Fourteen

Ben pulled up in front of the house and threw the van into park, making it lurch. “Things have been gray like this since the eclipse started. That’s also when people started going missing, and that happened.” He gestured out past the house. It was hard to tell in the perpetual dark, but as Eleanor squinted, she realized that beyond the orchard, the pine trees that surrounded Eden Eld weren’t there. There was only a solid wall of gray.

Ben waved toward the house. “It’s better inside the house. We’ll be safe in there.”

Ben ushered them all in and slammed the door shut. As soon as they crossed the threshold, their color returned. Everything inside the house looked normal, too—the house had magical protections on it that had kept the gray from encroaching every time the People Who Look Away came after them. Ben threw the locks—all nine of them, bolted along the door from top to bottom. Only then did he let out a breath and relax, his shoulders sagging.

“I think you’d better tell us what is going on here,” Eleanor said, as kindly as she could. Ben looked like he was barely holding things together.

“I should tell you? How about you tell me?” Ben said. He was a big man, and his voice was loud and wild, but somehow it all made him seem very small. “You three. You disappeared,” he said, pointing at Eleanor, Otto, and Pip. Then he looked at the hedgewitch. “And Claire? You’re dead or a criminal or something! I don’t know who the kid is, but she looks like she got lost on her way to a Renaissance festival, so she’s not really upping the normal quotient here.” He gave a manic laugh and swept his baseball cap from his head, running his hand over his hair.

“Uncle Ben, I know this is strange, but I promise it’s going to be okay,” Eleanor said, putting a hand on his arm. He flinched away. She dropped her hand, stung. Was he afraid of her?

It didn’t matter. Soon he’d forget that anything strange was happening. That’s what had happened all the other times he’d brushed up against the Wrong Things.

Usually it started working sooner than this, though. “Nothing is okay,” he said, sounding lost. “Jenny and Naomi are gone. The January Society has everyone living in terror, and he’s here, and we haven’t heard anything from the outside world in months. How is any of that okay?”

“Let’s go sit down,” Eleanor said. She reached for Ben’s hand, and this time he didn’t flinch away. “Come on. I’ll make you some cocoa.” She patted the back of his hand and led him through the crowd of her companions.

“Maybe you could go check the perimeter?” she suggested to the hedgewitch delicately. Eleanor wasn’t sure which would alarm him more—talking to her mother, who he thought burned her house down, or talking to a totally different person who had her face.

“I’ll make sure the wards on this place are still in working order,” the hedgewitch said with a nod. “Perhaps you would like to come with me, Thea.”

Eleanor stiffened. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said.

The hedgewitch huffed. “I promise you she’s safe with me. For now,” she said. “And I need to check her over to make sure there is no way her brother can sense her here.”

“Swear you won’t hurt her,” Pip said, narrowing her eyes.

“I swear on the Stories and on my own life,” the hedgewitch said with exaggerated patience. “Good enough for you?”

Eleanor looked at Thea. The girl gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod. The hedgewitch put her hand out, and Thea took it. Eleanor watched as they walked away, stomach pinched. She didn’t know if she trusted the hedgewitch, but she didn’t think she’d actually hurt a little girl.

Eleanor led Ben down the hall to the kitchen. Having gotten them into the house, he now seemed to have lost all direction, and let her guide him to a chair. She surveyed the kitchen with dismay. There were boxes of crackers and cookies and bags of chips open everywhere. Empty cans were piled into a mountain, spilling over the sides of the recycling bin, and while the dishes had been washed, they were all stacked high on the drying rack, threatening to topple.

If the world outside Eden Eld was swallowed by gray, how did they have fresh groceries? Eleanor opened the fridge with trepidation, but she was relieved to find it well stocked. There was a gallon of milk on the top shelf. She checked the expiration date. It just read never ☺.

She frowned and looked at the label. It showed a picture of a farmer facing away from the viewer, standing next to an inexplicably menacing cow. january dairy, it read.

“Is that safe to drink?” Pip asked, looking over her shoulder.

“Ben’s still alive,” Eleanor pointed out. “And judging by the recycling, he’s had lots of it.”

She got up on a chair to reach the good cocoa on the highest shelf of the cupboard and then heated it on the stove. She wanted to ask a million questions, but she waited until she had closed Ben’s fingers around the mug of cocoa.

