“Then where do you think she is, right now?”
There was a moment of silence. Then Horatio said, “Someplace dark.”
An imaginary droplet of cold water ran down the back of Olive’s neck. She turned away from Horatio and tried to focus her mind on the two paintings that hung on the bedroom wall. One was of an old wooden sailing ship on a purplish sea. The other was of a white-pillared gazebo standing in a shady garden, half enclosed by towering willow trees. A gangly man in an old-fashioned suit was seated in the gazebo, reading a book. It would be nice to hide in that gazebo with a book of her own, listening to the breeze, smelling the flowers…But Olive had more important, more unpleasant, things to do.
“I’m going to check the yard and make sure everything is safe,” she said in a brave voice, looking back at Horatio.
“Good,” said the cat. His eyes were already closed.
Olive thumped down through the house and out the back door. The garden sprawled before her in all its thorny, leafy chaos. The ancient trees that surrounded the yard seemed to be trying to cover up the mess with a blanket of shadows. Olive walked around the garden’s edge. There were no clues hidden among the strange plants, as far as she could tell. There were no footprints in the dirt near the compost pile, or lost pearls on the moss beneath the trees. Olive was beginning to feel sure that she wouldn’t find anything interesting at all, when suddenly half of her body plunged straight through the ground.
Her left leg arched behind her in an awkward ballet position, her arms shot out, grasping uselessly at the air, and her chin landed in the grass between a patch of dandelions and an anthill. Gasping for breath, Olive stared at the bustling ants. They ignored her.
By dragging herself on her elbows, Olive managed to pull her lower half out of the ground and to roll, beetle-like, back around. Her heart thumped as she pawed through the grass. Was there an old well out here, overgrown and forgotten? Had some gigantic animal dug its hole in her backyard? Olive looked warily around, but the largest animal she could see was an obese squirrel grooming itself in a nearby maple tree. She leaned over the gap in the grass.
Here, at the farthest edge of the overgrown garden, well hidden by a mat of twigs and leaves, was a hole—a hole so deep that Olive couldn’t see its bottom. Its mouth was between two and three feet wide. She ran one cautious hand around its edge. The dirt was bare, so the hole couldn’t have been here for long, and its sides were flat, like something cut by a shovel. This hole had been dug by a person…and it had been dug recently. Taking a last, sweeping glance at the yard, Olive lowered her head inside and peered down into the darkness far, far below.
4
OLIVE PREFERRED HER dark places with a little light in them. She was a big fan of light switches and candles and strings of electric Christmas lights, and she wasn’t the type to go plunging into a deep, dark cave without a flashlight. So when she fell headfirst through the hole, it was entirely by accident. One moment she was kneeling in the weedy garden, and the next moment, she was making a squealing sound (something like “AaoooOOP!”) as she slid down a steep dirt wall into a dark, chilly space far below the ground.
For a moment, all she could do was breathe. Once she was certain that she would go on breathing with or without trying to, Olive took an inventory of her body. Except for her now very dirty shirt, nothing seemed to be damaged, including the spectacles. Shakily, she rearranged herself into a semi-upright position and glanced up at the mouth of the hole, high above.
I’ve fallen into a trap! said a panicky voice in her brain. Just like the kind of trap they dig for tigers! Or is it bears?
No, you’re thinking of Winnie-the-Pooh, said another, slightly-less-panicky voice in her brain.
Oh, that’s right…The Heffalump trap, said the first voice.
Shut up, brain! Olive yelled at herself.
She took a timid look around. The darkness was as dense as chocolate cake, even with the streaks of faint gray daylight trickling in from above. All she could tell for certain was that she was in some sort of enclosed space, deep beneath the backyard. Horatio’s words about Annabelle being someplace dark trailed unsettlingly through the chaos in her mind.
“Annabelle?” she whispered. Her heart was thundering in her ribs. It made her voice waver. “Are you here?”
There was no answer.
Tentatively, Olive reached out into the darkness until her fingertips met something solid. But what she felt wasn’t dirt.
