Spellbound: The Books of Elsewhere

by Jacqueline West

  “I don’t need any of that,” said Olive. “I need to get in here.”

  Harvey craned over the top of the canvas and peered into the painting. “Oh,” he said, his voice suddenly small. “I see.”

  “Can’t you do it?”

  Harvey looked back up at Olive. When he spoke again, it was in that same small voice. “There is a difference between can and should.”

  Olive was surprised. If there was anyone who didn’t know the difference between can and should, it was Harvey. Last month, he had hidden in the branches of a tree near the sidewalk and bombarded everyone who passed by with pinecones while making cannonblasting sounds. A few weeks later, he had shorted out the wiring in the library chandelier by practicing Robin Hood–style leaps onto the furniture.

  “What will happen if we do go in?” Olive asked.

  Harvey appeared to think for a moment. It was hard to tell, because he stopped to think so rarely. “Well,” he said at last, “that depends on you, really. The only thing that’s certain is that something will happen.”

  Olive looked at the painting, at the thick, open book, at the pair of hands lying on it like two giant, pallid spiders. And she wanted it. She had never wanted anything—not a snow day, not a unicorn, not anything—so much in her entire life. She wasn’t going to think about anything else or do anything else or go anywhere else until she had that book in her hands. She wasn’t sure that she could go anywhere else. The pulling had gotten so strong, it was hard for her to move even her eyes away.

  “Let’s get it,” she whispered.

  Harvey nodded. It was a funny nod—resigned, and a little bit sad. But Olive wasn’t paying him much attention.

  “We need a plan, though,” she rushed on. “I think I have an idea.”

  Olive didn’t tell Harvey this, but it really wasn’t her idea. The idea dropped into her mind fully formed, like a present—just like the image of the book itself when she woke up from her scrambled dreams. Dragging herself away from the painting, Olive hurried across the room to a pile of boxes stacked in one corner. There was something in those boxes that she was meant to find.

  Setting the candle carefully on the floor, Olive flipped open their lids, tossing out stacks of ancient bedsheets, old newspapers, empty picture frames. Finally, in one moldy box, she uncovered an aging scrapbook, its pages crumbling and delicate, its covers held together by a frayed cord. Ordinarily, Olive would have liked to look through the scrapbook, studying the yellowed newspaper articles and old snapshots and pictures from antique fashion magazines, but she was in too much of a hurry to care about any of that just now. She turned it over, mentally measuring its size and shape, and skidded back across the floor to the easel.

  “I’m ready,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  Wordlessly, Harvey extended his tail for Olive to hold. He dropped from the top of the easel into the painting. Immediately, the hands fluttered, rising up from the book, patting searchingly at their nonexistent arms. The sight made Olive shudder. But she kept her grip on Harvey’s tail and clambered into the painting after him. The long-unused bottles of pigment rattled on the easel’s shelf as her feet kicked through.

  Inside, she nearly slid over the edge of the long wooden table. The room within the painting was small, almost cramped, even with nothing in it but the table, the book, and the hands. The blue walls were bare and windowless. Olive was sure that this was a room Aldous had created just for this painting, to keep the grimoire as safe as it could be. Back on the book now, the hands gave a slight twitch, like animals sensing a disturbance in the air.

  Olive sat on the table’s edge, taking deep breaths. Gently, she opened the scrapbook and laid it on the table, edge to edge with the spellbook. She glanced down at the scrapbook’s pages. Taped beside a row of pressed flowers that had long ago turned brown was a photograph of two girls, their arms linked, their faces framed by curly hair and lacy collars. One was pretty but sour-faced, with dark hair and eyes. The other had lighter hair and a chilly little smile, like something that would melt if it was left out of the refrigerator. Olive recognized both of those faces. In tiny, faded script beneath the picture, someone had written Annabelle and Lucinda, aged 14.

  The wheels in Olive’s head started to turn.

  No time for that now! shouted the voice in her head that controlled the wheels. The spellbook—the treasure she had been searching for, the tool that would change everything—was just inches away from her, almost close enough to read. It was exerting a pull so strong, she was surprised that strands of her hair weren’t floating toward it, as though it were a static-charged balloon. Between the painted hands on its open pages, she could glimpse scratchy lines of handwritten letters, curls of calligraphy made by someone who had certainly never seen a ballpoint pen. The sight made her heart pound.

