“Absolutely. One hundred percent. One hundred and fifty percent sure.”
Mrs. Dunwoody gave Olive a conspiratorial smile. “Don’t let your father hear you say that.”
Olive ran her mother’s blue silk scarf through her fingers and tucked it gently into the suitcase. “What do you do at a math convention, anyway?”
Mrs. Dunwoody’s eyes took on a glow. “We converse, compare ideas, listen to speeches, go to presentations.”
“Is there a pool at your hotel?”
Mrs. Dunwoody paused, looking puzzled. “I’m not sure.”
How could anyone not be sure if their hotel had a pool? Olive wondered. Indoor pools were the best part of any hotel—apart from the tiny bars of soap and toothbrushes and mending kits all wrapped in paper on the bathroom counter, like very sanitary presents.
“Anyway,” Mrs. Dunwoody resumed, “I’ve asked Mrs. Nivens to keep an eye on the house tonight, and she’ll stop by to check on you. She says you’re still welcome to change your mind and sleep at her house.”
Olive shook her head violently. If the inside of Mrs. Nivens’s house was anything like the outside, Olive didn’t belong in it. Olive was destined to break things in houses like Mrs. Nivens’s, where everything was spotless and carefully arranged. During just one weekend at her great-aunt Millie’s house, Olive had smashed a glass tabletop by dropping an antique marble egg through it and had made the toilet overflow. Twice.
“You can call us at the hotel, too, and they will page us no matter where we are.”
“I know, Mom.”
“My goodness.” Mrs. Dunwoody smiled and laid one smooth palm softly against Olive’s cheek. “Look at how grown-up you are.”
A few minutes later, Olive stood on the front porch and waved as her parents drove down the shady green street. Then she went to the kitchen and fixed herself a gigantic crystal bowl of Triple Ripple ice cream topped with chocolate chips. She glided through the parlor, settled herself regally on the living room sofa, and ate her ice cream in front of the television. It was early afternoon, and at first there were plenty of cartoons to watch, but soon there was nothing to choose from but news and courtroom shows. Olive switched off the television.
The big stone house was quiet. Late-afternoon sun filtered in through the ivy-covered windows, and patches of colored light fell through the stained-glass trim, making soft watercolor hues on the parquet floors. The refrigerator motor kicked in with a tinny growl. Olive got up and stretched. Then she spun around and around, looking up at the patterned tiles on the ceiling, until she got dizzy and had to sit back down.
She touched the spectacles on their long chain. With her parents gone all night, she could go into any painting she wanted to. She could even let Morton out for the night. Of course, it might be difficult to make Morton go back in again. Besides, she was no closer to knowing how to help him, and she didn’t want to visit him only to abandon him again. And she wasn’t even sure that what he told her was true. The only other person—or sort-of person—who would know the truth was Horatio.
“Horatio!” Olive called, glancing around the empty living room. “Horatio!” But no fluffy orange cat appeared.
She went back through the parlor and imagined Annabelle sitting there at her tea table so long ago, posing for her portrait. Olive could almost see her, in her long, gauzy gown, her soft hair piled up around her face. But when Olive blinked, the vision was gone. The parlor was as empty as the living room.
In the kitchen, Olive set her ice cream bowl in the sink. Its heavy clunk echoed through the room. Olive looked around. In their small painting, the three stone masons bent over their wall. Even without the spectacles, their eyes seemed to glitter at her strangely.
Olive wound through the hall and pushed open the creaking doors to the library. Afternoon was already twining into evening, and a few lengthening gold beams glinted on the towering shelves. The computers were off, their screens as blank and dead as the soot-stained mouth of the unused fireplace. “Horatio?” Olive called. No one answered.
Olive trailed up the stairs, turning the lights on as she went. She stopped for a moment beside the painting of the lake, serene beneath its starry sky. Reaching the landing, she turned slowly and looked around, just as she had on her very first visit to this house.
