The Books of Elsewhere, Vol. 1: The Shadows

  The second room was dark blue and somber, with an old hat rack and a dresser full of handkerchiefs, shoehorns, and other useless stuff. The blue room had a painting of a ballroom where an orchestra played while couples in old-fashioned evening clothes danced. Everyone looked very serious and graceful and didn’t seem to be having any fun at all.

  The third room was Olive’s favorite. With its pale violet paper and tatted lace curtains, it looked delicate and grandmotherly. While the other guest rooms smelled of dust and age, this one smelled as though it had been more recently used. A very faint scent of lilacs and lilies of the valley hung in the air.

  The violet room also had the chest of drawers full of old-fashioned trinkets that Olive had discovered just after moving in. Olive liked to try on the gloves and stick the tortoiseshell combs in her shortish, straightish hair. The pair of spectacles was there, too, still lying in their silk-lined case.

  A portrait hung over the chest of drawers. It was of a young woman—or of a young woman’s head and shoulders, anyway—painted in soft pastel hues. The woman’s dark hair was pinned up with combs on the sides, and she wore little pearl earrings and a long string of pearl beads around her neck. The woman was pretty, Olive thought, like the actresses in the old black-and-white movies they showed Sunday afternoons on public television. Her eyes were big and dark, and she had a tiny mouth that tilted up just a bit at the corners.

  One afternoon, when Olive was wearing a pink glove on the left hand, a blue glove on the right hand, three scarves around her neck, and all of the tortoiseshell combs she could find, something funny happened. Olive had taken the spectacles out of their case. They were on a long beaded chain, the kind that librarians wear. Olive put the chain around her neck and balanced the spectacles on her nose. And then the portrait winked at her.

  Olive took off the spectacles and peered up at the painting. The dark-haired woman still stared off to the left, not moving, wearing her little smile. Olive rubbed her eyes. She put the spectacles back on. The woman in the portrait winked at her again, and this time, her smile got a little wider.

  Olive waited, barely breathing. Several minutes went by, but the portrait didn’t move. Olive started to think that maybe she had hit her head on the corner above the bathtub too many times. She stuffed the gloves and scarves back in the drawer and hurried out of the bedroom with the spectacles still swinging around her neck.

  Once, somebody had given Olive a puzzle book with secret messages hidden in the pages. To find them, she ran a strip of red cellophane over the pictures, and the messages would “magically” appear. The messages said pointless things like, “Why did the banana leave the party? Because he had to split.” Eventually Olive had ripped up the puzzle book and used it for papiermâché. But that strip of red cellophane had given her an idea.

  In the hallway, Olive stopped in front of the painting of the forest at night. She squinted down the moonlit path. As always, she got the sensation of something lurking there in the darkness—something powerful, something unfriendly. Then she put on the spectacles and slowly leaned toward the painting, moving closer and closer until her nose was almost touching the canvas.

  There. She knew she had seen it before! And there it was again: a tiny white shape flitting in and out of the shadows on the path. Olive watched it run, trip on a root, and stumble. It turned, looking over its shoulder. It had a tiny, frightened face, a long white nightshirt, and a scraped knee. It got up, limping, and tried to hurry away. Olive leaned even closer, keeping her eyes on the scurrying figure. Suddenly she could feel the breeze in the dark forest rushing over her skin and through her hair. The canvas seemed to turn to jelly as her face sank through it—

  Olive jerked back from the painting. She rubbed her nose. It felt clean—not at all like she had just pushed it into a bowl of Jell-O. Carefully, the way you touch an animal that might not be friendly, she stretched her fingers toward the painting. Her hand went through the frame almost as easily as if it were an open window. A tickly excitement bubbled through Olive’s body.

  Tugging off the spectacles, Olive hurried down the stairs and skidded into the library. Mr. Dunwoody was working at his computer. He didn’t look up until Olive plunked down on the rug beside him.

  “Dad,” Olive began, “if you wanted to try something, but you weren’t sure it would work, and you didn’t know if you should try it, what would you do?”