  “All right,” she whispered to the cat crouching beside her. “I need you to cause a distraction. Get the hands off of the book, and I’ll slide this one into its place. When I say go, we move. Okay?” She glanced down at Harvey, who was staring at the hands as though they might explode. Harvey gave a teeny nod.

  “Go.”

  “Have at thee!” Harvey snarled, pouncing onto the hands, claws out. “Who dares to try his strength against Sir Walter Raleigh?”

  Like two giant crabs, the hands jumped from the book and locked around the cat’s body.

  Olive reached for the spellbook. Before she had even quite grasped it, she felt—or thought she felt—the book leap into her arms, like a cat that is delighted to be let in from the rain. Olive clutched the old book tight against her body. It was very heavy, with its thick pages and leather cover, and its corners had been softened by years of use until they felt almost like velvet. Olive stroked the edge of its closed pages calmingly. The book seemed to stir deeper into her arms.

  “Reee-OW!” Harvey screeched, bouncing up into the air in front of her, the hands still locked around his body. With a start, Olive remembered what she was meant to be doing. But she couldn’t bear to put the book down. She didn’t want to turn her attention from it, even for a second. Finally, she took one hand away from the book just long enough to push the open scrapbook into its place, and then wrapped her arms tightly around it again. She was almost afraid to look away from it, sure that somehow the book would vanish from her grasp.

  “Unhand me, villain!” Harvey shouted, writhing and twisting as the hands tightened around him. “Or you shall feel the wrath of the greatest swordsman in England!”

  Olive wasn’t listening. As the cat thrashed around on the table, screeching a string of Elizabethan insults (“Thou plume-plucked paper-faced puttock!” Olive thought she heard), she was stroking the edge of the book’s thick leather cover, running her fingertips along the spine that felt almost as soft as living skin. She wanted to never let it go.

  Harvey made a panicked, choking sound. One of the hands had worked its way around his throat and was steadily squeezing. “Your Majesty . . .” he wheezed.

  With a reluctant sigh, Olive tore her eyes away from the book, pinning it firmly to her side with one elbow. It clung to her body like a magnet. “Hold still, Harvey!” she commanded. But Harvey was too hysterical to listen. While he kicked and clawed and gasped for breath, Olive made a wild grab at one of the hands. Its cold, painted skin squirmed in her fist. It felt like a plastic sack of cold jelly, but with bones twisting and moving inside of it. While Olive held on, it wriggled, turning and groping, snaking its fingers between hers. Suppressing a scream, Olive shook her arm, and the hand flew off, hitting the blue wall with a smack. On the floor, it flipped over and scuttled back toward the leg of the table, its bulbous joints working in a blur.

  Back on the tabletop, Harvey lay on his back, kicking weakly at the air. “Strike, man, strike!” he croaked.

  Keeping the spellbook under her arm so that both her hands were free, Olive pried the remaining hand from Harvey’s neck and flung it down on the scrapbook. The hand stilled. It ran its fingertips over
the scrapbook’s worn pages. The left hand, which had clambered up the table leg, poked at the scrapbook from the other side.

  Olive turned back to the spellbook. It was still safe under her arm, its cover gleaming as softly as silk. “Get us out, Harvey,” Olive ordered.

  Harvey gave his head a dizzy shake, waited for Olive to grasp his tail, and stumbled back out into the attic.

  Safely outside the painting, Olive glanced up at the easel. Inside the canvas, both long, bony hands had curled around the open scrapbook in the very position they had held before. She pressed the heavy spellbook tight to her chest. Her heart pounded against its cover like a fist knocking on a door.

  “All right, Sir Walter,” she whispered to the cat panting on the floor beside her. “Now let’s get out of here.”

  11

  IN THE CORNER of the attic, the little candle had sputtered down to a nub. Olive hurried across the floor to pick it up. By its light, she got her first good look at the McMartins’ book of spells.

