SOMETIME AFTER MIDNIGHT, when the rest of the house was asleep, Olive woke from a bad dream about a huge chessboard where all the pieces were carved out of purple crayons. The shadows of the ash tree’s branches rippled and unfurled across her ceiling. One twig tapped softly at her window. At first, Olive wondered if this sound had woken her. But as she lay there, listening, she heard another sound.
It sounded like a voice. But it wasn’t her mother’s voice, or her father’s voice. It was a voice that she couldn’t quite place.
Olive slipped both legs out of bed and pushed back the covers with as little crinkling as she could manage. Holding her breath, she leaped off of the mattress and tiptoed toward her bedroom door. The hinges gave a creak as she pulled it open. Olive moved the door as slowly as she could, forming a gap just big enough for her to peep through.
The hallway angled away from her in two directions. One branch led to the staircase, and beyond that, to her parents’ closed bedroom door. The other dwindled off toward the lavender, blue, and pink bedrooms, where Olive couldn’t see. Faint silver moonlight glanced off of the banisters, turning the staircase railing into a cage of shadows. The picture frames glimmered like treasure sunk to the ocean floor.
The sound had seemed to come from her left, inside one of the empty guest rooms. There was a dull creak from the floorboards as someone moved out into the hallway. Olive couldn’t have seen whoever that someone was without sticking her whole head through the door, so instead, she stayed frozen in place, watching and listening with every nerve in her body. Again, she thought she heard the murmur of a low voice, but she couldn’t make out the words.
There was a soft whimper. “Shh,” someone hissed.
Olive wished that she could press a pause button on her heart. Its pounding in her ears had grown so loud that very little could squeeze past it. Nevertheless, she managed to catch a muffled thump and a creak, as though someone had jumped on the old floorboards. And then everything was still.
Olive stood as if she were frozen, with both hands clutching the doorknob and one wide eye staring through the gap. She stood there for so long, hearing nothing, that she almost managed to convince herself that she had imagined it all. Perhaps what she’d heard had been the house settling, or the TV from her parents’ room. This house had ways of tricking you, as Olive knew—of sending sounds echoing through empty rooms until you couldn’t tell what had come from where, what was nearby and what was far away, what was real and what was only the trick of your own fear.
But then, as Olive watched, a shadow slipped silently into view. It was stretched and blurred, as moon-shadows are, but it was clearly the shadow of a cat. It darkened as the cat came closer. Its black outline could have belonged to anyone—to any cat, that is—but, as Olive waited, one very specific cat’s head appeared.
Its orange fur was washed by the moonlight. Its luxuriant whiskers glinted. It trotted nearer, and soon Olive could make out its tufted paws, its sleek coat, and its long, twitching tail, as big around as a baseball bat.
Horatio.
The cat padded soundlessly past her open door. He turned at the staircase, vanishing down the steps into the darkness.
It took a few minutes before Olive’s heart and lungs remembered how to work normally again. We didn’t see anything strange, Olive reminded them. It isn’t unusual for Horatio to be patrolling the house at night. Maybe he was talking to Harvey, or to someone in a painting, or to himself. Maybe no one was talking at all.
Gently, Olive closed her bedroom door, checked under her bed, and climbed back between the covers. Then she pulled the blankets up to her chin and tried to figure out why she’d felt compelled to hide from Horatio, her friend…and why the sight of him slipping along the dark hall had filled her with a strange, low thrum of terror.