Seven

Pip and Eleanor peered into the clock, propping their hands up to shade the glass so they could see past their reflections.

“There, in the corner,” Otto said. “On the back.”

“I see it,” Eleanor said at once.

The back panel of the clock didn’t fit quite right against the bottom left corner of the case, and something pale stuck out through the gap. Eleanor shooed Pip out of the way and opened the glass door. She reached under the swing of the pendulum, feeling along the wood panel. Her fingers touched the rough surface of old, thick paper, folded over. She tugged on it, and it slid reluctantly free, making the wood creak.

The paper had been folded once, twice, and three times, making a bulky packet. The creases cracked as she smoothed it out in her hands and read it out loud.

Thirteen tales and thirteen keys,

Prowling beasts that no one sees.

Three are marked in flesh and name,

This way, that way, both the same.

A bargain struck in days of yore,

Thirteen keys, but just one door.

All Hallows’ Eve is when he’ll come.

When clock strikes twelve, you’d better run.

The left-hand edge of the page was ragged, like it had been torn from a book. At the bottom of the page was a little symbol, a peculiar curlicue hooked through the eye of an old-fashioned key.

Eleanor’s hand shook. Thirteen tales.

“What does it mean?” Otto asked. “What tales? What keys?”

“I’m more worried about the beasts,” Pip said.

“I know what this is from,” Eleanor whispered.

“All Hallows’ Eve—that’s Halloween,” Otto said.

“That’s Saturday,” Pip replied.

“I know what this is from,” Eleanor said again, loudly this time, and they stared at her. She tried to put the words together to explain, but all that came out was an empty puff of breath and a little click in the back of her throat. She knelt instead, pulling her backpack around to the front of her body. She unzipped the bag with one hand, still clutching the poem in the other, and pulled out the book.

Thirteen Tales of the Gray. The book was thin. A hardback, with the old-fashioned kind of cloth cover, bumpy and textured with ash still worked into the weave. Embossed on the cover, beneath the title and above Collected by B. A., was the same symbol from the page. A curlicue and a key.

“Where did you get that?” Pip asked.

“It was my mother’s,” Eleanor said. “She used to read it to me every night, when I was little. When I used to see the wrong things. But she stopped when I stopped seeing.” Or had it been the other way around?

Eleanor opened the book to the first page. The spine cracked. The pages were brittle and thin, rippled toward the edges, and they’d turned a shade of brown that made her think of old libraries and desperately want a cup of cocoa and a fire to read next to. She had always wondered why the first page was torn out, but her mother said it must have happened before she got it.

The poem fit perfectly against the ragged edge inside.

“Whoa,” Pip said.

“Whoa,” Otto agreed, nodding. “Oh, look.” He pointed at the inside cover. In careful block letters, someone had written Property of Andy Ashford.

“Ashford? Like this house,” Eleanor said. She didn’t really remember seeing that before, but her mother had always been the one to hold the book and read the stories. “Maybe she found it here when she was a kid.”

She flipped forward, carefully turning the torn page. The next page was blank, and the one after that just had the title and the author again, but then there was a table of contents, listing each of the stories.

“It’s kind of a weird book,” she said. She frowned. She couldn’t remember why it had always seemed so strange. She couldn’t remember the stories at all, but she remembered her mother’s voice, and she remembered the harsh ink strokes of the illustrations. And there was something else . . . “The stories are weird, but that’s not all. It says there are thirteen tales, but there are actually only twelve. See?” She pointed to the table of contents, laboriously counting them again and again.

The People Who Look Away

The Glass-Heart Girl

Rattlebird

Iron, Ash, and Salt

The Orchard Thieves

Jack and the Hungry House

Cat-of-Ashes

The Brackenbeast

The Kindly Dark

Tatterskin

The Girl Who Danced with the Moon

The Graveyard Dog

“Are those fairy tales?” Pip asked. “I’ve never heard of any of them. And I’ve read, like, hundreds. My dad translates them from all over the world.”

“Wait. There are thirteen,” Otto said.

“No, that’s twelve,” Eleanor said, frowning. She counted again, but she remembered asking her mother about it, and her mother didn’t know either. “The last one is ‘The Graveyard Dog.’”

“But there’s something written beneath it,” Otto said. He pointed, resting the tip of his finger against the page. And he was right. There was something written there—but it was like the letters had faded into the page. Or were still in the process of appearing. Eleanor couldn’t make it out.

“This has to mean something,” she said. “The clock. The book. The poem. We found them for a reason, and it has to do with the wrong things.” She spoke as if it were fact, waiting to see if it sounded wrong. But it sounded right, and Otto and Pip were nodding.

“But what does it mean?” Pip asked.

Eleanor ran her finger over the little curlicue and the key at the bottom of the page. It was exactly the same as the keys that were painted around the clock face. The same as the mark on her wrist. “I think it has to do with me,” she said softly, and pulled up her sleeve to show them.

Otto and Pip stared at the birthmark on her wrist. And then they looked at each other.

Pip pulled down the collar of her shirt. Otto hiked up the hem of his jacket. Two keys: one just above Pip’s collarbone, the other on Otto’s right hip.

“I think,” Otto corrected softly, “it’s about us.”

Eleanor gulped. Us. She’d felt it when she touched them, before they even met properly—they were connected. She wasn’t sure if that made her feel better or more afraid. Either way, she was glad not to be alone.

She glanced down the hall. It made her feel antsy being out in the open like this. “Let’s go back to my room,” she said, and marched her way to the door without waiting for an answer. She sat on the end of her bed. Pip flopped down next to her, propped up on her elbows, and Otto took the chair by the desk.

“Okay. Obviously we need to investigate and figure out exactly what’s going on here. We should look at the poem again,” Otto suggested. “We need to analyze it.”

“We’re wasting time,” Pip argued. “‘You’d better run.’ That sounds pretty bad. We should be getting ready to fight.”

“Fight what, though?” Otto asked. “We need to slow down and examine the evidence!”

“We need to find weapons. And escape routes,” Pip said. “Something’s coming. I can feel it.”

“You’re both right,” Eleanor said, and their attention snapped back to her. “What we need is a plan. And a good plan has two parts. Gathering information, and acting on it. We need to do both, and we need to do it fast. So let’s look at what we know.” She opened the book to the torn page. “Thirteen keys—there are twelve keys and a smudge on the clock, but we don’t know what that means. Prowling beasts—that’s got to be the dog. And the bird.”

“Bird?” Otto asked, and she explained about the thing she’d seen in the tree.

“Then it says, ‘Three are marked in flesh and name,’” Pip said. “The birthmarks?”

“But what about the name part?” Otto asked. They looked at each other, but no one had a suggestion, so Eleanor shrugged and moved on.

“Um. ‘A bargain struck,’ and then the keys again. We don’t know any of that yet. And then Halloween . . . That must be when something is supposed to happen. But we don’t know what.”

“Maybe the stories can tell us,” Pip suggested.

Eleanor ran her finger along the edge of the page, oddly reluctant to open it. The stories had always belonged to her and her mother, just the two of them. But if she was going to share them with anyone, it felt right that it was Otto and Pip.

“The first story,” she said, trying to remember. “The first story is about a kingdom, long ago.” She turned the pages. There was the title, and beneath it the black-and-white drawing of a castle, overgrown with vines and thorns, vultures circling overhead. She took a deep breath, and, her mother’s voice echoing in her mind, began to read.