The Second Spy: The Books of Elsewhere: Volume 3

by Jacqueline West

  Horatio stopped, mid-stride, and turned around to stare into her eyes.

  “The young man in the shack. He’s—” For some reason, Olive couldn’t quite say the words. All at once, she realized how Morton and his neighbors felt, barely able to speak the name out loud when its owner might be lurking in the shadows, just out of sight.

  Horatio finished her sentence. “Yes, Olive. He is Aldous McMartin.”

  23

  OLIVE HAD RIDDEN on a Tilt-A-Whirl at a state fair once. Once had been enough. For the rest of the day, she had stumbled around with her head tipped sideways, feeling dizzy and nauseous and trying not to walk into anything. Now, as she chased Horatio’s fluffy tail through the bracken, Olive felt as though she were stuck on a Tilt-A-Whirl that might never let her off again.

  “I can’t believe I didn’t figure it out sooner,” she moaned. “I thought it must be Annabelle, or my art teacher, and besides, you—the other you—said I could trust him, and I trusted you, and so I thought…”

  “I know,” said Horatio over his shoulder. “When everyone wants something from you, it can be very difficult to know whom to trust.”

  Olive let out a short, unhappy laugh. “You know, Annabelle wrote almost the very same thing in a note to me.”

  Horatio’s eyes glinted back at Olive through the gray light. “Did she?” he said. A look of concern landed on his face before flitting briskly away again. “Well—even liars tell the truth now and then.” He dodged around a cluster of thorny bushes. His voice trailed back to Olive as she hurried along behind him. “Speaking of the truth,” he went on, “I must admit that I didn’t know we would find Aldous here either. It was this place that I recognized, and therefore tried to avoid…until you made a visit compulsory. This is Scotland, Olive. These hills were McMartin land,” he explained as they hurried through the shrubbery at the edge of the woods. “When the family manor was burned to the ground by suspicious neighbors, Aldous escaped into the forest. There he hid, waiting and plotting, until he could leave the country once and for all.” Horatio glanced up at the flowering hillsides. “As I deliberately stayed away from this particular painting, discovering that Aldous had painted his younger self here, as well as my younger self, was nothing but a delightful surprise.”

  “You shouldn’t have come in after me,” panted Olive.

  “Then he would simply have abducted you instead. He would have taken back the spectacles and trapped you here for good. Or disposed of you somehow.” Horatio sighed, surveying the hills before darting across the bracken toward the distant picture frame. “They managed to manipulate both of us, and to get exactly what they wanted. By replacing me with that…that painted nitwit,” Horatio growled, “he was able to isolate you, to immobilize me, and to get the paint-making materials. At last, he had the perfect chance to finish the portrait.” Horatio gave his head a brisk shake. “The young Aldous may have had some talent, but he’s a schoolboy compared to the Old Man. And everything that Aldous McMartin learned or mastered or created within his long, cruel lifetime is preserved inside of that portrait.” Horatio glanced up at Olive’s gloomy face. “But it’s all right, Olive,” he said, in a voice that was surprisingly gentle. At least, it was surprisingly gentle for Horatio, which was sort of like comparing sandpaper to broken glass. “I’m glad I came in after you. And that you came in after me.”

  This made Olive want to flop down and hug Horatio until he couldn’t breathe, but the cat had already turned away. He nodded toward the picture frame hanging in midair ahead of them. “Once we’re out of this painting, Aldous will be stuck, just as he was before. In fact, I’d say we’re fortunate: The way everything has happened, we have a chance of getting out of here safely, catching the imposter, and setting everything right once again.” Horatio resumed his speedy trot. “Believe me, once I get my paws on that interloper—”

  But before Horatio could say another word, there was a sharp snapping sound, and both Olive and Horatio plunged through a layer of bracken into a deep, hidden pit. Olive’s brain barely had time to shout, It’s a tiger trap! No, it’s a bear trap! No, it’s a— before her feet hit something solid, sending a painful jolt through her spine, and she collapsed in a heap. Several feet above her, the flowering bracken mended itself, forming a net that blocked out all but a few glimmers of gray sky.

