Spellbound: The Books of Elsewhere

by Jacqueline West

  Her eyes scanned the spell again. So this was how the McMartins had taken possession of Horatio, Leopold, and Harvey. She imagined some long-dead McMartin—perhaps it was Athdar or Aillil, or someone even farther down the trunk of that blue-inked family tree—standing over the red glow of a fire somewhere in the craggy Scottish hills. Olive bumped the cereal bowl aside and pulled the book closer.

  To Control Your Familiar, read the next spell. To Punish Your Familiar. And, after that: To Summon Your Familiar.

  The words fit into Olive’s mind like a key into an invisible lock. She could almost hear the tick of the bolt pulling back, the gears starting to turn. If she got this spell to work, she might finally be able to explore whatever lay beneath the basement’s trapdoor. Leopold wouldn’t stand guard over it for no reason; there had to be something there, something important, something that would reveal new secrets about the house, the McMartins, or Elsewhere itself. She could use this spell to get Leopold out of the way.

  Without taking her eyes off the book, Olive scooped up a spoonful of cereal and chewed distractedly. The steps in the process looked fairly simple; she didn’t have to bury anything for six months and dig it up by the light of a full moon (that was one of the instructions she’d seen on another page), and she didn’t have to do anything that might accidentally light the house on fire. The spell only required white chalk, milk, “a trace of your familiar: fur or feather, hide or hair,” and several unusual plants. Olive had milk and chalk, she could get the fur . . . and she knew where to look for unusual plants.

  She thumped her heels against the rungs of the stool, thinking. This spell would be a good place to start experimenting. Maybe it wouldn’t even work, and if it didn’t, no one would be hurt—nobody had to donate blood to the mixture, no frogs had to lose their tongues. Besides, if you had to experiment on someone, why not experiment on a friend?

  On the other hand, if she did succeed, she would know that the book worked, and that she was capable of casting other spells. If A equals B, and B equals C, then you can spell cab . . . or whatever it was her parents were always saying about causation. Therefore, with a little practice using the spellbook, she would have a better chance of helping Morton.

  The thought of Morton clunked to the bottom of Olive’s stomach like the reminder of an unpleasant chore. Helping Morton was just one of the many things she could do with this wonderful book. And it would be quite dull and silly to only use it for helping Morton. That would be like going to a gigantic buffet and eating only the carrots and celery when a whole dessert table is set up at the end, heaped with cupcakes and cookies and chocolate truffles and soft-serve ice cream just waiting in a big silver machine . . .

  Olive’s stomach rumbled. She took another bite of soggy cereal.

  She’d get around to helping Morton eventually. Besides, if Morton hadn’t been so unhelpful and stubborn about helping her look for the spellbook, maybe she’d feel more inclined to help him.

  By the time Olive had scooped up the last mooshy bite from the puddle of pink milk at the bottom of the bowl, the microwave clock read 1:22. She had (Olive did some slow and painful math in her head) two hours and eighty-four minutes until her parents came home. Wait—that didn’t sound right. Olive subtracted again. Two hours and sixty-four minutes. It wasn’t much time.

  She slid down from her stool, hugging the open spellbook to her chest, and headed toward the basement door. A cool draft of air swirled around her bare toes as she yanked it open. To keep the book out of Leopold’s sight, Olive placed it carefully on the top step. As soon as she set the book down, her arms ached to pick it up again. Just a few seconds, she told herself—or perhaps she was telling the book. I’ll be right back. Glancing over her shoulder again and again, Olive edged down into the darkness.

  “Leopold?” she called.

  “At your service, miss,” answered a low voice.

  Olive pulled the chain of one of the dusty lightbulbs, and in the corner, a pair of green eyes suddenly settled into a large black face.

  Olive sat down in front of the cat. The basement floor was so cold against her legs that she half expected them to freeze to the stone, like when you pressed your tongue to a frosty railing. Leopold studied her calmly.

  “How are you, Leopold?” Olive asked, with what she hoped was a casual little smile.

  “Fit for duty, miss,” said the cat.