  Her father swiveled slowly around in his desk chair. “Would it be safe to say that we’re not really talking about me here?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well . . .” Mr. Dunwoody leaned back in the chair. “I would say—Just a minute.” Mr. Dunwoody sat up again. “We’re not talking about anything that involves electricity, are we?”

  “No.”

  “Chemicals?”

  “No.”

  “Violence toward yourself or others?”

  Olive paused. “I don’t think so.”

  “All right then.” Mr. Dunwoody leaned back again, looking satisfied. “In that case, I would say: Test your hypothesis.”

  “Test my hypothesis?”

  “Yes. Try a dry run.” When Olive looked puzzled, Mr. Dunwoody went on. “A dry run is a testing procedure in which the potential effects of failure are deliberately mitigated.”

  Olive blinked. “What?”

  “It means,” said her father, more slowly, “try it in a way that won’t hurt anybody if it doesn’t work.”

  “Oh.” Olive got up. “Thank you.”

  “Any time,” said Mr. Dunwoody, already turning back to the computer screen.

  Olive tromped back up the stairs, repeating the words “Test your hypothesis. Test your hypothesis. Test your hypothesis” in a marching rhythm.

  Hershel was lying on the pillows where she had left him. Olive tucked the bear under her elbow and went to her closet, where she yanked the polka-dot laces out of her sneakers. Then she knotted the laces together and tied them snugly—but not too tight—around Hershel’s upper arm.

  “All right, Hershel,” Olive whispered when they stood in front of the forest painting. Hershel was poised for takeoff in Olive’s hands, his shoelace anchor wrapped between her fingers. “Time to test the hypothesis.”

  Olive tossed Hershel at the painting. He hit the canvas with a muffled thud and bounced off onto the hallway carpet.

  Olive regarded him for a moment, then scooped him up. “Sorry, Hershel. I forgot about the spectacles.” She settled the spectacles on her nose and rearranged Hershel for launching. “Now beginning our second trial: in three . . . two . . . one . . . Lift-off!”

  This time, Hershel flew through the frame. Olive kept a tight grip on the shoelace. She squinted into the dark forest, but she couldn’t see Hershel anywhere in the picture—he must have fallen out of sight, below the edge of the frame. The leafless trees swayed in the distance, almost like reaching hands.

  Olive started to feel a bit nervous. Last year at school, the whole class had signed petitions to stop animal testing. She wasn’t sure if experimenting with Hershel counted, but it made her feel guilty either way.

  To give her mind something else to do, Olive started to count to a hundred. As usual, she got lost somewhere, and one hundred came up astonishingly fast. She suspected that she had skipped not only the eighties, but the seventies and sixties as well. “Close enough,” she whispered to the empty hallway. With a step backward, she yanked the shoelace, and Hershel soared back through the frame like a fish on a hook.

  Olive inspected Hershel from head to toe. He seemed calm; there were no cuts or bruises or even any dirt on him anywhere. She gave him an appreciative hug and put him back in his place on her pillows. Then she returned to the hallway, took a deep breath, and put her hands on either side of the painting.

  Somewhere far down the path, she saw a tiny white shape dart and flicker. Olive leaned forward. Her face sank through the canvas, and then her shoulders, and before she could grab the frame to stop herself, her whole b
ody toppled forward into the dark and chilly forest.

  6

  OLIVE FROZE. SHE could hear the wind creaking through the bare branches. Patches of moonlight fell onto the white path at her feet. The gravel on the path poked sharply through her favorite stripy blue socks. She looked over her shoulder. Behind her, a frame floated in midair, holding a smallish painting of the upstairs hallway. Olive stuck her hand back through the frame and wiggled it around, just to make sure.

  A snapping sound and the rustle of dry leaves came from the thick patch of trees ahead. Looking back once or twice at the glowing square of hallway, Olive set off along the path. At first she went cautiously, but soon her heart settled into an excited beat, like a snare drum in a marching band. Olive almost giggled out loud. It was the kind of giggle someone makes when she is playing hide-and-seek and none of the other kids can find her, even though they’ve walked past her hiding spot four times. High over Olive’s head, black branches rattled. The full moon in its oily navy sky tossed bony shadows over the path.

