mom was still in there.
She still had a shiny burn scar like a crescent on her right palm, where she’d touched the doorknob. The fire had been so hot it heated the knob all the way through. She couldn’t get in. She couldn’t help.
But it turned out her mother wasn’t still in there. They’d searched all over after the fire was out, and there was no body. But the police were sure, completely sure, that a person had set the fire—right at the bottom of the stairs. They told her that her mother had set the fire, and then she’d just . . . left.
Whenever Eleanor thought about it, she felt like she was touching the doorknob again—feeling that bite of pain, with so much more waiting on the other side. It filled her with so much rage and so much sorrow that all she could do was keep the door closed and try to feel nothing at all.
The police had looked for her, of course, and asked Eleanor all sorts of questions. About the strange things her mother said, about what they called her erratic behavior. They had called in a psychologist to talk to her, and he explained it like she was six. That her mother was sick in her brain, and she’d said, You mean she’s mentally ill, and the man had blinked three times behind his big glasses and said, slowly, Well. Yes.
And then she’d done the one thing her mother had told her not to do all her life.
She went to Eden Eld, to live with Aunt Jenny.
The bus pulled up in front of Ashford House. She walked down the steps, coughing into her elbow one more time. The branches of the tree in front of the house shook, and something scraped along the wood. Eleanor walked quickly to the front door, not breaking her stride until it was shut firmly behind her.
When she was little, before she realized that the things she saw, that her mother saw, weren’t real, her mother would put her arms around her in bed and whisper to her.
There are things in the world that shouldn’t be, she would say. Things out of place. Little pieces of other worlds that slipped in, like a piece of gravel in your shoe. Some of them are kind, but most of them are dangerous. Be careful, Elle, and stay away from Eden Eld.
She’d always wanted to protect Eleanor. So Eleanor couldn’t understand why she would have set the fire. Everyone seemed so sure—but they were sure that the things her mother was afraid of weren’t real, and Eleanor knew better. Her mother was ill—her fear crawled inside her and grew and grew until she couldn’t breathe or think straight. She was ill, and the things she saw were real.
Eleanor had thought the fact that she stopped seeing them meant that she was safe, and that her mother’s growing panic was only a symptom of her illness. But now they were back. Eleanor knew it didn’t mean her mother hadn’t been sick.
But it did mean that she’d been right.
And maybe it meant there was more to the fire than everyone thought.
* * *
• • •
BEN DIDN’T MAKE it home for dinner, and she and Jenny ate in front of the TV, Jenny with her plate balanced on her huge belly. They watched a show about a group of good-guy thieves, and at the end of the episode all the bad guys were ruined and all the good guys were happy, and Eleanor lost herself in a world where all wrongs could be righted in forty-three minutes (plus commercial breaks). By the time they were done, Jenny was yawning, and she headed off to bed with a “night, Elle,” leaving Eleanor on her own.
It had started raining outside, drumming pleasantly against the roof and the windows. She’d always liked the sound of rain, as long as she didn’t have to get wet. She pulled her sweater tight around her as she made her way to her room and pushed open the door.
She was surprised to see something waiting on her bed. A book. She didn’t remember leaving a book there. The one she’d been reading was on the bedside table, in fact.
She crossed the room, frowning. And then she stopped dead, her thoughts turning into a wild tangle that made no sense at all.
It was her mother’s book. Thirteen Tales of the Gray.
It must be another copy. Jenny had left it here, or—but no. It was the same book. The exact same book, the same wear on the spine, the same streak of pink, glittery paint from a close encounter with one of Eleanor’s early craft projects. It should have burned, but the only evidence of the fire was a few smudgy spots of ash.
She sat on the edge of the bed and pulled it toward her. The rain had stopped. The house was silent. “You can’t be here,” she said. The book, unconvinced, remained stubbornly real.
In the hall, the clock chimed the hour.
Five
Eleanor slept with the book beside her on the bed. She had odd dreams of something soft and almost uncomfortably warm on her chest, pinning her down, and she woke drenched in sweat and smelling faintly of ash. There were little smudges of it on her covers, too, and on her clothes. They must have come from the book. And the book . . .
She didn’t know if she wanted to think about where the book had come from.
She was afraid that Otto wouldn’t be on the bus again, but he came bounding on when they reached his stop, looking more rumpled than he had the day before. “Sorry I missed you yesterday,” he said immediately. “I went over to help my dad at the clinic. A border collie was giving birth. There were nine puppies. Nine. How would you like to have nine babies all at once?”
“One seems like more trouble than I’m interested in,” Eleanor confessed. “My aunt’s pregnant,” she clarified.
“Oh, neat. I love little kids,” Otto said. “I’ve got three little sisters—triplets—so liking them might just be a survival strategy. The only thing I like
better than little kids is probably animals. All animals. Dogs, cats, horses, lizards . . .”
She wondered if, given the chance, he would name every type of animal in the ecosystem. But the bus went over a sharp bump, and it seemed to derail his train of thought. For the rest of the ride, Otto talked about the veterinary clinic his dad ran, his dog, his sisters, the relative size of the planets in the solar system, and the Yellowstone supervolcano. Eleanor listened, happy to let someone else fill the silence. Eden Eld Academy used a block schedule, which meant Eleanor had a whole new set of classrooms to find today. Luckily, her first class of the day—English with Ms. West—she shared with Otto.
“Pip’s in it, too,” Otto said. “You met Pip yesterday.”
“Yeah, I know,” Eleanor said, laughing.
“Right. Of course you do. My mom says I need to install a better filter between my brain and my mouth.”
“I don’t mind,” Eleanor said, shaking her head, and followed him through the echoey school hallways. The fairy tale book was in the bottom of her bag, and it seemed to make it heavier as she walked. She hadn’t opened it yet, but she didn’t feel comfortable leaving it at home. She didn’t understand how it had gotten into her room.
Had her mother left it for her?
But that was impossible. Her mother was gone. She’d run off—abandoned Eleanor and worse. Eleanor hated her. Hated her, and so hated the book, too. Except she also loved her mother and so she kept the book, kept it close, and wished she knew what she was supposed to do and what she was supposed to feel.
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