by Dan Poblocki
Once they crawled from the mouth of the fireplace, the three kids went out the back door. The sky was black, and a big moon peeked through thick clouds on the horizon.
“Wait for us!” Eddie called as Harris disappeared around the corner of the house. Eddie clutched the two books, one in each hand. He slipped them into his bag, then swung the strap over his right shoulder. Maggie walked silently next to him as they made their way across the hill and into the pocket of trees at the top of the long driveway.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” whispered Maggie as she ran forward to tug on Harris’s coat sleeve. He spun around and threw her a nasty look.
As Eddie caught up to them, his flashlight lit Harris’s sooty face from below. Harris appeared downright evil. Noticing the frightened look on Maggie’s face, he softened. “What’s wrong?”
Maggie glanced back toward the house. “Do you guys get the feeling we’re being followed?”
“You’re being paranoid,” said Harris, though he sounded uncertain himself.
“No,” said Eddie, “I feel it too.” The thought of the monsters from Nathaniel’s books hit him in the back, and he spun around, searching the shadows for movement. One of the large clouds had moved across the moon, so there was little light to see by. The woods at the top of the driveway were quiet and still. Eddie fought the temptation to call out into the darkness. He didn’t want to be answered.
“What was that?” said Harris, looking over Eddie’s shoulder.
Then they all heard it. From somewhere in the woods, a few feet up the hill, came the sound of fluttering—a wing, a leaf, a piece of paper. Bumps rose on the back of Eddie’s neck, as if an icy breeze had suddenly blown past.
“Is someone there?” Maggie asked, a little too loudly. She had turned even whiter than usual. Then she fell backward, tripping over her feet. Eddie rushed to help her, but Maggie’s eyes were fixed on the house, still partially visible through the trees. “Look!” she said. When Eddie turned around, he too almost tripped.
At first, he saw nothing unusual—trees, shadows, passing moonlight. Darkness and more darkness. But then, Eddie’s eyes adjusted. It seemed that the empty spaces between the trees had filled, as if each black shadow solidified into a long, tall body. Eddie sensed slight movements, as if the forest itself were letting go of something it had been holding back.
Leaves crunched as a breeze rustled the forest floor.
Moving away from the empty spaces between the tree trunks, with almost imperceptible fluidity, the shadows revealed themselves as dozens of cloaked beings. Without having taken a single step, the beings materialized where Eddie, Maggie, and Harris stood at the top of the driveway. Under each hood was a stark white face. Their lips were pulled back, and what might have been a smile on any other living creature, here, was anything but.
Eddie rubbed at his eyes, then whispered, “It’s happening again.”
Harris stepped forward, clutching the boomerang. “Watch out, you guys,” he whispered to Eddie and Maggie, before calling to the creatures, “Leave us alone!” Harris pulled his arm back over his shoulder, then, with a quick flick, whipped the small piece of wood forward and sent it flying. Eddie was almost impressed as he watched the boomerang soar into the shadows, but the feeling disappeared when one dark creature swiped at it with a clawed hand and the boomerang simply vanished with a soft whoosh.
Suddenly, both of his hands were yanked backward, by Maggie on one side and Harris on the other. They pulled Eddie farther down the path, and the three kids ran.
Every tree they passed seemed to let go of another empty space that turned into a hooded creature. They appeared at every angle. Eddie nervously bit the inside of his lip, so hard he tasted blood.
Bare branches extended across the driveway, as if trying to scrape at them. Harris shouted as his cheek split open. Maggie screamed as she lost a tangle of hair. Eddie was sure the trees themselves were in on it. He heard the left side of his coat split down the back as something ripped clean through it.
Eddie’s bag slipped off his shoulder and toppled into the brush. Harris and Maggie continued to dash down the driveway, the flashlight’s beam bobbing in the inky shadows. “Wait!” Eddie called. But it was no use. Skidding to a clumsy halt in the middle of the overgrown driveway, Eddie spun around. His bag lay on the forest floor, obscured by a small pile of leaves.
