The Strangers

by Jacqueline West

  As it turned out, Olive didn’t need to worry about the cats being noticed. The crowd inside the front hall was so dense, three costumed hippopotami could have gone undetected. Strands of spiderweb trailed across the ceiling. Twists of black crepe paper threaded the warm air, where the smells of popcorn and caramel mingled in a sugary fog. Olive was jostled and shoved and bumped along, trying to keep her goggles firmly on her head and her feet firmly beneath her body.

  “Remember to stay together!” she called over the noise.

  But she was calling to no one.

  4

  OLIVE STARED AROUND the teeming school hallway. Rutherford, Morton, and the cats had vanished into the crowd like five raindrops into a river.

  Olive felt a sickening jolt. They had to stay together. Alone, each one of them would be vulnerable; each one could become a target. She pressed one tent-pegged hand over the lump of the spectacles. At least they were still with her. Craning around for any sign of the others, Olive let herself be carried along, through the gymnasium doors.

  There, the noise and color of the hall seemed to explode outward, swelling and dimming like a burst firework. The lights hanging from the ceiling had been draped in layers of black and purple tissue, filling the room with a violet haze. The wooden floor gleamed like a mirror. Where the bleachers usually stood, rows of tents and tables flickered with false candlelight. Masked faces shifted around her. Nylon wings poked her in the sides. Robots and aliens bumped past, making muffled zapping noises with their plastic laser guns. And one tall gray ghoul loomed over her shoulder, coming just close enough to catch the corner of her eye.

  Olive edged away from the ghoul’s lurking figure. How come she couldn’t find any of her friends, but she couldn’t seem to lose one stranger?

  “Rutherford?” she called, her voice useless against the carnival’s roar. “Morton?”

  She dodged through the crowd. If she could just find an open spot, or something tall to stand on, maybe she could get a clearer view and—

  “Braaaaains?” intoned a low voice in her ear.

  Olive whipped around and nearly planted her nose in a platter of pinkish gray goop. The goop looked suspiciously like molded Jell-O, and the zombie holding it looked suspiciously like her science teacher, but Olive’s heart gave a little shiver anyway. It gave another, harder shiver a moment later, when the zombie shuffled to one side, revealing the tall gray ghoul just a few steps away.

  Was it following her?

  With a burst of panic, Olive raced to the left, toward a massive display of carved pumpkins. Safe in their glow, she paused, breathing hard, and squinted into the nearby faces.

  There was no one that she recognized . . . No one but the tall gray ghoul that came gliding slowly through the crowd, its hooded face swiveling to find her.

  An imaginary hand grabbed Olive by the throat. She dove behind a knot of vampires drinking blood-colored sodas. Crouching close to the floor and keeping one eye fixed over her shoulder, Olive scuttled sideways, not noticing the tall black object in her path until she had crab-walked directly into it.

  The tall black object turned around.

  “Well, hello there,” said Ms. Teedlebaum, squinting down at Olive. “Happy Halloween!”

  “Um . . . happy Halloween,” Olive managed.

  The art teacher was dressed in black from head to toe, with rows and rows of silver chains wrapped tightly around her neck. Her kinky red hair had been combed straight up, so that it jutted like a petrified tassel from the top of her head. Its tips were splattered with glossy blots of orange paint.

  “I’m a paintbrush,” Ms. Teedlebaum announced. “I think it’s perfectly obvious, but people keep asking.”

  “Oh,” said Olive, glancing away just long enough to see that the ghoul had sunk back into the sea of costumes. “How—how did you—”

  “Get my hair to stand up like this?” Ms. Teedlebaum supplied. “That’s the other thing people keep asking. I used wood glue.”

  “Oh,” said Olive. “Will that wash out?”

  Ms. Teedlebaum paused. “To be honest, I didn’t think that far ahead.” She shrugged, smiling again. The rows of silver chains jangled. “I guess we’ll see!”

  Olive nodded.

  “And what about you? Are you a cockroach?” Ms. Teedlebaum asked, gazing at Olive’s goggles and scaly brown suit.

