She read on. The three heroes fought their way through the sort of trials that fairy tales often held—riddles and beasts and the like. “‘And then they sought an audience with the Storyteller. He permitted them three questions, and each asked one, but none was the right one. They did not know how to close the door for good, but still they had to do something, and so they set out to destroy the keys . . .’”
The heroes succeeded. They broke the keys and kept the door from opening, but it wasn’t a happy ending. Some people left the kingdom, and their color returned, and they learned joy again. But more remained, and stayed gray, and the kingdom was perfect and joyless, and the heroes never defeated the People Who Look Away. “‘And they knew,’” Eleanor finished, “‘that somewhere else, in some other kingdom, a stranger was standing before a king or a queen or an emperor and making them a promise.’”
“That’s an awful story,” Pip said. “It’s sad.”
“They stopped it, though,” Otto pointed out.
“And everyone was still miserable. And it didn’t stop the bad guys,” Pip said. “It’s not a proper ending if you don’t beat the bad guys.”
“Maybe they would have if they’d asked the right questions,” Eleanor said.
“Well, what are the right questions?” Pip demanded. “And who do we ask? What are we supposed to do?”
Eleanor rubbed her eyes. Adrenaline had kept her up, but now her brain felt like it was wrapped in cotton. For a moment, the immensity of everything that was happening rose up over Eleanor like a tidal wave, about to crash down. But she forced herself to take a deep breath. All they needed was a list. A plan. “First,” she started. She paused, thinking. “First, we should get some sleep.”
“Sleep?” Pip said. “You think we should sleep at a time like this?”
“Yes,” Eleanor said. “I think we need to sleep, if we’ve got any hope of staying ahead of the January Society and figuring all of this out. So first we rest. Second, we’ll go back to Ashford House. The cat-of-ashes said that there was something important there. She said—everything in this house has a purpose. And the book and the article, they were both from Andy Ashford. It’s the best place to look for more clues. And then—and then we figure out how to make it to midnight.” Midnight to midnight, that’s what the cat-of-ashes had said. If they could make it that long, they’d be safe.
She hoped.
The rest of the plan—the how part of making it that long—would have to wait until they knew more. Make the rest of the plan, she added to the end of the list in her head, and felt a little better.
But not much.
Seventeen
When they got to Ashford House, the driveway was empty. A dark car was parked across the street, and a man sat in it—but his head was tilted back, and he didn’t move at all while they crouched in the trees, watching. Asleep.
A few lights shone inside on the ground floor, but no one moved in the windows. They sneaked around the back, just in case the man out front woke up, then propped their bikes against the house so they could go through the kitchen door. Eleanor shut the door with a soft click and they moved down the hall in silence, except for the creak of floorboards. It might give them away, but at least they’d hear anyone else coming, too.
“I don’t think the January Society is inside,” Otto whispered. “If they just set a guard out front, they must not think we’ll come back.”
“It does seem pretty foolhardy of us,” Eleanor admitted, hoping that meant it was actually unexpected and clever.
Then she realized that no one was there. It was breakfast time, and Jenny and Ben should have been in the kitchen, but even though the lights were on, it was empty. Eleanor felt her heart beat all the way down in her toes. What if they’d gotten hurt? What if they’d gotten taken?
There was a note on the kitchen counter. The writing was sloppy and big.
Going to hospital. Everything ok.
BABY TIME
—Be
He’d been in such a hurry he hadn’t finished writing his name; it just ended in a flat line with a tiny bump on it. Eleanor let out a relieved breath. They’d probably hurried out without thinking to wake her up. They must have gone before the January Society showed up. Good. They’d be safer at the hospital.
“They should be safe there,” Otto said, echoing her thoughts while reading over her shoulder. She nodded, glad he understood what she was thinking. “Where should we start?”
“Back at the clock?” Eleanor suggested.
They trooped upstairs, Pip carrying an armload of snacks she’d liberated from the kitchen.
The clock stood right where they had left it, which Eleanor supposed wasn’t so surprising. But something had changed.
The clock’s hands now ran the usual way. It displayed the correct time, and the second hand tick-tick-ticked ahead clockwise. As they watched, the minute hand thunked forward.
“I never thought a clock working normally would be so spooky,” Otto said, and the others made noises of agreement.
Tick tock tick, said the clock.
“What did the cat-of-ashes say, exactly?” Otto asked.
“Something about Bartimaeus Ashford having a huge ego, and hiding things all over. And she said that everything in the house has a purpose,” Eleanor said.
“Huh,” Otto replied, which was about all that Eleanor had come up with. “Let’s look around the house. There has to be something that can help us.”
They set to work. They looked in the bedrooms along the hallway one by one, opening every drawer, peering behind doors, even checking behind paintings and mirrors. Drop cloths covered most of the furniture, turning the couches and dressers and chairs into lumpy ghosts, and a thick layer of dust coated everything else. Jenny and Ben couldn’t afford the staff to keep the whole huge house clean, so they left most of it closed up. In hibernation.