  “Duty?” Olive repeated, frowning. Then she smacked her forehead, pretending to have just remembered the trapdoor. “Oh, of course! Your station.” She glanced down at the door’s deep edges. “It must get so dull, sitting here all alone, in the same old spot, day after day.”

  “No, indeed, miss,” Leopold argued, his eyes widening. “After all, the price of safety—”

  “Is eternal vigilance. I remember.” Olive shifted her legs on the chilly floor. Just inches away from her knee, the outline of the trapdoor made a deep slash through the stone. “But you have to get uncomfortable sometimes,” she went on. “I mean, wouldn’t you like to rub your head against something soft, or have somebody around to scratch between your ears?”

  Leopold looked slightly surprised, as though just remembering that he had ears. Then he tipped his head to one side. “Well, a soldier doesn’t like to complain, miss.”

  “Of course not.” Olive nodded understandingly. “But as long as I’m here . . .” She held out her hand.

  Leopold lowered his head and let Olive give his ears a good, long rub. His bright green eyes slid shut, and a deep, boat-motor-ish purr began to rumble up from his chest. Olive could see several strands of sleek black fur clinging to her palm already. She pressed her fingers together to trap them. Then she looked back down at Leopold’s blissful face. Maybe it was the trusting way his head was pressed against her hand, maybe it was the sound of his purring, but something made Olive want to give Leopold another chance to let her through the trapdoor on his own.

  “Leopold,” she wheedled, “could you and I—”

  Leopold snapped back into upright position. “No, we couldn’t.”

  “But you don’t even know what I was going to say!” Olive protested. “Maybe I was going to say, ‘Could you and I throw a big ice cream sundae party down here in the basement for all the centipedes and spiders?’”

  Leopold squinted one eye. “Was that what you were going to say?”

  “Well, no.”

  “I didn’t think so.” Leopold puffed out his chest, looking rather proud of his own perceptiveness.

  Olive shifted closer, bringing herself eye to eye with the big black cat. “Leopold, why can’t I see what’s under the trapdoor?” she asked. “Do you think it would scare me? Do you think it isn’t safe for me to see? Is it something that shouldn’t be let out? What?”

  Leopold stiffened. “It’s not safe for you to know, miss.”

  “Leopold!” Olive moaned, rocking back on her behind and glaring up at the web-covered ceiling. For a moment, she pondered pushing the cat off of the trapdoor, or even picking him up and throwing him. She wasn’t sure if she could lift him off the ground, but she was bigger than he was; if she pushed with all her might, she might be able to slide him off . . . But, no—she couldn’t do that. It would be like shoving a policeman. She took a deep breath.

  “Leopold, please,” she said, keeping her voice as gentle as she could. “I need to know what’s down there. And I’m not going to give up just because you say no.”

  “Miss . . .” said Leopold, giving her a look that had a little drop of something—was it sadness?—at the very bottom. “Please believe me when I tell you that we are doing what we think is best for you.”

  “Everyone thinks they know what’s best for me,” muttered Olive, jumping to her feet and stalking away, with several strands of Leopold’s fur still clenched in her fist. She yanked the chain on the lightbulb as hard as she could, leaving the basement in darkness. She didn’t even look back over her shoulder to see if Leopold’s eyes followed her as she stomped u
p the stairs. She didn’t need to look. She knew they did.

  Olive slammed through the basement door into the kitchen with the spellbook safely back in her arms. Then she rolled the strands of black fur into a neat little ball and pushed the ball into her pocket. She had given Leopold one last chance, and he hadn’t taken it. Whatever happened next would be his fault. This was her house, after all, not his. And this was her book. And outside, rustling in the faint, humid breeze, was her garden. She wheeled toward the back door. But before she could take a second step, she stopped so abruptly that she nearly lost her grip on the book.

  Horatio sat in a shaft of sunlight that spilled through the kitchen windows, his long orange fur glowing around his body like a fiery halo. He’d been waiting for her.

  Olive felt an urge to hide the book from the cat’s sharp green eyes. She hugged it to her chest, wrapping both arms around it so that the cover was at least partly obscured. The look on Horatio’s face told her just how pointless this was.

