The Strangers (15 page)

Olive blinked, looking harder. No, the light didn’t cause the shades to disappear. Instead, as it touched them, it revealed human faces—actual human faces and actual human bodies, as faint and pale as the shapes formed by rising smoke. They were the faces of men and women, with craggy features and dark, deep-set eyes. McMartin faces. And the faces themselves were changing, shifting from young to old, old to young, floating through entire lifetimes within a few seconds. But the fire in the bowl had burned out, and the light of the candles was weak. The darkness was larger, and much, much stronger.

“I call you.” Delora was shouting now. “And
I cast you
out.
”

Olive’s voice stuck in her throat. “I—I call you . . .” she choked. “. . . And I cast you out.”

The words died away, leaving the basement so quiet that Olive could hear the candles sputtering.

One of the smoky silhouettes—one with a long, reptilian body—started to laugh. It was a strange sound, more like water steaming in a huge iron kettle than real laughter, but Olive knew that laughter was what it was. Another of the shades joined in, and then another and another.

In the center of the circle, Olive wobbled on her feet. “Is it working?” she called through the shifting ring of shadows. If Delora gave an answer, Olive couldn’t hear it.

Olive took a deep, freezing breath.
“I cast you out!”
she shouted.

Her voice ricocheted from the walls.

The shades fell silent.

Then, as one, they rushed inward, silhouettes paling and warping in the light. Olive felt a wave of freezing air sweep over her, blowing out all but three of the candles. She heard Delora gasp. In the dimness, a giant, bony dog lumbered forward. Olive watched its toothy muzzle dissolve into a woman’s smile as it bent toward the flames. There was a soft, whooshing sound, and the last of the light was gone.

In the darkness, Doctor Widdecombe let out a shriek that shook the dust from the rafters. With an audible rip from his tweed jacket, he dove for the staircase.

“Run, Byron!” Delora cried. Olive heard her steps creaking up the stairs after him.

“Wait!” Olive screamed. She plunged forward, knocking over the metal bowl. Dead candles clattered and rolled around her feet. A frigid wall of air broke over her, slippery fingers and claws and hands dragging at her skin, and then she was scrabbling on all fours up the rickety wooden staircase. The icy nearness of the shades rushed just behind her. Eely tendrils grasped at her ankles.

Doctor Widdecombe, Delora, and Olive raced through the basement door into the kitchen. With all the lights off and evening settling outside, only the streetlamps and a sliver of moon saved the house from total darkness. Olive slammed the basement door shut behind her, but a black trail, slick and smooth as spilled oil, poured instantly from beneath it, looming back into hideous forms once it had snaked free.

“We can’t stop them!” Delora shouted, glancing over her shoulder. Her hand locked around Olive’s wrist. “Just
run!
”

Dragging Olive behind her, Delora flew through the kitchen and into the hall, with Doctor Widdecombe chuffing ahead of them like a tweed train engine.

Walter stood at the end of the hallway, gazing out the windows near the front door. Olive watched his face swivel toward them in the dimness. “I had to set a little fire near the porch to keep the familiars occupied,” he began, “but—”

Walter’s lanky body stiffened. His gaze traveled away from his aunt and uncle toward the wave of monstrous shadows rushing down the hall behind them.

“Open the door!” Doctor Widdecombe roared.

Walter fumbled at the knob. He managed to yank the door open just in time for Doctor Widdecombe to bolt
through
rather than
into
it. The professor’s hefty frame bounded off the porch steps and puffed away into the night.

“Run, Walter!” Delora panted. “Get out! Escape this cursed place!”

Walter hesitated. His wide eyes flicked from Delora to Olive to the throng of approaching shadows. “Mmm—but I’m supposed to—” he began.

“Run!”
Delora screamed.

Walter paused for another fraction of a second, his Adam’s apple bobbing. Then he too rushed through the door and disappeared into the darkness.

Delora hurtled after him, still yanking Olive by the arm. Something long and boneless, like the limb of a giant squid, lashed over the floor beneath their feet. Icy fingers coiled around Olive’s leg. The front door gaped before them. In three more steps, they would be outside, running away into the night—

—abandoning the house to the McMartin family.

“Wait!” Olive shouted. She locked her knees, skidding over the slippery floorboards as Delora dragged her forward. “We can’t just run away!”

“Olive, you cannot stay here!” Delora insisted, yanking her toward the door.

