The Second Spy: The Books of Elsewhere: Volume 3 (18 page)

“Horatio,” she whispered. “What is
wrong
with you?”

The cat whirled away. “Leopold,” he snapped, darting back out of the light, “you and Harvey must remain on continual watch over the subbasement. That way we can ensure that she can’t steal any more of the jars. I will take care of this portrait myself.”

Leopold gave the tiniest of nods.

“But—then—who will be watching the rest of the house?” asked Olive.

“Who needs to?” Horatio shot back. “We know just where the problem is. It’s wherever
you
are.”

Olive turned to Leopold, pleading. “Leopold, I swear—you have to believe me—I—”

“Leopold.”
Horatio cut her off. “Hasn’t this girl deceived you enough times for you to learn your lesson? Downstairs.
Now.
”

Leopold hesitated, looking from Horatio to Olive. After another moment, Leopold dragged his eyes away from Olive’s face and trudged slowly toward the attic steps. His inky fur was swallowed by the darkness.

With a last hard look at Olive, Horatio backed across the floor, turned, and disappeared silently down the staircase after Leopold.

Olive stood alone in the attic.

In spite of the chilly air, she felt feverish. Her palms were sweating. Her heart thundered. Inside of her head, a flock of questions whirled and dived.

Whatever Horatio had said,
she
knew she hadn’t painted Aldous’s portrait. All other considerations aside, she simply wasn’t a good enough painter. And this meant that someone
else
had painted it.

But who?

Annabelle? She wasn’t a painter, as far as Olive knew. Besides, how would Annabelle have gotten into the attic without the spectacles or one of the cats? Ms. Teedlebaum? But she couldn’t have gotten into the attic either—and how would she have known where to find the ingredients, let alone concoct the paints? Olive chewed the inside of her cheek, trying to think. Could the bony hands have painted the rest of their body themselves? Olive had no idea, but it seemed pretty unlikely. Horatio was acting so strange…Might he have been the painter? Olive tried to picture Horatio holding a brush in one of his furry paws. The image would have made her laugh if she hadn’t been so terrified.

Horatio.
Olive’s vision blurred. She blinked back
the tears, but not before one slid down her chin and soaked into the collar of her pajamas.

What had happened to Horatio? Why had he turned against her—and gotten Leopold and Harvey to desert her as well? Did he truly believe what he told them—that Olive was trying to serve the McMartins? No, Olive reasoned. He
couldn’t
believe that. He was the one who knew about her failed painting of Morton’s parents; he was the one she had asked to take away the paints and dispose of them for good.

So why had he
lied
about her? The Horatio she knew might have been prickly at times, but he was honest. And, in spite of that prickly exterior, Olive had come to believe that Horatio cared for her, deep down in his centuries-old heart.

This
Horatio hardly seemed like the cat she knew at all.
This
Horatio, with his dull eyes, and his cold, hard expression, and his slick, not-quite-soft-enough fur…

He looked like
paint.

A breath of dusty attic air caught in Olive’s lungs. The flashlight shook in her hands, sending its jumpy beam over the mountains of clutter.

Her mind flashed through its images of Horatio—the way his fur had flared in the sunlight on her parents’ bed, and how warm and soft it had felt under her fingertips; the cool feeling of his ears as he edged
away from her in the upstairs hall, the way the light glanced off of him instead of making each orange strand of hair glow—and a sense of certainty began to fill her, like cement pouring into a mold. It made her feel indestructible. And heavy. And ready for whatever might come next.

With a deep, angry breath, Olive turned around and faced the easel. Aldous McMartin gazed back at her. Every nerve in Olive’s body wanted to pick up the painting and smash it over the old hat rack, and then to kick its broken frame across the attic, and then perhaps to wad the canvas up and see if the small, battered cannon still worked well enough to launch a crumpled painting through the night air. But Olive stopped herself.

Whoever had been painting the portrait would be back to finish it. And waiting—as difficult as it would be—was probably the only way for Olive to uncover the identity of its painter. Olive would have wagered her whole piggybank that the painted Horatio and the painted Aldous had more than their paint in common.

