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Authors: Jacqueline West

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BOOK: Spellbound: The Books of Elsewhere
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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 eased 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—
Don’t think like that,
said the reasonable voice in her head.
Just keep walking.
Olive’s mouth felt dry and sticky, like the gummy stuff on the back of a price tag. She could only take tiny, shallow breaths.
Pale roots hung from the ceiling in places, as fine as human hair. Once they brushed Olive’s head, and for a moment she was sure that her heart had stopped beating.
That’s it,
she could almost hear her heart saying.
I can’t take it anymore. You’re on your own.
But nothing moved, and there was no sound. In a moment, Olive felt the familiar knocking beat behind her breastbone again. She ventured on.
The lamp trembled in her hand, sending twisted, shadowy versions of herself racing over the packed dirt walls. Somehow, these other Olives didn’t make her feel any less alone. But she kept going, slowly, following the light, until the roots began to disappear. The ceiling was getting higher too—or the floor was getting lower. Either way, the tunnel was widening until the lantern light didn’t reach the walls at all. The air grew even colder and very, very still; Olive couldn’t feel the little breezes made by her own motion bouncing back toward her anymore. And suddenly, the farthest edge of the lamplight struck something—something that glimmered back.
Olive hesitated, shivering, wondering if she really wanted to find out what lay ahead. She could still turn back. She could apologize to Leopold and tell him that whatever he was guarding was still secret and safe. She could pretend that none of this had ever happened.
And then, as she stood frozen in the pool of lamplight, Olive felt something she couldn’t explain. A funny sensation trickled through her body almost as though it were flowing down the tunnel toward her. Her heartbeat slowed. Her breath drifted out in a long white plume. She didn’t feel alone anymore. Instead, Olive felt as though something protective and familiar had wrapped itself around her. She was standing at the very root of the house. Above her, the basement, the gleaming hardwood hallway, the wide stairs, the bedrooms, and the shadowy attic soared up like the trunk of a giant, immovable tree. She was part of that tree now. And once you are part of something, it can’t really frighten you.
Raising the lantern, Olive stepped toward the glimmering thing. It grew brighter as her light glinted from a thousand surfaces at once, refracting like the image in a fly’s magnified eye. Reflected stripes and glowing circles made weird patterns in the darkness.
The tunnel had ended in a three-sided room. Each of the three walls was covered with shelves, and each shelf was lined with jars . . . hundreds and
hundreds
of jars.
Olive took a careful look all around, turning in a circle. The walls here were stone-lined, like in the basement, except that there were no gravestones here, as far as she could tell. A few thick wooden pillars speared up from the floor, meeting the ceiling that hung several feet above her head. In the center of the room was a long, high table. The whole point of this room, obviously, was the jars. But what
was
this—some ultra-special, top-secret pantry?
Her bare feet whispered across the stones. Once she reached the far wall, she realized that some of the jars were empty, but a few dried streaks of whatever they’d held still clung to their sides, as though they’d been poured out and shoved back into place. Other jars had been smashed. Fragments of murky glass littered the shelves’ edges. Olive walked very carefully, avoiding the shards that were scattered across the floor. Faint stains lingered here and there on the stones.
BOOK: Spellbound: The Books of Elsewhere
7.23Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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