Fourteen

Bad Alchemy

“Oliver!” Lucy cried, dashing through the house—the walls, the furniture, the antiques flying past her in streaks of red light and shadow. There was a low rumbling, like a train approaching, coming from outside, but Oliver would not stop screaming.

“PLEASE, MOM, NOOOOO!”

“Oliver!” Lucy shouted, racing through the kitchen, and then her father stepped out of his bedroom.

“What the heck is going on?” he said, still half-asleep. “Is that the—?”

Crash!—a window shattered. Lucy’s father whirled, and then a cluster of shadow wood branches reached out from his bedroom and snatched him back inside.

“Pop!” Lucy cried, running after him, and then froze in horror at his door.

Dozens of shadow wood branches had broken in through her father’s window. The red light spilling in from the hallway gave them the appearance of a giant hand, beneath which Mr. Tinker lay, pinned in his bed. There were smaller branches coiled around his wrists and ankles, too, and one over his mouth, gagging him.

Lucy’s father screamed something unintelligible, and then one of the branches shoved Lucy backward into the hallway and slammed the door.

Howling in desperation, Lucy rammed the door with her shoulder, but the branch was bracing it shut from inside.

Crash!—more glass breaking—and then Oliver screamed, “NO, MOM, PLEEEAAAASE!”

Lucy moved to their bedroom door and burst inside. Oliver lay in his bed, writhing and moaning in the band of light from the hallway. More shadow wood branches scraped at the shattered window frame, and the floor was littered with shards of broken glass—which Lucy deftly avoided as she rushed to her brother’s side.

“Oliver, wake up!” she cried, her eyes darting frantically between the branches and her brother. The hair around his forehead was matted and sweaty, and his cheeks were streaked with tears. Lucy shook him by the shoulders. “Oliver, please! The Shadow Woods have Pop—we need to get help!”

Oliver’s eyes fluttered open, and a low moan escaped his lips.

“The acorn,” he rasped weakly. “Teddy . . . he gave me the nightmares. . . .”

Oliver’s head lolled on his pillow and his eyes closed. Lucy shook him by the shoulders and slapped his face. Oliver’s eyes opened halfway.

“Oliver, listen to me. The clock is ticking. The shadow wood has overpowered the sunstone, and the trees are inside the house. They’ve got Pop!”

“The acorn . . . ,” Oliver muttered, and then Lucy heard a cackle, low and croaking, coming from outside. Gazing out the window, she spied a pair of glowing red eyes staring back at her amid the trees. Lucy gasped.

It was the Garr!

“RUN,” he groaned, low and satisfied. “RUN AND GIVE ME YOUR FEAR!”

Lucy’s heart nearly stopped—there was no river this time to protect her from the giant tree man—but the Garr wanted them to run. That’s why the branches were holding back in the window. The Garr needed more fear—he could not enter the house yet. The sunstone was still too strong!

Where Lucy found the strength to carry Oliver as far as she did, she never knew. Lucy swung his arm over her shoulder, heaved him out of bed, and made it all the way into the foyer before collapsing with him onto the floor. The rumbling had stopped, but the ticking of the clock was loud and steady.

“The pendulum!” Lucy cried. Of course! If she could stop it from swinging, the Shadow Woods would stop advancing!

Lucy raced up into the mechanical room and threw her body against the swinging pendulum. But the force of it was too strong, and it knocked her backward onto her bottom. Lucy tried again, and again the pendulum knocked her back. It was no use; she couldn’t stop it alone.

Lucy howled in frustration and hurried back down to the foyer, where she found Oliver curled up in the fetal position, clutching his stomach.

“Teddy,” he groaned groggily. “He gave me a nightmare . . . the acorn.”

The acorn. There was only one thing Lucy knew that could counteract its effects.

Lucy rushed into the library, fetched the jar of sunstone cream, and was back in the foyer in a matter of seconds. She smeared the cream on every inch of Oliver’s bare skin she could find—his neck and face, his arms, even his stomach and the soles of his feet. And after a moment, Oliver began to convulse. His eyes snapped open, and he rolled over onto his hands and knees, choking and coughing.

Lucy was certain for a moment that she’d killed him, when suddenly, Oliver coughed up a large acorn with a half dozen or so spindly twigs for legs. Lucy cried out in horror—the acorn looked like a giant spider—but Oliver didn’t seem to notice and just sat back on the floor in a daze. The acorn wobbled for a moment as if its legs might buckle and then began to crawl away. Panicking, Lucy squashed it with the jar of sunstone cream. The spider acorn sizzled and smoked, and then crumbled into ash.

