The Strangers Page 20

  “Into the fire,” the shade breathed.

  Annabelle staggered backward, trying to break free, but Olive held on tight. Locked together, Olive, the shade of Ms. McMartin, and the portrait of Annabelle plunged over the hearth, into the massive fireplace.

  The flames took Annabelle instantly. The oil paint of her body turned into a streak of fire before she had time to speak. Olive squeezed her eyes shut, feeling the chill of the shade surrounding her while the burst of the conflagration warmed her face, and while Annabelle let out a scream that echoed away up the chimney on a burst of thick black smoke.

  When Olive opened her eyes at last, she could see that her shivering arms held nothing at all.

  Annabelle’s locket glimmered in the flames at her feet. There was a brief moment when Olive thought, I’m standing in a fire, and I can’t even feel it!—and then a soft, tickling warmth began to rise from her feet toward her ankles. Olive felt the chill of Ms. McMartin’s presence slipping away, falling upward, as though gravity had turned upside down. A figure made of mist, delicate as an exhalation, rose up the chimney with the trails of smoke. Olive saw soft white hair and a string of pearls dissolving, untangling into wisps, floating into the tiny square of violet sky high above.

  The fire that licked at Olive’s legs was suddenly hot and threatening. She stumbled out of the fireplace just as the cuffs of her jeans began to scorch. “Leopold,” she began, falling on her knees beside the cat. “Are you—”

  The rest of her words were buried in the incoming roar of the McMartin shades.

  23

  OLIVE AND LEOPOLD crouched together on the library floor. The room had taken on a strange, sickly haze, like the sky before a storm, and Olive could barely keep her eyes open against the force of the rising wind.

  The shades had collected into a streak of motion. Their barreling black mass tore around the room, twisting into a cyclone of claws and tentacles and sharp teeth. The heavy velvet curtains whipped and snapped as they roared past. Books tumbled from the shelves, their pages flapping as they blew across the carpets. Papers scattered from the Dunwoodys’ desks like snowflakes in a blizzard. The chandelier swung wildly on its chain.

  Olive felt a surge of cold as the black wind moved over her, through her, stealing the air straight out of her lungs. Her throat burned. Then the wind twisted away once more, and the walls themselves seemed to darken, as if they’d been coated with black frost, or a layer of ash.

  Leopold’s sleek fur rubbed against her arm. “Are you all right, miss?” he shouted, pinning the spectacles to the rug with one paw.

  “I’m fine,” Olive gasped. “I’m—”

  A fresh gust of cold crashed over her. A thousand needles of ice pricked her skin, sliding through her with their stinging, invisible threads.

  The roar filling the room grew worse.

  “Shall I summon help?” Leopold shouted.

  A blast of freezing air threw the cat aside. Olive heard his claws tearing at the rug as the black wind shoved him, hissing and thrashing, into the hall. The library doors slammed shut behind him.

  They are part of this house, Horatio’s voice whispered in Olive’s memory. And we belong to this house . . .

  Olive covered her head as the shades rushed inward again, and the heavy brass chandelier came plummeting down, smashing into Mr. Dunwoody’s desk. Shards of broken glass cascaded through the dim air.

  The room was growing darker still. Behind Olive, the fire had died to a few guttering embers, which were jerked and dulled by each shift of the wind. Olive crept backward, huddling against the hearth. Her hands and feet seemed to have disappeared. Only a soft tingling sensation in her wrists and ankles told her where they should have been.

  She felt so heavy. And so, so cold.

  She had only felt this cold once in her life: in the attic of the old stone house, facing the shadowy creature that was all that was left of Aldous McMartin. Then, as now, she had felt her body begin to give up without asking her brain’s permission. Exhaustion had taken over. She’d almost stopped fighting . . . and then . . .

  Like a red-hearted coal bursting back into flames, an idea opened in Olive’s mind.

  Wobbling to her feet, Olive lurched toward the center of the room. The rippling curtains and whirling shades eclipsed the faint light coming through the windows, and the wind was strong enough to nearly knock her backward. Bits of glass and paper sliced through the air. A heavy porcelain vase flew past her, shattering against the wall. Fallen books tumbled around her feet.

