Twenty-Six
Eleanor’s mother looked shocked. And then she laughed. It was a low, rolling sound. Her image slipped and slid and ran, like raindrops bending the view through a window.
Mr. January produced his cane out of thin air and twirled it. The top of the cane was a two-headed silver dragon, the heads facing in opposite directions. He planted it in the dirt in front of him and leaned forward. “Again you exceed expectations,” he said. He sounded different now. Less jovial, more sharp. “Eleanor Barton. Daughter of a hedgewitch and a man who’s far too much trouble for his own health. It’s going to catch up with him, and it’s going to catch up with you as well one of these days. And perhaps that day is today.”
“Try anything and I’ll—” Pip said, balling up her fists, but he raised a placating hand.
“Now, now. That isn’t how this works, young Philippa. I’m not a man of violence, though on occasion my pets fill that role for me. I am a man of agreements and rules, and these rules were set long before you were born. The Society has failed to fulfill their agreement, and they will suffer the consequences. But their agreement and our rules are different beasts.”
As if on cue, his sisters stepped out from among the trees. Still distant, still facing away, but Eleanor could feel them watching.
“The Society needs to have pushed you through the door themselves; I myself don’t much care how you get here. However. However.” He held up a finger. “We cannot technically stop you from leaving. Not until midnight. So: find your way out, and we’ll leave you be.”
“Forever?” Eleanor asked.
“Curious creature,” one of the sisters whispered, in a voice like dried leaves skittering over concrete.
“Full of questions,” said the other, in a voice like branches scraping together in the wind.
Mr. January merely shrugged. “A key’s no good if it won’t fit the lock, and after tonight you’ll be all the wrong shapes. I’m not saying I won’t find some other use for you three, but for now—for now, I’d have no reason to trouble you.” He drew a pocket watch from his vest pocket and frowned at it. “I would estimate you have . . . a quarter hour.”
“But it’s only been a few minutes,” Otto protested.
“The gray devours all sorts of things. Time being only one of them,” Mr. January said. “Children being another.” He grinned a wolfish grin. His lips stretched just a little bit too far, and there was something not quite right about his mouth. It seemed to go on too far, too deep.
One of the sisters sighed. “Now he’s playing with his food,” she whispered. Her head tipped toward her sister, conspiratorial, but they stayed at a distance.
“Such a shame if it all fell apart at the last minute,” the other whispered.
“So like him though,” the first replied.
“We never thought this would work,” the second finished.
Mr. January’s smile looked a bit fixed.
Eleanor swallowed. She turned to the others, beckoning them in close so they could whisper to each other. Mr. January waited at a distance with an air of indulgent politeness. “Do you think he’s telling the truth?” she asked.
“I don’t know. But in fairy tales, that’s the way it works. The bad guys have to keep their word,” Pip said. Eleanor nodded. It did feel right.
“Tick, tock, children,” Mr. January said.
“We still need to destroy the keys,” Otto said. “Otherwise, we’ve only delayed him a little bit, and he’ll still come after your cousin and the other kids.”
“Even if we destroy the keys, we only slow him down,” Eleanor said slowly. “That’s what happened in the story. They destroyed the keys, but Mr. January just started over somewhere else. Started over here. I have an idea. But I need all of us to agree.” Quietly, she explained.
Pip and Otto were quiet. Pip was the first one to speak. “I’m in,” she said.
“You’re sure?” Eleanor asked. “Because there’s no backing out.”
“I’m sure,” Pip said, and if her voice wavered, her fierce gaze didn’t.
“Me too,” Otto said. “For the kids after us and everyone else.”
“Then give me the keys,” Eleanor said. They handed them over silently, and she cupped them in her hands. Twelve keys, and they would make thirteen, and Mr. January would open that door to whatever horror lay on the other side. But maybe not. Maybe they could be strong enough and clever enough and brave enough to stop it for good.
“You’re certainly never going to get out if you don’t even try,” Mr. January said, sounding both delighted and disappointed, as if he’d hoped for more of a show.
Ask the right questions, Eleanor thought. Maybe we were just asking the wrong person. Eleanor took a deep breath. “What makes us the right shape?” she asked. “Is it because we’re thirteen, or is it because of the bargain?”
“Now that’s a clever question,” Mr. January said. “Thirteen matters because the bargain makes it matter.”
“Then could a new bargain change things? Make the keys something else?”
“Hm. Change entirely, no. Bend a bit, maybe,” Mr. January said. “What are you suggesting?”
