Thirteens

by Kate Alice Marshall

“Are you okay?” Eleanor asked.

  “It’s just the baby,” Aunt Jenny said, patting her big belly. “Contractions.”

  “Does that mean you have to go to the hospital?” Eleanor asked with alarm, heart giving a sloshy thump. “I can call Uncle Ben. I—”

  Aunt Jenny shook her head. “Not yet, hon. Not until they’re much stronger and much closer together. Don’t you worry.”

  “Can we get you anything?” Otto asked. “A hot pack? Ice pack? Ice water? More pillows?” He sized up her pile of pillows with a practiced eye and didn’t seem impressed. Triplet toddlers, Eleanor remembered.

  “Oh, no. I’ll haul myself upright in a few minutes,” Aunt Jenny said, waving a hand. The gesture startled Eleanor—something about that tiny movement was so much like her mother, her chest gave a painful squeeze. She’d never realized how much her mother and Aunt Jenny were alike, before now. She’d never really gotten to know Jenny, because Eleanor’s mother refused to bring her to Eden Eld. She’d only seen Jenny when she came to visit them, which wasn’t very often. When she did, she and Eleanor’s mother always fought. Eleanor wasn’t sure exactly why. It had something to do with their parents, and how her mother hadn’t gone back for their funerals—but it was more than that, too.

  Eleanor took the others to the back of the house—there were two sections of the third floor, and they didn’t connect at all, which meant you had to use the back staircase to get to her room. Pip and Otto ooh-ed and aah-ed at the wood paneling and the antique wallpaper and the big, dusty chandeliers, and raced each other up the spiral staircase.

  Eleanor had almost expected the big clock to be gone, or for Otto and Pip to not see it. Instead they all lined up in front of it, watching it tick tock tick backward as steadily as it had that morning.

  “It’s like it’s counting down,” Otto said.

  Eleanor nodded. “But counting down to what?”

  “I don’t think I want to know the answer to that,” Pip said.

  “If you don’t know, you can’t make an informed decision,” Otto said.

  “You’re always so you,” Pip replied with a sigh, and Otto punched her arm affectionately.

  “Is the clock a—a wrong thing?” Eleanor asked.

  Pip and Otto frowned at each other. “I suppose,” Otto said. “But usually the wrong things are less . . .”

  “They’re more . . .” Pip said at the same time.

  “More frightening,” Otto said.

  “Less sitty,” Pip said.

  “That’s not a word,” Otto said.

  “Is too, because I said it,” Pip shot back. She folded her arms. “I suppose it’s acting like wrong things, with the nobody-noticing bit. But usually wrong things give you the shivers and make your stomach pinch up. They make you want to stay away. The clock’s strange, but it doesn’t feel wrong.”

  “So what are the wrong things?” Eleanor asked.

  “Some people seem to see them. Most people don’t. Mostly we think it’s kids that see them. Or that aren’t smart enough to pretend they don’t,” Otto said. “They’re all over Eden Eld. Like the whirly light—it kept trying to lead us out into the woods once we’d seen it. And there’s a woman who walks down the middle of Bleecker Street sometimes.”

  “What’s so weird about that?” Eleanor asked. “Other than not liking sidewalks?”

  “She’s super dead,” Pip said. “See-through and everything. Her hair floats like she’s underwater. But she doesn’t hurt people. Hardly any of them do anything. They’re just around. But it’s not going to stay that way.”

  “You don’t know that,” Otto said.

  “I do,” Pip insisted. “Something bad’s coming. The dog’s been watching us, and my mom is planning something. And like I said: She’s evil. Pretty sure she has flying monkeys hidden somewhere in a storage closet.”

  “You don’t really believe that,” Eleanor said.

  “Of course I do. Haven’t you been listening?” Pip said with a laugh. “Trust me. There’s something evil coming for Eden Eld. For us. And soon. I feel it in my bones.”

  “If you believed that, you’d be scared,” Eleanor said levelly. “You’d be terrified. You wouldn’t be having fun.”

