The Books of Elsewhere, Vol. 1: The Shadows Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Acknowledgements

  About the author

  DIAL BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  A division of Penguin Young Readers Group

  Published by The Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

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  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Text copyright © 2010 by Jacqueline West

  Illustrations copyright © 2010 by Poly Bernatene

  All rights reserved

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  S.A.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data West, Jacqueline, date.

  The shadows / by Jacqueline West ; illustrated by Poly Bernatene. p. cm.—(The books of Elsewhere ; vol. 1)

  Summary: When eleven-year-old Olive and her distracted parents move

  into an old Victorian mansion, Olive finds herself ensnared in a dark plan involving some mysterious paintings, a trapped and angry nine-year-old boy, and three talking cats.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-43479-6

  [1. Space and time—Fiction. 2. Dwellings—Fiction. 3. Magic—Fiction.

  4. Painting—Fiction. 5. Cats—Fiction.] I. Bernatene, Poly, ill. II. Title.

  PZ7.W51776Sh 2010

  [Fic]—dc22

  2009013128

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For everyone who read to me—especially Mom and Dad

  —JW

  1

  MS. MCMARTIN WAS definitely dead. It had taken some time for the neighbors to grow suspicious, since no one ever went in or came out of the old stone house on Linden Street anyway. However, there were several notable clues that things in the McMartin house were not as they should have been. The rusty mailbox began to bulge with odd and exotic mail-order catalogs, which eventually overflowed the gaping aluminum door and spilled out into the street. The gigantic jungle fern that hung from the porch ceiling keeled over for lack of water. Ms. McMartin’s three cats, somewhere inside the house, began the most terrible yowling ever heard on quiet old Linden Street. After a few days of listening to that, the neighbors had had enough.

  The authorities arrived in a big white van. They marched in a group up the porch steps, knocked at the door, waited for a moment, and then picked the lock with a handy official lock-picking tool. A few minutes went by. All the neighbors held their breath, watching through the gaps in their curtains. Soon the uniformed group reappeared, rolling a white-sheeted stretcher onto the porch. They locked the ancient front door behind them and drove away, stretcher and all.

  Rumors soon began to fly regarding where and how Ms. McMartin had finally kicked it. Mrs. Nivens, who had lived next door for as long as anyone could remember, told Mrs. Dewey that it had happened in the hallway, where someone—or something—had startled Ms. McMartin so badly that she fell down the stairs. Mr. Fergus told Mr. Butler that Ms. McMartin had collapsed on the living room rug in front of the fireplace, while a sheaf of secret family papers went up in smoke behind the grate. Mr. Hanniman decreed that she had died of old age, plain and simple—he had heard that she was 150 years old, after all. And there were various theories as to just how much of Ms. McMartin’s face had been eaten by her cats.

  Ms. McMartin had no close family. Her nearest relative was a distant cousin who had recently died in Shanghai, after a severe allergic reaction to a bowl of turtle and arsenic soup. There was no one to come and collect an inheritance, or to dig through the rickety attic for long-lost treasures. The old stone house, covered with encroaching scarves of ivy, was left full of its antique furniture and strange knickknacks. Ms. McMartin’s yowling cats were the only items to be removed from the house, wrestled into kitty carriers by three scratched and bleeding animal shelter workers. And then, according to Mrs. Nivens, who saw it all through her kitchen window, just as they were about to be loaded into the animal shelter truck, the three kitty carriers popped open simultaneously. A trio of gigantic cats shot across the lawn like furry cannon-balls. The sweaty shelter manager wiped a smudge of blood off his cheek, shrugged, and said to the other two, “Well—how about some lunch?”

  It wasn’t long before someone heard about the old stone house for sale at an astonishingly low price and decided to buy it.

  These someones were a Mr. Alec and Mrs. Alice Dunwoody, a pair of more than slightly dippy mathematicians. The Dunwoodys had a daughter named Olive—but she had nothing to do with the house-buying decision. Olive was eleven, and was generally not given much credit. Her persistently lackluster grades in math had led her parents to believe that she was some kind of genetic aberration—they talked to her patiently, as if she were a foreign exchange student from a country no one had ever heard of.

  In late June, Mr. Hambert, Realtor, led the Dunwoodys through the McMartin house. It was a muggy afternoon, but the old stone house was dark and cool inside. Trailing along behind the rest of the group, Olive could feel the little hairs on her bare arms standing up. Mr. Hambert, on the other hand, was sweating like a mug of root beer in the sun. His cheeks were pushed up into two red lumps by his wide smile. He could smell a sale, and it smelled as good as a fresh bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich. As they walked along the first-floor hallway, he kept up a flow of chitchat.

  “So, how did you two meet?” Mr. Hambert asked Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody, pulling the chain of a dusty hanging lamp.

