Spellbound: The Books of Elsewhere (11 page)

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Authors: Jacqueline West

BOOK: Spellbound: The Books of Elsewhere
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10
 
O
LIVE WAS SO mad at Morton that she didn’t even tell him good-bye. The moment he and Harvey began to climb into the frame around the painting of Linden Street, she turned away and trudged into her bedroom. Then she tugged off her wet pajamas, getting even madder when one of the buttons snagged in her hair. Finally she pulled on a dry nightgown and threw herself down on the pillows. Hershel rolled against her face. Olive shoved him away, a bit rudely. She was so angry, she didn’t even notice that Horatio had disappeared.
They had been so close—
so close
—and again the book had slipped through her fingers. The tugging sensation that pulled at her from the other side of the attic door felt almost uncomfortable now, like a rubber band that was stretched just a bit too far. Olive wondered what would happen if it broke.
She buried her face in the pillow. Fine. She would look again tomorrow,
without Morton,
if that was the way he wanted it. She would look without Harvey too, if she could. If it weren’t for those stupid broken spectacles . . .
The pillow cradled her head, muffling the creaks and taps of the old stone house. Before she knew it, Olive was wandering through the feathery gray mist of almost-sleep, but in the next second, she was wide awake again, flipping over onto her back and staring up at the ceiling in a daze. Something had broken her sleep. Something that still whispered through her mind like a dragon’s tail, or the long train of a woman’s silk dress.
As she stared up at the ceiling, an image flickered dimly in her mind, parting the fog, coming closer and closer, until she could almost touch it.
It was a book.
A huge, heavy-looking book.
Clasped in a pair of large, bony hands.
She had seen that book somewhere before. She was sure of it. The last wisps of fog parted like a torn cobweb, and all at once, Olive knew exactly where it was.
She scooted off the bed and back into the hallway. The faint light of the predawn sky turned the walls, floor, and paintings varying shades of blue. Her own hands, groping for the bathroom door, were the pale, pearly blue of something drowned. She found the candle and matchbook and tiptoed back out into the hall.
“Sir Walter?” she whispered as loudly as she dared. “Sir Walter Raleigh? Can you hear me?”
Harvey’s splotchy head poked out from the open doorway of the pink room, just ahead of her. “Your Majesty?”
Olive hurried along the carpet. “Sir Walter, I think I’ve found the location of—that place you said. El Dorito.”
“The Lost City of Gold?” Harvey whispered back, his green eyes widening. “Downfall of Orellana? Vanquisher of Pizarro?”
“Yes,” said Olive quickly. “But we have to hurry. We have to reach it before dawn. Will you take me back up to the attic?”
“Ah, the northern passage. Yes, indeed, Your Majesty! Follow me!” And Harvey whirled around, whisking away into the darkness.
In seconds, they were through the frame, climbing the dusty stairs back to the attic.
“I shall explore the leeward shore!” Harvey announced, bolting into the jumble. Olive barely heard him.
The tugging sensation was stronger and steadier now. She took a deep breath, raised her candle, and let it pull her up the stairs, across the creaking, buglittered floor, to the spot right in front of Aldous’s easel. The cloth covering the easel was thick with dust except where her own fingers had brushed it away. Olive felt a little prickly thrill at the thought that no one had touched it—or anything else in this attic, in fact—for years and years. No one but her.
Olive lifted the cloth with one hand.
Beneath it, waiting on the easel, was the unfinished painting Olive had seen once before. She flinched at the sight of it. She had tried to forget it, but her memory must have filed it away somewhere—perhaps in the same messy, seldom-used drawer where her former phone numbers were jumbled with the rules of several card games and the recipe for apple crisp. Now she looked at it again, matching it with the picture that had trailed through her dreams.
