Now both doors were rattling together. Brian’s voice came from both of them. He sounded desperate. “Please! Please. It’s so dark. Coco. I don’t know what to do. Let me out! Let me out!” There was a crash, like someone had banged both fists on the door.
Now a third door was rattling, farther down. And a fourth.
Coco realized with horror that every door along that whole endless hall was rattling, and her friend’s voice was shouting from all of them, “Coco, let me out. Let me out!”
Coco stood there trembling, fighting the urge to clamp her hands over her ears. They couldn’t all be Brian! But they all sounded like Brian. Were any of them Brian? The courage that had kept her hands steady while she played chess with Seth had totally deserted her. Her mind ran in circles. Was Brian in any of these closets? Or none of the closets? How many closets were there?
Were there really undead coyotes?
She had a terrible suspicion, almost a certainty, that somewhere in the shadows, the smiling man was watching, laughing while he and Coco played this stupid game in the hallway, as Ollie’s time ran out and Brian disappeared forever into the depths of the lodge.
Calm down, Coco, she tried to tell herself. Think. Think. But she couldn’t think, not with Brian’s desperate voice echoing in her ears, shouting her name.
Move, she told herself. You have to move.
She went to the nearest rattling door.
“Brian?” Coco said. “How do I know it’s you?”
“Tiny, of course it’s me!” cried his voice from behind the door. The door handle shook harder than ever. “It’s so dark in here. Help me.”
Brian had said he wouldn’t call her Tiny again. Maybe that was a clue? That it wasn’t the real Brian? Should she just start trying doors? Asking trick questions to whoever was in there? But there were dozens of doors in the hallway. How long would it take her? And what would happen to Ollie if she took all this time trying to find Brian?
As she stood there, indecisive, on the edge of panic, Coco heard a very soft beeping. Coming from her pocket. Where she’d shoved Ollie’s watch in the race to get away. Coco, with a sudden surge of hope, pulled out Ollie’s watch and looked at it.
Nothing. The watch display was blank. Some help there. Maybe she’d been wrong to waste so much time on the chess game to get Ollie’s watch away from Seth.
Coco was about to put it back in her pocket. But then she paused, staring at the watch. It was still beeping. Why would it be beeping?
Coco licked her lips. She whispered, “If you can hear me, be quiet.”
The watch fell silent. Coco let out a soft breath. Even if Seth had somehow blocked the screen from working, maybe—
The doors in the hallway rattled louder than ever, and Brian’s voice rose to a terrified scream. “Coco, Coco!”
Coco didn’t let it distract her. She whispered to the watch. “One beep is no, and two beeps is yes. Beep three times right now if you understand me.”
The watch was silent. Coco held her breath. Then, slowly, the watch beeped three times.
Coco let her breath out with a shudder. Then she had another terrible thought. What if this was a trick too? What if the beeping wasn’t Ollie’s mom, but Seth? She thought quickly.
“Ollie plays softball, yes or no?”
Two beeps. YES.
“Ollie is scared of dogs.”
One beep. NO.
“Her favorite color is blue.”
NO. True. Ollie’s favorite color was yellow.
Okay. It definitely wasn’t a foolproof test, but she needed some help and this seemed like the best Coco would get. She hitched Seth’s Ouija board more firmly under her arm. She gathered her courage. “Okay,” she said. “I need to find Brian. Which room is he in?”
She turned to the first door. “This one?”
The door she was pointing at shook back and forth. Brian’s hopeless yell from inside hurt her ears.
But the watch beeped once. NO.
Coco began making her slow and steady way down the darkened hallway, crossing and recrossing to each door. Brian’s voice yelled at her from all of them. Each time, she whispered, “Here?” and each time, the watch said NO.
Now Brian sounded mad. “Coco, are you playing or what? Coco, help! Coco, why do you hate me? Coco. Tiny, what’s your problem? I never liked you anyway. You’re so lame. Ollie’s better than you, and braver than you and—”
On and on Brian’s voice went, saying hurtful things, desperate things.
