SOMETHING SMALL BUT insistent poked at Olive’s shoulder. Even through a thick layer of sleep, she could feel it jabbing her arm again and again, as though there were an elevator button on her pajama sleeve. Groggily, Olive shifted beneath the blankets, smooshing her face into Hershel’s fuzzy side.
The small, insistent thing kept poking.
“Olive,” whispered a voice.
Olive jerked her shoulder away.
The poking shifted to her face. “Olive,” the voice whispered again. The small, insistent thing poked her cheek. Poke, poke, poke. “Olive.”
Olive finally managed to raise her rusty eyelids. She gazed out into the darkened room. From somewhere amid the folds of her blankets, a pair of vivid green eyes stared back at her.
“Good,” said a voice with a faint British accent. “You’re awake.”
“Well, I am now, Harvey,” said Olive rather grumpily. “You woke me.”
“Shh,” whispered the cat. “Someone may be listening. Don’t reveal my identity. Call me Agent 1-800.”
“What happened to Sir Lancelot?” asked Olive.
“Who?”
“Never mind.” Olive closed her eyes again.
Harvey’s paw gave her cheek another insistent poke. “I have top-secret, high-importance, vital-organ, rush-delivery information,” he hissed.
“Vital organ?” Olive repeated.
“It concerns Agent M. Aka Sir Pillowcase.”
“You mean Morton,” said Olive, eyes still closed.
“Shh!” Harvey hissed again. “Agent M.”
“What about him?”
Harvey lowered himself toward Olive’s face until his nose was nearly touching hers. Olive could feel the wisps of his whiskers against her skin. “Agent M is plotting an escape.”
Olive’s eyes popped open. “But—he can’t escape. He can’t get out of Elsewhere. Not on his own.”
Harvey stalled for a moment, kneading Olive’s stomach as he rocked from paw to paw. “Reluctant as I am to inform against a fellow agent,” said the cat at last, “I am afraid…he tried to bribe me.”
“Huh?”
Harvey lowered his voice to a whisper. “He offered to be The Guy That Dies.”
“The…who?” said Olive, wondering if she’d fallen asleep again.
“The Guy That Dies,” Harvey repeated. “In any situation we might enact: any duel, any joust, any cannonball volley, I would be the victor, and he would be The Guy That Dies. Meliagaunce to my Lancelot. The Sheriff of Nottingham to my Robin Hood. The good guys to my Captain Blackpaw!”
“Oh.”
Harvey tilted his head to one side. “I must admit that I was tempted.”
“You didn’t say yes, did you?”
Harvey stiffened. “Of course not. I am loyal to our cause.”
“Then everything’s fine.”
“I’m afraid not,” said Harvey with another poke as Olive tried to close her eyes again. “Agent M is growing desperate. He’ll take any opportunity—however dangerous—to get out.”
Olive heaved a sigh. “I guess I should go talk to him.”
“A wise decision,” said Harvey. With an action-hero flip, he leaped off of the bed and slunk toward the door. “Situation comprehensive,” Olive heard him mutter into his imaginary transistor wristwatch. “Sleeper cell has been informed. Now heading to the head of headquarters.” A moment later, there came a low creak from the door, and Agent 1-800 was gone.
Olive swung her legs out of bed and jumped to the floor, landing as far away from the bed as she could. She double-checked the hallway for portraits and parents before creeping out of her room, putting on the spectacles, and hauling herself through the frame around the painting of Linden Street.
The moment her feet touched the painting’s misty ground, something smacked her in the side with a thwump. Olive flailed backward, hitting her head on a corner of the picture frame that dangled in midair behind her and flopping flat on her back in the grass. Something in a white nightshirt landed on top of her.
“MORTON!” Olive choked, once she could manage to breathe again. “What are you doing?”
“Tackling you,” said Morton, as though this should have been obvious. He rolled off of Olive and glowered at her from the grass. “I aimed for the picture frame, so we’d both fall back out. But you’re too heavy.”
Olive bristled. “Maybe you’re too short.”
Morton jumped up, standing as tall as his three and a half feet would allow. “Maybe you’re too STUPID.”
Olive took a deep breath and counted to five. On the crest of the misty hill before her, a few lights in the painted houses twinkled faintly.
“Morton,” she said, trying to push her voice down into a calm, steady line, “we’ve already talked about why you have to stay Elsewhere. You’re paint. People would find out about you, and they’d probably put you in a museum or something. And then they’d learn the truth about this house, and they’d either destroy everything or take it all away to study it, and then we would never find out what happened to your parents.”
Morton’s round, pale face seemed to soften. Olive was sure he was seeing the logic of her words. Then he said, “You should give me the spectacles.”
Olive’s hands flew up, grabbing the spectacle frames. “No way!”
“Why should you get to have them? I could use them. It’s my parents we’re looking for. Besides, you’ve got the cats. They can take you in and out any time you want. You’re just”—Morton stopped, momentarily befuddled—“a spectacle hog.”
“I am not.”
“Spectacle hog! Spectacle hog! Olive is a spectacle hog!” Morton chanted, hopping backward up the misty hill.
“Stop that!” Olive commanded.