It was stone.
Olive teetered to her feet. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, the space seemed to widen around her. Soon she could make out solid stone walls, a packed dirt floor, and something to her left that glinted in the wisps of faint gray light. Olive slunk closer. The glint seemed to split and multiply into rows and rows of glints, sparkling back at her. All at once, Olive knew where she was. She was at the end of the tunnel, beneath the basement, in the room full of jars.
Olive had only recently discovered this room for herself, after forcing Leopold to leave his station by using a spell from the McMartins’ spellbook. She still couldn’t understand why the big black cat was so protective of the place. To Olive, it looked like nothing more than a weird storage pantry for things no one would want to eat anyway.
But whoever had dug the hole had known about this place—had known about it, and had managed to get in. And, as far as Olive could tell, there was only one other person who would have been aware of its existence.
Annabelle McMartin.
Olive scanned the room. It wasn’t large, and it was clear that she was alone inside of it. She wrapped her chilly arms tight around herself and peered at the crowded shelves. The jars were filled with things she couldn’t quite identify: things that were red and powdery, things that were yellow and oily, things that had legs, things that were legs, things with petals or thorns or bones. It seemed to Olive that there might have been a few more gaps in the rows than there had been last time she was down here—but there were so many jars, and so many gaps, and so many bits of broken glass scattered across the floor that it was impossible to be sure. And why would anyone want these jars in the first place?
Shivering, Olive turned toward the high wooden table that stood in front of the shelves. Bits of torn paper were strewn across its surface, just as they’d been when Olive first found them a few weeks ago, with their handwritten words all broken apart like the pieces of a raggedy jigsaw puzzle. Olive turned over a few scraps, managing to make out Gree— and –olet and mix with b— by the trickle of distant daylight. A big mortar and pestle covered with orangeish powder stood nearby. Olive reached into the bowl and brought back a fingertip covered with orange dust. She sniffed it. It smelled like a rotten orange peel. Very cautiously, she put out her tongue and tasted it. It didn’t taste like a rotten orange peel. It didn’t taste like anything Olive had ever tasted before. She wiped her finger on one of the scraps of paper, drawing a little squiggly wave. Then she sighed, chafing her arms, and surveyed the room again.
Clearly, this place was important. Leopold had been guarding it for who-knew-how-long, and now, not one but two secret entrances led to it. She had to be missing something. She had missed important things before. And Olive had learned that when she missed something important, it was usually because she was looking at things in the wrong way.
She tugged the spectacles out of her collar and put them on. In the dimness, she stared hard at the rows of jars. Their contents didn’t move. No secret words appeared, letter by letter, in their glass walls. She studied the room itself, but everything looked just as it had a moment ago. Olive sighed. She was just about to take the spectacles off again when her eyes landed on the paper on the table.
The little orange squiggle that she’d drawn with her finger was waving and rolling across the page, just like a real wave in a powdery orange ocean.
Sometimes when you put change in a vending machine, there’s a long, mysterious pause while the inner workings catch and turn, and the coins
slide into the right slot, and you wonder if the drink you ordered is actually going to fall through the swinging door at all. And then, suddenly: Clank. Thud. The can of pop appears in the doorway, and it’s icy cold, and it’s exactly what you wanted. This is what happened in Olive’s brain when the little orange wave started to move.
Her feet pounded the packed dirt as she tore along the tunnel, arms out in front of her, barely noticing the near-total darkness. She stubbed her fingers hard against the ladder beneath the basement’s trapdoor, but even that didn’t slow her down.
“Leopold!” she shouted, flinging open the trapdoor.
The cat sprang off of the moving platform, whirling around mid-flight and landing gracefully on his feet.
“Is that you, miss?” he exclaimed. “But how did you—”
“Leopold, someone dug a hole in the backyard. Down into the tunnel,” Olive gasped, hauling herself out of the trapdoor and scurrying across the basement to turn on the light. “I fell through it. Somebody has been in the room down there. With the jars.”