“All right. Uncle Ben. Why don’t you tell us what’s happened since the eclipse?” Eleanor said gently.

Ben took a long, loud slurp of cocoa, wiped his lips with his hand (making Otto grimace), and began. “We were going outside to look at the eclipse. Jack ran outside. Then there was this woman there. She had these glittering things floating around her.”

“Wander,” Eleanor said.

He shrugged. “She grabbed Jack’s hand and suddenly there was this hole in the air, and they jumped through. Then everything got dark. I heard Jenny say my name, but when I turned around, she was just . . . gone. They both were.” A sob rose in his chest. He swallowed it down. “I was frantic. Calling their names. Running all over the place. It took me a while to realize that the eclipse . . . it wasn’t going away. And you were gone, too. After that, things got strange.”

“They weren’t already?” Otto muttered.

Ben took another swig of cocoa. “Jenny and Naomi weren’t the only ones missing. A whole bunch of people were. Only they weren’t just missing. All their things were gone, too. Naomi’s room is completely empty. Jenny’s paintings are gone. It’s the same all over town. They’re still in photographs, but all other evidence that they ever existed in the first place has been wiped. And then people that shouldn’t be here started showing up.”

“You said the January Society was here,” Eleanor said. The January Society had been sucked into the gray world on Halloween. She looked over at Pip. Pip’s mother had been part of the January Society—she’d been in charge of it. And she’d tried to give them to Mr. January on Halloween. Did this mean she was back? Pip must be frantic. But her expression was simply focused and curious.

Ben nodded. “They work for the mayor. This weird guy came out of the gray and said that he was here to save us. But if you ask me, he doesn’t know what’s going on any better than the rest of us.” He stared down into his cup, a foam of chocolatey milk striping his mustache. “But you’re back. So maybe everyone else will come back, too. Maybe all of this will end.”

“He’s not forgetting,” Pip noted, staring intently at Ben.

“I guess this is just too big to forget,” Eleanor said.

“Sometimes it gets hard to think,” Ben confessed. He put a hand to his head, wagging it side to side. “Like everything gets scrambled, and you have to remember all over again. But you get used to it.”

“Where do all the groceries come from?” Eleanor asked. “How is there even still power?”

“Eden Eld is perfect,” Ben said with a stretched-out, plastered-on grin. “The stores are always stocked. The lights never go out. No one gets sick and no one leaves.” He laughed horribly, a sound that choked off into a sob. Eleanor fought back a wave of fear. Why was this happening?

She was very, very afraid that the answer was because of me.

“What about my family?” Otto asked. “Are they missing?”

“What about my dad?” Pip added.

Ben ran a hand over his head. “Pip, your dad disappeared with the others. So did Lily.”

Otto moaned. Lily was one of his three younger sisters—triplets.

“We’ll get them back,” Eleanor told him fiercely.

“My poor parents,” Otto said, his eyes distant. “Losing me and Lily at the same time. And Gina and May—they must be so scared.”

Eleanor pulled him close to her, squeezing him tight. Otto’s first thought was how scared and sad his family was. He was always thinking about other people. But he wouldn’t always. The hedgewitch Story would steal that, too.

“Should we call them? Do the phones work?” Pip asked.

“They work,” Ben said. “That’s how I knew you were in town. Mr. Clarkson called to warn me. We can give your family a call and let them know you’re okay, Otto.”

Otto, sniffling, pulled himself away from Eleanor. “No. I’m glad they’re safe, but we shouldn’t tell them I’m back. If Mr. January gets us or the Story . . . if I . . .” He slumped. “If they have to lose me, it’s better if they only lose me once, right?”

Eleanor took his hand. Her heart ached for him—and for his parents, and his sisters, too young to even begin to understand what was happening.

There was a scrape from the hallway. The locks on the front door were opening, one by one. Pip leaped up with alarm, but Ben gave them a calming wave of his hand.

“That’s just Barry,” he said.

“Who’s Barry?” Eleanor asked.

“My roommate. This is technically his house,” Ben said. There was the sound of the door opening and clomping footsteps coming into the hall, and Ben called out, “In the kitchen. We’ve got visitors.”

Eleanor was so tired and her brain was so full that she heard Barry and his house and couldn’t make sense of it at all. And so when Bartimaeus Ashford, one of the thirteen founders of Eden Eld, stepped into the room, all she could do was stare blankly.

