The Books of Elsewhere, Vol. 1: The Shadows Page 8

  “Olive, dear, you’re soaking,” said Mrs. Dunwoody with mild surprise as she trailed past her down the staircase.

  13

  BY THE TIME Olive changed out of her wet clothes,

  Mr. Dunwoody had dinner ready. Mrs. Dunwoody lit a candle and gave it to Olive to place on the table. Olive helped set their places, poured everyone a glass of water, and even took seconds of the lasagna, but through the whole meal her mind was hopping from clue to clue like a SuperBall.

  The paintings. The trapdoor in the basement. The necklace, which hung even now inside her shirt. The attic . . . and the “someone else” who protected it, like Horatio had said. She wasn’t going to stop searching until she found a way into the attic and met that someone. Olive got so excited just thinking about this that she dropped her fork on the floor (three times), and knocked over her water (just once, and luckily the glass was almost empty).

  After dinner, Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody suggested that they all play “Forty-two,” a more complicated version of Twenty-one that Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody had invented together back in their college days. Olive knew her only escape would be to say she was too tired and wanted to head to bed, but this would have definitely made her parents suspicious. So she stayed. Her feet jittered impatiently under the table.

  At first Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody let Olive win most of the hands, but by 10:30 Olive lost her entire pile of paper clips and fell asleep in her chair, listening to the sounds of her parents whispering romantically about probabilities and numerical combinations.

  She woke up in her bed to the song of a robin and a beam of sunlight pouring in through her bedroom window. After shoveling down a heaping bowl of Sugar-Puffy Kitten Bits, Olive scrambled up to the second floor.

  This time, she had a new plan. An attic had to have a staircase or a ladder. And if there was a staircase, that meant there had to be a hollow spot within the walls. If she knocked in the right spot, maybe she would hear it.

  Olive started in the upstairs hall. At the front of the house, she pressed her ear against the wall and tapped with her knuckles. The wall made a low, solid thump. She moved her ear a few inches to the left and tapped again. The wall here sounded the same. Olive made her way slowly around the hallway corner, tapping and listening. She was near the painting of the strange bowl of fruit when she heard something else in the wall. It was muffled, and very distant, but Olive recognized the sound. It was the whine of a dog. Olive held her breath. She slid her ear along the wall. The whining sound grew fainter.

  On the other side of that wall was the pink room. Olive darted inside, catching the usual stale whiff of potpourri and mothballs. She put her ear to the pink wall, a few feet from the huge painting of the ancient town with its giant stone archway. Nothing—no dog whining, no sound at all. She tapped gently. This time, instead of a solid thump, she heard a light, hollow knock. Her heart gave a happy jump. This painting was certainly large enough to hide a door.

  Olive yanked on the huge gold frame. It didn’t budge. She wrapped her fingers around its edge and pulled with all her strength. She might as well have been pulling on the wall itself. Olive gave a disappointed huff. Then a new idea floated across her mind.

  She put on the spectacles and took a close look at the painting. Nothing changed. The distant trees around the town didn’t shake their leaves. The tufts of grass didn’t move in a soft summer breeze. Cautiously, Olive put out her hand and pushed her fingertips into the painting, right through the center of the giant stone archway, where the two stone soldiers glared down, unchanging. Her hand went easily through, but she couldn’t feel the Mediterranean sun on her skin, or any change in the air. Olive braced herself on one side of the huge frame and pressed her face through the canvas.

  At first, all she could see was darkness. She wasn’t in the ruins of a Roman village. She wasn’t in a painting at all. She was looking through it, just like one of those sneaky mirrors that’s actually a window. But there, in the darkness on the other side of the painting, was a thin strip of light. It ran along the bottom edge of an old wooden door. Just above it, a round brass doorknob gave off a reflected glint.

  With her heart doing a tap dance against her ribs, Olive stepped through the canvas onto a bare wooden floor, and grasped the handle. The door was heavy. At first it didn’t want to budge, but Olive pulled with both arms, and finally, with a low, vibrating creak, it swung toward her. The scent of dusty air, stale and ancient, swept around Olive like invisible snow.

