Spellbound: The Books of Elsewhere

by Jacqueline West

  “What about thorntooth?” said Rutherford.

  Olive gave him another horrified look, which was all she could do. She was afraid to speak or to move even a half inch and find Mrs. Dewey’s eyes on her—or on the spellbook—again. Why wouldn’t Rutherford just go away?

  “Well, that’s this, of course.” Mrs. Dewey smiled, plucking a bit of the plant with little toothy mouths. “Anything else?”

  “Just a few common things,” said Rutherford. “Catnip and nettles.”

  That was everything. Now Mrs. Dewey had heard practically the entire recipe, and it wouldn’t take a huge leap for her to figure out that there was more going on here than Rutherford was admitting. Behind Mrs. Dewey’s wide backside, Olive scowled furiously at Rutherford. He merely blinked back at her. Then he gave a little shrug.

  “Catnip looks a lot like mint; some people even call it catmint,” said Mrs. Dewey. “And the trick with nettles is to use a glove or a tool of some kind—or to very carefully pull it out at the roots. There. See? No stings at all.” She dropped the last two specimens beside the bat berry and thorntooth.

  “Thank you, Grandma,” said Rutherford.

  Mrs. Dewey slowly got back to her feet, which were tiny and made a very precarious-looking pedestal for the hefty shape balanced on top of them. “Well,” she said, smiling again, “good luck with your experiments.” She gave them a last glance—one that Olive was sure took in the badly hidden book—and teetered away toward the front yard.

  “Why did you tell her what I was looking for?” whispered Olive through her teeth as soon as Mrs. Dewey was out of earshot.

  “She knows a lot about plants,” said Rutherford sensibly.

  “But now she knows everything! She’ll suspect something for sure. She probably already knows what I’m doing. She was looking at the book, and—”

  Rutherford shook his head. “Why would she suspect anything? I’m always doing experiments and collecting things.”

  Olive jumped up, grabbing the spellbook. She brushed at its cover furiously, wiping away bits of dirt and grass. “If she thought she was just helping us identify plants, why would she pick them? Why, if she didn’t know we were going to use them in something?”

  “I think you’re being paranoid,” said Rutherford, getting to his feet. “That means you have excessive or irrational fears.”

  “I know what pear-annoyed is!” shouted Olive, a bit dishonestly. “And I am not being it. Why would your grandmother know so much about these weird plants if she wasn’t—” Olive stopped. This argument didn’t sound like her. This sounded like someone else. Someone familiar . . . someone furry and splotchily colored and full of irrational fears. She is not what she seems, Harvey’s voice whispered in the back of her mind. Neither of them is.

  Olive shook her head, erasing the words. Rutherford stood still, watching her, his brown eyes wide and steady behind their dirty glasses. He certainly didn’t look like a spy—unless spies looked like small, messy guests at a Dungeons and Dragons convention.

  “When are you going to complete your experiments?” Rutherford asked, beginning to jiggle from foot to foot again.

  Not while you’re around, thought Olive. She shrugged, taking a casual glance at the sky. The sun was still quite high, but it had begun its slow slide toward the horizon, and its light was changing from white to warm gold. Her parents would be home any minute. “I don’t know,” she said, bending down to gather up the herbs Mrs. Dewey had picked, careful not to touch the nettle’s stinging hairs. “I just wanted to see if I could find the right plants, really. I might not try the spell at all.”

  She glanced at Rutherford’s face, wondering if he believed her, and found that he was watching her with a gaze that was even more intent than usual. Olive got the sense that he wasn’t just watching her, but studying her. His eyes flashed back and forth between her face and the book in her arms.

  “I’ll be interested to hear how it goes,” he said at last. Then he added, almost as an afterthought, “. . . Whatever you decide, I mean.”

  Then Rutherford turned away and rustled back through the lilac hedge. Olive stood by herself in the garden, holding the book and the bundle of plants, wondering why she felt as though her toes were balanced on the edge of something very, very high.

  14

  “IS THERE SOMETHING wrong with your casserole, Olive?” asked Mrs. Dunwoody as the three Dunwoodys sat around the dinner table a few hours later. “You’ve eaten nearly fifty percent less than usual.”