  Olive knelt down, groping blindly over the rug until she’d amassed a heap of books and papers. She hoped that they were the very dullest books in the room—novels about Victorian dowagers sipping tea, or encyclopedias of socks perhaps—but there wasn’t time to check. Crawling, shoving the pile ahead of her, she inched back across the room toward the fireplace. The wind tore at her hair, ripping the breath out of her body.

  The fire had died to a faint red glow in the distance. Olive struggled forward, moving closer, closer, almost there—

  —until a solid weight of cold plunged suddenly around her.

  The library went completely still.

  In the icy hush that followed, Olive realized that the shades had enclosed her. They were layered one on top of the other—one inside the other—trapping Olive at their core. It was like being inside the shade of Ms. McMartin, only fifty times colder and heavier. Instead of being coated with ice, she was crushed by a frozen avalanche.

  At the center of the frigid darkness, Olive felt her racing heart begin to slow. Frost prickled on her eyelashes and inside her nose. Each breath stung. Her bones shook in their sockets. Cold could kill you, Olive knew, almost like a poison. It would shut her body down, bit by bit. Worse still, she could feel the shades’ hatred—their hatred of her—seeping through her entire body. Their voices hissed inside her brain.

  Liar. Trespasser. Our house.

  She blinked, frost stinging in her eyes. Before her, the fire seemed to waver and split into several pieces, which went floating off around the room. Olive tried to keep her eyes on the real fire glimmering in the dimness. She remembered Morton’s Halloween costume, flickering through the crowded gym, guiding her closer. She remembered the glint of Leopold’s eyes in the darkness of the basement.

  They had trusted her.

  She wouldn’t let them be wrong.

  With numb hands, she gave the pile of books anther shove forward. She had to reach that fire.

  Liar. Our house.

  The hiss swelled to a roar inside her brain. Coldness thickened around her heart, the hatred of the entire McMartin clan pinning her to the floor.

  Olive wormed forward, and felt the rug beneath her shift to tile. She’d reached the hearth. Come on, she told herself. Don’t give in.

  On trembling arms, she pulled herself into the warm ashes of the grate. The shades came with her, a black, thrashing, whispering armor. One ember still burned beneath the ash. Shaking so hard that she nearly lost her grip, Olive grabbed the nearest book and held its pages to the glow.

  The ember gave a small red flare, and then, very slowly, it winked out.

  Olive could hear the McMartins’ laughter inside of her own head. It was the only sound in that huge room. There was only the dark and the cold, and that awful sound—and the slam of two heavy wooden doors.

  A burst of gentle warmth, like water gushing into a bathtub, flowed around Olive’s body. She could hear the books she’d dragged along crackling into flames, and the sound of hissing laughter turning to shrieks. But these were too faint and far off for Olive to care. She smiled, rolling over in the warmth, as a flower of golden light filled the massive fireplace.

  Olive felt a weight lifting away, layer by layer. Wisps of mist rose up the chimney, carrying empty-eyed faces, fading hands. She blinked up the long, dark column at the shades dissolvi
ng softly into the night air beyond.

  The fire sank into ashes as suddenly as it had begun. The scorched books and papers surrounding her seemed to vanish. Olive lay for a minute, breathing the warm, wonderful air, realizing that she was still awake and alive. Then, cautiously, she inched out of the fireplace to find Walter, Rutherford, Morton, and all three cats staring down at her.

  “Oh, Olive,” sighed Horatio, his eyes flickering over Olive’s sooty clothes. “You are absolutely filthy.”

  24

  IN MS. TEEDLEBAUM’S art class, Olive had seen a film about art restorers at work on the ceiling of an old church in Italy. The ceiling was covered by a very old, very famous painting. Centuries of dust and smoke and dirt and dampness had covered the painting so gradually that no one had even noticed the change. But when the art restorers were done, the ancient painting looked new again. Its reds were red. Its blues were blue. What had been beautiful in spite of its darkness was suddenly, almost blindingly bright.

