The Strangers

by Jacqueline West

  —and, with a sudden, audible clunk, every light in the room went out.

  Without the spokes of white along the floor or the red glow of the work light, the air in the auditorium was as black as a jar full of ink.

  “Olive?” whispered a voice from over her shoulder—a voice that wasn’t Morton’s.

  Olive wheeled around just as a beam of light, bright and pure as a pillar of ice, speared through the darkness and shattered across the stage.

  Morton let out a shriek.

  Half blinded, shielding her face with one arm, Olive blinked into the blue-white glare. Inches away from her, near enough that she could have reached out and touched its rotting gray robes, stood the ghoul. It too was wavering and blinking into the light.

  “Everybody freeze!” shouted Rutherford’s voice from the light booth, where the giant spotlight was aimed at the stage.

  Nobody listened.

  Morton had already flopped down and wormed his way under the hem of the curtains, away from the burning white beam. The cats leaped from the rows of seats up onto the stage, forming a protective barricade around Olive’s shins. Olive backed up until her wire wings caught in the curtains.

  Only the ghoul stood still.

  Its skeletal frame was bathed in the light. Olive imagined its knobby hand reaching up and pulling back that hood, revealing a heap of long, dark hair, and a pair of pretty, icy, painted eyes. But it wasn’t dissolving, as the living portraits of Annabelle or Aldous would have.

  In fact, it seemed to be shivering.

  Olive wriggled her wings free of the curtain and took one tiny step forward. From the sunken pits of the ghoul’s face, two wide blue eyes watched her warily.

  “Take off that mask,” she commanded.

  The ghoul reached up with two bony hands. There was a sound like a rubber band stretching, and then the mask and hood were gone, leaving only a very skinny, very tall, very young man—a young man with stringy red hair, bulbous blue eyes, and a nervous expression—to stare back at her.

  “Who are you?” Olive demanded.

  The young man’s mouth worked from side to side, as though the answer had gotten stuck in his teeth. He hunched his shoulders around his long, skinny neck. He cleared his throat with a startlingly deep rumble.

  “Walter,” he said, in a very, very low voice.

  “Why are you following us?”

  “Mmm. Because I’m—um—” Walter swallowed, and Olive could see his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his scrawny neck. “Because I’m your bodyguard.”

  6

  “YOU’RE WHAT?” SAID Olive.

  Walter drew his head even closer to his shoulders and folded his lanky arms across his chest. “I’m your bodyguard,” he repeated, in a deep, slow voice.

  Pressed against Olive’s legs, the three cats fluffed their fur and made themselves as large and important as possible. Harvey forgot he was supposed to be a hunchback, and stood up like a stuffed cat in a museum. Leopold looked so tightly inflated that Olive feared the tip of one of her wings might pop him.

  “She already has a guard,” snapped Horatio. “Three of them, in fact.”

  Walter looked surprisingly unsurprised by the talking cat. “These are the familiars,” he rumbled. “I’ve heard about them.”

  “Wait,” said Olive, before too many more questions could pile up and crush her first one. “What do you mean, you’re my bodyguard?”

  Walter’s knobby shoulders shifted. “Mmm . . . I was supposed to follow you,” he began. His voice was so deep that it seemed to be coming from someplace a few floors below his body. “I was supposed to watch. Make sure you were safe. I wasn’t supposed to scare you. You weren’t even supposed to know.” Walter paused, his eyes darting anxiously from one of them to another. “But you kept running away. So I had to run after you. And now . . .” Walter kneaded the hollow ghoul’s mask in both hands. “Mmm,” he grumbled deep in his throat. “Now my aunt’s going to be so mad.”

  “Your aunt?” Olive echoed.

  Walter’s eyes widened. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you. They’re trying to stay undercover.”

  “‘They’?”

  “Oh, no.” Walter closed his eyes. “Could you—mmm—could you turn off that light? It’s hard to think.”

  There was another clunk from the light booth. The spotlight clicked off, the floor lights blinked on, and Rutherford emerged into the aisle, leaving one row of houselights glowing dimly behind him.

