OLIVE LET HER heavy book bag thud to the floor of the entryway. The thud echoed away through the old stone house, threading like an unanswered voice through the empty rooms. “I’m home,” she called, very softly. The walls seemed to lean in around her. Whether they were welcoming her or watching her, Olive wasn’t quite sure.
On the first floor, everything was as it should have been. The paintings hung in their places and the furnishings stood in their usual spots. No one with strangely streaked, shiny skin waited on the dusty velvet couch in the library. No one sat tapping her chilly fingers on the heavy wooden table in the dining room. No one with painted gold-brown eyes whispered Olive’s name from a darkened doorway.
Olive finished her survey in the kitchen, where a note in her mother’s handwriting hung on the refrigerator door. “We hope you had a wonderful first day at school, dear,” it read. “We’ll be back between 5:34 and 5:39, depending on the usual variables.” Olive scanned the kitchen. There was no sign of Annabelle there, either. In fact, it was hard to imagine Annabelle in a kitchen at all, with her pearls and lace amid the Tupperware and dish soap. But this had once been Annabelle’s kitchen. She had probably stood in the very spot where Olive was standing now. She’d sat everywhere that Olive sat, bathed in the tub where Olive bathed. The thought sent a swarm of invisible spiders skittering down Olive’s arms.
Shaking the spiders away, Olive darted for the basement door. An icy waft of air swirled around her ankles as she yanked it open. She had acclimated to almost all the oddities of the old stone house—the creaks and groans it made at night, the cobwebby corners, the low ceiling edges that seemed designed to bash people on the skull—but she hadn’t quite gotten used to the basement. Olive stood in the doorway for a moment, gazing down the rickety wooden stairs into the darkness and pulling her courage tight around her. Then, with a deep breath, she rushed down the steps.
“Leopold?” she called, swatting for the lightbulb chain.
“At your service, miss,” said a gravelly voice.
Olive found the light at last, and a dusty glow flooded the basement. It flickered on swathes of hanging cobwebs, drew shadows between the gravestones in the walls, and glinted in a pair of bright green eyes that looked up at Olive from the darkest corner of all.
Leopold sat at attention in his usual station, his sleek black chest puffed up so high that it nearly eclipsed his chin. Olive dropped to her knees in front of the gigantic cat. Between them, the outline of a trapdoor made a deep slash in the floor.
“How was your first day of school, miss?” Leopold asked.
Olive sighed and rubbed her chilly arms. She glanced around at the crumbling stone walls, skimming the carved names of the McMartin ancestors, and suddenly realized that she would rather be in a cold, dark basement built out of ancient gravestones than in a junior high classroom. “I’m glad to be home,” she answered.
Leopold gave a nod. “They say there’s no place like it.”
“No, there isn’t,” said Olive emphatically. “Did anything happen while I was gone?”
“Negative, miss. Nothing to report.”
“And the tunnel…?” Olive asked, nodding toward the trapdoor.
“Good. Thank you, Leopold.” Olive stood up, brushing the grit from the seat of her pants and wondering why her behind felt so ruffly. The relief of being home at last had shooed the flock of pink penguins right out of her mind. Now they waddled rapidly back. “I’d better go check the rest of the house,” she mumbled, scurrying sideways toward the basement steps to keep the ruffly area out of Leopold’s sight.
Olive skidded along the hall, zoomed around the newel post, and thundered up the stairs to the second floor. She checked each painting as she ran, but the silvery lake, the moonlit forest, and the painted version of Linden Street looked just as they’d looked a hundred times before.
After changing into a pair of jeans and stuffing the pink penguin pajama bottoms under her bed as far as they would go, Olive searched the upstairs hall. She looked into the empty bathroom, the empty blue bedroom, and the empty lavender bedroom, which felt the emptiest of all. Annabelle’s portrait—without Annabelle in it—still hung there, above the chest of drawers. As Olive stared into the deserted frame, she could almost see Annabelle’s face surfacing within it, with its cold eyes and tiny, unchanging smile…like something long dead rising up from the bottom of a pool of dark water.
Olive ran the rest of the way down the hall.
She rushed past the painting of a bowl of strange fruit, the painting of a church on a high, craggy hill, and—
She stopped abruptly, backing up to stare hard at the hill again.
Olive had never climbed into this particular painting. There were no people to be seen inside of it, and at first glance, there wasn’t much else to see either.
But today, the painting had moved. Out of the corner of her eye, she had seen the leafy bracken on the hillside ripple with a gust of wind.
Olive studied the painting. It wasn’t moving anymore.
