Spellbound: The Books of Elsewhere (2 page)

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Authors: Jacqueline West

BOOK: Spellbound: The Books of Elsewhere
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As Horatio had once said, the painted version of Linden Street was as close to home as Morton could get. Without a family, a heartbeat, or a body that could grow up, Morton didn’t belong in the real world anymore. But as someone who used to have all those things, he didn’t quite belong in a painting, either. Olive was still hoping to find the place where he
did
belong, but in spite of all her thinking and nose-pressing, she hadn’t found a way to get inside the paintings on her own—or a way to help Morton out for good.
And so, eventually, everybody in the big house on Linden Street settled down into a quiet routine, like a bunch of friendly but distant planets orbiting around each other.
Olive waited for something interesting to happen. She didn’t know it, but the house was waiting for something too.
2
 
B
Y THE END of July, the weather had turned hot and muggy. Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody spent most weekday afternoons in their offices at the college, where there was air-conditioning. They invited Olive to come along, but Olive didn’t like her parents’ office, where people talked in numbers instead of words, and where there was nothing to do but find patterns in the bumps on the ceiling.
On one of these long afternoons, Olive had the house to herself. Because it was made of stone and surrounded by a thick canopy of old trees, the house never quite got hot inside, but it felt humid and still and very quiet, like a bottle full of fog. The afternoon sun pushed blurry swathes of color through the stainedglass windows. Shadows spread beneath heavy antique armchairs. The picture frames on the walls glimmered faintly. Standing in the silent, stuffy living room, Olive looked at the painting of a couple at a sidewalk café in Paris and imagined wandering through narrow French streets, eating a croissant, tossing crumbs to the pigeons. That sounded like fun. Then she sighed, and, for the thousandth time, touched the spot where the spectacles had once hung around her neck.
She trailed up the carpeted staircase that led from the foyer to the upstairs hall. The painting of the little lake where Olive had found Annabelle McMartin’s locket gleamed softly on the wall halfway up the flight. Annabelle had once tried to drown Olive in that same little lake, but today the water looked harmless, peaceful, even refreshing. Olive blew a puff of air through the wisps of hair that kept getting stuck to her forehead and imagined dabbling her toes in that cool water. Then she remembered the sensation of the lake swirling around her, black and oily, while her kicking feet brushed against cold, slimy things, and the waves closed over her head . . .
She hurried the rest of the way up the stairs.
In the upstairs hallway, Olive stopped at the painting of Linden Street. She had stood in this same spot so many times that the carpet had a little divot where her feet pressed it down. Inside the painting, a misty green hill rolled away toward an old-fashioned version of Linden Street, where the same wood and stone and brick houses occupied by Olive’s neighbors stood in an unchanging twilight. Even without the spectacles, things that had once belonged in the real world—things that Aldous McMartin had hidden or trapped—could sometimes be seen moving inside of their paintings.
Squinting hard, Olive examined the row of houses. Perhaps she was just wishing, but she thought she could see a few small, pale figures bobbing and shifting in the distance. Maybe Morton was one of them. Olive pressed her nose to the canvas, and then jumped backward in surprise when the painting shifted with her touch. When the Dunwoodys first moved into the old stone house, all the paintings had been magically stuck to the walls. Now, with the McMartins out of the way, they could be nudged and moved just like ordinary paintings, and Olive hadn’t quite gotten used to this. She straightened the painting of Linden Street. Then she sighed again and shuffled into her bedroom.
Horatio was asleep on Olive’s vanity. His long body was balanced along the narrow shelf, and his gigantic feather duster of a tail wound delicately through Olive’s collection of old pop bottles. Annabelle’s locket, emptied of its portrait and its powers, was wrapped around the neck of one of Olive’s favorite pop bottles: the bright green one covered with bumps that felt like Bubble Wrap. Once, the locket had been wrapped around
Olive’s
neck, and she’d thought she would never get it off again. But now that the McMartins were gone, the locket was just one more magical thing that had faded into something normal.