Even though the Dunwoodys had lived there for weeks now, everything in the upstairs hall looked just as it had on that distant afternoon. The ends of the hallway still disappeared into darkness in either direction. Doorways leading to unoccupied bedrooms made shadowy holes along the walls. The frames of the strange paintings—the dark forest, the bowl of weird fruit, the lonely hillside with its distant graves—caught a thin, outlining shimmer of late afternoon light.
The floor gave a creak. “Horatio?” Olive asked hopefully.
There was no answer.
Olive knotted her fingers together. At least her hands could keep each other company. The stone house was huge, and ancient, and empty. But perhaps it wasn’t empty enough.
Olive almost ran to the painting of Linden Street. If she couldn’t find Horatio, she could at least talk to Morton. Out of habit, she looked around to be sure that her parents weren’t nearby. Then she almost laughed at herself. She was alone. That was the whole problem. Olive placed the spectacles on her nose and climbed into the painting’s cool mist.
She was getting familiar with this place. It felt almost natural to trot across a foggy field, up a painted street, to a house where somebody you knew lived. This must have been what it felt like to visit a friend. Not that Morton was a friend, exactly. But he was someone to talk to, and he didn’t make Olive feel nervous or awkward. And, in a secret, selfish way, Olive was glad that Morton was stuck in one spot. He couldn’t leave or change or hide, like Horatio, when she needed him. He was a bit like your favorite page in a book, one that you go back to and read to yourself over and over again, knowing that it will always be the same.
As Olive walked up the deserted pavement of Linden Street, faces peeped out at her from the dark houses and whispers rushed after her, like dry leaves in the wind.
Morton’s white nightshirt bobbed and twisted in the distance. He was in the front yard of the big wooden house. As Olive came closer, she could see him pick up a rock from the walkway and hurl it through the house’s front windows. The high, tinkly crash echoed down the empty street.
“Morton!” Olive exclaimed. “What are you doing?”
Morton glanced up at Olive, his face blank. “Smashing things,” he said.
“I can see that. But why are you smashing your own windows?”
“I don’t know,” said Morton with a shrug. “It isn’t very much fun to break things that don’t stay broken.” He scuffed at a bit of grass with his bare toe. The grass unbent and rearranged itself. “Everything you smash here just gets fixed. It goes back to how it was before.”
Olive looked up at the house’s big downstairs window. The glass had reappeared, as if it had never been broken at all.
“The rock comes back too,” said Morton.
And it was true. When Olive looked down, the very same rock had appeared on the path, an inch away from their toes.
“You want to throw it?” Morton offered.
Olive shook her head.
Morton picked up the rock, craned back, and threw it with all the strength in his spindly arm. SMASHHHH . . . said the window. Olive and Morton watched the fragments of glass shatter, then meld and pull themselves back into the window frame. The window stared back at them, as blank as ever. Olive looked down. The rock was back on the path.
Morton let out a sigh.
Olive cleared her throat, looking down at Morton’s slumped shoulders. “I’m sorry I had to leave when you were crying last time.”
“I wasn’t crying,” said Morton.
“Yes you were.”
“No. You just imagined it,” said Morton, looking away.
“Fine,” said Olive. “I’m sorry anyway.”
>
Morton kicked the rock. It bounced along the path, smacked against the porch steps, and rolled back to Morton’s foot as though playing fetch with itself. “When do I get to come out?” Morton asked softly.
Olive sighed. “Listen. I’ve been trying to find out about these paintings. There’s a lot I don’t understand yet. But maybe, when I do figure it all out, maybe I can—maybe we can . . .” Olive trailed off, not knowing how to finish the sentence. She looked up at the empty windows of the big white house. Her house was big and empty, too, but at least she had her parents. She had three cats . . . sometimes. Morton had no one. Only Olive. “Maybe I can help you,” she finished, very softly.
Morton snorted.
“What?” demanded Olive.
Morton looked at the ground, speaking into his chest. “You’ll never know what to do.”
“Well, maybe I would, if anybody would tell me the whole story!” Olive shouted, throwing her hands in the air. “You talked about a ‘bad man.’ Who was he? What was his name, Morton?”
