Six
At the end of the day, Pip got on the bus with Eleanor and Otto, and the bus driver didn’t protest. “Don’t you need a pass or something?” Eleanor asked.
Pip shrugged. “My mom’s the headmistress. I get away with basically anything. Everybody’s terrified of her, and she doesn’t really care what I do. So it works out okay.”
“My parents practice free-range parenting,” Otto said, shaking his head so his hair flipped out from in front of his eye. It flopped right back again, but he seemed satisfied with the operation. “Also, I have triplet two-year-old siblings and seventeen pets, plus the ones I’m helping my dad rehabilitate. It creates a sort of protective chaos, especially since my older sister’s off at college. I’ve got at least a couple hours before anyone notices I’m gone.”
They sat crammed together on a bench really meant for only two people. Eleanor sat squished against the window, Pip squeezed in the middle, and Otto balanced on the edge. Eleanor watched the morning’s landscape slide by in reverse as they chatted about some kind of seventh-grade drama that had unfolded after lunch. It was amazing to Eleanor that they could focus on that kind of thing. Could they be pulling her leg about the wrong things and the dog and all the rest?
Trees gave way to meadows and back to trees again. And there, in the shadows beneath the branches, was the dog from earlier. Big red eyes, mist falling from between his yellow teeth. Eleanor’s hands went icy cold.
“Guys!” Eleanor said, and pointed. Pip craned around her, but they were already past.
“What is it?” Otto asked, half standing in his seat and trying to look through the rear window, which was hopelessly grimy.
“The dog,” Eleanor said.
“Yeah, it’s been showing up for like a week,” Pip said. Her eyes darted around the bus, checking for eavesdroppers. “But seriously, keep your voice down.”
“Usually the wrong things stick to one place, but it’s been following us around. Maybe other people, too, but you can’t exactly ask,” Otto whispered. “Pip thinks we should try to attack it.”
“I said we could try to attack it. Not should,” Pip said.
“Your exact words were ‘Just let me at it,’” Otto said.
Eleanor shivered. She was cold all the way through now. All the way to her heart, which seemed to beat so hard she could feel it in the tips of her shoulders.
“It hasn’t done anything to us,” Otto said. “It just watches. Maybe it’s been there all along. Maybe we just didn’t notice it until now.”
“We usually notice the wrong things, though,” Pip said, sounding disturbed by this idea.
“Not always. You didn’t notice the whirly light until I showed you, and that was right outside your house.”
Eleanor thought of the clock in the hall. The clock she had not seen until yesterday morning. Or had she?
She frowned and shut her eyes and thought about coming up the spiral staircase the day she arrived, her sad little duffel bag of everything she owned under her arm. She’d looked down the long hall and counted the doors. Three on the left. Four on the right. And across from the room where she’d sleep—the clock.
She was sure of it. It had been there all along. She just hadn’t noticed.
She opened her eyes, still frowning. “There’s something you guys have got to see when we get to the house,” she said.
FROM THE OUTSIDE, Ashford House looked like a haunted mansion by way of Dr. Seuss. A turret stuck up on the west side of the house, like it had been pilfered from a medieval castle and attached with glue and possibly duct tape. The house was studded irregularly with round windows and square windows and rectangular windows and arched windows and even a triangular window, tucked up under the eaves.
Rooms and wings and awnings stuck out of it randomly, added on after it was built in the 1880s by Bartimaeus Ashford. The Ashford family had lived in the house all the way until the 1970s, when Eleanor’s grandparents had moved in. Her grandparents had a lot of money for some reason Eleanor wasn’t really clear on, and it had all gone away for reasons she was even less clear on. Jenny and Ben just had the house and Ben’s job, and whatever Jenny made from selling her paintings, which wasn’t much. Ben did what he could to keep up the house on the weekends, but there were shingles missing and windows cracked, and random boards and bits of metal heaped up near the side of the yard.
“Sorry it’s kind of a mess,” Eleanor said, feeling embarrassed even though she had nothing to do with the state of the house.
“I like it,” Pip said. “It’s scrappy. Everything in Eden Eld is so perfect. I’ve never even seen moss growing on a roof.”
“Yeah, it’s cool,” Otto agreed. “It has character. All the houses in town look the same.”
“Cookie cutter,” Pip concurred, and they both nodded, like that settled the matter.
Eleanor led Pip and Otto up the drive to the winding concrete walkway that led to the front door, which was made from a big slab of wood full of knots and whorls and had an iron knob shaped like a rose.
Gray paw prints dotted the concrete, like a cat had tracked dirt right up to the stoop. The paw prints hitched back and forth a few times and then trailed off into the grass.
“Big cat,” Otto said.
Eleanor nudged one of the paw prints with the tip of her shoe. It smeared. Not like dirt at all; more like ash. “We don’t have a cat,” she said. “Must be a stray.” She shivered even as she said it.
Aunt Jenny was in the drawing room (because Ashford House was the sort of place that had a drawing room). Jenny used it as a second studio for her painting, since the sun came in just right in the mornings, flooding the room with light, but in the past few weeks Jenny’s fingers had started hurting too much to paint, and she couldn’t sit in one place for long, either. Now she was lying back on the couch, half a dozen pillows propping her up as she talked on the phone.
“Yeah, but they say it can last for days like this. My mom was in early labor with Claire for two weeks.”
Eleanor squeaked a floorboard, and Jenny looked up, a guilty expression flitting over her face. Because she’d mentioned Eleanor’s mom, Eleanor knew. Jenny quickly smoothed the expression into a smile—a smile that grew bigger when she saw Pip and Otto hovering behind her.