  “I . . .” Olive began, but Horatio got to his feet at that moment. He took a very small step closer to Olive, his fine white whiskers quivering, his green eyes glowing. Olive stopped speaking. They stared at each other. The silence stretched between them like elastic. Olive braced for it to break, ready for Horatio to hiss or growl or yell, but this didn’t happen. Instead, it was Horatio who flinched. He edged away from Olive, keeping his distance.

  “I know you don’t like to listen to me, Olive,” he said softly. His usually sharp voice sounded muzzled, like something in it was being held back. “You would rather make your own mistakes than learn from the terrible mistakes of others. So far, you’ve been lucky, and you’ve survived those mistakes—those many, many mistakes.”

  Olive opened her mouth, but Horatio went on before she could interrupt.

  “Now, you can either keep being lucky, or you can start being smart. And you can only control one of those things, Olive. I hope that you’ll make the right choice.”

  Then, as Olive watched, the huge orange cat trotted silently past her into the shady hallway.

  Olive wavered, turning back and forth between Horatio’s retreating backside and the waiting back door, like the needle on a broken compass. The weight of the book leaned against her ribs. All the doubts she’d pushed to the corners of her mind popped out again, arguing in a storm of bossy little voices. She looked down at the book. Horatio’s deserted sunbeam coasted over the worn leather, tracing threads of fire in the gold letter M.

  M for Mine, Olive told herself.

  And then, amid that storm of voices, Olive felt the one force that she was waiting for—a gentle but insistent tugging that started in her chest. It tugged patiently, like a piece of dental floss around a loose tooth. It was the same sort of tugging she’d felt in the attic, leading her toward the painting on the easel. Now it was leading her somewhere else. With a first hesitant step, and then another and another, Olive let the house guide her over the kitchen tiles to the back door, across the porch, and down the steps into the waiting garden.

  13

  STANDING AT THE edge of the overgrown garden, Olive could almost see the trapdoor creaking open before her. Somewhere in this bushy chaos lay the key to opening it. In fact, Olive realized with an excited little heart-hop, now that she had the spellbook, the garden might open a lot of doors that she hadn’t even known were locked. Over her shoulder, the old stone house loomed, watching her.

  Apart from Mrs. Dunwoody’s occasional weedwatering, nobody had done a thing to the garden since old Ms. McMartin died. If anything, it looked even more jumbled and lush than it had last month. The plants with purple velvet leaves and the plants with little toothy mouths were still there, along with flowers that looked like staring eyes, and berries that looked like sacs of spider’s eggs. Amid the mess, Olive thought she recognized the twisty green sprout that had given her a welt when she tried to pull it up. She also recognized parsley, because it always came next to the dill pickle with grilled cheese sandwiches. Everything else was a leafy mystery.

  She knelt down, careful not to put her knees on anything that might leave thorns in her skin, and opened the book back to the spell for summoning a familiar. In addition to the milk and chalk, she needed to find catnip, thorntooth, nettle, and bat berry. Nettles sting, as Olive was well aware—she had stumbled into more than one patch of them while wandering daydreamily through the woodsy parts of parks—and catnip must smell good, at least to cats. Maybe it smelled like tuna. Olive leaned over a patch of bushy stems, inhaling deeply. She could smell mint and dirt and something that reminded her of the taste of blood when you licked it away from a paper cut, but no fish.

  As she crawled to the right, still sniffing, there was a gentle, almost imperceptible twitch from the lilac hedge nearby. Olive stopped sniffing. She leaned back on her heels, carefully pulling the book behind her back, where it couldn’t be seen. She scanned the row of lilac bushes. The leaves were too thick for her to see what had moved—if it was a lurking cat, or Mrs. Nivens spying on her, or just a breeze that had stopped at the edge of the lilacs. But the hedge didn’t move again. Perhaps it had been her imagination.

  And then, just when she was about to turn back to her task, the lilac branches bent and crackled, and Rutherford Dewey stepped through the hedge into her backyard.

  “I see you’ve found the grimoire,” he said, brushing a lilac twig off of his rumpled blue dragon T-shirt.

  Olive felt her heart jump so high into her throat she was afraid it would get stuck behind her uvula. She swallowed to push it back down. “Were you spying on me?” she hissed.