  “You’re Rutherford Dewey,” said Walter as Rutherford hurried down the aisle. “And that’s the Nivens boy. The one trapped in the painting,” he added, nodding at the lump behind the curtains.

  Morton’s head poked out from behind the velvet, his eyes glaring at Walter beneath his lifted hood.

  “Well,” said Olive, “since you seem to know everything about us, it might be fair if you told us a little about you.”

  Walter sighed a deep, rumbling sigh. He rubbed his head with the empty mask, making his hair stand up in uneven reddish spikes. “Mmm . . .” he said again, looking so uncomfortable under everyone’s scrutiny that Olive almost felt sorry for him. But not quite.

  “I belong to a group that opposes dark magic,” Walter began at last. “The S-M-U-D-S.”

  “The Smuds?” said Rutherford. He stood at the edge of the stage, staring intently at Walter’s face.

  “The—mmm—the Society of Magicians United against—mmm—Dark Spells,” Walter explained. “I’m a junior member. Sort of. Or an apprentice. Almost.” He blinked at Rutherford. “That’s how I know your grandmother. And we know about all of you.” His eyes fluttered over the rest of them.

  “Are you here because of the increased threat from the McMartins?” Rutherford asked.

  Walter nodded. “We know what’s been happening in their house. But we were supposed to stay undercover. If you didn’t know we were watching the house, then—mmm—then the McMartins might not know either.”

  “We thought you were Annabelle,” said Morton angrily, crawling out from the curtains to stand beside Olive.

  “Or something Annabelle had summoned,” Olive added.

  “No,” said Walter. “I’m just a dope whose aunt is going to yell at him.” Head bowed, he glanced around at the circle of wary faces. “Can I—can I at least escort you home?”

  Leopold’s chest inflated even further. “We do not require an additional escort,” he huffed.

  “No. I know you don’t.” Walter’s deep voice softened. “Mmm . . . I just meant I could go with you. Safety in numbers.”

  Leopold gave a puffy harrumph.

  “What do you think, Rutherford?” Olive asked.

  Rutherford nodded slowly. “I think Walter is telling the truth,” he said.

  “Very well,” said Horatio. His eyes gave Walter a last sharp scan. “Then let us return to the house. Some of us would rather not spend the night attired in green paint and plastic snouts.”

  A jabberwocky, a ghost, a professor, three cats, and one tall gray ghoul wound their way back through the junior high school and out the open front doors. The cats kept a watchful eye on Walter, Olive noticed, but once the group had passed through the school doors, they turned most of their attention back to the dark lawns and quiet streets.

  Morton hadn’t said a word since they’d left the auditorium. The paint in his costume had faded to a mild green glow, and he kept his eyes fixed on the sidewalk. Olive wasn’t sure if it was the prospect of going home, or the fact that the night had been far more frightening than fun that was dampening Morton’s mood. Maybe she didn’t want to know. There was nothing she could do about either of those things now. Still, she stuck close to Morton, keeping several feet of space between herself and the flapping edges of Walter’s long gray robes. She wasn’t sure what to think of Walter yet—but if Rutherford saw no reason to do
ubt him, then there was nothing in his mind to earn their distrust.

  Rutherford, in fact, was acting downright friendly.

  “But that is the problem with dressing up as a dinosaur, of course,” he opined to Walter as a cold rush of wind swept along the sidewalk, battering them with a swirl of dry leaves. “There are so many potential inaccuracies. Benjamin Davis’s costume seemed to imply that a Tyrannosaurus rex had five-fingered claws and a zipper along its spine. Highly implausible.”

  “Mmm,” said Walter agreeably.

  “Of course, dinosaurs are one of my areas of semi-expertise,” Rutherford went on. “What about you? What types of magic have you been studying? Are you an expert on any particular methods or subjects?”

  “Mmm . . .” said Walter. “Well, I’m interested in conjuration. But my aunt doesn’t think I have the gift. She’s a messenger,” he added, a hint of admiration lightening his deep voice. “She can communicate with the dead. And she says . . . mmm . . . She says they don’t have any messages for me.” Walter paused for a moment. “That means I won’t succeed at anything hard. So I’ve been learning basic spells. Protection. Summoning. Mmm. Stuff like that.”