  “I am scared,” Pip said. Her voice was suddenly quiet. “There are things about this town . . .” She drew in a deep breath and looked at Otto.

  Otto’s face was serious. “We’ve gotten used to joking around,” he said. “We always have to make it sound like we’re joking, in case someone hears. But Pip is right. Eden Eld is full of the wrong things, but they’ve been changing. They’ve been . . . watching us.”

  “We were starting to think we were both seeing things,” Pip said. “Or making it all up until we believed it. But you’re here. You’re proof. You’re like us.”

  The clock struck four. They jumped, all three of them at the same time, and then let out a chorus of nervous laughter.

  “You’re taking this really well,” Otto said.

  Eleanor bit her lip. “I told you. I’ve seen things like that before,” she said. “There was this man . . .” She trailed off. She didn’t want to talk about the man with see-through skin and shining bones. He hadn’t done anything to her. He’d sat down next to her at a bus stop and opened a newspaper. The paper was covered in angry little black slashes instead of words. The photo on the front showed a line of people with empty holes for eyes, glaring at her.

  He’d gotten on the bus. She’d stayed where she was, teeth chattering. She’d never told a soul.

  “A ghost?” Pip guessed. Eleanor nodded, glad she didn’t have to explain.

  “Hey,” Otto said excitedly. He was staring into the clock’s glass case, where the pendulum swung to and fro in its steady, unrelenting rhythm. “There’s something in there. There’s something inside the clock.”

  Seven

  Pip and Eleanor peered into the clock, propping their hands up to shade the glass so they could see past their reflections.

  “There, in the corner,” Otto said. “On the back.”

  “I see it,” Eleanor said at once.

  The back panel of the clock didn’t fit quite right against the bottom left corner of the case, and something pale stuck out through the gap. Eleanor shooed Pip out of the way and opened the glass door. She reached under the swing of the pendulum, feeling along the wood panel. Her fingers touched the rough surface of old, thick paper, folded over. She tugged on it, and it slid reluctantly free, making the wood creak.

  The paper had been folded once, twice, and three times, making a bulky packet. The creases cracked as she smoothed it out in her hands and read it out loud.

  Thirteen tales and thirteen keys,

  Prowling beasts that no one sees.

  Three are marked in flesh and name,

  This way, that way, both the same.

  A bargain struck in days of yore,

  Thirteen keys, but just one door.

  All Hallows’ Eve is when he’ll come.

  When clock strikes twelve, you’d better run.

  The left-hand edge of the page was ragged, like it had been torn from a book. At the bottom of the page was a little symbol, a peculiar curlicue hooked through the eye of an old-fashioned key.

  Eleanor’s hand shook. Thirteen tales.

  “What does it mean?” Otto asked. “What tales? What keys?”

  “I’m more worried about the beasts,” Pip said.

  “I know what this is from,” Eleanor whispered.

  “All Hallows’ Eve—that’s Halloween,” Otto said.

  “That’s Saturday,” Pip replied.

  “I know what this is from,” Eleanor said again, loudly this time, and they stared at her. She tried to put the words together to explain, but all that came out was an empty puff of breath and a little click in the back of her throat. She
knelt instead, pulling her backpack around to the front of her body. She unzipped the bag with one hand, still clutching the poem in the other, and pulled out the book.

  Thirteen Tales of the Gray. The book was thin. A hardback, with the old-fashioned kind of cloth cover, bumpy and textured with ash still worked into the weave. Embossed on the cover, beneath the title and above Collected by B. A., was the same symbol from the page. A curlicue and a key.

  “Where did you get that?” Pip asked.

  “It was my mother’s,” Eleanor said. “She used to read it to me every night, when I was little. When I used to see the wrong things. But she stopped when I stopped seeing.” Or had it been the other way around?

  Eleanor opened the book to the first page. The spine cracked. The pages were brittle and thin, rippled toward the edges, and they’d turned a shade of brown that made her think of old libraries and desperately want a cup of cocoa and a fire to read next to. She had always wondered why the first page was torn out, but her mother said it must have happened before she got it.

