The Strangers Page 17

  Olive froze.

  The figure in the doorway didn’t seem to see her. It wavered for a moment, its hooded head swiveling from side to side, surveying the huge, dark room. Then it glided into the library, its long cloak rustling over the floor.

  The air around Olive grew instantly warmer. She felt claws and tails and slippery limbs sliding past her as the shades moved away, following the intruder. Olive watched a clot of shadow drift across the room toward the bookshelves, its blackness so thick that it seemed to pull in every last mote of light; to swallow it, like a huge, hungry mouth. Olive saw it envelop the hooded figure. Holding her breath, she inched backward, toward the doors.

  Across the room, voices muttered, growing louder and louder. Olive caught fragments of their words. This house . . . Join . . . Power . . .

  Olive felt her shoulder bump against the wall. The tiny scuff of sweater meeting wood made her heart stand still, but the hooded figure—Annabelle, or Aldous, or someone else—didn’t seem to hear it. Olive was just about to duck out the door and make a run for it when from across the room, there came a soft click. A round blotch of light traveled across the bookshelves, glimmering on the embossed spines. The shades backed out of reach of the beam, growling and hissing angrily. Aldous and Annabelle wouldn’t have needed a light to find something inside of their own house, would they? And would either of them have carried a flashlight?

  Olive swept one arm along the wall. Her fingers brushed the light switch.

  It won’t work, she told herself. Of course it won’t. It won’t—

  The chandelier flared.

  A burst of warm gold light filled the library. The McMartin shades thinned to wispy human outlines, scattering into the shadows.

  The hooded figure dropped its flashlight. It hit the rug with a thump.

  Olive took a tentative step forward. The figure kept its back to her, its now-empty hands in the air, as though an imaginary police officer had just shouted Halt!

  Frowning now, Olive strode across the room. With each step she recognized another detail: the tattered gray robes, the long, bony hands, the narrow, hunching shoulders.

  She grabbed the intruder by the sleeve.

  Walter spun around, blinking down at Olive from the depths of the ghoul’s hood.

  “Walter!” The name burst out of Olive like a small explosion. “What are you doing back here? I thought you were one of the McMartins!”

  Walter blinked down at her. His Adam’s apple bobbed wildly.

  “What were you looking for?” Olive glanced up at the bookshelves. “And why would you sneak back in here, instead of just . . .” The air gushed out of her lungs. “Wait a minute,” she whispered. “You were going to steal something. Something you knew no one would want you to have. Weren’t you?”

  “Mmm . . .” said Walter. His eyes blinked even faster.

  A sudden frost filled Olive’s body. She was too numb to be angry or frightened now; she was merely cold. Cold and hard. “Was it the grimoire?” she asked. “Or something else that belonged to the McMartins? Is that why you were snooping around all week, looking through the books, searching the garden?”

  “Mmm . . .” Walter mumbled again. He took a step backward, colliding with the bookshelf. “Mmm . . . yes, but . . .”

  “Why?” Olive asked, staring up into Walter’s face. He couldn’t meet her eyes. “Never mind,” she said slowly. “I know why. You wanted this house. You wanted its secrets for yourself, to show your aunt and uncle what a great magician you could be.” She glanced at the pool of shadows lurking in the corner. The frost grew thicker, hardening her skin, turning her spine into steel. “You were working with them,” she said. “You were going to help them get this house back, if they would make you their heir.”

  “No,” said Walter, speaking clearly for the first time. “I swear. I—mmm—I just needed something.”

  “What?”

  Walter’s Adam’s apple bounced like a bobber on a fishing line. “I—I can’t tell you.”

  “If you can’t even tell me what it is, how am I supposed to believe you?” Olive frowned up at Walter. She folded her arms across her chest, squeezing herself as tight as she could. This didn’t help her feel any less alone.

  Walter didn’t answer.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Olive said at last. “Should I put you into Elsewhere and leave you there? Should I call your aunt and uncle and Mrs. Dewey, and tell them all about—”

  “No!” Walter interrupted. Fear glittered in his eyes. “Please. No. Don’t—don’t do that.”

