“We can look in the town archive,” Otto said, as if he’d just declared that they would be going to a candy store. “It’s stored in the Academy library. We don’t even have to leave school grounds.”
“Perfect,” Eleanor said. They looked at Pip expectantly.
“I suppose research is a good idea,” she admitted. “But at some point we’re going to need to actually do something. We have to know what we’re going to do if we can’t find the answers in time.”
Just then, the doorbell rang.
Ten
They heard voices in the foyer and filed out to find Jenny talking to Ms. Foster. It might have been after hours, but she looked no less polished than she had in her office. More so, really, here in the slightly run-down old house.
She wore the Eden Eld–blue skirt suit. Silver cufflinks winked at the sleeves, but Eleanor couldn’t quite make out their shape. When Ms. Foster saw the kids, she stepped away from Ben and Jenny, her perfect white teeth showing between her lips in what didn’t quite qualify as a smile.
“Pip, love,” she said in a voice like honeysuckle. The hairs on the back of Eleanor’s neck stood up, but Ben and Jenny looked charmed as could be. “And Otto. Always such a pleasure to see you.” She folded her hands in front of her and set her weight back like she was drinking in the sight of them. “And of course our newest pupil. I’m so glad you three are already getting to be such good friends. It’s always hard to move to a new town. Although Eden Eld isn’t quite a new town, is it, Eleanor? You’ve got it in your blood.”
Eleanor’s mouth was dry. She wanted to shrink back and back and back until she vanished, but she held her ground.
Ms. Foster stepped forward, reaching up, and it took Eleanor every bit of control she had not to flinch away as she tucked a strand of Eleanor’s hair behind her ear. Then she took Eleanor’s hands in hers, looking into her eyes. “I hope you’ll feel at home here in no time. You belong to this town,” she said.
Pip’s mother had cool, dry hands. They made Eleanor think of the time she got to hold a python. You could feel all its muscles beneath, getting ready to squeeze. Ms. Foster sighed. “You really are the spitting image of your mother.”
Eleanor’s stomach lurched. Her heart beat whump-thump and she felt it in her throat. But Ms. Foster didn’t let go, and neither did she. “Yes, we look a lot alike,” she said. She smiled. Puppet strings at the corners of her mouth. Wrinkles at the corners of her eyes.
“Well. We really must be going,” Ms. Foster said, and dropped her hands at last. Before she did, Eleanor caught a glimpse of the cufflinks. Each one showed two bearded faces pointing in opposite directions, joined in the middle like they were the same man, the same head, but looking two ways at once.
It itched something in the back of her mind, but she couldn’t place it.
“Would you like a ride home, Otto?” Ms. Foster asked.
He blanched, but then he caught Pip’s eye. Eleanor could guess what they were thinking. If Otto accepted the ride, at least they’d have longer together to look out for each other. Pip would have less time alone with her mother. And even if Ms. Foster wasn’t evil—a possibility Eleanor was beginning to doubt, whatever Otto said—Eleanor didn’t imagine it was fun, being her daughter.
“Thanks, Ms. Foster. That would be great,” Otto said brightly. He turned and, before Eleanor could react, grabbed Eleanor in a hug. He whispered in her ear. “Read the book again. And be careful. Watch out for the dog and the rattlebird.”
“You too,” she said.
Pip waved glumly from behind her mother’s back as they headed down the hall. Nothing would happen tonight, Eleanor told herself. Otto and Pip had been safe for nearly thirteen years in Eden Eld. They’d be safe for one more night.
She didn’t really believe in safe anymore—it had gone to the same place normal had. But she was getting pretty good at lying to herself, too.
When the door shut, Aunt Jenny gave Eleanor a bright smile. “So. Friends already,” she said, as pleased as Eleanor had known she would be.
“Yep,” Eleanor said, managing to sound chipper. “They’re great.”
Jenny frowned. “Is something wrong, hon?” she asked. “You look worried.”