  Its leather cover was worn to rich amber. It was covered with bumps and dimples in places, but was as smooth as glass in others—perhaps where hundreds of years of hands had rubbed it. Ancient embossing flickered here and there on its surface, like fine threads sewn into the leather. Olive was so enthralled that she almost stepped on Harvey, who was waiting for her at the top of the stairs.

  “Hey, Olive,” he said, sidling out of the way, “before we leave, would you . . . would you cover up that painting again?”

  Olive glanced back up at the unfinished canvas. The slick sheen of the paint rippled in the candlelight. Aldous’s disembodied hands clutched the scrapbook. She hurried to smooth the dusty cloth back into place. The painting disappeared like a stage between a pair of closing curtains.

  Harvey didn’t speak as they padded down the stairs and back out through the painted arch. He was silent in the pink room, silent in the hallway, and silent in the bathroom, where Olive stopped to leave the dying candle, freeing both hands to clasp the book against her body.

  Even when they got back to Olive’s bedroom, Harvey didn’t say a thing. In the doorway, he made an odd little throat-clearing sound before darting off down the hall, but Olive was too preoccupied with the book to notice. She had the McMartins’ spellbook in her hands. Every other thought simply floated away, like bits of fuzz in front of an electric fan.

  She slid into her bed, flicked on the tiny reading lamp, and tilted the book up against her knees. It was heavy and almost as wide as Olive’s body, but it nestled comfortably in her lap. Horatio and Leopold never nestled that way. Harvey was more likely to joust with a mailbox than to curl up in her lap, even if it meant giving himself a minor concussion in the process.

  Gently, Olive stroked the worn leather cover, and the book seemed to glisten under her fingertips. Then, as she watched, the glinting spots carved into the leather shifted into a familiar shape—a shape so worn and so ornate with its swirls and curlicues and spots of flaking gold that she hadn’t recognized it before. It was the letter M.

  Olive wiggled her toes beneath the sheets. She felt as if she were about to unwrap a pile of birthday presents, but with the excitement multiplied by a hundred. There wouldn’t be any lumpy sweaters, confusingly complicated calculators, or math games with names like Let’s Have Sum Fun! inside of this surprise.

  She took a deep breath, making the moment last. Then she lifted the cover and opened the book.

  On the thick yellow frontispiece was a sketch of a tall, nearly leafless tree, done in strokes of dark blue ink. The tree’s trunk was thick and crooked, dividing into a tangle of branches and twigs, all joining and bending and forking. Olive had to squint to see it, but on each branch and twig, a name was written in tiny, pointed letters. Most of them were names she had never seen before: Athdar McMartin, Ansley McMartin, Aillil McMartin. But near the top, in the very center of the tree, Olive found a name she recognized: Aldous McMartin. This name branched off toward Albert McMartin, and then to Annabelle McMartin. The branch from Annabelle went nowhere. It trailed away between the blue leaves at the very top of the page, dwindling into a line so thin that it finally became invisible.

  Olive wriggled deeper into her pillows and carefully turned the page.

  Sleeping spell. The word spell sent a happy little shock down to her toes. Olive skimmed the thick yellow paper. There were lots of words she didn’t recognize—valerian and boneset and witchnail—but most of the words were things she knew or sort of knew, like chamomile and nightshade. Even when the words were familiar, like cup or water or bird’s wing, the delicate, thorny calligraphy transformed them into something mysterious and completely new.

  The whole first portion of the book seemed to be about sleeping. There were spells to bring sweet dreams and spells to send nightmares and spells to make sleepwalkers fetch things for you. Reading about sleep was making her sleepy. Olive settled down onto her back, holding the book up above her and flipping to the next section. Here were spells that looked more like recipes: potions for winning hearts and erasing memories, a cake that made everyone who ate it angry at each other.

  Olive read on, fighting the tiredness that kept threatening to slam her eyelids down. To Attract Paper Cuts. To Give a Headache. To Cause Uncomfortable Flatulence. (Olive had to look up that last word in her dictionary.) To Bring on a Fever. To Break a Bone. The instructions were getting more and more complicated, full of ingredients she didn’t recognize or couldn’t imagine gathering—like frogs’ tongues. Where would a person get frogs’ tongues? Olive knew that some people ate frogs’ legs, but she’d never seen frogs’ tongues in a grocery store . . .