He started to scramble toward the bag when he realized that an enormous figure stood over him, cloaked in a filmy transparent shadow like black gauze. Eddie looked up into its face. Its swollen, piglike eyes dared him to look away. Its mouth grew wide as Eddie watched, showing him sharp teeth set in a round skull covered with pasty greenish-white skin. Eddie tried to scream, but nothing came out. The wind blew through the treetops, and like a candle flame the figure wavered before materializing again. Eddie saw the rest of the creatures behind the one towering over him. They were scattered throughout the forest and up the driveway like chess pieces, waiting and watching.
“Eddie!” Harris and Maggie called to him from down the hill.
“Urgh,” was all Eddie could muster. His tongue felt like old parchment. His voice was gone—fear had sucked it from his throat. He waited for the creature to descend upon him, but standing there, he realized it had frozen in place. As he struggled to swallow the cold night air, Eddie stared into the horrible face of the monster, and an idea began to fill him with courage.
Since moving to Gatesweed, Eddie had met the dogs from The Rumor of the Haunted Nunnery and encountered the gremlin from The Curse of the Gremlin’s Tongue. Eddie knew that he was now looking at the Watchers—the Witch’s hench-creatures who had followed Gertie from the woods into the basement of the old farmhouse. Yesterday afternoon, Eddie had read about them in The Witch’s Doom. They were real too. And he knew how to beat them.
“Eddie!” Harris’s and Maggie’s voices shocked Eddie out of his stupor.
He shouted, “Stay where you are! Don’t move. I’ll be there in a second.”
Keeping his eyes focused on the Watcher in front of him, Eddie reached forward and picked up his book bag. He slipped it onto his shoulder and took a step backward. The Watchers remained frozen, tied to their shadows, unable to move. As Eddie inched farther away, they stopped grinning. Once he was twenty feet away, they closed their eyes and opened their mouths in anguished, silent howls. Eddie tried his best not to stumble over the rocky path. All the creatures needed was for him to look away for a moment. He concentrated, then called to his friends to direct him.
Walking backward all the way down the driveway, he eventually found Harris and Maggie crouched behind a tree near the hole in the iron fence. Even though he could no longer see the Watchers through the dense trees, he knew they must still be at the top of the hill, so he kept staring in that direction. He was too frightened to even risk blinking.
“Come on! Let’s go!” said Harris as Eddie finally made it to the fence. “What are you doing?”
“Can I borrow your flashlight?” said Eddie. Harris handed it to him with a frustrated groan. Eddie shone it into the woods up the hill with a sigh of relief. “They’re allergic to light,” he explained. “They can’t follow if you watch them,” said Eddie, staring up the driveway.
“What do you mean—they can’t follow you if you watch them?” said Maggie. “Is that how you got away? You walked backward through the woods? How did you figure that out?”
Eddie nodded. “It’s how Gertie got away in The Witch’s Doom.”
“Of course!” said Harris. “I remember those things! They were really horrible.”
“The Witch’s Doom?” said Maggie. “I don’t get it. Are you saying those things came from a Nathaniel Olmstead book?”
As Eddie nodded yes, the flashlight splashed her face with a ghostly glow from underneath. Even with a smudge of dirt on her nose, she looked so pale that, for half a second, he thought she looked like the statue in the woods, but when her voice wavered, he knew she couldn’t be anyone but
herself. She looked between the two boys skeptically, as if they might be playing a joke on her.
Maggie thought about that for a second. Even though she still looked confused, she nodded, seeming to understand what they were saying. “Do we have to walk backward all the way back home?” she asked. “My dad’ll kill me if I bring home several dozen giant shadowy demons.”
Despite everything, Eddie laughed. Harris joined him.
“I don’t think they’ll follow us,” said Eddie. “They need the shadows, and even though it’s only half-full, the moon is probably too bright outside of the woods. In the book they only appear when it’s very dark out. But just to be sure, I’ll keep my eyes behind us until we get somewhere safe. You guys can guide me.”
