Thirteen years later, no such deaths were reported. Journals and records, along with those few stories older locals are willing to whisper, suggest that the town simply stopped talking about the People Who Look Away and Mr. January. They treated the marked children distantly, and when the children disappeared, they pretended it had not happened at all.
In time, that pretending grew and turned malignant, like a cancer. By the fifth such Halloween, it wasn’t just that the townsfolk chose not to see—they couldn’t see. They forgot. They made up stories. They recorded accidental deaths on other days, put the wrong dates on birth certificates, or simply seemed to . . . not notice. And so if you ask someone in Eden Eld why so many children disappear, they will tell you, without a hint of deception, that children don’t disappear in Eden Eld.
They are not lying. But they are not telling the truth.
If you visit Eden Eld, beware of anyone who won’t turn toward you. And if a sly stranger offers you a deal, here’s some advice: check his footprints. Because even when you think you see his face, the footprints of the People Who Look Away are turned the wrong way around. And any deal they offer isn’t one you want to take.
And remember the numbers—31313.
That’s how you’ll see the truth.
Twelve
Eleanor looked up from the magazine. “It’s the same as the fairy tale. I mean—almost.”
“Did you read the whole thing already?” Pip asked, eyebrows raised.
“Yes?” Eleanor said.
“Seriously? You read fast,” Pip said, scrunching up her nose in a way that suggested she didn’t read very fast at all, and felt a bit bad about it. She turned her attention back to the article, frowning at the page for another minute before she looked up. “Then we aren’t the first,” she said.
“Whatever’s happening to us, it’s happened to other kids before,” Eleanor agreed. “Lots of them. And people just . . . forgot.”
“Like they forget about the wrong things,” Otto added.
You can see. You can see what others can’t, as long as you look. It won’t keep you safe, but it’ll keep you smart, her mother had said. Not that last night, that horrible night, but before. When things were only just starting to get bad.
“The January Society is descended from the founders. They’re keeping up the deal with Mr. January,” Eleanor said slowly. Something was bothering her again, itching at the back of her brain. Something about silver cufflinks. “And what’s with these numbers? They were underlined in the book, too. Three, thirteen, thirteen.”
“There are thirteen stories in the book,” Pip said. “And we’re thirteen. And there are three of us.”
It’s all thirteens. The first part of what her mother said in the dream last night had really happened—she’d made Eleanor promise so many times not to go back to Eden Eld. But thirteens? She’d never said anything about that. Not that Eleanor could remember. But she’d said a lot of strange things near the end. Eleanor had started blocking them out.
“So three thirteens. Maybe that’s about us,” Pip said.
“What else does the magazine say?” Otto asked. Pip flipped forward and back, but the article didn’t have anything more about Eden Eld.
“Hold on,” Eleanor said, stabbing her finger against the previous page. “Look who wrote it!”
The article was by Professor Andrew Ashford.
“Andy Ashford,” Eleanor said. “He owned the book. He must have been the one who underlined the numbers. They have to mean something.” Then she gasped. “Wait! I’ve seen them before. They’re on the Founders’ Monument!” She fished around in her backpack. She still had the worksheet from history class in there, with the first answer written in her small, neat handwriting.
Eden Eld
Founded 1851
Drawn Onward
31313
“Three, thirteen, thirteen,” Otto said triumphantly.
“Three turn thirteen every thirteen years,” Eleanor said. “Just like the story said.”
“Or . . .” Otto made light slashes between the numbers with his finger. Not 3-13-13, but 31-3-13. “On the thirty-first, three turn thirteen. It works either way.”
It works either way. Something itched at Eleanor, but she still couldn’t figure out why. She chewed on the edge of her lip.
She’d read every story at least three times, even the ones that didn’t seem to have anything to do with Eden Eld. Little things jumped out at her, but she didn’t know if they were important. The Orchard Thieves put leaves in the poet’s mouth to keep him from talking. Jack never went anywhere without his walking stick. The girl with backward hands carried the rose Jack had stolen from the Cerulean King’s garden, its petals growing back whenever she plucked them.
They wove in and out of one another, the stories. The rattlebird was in more than one and Jack was the hero of “Tatterskin” and “The Brackenbeast,” and a character called the hedgewitch brought a present to the Glass-Heart Girl, and then made the magic slippers in “The Girl Who Danced with the Moon.” The girl with her hands turned backward showed up with Jack and the hedgewitch a lot, like they were friends, though it never explained how they’d met. The stories all braided together, looping and twining and making complicated knots that Eleanor couldn’t see how to undo.
But the People Who Look Away were in almost all of the stories. Sometimes they were just in the background. Sometimes they were even helpful—for a certain definition of helpful that usually led to a different kind of trouble than the heroes started with. But a lot of the time they were the reason that things went wrong.
In “Jack and the Hungry House,” the man from the first story was the one who convinced Jack’s mother that he needed to go and earn his fortune. At the end, when Jack came home and found his mother gone and the man in the house, he asked the man who he was. Eleanor couldn’t remember exactly what the man said, so she took out the book and opened it on her lap where she sat cross-legged on the floor.