They found old books and old clothes and a set of lawn darts and an ancient game of Boggle, but nothing that seemed to suit their purpose. They worked their way down to the second floor, where Ben and Jenny’s bedroom was, and then to the first floor again. In the great room Otto read the spines of all the books on the shelves. About half of them were Ben and Jenny’s. The other half had come with the house and had titles like A Treatise on the Uses of Deadly Flora in Folk Remedies and Practical Mycology and Rare Birds and Where to Find Them.
Pip collapsed onto the big cozy chair by the fireplace and propped her feet up on the ottoman. “This is useless,” she said, picking at a loose thread on the arm of the chair. “This place is too big, and we have no idea what we’re looking for.”
Eleanor had stopped in front of the fireplace. The huge stone fireplace, big enough to walk right into, and the staircase behind it. A staircase that led up to nothing. “Everything in this house has a purpose,” she said. “But what’s the purpose of a staircase that just leads to a wall?”
She led the way through the empty space where the fire was supposed to be set and up the short flight of gray stone steps. They weren’t tall enough to reach the second floor of the house; if they had connected to anything, it would have been halfway between the first floor and the second, but they ended at a blank stone wall instead.
“Is there anything on the other side?” Otto asked, knocking on the stone with his ear against it.
“No. There’s a little room on the other side on the ground floor, and one of the second-floor bedrooms above that, and in between there’s just a normal amount of wall. There isn’t room for anything else,” Eleanor said.
“But there must be something here. Otherwise it doesn’t have a purpose,” Otto replied, and began to feel carefully along the wall, stone by stone. “Hold on. What’s this?” Otto fitted his fingers under a groove at the edge of a stone and pulled. It swung away on tiny hidden hinges.
The false stone hid a keyhole. It was a
big keyhole, five inches tall. You’d need a very, very big key to fit it.
Eleanor bent down and peered through the keyhole. She could see a room on the other side. The light didn’t go very far, but she could make out the dark shapes of shelves and other furniture and floorboards that matched the rest of the house.
“That doesn’t make sense,” she whispered. “There’s no room for a room. And that one’s huge.”
“Normal physics and geometry are just suggestions in Eden Eld,” Otto said, sounding pained.
“How do we get in?” Pip asked.
“With a key,” Eleanor said. “A very big key.” She remembered what she’d thought the first time she saw the clock. The pendulum looked like the end of a fancy key. “I have an idea. Wait here.”
* * *
• • •
ELEANOR OPENED THE glass door and watched the pendulum swing back and forth. She didn’t like the idea of stopping it; it made her skin prickle, like the ticking clock was all that was keeping the day moving forward, from midnight to midnight. But she took a deep breath and put out her hand.
The pendulum hit her palm and stopped at once. The clock fell silent. She waited for something horrible to happen, but the house was as quiet as ever. Quieter, without the ticking of the clock.
She wrapped her fingers around the pendulum. She wiggled it. Jiggled it. It moved up and down more than she expected, and carefully she began to shift it back and forth and up and down. The mechanism was definitely attached to something, but it was like it was hooked there, not like it was held there by nails or screws.
Something clicked in the depths of the clock, and the pendulum slid free into her hands. She grinned.
The end of the pendulum had been carved like a key.
The whole thing was about three feet long and made out of some kind of pale wood. The teeth of the key, five of them, were carved with patterns like brambles and flowers, giving them a wild, lacy texture.
Otto and Pip were waiting downstairs, but Eleanor didn’t run back just yet. She stood with the key in her hands, balanced across her palms, and savored the moment. She’d figured it out. She was clever, like the cat-of-ashes said. She could beat this. She could win this. She could save them.
The key felt warm in her hands. She wished, more than anything, that her mother was here to see her and know what she’d done. What she’d figured out.
Her smile faltered. She tightened her grip on the key and gave a grim nod.
She didn’t need anyone to see her and be proud of her. All that mattered was saving her friends.
She went back downstairs with heavy steps. As she walked toward the living room, she got faster and faster, feeling lighter and lighter. By the time she reached Otto and Pip at the top of the staircase, she was smiling again.
“You got it?” Otto asked.
“I got it,” Eleanor replied. She lifted the giant key to the lock.
It slid in with a satisfying click.
Eighteen
A section of the wall swung inward when they pushed. The room beyond was pitch-black; the light didn’t make it up the staircase. Eleanor felt for a light switch. Her fingers closed around a tiny knob on the wall. She tried twisting it, and there was a hum through the room.
The lights came on gradually. They hung in two lines along either wall of the room, with wires strung between them. They buzzed a bit, and they were more yellow than the modern lights she was used to, but they served to illuminate the room.
The color was off. Eleanor blinked, but the view didn’t change. Everything outside the room was gray. But inside the room, all the color had returned. Was it protected somehow? This had to be the room the cat-of-ashes wanted her to find.
The room that shouldn’t have been there was long and narrow. Deep wooden shelves lined the walls, and glass cases ran down the middle of the room like in a museum. Against the back wall was a long, heavy desk, and beside it was a single window—a circle divided into quarters.
