The Second Spy: The Books of Elsewhere: Volume 3

by Jacqueline West

  Olive was still thinking and chewing when the front door creaked open.

  “Hello, junior high school student!” called Mr. Dunwoody cheerily as he and Mrs. Dunwoody set down their briefcases. The words junior high kicked over Olive’s tower of thoughts very efficiently.

  Mrs. Dunwoody bustled down the hall, kissed Olive on the head, and went into the kitchen to turn on the oven. “I’ll get dinner started, and then we want to hear all about your first day.”

  And so, from the start of the meal until the end of the evening, the three Dunwoodys talked about school (and about math class in particular), about study habits (about the use of rulers, compasses, and graphing paper in particular), and about the importance of good grades (A-pluses, in particular). By the time Olive climbed the stairs to bed, Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody were glowing like two delighted jack-o’-lanterns, and Olive was so worn out and worried that she didn’t want to do anything but crawl under her blankets, squeeze Hershel, and pile the pillows over her head.

  Which was exactly what she did.

  5

  SOMETHING SMALL BUT insistent poked at Olive’s shoulder. Even through a thick layer of sleep, she could feel it jabbing her arm again and again, as though there were an elevator button on her pajama sleeve. Groggily, Olive shifted beneath the blankets, smooshing her face into Hershel’s fuzzy side.

  The small, insistent thing kept poking.

  “Olive,” whispered a voice.

  Olive jerked her shoulder away.

  The poking shifted to her face. “Olive,” the voice whispered again. The small, insistent thing poked her cheek. Poke, poke, poke. “Olive.”

  Olive finally managed to raise her rusty eyelids. She gazed out into the darkened room. From somewhere amid the folds of her blankets, a pair of vivid green eyes stared back at her.

  “Good,” said a voice with a faint British accent. “You’re awake.”

  “Well, I am now, Harvey,” said Olive rather grumpily. “You woke me.”

  “Shh,” whispered the cat. “Someone may be listening. Don’t reveal my identity. Call me Agent 1-800.”

  “What happened to Sir Lancelot?” asked Olive.

  “Who?”

  “Never mind.” Olive closed her eyes again.

  Harvey’s paw gave her cheek another insistent poke. “I have top-secret, high-importance, vital-organ, rush-delivery information,” he hissed.

  “Vital organ?” Olive repeated.

  “It concerns Agent M. Aka Sir Pillowcase.”

  “You mean Morton,” said Olive, eyes still closed.

  “Shh!” Harvey hissed again. “Agent M.”

  “What about him?”

  Harvey lowered himself toward Olive’s face until his nose was nearly touching hers. Olive could feel the wisps of his whiskers against her skin. “Agent M is plotting an escape.”

  Olive’s eyes popped open. “But—he can’t escape. He can’t get out of Elsewhere. Not on his own.”

  Harvey stalled for a moment, kneading Olive’s stomach as he rocked from paw to paw. “Reluctant as I am to inform against a fellow agent,” said the cat at last, “I am afraid…he tried to bribe me.”

  “Huh?”

  Harvey lowered his voice to a whisper. “He offered to be The Guy That Dies.”

  “The…who?” said Olive, wondering if she’d fallen asleep again.

  “The Guy That Dies,” Harvey repeated. “In any situation we might enact: any duel, any joust, any cannonball volley, I would be the victor, and he would be The Guy That Dies. Meliagaunce to my Lancelot. The Sheriff of Nottingham to my Robin Hood. The good guys to my Captain Blackpaw!”

  “Oh.”

  Harvey tilted his head to one side. “I must admit that I was tempted.”

  “You didn’t say yes, did you?”

  Harvey stiffened. “Of course not. I am loyal to our cause.”

  “Then everything’s fine.”

  “I’m afraid not,” said Harvey with another poke as Olive tried to close her eyes again. “Agent M is growing desperate. He’ll take any opportunity—however dangerous—to get out.”

  Olive heaved a sigh. “I guess I should go talk to him.”