  Olive shook her head, letting out another angry breath. “I knew I couldn’t trust you,” she whispered.

  Walter’s shoulders sank. His mouth twitched. For a moment, he looked as though he was about to say something, but then he closed his eyes and swallowed, and whatever words had been waiting slipped back down his throat.

  “Here’s what I’m going to do to you,” said Olive, after a long, quiet moment. Walter stared at her, clearly terrified. “I’m going to let you leave.” Walter’s eyes grew even wider. “But you can never enter this house again. If I even think you’ve tried, I’ll tell your aunt about all of this.”

  “Thank you,” Walter gushed. He ducked past Olive, the ghoul’s robes fluttering around him. “Thank you.” In a few quick strides, he was out of the library and through the front door. It hung open behind him, letting in the night air.

  Feeling suddenly defrosted and empty, Olive trailed across the room. The hallway beyond still lay in darkness. She hadn’t had time to reach for the next light switch when a shadow entered the beam of light that fell through the library doors.

  Olive glanced up at the gray woman’s string of pearls and deep, cold eyes. She took a startled step back.

  “An interesting choice, Olive Dunwoody,” said the shade of Ms. McMartin. “Letting your enemy go free. I thought you would wish to protect this house.”

  “I—I do,” Olive stammered. “But I won’t be like you. I won’t—”

  Before she could finish, the misty figure had drifted back into the blackness, its face dissolving, its pearls fading like something sinking into a deep lake.

  Shuddering, Olive dashed from the glow of the library to the front door, flicking on the entry lights. In their sconces, dusty bulbs flickered to life along the hall. For a second, Olive wondered how Walter had managed to shut off all of the lights at once—but maybe he knew something about fuses and breakers that Olive didn’t. (If he knew what fuses and breakers actually were, he would have been ahead of Olive.) She stood on the threshold for a moment, listening to the rusty creak of the porch swing and watching the synthetic cobwebs sway between the pillars. Behind her, the house was quiet and lifeless once again.

  With a sigh, she reached for the doorknob. Her fingers had just closed around the chilly metal when a voice from the darkness murmured, “You shouldn’t have done that, Olive.”

  Rutherford stepped out of the porch’s shadows. A streak of moonlight glinted on his glasses, turning them into two smaller, fingerprint-smudged moons.

  “You shouldn’t have let Walter go,” he said. “He knows where your parents are.”

  19

  “I saw it,” Rutherford whispered. “In his thoughts.”

  They were huddled against the porch’s inner corner, next to the softly groaning swing, and Rutherford was speaking so fast that at first Olive thought he’d said “I saw wet tennis thoughts,” which didn’t make any sense at all.

  “I was certain that Walter was worthy of our trust, but I was misled, and I give you my deepest apologies,” Rutherford rushed on. “But I’m sure I’m not being misled now. He knows where your parents are—although I couldn’t read anything about the precise location. I’d just come over here to check on you, because I could read very clearly that something had gone wrong, and when Walter ran past me on
his way out the door, I caught a fragment of his thoughts. He knows something!” Rutherford finished, jiggling back and forth so fast that his face was only a moonlit blur.

  For the first time in days, Olive felt a spark of pure hope. Walter knew something! Something that might bring her parents home at last!

  “We need to find out what he knows,” Olive whispered back.

  “In order to pick up additional information, I would need to get closer to him,” said Rutherford. “Which would mean sneaking into the house next door.”

  “Let’s go!” Olive shot toward the porch steps, and halted with one foot over the edge. “Wait. If we leave, there will be no one guarding the house. The cats are Elsewhere. They won’t come out as long as the McMartins’ shades are loose.”

  “Perhaps I could go alone . . .” said Rutherford, his jiggling starting to slow.

  “No. We’ll be safer together.” Olive chewed on her lower lip. “We’ll just have to get in and out as fast as we can.”