  Wait a minute, said a distant, nudging voice from the very back corner of Olive’s mind. Wasn’t there something she was supposed to be looking for? Olive peeled her eyes away from the book for a moment, glancing around the room. The sky beyond the window was lightening very softly, like deep purple cloth after years of washing. It could have been either dawn or twilight. It looked like the sky in Morton’s world.

  Morton. Olive jerked upright. That was it. She was going to find a way to help Morton. Her eyes fell back on the book. But there were so many more pages to go, so many more interesting spells to read . . . There would be plenty of time to think about Morton. She would get to it later.

  Olive nestled her head against the pillow and raised the heavy book again. If only she didn’t feel so sleepy . . .

  Her eyelashes were tugging at her eyelids like a hundred little curtain-pulls. Her arms began to sag. The book slid down, gently, heavily, and came to rest on Olive’s rib cage. She breathed in its dusty smell. It smelled like the floor of an antique shop, like ballet slippers hidden in a drawer for years, and like something sharper, like rust or cinnamon. Perhaps like fingerprints left five hundred years ago, in Scotland, in a house that had been turned to ash.

  When she fell asleep, it was with the light still on and the open book forming a little roof above her heart. For the rest of the night she wandered through dreams full of trees and clutching hands and blowing paper. In the longest, clearest dream, she was part of the ground—in the ground, or beneath the ground—with a tree growing up out of her heart, its heavy trunk reaching from her toward the sky.

  Olive slept and slept and slept. On her chest, the book rose and fell with each breath.

  12

  SOMETHING WAS MAKING a thumping sound. Olive nestled deeper into the pillows and squinched her eyes shut. “No thank you,” she mumbled. “I don’t need a refill.”

  But the thing kept thumping. Slowly, Olive opened her eyes, and the hamburger and Coke she’d been enjoying dwindled away into her own rumpled bedspread. The book was still open on her chest, her room was drenched with bright yellow sunlight, she was very, very hungry, and a huge bumblebee was thumping its face stubbornly against her window.

  Olive glanced at the alarm clock: 12:31, said the red digits. She had never slept so late in her whole life, not even when she’d been delirious with a
fever of 104 and thought that her toes had all traded places. No wonder she was hungry.

  Dressed in fairly clean shorts and a T-shirt and carrying the spellbook in both arms, Olive stumbled out into the upstairs hall. “Mom?” she called. “Dad?” But the big house was quiet.

  She jogged down the stairs, the heavy book thumping against her hip, and craned around the corner toward the shiny carved squares of the library’s double doors. “Hello! Anybody home?” Her voice rang against the walls and faded away.

  In the kitchen, a note in her mother’s handwriting hung on the refrigerator door.

  “Good morning, dear,” read the note. “Gone to campus. Back between 4:06 and 4:09, depending on traffic and other variables. Help yourself to 1/6 of the leftover lasagna for lunch. Love, Mom and Dad.”

  Olive decided she’d prefer a big bowl of Sugar Puffy Kitten Bits to figuring out how much one-sixth of the lasagna was. She placed the spellbook on the counter in front of her, poured a heaping bowl of cereal, and sat down on one of the high stools. For a second, she was tempted to offer the book a bite of cereal—but that was silly, of course.

  Olive often read while she ate (or ate while she read, as reading was the thing that usually continued both before and after). But this morning, even as hungry as she was, her cereal got pretty soggy. Whenever she tried to turn her attention to her increasingly un-puffy Kitten Bits, the book seemed to tug her back, urging her to read one more word, one more line, one more page. And soon she came to a group of spells that almost made her forget about breakfast entirely.

  To Conjure a Familiar, said the first.

  Olive skimmed the list of ingredients. It was a horrible spell, involving human blood and a cat’s eye, and something that came out of a toad’s stomach. When all the ingredients were combined, boiled together on a fire of elder branches under the thinnest crescent moon, a creature would appear, called up from another world to serve its master. Forever.