Coco closed her ears and kept going. The hallway seemed endless. At each door, the watch said NO, and NO. Coco’s heart pounded. How much time had gone by? How much time did she have? She began to think that she’d just be walking until dawn, checking door after door, and then the sun would rise, and she’d be stuck in the smiling man’s hallway forever. Maybe she’d been tricked anyway. Maybe the watch wasn’t Ollie’s mom at all.
Just then the watch began beeping urgently. Coco halted. Realized that she was right about in the middle of the hallway. As though she hadn’t been walking for the last ten minutes.
Maybe she hadn’t. She didn’t know what was a trick and what was real. All around, Brian’s voice shouted at her. Was she alone in the dark? Did she have a friend behind any of the doors? Where was Ollie? Was the smiling man lurking in the shadows, watching her and laughing?
The watch was beeping softly. Not a YES or NO, but as though it were trying to talk to her. As though to tell her, Calm down and look.
Calm down, Coco thought. Calm down. She was surrounded by rattling doors. That’s the trick, she thought. He’s full of tricks. He makes things seem different than they are. Don’t listen.
Then she realized that the door in front of her wasn’t rattling at all. It was totally silent. “This one?” she whispered.
Two beeps.
Coco hesitated. She knew she either had to trust the watch or not, but she could imagine all kinds of horrible things lurking behind those doors.
But she gathered her courage, took the door by the handle, and pushed.
It wasn’t a closet at all. It was a staircase. Coco, not expecting it, almost fell down the stairs. Gasping, she caught herself at the last second and peered in.
All the rattling closet doors had fallen silent. Brian’s voice was silent too. In front of her, a simple flight of creaky wooden steps led down into darkness.
Coco absolutely did not want to go down those stairs by herself. She wanted to run back to her mom, wake her up, and ask what to do. She wanted to go to sleep in a warm bunk bed and have this all have been a dream when she woke up. She wanted Ollie and Brian with her.
But she’d lost Ollie and Brian. And she wouldn’t get them back unless she was brave. She had to be brave.
“Do I go down there?” Coco whispered to the watch.
The watch beeped twice. YES.
Coco, sick with fright, thought of her friends waiting for her and gathered her courage. She hitched the Ouija board more firmly under her arm and went through and down.
Just as she went, somewhere out of sight, the bird clock whistled.
Coco prayed she had enough time.
13
OLLIE SPRINTED DOWN the stairs, hating the dark. Somewhere below her, she thought she saw a faint golden light. It was all that kept her from tripping and falling headfirst down the stairs. But the light also scared her. She didn’t know what had made it. She didn’t know what was waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs. The wooden steps creaked and snagged threads on her wool socks as she ran.
About halfway down, she realized that there were no footsteps following her. Ollie slowed, and then she stopped.
Utter silence on the stairwell. Ollie tried to quiet her panic-fast breathing, her racing heart. She wondered if Mother Hemlock and the black bear weren’t following because they didn’t
need to. Because all they had to do was stand guard at the door and Ollie would be trapped in the basement until it was too late. Had she just missed her last chance of getting out of this place?
Tears pricked her eyes. She swallowed them, tried to think. She wasn’t done yet! Coco and Brian would be somewhere, trying to help. But they were on the other side of the mirror. She didn’t know what they were doing. Or even what they could do.
Ollie looked back up at the faint shape of the door she’d come through. Go down? Go back up? How long until dawn? The golden light below flickered. Ollie didn’t know what was down there.
But she knew what was waiting for her up in the lobby.
Ollie ran as quietly as she could down the stairs.
They ended sooner than she was prepared for. Ollie lurched from the last step onto the stone floor of a basement so fast that she went sprawling painfully to her knees. She wrenched herself to her feet and looked around.
The basement was massive. Cavernous. Ollie, eyes open wide in the dark, turned in a nervous circle and glimpsed all kinds of things. Big lockers with labels like SUMMER CLOTHES, WINTER CLOTHES, HISTORY BOOKS, NIGHTGOWNS. There were old rusty tools and nails on the floor. She breathed the musty damp and slow decay. She took a few cautious steps farther in, watching where she put her feet.