Eleanor hesitated. They would help her if they could. But they couldn’t, could they? And there was the baby—what if something happened to Jenny and the baby, and it was her fault? She needed to protect them. And protect herself, by herself.
“You can tell us anything, you know,” Jenny said—and then she winced.
“Starting again?” Ben asked. His face was screwed up like he was feeling sympathetic and guilty that he couldn’t take some of the discomfort for her, but also like he was really relieved he wasn’t the one who had to do this part.
“You are changing so many diapers,” she growled at him as she braced herself against the wall. A few seconds later she was panting but relaxed again. “Still not regular. We’re fine,” she assured him. “Could be days.”
“Could be days,” he echoed. He looked at Eleanor. “Sorry. What were we talking about?”
Eleanor couldn’t put them in danger. Especially not with the baby on the way. “Nothing,” she said. “It’s not important.”
“Okay. If you say so,” Jenny said. “I think I’m going to go straight to bed.”
“Need me to come rub your feet?” Ben asked.
“If you don’t, they may fall off completely,” Jenny told him, and he put his arm over her shoulders.
The way they moved, the way they touched each other, you could tell they loved each other more than anything. And they had for a long time. It was a little like watching Pip and Otto bicker affectionately, but different, too. Eleanor didn’t need to be part of their closeness. But it felt like standing next to a stove on a winter day. It made you warm, just by being close to it.
Eleanor went to her room, locked the door, and sat in the armchair near the window, cracking open the book of stories. She started at the beginning again, with “The People Who Look Away,” and read through every line. Every page.
When she was done, she turned back to the beginning and started again.
* * *
• • •
SHE DREAMED OF smoke, and of her mother’s hands on her arms. Whatever you do, don’t go back to Eden Eld, she shouted. Thirteens—it’s all thirteens.
Then her mother was gone. The smoke and fire were all around her, and she couldn’t move. She was too afraid. She couldn’t breathe. She choked and coughed. Through the smoke she saw the shape of a man—a man in an old-fashioned suit, facing away from her. Then, slowly, he started to turn.
Eleanor woke with a start in the chair with her arm asleep, pinched under her, her glasses squashed uncomfortably where her cheek leaned against the chair, and the clock in the hall striking ten. It was an odd and mournful sound, especially in the dark, and it was strangely loud. It took her a moment to realize why. Her bedroom door was open.
She had definitely closed it. She had definitely locked it. So how had it come open? She leaned over and turned on the light beside her bed. The darkness seemed to push back at it, and it illuminated the room only faintly.
There were paw prints on her floor, gray and sooty. A cat’s paws, but big, bigger than any she’d seen. They marched across the floor and right out the door. An ashy paw print marked the doorframe, right next to the lock, as if the cat had propped itself on its hind legs for a moment.
Eleanor had fallen asleep reading the book. It was tucked down beside the arm of the chair. She walked to her bed and stowed it out of sight under the pillow, and then followed the paw prints into the hall, her breath fast and shallow and the hairs on the back of her arms prickling.
The footprints marched right to the spiral steps and down them. She inched down one step at a time, sticking to the outside of the curve so she could peer around the
bend. The paw prints continued. Nothing else in the house moved.
She turned on lights as she went. Down to the first floor, down the hall. The paw prints got muddled here and there, where the cat peeked into rooms before backing out again, but they continued in the same general direction until they came to the living room. The living room was properly called the great room. There was also the drawing room, where Jenny painted in the mornings, and the den, where Ben and Jenny did most of their relaxing. The great room was just too big and cavernous to relax in, though it was very impressive. It had shelves that wrapped around three walls, reaching all the way to the edge of the humongous fireplace. The fireplace was big enough to walk into—even Ben could walk in without bending his head. There was a grate in the middle, but there was plenty of room to walk around the edge and get to the staircase that rose inexplicably behind the fireplace, leading up to a stone wall.
The paw prints went right into the fireplace.