  The poem fit perfectly against the ragged edge inside.

  “Whoa,” Pip said.

  “Whoa,” Otto agreed, nodding. “Oh, look.” He pointed at the inside cover. In careful block letters, someone had written Property of Andy Ashford.

  “Ashford? Like this house,” Eleanor said. She didn’t really remember seeing that before, but her mother had always been the one to hold the book and read the stories. “Maybe she found it here when she was a kid.”

  She flipped forward, carefully turning the torn page. The next page was blank, and the one after that just had the title and the author again, but then there was a table of contents, listing each of the stories.

  “It’s kind of a weird book,” she said. She frowned. She couldn’t remember why it had always seemed so strange. She couldn’t remember the stories at all, but she remembered her mother’s voice, and she remembered the harsh ink strokes of the illustrations. And there was something else . . . “The stories are weird, but that’s not all. It says there are thirteen tales, but there are actually only twelve. See?” She pointed to the table of contents, laboriously counting them again and again.

  The People Who Look Away

  The Glass-Heart Girl

  Rattlebird

  Iron, Ash, and Salt

  The Orchard Thieves

  Jack and the Hungry House

  Cat-of-Ashes

  The Brackenbeast

  The Kindly Dark

  Tatterskin

  The Girl Who Danced with the Moon

  The Graveyard Dog

  “Are those fairy tales?” Pip asked. “I’ve never heard of any of them. And I’ve read, like, hundreds. My dad translates them from all over the world.”

  “Wait. There are thirteen,” Otto said.

  “No, that’s twelve,” Eleanor said, frowning. She counted again, but she remembered asking her mother about it, and her mother didn’t know either. “The last one is ‘The Graveyard Dog.’”

  “But there’s something written beneath it,” Otto said. He pointed, resting the tip of his finger against the page. And he was right. There was something written there—but it was like the letters had faded into the page. Or were still in the process of appearing. Eleanor couldn’t make it out.

  “This has to mean something,” she said. “The clock. The book. The poem. We found them for a reason, and it has to do with the wrong things.” She spoke as if it were fact, waiting to see if it sounded wrong. But it sounded right, and Otto and Pip were nodding.

  “But what does it mean?” Pip asked.

  Eleanor ran her finger over the little curlicue and the key at the bottom of the page. It was exactly the same as the keys that were painted around the clock face. The same as the mark on her wrist. “I think it has to do with me,” she said softly, and pulled up her sleeve to show them.

  Otto and Pip stared at the birthmark on her wrist. And then they looked at each other.

  Pip pulled down the collar of her shirt. Otto hiked up the hem of his jacket. Two keys: one just above Pip’s collarbone, the other on Otto’s right hip.

  “I think,” Otto corrected softly, “it’s about us.”

  Eleanor gulped. Us. She’d felt it when she touched them, before they even met properly—they were connected. She wasn’t sure if that made her feel better or more afraid. Either way, she was glad not to be alone.

  She glanced down the hall. It made her feel antsy being out in the open like this. “Let’s go back to my room,” she said, and marched her way to the door without waiting for an answer. She sat on the end of her bed. Pip flopped down next to her, propped up on her elbows, and Otto took the chair by the desk.

  “Okay. Obviously we need to investigate and figure out exactly what’s going on here. We should look at the poem again,” Otto suggested. “We need to analyze it.”

  “We’re wasting time,” Pip argued. “‘You’d better run.’ That sounds pretty bad. We should be getting ready to fight.”

  “Fight what, though?” Otto asked. “We need to slow down and examine the evidence!”

  “We need to find weapons. And escape routes,” Pip said. “Something’s coming. I can feel it.”