  “An excellent plan,” Rutherford whispered back.

  With Olive leading the way, they slipped around the side of the old stone house and through the lilac hedge. Shriveled twigs clacked and rattled around them. The tall gray house waited on the other side, as cold and quiet as a gravestone. As they inched closer, Olive spotted a fragile red glow behind one curtained window, and knew that the old glass lamps were burning in the study.

  “Here is an eventuality I did not consider,” Rutherford whispered as he and Olive pressed their backs to the cold gray wall. “How do we get in? The doors are protected by a voice-released locking spell. We saw Walter use it on Halloween, remember?”

  Olive’s eyes traveled along the wall to the edge of the front porch. “What if we climbed from the railings up onto the porch roof, and then went in through the broken window in Lucinda’s old bedroom?”

  “Are you sure that’s safe?” Rutherford asked. The faint moonlight revealed his worried face.

  “No,” said Olive. “But I’m going to try it anyway.”

  As quietly as she could manage, Olive hauled herself onto the porch railing, teetering along its narrow wooden beam. She wrapped her chilly fingers around the roof’s edge. From there, she managed to swing one leg up over the roof, and then to roll the rest of her body up to safety, being careful not to crush the spectacles. She reached back down for Rutherford’s hand.

  They crawled across the leaf-strewn roof. The curtains in the shattered window drifted softly over the sill before them, snagging now and then on the remaining bits of glass that jutted around the frame like carnivorous teeth. Cautiously, Olive and Rutherford climbed over the shards and through the empty window.

  Inside what had been Lucinda’s bedroom, the air felt even colder than it had outside. Dead leaves cluttered the corners. Rain had faded the delicate curtains, and discolored patches had formed on the once-polished floor. The scorched spot where Annabelle had turned Lucinda into a burst of oily flames remained on the boards, dark and deep enough to be seen even in the weak moonlight.

  “We’ll have to be careful as we go downstairs,” Rutherford whispered, pausing in the bedroom’s open doorway. “There might be other protective spells in place.”

  “All right,” Olive whispered back. “And from this point on, no talking, unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

  “A vow of silence. I agree.” Rutherford held up one hand, oath-taking-style, before treading softly into the hall.

  Without any windows, and with no lights filtering up from the floor below, the hallway was as dim as the inside of an oilcan. Olive pressed her spine to the wall, feeling the deep chill of the house penetrate through her sweater. For the first time in decades, living people were occupying this house—and yet, with its neglected, chilly rooms and pitch-black corridors, the house felt more lifeless than ever.

  Olive started down the wooden staircase, inching her toes over each step, and setting her feet down as lightly as she could. In the darkness, it was impossible to tell where one step ended and the next began, but at last her toes hit a patch of floor that didn’t have an edge.

  Keeping silent, Olive and Rutherford glided along the downstairs hallway. Here, all of the curtains had been closed, so no lights from the street or sky could lessen the corridor’s darkness. They had to navigate by touch until they rounded a corner, and a slip of warm red light spilled across a patch of the hardwood floor.

  They had reached the dining room.

  A soft crackle of fire came from within, along with the sound of familiar voices. Olive and Rutherford leaned in, pressing their ears to the door’s chilly surface.

  “. . . ever did you hope to accomplish by creeping into that house in the middle of the night?” Doctor Widdecombe’s voice was saying, quite loudly.

  “Mmm . . . just some ingredients . . .” said Walter’s much deeper, much quieter voice. “Shifting Seed. Things for transformational spells.”

  “Transformational spells?” boomed Doctor Widdecombe. “It’s fortunate that you didn’t find any Shifting Seed! You might have turned yourself into a ninety-eight-pound toad!”

  “And that poor child,” breathed Delora’s voice. “If you’d woken her, can you imagine how frightened she would have been? She has quite enough fear to deal with in that house today.”

  “It was terrifying enough when you woke us, bursting back in here like the world’s worst cat burglar,” put in Doctor Widdecombe.