The basement was utterly quiet. Utterly still.
Or—almost still. The light moved. It shone from behind a set of lockers. It flickered and steadied. Like a candle flame. But who could have lit the candle? Cautiously, straining her senses to hear and see, Ollie crept around the corner of the old lockers. She stopped short. The light came from an old-fashioned oil lamp. It burned by itself on a small, splintering table.
Ollie knew about oil lamps. They had a few in the Egg, for when the power went out. The hollow base was full of lamp oil; there would be a piece of cotton for a wick, threaded up into a hollow glass tube. If you lit the wick, it burned slowly and steadily. You could brighten and dim the light by adjusting the wick up and down.
But how had a lit oil lamp made it down there? In the dark basement, on that side of the mirror? Ollie hesitated, listening hard. She couldn’t hear anything but the sound of her own footsteps.
She went closer, examined the lamp. It seemed ordinary. Except that it was in the oddest of places. Had a ghost lit it? Did ghosts have lamps here?
Or was it Seth?
Maybe the lamp didn’t matter, Ollie thought. How was she going to get back through the mirror? After Alice went through the looking glass, all she had to do was wake up, and she was home. Ollie didn’t think that would work this time. Back in October, she and Brian and Coco had made it home from the other side of the mist because Ollie had a book that existed in both worlds. But there was no mist and no books this time.
Ollie didn’t know what to do.
Think, she ordered herself furiously. Think!
Well, she needed to get out of the basement first, Ollie decided. She couldn’t get back through the mirror in a basement that, as far as she could see, didn’t have any mirrors.
Cautiously, Ollie reached for the lamp. The light would come in handy. But before she touched it, Ollie thought she heard a creaking from the stairs above her. The bear? Mother Hemlock? Were they chasing her after all?
Thud. Thud. Definitely footsteps.
She had to hide, Ollie thought. Disoriented, she looked frantically around. The lamplight ruined her night vision, and the shadows were deceptive. And even if she did hide, would the dead bear be able to smell her?
Well, if it could, she couldn’t help it now. Ollie ducked behind another bank of lockers, trying to get out of range of the lamplight.
For a second, she crouched alone in the shadows, panting.
Then a thin, high, whispering voice spoke out of the darkness.
“You shouldn’t have come here,” it said.
* * *
—
Coco stepped cautiously down a creaking flight of wooden steps. The Ouija board was clamped tight under one arm. “Brian?” she called, her voice small and fragile in the darkness. “Brian?”
No sound. No answer. Distantly she thought she heard a howl. The coyotes? Her heart beat faster. She really hoped that Brian was okay. The stairs were narrow and wooden. Splinters snagged on her socks. It was almost completely dark. Far below, a single yellowish light burned. It barely illuminated the stairwell. She had to go carefully so she wouldn’t trip. She took a cautious step down. Another.
It was hard to make out the walls, because of the darkness. But she could, a little. Coco slowed, then stopped.
There was writing on the walls. A lot of writing.
COCO, said the walls. COCO COCO COCO, blurring the letters of her name over and over and over. Then U LEFT ME U FORGOT ME I HATE U I HATE U.
Despite herself, Coco cowered back from the ugly words. Maybe Brian had been in one of those closets and she had just left him . . .
Wait, was it Brian’s handwriting? Was it Ollie’s? Coco swallowed hard. That was dumb. Why would either of them be writing on a stairwell? “It’s a trick,” she whispered. “A trick, a trick.”
She didn’t know what kind of tricks the smiling man could do. Another piece of knowledge she wished she had. She’d beaten him at chess, but he’d tricked her and Brian into separating, hadn’t he? If it was him, making the hall endless and full of Brian’s voice, making dead coyotes chase them, putting writing on the basement wall, then what else could he do?
Coco swallowed back fear. If she panicked now, she’d be like a climber on a cliff face, stuck in the middle, afraid to go up, afraid to descend.
She started down the stairs again. Down and down she went. The stairs seemed to go on forever.