But she wasn’t going to let the painter foil her again. Olive snatched the black-and-white photograph off of the easel’s shelf, holding it between the very tips of her fingers, like something that might give her a rash. Without meeting Aldous’s green-gold eyes, she covered the horrible portrait with its cloth.

The moonlight falling through the small round window seemed to brighten as Olive hurried across the room, tucking the flashlight under her arm and using both hands to push at the window frame. The swollen wood gave a low, angry groan. Olive froze for a moment, listening, but there was no other sound—nothing but the night wind whispering through the trees.

Leaning through the open window, Olive tore Aldous’s photograph to pieces. Then she tore the pieces into even tinier pieces, until there was nothing left that was large enough to tear. She tossed the pieces into the air. A breeze caught them, the fragments scattering and spinning until they were whirled away into the darkness.

Then Olive put the spectacles on and climbed back down the stairs, out of the attic.

21

A
FTER WHAT HAPPENED in the attic that night, Olive was sure she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She lay down in her bed and rolled herself up in the covers like silverware inside a napkin, and waited for sleep
not
to come. But then, suddenly, she was opening her eyes and her bedroom was sparkling with morning sun and the smell of breakfast was drifting up from downstairs. She was sure she would never be able to eat again either, but as it turned out, she managed to put away four muffins and a massive glass of orange juice before she even realized that she was hungry. And maybe it was the sleep, or maybe it was the fortification of muffins, but Olive began to feel more and more
steely
as the morning went on.

Once she had finished helping dry the breakfast
dishes and Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody were happily settled at the table with fresh coffee and giant stacks of quizzes to correct, Olive hurried back up the stairs, put on the spectacles, and climbed into the painting of Linden Street.

She tore up the misty hill, toward a small white blotch on Morton’s porch. As she raced closer, the blotch clarified into Morton himself. He was seated on the floor with the folds of his white nightshirt pooled around him, sorting through the pieces of the gigantic jigsaw puzzle Olive had brought.

“Morton!” she gasped. “Morton, I need to talk to you.”

“Found another edge piece,” said Morton, still sorting through the puzzle box. He glanced at her out of the corner of his eyes. “Is it about that other
boy
again?”

“No,” said Olive emphatically. “It’s not about…him.” Olive dropped onto the porch steps, pressing her hand to the cramp in her side, where some muffins seemed to be reassembling themselves. “It’s about this house. And the McMartins. And Horatio. And it’s
important
.”

Morton dropped his handful of puzzle pieces. “Important?” he repeated doubtfully.

“Yes.” Olive leaned forward, bringing her face close to Morton’s. “Something terrible has happened to Horatio. Somehow…he’s been turned into paint.”

Morton frowned. “How?”

“That’s part of the problem. I don’t
know
how. Maybe he got stuck in Elsewhere too long, just like you, and he—”

But Morton was already shaking his head. His tufts of white hair fluttered in agreement. “The cats stayed here with me lots of times. Like the night when Lucinda was…” He trailed off, leaving the sentence unfinished. “They stayed for a long time. And they didn’t change.” He looked back at Olive, and his face took on an explain-y, teacher-y expression. “They’re not really
alive,
you know.”

“I know,” said Olive, with a shade of irritation.

“Look,” Morton went on, lifting a puzzle piece and waving it in front of Olive’s nose. “Not alive,” he said slowly. “Not turning into paint. And the papers you brought for me to put together. They weren’t alive. They didn’t turn into paint.”

“Right,” said Olive. “So…he can’t be the same Horatio.” There was a panicky catch in her chest as she realized what else this would mean. The real Horatio—the one she knew and trusted and
needed
—was gone. “But where did the real one go?”

“Well,” drawled Morton, still sounding like he was talking to a kindergartener and enjoying it very much, “where’s the last place you saw him acting like the normal Horatio?”

Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody often used this sort of questioning with Olive.
Well, where’s the last place you saw your retainer? Did you have it in your mouth when you woke up? Was it there
before
you went to bed? How did it end up behind the frozen peas?
Now her brain clicked backward through its collection of Horatio memories: His strange behavior in the attic last night, as he tried to avoid the flashlight’s beam. His silhouette gliding past Olive’s bedroom door after she’d been woken by the recurrent bumps and creaks. His green eyes tilting up toward the painting of the craggy hill, where she’d surprised him one afternoon. His cold claw, stuck to the cuff of her blue jeans as she fell back through the frame around the
very same painting…

Olive sucked in a breath. “I’m going to come back here tonight,” she said slowly. “I think from inside this frame I might be able to see what I’ve been missing.” She turned back to Morton. “And, if you wouldn’t mind—I’d like your help.”