  This was what the old stone house looked like as Olive and her friends gazed around.

  Picture frames gleamed like buttery gold on the papered walls. Chandeliers sparkled from the ceilings. Stained glass gleamed and glittered in the windowpanes. In the library, each fallen book and toppled chair and broken lightbulb had returned to its place, better than new.

  Everyone halted in the front entryway like a swarm of bugs smacking into a windshield. They stared up at the colorful walls and the high ceilings and the gleaming floors, where slips of dawn light were just beginning to glimmer.

  “Wow,” Walter breathed.

  “Fascinating,” whispered Rutherford.

  Olive put out one hand, running her palm along the old stone wall. Instead of the familiar chill, she felt only a faint warmth, like the skin of something asleep, but alive.

  “I love it,” she said softly.

  Inside her own bedroom, Olive shut the curtains to keep Morton safe from the rising sun. Walter arranged his long, bony body on Olive’s much-too-small vanity chair. Morton sat on the floor, far from the reach of the bedside lamp, and Rutherford stood near the door. Olive and the three cats occupied the bed, Horatio seated grandly at its foot, Leopold keeping close to Olive, and Harvey pouncing at imaginary enemies in the rumples of Olive’s bedspread.

  “Walter,” Olive began, turning toward the vanity, “it was you who made that fire?”

  “Mmm—I just lit it,” said Walter. “Rutherford’s the one who knew what you were trying to do.”

  “Spontaneous spell-casting,” said Rutherford admiringly. “I saw it for myself this time.”

  Olive smiled at Rutherford. “Thank you,” she said. “All of you.”

  “Thank you, miss,” said Leopold. “It’s due to you that Annabelle McMartin is gone for good.”

  Olive hugged her knees to her chest. She patted the spectacles that were tucked safely back inside her collar. “She’s gone,” she said softly. “She’s really gone. And I know I should be glad, but—but I didn’t get her to tell me where Morton’s parents are.” Olive looked down at the floor, but she couldn’t meet Morton’s eyes. “I’m so sorry, Morton.”

  Morton didn’t answer.

  Harvey attacked a rumple in the bedspread, smashing it flat. “There,” he announced in a faint British accent. “I perceived that this room was bugged.” He turned to Leopold. “Now that the last of those bugs has been squashed, we can proceed with Agent 411’s debriefing.”

  Leopold stiffened. “I was not able to gather much information, I’m afraid,” he began, in a voice that was even gruffer than usual. “Annabelle kept me locked in a small box. I was not able to see where we went or how we got there. If I had to guess, I would say that we were underground—a situation with which I am quite familiar.”

  “And then,” Horatio prompted, “you helped her release Aldous from his portrait?”

  Head bowed, Leopold looked down at the bedspread. “I resisted for as long as possible,” he said softly.

  Everyone fell silent. The truth that Olive and Leopold had already known—that Aldous McMartin was free—filled the room like a freezing wind.

  “Don’t worry, Leopold,” Olive said at last. “It’s my fault that you had to go with Annabelle in the first place. The only thing that really matters is that you’re safe, and you’re back home with us.” She stroked Leopold’s head gently. It grew a tiny bit less bowed.

  “As for our more unexpected enemies,” said Rutherford, changing the subject, “my grandmother’s plan for Delora and Doctor Widdecombe involves a huge bag of Dutch-cocoa-sour-cream swirls and two one-way tickets to Transylvania. So Walter is free of his highly unfulfilling apprenticeship.”

  “And I’m going to stay here,” Walter said, smiling shyly. He rearranged his legs over the vanity chair, looking like a giraffe in a kindergarten classroom. “Next door. Mrs. Dewey is going to make me her apprentice.” His eyes traveled to Olive. “So I can help you. If—mmm—if you’d like.”

  Morton hopped suddenly to his feet.

  “I didn’t say you could stay in my house,” he said, marching up to Walter with his arms tightly folded. His head didn’t reach the seated Walter’s chin. “You’ll keep changing things and moving things. And you didn’t even ask.”