“My pleasure,” said Harris, brushing aside the vines that covered the hole in the fence. Eddie stumbled backward as Maggie and Harris steered him through. He prayed that the Watchers were no longer watching.
They picked up their bikes and walked them up the hill to Maggie’s house, where her father begrudgingly agreed to pile everyone into his pickup for a ride back into town. As they passed the entrance to Nathaniel Olmstead’s overgrown driveway, the moon returned from behind a small bank of clouds, and Eddie finally felt safe. He knew the Watchers would never set foot past the shadows where the trees ended and the moonlit asphalt began.
Eddie was sitting at his desk to distract himself with math homework, a task he expected would be nearly impossible after the evening’s events, when his mother knocked on his bedroom door. She’d reheated his dinner and brought it up to him, along with the cordless phone.
“It’s for you,” she said, resting the large antique silver platter on the comforter folded at the end of his bed.
“Thanks, Mom,” he said. She kissed his cheek before heading into the hallway and closing his bedroom door.
“Hey!” Harris said. He sounded exhausted. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. How ‘bout you?”
“Freaked out,” said Harris. “Those things were scarier than the dogs from the lake. Scarier than the gremlin.”
Eddie silently noticed that he didn’t include the Woman in Black. Despite the horror of meeting the Watchers, he knew they both understood that meeting her would be worse.
“Where did they come from?” said Eddie.
“I’m not sure,” said Harris. “In The Witch’s Doom, the old woman tells Gertie that legend during the town meeting, remember? She says the Watchers haunt the woods once the sun goes down.”
“Right,” said Eddie. “Maybe the same thing happens up at the Olmstead estate.”
Harris was quiet. Eddie could hear him breathing over the phone.
“What’s wrong?” Eddie asked.
“I was just thinking … if those things live in Nathaniel Olmstead’s woods now,” said Harris, “did they arrive before or after he left?”
Eddie shook his head. “Let’s not think about that,” he said, changing the subject. “I feel like we’re closer than ever. Did you get a chance to look at the code in the new book? I think it was different from the code in The Enigmatic Manuscript. Why don’t you check?”
Harris paused before answering. “I don’t have the books. You have the books.”
“Oh right,” said Eddie. “I forgot.” He grabbed his open book bag and dug through his notebooks and folders.
The books! Where were the books?
A terrible thought flickered through Eddie’s head. When he’d dropped his bag, had he lost the books? Everything had happened so quickly, it was difficult to remember if the bag had seemed lighter when he’d retrieved it from the pile of leaves. He’d been so concerned with trying to escape those things.
He imagined the books sitting in the middle of Nathaniel Olmstead’s driveway—a place he had hoped to avoid for quite some time.
“Uh …,” he struggled to say. His face began to sting. He emptied the bag, but the only thing remaining was the big hammer at the bottom, which he quietly shoved in the back of his desk drawer.
“Eddie? Are you there?”
“Yeah,” Eddie whispered. “I’m here … but the books are gone.”
12
Every time someone slammed a locker door the next day at school, Eddie felt like jumping out of his skin. His heart raced when Ms. Phelps asked him a question about ratios. Out of the corner of his eye, Eddie thought he saw someone watching him in the mirror while he washed his hands in the boys’ bathroom, but when he turned to look, no one was there. The past couple days had taken a toll on his nerves.
Part of him was relieved that he had lost the books the night before. If it weren’t for Harris, Eddie thought he might want to take a big break from anything having to do with Nathaniel Olmstead. But the other part of him felt terrible that all the work they had done so far was gone. Now, even if they were actually smart enough to figure out what the code meant, they couldn’t!
They met after third period outside the gym. When Eddie saw Harris, he gasped. Harris looked terrible. His hair was greasy, his eyes were glazed, and he looked like he’d just crawled out of bed.
“What’s wrong?” Eddie asked.
“I couldn’t sleep,” said Harris. “I kept wondering where we might have lost the books. I know last night you said you didn’t want to, but the only thing I can think to do is go back to the house and look for them.”