  “How come we didn’t notice this hole before?” Olive gasped, sucking air through her teeth.

  “Because it wasn’t here before,” Horatio answered. He had naturally landed on all fours, and now he was pacing back and forth, staring up at the covered mouth of the hole high above. “It was painted here.” Horatio lifted a paw that bore a smudge of fresh brown paint. “Camouflaged. A trap.”

  Olive rocked to her feet. Ignoring her bruised backside, which demanded that she lay down again, preferably on her front this time, Olive reached as high as she could up the hole’s rocky wall. Her fingertips were a few feet from the opening. Olive jumped, but she still couldn’t reach the edge.

  “Maybe you could climb up my arms,” she told the cat. “Or I could toss you.”

  Horatio’s eyes widened.

  Before Olive could make a grab at him, a voice spoke from the lip of the hole.

  “I’m afraid that’s not going to work.”

  A shadow passed over the carpet of bracken. A moment later, through a gap in the greenery, the ragged young man from the forest peered down at them. His face twisted with a slow, predatory smile, and all at once, Olive could see that this handsome young man and the terrifying portrait in the attic were not so very different after all.

  The man—Aldous McMartin, Olive reminded herself—held up a brush and a bottle of paint. Olive’s mind flashed back to the glassy clunk of the leather bag hitting the cottage floor. Something equally large and heavy clunked down to the pit of her stomach. “I am not about to let one little girl and one disobedient cat stand in my family’s way,” he said. Aldous dipped the brush into the bottle. With a few swift flourishes that led from the ground up into the painted air, he made one jagged, forking shape, and then another, and another, until the hole was encircled by small black trees. “Not my best work,” he said, “but I’m in a bit of a rush. And speaking of sloppy work, I met your portraits, Olive.” Aldous paused to shake his head, smiling. “What a sad pair of specimens. I’m not sure you could have done worse work if you’d tried.”

  Olive gulped.

  Above her head, Aldous took another bottle out of the leather bag and dabbed spots of black and brown and white onto a palette. “You were missing ingredients, you had mixed the paints incorrectly, and on top of that, your technique leaves a great deal to be desired,” he said, as patiently as a schoolteacher. “You see?” His brush flicked through the air, leaving a trail of magical paint behind. “All it takes is a line or two to suggest the shape of a plant.” Now the brush slashed outward, spinning leaves from the ends of still-damp branches. “What was bare ground minutes ago is now a hedge.” Jagged twigs of brown paint entwined in the gray air, branches hooking through branches, woven as tight as a fence. “With a few strokes, the right play of light and color, I could turn flowers into ice. Grass into rock. A bit of bare hillside into an open grave.”

  Olive had been watching with her mouth open. Now she closed it.

  “Horatio,” she whispered, her eyes still fixed on Aldous’s work, “what is he going to do?”

  Horatio was silent.

  Aldous’s brush hissed through the air like a torch leaving a trail of smoke. Thorns began to sprout from the painted trunks—thorns as big as blades in places, as small and sharp as needles in others. Even the sight of them made Olive wince. When the hole was entirely surrounded by this thicket of knives, Aldous paused and stepped back, surveying his work. “It needs something,” he murmured to himself. Then, with a fresh brush and a few rippling strokes, he added red roses, as bright as fresh wounds.

  “There,” he said. “There’s no reason that deadly things shouldn’t be beautiful,
after all.”

  Aldous’s work was beautiful. Olive had to admit it, even if it made her shiver. Peering up through the darkness into Aldous’s glittering yellow eyes, Olive thought again of her poor, lumpy portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Nivens, with their flat eyes and lifeless faces. She couldn’t hope to compete with Aldous—not with Aldous’s own tools. She couldn’t defeat him with magic or with art. She simply didn’t have his talent. The weight of her anger and frustration made it suddenly hard to breathe.

  “Now we wait. It shouldn’t take long.” Aldous smiled again, lowering his paintbrush. “Then I will seal you in. I’ll paint a surface so perfectly real, so smoothly blended into the landscape, that no one would ever guess there had been a hole here at all. If, by some impossible odds, anyone should come here to look for you, they will stand right above you, gazing around at the hillsides, never knowing that you are trapped just beneath their feet.”