Suddenly Coco felt a gust of icy air from above. Then she heard running footsteps come thundering down behind her.
Coco spun around, pressed herself against a wall, her heart in her mouth.
She didn’t see anyone at all. But she still heard footsteps. She instinctively flattened herself to the wall, as close as she could. The footsteps ran straight past her and kept going down into the basement.
All went quiet once more. Coco stood frozen with indecision.
The watch beeped again. Coco had almost forgotten it in her terror.
She whispered, “Should I go down?”
Two beeps. YES.
She didn’t want to go down. Maybe it was the smiling man after all, maybe he knew all about Ollie and that was who was making the watch beep. “Ollie hates Brussels sprouts, doesn’t she?” Coco whispered.
One beep. NO. That was true. Ollie loved Brussels sprouts, the weirdo.
Okay, then, Coco thought. As proof, maybe it was still kind of weak. Maybe it was the smiling man’s lucky guess, but she had to trust it. Coco kept on padding down the stairs.
Finally she stepped off the stairs and onto a concrete floor and found herself in a gigantic space. Utterly still and utterly dark, except for a flickering light. Coco went around a pile of old clothes and saw a single oil lamp burning. It was just like the oil lamps that Ollie’s dad had in the Egg. Coco stared at it. Where had that come from? Who had lit it? She scanned the basement. Complete and horrible silence.
The lamp illuminated dusty lockers and piles of boxes. Rusting tools.
Coco considered the lamp, thinking hard. Coco had taken the Ouija board because it was the only thing visible on both sides of the dining room mirror, after Ollie had gone through it.
But that wasn’t completely true. Coco remembered suddenly that there had been another thing visible on both sides of the mirror.
The fire itself.
Okay, but so? She didn’t know what that meant, or if it would be any help. It was only that the Ouija board was the first thing Coco had seen that had struck her as—different. Out of place. This lamp was the second.
&n
bsp; She was reaching out a hand to pick up the lamp when she heard soft, skittering footsteps again. She still couldn’t see anyone. “Brian?” she whispered. “Brian?”
No answer.
But Ollie’s watch began to beep, loudly and steadily, in the darkness.
* * *
—
Ollie, crouching behind the lockers, froze when she heard the thin, whispering voice. You shouldn’t have come here. It seemed to have spoken right beside her.
Very slowly, Ollie turned.
It was the ghost girl. Gretel, if that was her real name. The ghost girl had been scary at a distance. She was worse close up. Her nose was black, as were the tips of her fingers. There were black specks on her cheeks. The rest of her was bloodless-white, her lips bluish. Her eyes were wide and unblinking.
“I tried to warn you,” she whispered. “I tried. Too late. You’re here and she’s hunting you. Go away. I’m hiding. If she finds you, she’ll find me.”
It took Ollie a moment to understand what the girl was saying. Her voice was thick and slurred, as though her frozen lips and jaw didn’t work very well. “Mother Hemlock?” Ollie whispered back, trying to neither stare at the wide, unblinking eyes nor flinch away from the black-tipped fingers. “Is she looking for you?”
“Always,” whispered the girl. “Always. Sometimes she catches me. But I get away again. Now she won’t find me. I’m hiding. I’m not afraid of the dark anymore. I can hide in the dark.” She surveyed Ollie, and the blackened lips pressed down to nothing. “You’re here too and you have to take care of yourself. Go away.”
“You tried to warn me, didn’t you?” said Ollie. “You said, don’t listen. You showed me where to hide in the kitchen.”
The girl didn’t say anything, but Ollie had no intention of going away. She needed help, and she needed answers. She tried again, “Is your name Gretel?”
The girl shuddered, and slid away from Ollie. Her trembling mouth made an eerie contrast with her unblinking eyes. “Gretel? Was I? I can’t remember now.” Suddenly her calm, flat voice rose with panic. “I can’t say anything else! He won’t let me! How long have I been down here? An hour? Two? Not more. I can’t remember now. But it doesn’t matter. This is my hiding place. Go away!”
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