The canvas showed the inside of a blue room. In the foreground, on a dark wooden table, there lay an open book. And wrapped around the book was a pair of long-fingered, bony hands. They were Aldous McMartin’s hands. The hands led up to wrists and then ended, suddenly, with a line of jagged paint strokes where Aldous’s arms would have been if he had ever finished the painting.
Olive’s heart fluttered in her rib cage like a trapped bird. That was the spellbook. There was no question. Aldous had made a safe place for it, and had planned to paint himself right there with it, standing guard over the book. But he must have run out of time. As she stood looking at the book, the pulling sensation got stronger, until it felt almost like gravity, the kind that pulls you down staircases before you can catch hold of the banister.
“Sir Walter?” Olive called, struggling to keep her voice calm. “Come here. I need you.”
There was a soft swishing sound from the ceiling, and the cat dropped from the rafters onto the top of the easel. “Command me as you like, Your Majesty,” he declared. “I will sail for the colonies. I will battle the Spanish armada. I will—”
“I don’t need any of that,” said Olive. “I need to get in here.”
Harvey craned over the top of the canvas and peered into the painting. “Oh,” he said, his voice suddenly small. “I see.”
“Can’t you do it?”
Harvey looked back up at Olive. When he spoke again, it was in that same small voice. “There is a difference between
can
and
should
.”
Olive was surprised. If there was anyone who
didn’t
know the difference between
can
and
should,
it was Harvey. Last month, he had hidden in the branches of a tree near the sidewalk and bombarded everyone who passed by with pinecones while making cannonblasting sounds. A few weeks later, he had shorted out the wiring in the library chandelier by practicing Robin Hood–style leaps onto the furniture.
“What will happen if we do go in?” Olive asked.
Harvey appeared to think for a moment. It was hard to tell, because he stopped to think so rarely. “Well,” he said at last, “that depends on you, really. The only thing that’s certain is that
something
will happen.”
Olive looked at the painting, at the thick, open book, at the pair of hands lying on it like two giant, pallid spiders. And she wanted it. She had never wanted anything—not a snow day, not a unicorn, not
anything
—so much in her entire life. She wasn’t going to think about anything else or do anything else or go anywhere else until she had that book in her hands. She wasn’t sure that she
could
go anywhere else. The pulling had gotten so strong, it was hard for her to move even her eyes away.
“Let’s get it,” she whispered.
Harvey nodded. It was a funny nod—resigned, and a little bit sad. But Olive wasn’t paying him much attention.
“We need a plan, though,” she rushed on. “I think I have an idea.”
Olive didn’t tell Harvey this, but it really wasn’t
her
idea. The idea dropped into her mind fully formed, like a present—just like the image of the book itself when she woke up from her scrambled dreams. Dragging herself away from the painting, Olive hurried across the room to a pile of boxes stacked in one corner. There was something in those boxes that she was meant to find.
Setting the candle carefully on the floor, Olive flipped open their lids, tossing out stacks of ancient bedsheets, old newspapers, empty picture frames. Finally, in one moldy box, she uncovered an aging scrapbook, its pages crumbling and delicate, its covers held together by a frayed cord. Ordinarily, Olive would have liked to look through the scrapbook, studying the yellowed newspaper articles and old snapshots and pictures from antique fashion magazines, but she was in too much of a hurry to care about any of that just now. She turned it over, mentally measuring its size and shape, and skidded back across the floor to the easel.
“I’m ready,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Wordlessly, Harvey extended his tail for Olive to hold. He dropped from the top of the easel into the painting. Immediately, the hands fluttered, rising up from the book, patting searchingly at their nonexistent arms. The sight made Olive shudder. But she kept her grip on Harvey’s tail and clambered into the painting after him. The long-unused bottles of pigment rattled on the easel’s shelf as her feet kicked through.
Inside, she nearly slid over the edge of the long wooden table. The room within the painting was small, almost cramped, even with nothing in it but the table, the book, and the hands. The blue walls were bare and windowless. Olive was sure that this was a room Aldous had created just for this painting, to keep the grimoire as safe as it could be. Back on the book now, the hands gave a slight twitch, like animals sensing a disturbance in the air.