I am no one and I am everyone, the man said. Whichever way you look at me, I’m looking back at you. Or am I looking away, even when we’re face-to-face? I am the end and the beginning, the forward and the back. She stopped and read it again, silently. “Huh,” she said.
“What is it? Did you figure something out?” Pip asked.
“It just sounds like he’s talking about a palindrome,” Eleanor said.
“What’s that?” Pip asked.
“It’s a word or a sentence that’s the same forward and backward,” Eleanor explained. “Like the number. 31313. It’s the same whichever way you read it.”
“It’s symmetrical,” Otto said. “When something is the same end to end, it’s got bilateral symmetry. Like a human body. One arm and leg on each side, one eye on each side and everything. My name’s symmetrical, too.”
“That makes it a palindrome,” Eleanor said, nodding. Something clicked into place. “Janus!” she said.
“The god?” Pip asked. At Otto’s confused look, she explained. “He’s from Greek mythology. He’s the god of beginnings and endings. Like January, because it’s the end of one year and the beginning of the other. Oh, also, he has two faces, one in each direction.”
“Your mom was wearing Janus cufflinks,” Eleanor said.
“My dad bought those for her,” Pip said. “I thought it was just because he likes Greek myths. He bought me this big book of them, and . . .” She trailed off. Otto squeezed her shoulder, a comforting gesture.
“A man that faces forward and back at the same time. That sounds a lot like the People Who Look Away,” Otto said.
“It’s like how the fairy tales are a sneaky way of talking about what’s really happening,” Eleanor said. “Because you can’t say it outright. You need a story to hide it. So they use Janus, but they’re really talking about him. It’s probably why they call him Mr. Januar
y. Janus is where the name January comes from.”
“Wait. Pip is a palindrome, too, isn’t it?” Otto asked.
“But not Philippa,” Pip said.
“Even your parents have always called you Pip, though,” Otto said.
“Well, Eleanor’s not a palindrome. Rona-el-e,” Pip sounded out. “So maybe it doesn’t mean anything.”
Eleanor drew in a sharp little breath. Her hands were getting cold again. She pressed them against the pages of the book, but it didn’t offer any warmth. “I decided to go by Eleanor when I moved here,” she said. “But I never have before. My mom always called me—”
“Elle,” Otto finished for her. She met his eyes and nodded once.
“Our birthdays are one thing,” Eleanor said. “You don’t really control what day you have a baby on, or when you get pregnant. But our names? If our names are part of this—”
“Our parents picked our names,” Pip said, realization dawning.
“You remember the story. The children were marked as his,” Eleanor said. “What if it didn’t just mean that they had the right birthday? What if people gave them special names so that you knew right away you weren’t—weren’t supposed to get attached? ‘Marked in flesh and name.’ That’s what the poem said.”
“That would mean it wasn’t just my parents, though,” Pip said. “I mean—I knew my mom was a bad person. She says all the right nice things and she makes casseroles when people are sick and donates to charity, but she’s just bad inside. She doesn’t love me. She looks at me and she doesn’t love me and I’ve always known that. My dad’s okay, except he’s got to be evil, too, since he’s in the January Society. So maybe he doesn’t love me, either. Not really. But this means Otto’s parents—your parents—” Pip’s face was a tangle of different emotions. Like she was horrified and hopeful at the same time at the idea that she wasn’t the only one with a wicked family.
“My parents do love me,” Otto shot back. “And if they knew I was going to get sacrificed or whatever, they’d try to protect me. They wouldn’t stay here, for one thing. And I bet Eleanor’s parents weren’t evil, either. I bet they didn’t know any more than mine do.”
Eleanor swallowed. She was pressing her hands so hard against the book she was suddenly afraid she would damage it. She pulled them away and made fists with them instead. “My mom knew,” she said.
Otto looked startled. “What?”
“I lied. My parents didn’t die in a car crash. They aren’t dead at all. Or they might be. I don’t know. I don’t even know who my dad is. My mom—” She took a deep breath. Her thumb traced the crescent scar on her palm. “My mom moved away from Eden Eld right after she had me. My grandparents always tried to get her to come back, but she wouldn’t. And she made me promise I would never come here, either. She was always kind of . . . strange. But a few months ago, she started to get more and more scared. Saying strange things. She’d get up ten times in the night to check that all the doors and windows were locked, and she stopped letting me go to school. And then one day she lit our house on fire and disappeared.”
“Whoa,” Pip said. She wrapped her arms around her body, her fingers picking at the folds of her shirt with nervous energy.
“She was trying to protect you,” Otto said.
“And then she tried to kill me,” Eleanor shot back. “So I guess she was evil after all. And maybe your parents—”
“No,” Otto said, shaking his head. “There’s some other explanation, because my parents love me, and they’re the most normal people in the world. My mom’s a children’s librarian, and she won’t even kill spiders. My dad is a vet. He nurses tiny baby kittens with his own hands. He could charge way higher prices, but he treats tons of his patients for free because they can’t pay and he doesn’t want to turn anyone away. There’s no way they’re evil.”
“But you are descended from one of the founding families,” Pip insisted. “And you have the right kind of name.”