Part of Olive—the larger, louder part—wanted to dive straight through that open doorway, to run to the safety of the Nivens house, or to the even cozier safety of Mrs. Dewey’s house just beyond. But another part of her—a deeper, quieter part—knew that if she left, the McMartins would have won. She’d be abandoning the house, and Elsewhere, and Morton, and the cats, wherever they were. She would be fleeing from her own mistakes, leaving her friends to live with their terrible consequences.

She could stay and try to save them, or she could run away and save herself.

Lunging sideways, Olive hooked her arms through the banister that led up the staircase. “I won’t leave!” she shouted, holding on tight as the skittering, lumbering forms moved closer. The darkness thickened, the chill of the shades’ presence washing through the air. “This is
our
house!”

Delora gave a desperate growl. With a shake of her head, she released Olive’s wrist and dove for the doorway, slamming it firmly shut behind her—leaving Olive and the twisting mass of shadows sealed inside.

The air plunged from cold to frigid. Olive hugged the banister, shuddering. Even with her eyes squeezed almost shut, she could feel the shades pressing closer. She knew with perfect certainty that no one was coming to rescue her—not the cats, not the neighbors, and certainly not her parents. She was alone in the icy darkness, with the McMartins’ furious dead.

She kept very still, her arms twined through the banister, as the shades trailed their insect legs and slippery tails over her skin. The last breath she’d managed to suck into her lungs prickled like shards of ice.

“Intruder . . .”
whispered a voice in her ear—a voice so faint that at first it was drowned out by the echo of Olive’s own heartbeat.
“Intruder . . .”

“I’m not intruding,” said Olive shakily. She wrapped her arms even tighter around the polished spokes of the banister. “My family
bought
this house. There were no more McMartins to live in it.”

“Trespasser!”
hissed a voice that crawled over the skin like a spider.

“I’m not
trespassing,
” Olive said, as firmly as she could. “You’ve all died out. You’re extinct. Like—like—” She groped for a term Rutherford would use. “Like iguanodons,” she finished.

“Liar!”
the voices growled.
“Liar!”

Something with the legs of a giant centipede inched up the side of Olive’s neck. The tip of one huge, hooked claw trailed down her arm. In spite of the darkness, Olive closed her eyes.

“Do ye know what our family does to intruders?”
a voice breathed into her ear.

Without looking, Olive knew that the shades were closing in on her, their blackness seeping straight through her skin, freezing her lungs, chilling the blood that ran through her veins. Her heartbeat began to slow. When she took a breath, shards of ice prickled in her throat, and she wondered if she was inhaling the shades themselves.

She had felt this sort of cold before. She had felt it in the attic of the old stone house, where all that was left of Aldous McMartin—more than a shade; a monster of paint and ashes and no-longer-human blood—had tried to get rid of her. He had frightened her, and frozen her, and nearly convinced her to give in. But in the end, she had defeated
him.

Olive took a deep, cold breath. “You can’t do anything to me,” she said. She jerked upright, tossing her head so that the crawling thing slipped away. With a lunge, she skidded across the dark hallway to the light switch.

In the sudden electric glow, the monstrous black forms faded to human outlines. Insect legs vanished. Toothy jaws disappeared. A cluster of gray faces followed her, sunken-eyed and angry, as Olive darted into the parlor and then to the dining room, turning on the next light and the next, until the whole hallway was glowing. She pressed her back against the wall’s wood paneling, staring out at the figures that wavered before her.

“See?” she said, less shakily now. “You’re just—” Olive paused, looking around at the shifting faces, their familiar, craggy features and deep-set eyes. “You’re nothing,” she said. “You’re memories. You’re
stains.
”

Glowering, silent, the shades backed away. Olive watched them slither into the house’s remaining dark places. They crawled under furniture, behind curtains, into corners, regaining their inhuman forms.

With her jaw set and her chin in the air, Olive strode around the rest of the first floor, hitting each light switch and turning the knob of each lamp. She could feel the shades watching her from their patches of darkness, but she wasn’t going to let them see that she was afraid . . . not even when something with fingers a foot long reached out of the blackness beneath the old brown couch.

She had turned on each light in the kitchen and the family room and was heading for the huge brass chandelier that hung in the library, when something surprising caught her eye.

There was already a light coming from the library. She could see its reddish glow seeping through the crack in the doors. This light hadn’t been glowing a few minutes ago, she was certain. And the light was accompanied by a soft crackling sound—a sound Olive had heard many times before, but never in this room. It was the sound of a fire burning in a fireplace.

Cautiously, Olive pushed open the library’s double doors.

The room was dim. But inside the enormous fireplace, its glow dancing across the chipped tiles, there burned a small and cheerful fire. Seated before the fire, in one of the velvet chairs so old that its upholstery had worn away in small bald patches, was a very small, very old woman.

