by Dan Poblocki
Maggie and Eddie glanced at each other. “That would mean the monsters in Nathaniel Olmstead’s books are real,” she said.
“When the Watchers chased us through the woods last night, they certainly looked real, didn’t they?” said Harris. “You’ve heard of the curse. And you saw what happened in the library.”
“Yeah, but …” After a moment, she closed her eyes and shook her head. “There’s got to be a rational explanation for all of this.”
“Every single thing that’s happened to us so far seems to be connected to Nathaniel Olmstead’s stories,” said Eddie. He opened The Enigmatic Manuscript to the front page. “We were hoping this book might give us a clue why.” He looked into Maggie’s eyes. “You said you solved the code. Please. Will you tell us how?”
Maggie sighed and hugged her rib cage. “Last night, I flipped through the two books,” she said. “I remembered what you’d said in Nathaniel Olmstead’s basement, Eddie. About the code appearing in both books. You need a code key in order to read it, right? After I stared at it for a while, I had an idea. Since there were only two lines written at the end of the Woman in Black book, I counted the letters. There are twenty-six of them. No more. No less. And they’re all different. See? Only one of each.” Maggie opened to the last page of The Wish of the Woman in Black. Eddie looked at the letters Nathaniel Olmstead had scrawled there.
P B Z D Y F R H V J W L U
A Q C O E T G S I X K N M
Maggie was right. There were twenty-six letters. She sounded as excited as Eddie felt, when she added, “What else do you know that has twenty-six letters?”
Harris nearly toppled over in his chair. “No way!” he said.
Before Eddie was able to yelp too, Maggie reached out and turned over the piece of paper on the table. At the top, she had drawn out the answer for them to see.
“A is below P,” she explained. “B is above Q. C is below Z. And so on. Simple, really. Each letter has an opposite. In the text, he just switched their places. That’s his key.”
“Did you try it on the code?” said Harris. “Does it work?”
Nodding her head, Maggie pushed the paper toward him. “He broke the words up into groups of three letters. And he doesn’t use any punctuation. It’s hard to read, but I think he was trying to make it more difficult to find a pattern.” She handed him a pen. “See for yourself,” she said.
Harris laid The Enigmatic Manuscript open and used Maggie’s code key as a reference as he started to translate the first few sentences. Eddie drummed on the table as Harris wrote. When Harris gave him a dirty look, Eddie folded his hands in his lap.
Finally, Harris laid down his pen and picked up the paper. It trembled in his hands. He cleared his throat and slowly worked through what he’d written. “‘I have made an enormous mistake.’”
Wide-eyed, Harris glanced up at them before continuing. “‘The creatures have come through the door, Gatesweed is on the verge of catastrophe, and I realize now that it is my fault. The Woman in Black will haunt me until I use the pendant to open the gate for her too, but I can’t. I won’t. I’ve seen what she can do. Instead, I must stop her. I fear I may fail, but I have no choice. And so I must write my own story.’”
Harris dropped the paper, his mouth open in shock. “Holy cow,” he said quietly, staring at the paper. “‘The creatures have come through the door’? ‘Gatesweed is on the verge of catastrophe’? And it was Nathaniel’s fault?”
“But … what does it mean?” said Maggie.
“It means you were right, Maggie,” Eddie whispered. “You’re a genius. That was the secret. The key was right here. In The Wish of the Woman in Black.”
“We’ve got some answers now, which is amazing, but we also have more questions,” said Harris. He glanced at the paper in his hand and read through it several more times to himself. When he was done, he looked up. “Where is this gate he’s talking about? And what is this pendant-thingy? And what does writing his own story have to do with anything?”
“And what about the key itself?” said Eddie. “Why would Nathaniel Olmstead have written the code key in this book and then buried it in his basement?”
“He obviously didn’t want anyone to find it,” Maggie said.
“I have a question about the code too,” said Harris. “What about the symbol on the first page, the one that’s carved onto the statue in the woods? Pi is part of the Greek alphabet, not ours.”
