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

  With a rush of nausea, Olive realized what Horatio had meant about being trapped in the painting for too long. He had been telling the truth after all. Was this what had happened to Morton? And to the neighbors? And to the men who had laid the gravestones in the basement? Revelation pummeled Olive like another great black wave. Maybe the cats had been telling the truth the whole time. And maybe it was already too late.

  Olive clamped her hands around the silver edges of the frame. “Horatio!” she screamed. “HORATIO!”

  “Well, back up if you want me to get in there,” a voice snapped.

  Olive staggered sideways, and the huge orange cat soared through the frame. Horatio glanced up at Olive through the dark, swirling air, and the irritated expression on his face disappeared for a split second. “Are you all right?” he shouted over the storm.

  “Mostly. My feet—” Olive looked down. The shiny streaks of paint had climbed past her ankles. Her toes felt numb.

  “Hang on to my tail! Hurry!” Horatio bounded back through the frame.

  Olive locked one hand around Horatio’s tail and the other around the picture frame, hoisted herself out of the painting, and shot across the hallway stairs with such force that she hit the opposite banister and rolled all the way down the steps onto the rug at the bottom of the staircase.

  Olive pulled herself up onto her elbows and examined her legs. Little tickling waves of warmth were zinging down from her knees to the tips of her toes. If she hadn’t known better, Olive would have thought her legs had fallen asleep. Her feet looked like they had always looked, like they were made of bones and skin. She wiggled her toes. So far, so good.

  Horatio huffed and paced on the step above her. “What did I tell you?” he demanded. “I said, Don’t lose the spectacles. I said, If you lose them, you won’t be able to get out again. For more than a century, nobody lost those spectacles. But you manage to lose them in just a few weeks and to almost get yourself killed because of it. It’s astonishing, really. The one thing I’ve told you to do, the most important thing—”

  “But I didn’t lose them!” shouted Olive, who had finally gotten her breath back. “She took them.”

  “She?” Horatio crouched on the step, staring intently at Olive. “She who?”

  The doorbell rang.

  Horatio bolted up the stairs. Olive clambered to her feet, which still felt a bit numb, and pushed the wet strands of hair out of her eyes. Her saturated sweat socks made small squish, squish sounds as she walked along the hall to the door.

  Olive peeked through the keyhole. Mrs. Nivens stood on the porch. She wore a spotless apron, a perfectly ironed dress, and a smile that, when Olive opened the door, looked like it might slide off of her face and shatter on the stoop.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Nivens,” said Olive politely.

  “Hello, Olive, dear.” Mrs. Nivens looked down at the pool of water that was forming around Olive’s feet. “Were you—swimming?”

  “I was just taking a shower,” said Olive.

  “In your clothes?” asked Mrs. Nivens, whose voice had gone up a key.

  “They were dirty too,” said Olive.

  “I see.” Mrs. Nivens nodded slowly. A few droplets of water from the pool at Olive’s feet trailed over the doorjamb and plopped onto the porch.

  “Well, I brought you a plate of chocolate raisin cookies,” Mrs. Nivens went on bravely, holding out a foil-wrapped plate. Olive took the plate in her wet hands. “But don’t spoil your dinner, now.”

  “Thank you very much, Mrs. Nivens,” said Olive.

  “You’re welcome,” said Mrs. Nivens. She gave Olive a long, hard look. “Are you sure you’re all right, Olive?”

  Olive nodded hard, hoping Mrs. Nivens would leave before a talking cat or escapee from a painting showed up.

  “It’s a funny old house, isn’t it?” Mrs. Nivens murmured. Her eyes left Olive’s face and slowly scanned the hallway, trailing up the stairs. “So much history. I haven’t been inside in ages, but I can still remember almost every detail—”

  “Uh-huh,” said Olive quickly. “Well, I’ll call you if I need anything. Thank you again for the cookies.” She slammed the door shut before Mrs. Nivens could say another word.