Olive sat on the table’s edge, taking deep breaths. Gently, she opened the scrapbook and laid it on the table, edge to edge with the spellbook. She glanced down at the scrapbook’s pages. Taped beside a row of pressed flowers that had long ago turned brown was a photograph of two girls, their arms linked, their faces framed by curly hair and lacy collars. One was pretty but sour-faced, with dark hair and eyes. The other had lighter hair and a chilly little smile, like something that would melt if it was left out of the refrigerator. Olive recognized both of those faces. In tiny, faded script beneath the picture, someone had written
Annabelle and Lucinda, aged 14.
The wheels in Olive’s head started to turn.
No time for that now!
shouted the voice in her head that controlled the wheels. The spellbook—the treasure she had been searching for, the tool that would change
everything
—was just inches away from her, almost close enough to read. It was exerting a pull so strong, she was surprised that strands of her hair weren’t floating toward it, as though it were a static-charged balloon. Between the painted hands on its open pages, she could glimpse scratchy lines of handwritten letters, curls of calligraphy made by someone who had certainly never seen a ballpoint pen. The sight made her heart pound.
“All right,” she whispered to the cat crouching beside her. “I need you to cause a distraction. Get the hands off of the book, and I’ll slide this one into its place. When I say
go,
we move. Okay?” She glanced down at Harvey, who was staring at the hands as though they might explode. Harvey gave a teeny nod.
“Go.”
“Have at thee!” Harvey snarled, pouncing onto the hands, claws out. “Who dares to try his strength against Sir Walter Raleigh?”
Like two giant crabs, the hands jumped from the book and locked around the cat’s body.
Olive reached for the spellbook. Before she had even quite grasped it, she felt—or thought she felt—the book leap into her arms, like a cat that is delighted to be let in from the rain. Olive clutched the old book tight against her body. It was very heavy, with its thick pages and leather cover, and its corners had been softened by years of use until they felt almost like velvet. Olive stroked the edge of its closed pages calmingly. The book seemed to stir deeper into her arms.
“Reee-OW!” Harvey screeched, bouncing up into the air in front of her, the hands still locked around his body. With a start, Olive remembered what she was meant to be doing. But she couldn’t bear to put the book down. She didn’t want to turn her attention from it, even for a second. Finally, she took one hand away from the book just long enough to push the open scrapbook into its place, and then wrapped her arms tightly around it again. She was almost afraid to look away from it, sure that somehow the book would vanish from her grasp.
“Unhand me, villain!” Harvey shouted, writhing and twisting as the hands tightened around him. “Or you shall feel the wrath of the greatest swordsman in England!”
Olive wasn’t listening. As the cat thrashed around on the table, screeching a string of Elizabethan insults (“Thou plume-plucked paper-faced puttock!” Olive thought she heard), she was stroking the edge of the book’s thick leather cover, running her fingertips along the spine that felt almost as soft as living skin. She wanted to never let it go.
Harvey made a panicked, choking sound. One of the hands had worked its way around his throat and was steadily squeezing. “Your Majesty . . .” he wheezed.
With a reluctant sigh, Olive tore her eyes away from the book, pinning it firmly to her side with one elbow. It clung to her body like a magnet. “Hold still, Harvey!” she commanded. But Harvey was too hysterical to listen. While he kicked and clawed and gasped for breath, Olive made a wild grab at one of the hands. Its cold, painted skin squirmed in her fist. It felt like a plastic sack of cold jelly, but with bones twisting and moving inside of it. While Olive held on, it wriggled, turning and groping, snaking its fingers between hers. Suppressing a scream, Olive shook her arm, and the hand flew off, hitting the blue wall with a smack. On the floor, it flipped over and scuttled back toward the leg of the table, its bulbous joints working in a blur.

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