  “I’m a jabberwocky. Like in Alice in Wonderland.”

  “Ah.” Ms. Teedlebaum nodded. “I think I would prefer a cockroach infestation to a jabberwocky infestation, wouldn’t you, Alice? But I’d prefer a butterfly infestation to either of those. Why are there never infestations of nice things, I wonder.” Shaking her head thoughtfully, the red-haired paintbrush wandered away.

  Olive turned in a wobbly circle, trying to bring her brain back to the present. The ghoul was still nowhere to be seen—but neither were Rutherford, Morton, or the cats. Shrieks from the Haunted Maze shot through the sugary air, making Olive twitch. She clenched her hands inside the bulky gloves.

  Rutherford and the cats could find their own way home. But what if she had lost Morton for good? What if he used this chance to run away from the house, from Elsewhere, and from Olive? Or what if he came too close to those flickering jack-o’-lanterns, and the candle flames caught the edge of this costume, and—

  No, Olive told herself. That wasn’t likely. It was much more likely that the McMartins would use this chance to separate them all, to scare and confuse them, and then to spring upon them, like wolves on a scattering herd of sheep. She had to find her friends again, before someone else did.

  Olive stood on her tiptoes, searching the throng. Please, she thought. Please, please, please. And as though she had wished it into existence, a delicate greenish light, like the glimmer of a firefly, glowed through a seam in the crowd.

  Olive’s heart leaped.

  “Excuse me,” she murmured, darting past turtles and space troopers and someone dressed as a dachshund in a hotdog bun. She had to keep that firefly glow in sight. “Excuse me. Excuse me.”

  Two giggling fairies bounced past, knocking Olive off course. “Hey!” shouted the dark-haired fairy. She squinted at Olive, her glittery green eyeliner sparkling in the dimness. “You came as a bat!”

  “Ew! Don’t let it get caught in your hair!” squeaked the other fairy, and the two of them fluttered away, shrieking and covering their heads.

  Olive spun around, trying to find the green light again, and felt something damp brush the side of her neck. Something slick and soft and almost rotten. She halted, looking up.

  The tall gray ghoul loomed above her.

  Letting out a gasp that no one heard, Olive stumbled backward through the crowd. The ghoul’s eyes, two glinting black pits in the shade of its hood, glided after her. She dropped to her hands and knees, veering left and then right and then left again, putting as many other bodies as she could between herself and the thing in the rotten gray robes. When she was sure she’d lost it, she bolted toward the greenish glow of Morton’s costume, weaving through the crowd until suddenly she could make out the familiar shapes of Morton, Rutherford, and all three cats, gathered around the mouth of an Egyptian tomb.

  Olive skidded to a halt before the tomb’s cardboard walls.

  “There you are!” she panted, grabbing Morton’s ghostly arm. “I was so—”

  “Mademoiselle!” Harvey bellowed from the corner of his mouth. “You are safe!”

  “Shh!” hissed Horatio, giving Harvey a warning swat on the head.

  “What did you say?” Harvey bellowed even more loudly. “The cathedral bells have made me deaf!”

  “Shh!” Horatio hissed again, pressing his green nose to Harvey’s splotchy one.

  “I thought I wouldn’t find you again,” Olive gasped, gazing around at all of them. “I thought something might already have happened to you.”<
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  “We were right here the whole time,” said Morton, rather grumpily. He nodded at Rutherford. “This boy has been staring at the same display forever.”

  “I am almost certain that these hieroglyphs are gibberish,” Rutherford observed, glancing up from a painted cardboard column. “And even I—who am not an expert on ancient Egypt—know that mummy cases were placed horizontally inside of sarcophagi, not left standing up so that mummies could reach out and attack nearby people,” he added as the case swung open and a bandaged arm reached out to paw at the air.

  “Listen, everyone,” said Olive, lowering her voice to a whisper. “I think someone is following us.”

  “Whom do you mean, miss?” Leopold asked, stiffening.

  Horatio’s green eyes sharpened. “What makes you think so?”