  Olive peeked through the front window and watched Mrs. Nivens go side-wise down the porch stairs, keeping one eye on the house, before scuttling down the walk toward her own house. Then Olive locked the door. She didn’t want Mrs. Nivens’s help. There was something about the way Mrs. Nivens looked at her that made Olive want to tell lies. Olive leaned against the door, keeping her eyes peeled, and absently munched a cookie. If Annabelle was waiting for Olive to drown so that she could get the necklace back, she probably wouldn’t have gone far.

  Olive wondered how one went about getting rid of a person who had come out of a painting. Annabelle wasn’t alive, after all. What did people use to destroy paint? Soap and water? Turpentine? A paint scraper?

  Olive was brushing a streak of crumbs off of her wet clothes when a furry orange cannonball shot down the stairs in two bounds and crashed into Olive’s shins.

  “Now is the time!” puffed Horatio, staggering onto his feet. “We need your help—Ms. McMartin is loose!”

  17

  OLIVE, HORATIO, AND Harvey, freshly escaped from the attic, held a hushed conference in one of the upstairs bathtubs. There were no paintings in this bathroom, and Horatio had selected the spot as the safest base of operations.

  Still wet and wobbly, Olive huddled against the tub wall and gave both cats a long, cautious look. Could they really be what Morton’s neighbors had said? She glanced from one to the other. Harvey’s eye patch had disappeared. Instead, he was wearing a small metal breastplate, which looked as if it had been made from tuna cans and pop tabs.

  “Who does he think he is tonight?” Olive whispered to Horatio.

  “Lancelot du Lac,” Horatio whispered back.

  Harvey gave Olive a gallant bow.

  “First things first,” said Horatio. “Have you still got the necklace?”

  Olive reached into the neck of her damp shirt and slowly, shakily, pulled out the pendant. Horatio gave a sigh of relief.

  Harvey’s eyes went wild.

  “Blackpaw’s booty!” he exclaimed. “The buried treasure of the pirate king!”

  Horatio’s eyes became two thin green slits. “It was you?” he hissed. “You knew where it was all along?” His head swiveled toward Harvey like the gun on an army tank. “You took it from Ms. McMartin’s body and decided to play pirate with it?!”

  Thick orange fur bristling, Horatio pulled himself into pre-launch position.

  “You dare to challenge zee greatest knight of all?” growled Harvey in a French accent, turning into a smaller but equally bristly hump.

  “Wait! Wait!” said Olive, throwing herself between the cats and pinning them to the tub walls. Harvey let out an angry hiss above her elbow. “We can’t waste time like this!” she insisted. “I need to know what’s going on here. Then we can make a plan. Agreed?”

  “Fine,” Horatio muttered.

  “I grant my opponent’s plea for mercy,” said Harvey magnanimously.

  “Good.” Olive took a deep breath and looked closely at both cats. “But first, I need to know one thing.” Olive tried to keep her voice from wavering. “Do you actually work for Aldous McMartin? Are you . . . witches’ familiars?”

  Harvey and Horatio glanced across the tub at each other. Harvey looked down at Olive’s toes. Finally, Horatio sighed. “We have belonged to the McMartin family for hundreds of years,” he said. “Longer than any of us can remember. And, yes, they are a line of powerful witches, and, yes, it was our role to serve them.”

  “Even if we didn’t want to,” Harvey put in, still looking at Olive’s toes.

  “So why wouldn’t Leopold just tell me how old he was?” asked Olive.

  “Can you remember what you had for dinner last Monday?” Horatio challenged. “Try remembering your age if you
predate paper.”

  Olive tried to imagine this. She couldn’t. In fact, she couldn’t even remember when paper was invented.

  “Aldous McMartin was the worst of the lot,” Horatio went on. “Greedy, cruel, dangerous. And brilliant. He was so hated and feared in Scotland that one night a band of townspeople set fire to the McMartin homestead, where the family had lived for centuries. They destroyed the family plot, smashed the headstones, dug up the graves, and burned what they found. After escaping to America, Aldous had everything that remained of the family graveyard brought here—”

  “Everything?” squeaked Olive, hugging her knees.

  Horatio gave her a sharp look. “—and built a new home for the McMartin line on top of it, to preserve the power of the family.” Here Horatio paused, studying his front paw. “But things didn’t work out quite as Aldous had hoped.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Olive.

  “His son, Albert, was a huge disappointment.”