Leopold’s eyes widened. “Was anything disturbed? Taken? Vandalized?”
“I’m not sure,” said Olive. “It looked like there might have been a few less jars on the shelves. But maybe they were just the ones that were already broken.”
Leopold paused for a split second, appearing to think. “I’ll get the other guardians. We’ll examine the backyard.”
“I need to put on a clean shirt, but then I’ll come outside too,” said Olive as Leopold turned away. “Give me just a minute.”
Heart pounding, Olive watched Leopold bound up the basement stairs. She waited until the tip of his glossy black tail had disappeared from sight. And then Olive did something so clever and secretive and sly, she herself wondered how she’d come up with it.
She went to the dryer, which stood in one of the basement’s cobwebby corners, dug through the clothes inside, and took out the largest T-shirt she could find. She tied the bottom of the shirt in a knot, turning it into a makeshift bag. Then she scrambled back through the trapdoor, down the ladder, and along the tunnel to the stone room. Being careful not to miss a single scrap, she swept all the torn bits of paper from the tabletop into the T-shirt bag. If Annabelle wanted what was in the jars, then she would want what was on these papers too. In fact, if Olive’s slowly solidifying theory was correct, the papers might be even more important than the jars. She had to keep them safe.
On top of the ragged bits of paper, Olive placed five jars, picking those whose contents had the most widely varied colors. One was powdery and white, another was viscous and black, and the other three were yolk-yellow, deep red, and a beautiful, water-color-ish blue. Making sure not to trip and smash the whole sack, Olive darted back along the tunnel, up the ladder, through the trapdoor, and up the basement steps.
The first floor of the house was quiet. The cats were nowhere to be seen. Scanning every hall and doorway, Olive smuggled the T-shirt up the staircase to her room and stuffed it underneath her bed.
Crouching there, while Hershel, her brown bear, gazed down at her from the pillows, Olive paused to really think for the first time. What she had beneath her bed, right next to the pink penguin pajama bottoms and a single dusty slipper, were the ingredients and instructions for Aldous McMartin’s magical paints.
An electric shock of joy buzzed through her. A second later, the buzz fizzled into a shiver as she imagined what the cats would do if they found out.
They would take the jars away. They would stop Olive from trying to put the pieces together. They would tell her that dealing with Aldous’s magic was wrong and dangerous, and that if she didn’t want to become like the McMartins herself, she should simply sweep it out of her mind.
But Olive couldn’t do this.
She couldn’t let the paints or the papers fall into the wrong hands. And the tunnel clearly wasn’t secure, even with the cats guarding it day and night.
Besides, if she figured out how to create them, maybe she could use these paints to do good. Maybe she could help the people trapped in the painting of Linden Street. Maybe she could undo some of the evil that Aldous McMartin had left behind. All she needed was time to think. And as long as the cats believed that Annabelle, not Olive, had taken the missing jars and the torn-up papers, then Olive’s secret was safe.
Giving the bed one last glance, Olive brushed the dirt off her hands, tugged a clean shirt over her muddy one, and hustled downstairs to join the cats.
Horatio, Leopold, and Harvey had assembled behind the garden shed, out of sight of the house. Their low, arguing voices trailed across the grass toward Olive as she tiptoed closer.
“It’s your station,” she heard Horatio saying. “Couldn’t you keep one little area safe?”
“With all due respect,” Leopold’s gruff voice answered, “the grounds are a shared area. I’ve examined the hole. It was dug several days ago, possibly weeks. And none of us noticed it. Harvey, didn’t you monitor the backyard during night patrol?”
“I am not sure who ees this ‘Harvey’…” said Harvey’s voice, in Sir Lancelot’s accent, “but I am neverzeeless certain zat he watched zee backyard with awe-inspiring bravery.”
“Indeed,” said Leopold. “Then I do not see how—”
“This is Annabelle!” Horatio cut him off. Olive crouched behind the shed’s open door, listening hard. “Furthermore, it’s not the backyard that matters, it’s what is beneath. Do you both realize what damage she could do with a single one of—”
At just that moment, bumped by Olive’s elbow, the shed door gave the kind of loud, rusty creak that makes most people try to use their shoulders to cover their ears. Olive flinched.