“Horatio?” said Olive.
The cat didn’t move.
“Horatio?” said Olive, more loudly.
“Mmmph,” the cat grunted.
Olive wriggled her toes against the floorboards, steeling herself. “Will you please take me to visit Morton?” she asked, keeping her voice as un-whiny as she could. “It’s been days and days since I’ve seen him.”
Horatio didn’t reply.
“I said, would you please take me to—”
“I heard you, Olive. Even though I was
asleep,
I heard you.” Horatio turned his head very slightly, and Olive saw one green eye glaring at her from the reflection in the mirror. “Go ask someone else to take you.”
Olive gave a giant sigh. Then she trudged out of the room, glancing up at the painting of Linden Street and hurrying past the bare spot at the head of the stairs where the painting of the moonlit forest used to hang, and which still felt a bit more menacing than a bare bit of wall had any right to. She thumped down the steps, along the high-ceilinged hall, and through the empty kitchen, all the way to the basement door.
Although Olive had gotten used to the basement, she hadn’t grown especially fond of the place. It was always shadowy and dirty, and full of spiders, and even if she couldn’t see them, she knew that the ancient gravestones were there, embedded in the chilly walls.
Olive opened the door and switched on the first light. Its weak glow revealed a rickety wooden staircase dwindling away into the darkness. “Leopold?” Olive called, venturing down the steps. “Are you there?”
At the foot of the staircase, she groped for the next lightbulb’s hanging chain, but it seemed to have disappeared. Wasn’t this where it should be, right at the bottom of the steps? She waved both hands through the air. The darkness of the basement seemed to thicken, the stone walls exhaling cool, damp breaths that tickled the back of Olive’s sweaty neck. She was just about to give up, turn around, and bolt back up the stairs when her palm struck the chain. She pulled it so hard that the lightbulb rattled.
A pair of bright green eyes flickered in the corner. Even though she expected to see them, the sight still made her heart give a shuddery little jump. Then a gruff, familiar voice said, “At your service, miss.”
Olive tiptoed across the gritty basement floor and into the shadows. The gigantic black cat was poised on the trapdoor just as he had been when Olive first met him, as rigid as a statue, his fur as dark and shiny as an oil spill. Long ago, Annabelle McMartin had hidden the urn of her grandfather’s ashes under that trapdoor. Then, not so very long ago—and with Olive’s unwilling help—Annabelle had taken the urn back out again.
Standing at the edge of the trapdoor, Olive could almost feel the wind of the painted forest where Aldous’s ashes had whirled up, blotting out the sky, whispering across her skin like a million black insects as she and Morton had raced toward the safety of the picture frame—
She shook her arms, brushing both the memories and the imaginary insects away.
“What are you doing, Leopold?” she asked, crouching down beside the trapdoor and trying to force her heartbeat to return to normal.
“Standing guard,” answered the cat, puffing out his chest. “The price of safety is eternal vigilance, you know.”
“But there isn’t anything down there anymore.”
Leopold opened his mouth as though he might be about to argue. Then he shut it again. He cleared his throat, lengthily and elaborately, before speaking. “A soldier doesn’t question his orders.”
“But who
gave
the orders?” asked Olive.
There was a long pause. Leopold, standing at attention, stared straight ahead so hard that his eyes began to cross.
“Never mind,” said Olive quickly, worried that Leopold might hurt himself if he thought any harder. “I just wondered if you would take me into the painting to visit Morton.”
“Hmm,” said the cat. “That would mean leaving my post, miss. It’s against regulations.”
“I see.” Olive nodded. “Well, what if instead of leaving your post, we just stayed here, and maybe . . . went through the trapdoor?”
Leopold gave his head a violent shake. “Absolutely impassible, miss. I mean astutely imparsible. I mean
NO
.”
Olive knelt down on the chilly stone floor and scratched Leopold between the ears. Slowly, his head began to tilt toward Olive’s hand. “Come on,” Olive wheedled as Leopold’s eyelids slid down to half-mast. “You would be with me the whole time. I just want a peek. A little, teeny-tiny peek. Please?”