  “I would have said forty percent less,” said Mr. Dunwoody, looking interestedly at Olive’s plate.

  “Forty? I think you would be underestimating there, dear,” said Mrs. Dunwoody gently. “I count seventeen noodles remaining on Olive’s plate, and at least twenty-two peas, under a proportionately large amount of tuna.”

  “Yes, I see your point, darling, but I would have said that the amount of tuna looked disproportionately large . . .”

  Olive stared into the distance, toward the ivycurtained window. It was getting dark outside, so she couldn’t quite see through the glass. All she could see was the reflected image of her parents, deep in discussion, and her own dazed, motionless face floating between them. But she wasn’t really looking at the window at all. In her mind, the trapdoor was creaking open and thudding shut over and over again, so loudly that she was surprised the noise wasn’t leaking out her ears. Naturally, this made it very hard to concentrate on tuna casserole.

  Furthermore, the minute she’d left the spellbook in her room, hidden under her fuzzy blue bathrobe, she’d felt the tugging begin again. It pulled at her like an invisible cord, yanking harder and harder as Olive moved away, back down the stairs, through the hallway, and into the kitchen to help set the table for dinner. The farther away she went, the harder it tugged, until it was impossible to think about anything else at all.

  Her hands itched to hold the book. Her feet jiggled under the table, ready to race up the stairs with or without the rest of Olive’s body, and a tingly, nervous feeling kept creeping up and down her arms.

  “May I be excused?” Olive asked.

  “Certainly, Olive dear,” said her mother with a concerned little frown. “Are you feeling all right?”

  “I’m fine. I’m just tired,” said Olive.

  “Sweet dreams, Olive,” said Mr. Dunwoody, giving Olive’s hair a gentle stroke.

  Her parents were already so deep in a continuing discussion of proportions that they didn’t even notice when Olive took her unfinished glass of milk up the stairs.

  Olive kept both eyes on the glass, concentrating on not spilling. When she reached the painting of Morton’s Linden Street just outside her bedroom door, she hurried past, hardly giving it a glance.

  As soon as she pushed open the door, the tugging sensation relaxed just a little. Olive left the glass of milk on the dresser and rushed to the bed, where she pulled the book out from beneath her bathrobe. Immediately, a sense of happy relief washed through her. It felt as though she’d been holding her breath for as long as she could stand it, and was now taking a big gasp of fresh air. Olive flopped onto the bed and held the book close. Hershel rolled against her back in a friendly way, but Olive ignored him. She pressed her nose to the spellbook’s leather cover, inhaling its dusty, spicy smell, mixed with the minty scent of the herbs, which stuck out between its pages like a bushy bookmark. And she waited.

  Downstairs, the voices of Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody twined through the sounds of silverware against plates, and then were half drowned in the rush of water from the kitchen sink. Olive listened. She hadn’t turned on any lights in her bedroom—if her parents peeped in, she wanted them to think she’d gone to sleep—and the violet sky beyond the windows was scattered with the first small sprinkling of stars. The softness of the bed and the warm weight of the book in her arms were pulling her toward sleep. Olive even dozed off once or twice, wandering in dreams through an overgrown garden where one grand, blue tree towered over her, its l
owest branches seeming to reach out to her, inviting her to climb up and up and up toward the canopy that spread above her like a leafy, rustling sky—and then she jerked awake, wondering how she had gotten back to her own bedroom.

  Olive pinched her arm with her fingernails. She tried counting sheep to stay awake, but she kept losing track somewhere between sixty and eighty, and the sheep kept turning into cats: orange, black, and splotchily colored cats who ran away, refusing to be counted. It was irritating. Then she remembered that counting sheep was supposed to help you fall asleep, not stay awake. At last, two sets of footsteps thumped along the hall below her, and Olive heard the double doors of the library click shut.

  She wriggled off the bed and peered out into the hall, making sure no cats or parents were in sight. Then she turned on her bedside lamp and opened the spellbook to the marked page. The spiky calligraphy stood out sharply against the yellowing paper. For a moment, Olive hesitated. She could almost feel the walls of the old stone house leaning in around her, watching. Her heart was beating hard and fast inside her ribs. She couldn’t stop now, without ever knowing if the spell would work, without ever seeing what was hidden beneath the basement’s trapdoor . . .