There wasn’t a round window on that side of the house. Eleanor was sure of it. And yet, here it was.
They dumped their backpacks next to the door. Eleanor propped the key up next to them and they made their way slowly down the room. Many of the shelves and cases were empty, as if waiting to be filled, but the rest held an assortment of seemingly random objects. A deck of strange cards, a scarab carved out of black stone, a cracked hand mirror, a coin so old it had turned green. She picked up the coin, trying to make out the details on its surface, but it was lumpy and illegible. Without thinking, she slipped it into her pocket and moved on.
Eleanor stopped in front of a shelf that held just one item: a small brass box with eight sides. The lid was propped open. The interior had once been lined with green silk, but it was faded mostly to gray and rather tattered. A piece of crystal nestled in the ruined silk, clear as glass. It was just like the one in the illustration—the one the king’s sister used to look at the mysterious man’s footprints. Eleanor picked it up gingerly and held it to her eye.
The room looked the same—mostly. But a few of the objects in the room glowed with a faint golden shimmer that wavered around their edges.
“Whoa. Look at this,” Otto said. He was standing at the window. Eleanor tucked the crystal in her jeans pocket and walked over.
The view outside the window ought to have been the side of the house. The shed, the scrubby grass, the pines. Instead, an ocean rolled and pitched beyond the glass. It stretched in all directions; not even the smallest shadow of land interrupted the horizon. The moon hung full and heavy, reflecting off the water.
Eleanor reached up and touched the window wonderingly. The image rippled and changed. The ripples steadied into a lush, misty forest—not the one outside, but one far older and far wilder. Something huge and shadowy moved among the trees, a long way off. It stood as tall as the trees themselves, and on its head were huge, branching antlers. It turned toward them, and—
Pip swiped at the glass, and the image rippled away before it could see them. Eleanor cast her a frightened look. “That was probably smart,” she said.
“I’m not just good for hitting things,” Pip said.
Now the window showed a crossroads, two walking paths intersecting in the middle of a wide, grassy field. A woman walked down one of them, getting closer to them. The darkness made it hard to see, but there was something about the woman’s silhouette that seemed familiar.
She reached the crossroads and hesitated, looking to and fro. And then she glanced down the road that led toward them, and Eleanor saw her face. Her dark hair, up in a ponytail. Her sharp nose and big, dark eyes.
“Mom?”
Her mother didn’t hear her. She seemed to make a decision and turned toward the road that led away from the window.
“Mom!” Eleanor shouted. “Mom, it’s me! Mom!” She pounded on the glass without thinking—and the image rippled, and they were looking out over a mountain slope, tumbling down into darkness. Eleanor pressed a hand against her mouth, stifling a sob.
Pip and Otto looked at her with wide eyes. “That was your mom?”
Eleanor couldn’t speak. She could barely nod.
“Your mom that lit the fire,” Otto said slowly.
“I think maybe she didn’t,” Eleanor said. She believed that story less and less. Her mother hadn’t been hallucinating the things she saw. That didn’t mean she wasn’t sick—the way her fear had taken her over was an illness, but the things she saw were real. She’d tried, tried so hard, to warn Eleanor about Eden Eld and what was coming. She hadn’t wanted Eleanor taken. She couldn’t have wanted her dead. “I don’t think she meant to leave me at all.”
“Of course,” Pip said. “Why would your mom be bad, too? My parents are the only actually evil ones. Of course.” She turned away, arms crossed, and stomped her way across the room.
“Pip,” El
eanor said. Otto put a hand on her arm.
“Don’t,” he said. “She needs to be mad for a bit. She’ll come back.”
“You guys have known each other a long time, huh?” Eleanor asked.
“Since we were born. Literally. Our moms were in the same hospital room,” Otto said. He bit his lip. “I’ve been thinking about it all. I was mad at the town at first. I wanted to get away from it. But I don’t think that’s right. I don’t think we should want to run away. Our ancestors—some of them, anyway—made a mistake. No. It wasn’t a mistake. Mistake makes it sound like it was an accident. They made a decision, and it was an evil one. And that’s why the town is the way that it is. Dangerous in a way no one will talk about or even see. But we can see it. So maybe that means it’s on us to stop it.”
Eleanor didn’t answer. She was thinking about how hard her mother had worked to try to get her away from Eden Eld. Was that the wrong decision? And if it was, was it wrong only because it hadn’t worked? No matter how hard she tried to escape, she couldn’t get away from Eden Eld. Had it ever been a possibility? Did her mother’s fight matter at all, or was she always going to end up here?
“It shouldn’t be our job,” Eleanor said. “We’re just kids. And we didn’t agree to the curse.”
“It’s our job because we can do something about it, though. And because we’re willing to,” Otto said. “Otherwise, no one would do it at all.”
Pip had picked up a walking stick that had been leaning against the wall and was swinging it like a sword. She thumped it on the ground and turned to them.
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