AFTER WHAT HAPPENED in the attic that night, Olive was sure she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She lay down in her bed and rolled herself up in the covers like silverware inside a napkin, and waited for sleep not to come. But then, suddenly, she was opening her eyes and her bedroom was sparkling with morning sun and the smell of breakfast was drifting up from downstairs. She was sure she would never be able to eat again either, but as it turned out, she managed to put away four muffins and a massive glass of orange juice before she even realized that she was hungry. And maybe it was the sleep, or maybe it was the fortification of muffins, but Olive began to feel more and more steely as the morning went on.
Once she had finished helping dry the breakfast dishes and Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody were happily settled at the table with fresh coffee and giant stacks of quizzes to correct, Olive hurried back up the stairs, put on the spectacles, and climbed into the painting of Linden Street.
She tore up the misty hill, toward a small white blotch on Morton’s porch. As she raced closer, the blotch clarified into Morton himself. He was seated on the floor with the folds of his white nightshirt pooled around him, sorting through the pieces of the gigantic jigsaw puzzle Olive had brought.
“Morton!” she gasped. “Morton, I need to talk to you.”
“Found another edge piece,” said Morton, still sorting through the puzzle box. He glanced at her out of the corner of his eyes. “Is it about that other boy again?”
“No,” said Olive emphatically. “It’s not about…him.” Olive dropped onto the porch steps, pressing her hand to the cramp in her side, where some muffins seemed to be reassembling themselves. “It’s about this house. And the McMartins. And Horatio. And it’s important.”
Morton dropped his handful of puzzle pieces. “Important?” he repeated doubtfully.
“Yes.” Olive leaned forward, bringing her face close to Morton’s. “Something terrible has happened to Horatio. Somehow…he’s been turned into paint.”
“That’s part of the problem. I don’t know how. Maybe he got stuck in Elsewhere too long, just like you, and he—”
But Morton was already shaking his head. His tufts of white hair fluttered in agreement. “The cats stayed here with me lots of times. Like the night when Lucinda was…” He trailed off, leaving the sentence unfinished. “They stayed for a long time. And they didn’t change.” He looked back at Olive, and his face took on an explain-y, teacher-y expression. “They’re not really alive, you know.”
“I know,” said Olive, with a shade of irritation.
“Look,” Morton went on, lifting a puzzle piece and waving it in front of Olive’s nose. “Not alive,” he said slowly. “Not turning into paint. And the papers you brought for me to put together. They weren’t alive. They didn’t turn into paint.”
“Right,” said Olive. “So…he can’t be the same Horatio.” There was a panicky catch in her chest as she realized what else this would mean. The real Horatio—the one she knew and trusted and needed—was gone. “But where did the real one go?”
“Well,” drawled Morton, still sounding like he was talking to a kindergartener and enjoying it very much, “where’s the last place you saw him acting like the normal Horatio?”
Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody often used this sort of questioning with Olive. Well, where’s the last place you saw your retainer? Did you have it in your mouth when you woke up? Was it there before you went to bed? How did it end up behind the frozen peas? Now her brain clicked backward through its collection of Horatio memories: His strange behavior in the attic last night, as he tried to avoid the flashlight’s beam. His silhouette gliding past Olive’s bedroom door after she’d been woken by the recurrent bumps and creaks. His green eyes tilting up toward the painting of the craggy hill, where she’d surprised him one afternoon. His cold claw, stuck to the cuff of her blue jeans as she fell back through the frame around the very same painting…
Olive sucked in a breath. “I’m going to come back here tonight,” she said slowly. “I think from inside this frame I might be able to see what I’ve been missing.” She turned back to Morton. “And, if you wouldn’t mind—I’d like your help.”
Morton’s smile threatened to reach all the way to his ears.
Never in her life had Olive been more impatient for a Saturday to end. She and Mr. Dunwoody raked the backyard, where a thick quilt of maple leaves was already smothering the neatly refilled hole behind the garden. She decorated three rocks with fingernail polish. She even got all of her homework done, with an entire half of the weekend left to go. And still, the evening moved about as quickly as a snail stuck to a wad of chewed bubble gum. After dinner and a seemingly endless game of Forty-two, Olive said good night to her parents and charged up the stairs to her bedroom, where she changed into a black T-shirt and a pair of dark flannel pajama pants. Then she lay down in bed with a book to wait.