They heard a sneaker squeak on the linoleum behind them. When they turned, Maggie smiled. For the first time since he’d met her, Eddie thought she looked happy to see him. She brushed her dark hair out of her face and hiked her bag up on her shoulder. “Can I come?”
Eddie and Harris were speechless.
“Look,” said Maggie, “that was some crazy stuff up there in the woods last night. I can’t stop thinking about it.” When the boys didn’t answer her, she said in a playful tone, “Then I guess it’s not really worth showing you what I found.”
Harris rolled his eyes. “What did you find?”
“You’re not interested. Forget it.”
“Maggie …,” said Eddie, sounding more pathetic than he wanted to.
“This whole boys-only thing is so fifth grade,” she said. She smiled again. “Promise you’ll let me come, and I’ll tell you.”
Eddie turned to Harris. Somehow, he was certain what she had to offer would be worth it. They both nodded. “You can come,” they said at the same time.
“Great.” Maggie slapped their shoulders. They both winced.
“So tell us. What did you find?” Harris said.
Maggie slipped her bag off her shoulder, reached inside, and dug around. “In the house last night, I overheard everything you said.” Harris started to protest, but Maggie interrupted. “Get over it.” Harris folded his arms but listened. “After you read that story about that creepy old woman, Eddie, you mentioned something about a code that matched up a couple of books you guys had.” She pulled two books out of her bag. “These books, right?”
“Oh, geez,” said Harris, turning pale, throwing his hands to the ceiling. “Thank goodness.”
“Whoa,” said Eddie, relieved.
“Guess we don’t really need to head back up to the woods, after all,” she said, smiling, and handed the books to Eddie. “You left them in my dad’s pickup,” she said. “He found them this morning. We were all pretty out of it last night when he gave you a ride home, so I guess you didn’t notice that they’d fallen on the floor. Still, if they’re so important, you might want to keep closer watch on them.”
“We’ll try,” said Harris, slamming his locker.
The second bell rang. They were all officially late.
“I’ve got to go,” Eddie said, inching down the hall.
“But I solved your code,” said Maggie smugly.
Eddie wasn’t sure if he heard her correctly, but when he saw Harris’s mouth drop open, he figured that he had. The hallways were slowly starting to empty, and Eddie’s heart started to race as he realized that the hall mon
itors would soon be at their stations.
Maggie shoved another loose piece of hair behind one ear and said, “How do you guys feel about cutting class?”
13
Inside the school library, they found a quiet table in the reference section—an isolated spot toward the back of the room, hidden behind several large shelves near the windows.
Maggie took a piece of paper out of her book bag and placed it on the table, facedown, next to The Enigmatic Manuscript and The Wish of the Woman in Black. She zipped up her black hooded sweatshirt, then pushed her dark, messy hair behind her ears. On her wrist, she loosely wore several black rubber bands, which she adjusted before resting her skinny hands on the table in a businesslike manner.
Eddie remembered that she’d told him about liking science and math. Funny, he thought as he stared at her, in her Goth costume she looked more like she’d be into magic and mystery stories. Maybe she was, but she just didn’t know it yet.
“I don’t mean to sound like a total jerk,” Maggie began, “but before I tell you anything, I want to know what’s going on here.”
“Lots of stuff is going on here,” said Harris. He picked up The Enigmatic Manuscript and tapped its spine on the table. “What do you want to know?”
Maggie thought, took a deep breath, and then said, “Well … everything.”
Before the next bell rang, Eddie managed to tell Maggie most of what had happened to him since coming to Gatesweed. She spent several seconds silently contemplating his story. Then she turned to Harris and said, “You seem to be a Nathaniel Olmstead expert, so what do you think is going on here, Harris?”
Harris smiled and leaned forward to answer. “After everything that’s happened to Eddie and me, I’m beginning to think Nathaniel Olmstead’s monsters chased him out of Gatesweed.” Then his smiled dropped, as he seemed to recall the previous night’s events. “Chased him out … or something worse.”