  “Hello?” Olive called. “I know you’re here!”

  There was a rustle from a cluster of shrubs some distance off the path, to the right.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” she promised, moving closer.

  The shrubs gave a terrified squeak.

  “You can come out,” she whispered. “Really.”

  The shrubs were quiet.

  Olive stepped forward and pushed apart their prickly branches. A little white figure inside gave another squeak and rolled itself up into a ball.

  “Look!” said Olive. “I’m not anything to be scared of.”

  “Oh,” the ball said, and began to unroll itself.

  When it had unrolled completely, Olive saw that it was actually a boy with a large, round face and a very small body hidden in a white nightshirt that was several inches too long. From the top of his round head, pale hair tufted in all different directions. He looked a bit like a tiny, unthreatening scarecrow—the kind that birds end up using as a convenient perch.

  “I’m Olive.”

  “I’m Morton.” The scarecrow held out a small, grubby hand. Olive shook it solemnly.

  “Are you lost?” she asked.

  Morton slowly shook his head. “No . . . He brought me here. And then I couldn’t get out.”

  “Who brought you here?”

  “The bad man,” Morton whispered.

  “What do you mean, the bad man?”

  Morton squinted up at Olive, his round face catching a beam of moonlight. “Everybody knows the bad man.”

  “Do you mean the bogeyman?” asked Olive. “Because he’s only in your imagination, you know.”

  Morton shook his head so hard, he almost fell down. “Everybody knows him.” He looked up at Olive reproachfully.

  Olive sighed. “Well, I don’t know what you’re talking about, so why don’t you tell me?”

  Morton crossed his arms over his baggy white nightshirt. “I was in my BED . . .” he said very slowly, as if Olive might not understand simple sentences, “and then I HEARD him—”

  “The bad man?” Olive interrupted.

  Morton glared at her, then nodded. “He was in the garden,” Morton continued. “And he was talking. And I got out of my bed, and I went across the grass, and I watched him. He was mixing things, and he was talking to a cat. And the cat TALKED BACK.”

  Inside Olive’s head, two little puzzle pieces went click. She held her breath and waited for Morton to continue.

  “I made a noise,” Morton went on. “The man looked up and he saw me. He said, Come here, boy. I have something special to show you. He said I could help him. He said I would be the very first one.”

  “The very first what?” whispered Olive.

  Morton shrugged. “I don’t remember. I didn’t want to go with him. But my feet went anyway. We went into his house, and then . . .” Morton shook his head, like somebody shaking a Magic 8-Ball to make the next words appear. “Then . . . we both went into the forest, I think. And then the man said, Good-bye, boy. Don’t wait for them to find you. And then he left.” Morton looked down at the hem of his nightshirt. “And then I was by myself.”

  A cold feeling rippled up Olive’s back and across her scalp. “Let’s get out of here,” she said, glancing over her shoulder. “Right now.” She held the branches of the shrubs apart, and Morton crawled through.

  They stood up together. In those few minutes, the moon seemed to have moved. Thicker shadows filled the forest, leaving the ground and the path submerged in a deep pool of black.

  Olive looked around. “I’m not sure which way to go,” she admitted.

  Morton, whose head reached the level of Olive’s elbow, sidled closer. “I never know which way to go,” he said.

  “Well, all we need to do is find the path,” said Olive. “That should lead us out of here.”

  Olive took a few steps in one direction, with Morton trailing after her like a broken kite. There was no path to be seen. Olive turned and headed in the opposite direction. Nothing. Olive squinted into the growing darkness, looking for a spot that she had passed before—a tree, a stone, anything—but nothing looked familiar.

  “That’s funny,” she said. “I can’t remember which way I came.”

  “He’s watching us,” Morton whispered. “He won’t let us leave.”