In spite of the fire, Olive felt a sudden chill.

The old woman looked up. Her hair was pure white, pinned into a high, soft bun, and she wore a neat gray skirt and sweater. A strand of pearls gleamed around her shriveled neck. Her skin was pale . . . No, not pale, but
misty,
smoky, changing. As Olive stared, the old woman’s face smoothed and her stooped back straightened, revealing the cold, pretty features and thick, dark hair of Annabelle McMartin.

“Hello, Olive Dunwoody,” she said as her hair faded to white once again. But the smile that Olive knew so well remained, sweet and icy, on her inhuman lips.

P
LEASE SIT DOWN,
Olive,” said the shade of Annabelle McMartin, gesturing to a vacant velvet chair.

Like a sleepwalker, Olive obeyed. She shuffled across the huge, dim room and plunked down into the chair so hard that it sent up a cloud of dust.

“You—you’re Ms. McMartin,” she stammered.

The old woman gave Olive an elegant nod. “I am. But you may call me Annabelle.”

“I’d rather not,” said Olive.

Something black and many-jointed slid through the doorway and skulked into the shadows at the back of the room, where the firelight didn’t reach.

“Doesn’t my family frighten you?” Ms. McMartin asked, watching Olive with eyes as sharp as scalpels.

“They can’t hurt me.” Olive shivered as Ms. McMartin’s face shifted yet again, revealing a flash of Annabelle’s features. “
You
frighten me,” she added, before she could stop herself.

Ms. McMartin smiled. It was not a comforting smile. “But I can’t hurt you either, Olive. And I don’t even intend to try.”

“How come—” A log in the fire tumbled, sending a patch of black shadow sliding over Ms. McMartin’s arm. It was gone again too quickly for Olive to see what form the darkness had revealed. “How come your voice is so much clearer than the others’?” she asked. “How come you
look
clearer?”

“Less time has passed for me than for them.” Ms. McMartin turned back toward the crackling fire. “Things fade away eventually. Most things, that is.”

Olive twitched in her chair. She glanced around the room, at the high rows of shelves, the dark slit of sky between the velvet curtains, the glimmering firelight on the dancing girls’ frame. “So, if you’re here now, like
this,
does that mean that you . . .” Olive wavered, remembering the gravestones and the urn of Aldous McMartin’s ashes hidden below the basement. “Does that mean that
you
were buried here somewhere too?”

The smoky outline of Ms. McMartin shook her head. “My grandfather’s wishes were not my wishes. But I
did
die in this room,” she continued lightly. “I spent a great deal of time here. Of course, when you have lived in one house for over a century, you have spent a great deal of time
everywhere.
”

“I guess so,” said Olive, lifting her feet off the carpet.

“I loved the front parlor as well,” Ms. McMartin went on. “And the dining room. And my own bedroom, naturally.”

Olive nodded. “I like the library and the family room. And the kitchen, especially on weekend mornings. And the porch. And the attic. I even kind of almost like the basement, because Leopold—” The name caught in Olive’s throat.

“Ah yes. The cats,” said Ms. McMartin, with an exasperated sigh. “What a change it must have been for them, having you move into this place.”

Olive swallowed. Yes, she’d caused many changes for the cats, some probably for the better, and some definitely for the worse. She hoped that Harvey and Horatio had found someplace safe to hide during this latest change. She nodded again, unable to speak.

The flickering glow of the fire shone straight through Ms. McMartin’s body, filtering through the skirt and sweater that rippled into one of Annabelle’s long lacy gowns.

Olive chewed the inside of her cheek. “So, how . . .” she began. “How did you . . . um . . .”

“How did I
die?
” Ms. McMartin supplied impatiently. “You can say the word, Olive. I think we’ve passed the point of squeamishness.”

Olive cleared her throat. “How did you die?”

“How do most hundred-and-four-year-old women die?” Ms. McMartin asked. “Something gives out, and then something else gives out, and then something gives out that you really
need,
and then it’s over.” She gave a dainty shrug. “It was quite sudden, in the end. It didn’t hurt.”

“Oh,” said Olive. “Good.”

Ms. McMartin tilted her head sharply. A puzzled frown appeared on her features.

Olive cleared her throat again. “Um—there was a rumor that you were in here for a really long time before anybody found you. Someone even said . . . they said the cats had been
nibbling
on you.”

“You know the cats, Olive,” said Ms. McMartin, still frowning. “Does that sound like something they would do?”