  “’E was nice,” Harvey piped up. “Nice and stupeed.”

  “Albert had no talent for witchcraft. In fact, he had no talents at all. The only good thing Albert ever did, as far as Aldous was concerned, was have a daughter. Annabelle.”

  “Annabelle!” Olive gasped.

  “Yes, Annabelle McMartin. And Annabelle was everything her grandfather could have hoped for: intelligent, greedy, and cruel.”

  Olive thought she might be sick. “Then, I guess . . . I did something terrible.” Olive looked from Horatio to Harvey and back to Horatio. “I let her out. She said her name was Annabelle, and she was sad, and . . .” Olive trailed off, feeling exceptionally silly. “But I didn’t know it was her! Annabelle is young and pretty, and Ms. McMartin was an old woman . . .”

  “Well, she wasn’t always old, you twit!” Horatio snapped.

  “How dare you speak to a lady zat way!” demanded Harvey, looking ready to start a duel over whatever conflict was handy.

  Olive stifled a frustrated scream. “Why didn’t you warn me?”

  “We tried!” Horatio exploded. “We gave you hint after hint! We told you to be careful if you went into the paintings. We told you not to bring things out. But we were forbidden to directly interfere with the McMartins’ plans.” Horatio’s voice dropped, and a note of sadness trickled into it. “You know what we are, Olive. We belonged to them. We belong to their house.”

  “But zen you came along . . .” Harvey put in.

  “Yes.” Horatio sighed. “None of us thought you would discover so much so quickly, or that Annabelle’s plans would come to pass. But you did, and they have. And if we don’t want the McMartins controlling us again, we can’t be cautious anymore.”

  “Oui,” said Harvey. “Ze time has come for us to take a stand.”

  “But what does Annabelle want?!” Olive threw up her hands. “Why was she in a painting? Why do the paintings come to life? How did the people in the paintings get inside in the first place?”

  “Keep your voice down,” snapped Horatio. “Now that things can’t get much worse, I might as well tell you the whole story. Listen closely, and stop interrupting, if you possibly can.” Horatio took a provoking pause, as if daring Olive to speak. Then, at last, he began:

  “More than anything else, Aldous McMartin wanted to control life. He wanted to create it, trap it, make it last forever. First, he made the paintings—little worlds that could come to life if seen through a pair of enchanted spectacles. Because he had created the paintings, he had power over them. He could watch what went on inside, and use the paintings as windows, in a way, to keep an eye on the entire house. As he practiced, he got better and better at it. He painted portraits that could come to life, and that would even have the personalities of the people he had painted, but with one big improvement: These people could live forever. Sometimes he painted people as a reward, as he did for Annabelle. In her portrait, she would always be young and lovely, and she would always be loyal to him.

  “Next, he learned to trap living people in paintings,” said Horatio, pacing up and down the lip of the tub. “To make them become paintings. They weren’t dead, exactly, but they weren’t alive anymore either. They were . . . Elsewhere. That’s what he did to the neighbors on Linden Street who knew too much about Old Man McMartin, as they called him. It’s what he did to the builders who could have given away the secret of the gravestones, or to anyone else he disliked. Sometimes he just did it for fun. Like a collector pinning a living butterfly to a piece of cardboard.”

  In Olive’s mind, the fragments of the story whirled and shifted. But this time, when they settled, she could see the whole picture. It had been there, in pieces, all along. “That was what he did to Morton,” she breathed.

  Horatio gave the tiniest nod.

  “Morton was telling the truth. And I didn’t believe him.” The words felt as heavy as pebbles in her mouth. “He was alive. And you helped bring him here, and Aldous McMartin trapped him, and now . . . what?” Olive choked. “He’s trapped forever? How could you do that to him?”

  “Zat was the part I didn’t like,” said Harvey softly.

  “Then why did you help Aldous McMartin?” demanded Olive furiously. “Why did you spy for him? Why did you trick innocent people?”

  “We didn’t have much choice!” retorted Horatio. “If you had ever been an indentured servant for a family of witches, you might begin to understand. Besides,” the cat huffed, “we didn’t always obey. After Aldous trapped the little boy from next door, I refused to help him anymore. Once, we even destroyed his paints and canvases.”