  “You’re both right,” Eleanor said, and their attention snapped back to her. “What we need is a plan. And a good plan has two parts. Gathering information, and acting on it. We need to do both, and we need to do it fast. So let’s look at what we know.” She opened the book to the torn page. “Thirteen keys—there are twelve keys and a smudge on the clock, but we don’t know what that means. Prowling beasts—that’s got to be the dog. And the bird.”

  “Bird?” Otto asked, and she explained about the thing she’d seen in the tree.

  “Then it says, ‘Three are marked in flesh and name,’” Pip said. “The birthmarks?”

  “But what about the name part?” Otto asked. They looked at each other, but no one had a suggestion, so Eleanor shrugged and moved on.

  “Um. ‘A bargain struck,’ and then the keys again. We don’t know any of that yet. And then Halloween . . . That must be when something is supposed to happen. But we don’t know what.”

  “Maybe the stories can tell us,” Pip suggested.

  Eleanor ran her finger along the edge of the page, oddly reluctant to open it. The stories had always belonged to her and her mother, just the two of them. But if she was going to share them with anyone, it felt right that it was Otto and Pip.

  “The first story,” she said, trying to remember. “The first story is about a kingdom, long ago.” She turned the pages. There was the title, and beneath it the black-and-white drawing of a castle, overgrown with vines and thorns, vultures circling overhead. She took a deep breath, and, her mother’s voice echoing in her mind, began to read.

  Eight

  The People Who Look Away

  Once there was a kingdom, and the kingdom was dying. Crops withered in the fields. Animals grew ill and died. The people were sick and starving, and they cried to their king to help them. Some said the king was a good man and some said he was a wicked man. Whether he was good or bad, though, he was a frightened man. For he had so very much, and his people had so very little, and while he wished that they had more, most of all he feared that he would have less.

  And so he sent word to every corner of the world that if someone could find a way to save his kingdom, he would grant them anything they asked.

  The word passed from town to town and kingdom to kingdom, across the whole of the world and beyond it. It reached dark and hidden places, lost places, forgotten places, where words were only whispered and what heard them wasn’t human at all.

  Three people answered his call and came to the court. They were odd travelers, dressed strangely, in the garb of another land or another time. They said they were siblings, two sisters and their brother, who c
ame to solve the riddle of the dying kingdom. The man was the strangest of all, with gray, quick eyes that seemed to hold a hundred secrets, and three strange beasts he kept as companions: a great cat that smelled of ash and smoke, a bird whose wing-beats rattled like bones, and a huge dog, a black beast with eyes like the coals of a fire . . .

  Eleanor stopped reading. She ran her fingertip under the words.

  “That’s him,” Pip said, sitting up. “That’s the dog we saw.”

  Eleanor went back to the list of stories, and her eye caught on the last one. She flipped ahead. There he was again, staring out of an illustration. The drawing was black and white, but it looked like his eyes were glowing. “Look,” she said, showing the others, and they pressed into either side of her as she skimmed the story of the graveyard dog. The story didn’t have anything to do with Eden Eld—it was about a brother and a sister whose stepmother threw them out of their house, and who slept in a graveyard by accident. They defeated the dog with an iron shovel and then were rewarded with a bunch of treasure. But she was absolutely sure it was the same dog.

  “Read the rest,” Pip whispered. Their voices had dropped to a hush, caught in the spell of the story. Eleanor was remembering a bit more with every word. Now she read confidently, as if she knew the words before she spoke them.

  The strange man offered the king a bargain: he would grant the kingdom great wealth and prosperity. The treasure vaults would burst with gold. The fields would flourish. The rivers would flow but never flood. No building would fall, no knife would dull, no stone would crack. And for all of this, he asked only one thing: in thirteen years, the man would return and ask for a single treasure, the most valuable thing the king possessed.

  This seemed an easy deal for the king. If his treasure vaults were full, he would hardly miss one bauble, even if it were the grandest he owned. But his sister, whose mother had been a wise woman of the old sort, the sort with secret knowledge and a keen eye, told him not to take the bargain. The man was some kind of wicked spirit or warlock, she warned, and no good would come of his deal.