“We have the keys,” Eleanor said. “And if you could just take them from us, you would have done it by now.” His jaw went tight. She thought she must be right. “If we destroy them, you have to start over completely. And it’s taken you more than a hundred years to get this far.”
“Much more,” one of Mr. January’s sisters said, and the other one laughed. His jaw got even tighter.
“So what if we made a new bargain?” Eleanor asked. “We give you the keys now. And you give us a year. If we can’t find a way to beat you in a year, we’ll go through the door willingly. What would that be worth?”
“Willingly?” Mr. January asked. His eyes lit up, like there were candlewicks burning just behind them. “Oh, that would be worth quite a lot. Yes, enough and more than enough.” He licked his lips. The tip of his tongue was a deep, bruised purple.
“But if we do beat you, you have to stop. You never get to try to open the door again,” Eleanor said. “You have to give your word. You and your sisters.”
His sisters hissed in displeasure, but he grinned wider. “Ah. But that is another bargain entirely. For my sisters have their own seasons, as this is mine, and their own means of mischief. Bring them into it, and you’ll have to contend with them as well, and not only on All Hallows’ Eve.”
“If we catch you, we get to keep you,” one of the sisters said. She turned. Her face was long and thin and hungry.
“And we are very good at hunting,” the other sister said, turning as well. Her face was shorter, rounder, blunt and rageful.
Eleanor swallowed. “We understand,” she said.
“Then you have a deal,” Mr. January said with a twirl of his cane. “I will see you in one year.”
“If we don’t get them first,” one of his sisters hissed.
“And no helping them, just to spoil our fun,” the other sister said.
“I would never risk the cause in such a manner. And I’ll expect the same from you,” he admonished them.
The women laughed, and in unison, they each stepped behind a tree—and vanished. Mr. January gave the children a steady look.
“You may regret opening yourselves up to their predations,” he said. “My sisters make me look like quite the tamed tiger, I assure you. But it’s too late now. You’re up against all of us. But I do rather hope you outwit them, and we see each other again next year. Ah, but midnight approaches, and you’ll be needing . . .”
He snapped his fingers and pointed behind them.
Eleanor didn’t like turning her back on Mr. January, but she forced herself to look. A door had appeared behind them—not the huge, ornate door, but the one they had stumbled through in the field. The door to Eden Eld.
“Now. The keys,” Mr. January said, holding out his hand.
Eleanor approached. She laid the keys across his palm, and as they struck his skin, they vanished.
“One year,” he reminded them. And he touched a finger to his brow, and stepped back, and back again, and faded as he did, until there was nothing but the gray, the trees, and the distant sound of rattling wings.
A clock began to chime. The clock from the hall in Ashford House.
“Hurry!” Pip yelled, and she ran for the door, Eleanor and Otto right behind her. Pip wrenched it open.
The meadow lay beyond. Just as gray as the woods, but unmistakably the place they had left. The January Society were scattered around, some of them holding themselves gingerly like they’d been hurt, some of them sitting on the ground. Mr. Wells had a big cut on one cheek, and even Ms. Foster looked rumpled and dejected.
The clock kept chiming—and the Academy clock chimed, too, and in the distance the tower clock was counting out the hour as well, the three of them making the air reverberate. Three. Four. Five.
“Before it hits twelve!” Eleanor yelled, and they plunged through.
One of the January Society members yelled in alarm and delight as they stumbled out. Eleanor took off running. Otto and Pip ran with her, a half dozen Society members on their tails.
“This is your fault, Philippa Foster!” Ms. Foster yelled. “I had everything perfectly organized! I had spreadsheets! They were color-coded! It was going to be perfect until you ruined it!” Her hand snagged Pip’s arm and yanked, pulling her around to face her. Mr. Wells caught Otto by the shirt, and Great-Aunt Prudence caught Eleanor by the wrist, pulling her up short.
Ms. Foster panted. She wavered on her feet, but her grip looked tight as iron. “I am going to shove you through that door myself, young lady,” she snarled.
Pip glared up at her defiantly. “No, you aren’t. You’re out of time,” she said.
Eleven. Twelve.
The clock was done ringing.
The door in the middle of the meadow slammed shut.
Somewhere up in the sky, the rattlebird screamed; off in the forest came a baleful howling.