Maggie shook her head. “That’s not pi,” she said, pointing at the first page of The Enigmatic Manuscript. “I think it’s Hebrew.”
“Hebrew?” said Harris. “Do you know what it says?” “It doesn’t say anything,” said Maggie. “It’s only a letter called Chet.”
“Chet?” Eddie repeated. “Why do you think it’s carved onto the statue?”
Maggie shook her head.
Harris thought to himself for a moment before turning to Eddie. “Where did you say your parents found this book?”
“The Black Hood Antiques Fair—a few months ago, I think,” said Eddie. “North of the mountains?”
“I wonder how it got up there?” said Harris. “I mean, doesn’t it seem like Nathaniel Olmstead would have wanted to keep this book down in the basement with all the other ones he wrote by hand?”
“Only one way to find out, I suppose,” said Maggie, pushing the pen and paper toward Harris. “Better hurry, before someone discovers we’re missing.”
“Here,” said Eddie, pulling out a spiral notebook. “We’ll all work at the same time.” He laid The Enigmatic Manuscript on the table so each of them could see it.
They worked for the next two periods. Whenever they heard someone approach, they scattered, hiding in separate aisles of books. Returning to the table, each of them continued to translate a part of the page. When they were done, together, they would read their parts aloud, before going on to the next page. In this manner, they slowly but surely began to piece the story together.
At first, the book was filled with fairly standard autobiographical information. It was interesting, but as he continued to read, Eddie wasn’t sure why Nathaniel felt the need to write his life story in code. Nothing about his reading ghost stories late into the night seemed all that scandalous.
Then Eddie learned something about Nathaniel Olmstead he didn’t already know.
From early on, Nathaniel didn’t think he had enough talent to be a writer. He never thought his ideas were any good. Saving his allowance each week, he sought inspiration at second-run monster movies in his hometown of Coven’s Corner, but afterward, when he went home and took out his notebook, all he could imagine was what he’d seen that afternoon. Nearing high school, he became interested in the ancient mythologies, old cultures, and world histories upon which many of the stories he read or watched were actually based. These interests led him to a degree in English and a minor in history from New Starkham College. After graduation, he spent a year traveling the world. He saw pyramids in Egypt, castles in Ireland, canals in Venice, Aztec ruins in Mexico, glaciers in Alaska, and volcanoes in Hawaii. He thought these sights might inspire him to write—but for some reason, his ideas never solidified into anything more than a glorified diary.
As Maggie began to read her section aloud, Eddie stared at the wavy pattern of the wood grain on the surface of the library table. Listening to the hypnotic sound of her voice, he imagined Nathaniel’s story in his head. After a moment, he felt like he was actually there with him.
Finally, my journey brought me to the Carpathian Mountains of Romania. I stayed with a college friend who was doing research at the university in Bucharest. One day, while seeking a particular antiques shop specializing in vampire protection artifacts, I wandered down an alley and became lost. After walking the labyrinthine byways for nearly an hour, I came upon an old woman selling trinkets out of the doorway behind her house. On a crate, she had set up a small display of what looked like homemade jewelry. I didn’t speak her language, but I understood th
at she wanted me to buy something. I had budgeted only enough for my exploration of the absent vampire antiques shop, so I tried to refuse her hustle, but she was insistent that I inspect one artifact in particular. She grabbed my hand, pressing a piece of metal into my palm. Attached to a sparkling chain, it was long and silver, about six inches in length, featherlight, and perpetually cold to the touch. Its body was flat and wavy like a wriggling snake. One end was wide and straight like a spoon or small shovel. The other end came to a sharp point like a pen.
I had no idea what it was, but as soon as I held it, I felt I needed to own it. I took out my wallet, but she pushed my money away, shaking her head. She said something to me that I couldn’t understand, then turned around and walked through her darkened doorway, leaving me alone in the alley.