After what felt like hours, she heard her parents’ footsteps creaking up the staircase. Their bedroom door clicked shut. Olive listened to the roar of blood pounding through her body as several more minutes ticked by. Then, just when she was about to slide out of bed, there was a tiny squeak from her own bedroom door.
Olive froze. A slit of moonlight, no wider than a finger, fell across her bed. Olive lay perfectly still, pretending to be asleep. The slit of moonlight disappeared. A minute later, she heard a soft creak somewhere in the distance. When the house had sunk back into silence, she slipped into the hallway, closed her bedroom door behind her, and dove into the painting of Linden Street.
This time, Morton was waiting for her. When Olive landed with a flump on the dewy ground, his round head popped up just a few yards away, the tufts of his pale hair mingling with the long green grass.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Fine,” whispered Olive. She turned back to peer through the picture frame, but whatever had made the creaking sounds had already disappeared again.
“I wasn’t sure when you’d be back, so I just decided to wait here,” he told her.
“Thanks.” Olive knelt next to Morton in the grass, sending up a swirl of mist that clung stubbornly around her.
“So, what are we watching for?” asked Morton.
Olive hopped up again and beckoned Morton to the picture frame. He stood on his toes to look over its edge. “See how you can look all the way down the hall from here?” Olive asked. Morton nodded. “I think something funny has been going on with that painting—that very last one, down there by the door to the pink room.” She pointed. Morton craned to follow her finger. “But I can’t see that picture from the door of my own room.” Olive sighed, blinking through the frame. “I just hope whatever it is happens again before I have to get back out of here.”
For a while, they both stood at the picture frame, gazing over its edge. The hallway was black and still. Even the beams of moonlight on the carpet were motionless. After several silent minutes of watching, they decided to play Twenty Questions, but Morton was jumpy and distracted, and Olive kept seeing imaginary intruders darting down the hallway from the corner of her eye. Olive’s toes were just starting to feel prickly and numb and Morton was saying “You already asked if it was bigger than a breadbox” for the fifth or sixth time, when, at the far end of the hall, a shadow shifted.
“Look!” whispered Olive. She and Morton huddled below the frame, letting just their eyes peep over its corners.
From the darkness of the pink bedroom, a smaller blot of darkness emerged. It stepped into the hall, where the moonlight from the house’s front windows snipped and stretched its shadow. And casting that long black shadow was a cat.
“Is that Horatio?” breathed Morton.
“Sort of,” Olive breathed back.
Behind Horatio glided another blot of darkness. This one was tall and thin, and it cast a shadow so long that it reached almost to the frame where Olive and Morton were crouching. Olive squinted at it, trying to get a closer look without letting herself be seen. The shadow moved along the hall, passing briefly through a blue beam of moonlight. In that instant, Olive made out the tall, lean shape of a man’s body—a man with long, wavy hair and ragged clothes; a man with features that looked as though they could have been carved out of wood. The man was carrying two bags. One bag was small, and had short handles that looped over his left arm. The other was a large cloth sack, kind of like a pillowcase with a drawstring. And something inside of the sack was moving.
The sack made a muffled whimpering sound—a sound Olive had heard at least once before. The man gave the sack a sharp shake. The whimpering stopped. He paused before the painting of the craggy hill, and, as Olive stared, barely able to breathe, he reached into the drawstring sack. With his arm still inside it, he climbed into the picture frame, hauling both bags with him.
Horatio sat on the hallway carpet, watching the man disappear. Then the cat got to his feet and trotted along the hall, past the frame of Linden Street, and down the staircase into the darkness.
Morton turned, wide-eyed, to Olive. “Who is that? How did he—”
“Morton, I’m not sure what’s going on yet, but I need you to follow Horatio. Try to keep him away from the painting that man climbed into. Keep him away from the whole upstairs, if you can. Will you do that?”
Morton nodded.
Olive grabbed him by the hand, and they climbed one after the other through the frame into the upstairs hallway.
“Be careful,” Olive whispered.
“You be careful,” Morton whispered back. Giving her one last anxious glance, he hurried down the stairs.
Olive rushed along the hall, made sure the spectacles’ ribbon was secure around her neck, and hoisted herself as soundlessly as she could into the painting of the craggy hill to follow the shadowy man.