“So maybe someone suggested it to them,” Eleanor cut in quickly, because she could see that Otto was getting ready to really argue and she didn’t want them fighting.
“What I don’t get is why you’d hide all this in a book of fairy tales,” Pip said. “If somebody wanted to tell you how to fight the wrong things, why not just make a textbook or something?”
Eleanor thought. And then she spoke slowly. “It’s like you said, with trying to show people the wrong things. Sometimes, it’s hard to see the truth when it’s right in front of you,” she said. “Sometimes you can only see it if you look at it out of the corner of your eye. Or if you tell a story about it. If people don’t notice or don’t remember the things that happen here, you couldn’t exactly warn them about it. But maybe if you put them into stories, stories that didn’t seem to be about Eden Eld at all but which told you how to protect yourself . . .”
“Like sprinkling the flour at the wedding,” Otto said.
“And that crystal the king’s sister is holding in the illustration,” Eleanor said. “It’s not in the story, but it’s in the picture. I bet that’s important.”
“So it’s like . . . a guide. Just a sneaky one,” Pip said.
“Right. So even if your mind was all wired to ignore the wrong things, it could remember the stories.”
“Will it tell us how to save ourselves?” Pip asked, shifting from side to side.
“I don’t know,” Eleanor said. “But I trust books. And I think we can trust this one. Besides, we don’t really have any other ideas.”
She waited for one of them to chime in to tell her they didn’t need the book, that they knew a way to save themselves, that it would all be okay. But both of them looked grim.
“I don’t know what to do,” Pip said softly.
“We know one thing for sure,” Eleanor said, forcing every bit of iron she had into her voice. “We have to get out of Eden Eld. And we have to do it today.”
Thirteen
They couldn’t leave right away. If they missed their classes, people would come looking for them. Besides, they’d need to get supplies if they were going to get far enough away. How far that was, they didn’t know.
“We’ll meet up at Ashford House after school,” Pip declared. “It’s right on the border of town, so it’s the best place to start from. We’ll head through the woods. We just need to find somewhere to hide long enough to wait out Halloween.”
They all agreed. It seemed foolproof. Something bad was coming for Eden Eld on Halloween—so leave Eden Eld. Simple.
So Eleanor kept telling herself as she sat through the rest of her classes. So she told herself on the bus ride home, sitting next to the uncharacteristically silent Otto. At his stop he got up, then hesitated, his backpack slung over one shoulder.
“This is going to work, isn’t it?” he asked. “We’ll be safe?”
“It’ll work,” she told him. “I’m sure of it.”
Lying got so very easy after a while.
He hopped off the bus. She watched him make his way down a long gravel driveway, vanishing among the trees. She’d see him again soon, she told herself, but she couldn’t bring herself to think what might happen after that.
Jenny was napping when she got home, so she went through the kitchen cupboards, finding enough food to last a couple days and stowing it in her backpack. Warm clothes were next, and then she found herself frozen in the middle of her room, trying to think of what to bring, terrified that she’d forget the one thing that might save them.
She grabbed the book and sat down on her bed, tucking her feet under her. She turned the pages, as if an answer would jump out at her. She wished she were as brave as Jack, the hero in so many of the stories, or as clever as the girl with backward hands who went on several of his adventures with him. And then there was the hedgewitch, too, who always seemed to have a magical brew or a pair of charmed boots t
o save the day—and who, it had to be said, seemed to have something going on with Jack, though the stories never came out and said it.
She didn’t have a magic walking stick like Jack, or a satchel of potions like the hedgewitch, or an enchanted rose like the girl with backward hands. But there were three of them, and she and Pip and Otto made three, and maybe that was enough. Maybe they were enough.
She flipped through to the end of the book to a number of blank pages where the thirteenth story ought to have been. The first of the blank pages had smudges on it—no, the ghosts of words she still couldn’t quite read. She squinted at the title.
The Thirt—
It was all she could make out.
Clack!
Something sharp hit the window, and Eleanor jumped. Then another one hit. Clack! A rock. Being thrown from down below.
“Pip,” Eleanor said with relief, and ran to the window. Pip and Otto stood below, their bikes beside them and their backpacks stuffed full. Pip waved wildly. Eleanor waved back and held up a “wait a minute” finger. She stuffed the book in her bag and ran for the stairs.
Her path brought her past the kitchen. Jenny was up, sipping a glass of water between blowing out long, tense breaths. “Hey, Elle,” she said. “Where are you off to?”
Guilt jabbed Eleanor between her ribs. One more lie, she thought, and then she wouldn’t lie to Jenny and Ben ever again. “Just going out to explore a bit with Pip and Otto,” she said. “I’ll be back for dinner.”
“Have fun,” Jenny said, obviously distracted by the state of her belly.
Eleanor slunk away. She headed down the steps and around the side of the house, where Pip and Otto were waiting.
“There you are,” Pip said, as if she’d taken five hours and not five minutes. “Ready to go?”
Eleanor nodded.
“We’ll stow the bikes in the trees. They’re no good in the forest,” Pip said. “But it was the fastest way to get here.”
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