Eleanor followed them, stepping softly so she wouldn’t make a sound. The floorboards creaked anyway, but she hoped the settling and groaning of the house would cover them.
She reached the fireplace and peered up. The footprints pattered right up the steps, all the way to the wall—and stopped.
There was no cat. No anything. Just the paw prints on the top step.
Eleanor let out a breath. She wasn’t sure if she was relieved or even more unsettled to find the top step empty. She walked up the steps and pushed on the wall. Solid stone. She pressed her ear against it and knocked. Was the sound hollow?
She couldn’t tell.
She turned back around. The paw prints were flaking away, vanishing as if scattered by the wind, but there wasn’t so much as a breeze. She followed them back the way she had come. By the time she got to her room, there was no sign of them.
She closed the door. Locked it. And turned around.
The book sat in the middle of her bed. It was open to an illustration in the middle of the book. The one for “Jack and the Hungry House.” It showed Jack, his indispensable walking stick in hand. The girl with backward hands, who had showed up in several of the stories, was just visible at the door of the house, turned back like she was waiting for him. She held a rose in her left hand. It was the rose she used in the story to mark the shifting doors and halls in the hungry house, leaving petals for the safe ways to walk and thorns for the dangerous ones.
There was a figure Eleanor hadn’t noticed before. A tiny, pale figure, more of an interruption in the lines that made the dark night sky than a proper shape. Only a few faint lines defined the figure’s body. It was a man. He seemed to be wearing an old-fashioned kind of suit, and he was facing away from Jack.
Eleanor paged through the book, suspicion at the back of her mind. There was a figure there in the drawing in “Tatterskin,” too, in one of the windows of the haunted town, facing away—a woman this time, tall and pale. And the man was in the ballroom in “The Girl Who Danced with the Moon.” Two of them appeared in “The Kindly Dark,” just shadows against the stars as Jack and the girl with backward hands fled the sunrise.
The only place she couldn’t find any of the People Who Look Away in was the illustration from the first story, and the man’s—Mr. January’s?—footprints were in that one.
That illustration was on page 12. On page 13, the page number was underlined in pen. Eleanor frowned and flipped through again. Three numbers were underlined. Page 3 and page 13. And then page 133 had just the first two numbers underlined. 3, 13, 13. She whispered the numbers to herself so she was sure she would remember.
Three, thirteen, thirteen. It’s all thirteens, she thought, and she drifted off to sleep.
Eleven
It was agony to wait through breakfast, and then the long ride to school, and then two whole periods before the lunch bell rang and they could bolt to the library together. Pip led the way past the fiction section to a heavy door marked ARCHIVE.
“It’s not locked?” Eleanor asked.
“Doors don’t usually get locked in Eden Eld,” Pip said. “No one ever steals anything.”
The room was crowded with metal shelves filled with cardboard boxes, glass cabinets, wooden bureaus with long, flat drawers, and stacks of old newspapers. A musty, dusty smell hung in the air. One of the lights in the back kept flickering before coming back on with a buzz, and a discarded diorama covered with illustrations of pea plants lay trampled on the floor.
“This,” Pip declared with a flourish, “is the world’s greatest repository of Eden Eld–related lore.”
“It’s the world’s only repository of Eden Eld–related lore, since city hall flooded and they moved everything that didn’t get destroyed here,” Otto said.
Eleanor felt a little shiver of excitement. She loved old books and old records and anything that might qualify as an artifact. She felt like she was standing in the middle of a hundred little mysteries, and she had to remind herself there was only one that mattered right now. “Where do we even start?” she asked.
Pip looked at Otto. Otto looked at Eleanor. Eleanor glared.
“I asked first,” she said.
“I guess we just pick a shelf and start reading,” Otto said. “Not very scientific of us.”
“We can narrow it down better than that,” Eleanor said, more confidently than she felt. “Let’s think about what we know. We have the poem and the book. There’s the clock. And we all have the same birthmark.”