“Oink, oink, oink,” taunted Morton, before turning and bolting for the street.
Olive chased after him. “Come back here!” she shouted, starting to smile in spite of herself.
Morton’s oinks turned to giggles as he led Olive in a looping, zigzagging path up the hill toward Linden Street, his baggy white nightshirt whipping around his legs. Finally, on the edge of a neighbor’s foggy lawn, Olive caught him by the elbow, and they both sprawled face-first into the dewy grass, sending up a puff of mist that hovered above them like an impatient cloud.
Olive sat up, laughing. She began to brush the grass off of her pajamas, but each blade had already flown back to its place on the ground, mending and straightening itself. A moment later, Morton sat up too, still giggling. “Oink, oink,” he managed, between laughs.
Gradually, Morton’s chuckles faded. Olive’s panting quieted. Soon the silence of Linden Street surrounded them again, as thick as the mist in the painted air.
The dark houses of a hundred years ago stood before them and behind them, quietly waiting. With their deserted porches and motionless curtains, their quiet rooms and closed doors, they had the air of houses where every inhabitant is fast asleep. Most of the houses were empty, as Olive knew. But here and there, other painted people—others who had been trapped, like Morton—waited inside those curtained windows, staring out into the street even now, watching Olive and Morton, the only things that moved. Nothing else ever changed here. It would be dusk on this misty spring evening for decades—maybe centuries—to come.
“Today was my very first day of junior high,” said Olive, after a few quiet minutes had slipped by. “I don’t think it could have been any worse if I had accidentally lit the building on fire. Actually, that would have made it better. Because then at least we’d have been sent home early.” Olive watched a wisp of mist settle back into place when she shifted her foot. “The kids were mean, the classes were hard, and I wore pajama pants by mistake. And then, when I got home, I found out that somebody had tried to get into the house to steal things. Again. Oh, yeah—and an angry witch who can’t really die is after me, and she’s already tried to drown me and light me on fire, so she’s probably coming up with something even worse to do to me the next time she gets the chance.”
Morton’s tufty head turned away. “I wish I got to go to school,” he said.
Olive looked down at the curve of Morton’s skinny back. A lump of sadness slid down through her rib cage, coming to rest right on top of her heart. “I’m looking for a way to help you, Morton,” she said. “And I am going to find your parents. I promised.”
“I’m tired of waiting,” said Morton into his folded arms. “I’ve been waiting and waiting, and nothing’s happened.”
“That’s not true,” Olive protested. “We found your sister.”
Morton’s wide blue eyes swiveled back toward Olive’s. She could practically read the words And look how well that turned out printed across his pupils.
Morton turned away again. When he spoke, he appeared to be addressing his knees, which formed two small white hills underneath his nightshirt. “I know you think it’s a bad idea,” he said. “And I know you won’t ever let me have the spectacles. But I’m going to find another way to get out of here. You can’t stop me.”
Olive tugged on the ribbon that tied the spectacles around her neck, making sure that the knots were tight. “What if we made a deal,” she said slowly. “What if you promised not to try to run away, or to trick the cats, or to sneak out of Elsewhere, for the next…” Olive paused, counting “…four months. If I don’t find your parents before that, then you can use the spectacles. For a while. But you have to give them back.”
Morton squinted, tilting his tufty head to one side. “Two months,” he said.
Olive huffed an indignant breath through her nose. “Three.”
“Deal.” Morton put out his hand. Olive took it, feeling surprised yet again by the strange, slick warmth of his not-quite-real skin. Then she slumped forward, leaning her head against her knees. “Just what I need,” she muttered. “More pressure. On top of sixth grade, and this house, and Annabelle, now I have a deadline.”
“I wish I had something extra to worry about,” said Morton. He flopped down on his back. “I just want to do something different. Everything here stays the same.” He pulled up a blade of grass and lowered it gently back toward the ground, watching its roots wriggle gratefully into place.
Something different. The words took hold in Olive’s mind like the roots of the painted grass. Morton needed something different. Something that would absorb him, and challenge him, and make him feel necessary. He needed a whole obstacle course, or a neighborhood-sized scavenger hunt, or some gigantic five-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle—
Olive jumped to her feet. “Be right back!” she shouted, already racing down the hill.
Moments later, she was in her own bedroom, rooting among the dust bunnies under the bed. Her hand touched something soft and ruffly, and then something crumbly and dry (which explained where the graham crackers she’d been eating in bed last week had gone), and then something that felt like cotton but was hard and round inside.
With the T-shirt full of torn papers and several rolls of tape from her art supply drawer, Olive slipped back into the hall. Moonbeams from the windows split her shadow into pieces that clustered around her feet like petals around a stem. For an instant, Olive would have sworn that she wasn’t alone…that someone else was tangled in the darkness of that silent hallway.
She stopped, one hand on the picture frame. Her eyes flickered over the nearby paintings: The forest, the silvery lake, the tiny church on its craggy hill. Nothing moved. There was no sound. But Olive got the feeling that the shield around her new secret was already wearing thin. She had to work fast. It wouldn’t be long before someone—whether it was a friend or an enemy—found the way in.