  “Sorry . . . mmm . . .” Walter’s voice muttered something too low for Olive to catch.

  “Yes, well, when we have determined how to rid the house of the shades—a pursuit in which your aunt and I are both fully engaged—we will have to reconsider whether you are fit to act as Olive’s guard after all.”

  Olive hung on each word, biting her lips to keep silent. Her heart was thundering, and her breath was coming faster, and a little piece of hair had slipped inside her ear and was itching and tickling irritatingly. What a liar Walter was! She could open this door right now and proclaim to Doctor Widdecombe and Delora that Walter was a traitor, ready to turn against them all. She gritted her teeth. The itch in her ear mixed with her simmering anger, and suddenly, Olive was boiling over. She had just grabbed the doorknob, when Rutherford’s fingers locked around her wrist.

  “What?” Olive mouthed.

  Rutherford shook his head emphatically. He tugged her away from the door, along the hall, toward the kitchen. Olive trailed him through the blackness, chewing the inside of her cheek in a fury.

  At the far corner of the kitchen, where the voices from the dining room could no longer reach them, Rutherford stopped.

  “What is it?” Olive demanded through clenched teeth.

  “What were you thinking, Olive?” Rutherford whispered. “Why were you about to give us away before we’ve ascertained what has been going on?”

  “Because,” said Olive, in a much louder whisper, “we should just tell Delora and Doctor Widdecombe that Walter is lying. They can deal with him!”

  “Is that what you meant about ‘knowing the answers’?”

  “The answers to what?” Olive whispered back.

  “Didn’t you think something about knowing the answers?”

  “No. I was thinking, We should go in there and tell everybody the truth, and that’s what I’m still thinking right now!”

  Olive turned back toward the hall, but Rutherford caught her by the arm.

  “I’m absolutely certain that I heard those words. Although, come to think of it, it didn’t sound like your usual thoughts. But it came from somewhere close by.”

  Olive frowned. “Did you hear anything else?”

  “Something about Aristotle . . . displacement . . . a blue bath towel . . .”

  Olive’s heart shot upward, fizzing against her ribs like an exploding pop bottle. She grabbed Rutherford’s arm with both hands.
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  “I don’t know what that means, so don’t ask me,” he said defensively.

  “I do!” Olive cried. “It’s my dad!” She choked back her excitement, forcing it into a whisper. “Can you tell where it came from?”

  “No, nothing about its surroundings. But if we get closer to the source, I may be able to read more clearly.”

  “Then go!” whispered Olive, using every bit of her willpower to keep herself from shouting instead.

  Rutherford swayed, listening, his shoes creaking softly on the kitchen floor. Then he took off for the hall, with Olive hanging on to his sleeve.

  They hurried past the dining room door, where arguing voices could still be heard, and along the edge of Lucinda’s perfect white parlor and around the foot of the staircase. One tiny window set in the front door wasn’t covered by a curtain, and the pale glow of moon, stars, and streetlamps tinged the nearest few feet of the hall.

  “I don’t think the source is upstairs,” said Rutherford slowly. “And, Olive, thinking hurry up over and over again is not actually helpful.”

  “Then just hurry up,” said Olive.

  As Olive tiptoed behind, Rutherford crept to the other side of the hall, around the barricade formed by the staircase, where three closed doors made darker rectangles in the wall. He passed the first door, hesitated, then darted toward the second. It groaned softly on its hinges as he pulled it open.

  Inside, the room was utterly dark. There were no windows, not even covered by curtains, and no other sources of light. Nothing glinted or glimmered in the distant glow from the front door.

  “Well,” whispered Rutherford bravely, “I shall go first.” He edged through the open door.

  With a deep breath, Olive followed. She shut the door quietly behind them.

  Within the blackness, Olive stretched her arms out, testing the air. She hadn’t taken two steps before she hit something with her fingers—something soft and furry, and then something heavy and rough, and then something that felt like silk. Beside her, she could hear Rutherford rustling through the fabric too.