Morton’s smile threatened to reach all the way to his ears.

Never in her life had Olive been more impatient for a Saturday to end. She and Mr. Dunwoody raked the backyard, where a thick quilt of maple leaves was already smothering the neatly refilled hole behind
the garden. She decorated three rocks with fingernail polish. She even got all of her homework done, with an entire half of the weekend left to go. And still, the evening moved about as quickly as a snail stuck to a wad of chewed bubble gum. After dinner and a seemingly endless game of Forty-two, Olive said good night to her parents and charged up the stairs to her bedroom, where she changed into a black T-shirt and a pair of dark flannel pajama pants. Then she lay down in bed with a book to wait.

After what felt like hours, she heard her parents’ footsteps creaking up the staircase. Their bedroom door clicked shut. Olive listened to the roar of blood pounding through her body as several more minutes ticked by. Then, just when she was about to slide out of bed, there was a tiny squeak from her own bedroom door.

Olive froze. A slit of moonlight, no wider than a finger, fell across her bed. Olive lay perfectly still, pretending to be asleep. The slit of moonlight disappeared. A minute later, she heard a soft creak somewhere in the distance. When the house had sunk back into silence, she slipped into the hallway, closed her bedroom door behind her, and dove into the painting of Linden Street.

This time, Morton was waiting for her. When Olive landed with a
flump
on the dewy ground, his round
head popped up just a few yards away, the tufts of his pale hair mingling with the long green grass.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Fine,” whispered Olive. She turned back to peer through the picture frame, but whatever had made the creaking sounds had already disappeared again.

“I wasn’t sure when you’d be back, so I just decided to wait here,” he told her.

“Thanks.” Olive knelt next to Morton in the grass, sending up a swirl of mist that clung stubbornly around her.

“So, what are we watching for?” asked Morton.

Olive hopped up again and beckoned Morton to the picture frame. He stood on his toes to look over its edge. “See how you can look all the way down the hall from here?” Olive asked. Morton nodded. “I think something funny has been going on with that painting—that very last one, down there by the door to the pink room.” She pointed. Morton craned to follow her finger. “But I can’t see that picture from the door of my own room.” Olive sighed, blinking through the frame. “I just hope whatever it is happens again before I have to get back out of here.”

For a while, they both stood at the picture frame, gazing over its edge. The hallway was black and still. Even the beams of moonlight on the carpet were motionless. After several silent minutes of watching,
they decided to play Twenty Questions, but Morton was jumpy and distracted, and Olive kept seeing imaginary intruders darting down the hallway from the corner of her eye. Olive’s toes were just starting to feel prickly and numb and Morton was saying “You already
asked
if it was bigger than a breadbox” for the fifth or sixth time, when, at the far end of the hall, a shadow shifted.

“Look!” whispered Olive. She and Morton huddled below the frame, letting just their eyes peep over its corners.

From the darkness of the pink bedroom, a smaller blot of darkness emerged. It stepped into the hall, where the moonlight from the house’s front windows snipped and stretched its shadow. And casting that long black shadow was a cat.

“Is that Horatio?” breathed Morton.

“Sort of,” Olive breathed back.

Behind Horatio glided another blot of darkness. This one was tall and thin, and it cast a shadow so long that it reached almost to the frame where Olive and Morton were crouching. Olive squinted at it, trying to get a closer look without letting herself be seen. The shadow moved along the hall, passing briefly through a blue beam of moonlight. In that instant, Olive made out the tall, lean shape of a man’s body—a man with long, wavy hair and
ragged clothes; a man with features that looked as though they could have been carved out of wood. The man was carrying two bags. One bag was small, and had short handles that looped over his left arm. The other was a large cloth sack, kind of like a pillowcase with a drawstring. And something inside of the sack was
moving.