“No,” said Olive. “Well—maybe Harvey, if he—” She stopped herself. “No.”

“As for it being ‘a really long time’ . . . It was a few days, I believe. Perhaps a week.”

“So, you were all alone,” Olive said. “When it happened.”

Ms. McMartin stared into the fire and didn’t answer.

Olive struggled on. “Didn’t anybody—like Lucinda, or—didn’t anyone miss you?”

Ms. McMartin’s head jerked toward Olive. “Are you feeling
sorry for me,
Olive Dunwoody?” Her voice was clipped and cold. “No. No one missed me. Certainly not Lucinda Nivens.”

Olive waited for a few seconds, breathing as quietly as she could.

Ms. McMartin’s shade kept silent.

“Lucinda’s brother—Morton—he’s still here,” Olive said at last. “In Elsewhere. He’s trying to find his parents.”

“Is that so?” Ms. McMartin sounded almost bored. “Good luck to him.”

“You know where they are, don’t you?” Olive gripped the arms of her chair so hard that the ancient wood squeaked in protest. “What did Aldous do to them?”

Ms. McMartin stared into the fire. Its light erased her eyes, leaving two shadowy pits behind. “Mary Nivens was dangerous to us,” she said slowly. “Grandfather took her and her husband out of our way. He did what he had to do to keep this house and family safe.”

Before her brain had the time to stop her mouth, Olive asked, “Is that what you told yourself when he killed your parents?”

Ms. McMartin’s eyes flew back to Olive. Beyond the reach of the firelight, they were silvery and deep and cold. “There were very few things in this world that I loved,” she said, in her soft, poisonous voice. “But I did love this house. In fact, this house may have been the
only
thing.” Her mouth curved into a tiny smile. Annabelle’s face, smooth and young, reappeared around it. “You understand that, don’t you, Olive? You love it too.” The smile widened. “And what about your parents? Do they love it as you do?”

“My—my parents are gone,” said Olive. “They were taken from this house. And your portrait had something to do with it.”

“Yes, she’s loose, isn’t she?” Ms. McMartin sounded amused. “I’m sure she’s caused you all sorts of bother.”

“Where do you think she would have taken them?” Olive asked, leaning forward, with her feet back on the floor. “And who do you think is helping her?”

“I don’t know anything about it.” Ms. McMartin waved one smoky hand. It moved beyond the beams of the firelight, and Olive saw it change into something black and withered—something that was barely a hand at all. Then Ms. McMartin folded her hands in her lap once again. “All I know for certain is that she wants this house back.” Her eyes, shifting from an old woman’s to Annabelle’s, fixed on Olive. “Wouldn’t you?”

“I—I don’t—” Olive stammered.

“Tell the truth, Olive. Wouldn’t you do almost anything—even dangerous, destructive things, things your friends warn you not to do, things that you don’t truly understand—to keep this house for yourself?”

Olive’s mouth fell open, but no words came out.

“Never mind,” said Ms. McMartin, after a few silent seconds. “I think we both know the answer.”

Olive jumped out of her chair so fast that its legs thumped against the floor. “Is that what you want to happen?” she demanded, stepping toward the flickering form in the other chair. “Do you want the younger version of
you
coming back to take over this house?” She leaned close enough to feel the chill surrounding Ms. McMartin, her words coming faster and faster. “I thought you changed your mind about all of that. I thought that was why you let your family die out in the end. I thought you might have
learned something
from all the horrible things you watched Aldous McMartin do!”

Ms. McMartin’s eyes shifted away from Olive back to the fireplace. “I believe someone is at your door, Olive,” she said softly. “You had better answer it.”

Olive waited, rocking on her feet, but Ms. McMartin didn’t speak again until Olive had whirled around and stalked toward the door.

“Remember,” she murmured, “I will be watching over
my house,
Olive Dunwoody.”

Olive threw the library doors open with an aggravated double
bang.
She looked back over her shoulder, but the worn velvet chair before the fireplace was already empty. The fire smoldering in the grate had collapsed into a mass of ashes. Olive thought she could make out one more blotch of shadows gliding toward the darkened corner, but it moved quickly, and the room was too dim to be sure.

A silhouette that was too short to be Walter’s or Delora’s and too thin to be Mrs. Dewey’s or Doctor Widdecombe’s flickered outside of the front windows. Olive yanked the door open.

“I’ve been picking up some extremely odd thoughts from your vicinity,” said Rutherford, without a hello. He hovered on the threshold, jiggling back and forth in his slippers. His jacket flapped loosely over his blue dragon pajamas. “I received flashes of candles and living shadows, and then for a while I was picking up a stream of mathematical equations, but that was interrupted by something about fire and Annabelle McMartin.” His dark brown eyes honed on Olive’s. “What, exactly, has been going on?”