Leopold caught himself. “Simply impossible, miss,” he announced, jerking back into his soldierly pose. “I am prepared to do a great deal for you, but I will not allow you to go underground. And I’m afraid I cannot go AWOL.”
“Go
A
wall?”
“Absent Without Leave,” Leopold enunciated, obviously pleased to have to explain. “If you’d like, at fifteen hundred hours we could engage in a game of Clue here at my base of operations. As long as I get to be Colonel Mustard,” he added.
“Fifteen hundred hours?” repeated Olive. “Noon is twelve, plus one is thirteen, plus two is . . .”
“Three o’clock,” Leopold whispered helpfully.
“And we’d have to play down here?”
“I’m afraid I can’t leave my station, miss. Not while you’re home alone.”
Olive glanced around at the stone walls pooling with darkness in the corners. A small carved skull in the stonework gazed back at her from the vicinity of the washing machine. “No offense, Leopold, but I don’t like it down here.”
“No offense taken,” said Leopold. He appeared to think for a moment. “Where is Harvey?”
It was a good question. Olive hadn’t seen Harvey all morning, and this was generally a bad sign. The last time Harvey hadn’t been seen for two days, Olive and Horatio had finally found him in the garden shed, wearing a dented pirate’s hat and helplessly tangled in an old hammock, which Harvey insisted was ship’s rigging. “Captain Blackpaw will never surrender!” he had yowled as Olive extracted him.
Now Olive clumped up the basement stairs, feeling frustrated and a bit mopey, and looked around the empty kitchen. “Harvey?” she called. “Harvey?” But Harvey wasn’t there, or in the dining room, or the parlor, or sleeping on the cool tile in the upstairs bathroom.
Olive walked along the hall into the pink bedroom, where the air smelled like dust and mothballs, and where the entrance to the attic was hidden by a painting of an ancient stone archway. It had taken Olive ages to find the attic’s entrance, even with the spectacles. Without the spectacles, she couldn’t get in at all. With a huff of frustration, she put her lips as close to the canvas as she could without actually touching it, and yelled, “Harvey!” at the top of her lungs. There was no answer.
Olive trailed back down the staircase and stepped out onto the front porch. The warm, dewy air felt almost stifling, like a stranger’s breath on the back of her neck. She glanced around the overgrown lawn. The thick ferns swayed in their hanging baskets, releasing their spicy scent into the air. The old porch swing shifted lightly on its chains. Nothing else moved. Frowning, Olive turned back toward the door. And that was when she spotted it.
On the scuffed gray boards of the porch, the green print of a cat’s paw stood out like a traffic light. Olive knelt down and touched the paw print. It was made of paint—paint that was still fresh enough to smear on her fingers. She stood up and took a careful look around. At the bottom of the porch steps, her box of birthday paints was spilled in a pile. The tube of green paint was open and oozing a trail that wound through the long grass toward the backyard.
Curiosity bumped the boredom and frustration right out of Olive’s mind. As far as she knew, the cats never went far from the house. Even when Olive brought them outside, they zoomed back toward the doors like furry magnets. If Harvey had wandered away, there was no telling what sort of trouble he would find. The only thing that was certain was that he
would
find it.
“Harvey?” Olive called.
No one answered.
It was difficult to find traces of green paint on a green lawn. Olive had to get down on her hands and knees and squint, but here and there, she spotted a green splotch on a dandelion, or half of a paw print on a dry leaf.
The trail of clues led to the end of the Dunwoodys’ backyard, where the ancient maple trees layered their thick shadows over the mossy ground. Still crawling, Olive noticed a streak of bright green on the leaves of the lilac hedge that separated the Dunwoodys’ property from Mrs. Nivens’s. Olive peered between the leaves, making sure that Mrs. Nivens’s sunhat-topped figure was nowhere to be seen, and wriggled through the branches.

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