  Olive huddled against the tomb’s cardboard corner. “I should have known,” she whispered to the others. “It looked too tall and too real to be a kid in a costume.” She pointed into the crowd. “Do you see that tall gray ghoul, right—”

  But the towering hooded head wasn’t there.

  It wasn’t anywhere.

  Olive turned back to her friends. “I don’t know where it went,” she said. “It was right behind me when I came into the gym. And then . . .”

  The words shriveled in Olive’s throat.

  On the silvery wooden floor, just behind the model tomb, lay a tattered slip of gray cloth. Olive’s eyes traveled upward, along the tomb’s wall, and came to rest on a hand—a bony, gray-skinned, rotten hand, with its long fingers wrapped around the wall’s cardboard edge.

  “Run!” she screamed.

  Olive streaked toward the closest exit, a pair of doors that led not to the crowded front corridor, but to one of the school’s inner halls. She smacked through the doors, their heavy panels creaking open to let out the many running feet that came right behind her. Everyone shot out into the dark corridor, the cats racing protectively around Olive’s ankles, Morton reaching up to grab her gloved hand.

  They turned a corner into an even darker hall. Beneath their footsteps and her own gasping breath, Olive could hear the gym doors creaking open, releasing a blast of screams and laughter before whooshing shut again.

  . . . Leaving one more pair of footsteps to follow them into the darkness.

  5

  NO PLACE IS as silent as an empty school.

  Even in the daytime, when all the lights were on and the sun was shining through the windows, Olive couldn’t find her way around the junior high. Now, in the echoing darkness, she made one terrified turn after another. Her goggles slipped irritatingly over her eyes. Her heart smacked against her ribs. Panic pushed her forward like a cold, heavy hand.

  “I think we need to turn the other way, Olive,” said Rutherford, puffing in the blackness beside her.

  “I believe he is correct, miss,” Leopold added. “We ought to retrace our steps and return to the gymnasium, in order to—”

  “We can’t turn around,” Olive argued. “That thing is right behind us! We need to find someplace to hide!”

  They reached a spot where two hallways met, forming a knot of even thicker darkness. Olive halted, unsure of which way to go. Her heartbeat thundered in her ears—and still, beneath its pounding, she could hear the rustle of footsteps coming closer.

  “This way. Quickly,” Horatio commanded, bounding to the right.

  Olive forced her legs back to a run.

  They turned into another hallway, where a carpet of moonlight unrolled along the tiles beneath their feet. Olive glanced up, catching sight of the moon’s bony hook gleaming through the high windows, and looked down again just in time to see Horatio dart through a gap in the hallway walls. Everyone else rushed after him.

  Olive took a hasty look around. They were inside a stairwell, where a flight of steps disappeared into the darkness above. The cats crouched in the doorway, out of sight of the hall. Morton’s robes flickered from the corner. Beneath the rhythm of her own heart, she could hear Rutherford’s muffled breathing. For several seconds, there was no other sound.

  “I believe we lost it,” Leopold murmured at last.

  There was another moment of silence.

  Then Morton whispered, “Who do you think it is?”

  Rutherford had an instant answer. “Well, it can’t be Aldous McMartin, unless Annabelle found some way to get him out of his portrait on her own, which is highly unlikely. It could be Annabelle herself, or someone in her employ who she sent after us. Or, I suppose, it might not be a costume at all.”

  Morton’s eyes were the size of billiard balls. “What do you mean? You mean that thing is a real ghost?”

  “There’s no such thing as ghosts,” said Olive, giving Rutherford a hard look.

  Rutherford blinked. The three cats turned to stare at Olive, their eyes glimmering like stained glass.

  “Maybe it’s just a high school student,” Olive went on. “Or some other kid trying to scare us.”

  “What did you say?” Harvey blared. “‘Bells on high ringing through Paris’?”

  “Shh!” Horatio hissed.

  Everyone fell silent.

  Olive held her breath. There was no noise from the hallway outside. On her hands and knees, Olive edged out of the stairwell and squinted along the dim corridor. A few yards away, just inside the alcove of a locked classroom door, she could make out the edge of a rotting gray robe.