He stared right back. “This is unexpected,” he said.

The last time they’d seen Bartimaeus was on Halloween. Pip and Eleanor had found the secret room in the clock tower where he’d hidden himself away for decades. Before that, he’d built this house and collected all the artifacts it was stocked with. He was also the one who’d written Thirteen Tales of the Gray. He was a tall, creaky man, with a fluff of white hair on his head and the kind of glasses you mostly wear so that you can peer over them disapprovingly. The vest and suit jacket he was wearing looked almost exactly the same as the ones he’d had on Halloween, though a bit more worn out.

“What are you doing here?” Eleanor demanded, rising.

“Who is he?” Otto asked. That’s right—Otto hadn’t been with them when they met Bartimaeus. He’d been captured by the January Society.

“You know each other?” Ben asked.

“Bartimaeus Ashford, Otto. Otto, Bartimaeus,” Eleanor said. “Now back to my question.”

“My sanctuary in the clock tower is currently inaccessible,” he said, in the detached tone Eleanor remembered from their first encounter, like none of this had anything to do with him. “Your uncle was generous enough to allow me to take up residence in my former abode.”

“So you finally had to stop lurking around not helping anyone?” Pip asked.

“You keep insisting that I’ve done nothing to help, but that’s simply not true. I’ve done a great deal, including building this house, with all its protections. And doing quite a bit of work for your father, young Eleanor, not that he’s ever bothered to come back and thank me for it,” Bartimaeus said, and, as anticipated, peered over his glasses with a scowl.

“He was in an enchanted sleep for thirteen years,” Eleanor said defensively. “You might have told me that Jack was my father.”

“And what could you possibly have done with that information, other than distract yourself into certain doom?” Bartimaeus asked. “You were rather focused on other things.”

“That didn’t stop you from telling me to give him a message. Not very useful when I didn’t even know his name,” Eleanor said, rolling her eyes. Then she gasped. “Yes!”

“Yes what?” Otto asked.

Eleanor pointed at Bartimaeus. “That’s the message he told me to deliver. He said to tell my father the answer was ‘yes.’ Jack told us the question was ‘Can I get rid of the Prime Stories?’ ”

“The what?” Ben said, looking baffled.

“That wasn’t his precise phrasing, but yes, that’s accurate,” Bartimaeus said. He seemed to notice Gloaming for the first time, then blinked at Eleanor. “My goodness. The Stories have moved on, haven’t they?”

Eleanor nodded. “But you can tell us how to stop them. How to get rid of them. So? How do we do it?”

“Is this really the most urgent question right now?” Pip asked.

“With our luck, he’s going to disappear again and we won’t see him until next Halloween. If we’re even still alive,” Eleanor pointed out. She glared at Bartimaeus. “So talk.”

“Really? Now?” Bartimaeus asked.

“You heard the lady,” Pip said.

“Spill,” Otto added, doing his best to look intimidating. He managed “exhausted and cranky,” at least.

“I believe the answer lies in the Library of Endersea,” Bartimaeus said.

“The who?” Ben asked.

Eleanor frowned. Where had she heard that before? Wander had mentioned it. And so had Thea. “That’s the library that contains every story from every world, right?”

“That’s the one. It is famously impossible to reach. So impossible that I hesitated to even mention it to your father. But you . . .”

“We have the Wending,” Eleanor said. Bartimaeus nodded. Ben looked between them, sighed, and seemed to give up on trying to understand any of it. “You think that the Library can somehow help us?”

“My research suggests that the Prime Stories—the actual, physical originals of the tales that have possessed you—are in the Library’s collection. If you destroy them, their hold on you will end,” Bartimaeus said.

“But the Stories aren’t books, are they? They’re in us,” Otto said, frowning.

Bartimaeus harrumphed. He gestured in the air with one hand, like a lecturing professor. “Stories in the wild are mercurial things, constantly changing. Put one of them in a person and it changes to match them, doing no harm at all. Stories like the ones attached to the three of you have to keep their shape. And for that, they have to be written down in books.”

“Hey, I mean, you can destroy a book,” Ben said, clearly lost but trying to help.

“You can absolutely destroy a book,” Eleanor said, cracking her knuckles.

“If you can get past the Librarian,” Bartimaeus said.