  The back of Olive’s neck prickled. She spun around, searching the shadows under the shifting branches. She didn’t see anyone, but she felt quite sure that Morton was right. Somebody was watching them. Olive looked down at Morton’s round, terrified face. “We’ll be okay,” she said, hoping her voice sounded surer than she felt. “I promise.”

  Nearby, a dry twig snapped. In the silence, the sound traveled like a firework. Olive and Morton froze in their steps. There was another sound—the rustle of something moving through the underbrush. Olive crouched, pulling Morton close, keeping her eyes wide open. In the shadows, she saw the glitter of something green.

  “Horatio? Is that you?” she whispered.

  A furry shape with green eyes emerged from the darkness. It paused, looking at Morton and then at Olive. Finally it gave a long, aggravated sigh, shook its head, and moved quickly to the left.

  “Follow the cat!” cried Olive, bounding after Horatio.

  But Morton had planted his feet. “That’s the cat!” he hissed. “The one that talked!”

  “I know he talks,” said Olive. “I think he’s going to show us the way out of here. Now come on!”

  Morton shook his head so hard that this time he did fall down.

  “Morton! Hurry!” Olive begged, yanking at Morton’s hand.

  But Morton sat on the ground like an anchor. “No,” he said. “I’m not following that cat.”

  “His name is Horatio, and he said he would be keeping an eye on me. He’s trying to help us. Get up!”

  “I don’t have to do everything you say. And you can’t make me.”

  “What?” Olive spluttered.

  “You have to do what I say. Because I’m the boy.”

  Olive dropped Morton’s hand and put her fists on her hips. “How old are you?”

  “Nine.”

  “Well, I’m eleven. So come on.”

  “I’ll be ten in June.”

  “It is June!”

  “No it isn’t.”

  “Yes it is!!”

  “It’s April,” said Morton stubbornly.

  The last drip of Olive’s patience dried up. “Look,” she growled, dropping to her knees so that her nose nearly touched Morton’s. “I’m going with the cat. You can stay here forever, all by yourself, or you can come with me. Now.”

  With his mouth squished into a pout, Morton stood up. Olive took his hand. Morton shook her off. This time, Olive grasped his wrist and didn’t let go.

  Horatio had paused for them, but the moment Olive and Morton were on their feet, he was flying through the underbrush. They scrambled along behind his furry silhouette, hopping o
ver fallen trunks, pushing through bushes. When they reached the pale stones of the path, the cat broke into a run. Morton and Olive hurried behind. They left the thick cover of the forest, and moonlight fell over them, lighting their way. Olive could see the orange hue of Horatio’s fur glowing ahead of them. Still running, she turned to glance over her shoulder and had to swallow a scream.

  They were being followed. And no matter how fast they ran, Olive didn’t see how they could get away.

  7

  A SHADOW, THICK AND solid as a pool of oil, raced after them from the edge of the forest. It swept up the path, filling the sky. It shut out the moonlight. Olive could feel it turning the air to ice. Goose bumps prickled across her body. A chilly breeze swirled through her hair.

  “Hurry!” she shouted to Morton, pulling him along by the arm. With her free hand, she clumsily straightened the spectacles on her face.

  Ahead of them, she could see the hanging frame and its picture of the hallway.

  “Stay close to me!” Horatio yowled, streaking ahead of them like a furry comet.

  Morton pumped his little legs, trying to keep up. Sharp stones jabbed at Olive’s feet, but she could barely feel them. Her heart was thundering. Her lungs ached. Her whole body knew that nothing mattered but getting away from the darkness. And it was coming closer. She could sense it—the thing in the forest, the thing that had been plotting, biding its time, was now just inches away.

  Horatio shot through the picture frame like a dart from a blowgun. Olive grabbed Morton beneath the arms and half boosted, half tossed him after the cat. “Hey!” Morton piped indignantly. Then Olive grabbed the sides of the frame and hoisted herself, face-first, onto the hallway carpet just as the shadows swooped in around her.

  Horatio didn’t waste any time. “This way!” he hissed, streaking down the hall. By the time Olive and Morton had scrambled to their feet, the cat had hopped into the painting outside Olive’s bedroom.