In any other house, paintings that moved would have seemed surprising, to say the least. But that wasn’t what surprised Olive. It was the fact that the painting had moved when she wasn’t wearing the spectacles.
Keeping two watchful eyes on the canvas, Olive placed the spectacles on her nose. Before she’d even lowered her hand again, a flock of birds surged out of the brush on the painted hillside and rose into the sky, their wings flashing, their hundreds of bodies swooping and swirling like a single living thing. Olive let out a delighted little gasp.
This wasn’t the first time she had seen things move inside of Elsewhere when she wasn’t wearing the spectacles. Morton, Baltus the dog, and the glinting of Annabelle’s locket had all revealed themselves to her without the magic glasses. But these were things that had come from the real world and ended up stuck inside Elsewhere. Did this mean that the wind in this painting had come from the real world? How had Aldous McMartin managed that?
Olive hesitated, feeling curiosity—and the painting itself—tugging her closer. Come on in! the canvas seemed to call. The bracken’s fine!
But there was no time for Elsewhere exploration. Not now. And not alone. She still had the rest of the house to check, and two cats to find, and letting down her guard, even for this half minute, was probably a bad idea. Olive turned and swept the hallway with a glance. She was still alone. With a deep breath, she headed onward.
The pink bedroom waited at the end of the hall. Afternoon sun fell through its lace curtains, leaving a pattern of fuzzy golden dots on the floor. The scent of mothballs and old potpourri floated in the air. Olive positioned herself in front of the room’s single painting, a picture of an ancient town with an archway guarded by two towering stone soldiers. Even through the spectacles, this painting did not come to life. The painted trees on the distant hills didn’t sway as Olive moved closer to the painting, pressing her nose into the canvas until its surface pooled around her face like a wall made of jelly. Olive pushed her head through the painting, and then her shoulders, and then her feet, and all at once, she was on the other side. But she wasn’t in an ancient town. She was in a small, dark entryway, where a few slips of daylight outlined the shape of a heavy door.
Even though she had stood in this spot too many times to count, Olive felt a shiver race over her skin as she groped through the darkness for the doorknob. The door swung open with a low groan, and Olive scurried through it, rushing up the dusty stairs into the attic.
The attic of the old stone house looked like an antiques store that had been picked up, shaken hard, and put back down. Old chairs and cabinets and mirrors, some covered by sheets, some covered by cobwebs, were heaped against its angled walls. Stacks of paintings crowded its corners. Sagging boxes and old leather bags and locked steamer trunks towered almost to the ceiling. Rusty tools and bits of china were scattered across the floor, like dangerous confetti. And there, a little bit apart from everything else, stood Aldous McMartin’s easel.
A drop cloth covered it now, but Olive knew that the easel held Aldous’s final—unfinished—self-portrait. Bending down, she raised one corner of the cloth, the way you might lift up your shoe after stepping on a particularly large bug, and glanced at the painting beneath. On the dark canvas, Aldous’s bodiless hands gave a twitch. One long, bony finger rose, seeming to point directly at her. With a jerk, Olive let go of the cloth. She backed hurriedly away from the easel and collided with an ancient love seat, landing on her behind with a dusty whump.
On the cushions beside her, a splotchily colored cat bolted upright.
“Zee castle ees undefended!” he cried in a thick French accent, hurrying to put on his coffee can helmet by knocking it upside down and cramming his head into it. “Knights, arm yourselves!”
“It’s all right, Harvey—I mean, um…Sir Lancelot,” said Olive. “It’s only me.”
“Ah,” said Harvey. He had gotten the helmet on sideways, so that only one green eye peeped through its rectangular slit. “Bonjour, my lady,” he added tinnily.
“Hello,” said Olive, adjusting the coffee can until both of Harvey’s eyes appeared in the eyehole, just above the words Bold, Hearty Flavor! “Did you see anything suspicious today?”
“Zuspeecious?” Harvey repeated. “Non. All was quiet. Zat ees, but for one intruder ’oo attempted to surmount zee walls of my fortress. ’Ee was defeated.” Harvey nodded proudly toward the floor below, where a squished spider made an asterisk-shaped blot on the boards.
Olive moved her feet away from the blot. “But no sign of Annabelle?” she asked, watching the spider to make sure it didn’t magically regenerate. It didn’t.
“I ’ave not zeen her,” said Harvey, hopping lightly onto the back of the love seat and promenading back and forth. “She ees likely aware zat zee castle is protected by Lancelot du Lac, zee greatest knight of all!”