The sunstone cream—it was their only defense now against the Shadow Woods.

“We’ve been duped, Oliver,” Lucy said, smearing the rest of the cream all over herself. “Pop was hired to fix the clock, but not in the way we thought. We’ve got to save him and get out of here.”

“It was Teddy,” Oliver said—he was awake, his eyes clear in the red light from the chandelier. “I remember now. He forced me to eat that acorn—it gave me the most horrible nightmare—but I couldn’t wake up. And Mom. She was—”

Oliver shuddered, and Lucy tossed aside the empty jar of sunstone cream.

“It’s all right now,” she said, helping him to his feet. “But I need you to keep it together so we can all get out of here.”

“You don’t understand. It’s Teddy—he’s not what he seems!”

“Neither is Mr. Quigley. He’s the one who rerouted the pipes into the shadow wood. You were right all along about the clock, Oliver—but Mr. Quigley is working for the Garr!”

“What are you talking about? Where’s Pop?”

“The Shadow Woods have him trapped in his bedroom. But the sunstone cream will protect us. We can save Pop—come on!”

Lucy and Oliver raced to their father’s bedroom. The door was still closed, but Lucy could hear him squealing and struggling within. Working together, the children shoved the door open just enough so Lucy could slip her hand inside. Her fingers brushed one of the branches and it immediately recoiled with a hiss! The door swung open, and as Lucy and Oliver burst into the room, the branches withdrew to the window, avoiding the children and releasing their father.

Mr. Tinker sprang up from his bed and pushed Lucy and Oliver out into the hallway, slamming the door behind them. “Thank goodness you’re safe!” he cried, breathless. “How did you—?”

“We’re leaving, Pop,” Lucy said. “Just stay between Oliver and me, and we can protect you from the branches. If we make it to the other side of the river, we’ll be safe.”

“Lucy, what are you talking about?”

“There’s no time to explain. We need to get out of here now!”

The Tinkers ran. Oliver grabbed his glasses from their bedroom, Mr. Tinker snatched the truck keys from the kitchen counter, and in the next moment, they were in the foyer heading for the front door.

“The animals,” Lucy cried, stopping. “We can’t leave the animals!”

“What animals?” asked Mr. Tinker, but Lucy was already hurrying through the parlor and into the library. The animals were gone—back in their hiding spot, Lucy knew—and she squatted down by the secret door in the bookcase.

“Torsten!” she cried frantically. “Meridian—everyone! We need to get out of here now. The Shadow Woods have reached the house. The Garr will be here any minute.” No response. “Please listen! You can come with us. Blackford House is lost, but we can all survive if we leave now! I almost forgot—we can use the secret passageway in the fireplace!”

“Lucy, what are you doing?” her father asked. He and Oliver stood watching from the library door, their eyes huge with fear and confusion. Suddenly, it was all too much for her, and Lucy burst into tears.

“I’m not the caretaker!” she cried. “I should’ve told you both, but I thought I could help the animals. I thought I could save the house and—”

Lucy’s father went to her and held her close. “Sweetie, it’s all right. But come on, we need to get out of here.”

“But the animals,” Lucy said, sobbing. “You don’t understand—”

“I love you and your brother, that’s all I need to understand. And I’m not going to let anything happen to you. Now, come on, before more trees break inside.”

Just then, the lights dimmed for a moment and brightened again. Lucy stopped crying.

“The atmospheric changes,” Oliver said, looking around. “If the shadow wood absorbs our fear—I remember now what Teddy said! The sunstone absorbs our love. That means there’s still a chance—a chance to fix the clock and counteract the shadow wood.”

“Ollie, what are you talking about?” cried his father. “We need to get out of here!”

“It’s the house,” Lucy said, wiping away her tears. “It’s talking to us—telling us there’s still hope. Hope is the antidote to fear. The Garr hasn’t come inside yet, which means maybe the sunstone here is still too strong for him. He needs more fear to destroy what’s left.”

“Who is the Garr? Will someone please tell me what’s going on?”

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” Lucy said, gazing out the window. She could no longer see the large patch of overgrown grass in the moonlight. The Shadow Woods had grown over it. Lucy shivered. Would they be able to make it through those trees before the sunstone cream wore off? And even if it didn’t, one wrong move and they’d be dead. As for the secret passageway, the thought that the Shadow Woods might trap them down there was too much to bear.

All this ran through Lucy’s mind in a split-second, but in the end, the biggest problem was still the Garr.