  “Oui. Zat was fun,” said Harvey, gazing toward the ceiling and swiping his paw through an imaginary bit of cloth.

  “But then he got that dog . . .” said Horatio.

  “Baltus,” hissed Harvey.

  “. . . and that helped Aldous keep us out of the way for a while. It took us years to get Baltus hidden away in that painting. And then you, Little Miss Rescue Crew, came along and let him out.”

  “Baltus!” Olive shouted so suddenly that both cats jumped. “I could hear Baltus even without the spectacles. And I could see Morton moving in the forest. The builders—their eyes glittered. And I noticed the necklace glinting in the lake before I put the spectacles on!” She looked from one cat to the other. “So the things that were from the real world . . . they still seem real in the paintings, even without the spectacles!”

  “Very good,” said Horatio, raising his whiskered eyebrows slightly. “Aldous never did get the things he’d taken from the real world to blend in completely.”

  “Wait a minute.” Olive crossed her arms, frowning.

  “If he wanted to create eternal life, why didn’t Aldous McMartin just paint a picture of himself?”

  “He did,” said Horatio.

  “Dozens,” said Harvey.

  “His son destroyed them,” Horatio continued.

  “Albert wasn’t so stupid that he couldn’t see what was going on. He lived in the same house, after all. He disliked the influence that his father was having over Annabelle, and finally he moved his wife and daughter out of this house and refused to let Annabelle see her grandfather, even though Annabelle was a young woman by that time and it was already far too late. However, Aldous decided to take care of that problem.”

  “How?” asked Olive. A creeping feeling tiptoed over her scalp.

  “He killed Annabelle’s parents,” said Harvey bluntly.

  “But there Aldous made a little mistake,” said Horatio. “Annabelle was not as evil as her grandfather. After the murder of her mother and father, she began to realize that she did not want what her grandfather wanted. Maybe she didn’t even want to live forever. Unfortunately, Aldous had planned for this, too.” Horatio gave a significant look at the spot where the necklace hung against Olive’s shirt. “Aldous was a very old man by this time. He painted one last self-portrait. And he put it in the locket that you are wearing at this very moment.”

  Olive clutched the
pendant.

  “Blackpaw’s booty,” whispered Harvey, a bit sadly, to the bathtub drain.

  Horatio rolled his eyes.

  “Aldous gave the necklace to his beloved grand-daughter, and made her promise to bring him back to life by setting that portrait free,” Horatio said. “Of course, by now, Annabelle had no intention of doing so. When Aldous did die at last, Annabelle had him cremated, so there would be no grave or gravestone, and she hid his ashes in a place she thought was safe. We’ve been helping her guard them for years. Then she tried to destroy the locket. But Aldous had made sure that Annabelle could never take it off. She wore it until she finally died of old age, at a hundred and four years old, right here in this house. And then this nincompoop in the tuna can breastplate made off with it before Leopold or I could find a safer spot for it.” Horatio shot a look at Harvey, who was conveniently preoccupied with grooming his tail.

  “Annabelle—Ms. McMartin—never had children, never told anyone her family’s secrets,” Horatio continued. “She wanted the McMartin line to end with her. Of course, it didn’t really end. This house is still a powerful place. The painted version of Annabelle is wandering around, faithfully trying to bring her grandfather back. And you’ve got his picture hanging around your neck.”

  Olive clutched at the necklace. “What can we do?”

  “My lady,” Harvey proclaimed, “I have seen zee sorceress Annabelle moving through zee upstairs hallway. She zhen entaired zee painting of zee street des Lindens, perhaps to get zee petit garçon. Zat means ‘leetle boy.’”

  “This will be much easier if you drop that accent,” said Horatio.

  Harvey glared.

  “She has tried to get the necklace—and now she has gone to get the blood of a boy who cannot die to open it. All she needs . . .” Horatio trailed off.

  The two cats gave each other a steady look. Then, in one smooth movement, they leaped out of the bathtub. Olive scrambled behind them. With Horatio and Harvey in the lead and Olive rushing blindly after, they ran down the stairs, into the kitchen, and through the creaking door of the basement.