  “We met in the library at Princeton,” answered Mrs. Dunwoody, her eyes glowing with the memory. “We were both reading the same journal—The Absolutely Unrelenting Seriousness of Mathematics for the New Generation —”

  “Or ‘Ausom’—get it?” interjected Mr. Dunwoody. “‘Awesome.’ Very clever.”

  “—and Alec asked me, ‘Have you seen the misprint on page twenty-five?’ They had written that Theodorus’s Constant—”

  “Is the square root of two!” interjected Mr. Dunwoody again. “How their copy editors missed that, I can’t imagine.”

  “Oh, we both laughed and laughed,” sighed Mrs. Dunwoody with a mi
sty look at her husband.

  “Well, you must be a regular math whiz, with parents like yours—am I right?” said Mr. Hambert, leaning his sweaty face toward Olive.

  Mr. Dunwoody patted Olive’s shoulder. “Math isn’t really her thing. Olive is a very . . . creative girl, aren’t you, Olive?”

  Olive nodded, and looked down at the toes of her sneakers.

  Mr. Hambert kept up his shiny-cheeked smile. “Well, good for you,” he said, stopping in front of a pair of dark wood doors, carved into shiny raised squares. He pushed them open with a grand gesture.

  “The library,” he announced.

  Through the doors was a large, dusty room, almost the size of a small ballroom. The wooden floor was a little scratched, and the tiles around the giant fireplace were chipped here and there, but these flaws made the vast room seem cozier. In fact, it looked as though it might have been used yesterday. Long shelves, still covered with rows of embossed leather volumes, stretched from the hardwood floor to the stenciled ceiling. Ladders on wheels, the kind that Olive had only seen in old paintings, were leaning against the shelves so that the very highest books could be reached. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of books, obviously collected by several generations of McMartins.

  “The managers of the estate have decided to sell the contents along with the house. Of course, you can dispose of these however you choose,” said Mr. Hambert consolingly, as though so many books would be a terrible bother.

  “This room would be just perfect for studying, correcting papers, writing articles . . . don’t you think?” said Mrs. Dunwoody to Mr. Dunwoody dreamily.

  “Oh, yes, very cozy,” agreed Mr. Dunwoody. “You know, I don’t believe that we need more time to make up our minds—do you, dear?”

  Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody exchanged another misty look. Then Mr. Dunwoody declared, “We’ll take it.”

  Mr. Hambert’s face turned as red as a new potato. He burbled and shone and shook Mr. Dunwoody’s hand, then Mrs. Dunwoody’s hand, then Mr. Dunwoody’s hand again.

  “Excellent! Excellent!” he boomed. “Congratulations—perfect house for a family! So big, so full of history . . . A quick look around the second floor, and we can go back to my office and sign the papers!”

  They all trooped up the mossy carpet of the staircase, Mr. Hambert in the lead, puffing happily, Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody following hand in hand, smiling up at the high ceilings as though some lovely algebraic theorem unfolded there. Olive trailed behind, running her hand up the banister and collecting a pile of thick dust. At the top of the stairs, she rolled the dust into a little ball and blew it off of her palm. It floated slowly down, past the banister, past the old wall sconces, into the dark hallway.

  Her parents had disappeared into one of the bedrooms. She could still hear Mr. Hambert shouting “Excellent! Excellent!” every now and again.

  Olive stood by herself on the landing and felt the big stone house loom around her. This is our house, she told herself, just to see how it felt. Our house. The words hovered in her mind like candle smoke. Before Olive could quite believe them, they had faded away.

  Olive turned in a slow circle. The hall stretched away from her in two directions, dwindling into darkness at both ends. Dim light from one hanging lamp outlined the frames of the pictures on the walls. Behind Olive, at the top of the stairs, was a large painting in a thick gold frame. Olive liked to paint, but she mostly made squiggly designs or imaginary creatures from the books she read. She had never painted anything like this.

  Olive peered into the canvas. It was a painting of a forest at night. The twigs of leafless trees made a black web against the sky. A full moon pressed its face through the clouds, touching a path of white stones that led into the dark woods and disappeared. But it seemed to Olive that somewhere—maybe just at the end of that white path, maybe in that darkness where the moonlight couldn’t reach—there was something else within that painting. Something she could almost see.

  “Olive?” Mrs. Dunwoody’s head popped through a doorway along the hall. “Don’t you want to see your bedroom?”

  Olive walked slowly away from the painting, keeping her eye on it over her shoulder. She would figure it out later, she told herself. She would have plenty of time.

  2

  THE DUNWOODYS MOVED in two weeks later. Everything had been taken out of their two-bedroom apartment and scattered through the stone mansion on Linden Street. In the big old house, their belongings looked small and out of place, like tiny visitors from outer space trying to blend in at a Victorian ball. The Dunwoodys’ expensive computer sat on an old wooden desk in the library, where antique books seemed to look at it a bit distrustfully. There weren’t enough outlets in the kitchen for all of their appliances, but in every drawer and corner they found utensils that no one could figure out—they could have been cooking accessories or dental equipment, for all any of the Dunwoodys knew. Sepia portraits hung from the walls, and glass medicine bottles stood in every bathroom cabinet.