“We’re all from founding families,” Pip said.
“Really?” Eleanor asked, surprised.
“Barton, Foster, Ellis,” Pip said, pointing to each of them in turn. “There were thirteen founding families. I can recite them all, if you want.”
“Thirteen,” Eleanor said. Thirteens. It’s all thirteens. “I’m almost thirteen years old.”
“Me too,” Pip said. “And Otto. We have the same birthday.”
Eleanor’s hands went cold. It couldn’t be. “It isn’t—your birthday isn’t Halloween, is it?” she asked in a whisper. Pip and Otto nodded in unison. “Okay. That’s spooky.”
“All Hallows’ Eve,” Otto said. “We have the same birthmark and we’re all turning thirteen on All Hallows’ Eve? Whatever’s happening, it’s happening tomorrow.”
“Then we need to work fast,” Eleanor said. “Spread out. Look for anything about Halloween and the town’s history.”
“And the January Society,” Pip added.
“And the January Society,” Eleanor agreed. “That should narrow it down.”
She started sorting through old newspapers, trying to find ones from October of years past. She’d barely fished one out—October 26, 1993—when Otto made a triumphant noise.
“Guys! Look at this,” he said excitedly, and Eleanor felt a thudding sense of disappointment that she hadn’t been the one to find something. She shoved the feeling away. Otto held out a magazine, flipped to a page in the middle. “‘The Curse of Eden Eld,’” Otto read in an ominous tone.
“A curse?” Eleanor whispered. Her fingertips were cold. Frozen cold. Her whole hands, too. She curled her fingers, trying to keep them warm by making fists. It’s cursed, that place. I’ve tried to keep you safe. But I can’t anymore. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, her mother’s voice said in her memory. “What kind of curse?”
“It says—hold on,” Otto said, turning the magazine back around as Pip and Eleanor clustered close. “‘A sleepy town called Eden Eld is said to harbor a terrible secret. Every thirteen years, on Halloween night, three children go missing.’” Otto gulped, but pressed on. “‘None of them have ever been found.’”
“That can’t be true,” Pip objected. “We would have heard about it. There would be news stories.”
“I’m just telling you what it says,” Otto said, exasperated, and pushed the magazine toward them. “Read it yourself.”
Part
of the page was taken up with a clearly photoshopped picture of a forest with a full moon shining between the trees. Otto had skipped past the headline, but it was obvious that the article was about scary stories from different places. The first one on the page was about someplace called Briar Glen in Massachusetts, and the last one just had the header and a couple sentences about a town in Florida, but the one in the middle was for Eden Eld. After the one-line introduction, the article continued.
Eden Eld is a small town in a mostly forgotten part of Oregon. There is not much to see there—a private school of some repute, towering pines that keep the town’s logging industry running, and a mine off in the hills that has long since shuttered. But even Eden Eld has its ghost stories—and they are stranger and wilder than most.
The town is haunted by a peculiar trio of spirits—ghosts, monsters, apparitions, you tell me. They’re seen from time to time, but most especially on Halloween. They are called the People Who Look Away, and chief among them is the figure known as the Backward-Facing Man—or, to some, Mr. January. He is tall and thin, and when he is sighted at a distance, he is always facing away from you, for he only shows his face to those he means to trick. And what a trickster he is.
It is said that Mr. January was there when Eden Eld was founded, and that he struck a deal with the town’s first residents. He would make sure their town thrived, but in return, every thirteen years he would take three of their children. Not just any children—these children were marked, because they were born on his day. Halloween. Thirteen times he would do this, and then the deal would be fulfilled.
The settlers, who had crossed a continent to claim this land, and who had suffered and lost along the way, reluctantly agreed. They set about making their town. Thirteen years later, it was formally established, and three accidental deaths were recorded. Three children, aged thirteen exactly, swept away in a mysterious flood. No bodies were ever recovered.
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