“No,” Ms. Foster whispered. “No. Not once in over a hundred years—it won’t be my fault, I won’t be the one that—”
But whatever else she was going to say, they never heard it. Color rushed back into the world all at once—and the January Society rushed out of it. Between the space of one breath and the next, they turned see-through like tissue paper, and then clear like glass, and then, with no sound but a soft whisper of air, they were gone.
The pressure on Eleanor’s wrist vanished, and she rubbed the skin where the woman’s hand had gripped. The skin was white in the imprint of long fingers, but the color was already coming back. The pain lingered longer, but that would fade, too, and there’d be no sign left that the Society had been here at all.
Pip was staring at the air where her mother had been a moment before. Then she gave a quick nod, sniffed heavily, wiped her hand across her eyes, and wheeled to face the other two.
“We did it,” she said. “We’re alive. We survived. We won. Everything else gets to wait until morning.”
Eleanor nodded. So did Otto. They took Pip’s hands, one on either side of her, and limped their way out of the meadow.
They had won.
Maybe all they’d won was another year—but they’d done it. And Pip was right.
The rest would wait.
THEY DECIDED TO go to Pip’s house. They were all exhausted and starving, and more than a little banged up, and it was the closest safe place—safe, now that her mother and the rest of the January Society were gone.
They made their way up the road, past the place where Eleanor and Pip had crouched as the car prowled by. Eleanor couldn’t believe that this was only the next night. In the distance, fireworks went off, spattering against the sky. The Halloween celebration in the square, still going.
“If anyone noticed we were gone, we can say we snuck out to see the festival,” Otto said.
“No one noticed, Otto,” Pip said bitterly. “That’s how they’ve gotten away with this for so long. No one noticed at all.”
She shoved her key in the front door and pushed it open angrily.
A man was standing in the hallway, his hair silvery and his nose long and mournful. He was wearing a trench coat, hastily tied shut over pajamas, and he was in the process of putting on his hat, but he seemed to have gotten stuck just shy of actually managing it. He blinked at the three of them.
“Oh,” he said. “Hello there. You’re out a bit late, aren’t you?”
“Dad,” Pip said, stepping forward. “What are you doing?”
He lowered his hat. His fingertips mashed the brim, turning it around and around in his hands. “That’s a funny thing,” he said. “I have been trying to get out the door, but I keep forgetting why I’m doing it. I get my coat and I get my hat, and then I’m hanging them up again with no notion of why I wanted them in the first place. Except that . . . well. Except that I had the sense that I had lost something, and I had to go and find it.”
Pip made a soft little sound in the back of her throat. “What did you lose?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” He frowned down at his hat. “But it was something very, very important. But it’s all right. I don’t feel as if I’ve lost something anymore. I feel quite all right now.” And then, in complete contradiction of these words, he burst into tears.
“Dad?” Pip said, stepping forward cautiously.
He grabbed her. Eleanor stiffened and lunged, but he only crushed Pip against him in an enveloping hug, kissing the top of her head again and again. His knees shook, and he sank to the floor with her, holding her against him as they both cried.
Eleanor looked away. So did Otto. They stepped outside, back into the brisk night air, and stood looking up at the cloud-strewn sky.
It was a few minutes before Pip stepped out, scrubbing her red-rimmed eyes dry with her palms. “Hey,” she said.
“I guess your dad noticed after all,” Otto said.
Pip grinned, the fiercest and wildest grin Eleanor had ever seen on her. “I guess so,” she said.
Her father poked his head out the front door. His eyes widened when he saw the two of them. “Oh! You’re still here,” he said. “I’d quite forgotten. Do you need a ride home, kids?”
“That would be great,” Otto said with feeling. “All I want to do is sleep in my own bed.”
“Me too,” Eleanor said, surprised to find that when she thought of the bed in Ashford House she thought of it as hers.
“I’ll get my keys and my coat, then,” Pip’s father said. Then he glanced down. “I seem to already have my coat. Keys, though. Back in a jiff.” He vanished inside.
“Is he okay? He seems kind of . . . vague,” Eleanor said. “Is he still not noticing?”
“No, he’s always like that,” Pip assured her, laughing. “Everything’s okay.”
Eleanor’s mind supplied a hundred reasons why that wasn’t true. Her mother was still missing. Mr. January and the People Who Look Away would come back. Their plan hadn’t been stopped, it had just been delayed. And they still didn’t know what happened now that the agreement had been broken. But she nodded. “Everything’s okay,” she echoed.
“Everything’s okay,” Otto said as well.
For tonight, let it be true.