  “Spying implies that I was watching you without you knowing it.” Rutherford jiggled back and forth in his loafers. A lilac leaf, stuck in his messy curls, jiggled back and forth too. “But now you know that I was watching you, and as I was never trying to keep it a secret, I think it can be said that I wasn’t spying on you.”

  Olive would have liked to argue with this, but she had no idea how. Instead, she just pulled the book tight against her back and scowled up at Rutherford in her most unwelcoming manner.

  Rutherford wasn’t daunted.

  “Do you think the grimoire is functional?” he asked, moving closer to the garden, speaking so fast that Olive had to replay his words in her head, in slow motion. “Have you experimented with any spells yet?”

  For a moment, Olive pressed her hand against the book’s open pages while her thoughts skittered around, getting nowhere. It was too late to lie. Rutherford had already seen too much.

  “No,” she said at last, sounding rather pouty. “I haven’t. I’m looking for some ingredients, and then maybe I’ll try it. But I don’t know if I will.”

  Rutherford dropped down onto his knees next to her, making Olive wriggle a few inches away. “What exactly are you looking for?”

  Without speaking, Olive pulled the book around her body and plopped it between them. She pointed to the list of plants.

  “Interesting,” murmured Rutherford. “Catnip, nettles . . . But I’ve never heard of bat berry. How will you identify it?”

  “Something that looks like a bat, I guess,” Olive answered. “Or like something a bat would eat.”

  Rutherford nodded. “And do you have a hypothesis about thorntooth?”

  Olive shrugged. “I was just going to look for something that seems thorny. Or toothy.”

  “Very logical,” said Rutherford with approval. “Of course, you may have to experiment several times, in multiple combinations, in order to limit the variables.”

  Olive blinked at him.

  “Do you want to do the nettles, or should I?” he asked, leaning over the clumps of plants.

  Olive opened her mouth to tell Rutherford that she should do the nettles, and he should work on minding his own business, but she didn’t get the chance. At that moment, a voice hooted, “Rutherfooord!” and in the next moment, Mrs. Dewey was hustling past the corner of the big stone house toward the garden. Olive’s hear
t gave a panicky leap. Had Mrs. Dewey been watching them through the hedge? And, if she had, how much had she heard? Olive just had time to flip the spellbook shut and sit on it before Mrs. Dewey’s snowman-shaped shadow was falling over them.

  “Rutherford Dewey!” Mrs. Dewey puffed. She glanced at Olive, and her mouth turned into a tiny pink smile. “Oh, hello, Olive dear,” she said. The smile disappeared like a popped bubble. “Rutherford Dewey, what have I told you about leaving those models of yours all over the dining room floor?”

  “You didn’t move them, did you?” said Rutherford. “They’re all set up for a reenactment of the Battle of Bosworth.”

  “I nearly broke my neck on them!” said Mrs. Dewey. “I want you to go home right now and put them where they belong.”

  “Can I have just a little bit longer?” said Rutherford. “We’re in the middle of something very important.”

  “Very important?” Mrs. Dewey repeated skeptically. Her round blue eyes wandered over to where Olive was sitting, and lingered for just a moment on the thing that Olive was sitting on. Olive felt her skin go rigid. Then Mrs. Dewey sighed, and her eyes trailed back to her grandson.

  “What exactly are you up to, Rutherford?”

  “It’s a science experiment. We’re trying to identify some unusual plants.”

  “Oh?” Mrs. Dewey tilted her round head. “What are you looking for?”

  “We’re looking for something called bat berry,” said Rutherford. Olive flashed him a look of horror. Rutherford ignored her. “That’s not its scientific name, of course, but that’s all we have to go on.”

  Mrs. Dewey tugged up her dress so that the hem was just above her dimply white knees, and then she knelt between them at the edge of the garden. “Let me see,” she murmured. Her equally dimply hands rustled through a patch of leaves. “Ah, yes. Here we are.” There was a little snap, and Mrs. Dewey held up a black stalk covered with tiny blue berries, all coated by fine silvery hair. “Bat berry,” she said.