  “So have I!” said Rutherford. “What do you think of substituting Picklox for Hookweed in a basic keyhole spell? Of course, it’s not authentic to the spell’s medieval roots, but . . .”

  They turned the final corner, and Olive’s mind traveled away from Rutherford and Walter and Morton to hurry up the slope of Linden Street.

  The trick-or-treaters had vanished as suddenly as they’d appeared. Here and there, the nub of a candle continued to sputter behind a pumpkin’s fading smile. Most of the neighbors had switched off their porch lights, leaving their houses dark and unwelcoming.

  But none of them were quite as dark and unwelcoming as the Nivens house.

  Morton’s older sister, Lucinda—the closest thing to a friend that Annabelle McMartin had ever had—had lived for decades in that quiet gray house, hiding her painted skin from the daylight, keeping its rooms spotless and its garden neat. Now clusters of crabgrass sprouted in the cracks of the walkway. Thistles and creeping vines invaded the once-perfect rose beds. Grass and weeds grew high around its walls, as though they were trying to help the house itself to disappear.

  When they reached its walkway, Morton stopped so abruptly that Rutherford, who had been rattling off a list of medieval herbs, smacked directly into him.

  “Someone’s in there,” Morton whispered.

  “What are you talking about?” Olive followed Morton’s eyes toward the silent gray house. In one upper window, where the pane of glass had been shattered, pale curtains twitched gently in the wind. “Oh, that? It’s just a broken window, Morton.”

  “No.” Morton shook his head. “There’s someone in there.” The cats stopped to cluster around them. Rutherford and Walter leaned closer. “I saw a light,” Morton went on. “It moved.”

  Walter straightened up and gave the street a long, careful look. “This way,” he said softly. “To the back.”

  Before anyone could question him, he had taken off across the overgrown lawn.

  The rippling hem of Walter’s costume made a darker trail across the dewy grass. Dead leaves crackled beneath Olive’s feet as she hurried after him, with Rutherford, Morton, and the cats close behind. They edged around the corner of the house, through a clump of withered hydrangeas, into the shelter of the house’s back wall. Through the nearest windows, Olive spotted a flicker of light—the faint, floating glimmer of a candle gliding through the house’s quiet rooms.

  She glanced down at Morton, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was watching Walter, who had stopped at the back door, with one hand pressed against the wood. Walter’s voice was soft, but Olive caught the stream of words it carried—words from some other language, low and smooth and strange.

  “Walter?” she breathed. “What are you doing?”

  Walter didn’t answer.

  The door creaked open before them. A breath of air drifted out of the darkness inside, cold and smoky with the scent of dust. Somewhere in the depths of the house, the glimmering light bobbed and brightened.

  Walter stepped over the threshold.

  Morton followed him.

  “Morton, wait!” Olive whispered, darting after him through the gaping doorway. The cats brushed against her legs, keeping close.

  Rutherford hurried behind. “I’m not sure this is wise,” Olive heard him say, before the door banged shut, leaving them all sealed in the dark.

  Olive blinked around. She could feel one of the cats pressed against her leg, and she could see the dying glow of Morton’s sleeve, but everything else was black. Walter’s voice rumbled up from somewhere nearby, startling and dangerously near, like the thunder of an approaching storm.

  “We’re here,” he called into the darkness.

  7

  “HUSH!” WHISPERED A voice.

  Footsteps rustled through the dimness. The floating light drew nearer, its ruddy glow sliding along the hallway. When it reached the room where Olive and her friends stood, it tightened into the small, shifting flame of a candle, throwing its beams over the cabinets and countertops of Mrs. Nivens’s deserted kitchen. There, the candle—and whoever was holding it—halted, too far away to be clearly seen.

  “They noticed me,” said Walter, shuffling toward the light.

  “Oh, Walter,” the distant voice sighed. “Why am I not surprised?” The candle flickered. “Come inside, all of you. And Walter—lock the door.”