Morton frowned. “I don’t remember.”
The fragments in Olive’s mind whirled. Mrs. Nivens, Morton, the stone masons, the paintings. And the name that kept turning up, like a book always falling open to the same chapter.
Olive crouched down in front of Morton, who tried not to meet her eyes. “Morton, I need you to remember,” she said. “Was his name Aldous McMartin?”
Morton’s frown got deeper. He started to shake his head, then stopped. His eyes widened. “Old Man McMartin . . .” he whispered.
Olive’s heart started to play hopscotch. “That’s it, isn’t it?” she whispered back. “He lived next door to you. It was him you saw in the garden that night.”
A sudden breeze rippled through the foggy air. Olive glanced around. But the sky above them hadn’t changed. The same gray light held the painted Linden Street in place, like a specimen trapped in a jar.
Olive reached out and laid her hand on Morton’s shoulder. “I’m going to find out the truth. I promise.”
“You?” Morton jerked his shoulder out from under Olive’s hand and backed away. “You just took me out of one place and got me stuck in another!” He looked at her reproachfully. “You’re no help at all! You’re just a stupid girl!” Morton whirled and ran around the corner of his house, out of sight.
Olive put her fists on her hips. “And you’re just a bratty little boy!” she yelled after him. “You’re not even a boy—you’re a painting!”
Furious, Olive turned in the opposite direction and stomped away, past the empty lot where her house should have been, past the houses where faces shifted and stared behind the dark windows. Stupid Morton. She would show him.
“Wait!” called a voice.
Olive turned, expecting to see Morton trailing after her, ready to say that he was sorry. Instead, she saw a woman in a lacy nightgown just climbing down from the porch of a house Olive didn’t recognize. From other doorways and other windows, heads peered out into the darkness. One by one, a few people ventured tentatively onto their lawns. Olive noticed that all of them were wearing pajamas, just like Morton—funny, old-fashioned nightgowns with puffy sleeves or long flannel suits with nightcaps. In the pale light, in their long, loose clothes, the people looked ghostly, as if they might fade away into the mist at any moment.
They all stared at Olive. Olive stared back. Her heart gave a frightened little flutter.
“We heard what you said,” the woman in lace began. “About him.”
“You mean Aldous McM—?”
“Shh!” gasped the woman, her eyes widening. The others looked around, watching the sky, rubbing their arms as if they were cold. “He will hear you.”
“You’re being tricked,” called a man in striped pajamas, from a porch across the street. In the dim light, Olive couldn’t make out the features of his face.
“What do you mean?” she whispered.
“The cat that brought you here,” said the woman.
“Those cats, all three of them.” She stepped closer to Olive, and the fog stirred softly around her feet. Instinctively, Olive backed away. “Don’t you know what they are?”
Olive couldn’t answer. She shook her head once. An old man with a thick beard edged toward the street. “They are witches’ familiars,” he grumbled. “Imps in animal form, serving evil masters.”
“They came to Linden Street with Old Man McMartin,” said the man in the stripy pajamas. “They were his servants. His spies.”
“He may be listening,” whispered the woman in the lacy nightgown, grabbing Olive’s hand. “We must talk quickly.” The woman’s hand was warm, but Olive shuddered anyway. “The cats spied on us. They searched the whole neighborhood. They learned who knew too much, who was suspicious. Then they helped bring us to him.”
“I was in my bedroom,” said a young woman, from an upstairs window.
“I was asleep in bed,” said the old man with the beard. “And then suddenly I was in the big stone house across the street, where I never would have set foot of my own free will.”
“I thought I was dreaming,” said an old woman’s voice in the distance. “But I could feel the night air. I could feel the grass under my feet.”
“He said, if we agreed to serve him, he would make us live forever,” spoke up the man in the stripy pajamas. “If we refused, he left us here.” The old man’s face went slack.
“Where no one would find us,” said the young woman from the window.
“Where we could never leave,” said the old man.
“He wants this house back,” whispered the woman, still clinging to Olive’s hand. “He needs it. The cats are helping him.” She looked at Olive through black irises. “They want to get rid of you.”