“I must have been dreaming,” said Olive lamely.

“Dreaming about Annabelle McMartin and the quadratic formula?”

“They were really bad dreams,” said Olive.

“And where is Walter?” asked Rutherford, looking unconvinced. “Why isn’t he standing guard?”

“Umm . . .” Olive hesitated. She glanced around the hallway, where patches of living darkness huddled in each corner and cranny. “Come with me.” She grabbed Rutherford by the sleeve of his jacket and hustled him down the hall, across the kitchen, and out the door of the back porch. She halted inside the pool of the burning porch light that spilled over the threshold, where she hoped no shades could follow.

Above the backyard, a fragment of moon was wedged deep in a grape jelly sky. Wind whispered over the grass, scattering clusters of dead leaves. To their right, beyond the lilac hedge, the Nivens house towered, dark and silent.

“Rutherford,” Olive whispered, “you can’t tell your grandmother about this, all right?”

Rutherford raised his right hand. “I swear upon my honor that I shall—”

“Good,” Olive interrupted. “That magic that Delora mentioned? The kind your grandmother said we shouldn’t try? Well . . . I asked her and Doctor Widdecombe to help me do it.”

Even through their dirty lenses, Olive could see Rutherford’s eyes widen. “The necromantic conjuration and expulsion?”

“The . . . what?”

“It means getting rid of the power of the dead, to put it simply. Doctor Widdecombe prefers the term ‘necromantic conjuration and expulsion.’ Was it successful?”

“Well . . . sort of.” Olive rubbed the sleeves of her sweater, trying to brush away the chill of the deepening night. “The conjuration part worked, I guess. But the other part—”

“The expulsion?”

“—didn’t.”

“Oh,” said Rutherford slowly. His eyes traveled toward the well-lit windows above them, and then back to Olive’s face. “What did Doctor Widdecombe try to do to aid the expulsion process?”

Olive blinked. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?” Rutherford echoed.

“All right, not
nothing
. He screamed so loudly that he might have popped his own eardrums, and then he ran out of the house before Delora could catch up with him.”

One of Rutherford’s eyebrows went up. “I find that rather difficult to believe,” he said, like a parent answering a toddler who insists that there’s an eight-headed monster hiding under the bed. “Doctor Widdecombe is a world-renowned expert on magic in nearly all its forms.”

“He’s also a scaredy-cat,” said Olive. “And so is Delora.”

Rutherford tilted his head doubtfully.

“Just because he’s some famous expert—”

“A
world-renowned
expert,” Rutherford corrected.

“That doesn’t mean he knows
everything,
” said Olive, folding her arms across her chest. “I mean, when you read his thoughts, you must notice that they’re not always perfect.”

Rutherford tilted his head to the other side. “Olive, I have never read anything in his thoughts that didn’t confirm what I already know: Namely, that he is an expert on magical history who has nothing but the best intentions when it comes to . . .” Rutherford’s words slowed. His eyes grew distant. “. . . The Fibonacci sequence.”

“The
what
sequence?” asked Olive.

“What?” said Rutherford.

“Why did you start talking about a sequence?”

Rutherford blinked. “I didn’t.
You
did.”

“I only said what
you
said,” Olive argued. “I don’t even know what the fettuccini sequence is!”

“The
Fibonacci
sequence,” Rutherford corrected. “It’s named after a medieval mathematician, and it’s a series of numbers in which the next number is always the sum of the two preceding numbers. It frequently appears in nature: in ferns, in seashells, in pinecones—”

“All right,” Olive interrupted. “But I didn’t say it.” She paused, staring through the dimness into Rutherford’s brown eyes. “If it’s a math term, do you think it could have been coming from someone else? Like . . . maybe . . . from my parents?”

Rutherford gave her a thoughtful frown. “I don’t see how that would be possible. I can only read thoughts from a distance when I know the thinker extremely well—like you, or my grandmother, or my own parents. I generally need to look directly into someone’s face in order to read them.”

“But Delora said they were nearby, didn’t she?” Olive’s eyes raked the yard. Leaves covered the garden with thick, grave-like mounds. Shadows pooled around the porch steps. “What if we just missed them somehow? Or what if they’ve been hidden in more than one place, and now they’ve been moved to a spot that we haven’t checked again?” Olive’s heart jumped a little higher with each question. “You search the yard, and I’ll look through the nearest rooms! Let’s go!”