  With a last look around her dim bedroom, Olive leaned down to read the steps of the spell one more time. And, as she read, a sense of certainty came over her. It closed around her like armor, pressing the last traces of nervousness down into a tiny fire that jumped with her heartbeat. By the time she started to carry out the instructions, Olive was moving so smoothly and confidently that she hardly felt like herself at all.

  A glass bowl of stale potpourri stood on her vanity. Olive dumped out the brown petals and set the empty bowl next to the glass of milk. Then she dug through her drawers full of art equipment, pushing aside the palettes of watercolors and the tattered packets of colored pencils until she found a box of chalk. She took out the white piece and set it next to the bowl. The ball of black fur was still safe in her pocket, and now Olive placed it in the bottom of the empty dish.

  Moving slowly to keep the door from squeaking, Olive opened her closet. She shoved piles of shoes and books out of the way, clearing the scuffed hardwood floor. With the chalk, she drew a circle on the floorboards, making sure to leave no gaps or cracks. In the center of the circle, she wrote the name Leopold, in handwriting that was much stronger and spikier than usual. She crumbled the plants around the borders of the circle, gasping now and then when the nettles stung her. Finally, inside the circle’s top edge, she set down the glass bowl with its pinch of black fur and filled it with her leftover milk.

  Beyond her bedroom door, something creaked.

  Olive froze. But whatever had creaked didn’t do it again. It was probably just the house settling, Olive told herself, not one of the cats standing outside her room, listening . . . Still, Olive backed out of the closet and shut the door, breathing harder, feeling all the little hairs on her arms standing on end. What are you so afraid of? she asked herself. Unfortunately, she also knew the answer to that question.

  She was afraid that the spell might not work—or worse, that it might go terribly, hideously wrong. What if it hurt Leopold? What if it made him disappear, and she could never get him back again? What if she couldn’t control the spell, and it summoned all three cats, and scrambled all the parts of them together into three insane Frankenstein cats, one with three tails, one with six eyes, and one with nothing but ears all over his body? She imagined Horatio yelling at her out of three mouths at once. The thought made her feel sick to her stomach.

  You’re letting your imagination run away with you again, said a reasonable voice in her head—a voice that sounded a lot like her father’s. Those things probably won’t happen.

  Olive chewed on the inside of her cheek, thinking. The cats seemed able to get in and out of almost anything: closed windows, locked doors, paintings. Even if she was able to summon him from the basement, a closet might not hold Leopold. Then again, it might give her the few minutes she needed to get into the basement and through the trapdoor before anyone saw her. Olive dragged her bedside table in front of the closet door, and, just to be safe, her vanity chair too. She backed a few steps away.

  Olive took a long, slow breath, imagining the air coming out through the tips of her fingers. She took a last glance at the book lying open on her bed, its spiky letters like delicate black thorns. Then she planted her feet wide apart on the creaking floorboards. “Leopold,” she whispered. “Leopold. Leopold.”

  There was a muffled snapping sound from inside the closet.

  Olive waited, holding her breath. Then, from behind the stacked furniture and the closed closet door, there came a tiny, mournful mew. Olive had never heard Leopold—or any of the cats, for that matter—make a sound like this. It squeezed her heart like a little lasso. But the lasso wasn’t strong enough to hold her.

  The spellbook tugged at her too, but Olive knew this might be her only chance to find out what waited beneath the basement. She gave the book a last, loving glance before tucking it under her blankets. It would be safe there until she came running back.

  Olive tiptoed down the stairs. Her parents were hard at work in the library; she could hear the quick clatter of computer keys. There was not a cat in sight in the hallway, or through any of the open doors, all the way to the kitchen. She snatched the trusty camping lantern from one of the high cabinets. Then she raced back across the kitchen floor and plunged down into the darkness of the basement.

  The basement air was cool and still. With no light leaking in from upstairs, it seemed even darker than usual. Olive felt her skin shriveling along her bare arms, as if it were trying to run away. She yanked at the strings of the hanging lightbulbs. Shadows slithered into the corners, hiding beneath the stairs, along the edges of mottled stone walls. Where Leopold’s flickering green eyes usually appeared, there was no one—only the faint outline of a square door sunk into the chilly stone floor.