  “It’s still out there, just waiting for us!” she whispered, ducking back into the stairwell. “We can’t stay here!”

  With Olive leading the way, they scrambled up the flight of stairs into yet another deserted hall. Posters for the Halloween carnival fluttered like spectral leaves as they rushed past. Olive dropped the sack full of candy that was crinkling much too noisily on her arm, and she heard the smacks of Rutherford and Morton letting go of theirs as well. Spilled candy clattered on the tiles.

  “We shouldn’t have done this,” Olive panted to the others. “I’m sorry. I thought we would be safe, if we—”

  “We will be safe, if we can just outrun it,” Leopold promised. “Follow me, men. And lady.”

  The black cat veered to the right, toward an open set of doors. They plunged through the archway, following a flight of steps down, down, down, into a long and windowless passage.

  “Where are we?” Olive asked Rutherford, who was gasping in the blackness beside her.

  “I have no idea,” Rutherford answered. “And you know that I do not use those words, in that particular combination, often.”

  “Is that thing still coming after us? Can you hear its thoughts?”

  “As I don’t even know who or what it is,” Rutherford huffed, “I would have to stop and stare directly into its eyes in order to get a clear reading, and I find that thought rather unappealing.”

  “Halt!” said Leopold, before Olive could ask another question. “We seem to have reached an impasse.”

  Olive groped through the blackness. A smooth, solid surface sealed off the end of the corridor. This was a dead end. “Oh no,” she breathed. “No.” She gave the wall a desperate shove. Before them, the solid surface swung forward, sending the groan of disused hinges echoing through the passageway.

  “It’s another door!” Olive shouted. “Come on!”

  Everyone stumbled through the doorway into a vast, open space. It was far too dark to see the room’s dimensions, but the smacks of their footsteps reverberated against a ceiling that hung high above their heads, and the air felt cool and still. Rows of tiny white bulbs formed wide stripes along the floor. In the distance, one red light hung high on the wall, tingeing the darkness with a bloody haze.

  “Are we still in your school?” Morton whispered.

  Olive frowned around at the dim white lights. She took another step forward, and her knee nudged the first seat in
a row that curved away into the darkness.

  “I know where we are!” she called to the others. “We’re in the auditorium!”

  “Olive, are you trying to let our pursuer know exactly how to find us?” hissed Horatio from the vicinity of Olive’s shins. “We ought to find another way out of here, before . . .” Horatio’s whiskers twitched. His ears flicked back, catching a trace of sound.

  A split second later, Olive heard it too: the rusty groan of the passage doors.

  The ghoul had followed them into the auditorium.

  Behind the towering creature, the passage doors thumped softly shut. For a moment, the ghoul kept still, its hooded face turning from one of them to the other, taking in the cats, the dimly glowing ghost, the miniature professor, and the petrified jabberwocky in sweatpants. Olive knew just what Horatio had been about to say: They needed to find another way out, before they were trapped here. Alone. Far from the crowd, and the lights, and the teachers, and the exits. Just like they were trapped now.

  Silence hung in the air like a blade about to fall.

  And then several things happened at once.

  “Run!” screamed Olive.

  “Men, split up!” yelled Harvey.

  “Men, stay together!” yelled Leopold.

  “The light booth!” shouted Rutherford.

  “The outer doors!” shouted Horatio.

  “Olive!” screamed Morton.

  At the explosion of sound, the ghoul gave a start, staring around as its prey darted in all directions.

  Rutherford shot up one aisle. Horatio took another. Leopold and Harvey charged off into the rows of seats. Grabbing a wad of Morton’s sleeve, Olive hauled him toward the dim red light, which cast its glow over the steps that led to the stage.

  Black boards thudded under their feet. Dragging Morton behind her, Olive rushed toward the stage’s closed curtains. There had to be a stage door on the other side. But there seemed to be no gap in the heavy black velvet, and another set of steps was crossing the stage, drawing closer and closer. The tremor of the floorboards threaded upward into her spine—