As Eddie listened, he realized that a shape had appeared in the library table’s wood grain. The swirling and swooping lines of intermittent blond and brown wood looked like a face staring up at him. Long dark hair seemed to stretch toward the edge of the table, framing an uneven, lighter patch of wood from which empty eye sockets glared, skull-like, above a thin, angry mouth. Eddie’s heart raced as he stopped hearing what Maggie was reading.
The face appeared to be moving. For a moment, it seemed to smile. Then it parted its lips as Eddie pushed himself quickly away from the table. He gasped and said, “Do you guys see—”
“Excuse me.” Mr. Lyons, the school librarian, emerged from behind a bookshelf. “Where are you kids supposed to be this period?” he said.
Eddie nearly screamed. When he glanced at the table again, the face had disappeared. Had it only been his imagination? He stared at the table in disbelief. It took him a few seconds to realize that they had been caught. Mr. Lyons stood in the nearby aisle with his hands shoved into his pockets. The three kids glanced at each other, as if trying to psychically communicate before returning to the librarian.
“Well?” said Mr. Lyons.
“We’re working on a project,” said Harris. “For … uh … extra credit.”
“Ah,” said Mr. Lyons. “The infamous extra-credit excuse …” He approached their table, planted his fists on the surface, and leaned over the notebook in which Harris had been scribbling. Eddie worried that Mr. Lyons would ask what they were doing and then confiscate all of their work, but he didn’t seem to notice the strange words on the pages of The Enigmatic Manuscript.
“Get back to class now, and I won’t report you,” said Mr. Lyons. “However, if you’re caught in the hallway without a pass, don’t come crying to me. I will deny this conversation ever happened.” He flashed them a peace symbol, turned around, and walked away.
The kids stared at each other, then burst into nervous laughter. Eddie quickly glanced at the table again, to see if the face in the wood grain had returned. If the face had been there at all, Mr. Lyons seemed to have frightened it away. Eddie covered his own face, hoping silently that he was not going nuts.
“What do we do now?” said Harris. “There’s so much left to translate.”
“I’m pretty sure Mr. Lyons won’t let us use the photocopier now, so we can’t split the code up like we did today. Only one of us can keep working on the book tonight,” Maggie answered, pushing her chair from the table and standing up. “Later we can meet up and read it all together. Maybe tomorrow?”
“Good idea,” said Eddie quietly. “But who should keep translating it?”
Harris and Maggie glanced at each other. “It’s your book, Eddie,” said Harris. “I think you should be the one who works on it tonight … if you want to, that is.”
Eddie nodded. “I’ll keep my eyes open for anything important,” he said. Distracted by the memory of the wood-grain face, he gathered The Enigmatic Manuscript, their translation, and the piece of paper on which Maggie had written the code key, and shoved everything in his book bag. Translating the book by himself was a daunting task, but he knew he could do it. He only needed to stay focused.
As they made their way to the front of the library, Eddie wondered if he should mention the face to Harris and Maggie. But before he had a chance, the bell rang, startling him. He jumped.
“Call me tonight if you figure anything out. Good luck!” said Harris, pushing open the library door and disappearing with Maggie.
14
When Eddie came home from school, his mother was sitting at the kitchen table, typing on her laptop computer. She was transcribing from a notebook, which was sitting on the table. She was so intent on the computer screen that she didn’t glance up at Eddie as he said hello. When he tapped her on the shoulder, she nearly fell out of her chair.
“Edgar!” she said, finally seeing him standing next to her. “You scared me!” She took a deep breath and flipped the notebook over. Then she closed the computer. “I’m sorry. I’m coming up to the scariest chapter of my story. I’ve been sitting here, frightening myself as I go along. Every little noise I hear makes me jump.”
“Sounds really scary,” said Eddie, wandering to the counter and grabbing an apple. “When can I see it?”
“I’ll be done within the next couple days, I think,” she said. She tapped her fingernails on the table. She seemed distracted. “I saw a sign for an open-mic night on Saturday, at the bookstore in town. The Enigmatic Manuscript, I think it’s called?”
“That’s Harris’s mother’s store,” said Eddie.