  In one spare bedroom, Olive discovered an old chest of drawers that was full of handkerchiefs and lacy bloomers, a pair of spectacles, and pearl-buttoned gloves. There were even ropes of fake pearls and colored glass beads that she could try on and pretend to be Cleopatra or Queen Guinevere. Even though Mr. Hambert had said everything in the house was theirs, Olive always carefully wrapped the jewelry and the gloves back up in tissue paper and returned them to the drawers, just as she had found them. It felt right, somehow. It was like being in a museum where you were allowed to play with the exhibits, not just stare at them through the glass.

  At the same time, Olive missed their old apartment, where all the beige walls met at perfect ninety-degree angles, where there were no surprising corners, no twisting hallways, no slanted ceilings to bash your forehead against as you climbed out of the bathtub. This new house was always sneaking up on her.

  The Dunwoodys had lived in many different apartments, but somehow they all felt the same to Olive. They were all in three-story buildings made of brick, where all the walls were the same color, and all the windows were the same shape, and you could wander into a neighbor’s living room (if their door was unlocked) and spend several minutes lying on their couch, which was exactly like your couch, watching their TV, before you realized you were in the wrong place. Olive had done this quite a few times.

  No one would ever mistake the big house on Linden Street for someplace else. This house was crumbly and dark and weird. It was full of corners that the lights never reached. It made squeaking, moaning sounds when the wind changed, like a dog howling or a child whimpering. Olive had never been anywhere—not even the doctor’s office, not even gym class—that made her feel so out of place, or so alone.

  And the painting at the top of the stairs still seemed to be keeping a secret. Olive stood in front of it for almost half an hour that first night, until her eyes crossed and bits of the trees popped out at her. Nothing. Nothing but the feeling that there was something not quite right about this painting.

  And it wasn’t the only one.

  There were paintings all over the house that gave her the same funny feeling. Right outside her bedroom door, there was a painting of a rolling field with a row of little houses in the distance. It was evening in the painting, and all the windows in the houses were dark. But the houses didn’t look like they were sleeping comfortably, just waiting for sunrise to come and start another day. The houses looked like they were holding their breath. They crouched among the trees and blew out their lights, trying not to be seen. Seen by what? Olive wondered.

  On their first night in the house, Mrs. Dunwoody came upstairs to tuck Olive into bed. Olive heard her mother’s steps on the squeaky staircase and reluctantly pulled her eyes away from the painting. She scurried into her room and hopped under the blankets, knocking several pillows onto the floor.

  “Ready for bed, sweetie?” asked Mrs. Dunwoody, peeking in.

  “Yes,” said Olive.

  “Good girl.” H
er mother crossed the room and sat down on the edge of Olive’s high, creaky bed. “Are you comfy?”

  “Mm-hm,” answered Olive.

  “I know it’s going to take some getting used to, sweetie—this new room, and new house, and new everything. But I bet that in just a few days you’re going to start to feel at home here. Don’t you like having such a big house and big yard to play in?”

  “Yeah . . . kind of,” said Olive. “I don’t know.”

  “Just give it a little more time. You’ll see.”

  Her mother stood up. The mattress bounced just a little. “See you in the morning,” she whispered from the doorway.

  “Um—Mom?” said Olive, just as Mrs. Dunwoody was pulling the door closed. “Something here is . . . There’s something . . . bugging me.”

  “What is it?” asked her mother.

  “That painting, right outside my door? It bothers me. It’s . . . creepy.”

  Olive slid back out of bed and padded into the hallway, where her mother stood, frowning up at the painting.

  “This one, of the little town?” said Mrs. Dunwoody doubtfully. “What do you think is creepy about it?”

  “It looks . . .” Olive whispered, feeling silly. “I think it looks scared. It’s like the houses are trying to pretend they’re asleep, and stay quiet . . . like something bad is coming.”

  “Hmmm,” said her mother, trying to hide the skeptical look on her face. “Well, why don’t we just take it down?”

  Mrs. Dunwoody grabbed the sides of the thick wooden frame and pulled. But the painting didn’t budge.

  “That’s funny,” she said.

  She tried pushing the frame upward, in case the painting was hung on a hook. Still it didn’t move.

  “This is very strange,” Mrs. Dunwoody said.

  Bracing her feet on the hallway carpet, Mrs. Dunwoody got a good grip on the bottom corners of the frame and yanked as hard as she could. Olive thought the frame would either crack in half or her mother would lose her hold on it and go flying backward across the hall. But neither thing happened.