“The Garr won’t let us leave,” she said, turning back to the others. “But he still can’t come inside. It’s our love that’s keeping him out—which means there is still enough magic left in the sunstone. Our only hope then is to fix the clock and restore the balance. That will keep the Garr and the Shadow Woods away for good.”

Mr. Tinker just gaped at Lucy in confusion.

“I don’t understand everything Lucy’s talking about either, Pop, but I trust her,” Oliver said, pushing up his glasses. “And I do know that everything Mr. Quigley and Teddy told us is a lie. It’s our fear, my fear that got the clock ticking again. I should’ve put it together when Lucy screamed upstairs and the pendulum moved. Same thing after my first nightmare when I noticed the Shadow Woods had overtaken the carriage house.”

“Don’t you see, Pop?” Lucy said. “If your love for us can make those lights flicker without any pipes at all connected to the clock face, then there’s still hope. That’s what the house is trying to tell us!”

“Lucy, I—”

“There’s magic here; Pop, you’ve got to believe me! And there’s a monster in the woods who wants that magic for himself. The Garr.”

At that moment, the secret door in the bookcase opened, and the animals poked their heads into the library.

“Your children are telling you the truth, Mr. Tinker,” said Meridian.

Mr. Tinker gasped and staggered backward. His knees buckled, and he leaned on the chemistry table for support.

“You—you can—talk!” he stammered in disbelief.

“That’s what I was trying to tell you, Pop,” Lucy said.

“My name is Fennish,” said the rat, coming forward. “I’ve seen many wondrous things here in my time, Mr. Tinker, but never courage as strong as your daughter’s. And if your love for your children can make those lights flicker, then Miss Lucy is not the only caretaker here. All of you are.”

“But—this is—impossible,” Mr. Tinker stammered. Oliver, however, calmly stepped toward the animals and smiled.

“I don’t know what’s going on either, Pop,” he said. “But I want to help. I’m tired of being afraid all the time.”

Mr. Tinker considered this for a moment and then, with a heavy sigh, said, “I trust you, Lucy. I trust you both. What do you need me to do?”

Lucy threw her arms around his waist and hugged him.

“First we need to stop the pendulum,” she said, moving to the door. “I tried, but I wasn’t strong enough. Maybe all of us, working together—”

“The pendulum has stopped only once in over a hundred years,” said Meridian. “When the Garr arrived. The burst of evil from the Shadow Woods was so strong it threw off the balance here. And now that the clock is powered by fear, there is no way to stop the pendulum.”

“Perpetual motion,” Oliver said. “The Shadow Woods are here in the house now. They feed the clock just as the clock feeds them.”

“And even if you stopped the clock,” said Duck, “the Shadow Woods are already here—quack-quack!”

“But we’ve got to stop the clock!” cried Torsten. “If we don’t, the house will die! All of us will die!”

“Hang on,” Lucy said, “if a burst of evil from the Shadow Woods stopped the clock the first time, do you think maybe a burst of good could stop it now?”

Mr. Tinker rubbed his forehead. “But, if I follow you, the only way to do that would be to reroute some pipes into the clock face. And that would take days!”

“Not to mention the clock face was originally built for us,” said Torsten.

“That’s it!” said Fennish. “The clock face was built for us!”

“What do you mean, old friend?” asked Meridian, but before Fennish could explain, a shadow wood branch crashed in through the library window and went straight for him. Oliver hurled himself in front of it, shielding the rat with his body, and the branch disintegrated into ash as soon as it touched his back.

“Retreat, retreat!” cried Fennish, and in the next moment, Tempus Crow flew in through the broken window and dive-bombed Mr. Tinker.

“He’s alive!” Torsten howled. “Tempus Crow is alive!”

Everything next happened at once. Lucy shrieked, and Mr. Tinker, swatting blindly as the crow attacked, backed out of sight into the parlor. Oliver ran after him, and then the animals latched onto Lucy’s nightgown and dragged her back into the hiding spot. The secret door in the bookcase closed behind them, and Lucy found herself inside a narrow, darkened shaft with a set of stone stairs curving upward into the shadows behind her. The only source of light was a small crack higher up in the bookcase. Lucy could just make out a set of smaller, animal-size stairs leading up to it in the gloom.

Lucy restrained herself from screaming and sat there with her heart hammering as Nessie hopped up the stairs and peeked out the crack. At the same time, the slam of the front door shook the walls, and a muffled voice shouted:

“That’s enough, Tempus!”

“It’s the old clocksmith,” Nessie whispered, and Lucy heard him cough.

“It’s Mr. Quigley!” she whispered in terror, and as if in reply, a low creak echoed through the house. “What’s happening to my father, to Oliver?”