“Why?” Olive choked out. “Why does he need the house?”
“Go look at the stones,” said the old man. “At the bottom.”
“Don’t trust the cats,” hissed the woman in the lacy nightgown, her eyes glittering pools in a face of paint. “Believe us. Go now, while you might still save yourself. Go!”
A sudden wind lashed Olive’s face, blowing her hair into her eyes. She could hear the shush of moving air, and the thick rustle of leaves on towering trees. She squinted at the street. Again it was deserted, its porches and windows empty, the houses as lifeless as they had seemed before.
Olive raced back to the picture frame, her feet barely touching the ground. Horatio had said the McMartins’ old stone house wasn’t necessary in this version of Linden Street. Now Olive realized what the cat had meant. This painting was just a place to hold the people Aldous McMartin had captured, like moths in a specimen jar. Olive ran until the painted world around her became like the inside of her mind: a foggy blur streaked with shadows, where things she couldn’t see lurked and waited, suddenly rearing into the light when she had already gotten too close.
The upstairs hallway, which had seemed so dark and menacing before, looked brightly lit and comfortingly warm when Olive finally lurched through the frame. She stood staring at the painting of Linden Street for a while, listening to the thundering of her heart, wondering if she really did want to know what the people in the painting were talking about.
She took a deep breath.
Of course she did.
Olive had heard the old saying about curiosity killing the cat. It never quite made sense to her, even when she asked her mother to explain it. “It means that curiosity can lead to danger if we take too many risks,” Mrs. Dunwoody had said. “But, of course, if it wasn’t for curiosity, we wouldn’t take the risks that lead to wonderful discoveries. Roald Amundsen would never have explored the North and South poles. Marie and Pierre Curie wouldn’t have done their work with radiation. We would have no penicillin, no polio vaccine . . .” Mrs. Dunwoody had leaped to her feet and begun waving her arms. “Benjamin Franklin would certainly never have flown his kite in a lightning storm! It’s curiosity that is the mother of invention!”
Olive ha
d to agree with her mother. What could you learn without curiosity, anyway? Only the stuff they made you study in school. She took another deep breath and squared her shoulders. She needed to look at the stones. The stones at the bottom. The stones that the builders must have meant all along.
Moments later, she stood at the top of the basement stairs, armed with one flashlight in her hand and another in her pocket, for backup. She took a last, shaky breath. This was no time to let fear carry her away. The air became colder and denser with each downward step, as if she were wading into a dark, chilly lake. She wasn’t going to turn on the lights. She hoped to avoid being noticed by Leopold for as long as she could, and she was sure that he was down there, waiting, his huge black body melding with the shadows.
Olive groped through the darkness, feeling for the basement wall. Her fingertips scraped the stones. She got down on her knees and ran her palms carefully over their surface, following the wall to the corner, then turning, running her hands over the next wall, as high and low as she could reach.
The stones were almost as cold as if they had been kept in a refrigerator, and they were jumbled on top of each other in all different shapes and sizes. She pushed against them, but the walls were solid. There were no cracks, no loose stones to pull out. Olive ran her hand over them in a long, slow arc. There. She felt something. A dent in the stone—and then another dent, and another, thin and blunted in places, like something that had been rubbed away. She turned on the flashlight.
In the small white blotch of light, a letter stood out against the gray stone. It was faint, and worn a little bit around the edges, but it was definitely there, and it was definitely real. Olive ran her finger over its carved branches. It was a letter M.
Shaking a sticky bit of old cobweb off of her fingers, Olive scanned the stones nearby. To the right, almost in the basement’s corner, she spotted what looked like another carving. She had to scrunch down until she was nearly on her stomach to get a good look. This one wasn’t a letter. This carving was a shape. Olive rubbed away a streak of dirt, focused the flashlight, and squinted hard. On the mottled gray stone was the outline of a skull. Its empty eyes stared back at Olive.
The Books of Elsewhere, Vol. 1: The Shadows Page 9