“I know. I’m considering reading a chapter or two. Will you come watch? I think you’ll like it.”
“Of course,” said Eddie, nodding as he took a bite of the apple. “I’m sure Harris will like it too.”
After a moment, she cleared her throat. “And on a more serious note, I received a phone call from school today.”
“Really?” said Eddie, forcing himself to smile blankly. “About what?”
“They said you cut your history and English classes. Is that true?”
Eddie steadied himself by leaning against the counter near the kitchen sink. He nodded.
“I thought you loved those subjects,” she said. “What’s going on?”
He didn’t know how to explain himself. Everything’s fine, Mom. Except that Nathaniel Olmstead believed that he’d done something to open some sort of gate, and now, for some reason, Gatesweed is filled with monsters.
“Edgar,” she said, “I’m very happy that you’ve been making friends here in Gatesweed, but if these kids are talking you into …” She paused, then shook her head. “Well, I hope you’ll use better judgment next time.”
“It won’t happen again,” he whispered.
“That’s for sure,” said Mom, opening her computer. “No television for the rest of the week.”
“Okay,” he said, trying to sound disappointed.
As soon as Eddie finished his snack, he brought his book bag upstairs and closed his bedroom door. He took out The Enigmatic Manuscript, The Wish of the Woman in Black, Maggie’s code key, and the notebook pages of their translations. He laid everything on his bed, turned on his lamp, and propped three pillows against his headboard. Leaning against them, he settled back and opened his own notebook. For a brief moment, the wood-grain face from the library table flashed before his eyes, but then he noticed Maggie’s handwriting meandering across the notebook page. He forced the strange image out of his head and began to read.
I took out my wallet, but she pushed my money away, shaking her head. She said something to me that I couldn’t understand, then turned around and walked through her darkened doorway, leaving me alone in the alley.
Chewing on the end of his pen, Eddie scanned the page several times before he finally opened The Enigmatic Manuscript to where they’d been when Mr. Lyons had appeared. What was going to happen? Would tonight be the night he finally learned Nathaniel Olmstead’s fate? Or would the story end as abruptly as the book about the Woman in Black?
Finally, Eddie started to translate. He worked through each paragraph, transcribing every letter, leaving behind big bunches of words,
which he then went back and read every few pages. He found it easier to understand that way.
Nathaniel Olmstead showed the Romanian woman’s strange metal object to his friend, who was impressed. Being a student of antiquity, his friend assured him that the object was not Romanian and most definitely had nothing to do with vampires. He showed Nathaniel an article from a history textbook about the legend of an enigmatic “key,” which some people believed had once locked the gates of Eden.
“Are you suggesting that this is the same ‘key’?” I asked my friend incredulously. “That I own the ‘key’ to the gates of Eden?”
“A fake, of course,” my friend told me, amused. “A replica. According to the descriptions I’ve read in several other texts, yours certainly fits the legend. What a strange souvenir!”
At the time, I was not sure what I believed. According to the article my friend had provided, academics were interested in the stories people invented in order to make sense of their lives. This I understood. The myth of the Garden of Eden, the theory of the Big Bang, every single “once upon a time” you ever heard when your parents tucked you into bed—these help us imagine our own personal world. And wasn’t that the job of the writer? To create worlds? To invent myths? I’d finally found a topic about which I was excited. I was so interested in these theories that I studied as much as I could about my mysterious souvenir “key.” One day, I found a comprehensive article about “the real thing” in a book called The Myth of the Stone Children.
As Eddie read what he’d translated, he gasped. The Myth of the Stone Children? He thought of the statue in the Nameless Woods—she was a “stone child,” wasn’t she? Did the statue have something to do with Nathaniel’s experience in Europe? Finally, something was starting to make sense!
Glancing outside, Eddie noticed the sky quickly fading to night. Many of the leaves had fallen from the trees, so the bare branches were left in silhouette against the deep blue. They looked like bones clawing up from the earth. He licked his lips and got back to work.