  A surge of panic swept through Olive’s body, mixing with her pent-up fury until she was sure that she could have hurled a boulder at Aldous’s head—if only she’d had a boulder to hurl. “Why don’t you just get it over with?” she demanded.

  Aldous’s eyebrows went up ever so slightly. “If you were still alive when I sealed you in, you might merely suffocate.” The eyebrows came back down again as a carnivorous smile uncurled on Aldous’s face. “But once you have changed to paint and no longer need to breathe, or eat, or drink, you can remain down there in the darkness forever.” The smile widened. “Forever, Olive. Can you imagine it? Without even the possibility of death to set you free.”

  “Aldous,” growled Horatio. “Spare the girl.”

  Aldous paused. His bright yellow-green eyes flickered through the depths of the hole, fixing on Horatio. “What on earth,” he began, his voice as low and soft as distant thunder, “would make you think that you may ask anything of me?” Aldous leaned over the edge of the pit. Between the thorns and the carpet of bracken, Olive watched his face move into clearer view. “You traitor. You weakling. Our family already lost our home once. Do you think I would allow that to happen again? I, who have had to live like a pauper on the very land where I should have lived like a king?” Aldous raised the wet paintbrush. “Shall I add some spiders to your cozy little den?” he asked, his voice even softer than before. “A few vipers? A hornets’ nest? Or something else to make Olive’s last living moments less comfortable?”

  Olive gulped, glancing from Aldous’s eyes to the hedge of deadly thorns. Horatio didn’t move.

  Aldous waited. “Speak again, and I will,” he murmured, when it was clear that Horatio was not going to answer. “I believe I will let Horatio stay and watch you change into paint, Olive. It might be unpleasant for him. He seems to care about you.” Aldous’s eyes traveled back to the cat. “Once my family has reclaimed this house and everything in it—which includes your misguided compatriots, Leopold and Harvey”—Aldous’s voice coiled around them like the hiss of a snake—“we shall devise some special punishments for you, Horatio.”

  Gathering up the jars and brushes, Aldous turned away from the pit. In a moment, he had vanished. Olive listened to his steps crunching away across the brush.

  “What do you think he’s doing?” she whispered to Horatio.

  “Waiting,” he answered.

  “Where do you think he’s going?”

  “Not far.”

  For a moment, they were both still. Between the bruised ache of her backside and the pounding of her heart, Olive hadn’t noticed the fainter discomfort of her feet, or the way that her ankles were beginning to prickle and go numb. Through the lacy shadows from above, she glanced down at her hand. The skin was shiny and streaked.

  “Horatio…” she whispered.

  Horatio’s eyes followed hers. “Has it already been so long?” he asked.

  “First I watched the hallway with Morton from inside his painting for a long time, and then I came in here…”

  Even in the dimness at the bottom of the pit, Olive could see Horatio hang his head. “I’m sorry, Olive,” he said. “I’m sorry that I couldn’t save you.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Olive. “It’s my fault for using the paints and climbing in here in the first place.”

  They were quiet once again. After a moment, Olive threw herself at the rocky wall, pawing and kicking, but she couldn’t get a foothold. When she managed to scrape a bit of dirt out of place, it only flew back to its own spot, forming the same un-climbable surface. And even if she reached the top, she doubted that she could survive those thorns.

  She slumped back down to the ground. The prickling feeling was climbing toward her knees. Her hands felt numb. In the darkness a few inches from her side, Horatio sat as still as a stone.

  “Horatio,” Olive whispered. “If I’m sort of…um…like Annabelle used to be, does that mean that you and Annabelle…that you were friends?” She swallowed. “I mean…did you care about her?”

  She heard Horatio let out a little breath. “Well, Olive,” he said, “that’s where you two are quite different.”

  They were silent for another moment.

  “Horatio,” Olive choked, “if you do eventually get out of here, would you tell everybody—I mean my parents and Morton and Leopold and Harvey and Rutherford—”

  “Yes, Olive,” Horatio prompted. “Everybody.”

  “Would you tell them that I—”

  “Freeze!”

  Olive and Horatio obeyed.