The rabbit pressed one of her long ears to the peephole, blocking out the light entirely. “They’re all right. But one wrong move, Mr. Quigley says, and he’ll shoot.”

Lucy gasped. “Mr. Quigley has a gun!” she cried, and Meridian shushed her.

“Now Mr. Quigley’s asking where you are, Miss Lucy,” Nessie said. “Tempus Crow saw us. Oh no, he knows about the hiding spot—they’re coming into the library!”

“Quiet, everyone, not a sound!” Meridian hissed. Reginald squealed, Torsten whimpered, and then came the sound of footsteps shuffling into the library.

“Down on the floor, the both of you!” ordered Mr. Quigley. “Where’s Lucy?”

“Er—she must have jumped out the window,” Mr. Tinker said shakily, and then a loud thump on the other side of the bookcase startled everyone. Lucy slapped her hand over her mouth to keep from screaming.

“In-SIDE—caw!” Tempus Crow cried throatily, and Mr. Quigley pounded on the bookcase.

“Open up, you loathsome creatures!” the old man shouted.

Nessie hopped down from the crack—“Out of the way, out of the way!” she whispered—and Mr. Quigley was heard knocking some books off the shelves. Lucy and the animals backed up and around the curve of the stone stairs, and then—bang!—a bullet ripped a hole through the bookcase, casting a dot of red light on the stone wall. Lucy and the animals huddled together, their hearts hammering against one another in panic.

“Mr. Quigley, no!” cried Lucy’s father from the library. “Let the children go—”

“Another move and you die!” the old man snapped, then he began coughing into his handkerchief. “Curséd soot! What, no more tricks, house? No more candlesticks?”

The walls creaked and groaned.

“I thought as much! You’re too weak now, aren’t you, house? Very soon, the magic in your sunstone will be depleted, and your light will be gone forever!” Mr. Quigley laughed. “Now, where’s the secret switch to open the bookcase, Tinker?”

“We don’t know, I swear! We don’t even know what’s going on!”

“Maybe this will make you talk!”

“No, please, not my son!”

“Alive GOOD—caw! Fear help Ed-GAR!”

Lucy gasped—did she hear the bird correctly?

Mr. Quigley sighed. “Perhaps you’re right, Tempus,” he said calmly, and pounded on the bookcase again. “Go ahead and hide, then! The house is almost ready. Your fear will only help Edgar!”

“Ed-GAR—caw!”

Lucy’s skin broke out into gooseflesh. She understood. Tempus Crow had not said “The Garr!” when he deserted the clock that night three months ago. He’d cried out the name of the Blackfords’ long lost son—which meant little Eddie was the Garr!

“Of course,” Meridian whispered. “The only one of us Eddie ever liked was Tempus Crow. He would sit there on the landing for hours just to watch him cuckoo. Tempus must have sensed his presence that night in the Shadow Woods and flew off to find him! Little Eddie is the Garr!”

“Impossible—oink! Edgar Blackford died over a hundred years ago—oink-oink!”

“The Shadow Woods,” Fennish said quietly. “They transformed him into even more of a monster than he was before.”

“But how?” Torsten said. “And why? After all these years, why would Edgar suddenly come back for his house three months ago?”

“That’s when Mr. Quigley said he bought the house,” Lucy said, the light dawning. “You don’t think—”

“Mr. Quigley, please,” said Mr. Tinker. “Surely you can let us go. We only came to fix the clock!”

“Yes, and a pretty penny it cost me, too,” said Mr. Quigley. “But then again, turning lead into gold is nothing for me.”

“He’s an alchemist,” Meridian whispered. “You heard him. He can turn lead into gold. Which means he must have come to Watch Hollow for the same reasons the Blackfords did over a century ago. He knows about the magic here!”

“Unfortunately,” the old man went on, “I got more than I bargained for when I acquired this house. Who would’ve thought my activities in the Shadow Woods would’ve brought a monster back from the dead? But no matter, just like you, Charles Tinker, my debts will soon be paid. Edgar will have his house back, and I shall have what’s mine.”

“The fool,” Meridian said. “He resurrected Edgar Blackford by accident when he tried to use the magic in the Shadow Woods for alchemy!”

“I’ve heard enough,” said Fennish, heading up the stairs. “We need to get up into the clock. I know the way. Follow me.”

“But what about Edgar?” asked Frederick. “He’ll be here any moment now!”

“That’s right,” said Fennish, his one eye twinkling in the light from the bullet hole. “And we shall be waiting to welcome him home.”