  Walter blinked. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right. We should have asked you first.”

  “Yes,” said Morton. “You should have.”

  “So . . . mmm . . .”

  “I give you permission to stay in my house,” said Morton grandly. He cast a glance back at Olive. “And I’m going to stay there too.”

  “What?” Olive sucked in a breath. “Morton, don’t you remember how dangerous it could be, if—”

  “Lucinda lived outside for years and years, in that very same house,” Morton interrupted her. “Nobody even noticed there was something wrong with her. And I’m much smarter than she was. Besides, I’m only going to stay there until we find my parents. I know what you’re going to say,” he went on, before Olive could argue. He put on a high, squeaky voice. “But Morton, that could take a long, long time!”

  “I don’t sound like that!” Olive objected.

  “But it won’t take a long time,” Morton plowed on. “Because I’m going to find them. And Walter will be my bodyguard. Right?”

  “Mmm . . . Right,” said Walter, looking slightly stunned. “Yes.”

  “I’ll even let you keep the spectacles,” said Morton, chin in the air. “As long as you help me later. If I ask you to.”

  “Morton . . .” Olive let out a heavy breath. “I really tried,” she whispered.

  “I know.” Morton stepped toward the end of the bed. “But I want to look for my parents myself. Just like you did.”

  Olive stared into Morton’s round, determined face, and the truth settled over her like light slipping through a window. You could confine someone for two different reasons: Because you wanted to punish them, or because you wanted to keep them safe. But to the someone being confined, there really wasn’t much difference. She turned toward the window, where the curtains were just beginning to brighten with the morning light.

  “Then you had better get moving,” she said. “It’s almost sunrise.”

  • • •

  From the front porch of the old stone house, Olive and the cats watched Morton and Walter walk away down the street. Morton was dressed in an old coat from the back of the Dunwoodys’ closet, with a wide-brimmed hat planted securely over his tufty hair. The coat was too long for him. Each time Morton tripped, Walter waited patiently, watching over him like a long-legged crane guarding a fuzzy hatchling, until Morton had kicked the coat free.

  The sun had just inched over the horizon. Its misty rays touched the rooftops of Linden Street, turning the brown lawns to silver. It spread across the houses, making windows sparkle and walls glow. Walter and Morton disa
ppeared through the front door of the tall gray house just as the sunbeams washed over its weedy front lawn. Olive watched the door close behind them.

  In the house beyond that, another door swung open. Olive smiled at the sight of her parents emerging onto Mrs. Dewey’s stoop, blinking and squinting into the morning sunlight. Mrs. Dewey walked beside her mother, and Rutherford bounced and jiggled beside her father, leading them up the hill toward the old stone house.

  “I’d better get my dad his glasses,” said Olive, stepping back inside.

  The moment she and the cats were through the door, Olive remembered something else—another precious object someone had left behind.

  She hurried into the library, with the three cats beside her.

  Still glimmering in the fireplace was Annabelle McMartin’s locket. Its chain was tangled in the grate, and its filigreed gold was smudged with oily soot. Olive bent down and picked up the locket, feeling its familiar shape against the palm of her hand. Annabelle had said she had something new to put inside of it. Olive slipped one fingernail along the locket’s edge, hearing the tiny click of its catch.

  Inside the once-empty locket was a portrait. It was very small, made up of nothing but delicate lines of black ink, but it was perfectly clear whose portrait it was—and who had created it. Olive would have known that sharp brow, those hollow cheeks, and those sunken firepit eyes anywhere on earth, whether they were staring at her from an old photograph, or inside an antique locket, or from the just-finished portrait that had vanished from the attic of the old stone house.

  “Well,” said Horatio, from the rug beside her feet. “We know the best and worst of it all.”

  “What are you going to do now, miss?” Leopold asked.

  Olive let out a long, heavy breath. “I think . . . I think I’m going to give my dad his glasses. And then I’m going to go to sleep for about three days.”