Horatio stopped speaking. A second later, the bright green eyes of all three cats appeared around the corner of the shed: Horatio’s angry, Leopold’s wary, and Harvey’s half eclipsed by the coffee can.
“Olive?” said Horatio.
“Oh,” said Olive, trying very hard to look casual and fumbling with the shed door so that it gave another violent creak, “so you’re not inside the shed. I thought you were. Inside, I mean. That’s why I—um…”
“Well, come over here, so we can speak without shouting to you,” snapped Horatio.
Olive scurried around to the other side of the shed and crouched down until she was at cats’-eye level.
“Miss,” Leopold began, “we owe you our apologies. I was”—he fought to get the next words out—“an incompetent guardian. The security of the tunnel was compromised, and I deserve to be disciplined.”
“You desairve to be burned at zee stake!” hissed Harvey, with a knightly toss of his coffee can. “Beheaded! Put on a pike!”
“Hey!” objected Olive, even though it sounded to her more like a reward than a punishment to put a cat on a fish. “You have no right to criticize, considering that I found you asleep at your post about half an hour ago.”
“Zat is true,” said Harvey, in a smaller voice. “But napping ees not treason.”
“Annabelle is tricky,” said Olive. She looked down at Leopold, who in turn was looking sadly down at his toes. “Almost anybody could be fooled by her.”
Horatio let out a long breath through his nose. “She’s right,” he said at last. “I suppose our only course of action now is to fill in this hole and redouble our efforts.”
“The price of safety is eternal vigilance,” Leopold mumbled to his front paws.
Olive patted him on the head.
“Leopold,” Horatio commanded, “go back inside and patrol the tunnel. Harvey and I will get to work out here. Olive…” Olive straightened up, ready to be useful. “Go wash up. Your parents will be home soon, and you look like you’ve been rolling around in a coal scuttle.”
Olive sagged again. She headed toward the back door obediently, wondering what a coal scuttle was. Leopold slumped along beside her. Behind them, Harvey and Horatio were already crouching at the far side of the garden, examining the tunnel’s newest ent
rance.
“You may not see much of me for a while, miss,” said Leopold, not meeting her eyes, once the back door was safely shut behind them. “I will be going underground for a time. But if you ever need me, you’ll know where to find me.” With a nod that lacked its usual soldierly sharpness, Leopold vanished down the basement stairs.
Olive watched him go. Then she stood by herself in the kitchen for so long that her feet began to go numb. She was stacking up a tower of thoughts, and Olive knew that if she moved, the whole tower might come crashing down.
If it was Annabelle who had dug her way into the room at the end of the tunnel (and it seemed more than likely that it was), then she would almost certainly have taken some of the jars. However, she hadn’t taken the papers, which gave Olive a sliver of hope. Furthermore, with or without the paint-making instructions, Annabelle wasn’t a painter, as far as Olive knew. It was Aldous who was the artist of Elsewhere. What good would the paints be to Annabelle? Olive chewed on a strand of her hair, thinking. What good would the paints be to her?
Well, they would be no good at all unless she knew how to concoct them. And in order to even begin to do that, she would have to put together all those thousands of bits of torn-up paper. And that could take ages, if she managed to do it without losing her mind first. One Christmas, an aggravating great-uncle Dunwoody had sent Olive a jigsaw puzzle. It was made up of five thousand pieces, and every piece was covered with a broken picture of other puzzle pieces. If you put all five thousand pieces together, you had what looked like another pile of unsolved puzzle bits all tumbled together on a tabletop. Just the idea of putting that puzzle together made Olive’s brain start to hiss and sputter like a frying egg.
Even if she did manage to reassemble all those torn-up papers, and even if they were recipes for paint, and even if she could figure out how to use them…what would she use them for? What could Olive possibly paint that would be worth bringing to life forever?