“I’ll call you back, Lena. Eleanor just got home.” She hung up and levered herself into a more upright position, groaning and putting both hands on either side of her big belly. “How was your second day? I see you picked up some souvenirs.”
“It was fine. This is Otto. And Pip. They’re going to help me catch up with some schoolwork. Since I started so late.” Once you told a big lie, telling smaller ones was easy. It got easier than telling the truth. Sometimes Eleanor had to stop herself from lying about things that didn’t matter at all.
“That’s lovely.” Jenny grimaced suddenly.
“Are you okay?” Eleanor asked.
“It’s just the baby,” Aunt Jenny said, patting her big belly. “Contractions.”
“Does that mean you have to go to the hospital?” Eleanor asked with alarm, heart giving a sloshy thump. “I can call Uncle Ben. I—”
Aunt Jenny shook her head. “Not yet, hon. Not until they’re much stronger and much closer together. Don’t you worry.”
“Can we get you anything?” Otto asked. “A hot pack? Ice pack? Ice water? More pillows?” He sized up her pile of pillows with a practiced eye and didn’t seem impressed. Triplet toddlers, Eleanor remembered.
“Oh, no. I’ll haul myself upright in a few minutes,” Aunt Jenny said, waving a hand. The gesture startled Eleanor—something about that tiny movement was so much like her mother, her chest gave a painful squeeze. She’d never realized how much her mother and Aunt Jenny were alike, before now. She’d never really gotten to know Jenny, because Eleanor’s mother refused to bring her to Eden Eld. She’d only seen Jenny when she came to visit them, which wasn’t very often. When she did, she and Eleanor’s mother always fought. Eleanor wasn’t sure exactly why. It had something to do with their parents, and how her mother hadn’t gone back for their funerals—but it was more than that, too.
Eleanor took the others to the back of the house—there were two sections of the third floor, and they didn’t connect at all, which meant you had to use the back staircase to get to her room. Pip and Otto ooh-ed and aah-ed at the wood paneling and the antique wallpaper and the big, dusty chandeliers, and raced each other up the spiral staircase.
Eleanor had almost expected the big clock to be gone, or for Otto and Pip to not see it. Instead they all lined up in front of it, watching it tick tock tick backward as steadily as it had that morning.
“It’s like it’s counting down,” Otto said.
Eleanor nodded. “But counting down to what?”
“I don’t think I want to know the answer to that,” Pip said.
“If you don’t know, you can’t make an informed decision,” Otto said.
“You’re always so you,” Pip replied with a sigh, and Otto punched her arm affectionately.
“Is the clock a—a wrong thing?” Eleanor asked.
Pip and Otto frowned at each other. “I suppose,” Otto said. “But usually the wrong things are less . . .”
“They’re more . . .” Pip said at the same time.
“More frightening,” Otto said.
“Less sitty,” Pip said.
“That’s not a word,” Otto said.
“Is too, because I said it,” Pip shot back. She folded her arms. “I suppose it’s acting like wrong things, with the nobody-noticing bit. But usually wrong things give you the shivers and make your stomach pinch up. They make you want to stay away. The clock’s strange, but it doesn’t feel wrong.”
“So what are the wrong things?” Eleanor asked.
“Some people seem to see them. Most people don’t. Mostly we think it’s kids that see them. Or that aren’t smart enough to pretend they don’t,” Otto said. “They’re all over Eden Eld. Like the whirly light—it kept trying to lead us out into the woods once we’d seen it. And there’s a woman who walks down the middle of Bleecker Street sometimes.”
“What’s so weird about that?” Eleanor asked. “Other than not liking sidewalks?”
“She’s super dead,” Pip said. “See-through and everything. Her hair floats like she’s underwater. But she doesn’t hurt people. Hardly any of them do anything. They’re just around. But it’s not going to stay that way.”
“You don’t know that,” Otto said.
“I do,” Pip insisted. “Something bad’s coming. The dog’s been watching us, and my mom is planning something. And like I said: She’s evil. Pretty sure she has flying monkeys hidden somewhere in a storage closet.”
“You don’t really believe that,” Eleanor said.
“Of course I do. Haven’t you been listening?” Pip said with a laugh. “Trust me. There’s something evil coming for Eden Eld. For us. And soon. I feel it in my bones.”
“If you believed that, you’d be scared,” Eleanor said levelly. “You’d be terrified. You wouldn’t be having fun.”
“I am scared,” Pip said. Her voice was suddenly quiet. “There are things about this town . . .” She drew in a deep breath and looked at Otto.
Otto’s face was serious. “We’ve gotten used to joking around,” he said. “We always have to make it sound like we’re joking, in case someone hears. But Pip is right. Eden Eld is full of the wrong things, but they’ve been changing. They’ve been . . . watching us.”
“We were starting to think we were both seeing things,” Pip said. “Or making it all up until we believed it. But you’re here. You’re proof. You’re like us.”
The clock struck four. They jumped, all three of them at the same time, and then let out a chorus of nervous laughter.
“You’re taking this really well,” Otto said.
Eleanor bit her lip. “I told you. I’ve seen things like that before,” she said. “There was this man . . .” She trailed off. She didn’t want to talk about the man with see-through skin and shining bones. He hadn’t done anything to her. He’d sat down next to her at a bus stop and opened a newspaper. The paper was covered in angry little black slashes instead of words. The photo on the front showed a line of people with empty holes for eyes, glaring at her.
He’d gotten on the bus. She’d stayed where she was, teeth chattering. She’d never told a soul.
“A ghost?” Pip guessed. Eleanor nodded, glad she didn’t have to explain.
“Hey,” Otto said excitedly. He was staring into the clock’s glass case, where the pendulum swung to and fro in its steady, unrelenting rhythm. “There’s something in there. There’s something inside the clock.”