  It had worked.

  Olive dropped to her knees in front of the trapdoor. Her hands shook. Her heart began an excited drumroll.

  She grasped the looped iron handle. The trapdoor was heavy and stubborn, and once it slipped out of her grasp, slamming back down with a thud that seemed to echo beneath the floor. Olive froze, listening, but her parents didn’t appear to have noticed. She worked her fingers through the loop this time, braced her legs, and pulled at the door with all her might. Its hinges made an angry sound, like a very old man clearing his throat. Olive leaned the door back as far as it would go, so that it balanced at an angle on its hinges. Then she turned on the camping lantern, held it over the gaping darkness, and took her first timid peek into the space below.

  15

  A RICKETY WOODEN LADDER dwindled down from the trapdoor into the darkness. The shelf where Aldous McMartin’s ashes had been stored waited beside the ladder, bare now but for a thick coat of grit and the dusty lace of spiderwebs. Below the shelf, Olive could glimpse packed dirt walls with wooden braces running up to the tunnel’s ceiling, like the rafters in a mine. The only mine Olive had ever been in was at an amusement park, where you could ride little miners’ carts up and down underground hills through stalactites made of sparkly Styrofoam. That tunnel looked very different from this one. Just kneeling at its entrance, Olive caught the sensation of something waiting beneath the old stone house—something real, something so big that its gravity was pulling her in.

  Half of Olive wanted to slam the trapdoor and run back upstairs. The other half wanted to hurry down into the tunnel and explore before anyone could stop her. But both halves knew that if she turned back now, she would regret it. The question of what waited beneath the trapdoor would dig at her relentlessly, like an itch in the middle of her back, just out of reach. After a long moment, Olive reached into the hole and set the camping lantern on the shelf where Aldous’s urn had stood. Then, cautiously, she lowered herself onto the first rung of the ladder.

  The wood creaked beneath her. She eas
ed onto the next rung, feeling the old wood bend and settle. While she could still reach it, she grabbed the lantern, then jumped the last few feet to the floor. The drop was farther than she’d thought. She landed hard on both bare feet, stumbled forward, and managed to catch her balance just in time to keep from falling flat on her face—or on the lantern, which would have been worse.

  If the basement was cold, the tunnel below it was frigid. Olive’s shorts and T-shirt suddenly felt much smaller and thinner than they had before. Her bare feet, pressed against the freezing dirt, were already turning numb. She shivered, holding both arms tight against her rib cage. The air in the tunnel was damp, tinged with a faint sick-sweet scent of decay. Olive stood between the packed dirt walls, in the changeless chill, and realized that this must be what it feels like at the bottom of a grave. But graves were only six feet deep. This was much deeper. And darker. And colder.

  The lantern made a pale splotch on the walls and floor around her. Beyond that splotch, there was only darkness. Olive took a step forward. The splotch of light moved with her, and the darkness resolved itself around it, pouring into the spots that the light had left behind.

  She glanced back at the trapdoor. In a Sherlock Holmes story, the trapdoor would slam shut, and she would be stuck down here, with no one near enough to hear her screams. The thought made Olive’s skin crawl. But the trapdoor was still open. Olive pressed her back to the wall so that nothing could sneak up behind her. Then she ventured forward, moving faster, following the tideline of the light.

  The lantern’s glow couldn’t reach the end of the tunnel. As Olive headed toward the darkness where everything disappeared, she wondered why Aldous McMartin had built this place. Maybe he had used it to sneak into his neighbors’ yards, kidnapping children, luring people out of their beds. Maybe he had used it to hide awful things, like the catacombs she’d read about beneath the big stone churches in Europe. Maybe it was some sort of underground tomb for storing all the leftover bits of the McMartin family, everything that used to lie below the headstones that built the basement walls. Maybe bones were stacked up in teetering piles, maybe skeletons were lying on shelves, maybe big pyramids of skulls stood staring, just waiting for Olive to come bumbling along. Knowing her, she’d trip over a heap of bones, smash the lantern, and be stuck down here in total darkness for weeks until—