  “A wise decision,” said Harvey. With an action-hero flip, he leaped off of the bed and slunk toward the door. “Situation comprehensive,” Olive heard him mutter into his imaginary transistor wristwatch. “Sleeper cell has been informed. Now heading to the head of headquarters.” A moment later, there came a low creak from the door, and Agent 1-800 was gone.

  Olive swung her legs out of bed and jumped to the floor, landing as far away from the bed as she could. She double-checked the hallway for portraits and parents before creeping out of her room, putting on the spectacles, and hauling herself through the frame around the painting of Linden Street.

  The moment her feet touched the painting’s misty ground, something smacked her in the side with a thwump. Olive flailed backward, hitting her head on a corner of the picture frame that dangled in midair behind her and flopping flat on her back in the grass. Something in a white nightshirt landed on top of her.

  “MORTON!” Olive choked, once she could manage to breathe again. “What are you doing?”

  “Tackling you,” said Morton, as though this should have been obvious. He rolled off of Olive and glowered at her from the grass. “I aimed for the picture frame, so we’d both fall back out. But you’re too heavy.”

  Olive bristled. “Maybe you’re too short.”

  Morton jumped up, standing as tall as his three and a half feet would allow. “Maybe you’re too STUPID.”

  Olive took a deep breath and counted to five. On the crest of the misty hill before her, a few lights in the painted houses twinkled faintly.

  “Morton,” she said, trying to push her voice down into a calm, steady line, “we’ve already talked about why you have to stay Elsewhere. You’re paint. People would find out about you, and they’d probably put you in a museum or something. And then they’d learn the truth about this house, and they’d either destroy everything or take it all away to study it, and then we would never find out what happened to your parents.”

  Morton’s round, pale face seemed to soften. Olive was sure he was seeing the logic of her words. Then he said, “You should give me the spectacles.”

  Olive’s hands flew up, grabbing the spectacle frames. “No way!”

  “Why should you get to have them? I could use them. It’s my parents we’re looking for. Besides, you’ve got the cats. They can take you in and out any time you want. You’re just”—Morton stopped, momentarily befuddled—“a spectacle hog.”

  “I am not.”

  “Spectacle hog! Spectacle hog! Olive is a spectacle hog!” Morton chanted, hopping backward up the misty hill.

  “Stop that!” Olive commanded.

  “Oink, oink, oink,” taunted Morton, before turning and bolting for the street.

  Olive chased after him. “Come back here!” she shouted, starting to smile in spite of herself.

  Morton’s oinks turned to giggles as he led Olive in a looping, zigzagging path up the hill toward Linden Street, his baggy white nightshirt whipping around his legs. Finally, on the edge of a neighbor’s foggy lawn, Olive caught him by the elbow, and they both sprawled face-first into the dewy grass, sending up a puff of mist that hovered above them like an impatient cloud.

  Olive sat up, laughing. She began to brush the grass off of her pajamas, but each blade had already flown back to its place on the ground, mending and straightening itself. A moment later, Morton sat up too, still giggling. “Oink, oink,” he managed, between laughs.

  Gradually, Morton’s chuckles faded. Olive’s panting quieted. Soon the silence of Linden Street surrounded them again, as thick as the mist in the painted air.

  The dark houses of a hundred years ago stood before them and behind them, quietly waiting. With their deserted porches and motionless curtains, their quiet rooms and closed doors, they had the air of houses where every inhabitant is fast
asleep. Most of the houses were empty, as Olive knew. But here and there, other painted people—others who had been trapped, like Morton—waited inside those curtained windows, staring out into the street even now, watching Olive and Morton, the only things that moved. Nothing else ever changed here. It would be dusk on this misty spring evening for decades—maybe centuries—to come.

  “Today was my very first day of junior high,” said Olive, after a few quiet minutes had slipped by. “I don’t think it could have been any worse if I had accidentally lit the building on fire. Actually, that would have made it better. Because then at least we’d have been sent home early.” Olive watched a wisp of mist settle back into place when she shifted her foot. “The kids were mean, the classes were hard, and I wore pajama pants by mistake. And then, when I got home, I found out that somebody had tried to get into the house to steal things. Again. Oh, yeah—and an angry witch who can’t really die is after me, and she’s already tried to drown me and light me on fire, so she’s probably coming up with something even worse to do to me the next time she gets the chance.”