“Naturally,” Ben said, nodding.

“Then we’re going to the Library of Endersea,” Eleanor said, and felt a heavy burden drop from her shoulders. There was a way out of this.

“No, we’re not,” Pip cut in. “Eleanor, have you looked around? There’s a permanent eclipse in the sky! People are vanishing! Mr. January’s going to come for us tomorrow! We do not have time to be worrying about the Stories right now. Besides—without them, we’re weaker. We need them.”

Eleanor crossed her arms, matching her stubborn glare for stubborn glare. “We beat Mr. January without the Stories before.”

“Barely. And he’s had a whole year to think up new tricks,” Pip said.

“But we did it. We didn’t have powers or a magical sword. We had an old walking stick and good ideas,” Eleanor reminded her. “We need to get that thing out of you before—”

“I’m the one who gets to decide that!” Pip snapped. “They’re my memories. It’s my life.”

“But it’s not just you anymore,” Eleanor said. “And even if it was, we would still help you, because you’re our friend, and we don’t want to lose you!” Her voice rose until she was almost yelling, her hands balled up into fists at her sides. How could Pip be so stubborn? Did she want to forget them?

“I’m not getting rid of the warrior,” Pip said, shouting just as loudly as Eleanor. “Not until you’re safe! Not until my dad is safe and the triplets are safe and everyone is safe, which they can’t be until I win!”

“Until we win,” Otto said quietly. Pip looked at him, panting a little, her hair sticking to her face. “You aren’t on your own, Pip.”

“I know. Sometimes it feels like I am, though,” she whispered.

“Yeah,” Otto said. “I know what you mean.”

Ben, who had been looking rapidly between them as they spoke, stepped forward. Wordlessly, he wrapped Pip up in a one-armed hug. With the other, he grabbed Eleanor—then reached out and snagged the collar of Otto’s shirt, yanking him in. “You kids,” he said roughly, and his voice broke. “I had no idea what you were dealing with. You are amazing. All of you.”

For a moment they stood there, leaning into Ben’s comforting warmth. Then Pip pulled away, swiping a hand over her face to hide a sniffle. “I’m just saying,” she said, her voice cracking, “we have other things we need to deal with first. Starting with finding out what’s wrong with Eden Eld.”

“I should think that would be obvious by now,” the hedgewitch said, entering with Thea in tow. “You are.” She looked right at Eleanor.

“Me?” Eleanor said, brow wrinkling.

“You and your careless, graceless tearing through the Wending. You have no skill, no precision. You fling your will at it without focus, and it picks up everything you’re thinking. You wanted more time and you were thinking about the People Who Look Away, so it flung you into the past and right into their path, and dragged me along with you. Then you ripped Thea out of her time, demanding it take you back to Eden Eld—only which Eden Eld? The one you’re constantly obsessed over. The Eden Eld of Halloween. It’s only doing what your thoughts tell it to, because you haven’t bothered to control them,” the hedgewitch said. “Oh. Hello, Bartimaeus.”

“Hedgewitch,” Bartimaeus said uncomfortably, shifting somewhat nervously from one foot to the other. She gave him an unimpressed look.

“You’re still alive, then.”

“Indeed.” He cleared his throat. “You say this girl was taken from the past? And the Wending, it was opened from here in Eden Eld? Then the hedgewitch is right—that does explain the eclipse. Time has fractured, and the fracture is centered here, on Eden Eld. My goodness. Using the Wending without training is dangerous enough. You never know which whim it might pluck from your mind.”

Eleanor quailed. “All of this is my fault? I . . . broke time? I brought us straight to Halloween?” They’d lost months to plan and prepare. They’d lost Jenny and Naomi and Lily and Pip’s dad and who knew how many other people. And it was her fault.

“We broke time. That’s . . . kind of epic,” Otto said. Eleanor and Pip looked at him. He spread his hands. “Bad, obviously. But also epic.”

“Can we fix it?” Ben asked hopefully. “Can we bring everyone back?”

“If you returned the girl to her time—” Bartimaeus started.

“No,” all three of them snapped at him.

Eleanor set her jaw. “We’ll find a way to fix things and save Thea,” she said.

“Okay. But . . . how?” Otto pressed. He looked at Pip. She looked at Eleanor.

Eleanor sighed. “I have no idea.”