  A wooden staircase angled upward from darkness into faint daylight. Olive shut the door behind her and climbed slowly up the narrow stairs. The steps were littered with the papery bodies of dead wasps and bits of brittle sawdust. Olive hoped that there weren’t any living wasps to worry about—she wasn’t very good with insects.

  At the top of the stairs, she stood up, took off the spectacles, and gave the room a long, careful look.

  The attic was surprisingly large. Round portal windows cut in each side let in streaks of dusty white sunlight. The ceiling angled sharply up to a point in the middle, with the sides of the room growing lower and lower, so that even a very small person would have had to crouch to reach the corners. But the room itself was not what caught Olive’s attention.

  The attic was simply heaped with things. There were sewing mannequins and ancient tapestries, locked steamer trunks and glass-fronted cabinets, upholstered sofas draped with white sheets. There were giant gilt-framed mirrors and dusty dressers. There were the remnants of a Victorian washing machine, a small, battered cannon, and something that looked dauntingly like a dentist’s chair, or, possibly, a torture device.

  And, slightly apart from everything else, stood a tall, paint-spattered easel.

  Olive edged toward it. A low stool was positioned in front of the easel, and tubes of paint and bottles of powders were ranged along its tray. To the right, a small table held jars full of brushes, more tubes of pigment, and a palette covered with blobs of dried paint. An oilcloth-draped canvas leaned against the easel’s back. Olive reached out, and, with the tips of her fingers, lifted up the cloth and peeped underneath.

  The painting on the easel was far from finished. A blue background, which could have been either a wall or the sky, hung behind a wide wooden table that filled the canvas from left to right. On the table lay an open book. And on the book lay a pair of hands. The wrists trailed off into the background, toward a body that had not yet been painted . . . that never would be painted, Olive realized.

  Her knees wobbling, she put on the spectacles and looked more closely at the painting. In an instant, the hands came to life, clenching the book. Then they moved hesitantly upward, patting at arms and a face that were not there. Olive jumped away, dropping the cloth back over the canvas. Her stomach fizzed and clenched queasily, as if a huge spider had just run over her skin. This was Aldous McMartin’s studio. This was where he had worked.

  Ducking her head, Olive moved carefully along one wall, peeking beneath the dusty sheets. Yes, there were more of Aldous McMartin’s paintings here, in frames of all different shapes and sizes.

  She was about to put on the spectacles again, when a voice from above her hissed, “Oh, ho—a thieving scoundrel, is it? Have at thee!”

  Something landed on Olive’s back and dug in with four pointy claws.

  “Ow!” exclaimed Olive, trying to shake the clinging thing off of her shoulders.

  “Yah! Take that, ye scurvy knave!” shouted the thing triumphantly.

  “Let go of me!” Olive bellowed, giving the thing a solid thump against a nearby hat rack.

  The thing gave a yowl and pulled its claws out of Olive’s shirt. She turned just in time to see a furry shape dart up the hat rack and leap into the rafters.

  Olive edged slowly around a heap of furniture. Above her, peeping out from behind a crossbeam, was one bright green eye.

  “I can see you, you know,” she told the green eye. “You might as well come out and talk like a sane person.”

&n
bsp; A cat edged slowly onto the rafter. It was smallish and short-haired, and covered with splotches of every color in the cat-fur rainbow. Its tail was patched with brown and gold. Its belly and the tips of its toes were white, except for one hind leg, which was mottled gray and orange. Its nose was crookedly divided into white and black. One eye seemed to be covered in a dark swath of fur, but as the cat moved into the light, Olive saw that the dark fur was, in fact, a leather eye patch.

  “I’m Olive,” she said to the cat. “I know Horatio, and I’ve met Leopold, so you can tell me who you are, too.”

  The cat blinked its uncovered eye at Olive for a moment, as if it were searching for some way around this conversation. Then it gave a little, reluctant sigh. “Harvey,” he said.

  “And you protect the attic, I suppose?”

  “Aye, lass, that I do,” said the cat, seeming to regain a bit of his swagger. “Naught that brings danger to this house shall enter it on my watch.” The cat gave a leap and grasped a hanging skein of rope, executing a midair somersault that was obviously intended to impress an audience.