  Morton’s tufty head turned away. “I wish I got to go to school,” he said.

  Olive looked down at the curve of Morton’s skinny back. A lump of sadness slid down through her rib cage, coming to rest right on top of her heart. “I’m looking for a way to help you, Morton,” she said. “And I am going to find your parents. I promised.”

  “I’m tired of waiting,” said Morton into his folded arms. “I’ve been waiting and waiting, and nothing’s happened.”

  “That’s not true,” Olive protested. “We found your sister.”

  Morton’s wide blue eyes swiveled back toward Olive’s. She could practically read the words And look how well that turned out printed across his pupils.

  Morton turned away again. When he spoke, he appeared to be addressing his knees, which formed two small white hills underneath his nightshirt. “I know you think it’s a bad idea,” he said. “And I know you won’t ever let me have the spectacles. But I’m going to find another way to get out of here. You can’t stop me.”

  Olive tugged on the ribbon that tied the spectacles around her neck, making sure that the knots were tight. “What if we made a deal,” she said slowly. “What if you promised not to try to run away, or to trick the cats, or to sneak out of Elsewhere, for the next…” Olive paused, counting “…four months. If I don’t find your parents before that, then you can use the spectacles. For a while. But you have to give them back.”

  Morton squinted, tilting his tufty head to one side. “Two months,” he said.

  Olive huffed an indignant breath through her nose. “Three.”

  “Deal.” Morton put out his hand. Olive took it, feeling surprised yet again by the strange, slick warmth of his not-quite-real skin. Then she slumped forward, leaning her head against her knees. “Just what I need,” she muttered. “More pressure. On top of sixth grade, and this house, and Annabelle, now I have a deadline.”

  “I wish I had something extra to worry about,” said Morton. He flopped down on his back. “I just want to do something different. Everything here stays the same.” He pulled up a blade of grass and lowered it gently back toward the ground, watching its roots wriggle gratefully into place.

  Something different. The words took hold in Olive’s mind like the roots of the painted grass. Morton needed something different. Something that would absorb him, and challenge him, and make him feel necessary. He needed a whole obstacle course, or a neighborhood-sized scavenger hunt, or some gigantic five-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle—

  Olive jumped to her feet. “Be right back!” she shouted, already racing down the hill.

  Moments later, she was in her own bedroom, rooting among the dust bunnies under the bed. Her hand touched something soft and ruffly, and then something crumbly and dry (which explained where the graham crackers she’d been eating in bed last week had gone), and then something that felt like cotton but was hard and round inside.

  With the T-shirt full of torn papers and several rolls of tape from her art supply drawer, Olive slipped back into the hall. Moonbeams from the windows split her shadow into pieces that clustered around her feet like petals around a stem. For an instant, Olive would have sworn that she wasn’t alone…that someone else was tangled in the darkness of that silent hallway.

  She stopped, one hand on the picture frame. Her eyes flickered over the nearby paintings: The forest, the silvery lake, the tiny church on its craggy hill. Nothing moved. There was no sound. But Olive got the feeling that the shield around her new secret was already wearing thin. She had to work fast. It wouldn’t be long before someone—whether it was a friend or an enemy—found the way in.

  6

  THREE MONTHS. THREE months. THREE MONTHS to find Morton’s parents, or lose Morton himself.

  This thought rubbed like a blister against Olive’s other thoughts as she struggled through the second day of junior high. She managed to arrive at school in actual pants this time, which was a considerable improvement. However, the pants had a mysterious pinkish blotch on the seat, which might have been caused by a laundry mishap, a unique form of mold, or the puddle of Sugar Puffy Kitten Bits that Olive had sat on after accidentally spilling cereal all over the breakfast table that morning. Olive was pleasantly unaware of the blotch’s presence until math class, when she was called up to the board to solve a problem and the class erupted into sniggers behind her.

  She did the math wrong too.

  By the time the last hour of the day arrived, Olive barely had the energy to climb the worn stone stairs to the art room and pull out her stool at the table all the way at the back.