“That must be it,” said Olive as Harvey lost his footing and slid over the back of the love seat. There was a loud clank from the coffee can.
“Ah-HA!” roared Harvey, leaping back onto the cushions. “Booby traps!? You zink zuch tricks can defeat Lancelot?”
“I’ve got to see Horatio,” said Olive, edging away as Harvey tore into the love seat with all four claws.
Olive hustled out of the attic, back down the upstairs hall, and turned toward her parents’ bedroom.
She hardly ever went to this end of the hallway. Her parents’ room stood between a small green room that had no paintings in it, and an even smaller white room, which contained only the painting of a cranky-looking bird on a fencepost and dozens of boxes that her parents still hadn’t unpacked. After scanning both the green and the white room with the spectacles, Olive opened the door to her parents’ bedroom.
It was a large room, and in it was a very large bed. In the center of the bed, a very, very large cat appeared to be fast asleep. A beam of sunlight fell through the window directly onto the cat’s orange fur, making him glow like some sort of angelic sea anemone. Olive tiptoed closer. Unable to resist, she reached out and ran her hand over the warm, silky ends of glowing fur.
“Hello, Olive,” said Horatio, without opening his eyes.
“How did you know it was me?”
“The smell,” said Horatio, eyes still closed. “Peanut butter and sour milk.”
Olive folded her arms. “You really shouldn’t be sleeping on my parents’ bed,” she said. “You know my mother is allergic to cats.”
Horatio stretched, rearranging himself so that the sunlight covered as much of his body as possible. “Yes, that is unfortunate. But sometimes sacrifices must be made to achieve the happiness of others.”
“Hmm,” said Olive. She watched Horatio’s tail, as bushy as a feather duster, flick back and forth over the sun-warmed blankets. “I can’t believe you can sleep in the middle of the day when Annabelle is out there somewhere, trying to get back in here.”
“Perhaps I wanted you to believe I was asleep. Perhaps I wasn’t actually sleeping at all.” One of Horatio’s eyes opened, revealing a slit of sparkling green. “Annabelle McMartin is not going to charge into this house in broad daylight, Olive, especially not when she knows we’re watching for her. She’s cleverer than that.”
“Then where do you think she is, right now?”
There was a moment of silence. Then Horatio said, “Someplace dark.”
An imaginary droplet of cold water ran down the back of Olive’s neck. She turned away from Horatio and tried to focus her mind on the two paintings that hung on the bedroom wall. One was of an old wooden sailing ship on a purplish sea. The other was of a white-pillared gazebo standing in a shady garden, half enclosed by towering willow trees. A gangly man in an old-fashioned suit was seated in the gazebo, reading a book. It would be nice to hide in that gazebo with a book of her own, listening to the breeze, smelling the flowers…But Olive had more important, more unpleasant, things to do.
“I’m going to check the yard and make sure everything is safe,” she said in a brave voice, looking back at Horatio.
“Good,” said the cat. His eyes were already closed.
Olive thumped down through the house and out the back door. The garden sprawled before her in all its thorny, leafy chaos. The ancient trees that surrounded the yard seemed to be trying to cover up the mess with a blanket of shadows. Olive walked around the garden’s edge. There were no clues hidden among the strange plants, as far as she could tell. There were no footprints in the dirt near the compost pile, or lost pearls on the moss beneath the trees. Olive was beginning to feel sure that she wouldn’t find anything interesting at all, when suddenly half of her body plunged straight through the ground.
Her left leg arched behind her in an awkward ballet position, her arms shot out, grasping uselessly at the air, and her chin landed in the grass between a patch of dandelions and an anthill. Gasping for breath, Olive stared at the bustling ants. They ignored her.
By dragging herself on her elbows, Olive managed to pull her lower half out of the ground and to roll, beetle-like, back around. Her heart thumped as she pawed through the grass. Was there an old well out here, overgrown and forgotten? Had some gigantic animal dug its hole in her backyard? Olive looked warily around, but the largest animal she could see was an obese squirrel grooming itself in a nearby maple tree. She leaned over the gap in the grass.
Here, at the farthest edge of the overgrown garden, well hidden by a mat of twigs and leaves, was a hole—a hole so deep that Olive couldn’t see its bottom. Its mouth was between two and three feet wide. She ran one cautious hand around its edge. The dirt was bare, so the hole couldn’t have been here for long, and its sides were flat, like something cut by a shovel. This hole had been dug by a person…and it had been dug recently. Taking a last, sweeping glance at the yard, Olive lowered her head inside and peered down into the darkness far, far below.