  “I see,” said Olive.

  “Sometimes he thinks he’s a pirate,” said a dry voice. Olive looked down to see Horatio gazing up at Harvey from the floor, and felt her face break into a smile before she could help it. “Other times, he claims to be one of the Three Musketeers.”

  “The Three Musketeers?” sniffed Harvey, taking a dignified pose on the rafter. “That’s ridiculous. I said I was a cousin of the Count of Monte Cristo.”

  “Horatio,” said Olive, casually running her finger along the dusty edge of a mirror. “I was trying to ask you something important the last time I saw you.” She glanced up at the cat posing on the rafter. “Maybe Harvey could help with the answer.”

  Horatio gave a doubtful harrumph.

  “I want to know about Aldous McMartin. I know he made the paintings. I want to know why. I want to know if Morton ever really knew him. I want to know everything.” Olive stared hard into Horatio’s unreadable green eyes. “Please tell me the truth.”

  Horatio looked up at Harvey.

  Harvey stroked an imaginary mustache. “Tell the lady,” he said.

  “Are you mad?” snapped Horatio. “Don’t answer me, Harvey. That was a rhetorical question.”

  A sudden loud whimper came from the far corner. Olive gave a start. “What was that?”

  “What was what?” asked Harvey innocently.

  “That sound. That whimpering sound.”

  “I have a guess,” said Horatio, with a sharp look up at Harvey.

  Olive had already moved to the far corner of the attic and put on the spectacles. Now she was flipping through a stack of canvases. The whimpering sound had gotten a bit louder.

  When she came to a painting of a weathered wooden barn surrounded by high yellow grass and a grove of birch trees, Olive heard the whimpering clearly. She knew she had heard it before. It sounded like a dog—a dog that was sad, or hurt. Through the small, square panes of the barn’s back window, she thought she could see something moving.

  “Don’t do it,” Horatio warned. “Don’t go in.”

  Olive thought of Morton, shivering all alone in the dark forest. “But something is whimpering in there,” she argued. She propped the canvas against the wall.

  “At least don’t bring anything out with you this time!” Horatio shouted, but Olive was already halfway into the picture.

  It was late autumn in this painting. There was a nip in the air that brushed the long grass around the old brown barn. Most of the trees in the distance had dropped their leaves, but here and there, one leaf hung, brown or red or gold. The whimpering had gotten louder now, and an edge of excitement entered it as Olive pushed open the creaking barn door.

  The barn smelled like very old, empty barns do: like damp wood, and soil, and dust. Something bumped and shuffled in one of the stalls. Olive followed the sound, tiptoeing through the cloudy yellow light.

  Inside the last stall, there was a dog. It was a large, dark brown mutt that could have been equal parts bloodhound, spaniel, boxer, and St. Bernard. When it saw Olive’s face appear over the edge of the stall door, it gave a delighted yap. And when Olive pulled open the stall door and came inside, its tail thwacked the ground in a frenzy.

  The dog was clumsily tied up with a few strings and wires, but it didn’t look hungry or thirsty or hurt. Olive supposed that dogs in paintings don’t get hungry very quickly anyway. While Olive untangled the knots, the dog licked her face ecstatically.

  “Good boy. Down. Down, boy,” said Olive. The dog went on licking. “What’s your name? Who put you in here?”

  The dog didn’t answer. Olive felt a bit surprised, but she told herself that she shouldn’t be. After all, in most houses, the surprising thing would be if a dog did talk, not if it didn’t.

  Olive was just getting the final knot undone when the dog gave a throaty woof. His whole body, which had been shaking with happiness, became suddenly taut and still. Olive followed his eyes. A multicolored cat wearing an eye patch was seated atop the narrow stall wall.

  “So, me old matey,” it whispered, “We meet again.”

  The dog gave a flying leap. Harvey zoomed off like something fired from a musket. “Yah!” Olive heard the cat yell. “That’s right, you rump-fed roustabout! Try to get me!” The dog and cat crashed away through the barn. Olive came through the door just in time to see them leap through the frame back into the attic, with the dog’s jaws clamped around the cat’s long tail.