  Morton stepped farther into the room, and Olive came with him, still holding tight to his sleeve. The cats and Rutherford followed. Behind them, Walter turned the lock, its metal click loud and sharp in the stillness.

  “There,” said the voice, coming closer. Olive stared at the candlelit face that came with it. It had high, dramatic cheekbones, arching black eyebrows, and eyes that were a strange shade of silvery gray, as cool and changeable as mirrors.

  “This is my aunt Delora,” said Walter, trying to untangle his long arms from his costume’s even longer sleeves. “Mmm—Aunt Delora, this is Olive Dunwoody and Rutherford Dewey and—”

  “I know who they are,” the woman interrupted, brushing one pale hand through the air as if she were waving away a trail of smoke. Her mirrory eyes landed on Olive. “I hope all of you feel as at home as I do in the darkness, enclosed in its soft embrace.”

  Actually, Olive felt quite the opposite about the darkness, but Walter’s aunt wasn’t waiting for an answer.

  “Of course, some of us are more comfortable never being seen . . . in the flesh, as it were,” Delora went on. Her eyes traveled away from Olive, back up into the sooty air. “Those of us who float between the worlds: What need have we for bodies at all?”

  Horatio cocked one whiskery eyebrow. “Hands must be rather useful for holding that candle,” he muttered.

  Olive gave him a little shove with the toe of her shoe.

  Delora didn’t seem to notice. “Please, come into the study,” she said, swishing her pale hand through the air again. “There we can speak more freely.” With a flutter of long black skirts, she trailed ahead of them into the hallway.

  Olive glanced at Rutherford. He nodded.

  They followed the blotch of candlelight along the narrow hall, the floorboards groaning softly under their feet. Walter, who had finally wormed his way out of the ghoul suit, lurched hurriedly after them.

  Delora paused beside a closed door. A ribbon of rosy light slipped through the crack beneath it, widening and brightening as she opened the door and ushered them through.

  Inside, Lucinda Nivens’s formal dining room had been transformed into the strangest “study” that Olive had ever seen. In fact, it looked more like a laboratory that had collided with a graveyard while being rained on by a traveling carnival. Lucinda’s spotless white c
hairs were draped with dark shawls and brocade blankets. Burning candles were wedged into bottles, jars, and the tops of a few yellowish skulls, which Olive hoped were made of plastic. A collection of old botanical diagrams were tacked haphazardly to the walls, and a row of bottles full of tinted liquids was arranged in a metal tray on the sideboard. A giant stuffed raven with red glass eyes stared down at the room from its perch on the curtain rod. Atop the long dining table, two antique oil lamps burned dully. The rest of the table’s dark wooden surface was littered with stones and vials and beakers and loose papers and clumps of dirt and bunches of dried herbs. A gilt-framed hand mirror lay at one end, next to a deck of very strange-looking cards.

  In the far corner of the room stood a desk. At the desk sat a bearded man in a worn brown suit. He got to his feet as the others came in. The man was large. His suit was not. As he crossed the room to greet them, Olive felt the urge to duck, in case one of his vest buttons should come shooting off and hit her in the eye.

  “Welcome,” said the man, taking Olive’s hand between his large, damp palms. “Welcome. Welcome.” He shook Rutherford’s and Morton’s hands too, brushing at his hair and his jacket with compulsive little swipes in between. “Rutherford Dewey,” he boomed, shaking Rutherford’s hand for the second time. “I’ve heard all about you from your grandmother. The magical community expects great things. And this,” he added, turning back to the hooded ghost, “must be Morton Nivens, the century-old child. I’ve been fascinated by your family’s story for quite some time.”

  Olive felt a zing of hope. “You have?” she broke in. “Do you know where Mary and Harold Nivens are?”

  “Regrettably, no,” said the bearded man. His eyes traveled back to Morton. “I don’t suppose that you would remove that costume, so that I might—”

  Morton grabbed his hood with both hands and pulled it tighter over his head. He hopped backward, out of the man’s reach. The cats clustered protectively around him.