  “Agent Olive! Agent Orange!” shouted a voice with a faint British accent. “Don’t move! We’ve got you covered!”

  24

  TWO CATS—ONE LARGE and black, one small and splotchily colored—and one mussy-haired boy in dragon pajamas peered over the thorny edge of the hole, high above.

  At first Olive was sure she was dreaming; her own imagination was bringing her friends to save her in the nick of time. Then she noticed that Rutherford was holding two small pistols. A third pistol was clamped between Leopold’s teeth. A fourth was strapped to a miniature holster that was belted across Harvey’s chest. Even Olive’s imagination would not have done that.

  As Olive stared, Rutherford aimed both his pistols at the mass of thorns. She gritted her teeth and prepared for a bang. Instead, all she heard was a soft hiss.

  She looked up. “Water pistols?”

  Rutherford glanced down at her, still spraying. “Filled with paint thinner,” he explained. “And a mixture of my grandmother’s herbs.”

  Harvey leaped onto the dripping stems, smearing them wildly with both paws. “Take that!” he shouted. “And that! Don’t try to tangle with Agent 1-800!” The fresh paint, coated with sparkling liquid, rapidly began to dissolve, sending rivulets of melting black and red down the side of the pit toward Olive’s toes.

  “Grab my hands!” said Rutherford, leaning over the cleared space and reaching into the hole. Olive grabbed. Before Rutherford could begin to pull, Horatio clambered up the ladder made by their bodies and perched on the hole’s edge.

  “Come on, Olive,” he urged. “Climb!”

  Hanging on to Rutherford’s hands, Olive struggled up the wall, her numb feet slipping in the streams of paint. Leopold’s paw caught the fabric of her shoulder, Harvey’s teeth closed around a hank of her hair, and suddenly, Olive was crawling out of the pit, knocking Rutherford backward and blinking in the gray daylight.

  “Arm yourself, miss,” Leopold commanded, dropping a spare water pistol beside her hand. His eyes caught on her streaked skin. “Don’t get any of the ammunition on yourself,” he warned.

  “Where’s Aldous?” asked Rutherford, turning away from the half-melted thorn hedge.

  “In the woods,” Olive panted, barely able to breathe for the stinging in her legs. “But he’s coming back.”

  “We have to get Olive out of here,” said Horatio to the others. “It’s been dangerously long already.”

  Olive tried to get to her feet, but her legs refused to hold her. She crashed back to the ground,
her palms scraping the rocky earth. The water pistol slipped out of her fist and bounced away into the bracken. “I can’t get up,” she said through gritted teeth.

  “We’ll have to help her,” Leopold ordered. “Harvey, put down that gun and get over here.”

  Rutherford and the three cats had just managed to help Olive balance on her numb feet when, from the bracken behind them, there came a snap.

  The snap was followed by a deep, soft chuckle.

  The three cats froze as though someone had disconnected their batteries. Olive turned around, falling to one knee. Rutherford took a startled step back.

  As Aldous McMartin strode gracefully across the flowering hillside, the clouds began to thicken. Darkness poured across the landscape. Gathered around Olive, the three cats gave small, frightened jerks.

  “I disposed of your painted assistants, Olive,” said Aldous, stepping closer. “A piece of flint, a bit of fire.” He smiled that same twisted, predatory smile, and Olive felt her stomach plunge toward her big toe. “There are even simpler ways to get rid of these.”

  While Olive teetered on her numb hands and knees, searching desperately for the lost water pistol, Aldous made a motion with his hand—a gesture so small that it almost didn’t exist—and whispered something under his breath.

  Leopold fell first. His long black body hit the ground and curled into a ball that jerked and writhed, then stretched out all four legs as though he were trying to run away from himself. He let out a howl that Olive had never heard before.

  “NO!” she screamed, forgetting the lost water pistol and lunging on all fours at Aldous. But her rubbery limbs wouldn’t hold her. She collapsed to the ground, much too far away to reach him. Twin jets of pain raced up her legs.

  Harvey was the next to fall. His yowl joined Leopold’s, which was already dying to a whimper. Rutherford watched from a few feet away, clutching his water pistols and jiggling desperately from foot to foot.