  Harvey caromed off an antique chaise and soared toward the rafters. The dog, who had lost his grip on Harvey, came crashing behind, knocking over the hat rack and managing to shake the cat down from his balancing beam. Olive, crawling back through the frame, watched the cat bolt down the staircase like a flying squirrel, barely touching the floor. The dog was right on his tail.

  “Harvey, no! Dog! Stop!” yelled Olive. Nobody listened.

  There was a hearty thump as one or both animals hit the attic door and tumbled through the painted arch and into the bedroom. Olive could still hear Harvey laughing like a maniac as the sound of eight galloping paws faded away.

  By the time Olive made it to the bottom of the attic stairs, the whole house was in chaos. Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody had come rushing out of the library, alerted to the crashings coming from the parlor. Mr. Dunwoody was asking questions such as “What on earth was that?” and not getting any answers. Mrs. Dunwoody was sneezing.

  Harvey had made a sharp right turn at the bottom of the staircase, leaping from the piano to the mantel-piece. The dog had tried to follow, but had fallen several feet short and landed on the chess table. Horatio had conveniently disappeared.

  Olive watched as Harvey catapulted from the hanging lamp through the door to the dining room. “Ha HA!” the cat proclaimed. “No one can capture the wily Captain Flintlock!” The dog answered by knocking over a potted fern.

  Harvey and his pursuer skidded down the polished wood of the hallway, Harvey bounding onto a table, the dog jostling the table’s legs so that a glass lamp teetered and fell with a crash.

  In the knick of time, Olive made a blockade with her body so that both animals were diverted back up the stairs. Two furry blurs barreled toward the pink bedroom. Once more, Olive heard Harvey’s taunting “Ha HA!” Horatio, who had been waiting beside the painting, hopped through the arch and slammed the attic door neatly behind them.

  Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody stood in the hallway, surveying the damage.

  “Was that a cat?” asked Mr. Dunwoody.

  “That was absolutely a cat,” said Mrs. Dunwoody.

  “And I believe there was also a dog,” said Mr. Dunwoody.

  “I believe you’re right,” said Mrs. Dunwoody.

  Olive tried to slink out of sight.

  “Olive, dear,” Mrs. Dunwoody called, “would you come here a moment, please?”

  Mr. Dunwoody picked up a frond of bedraggled fern and turned it over thoughtfully.
“We’re not saying that you let in the cat and the dog, Olive,” he began. “But we hope that you can see why we cannot have animals running through the house like this.”

  “Yes, I see,” said Olive, looking at her feet.

  Mrs. Dunwoody sneezed.

  “Good.” Mr. Dunwoody gave Olive a businesslike nod. “Now, if you make sure both animals are out of the house, we won’t have to talk about this again.”

  Olive turned and shuffled away up the stairs.

  For a moment, Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody looked down at the fragments of the glass lamp scattered across the hall like treacherous confetti.

  “How many pieces, dear?” Mr. Dunwoody asked Mrs. Dunwoody with a twinkle in his eyes.

  “Three hundred thirteen,” said Mrs. Dunwoody.

  Mr. Dunwoody smiled at her lovingly. “You’ve still got it, darling.”

  14

  ARE YOU SURE you’ll be all right, sweetie?” Mrs.

  Dunwoody asked Olive for the hundredth time.

  “Mom,” answered Olive, also for the hundredth time, “I’m eleven and three-quarters. And it’s just for one night. I’ll be fine.”

  Olive didn’t tell her mother this, but she had plans of her own for that night. First, with the house all to herself, she was going to eat ice cream out of a fancy dish, and flounce around the living room and the parlor, imagining she was a Victorian heiress. Then she was going to find Horatio and make him explain about Aldous McMartin. Maybe this would be the key to helping Morton. Finally, when the house began its nightly creaking and moaning, she would bring Hershel downstairs, make a bed for the two of them on the couch, and spend the whole night watching movies, with all the lights on.

  “You’re absolutely sure you want to stay here?” said Mrs. Dunwoody, tucking a toothbrush and floss into her overnight bag.