  Once again, the art teacher was nowhere to be seen. The students sat at their tables, chattering and squirming and complaining. But as the bell rang and the minutes ticked by, a sense of not-right-ness settled gradually over the room. Stools stopped squeaking. Fingers stopped fidgeting. Students glanced at each other in puzzled silence. Soon the class had gotten so quiet that a soft whistling sound from the back of the room seemed to echo through the air.

  Looking for the source of the sound, the other students turned around and stared directly at Olive. Olive, feeling twenty-five pairs of eyes on her, turned around as well. There was nothing behind her but a high white wall. She stared at the wall for a while, pretending that it was the most fascinating thing she’d seen all day. And, as she stared at the wall, something red and curly caught the corner of her eye. Olive glanced down. There, on the floor, with her kinks of dark red hair spread out against the tiles, lay Ms. Teedlebaum. The whistling sound was coming from her nose.

  “Ms. Teedlebaum?” whispered Olive. “Are you awake?”

  “Unfortunately, yes,” said Ms. Teedlebaum. “Would you help me up, please?” Eyes still shut, Ms. Teedlebaum reached out two arms that were covered in clanking rows of bangle bracelets. Olive took Ms. Teedlebaum’s hands. The other students watched as the art teacher hefted herself back onto her feet, almost yanking Olive off of hers in the process. Then Ms. Teedlebaum shuffled toward the front of the classroom, pressing both hands to the small of her back and hunching over so that the cords and whistles and lanyards around her neck had an extra-wide range in which to swing.

  “I have an old back injury that’s acting up today. Circus stuff,” said Ms. Teedlebaum, as though this required no further explanation. “You won’t mind if I teach lying down today, will you?”

  No one answered.

  “Good,” said Ms. Teedlebaum. With a heavy sigh, she lay down flat on her back on the large table at the front of the art room, turning her face toward the ceiling and closing her eyes.

  “We are going to continue our study of portraits for the next two weeks,” said Ms. Teedlebaum to the ceiling. “Today, you’ll work on your self-portraits. I’ve labeled your shelves in the cabinet, so you can find your pictures. You know where the other materials are.” Here several students gave each other confused looks, but Ms. Teedlebaum, with her ey
es closed, didn’t notice. “Your assignment for tomorrow is to bring in a photograph. It can be of one person or a group of people, but it has to be people. No dogs or cats or unicorns or what-have-you. You’re going to work from the photograph to paint the portrait, so make sure it’s a nice clear picture. Any questions?” Ms. Teedlebaum asked this without opening her eyes, so it was a good thing that no one raised a hand. “Okay. Get to work.”

  Ms. Teedlebaum lay motionless on the front table while the students dug through the cabinets to find their unfinished portraits and art materials. It was hard to tell if Ms. Teedlebaum was, in fact, still awake, but by some unspoken agreement everyone tiptoed and whispered, just in case. Olive slipped down from her stool once all the other students were out of the way and brought her self-portrait back to her desk.

  She gave the picture a long look. It was both better and worse than she remembered. The shape of her face wasn’t too lumpy or off-balance, although her nose looked as though it began in the center of her forehead, and her eyes were either too far apart or too close together—it was hard to tell which. Maybe this was because the eyes were so large overall. Olive picked up her eraser and started rubbing.

  While she smudged away the upper end of the nose, she thought about the homework assignment. What picture should she bring in? Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody were the picture-takers in the Dunwoody house, so most of the pictures in the family albums were of Olive. In fact, if you flipped quickly through the pages of each album, you could watch Olive gradually shrinking or swelling, depending on which direction you flipped.

  There were some pictures of Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody by themselves, taken before Olive had been born—like the one that sat on Mr. Dunwoody’s desk, where Alec and Alice beamed at each other in the center of a dance floor, with romantic lights glinting off the thick lenses of their glasses. Neither of her parents was facing the camera, and the glints on their glasses would be tricky to capture.

  Olive chewed the inside of her cheek, thinking. What she really needed was a traditional family photo, the kind that people posed for in photographers’ studios, where everyone is smiling and looking slightly to the right. She had seen a photograph just like this, not long ago…