Between the Lines (10 page)

Oliver blinks up at me. “Well. I guess you just take it.”

I gently reach down, trying to pinch the spider off the page, but nothing happens. There is a barrier between us, thinner than silk and incredibly solid. “It’s not working.”

“I forgot about the wall,” he says. He sits down, lost in thought.

“The wall?” I ask.

“It’s what keeps us safe, I suppose, if a Reader handles
the pages without much care, or folds one down right in the center of an illustration. It’s like a bubble. Soft, but you can’t push through it no matter how hard you try.” He glances up. “Believe me, I have.”

“So you need something that can poke a hole in it….”

Oliver reaches for the dagger in his belt and takes a running leap directly toward me, so forceful that I find myself covering my face with my hands, as if he might burst through the pages and land right in front of me. But when I peek between my fingers, I find him flat on his back, staring up at the sky.

“Ouch,” he murmurs.

“Scientific discovery number one,” I say. “You can’t break the barrier between us.”

He sits up, rubbing his forehead. “No,” he replies, “but maybe
you
can.”

“You want me to poke the book with a knife?”

“No,” Oliver says. “You have to rip the book.”

I gasp. “No way! This is a
library
book!”

“You have
got
to be kidding me,” Oliver mutters. “Come on, Delilah. Just a little tear, so that I can sneak the spider out to you.”

When he offers up that smile again—the one that makes me feel like I’m the only person in his universe (although in this case that’s probably true)—I am utterly lost. “Okay,” I say with a sigh.

Gingerly, I take the page between my fingers and
make the tiniest, most minute, infinitesimal tear.

“Delilah,” Oliver says, “I couldn’t squeeze protozoa through that, much less a spider. Could you try again? A little less imaginary this time?”

“Fine.” I pinch the top of the page between my fingers and give a good, solid tug. The paper tears.

“It
had
to be up at the top of the page, didn’t it….” Oliver rolls his eyes and wearily looks at the sheer cliff of rock before him.

“You do it for Seraphima,” I point out.

“Very funny.” Clenching the spider in his fist, he looks up. “How am I supposed to hold on to this thing
and
climb?” With a grimace, Oliver opens his mouth and pops the spider onto his tongue.

“That is so gross!” I cry out.

“Mmffphm,”
Oliver says, but his eyes speak volumes. He starts to climb up the rock wall, getting quicker and quicker as he comes closer to the top. He inches to the right, to the part of the page that I’ve torn.

Holding his hand in front of his mouth, he spits. “That,” he says, “was
revolting.
” He glances at me over his shoulder. “Are you ready?”

“Yes,” I say. Feeling foolish, I hold my finger up to the rip in the paper.

Oliver extends his hand. The spider begins to crawl across his knuckles, his ring finger, his pinkie. When it
reaches the edge of his skin, its legs grasp for purchase and find the seam of the paper.

And suddenly, there is the tiniest of black dots in my palm.

It’s nearly invisible, and it’s uncomfortably warm and wet. Before my eyes, it begins to grow, expanding into a familiar formation of eight creepy, crawly legs.

“Oliver!” I say, stunned. “I think it worked!”

“Really?” He has jumped down to the ground again and stares up at me eagerly. “You’ve got the spider, then?”

I glance down at the tiny arachnid. But now that I am looking more carefully, I see something’s not quite right. What I thought were legs are letters, raveling and unraveling. I think I can make out a
d.
And a
p.

It’s not a spider, really. It’s the
word
“spider,” taking the shape of the bug and crawling across my hand.

Before I can tell Oliver, however, a knock at the bathroom door startles me. I shake the word-insect off my palm, beneath the inside cover of the book, and shut the book tightly. “I’ll just be another minute,” I call out.

Gingerly, I open the book again. There is no insect. Instead, written neatly on the inside cover, at a bizarre diagonal angle, I read:
spider
.

“Oliver,” I murmur, although the pages are still closed, although he probably cannot hear me. “I think we need to go back to square one.”

page 27

T
he last thing Oliver remembered was the splash. Now he was tumbling head over heels as he sank to the depths of the ocean. Two eels twined and vined, the water sizzling with electric current every time they rubbed against each other. Oliver felt his lungs burning, at the point of bursting, and he wondered if this was how he’d die—not at the hands of the villain who’d kidnapped Seraphima but simply consumed by the ocean. Suddenly, he remembered the compass hanging around his neck.
Home,
his mother had promised. It was a foolproof escape. He let the chain slip through his fingers, and with the last of his energy, he reached to grab it, but before he could, it was snatched out of his grasp.

“Noooo!” he screamed, water filling his lungs. He closed his eyes, imagining the worst.

Fingers snaked beneath his collar. A soft mouth closed over his own, and he felt a shudder run through his chest. “Seraphima,” Oliver murmured, stunned to realize he could talk and breathe. He blinked to find a woman in his arms.

Her skin was blue, patterned with a web of scales. Her hair was a wild black cloud, seaweed twisted into its crown, flowing behind translucent, spiny ears. Two sets of gills undulated on her cheeks and beneath her emaciated rib cage, which tapered into a muscular, finned tail that reflected flashes of copper and gold. She had no bridge to her nose, just deep-set nostrils that flared above the cavern of her toothless smile. “Who’s Seraphima?” the girl asked, her clear blue eyes flashing a deep shade of red. “I’m Marina.”

Terrified, Oliver thrashed, trying to loosen himself from her embrace.

“Sister,” said another female voice. “Don’t keep him all to yourself.” Oliver looked up to see a second mermaid, who was wearing his father’s compass around her neck. And then he heard a third voice: “Oh yes, this is the one we’ve been waiting for.”

Oliver managed to land a swift kick against Marina’s tail, only to have the hair of the second mermaid twist itself into a spitting bronze eel, which wrapped its neck around his torso, immobilizing him and pulling him closer to her. “Tell my sisters that you’re here for me, Ondine,” she said. He tried to close his fingers around the compass that hung from her neck, but she kissed him so deeply that he started to lose consciousness again.

A webbed hand smacked Oliver across the face, scratching his cheek with long, pointed nails. He was snatched away by the third mermaid, who cradled him in her elongated arms. “Why bother with a trifle like that,” she sang into his ear, “when you could have someone like me, Kyrie?”

“Ladies,” Oliver said, his heart racing. “With three beautiful choices, you can hardly expect me to make a decision so quickly.” If he could only get out of their clutches long enough to think clearly, he could get his compass back. And once he did that, he knew he could escape and find Frump and Socks. He backed away so that he could see his rescuers, and gave them a dazzling smile. Marina’s black hair fanned through the water in slow motion as her eyes settled back to a deep, royal blue. Her slender neck was draped with beads and shells, and her shimmering tail swayed in the water behind her. Ondine and Kyrie swam behind her. When one of the mermaids reached out toward Oliver again, Marina slapped her hand away and hissed so loudly that the water pounded against Oliver’s eardrums.

“You must stay for dinner then,” Kyrie said.

What if I
am
dinner?
Oliver wondered. “I can’t imagine a better way to pass the evening,” he said.

Ondine and Kyrie wrapped their hair around his wrists, pulling him into the current. Marina tilted his chin and kissed him once more. The kiss was foul and tasted of fish, but it filled his lungs with oxygen.

They arrived at a deep cave, with jaws of stalagmites and
stalactites that nicked at Oliver’s legs when the mermaids drew him into its belly. He winced as blood welled from his calf. It curled in the water like crimson smoke, and before Oliver could even cry out from the pain, there was a sudden rush of movement as a broad silver shark sped toward him. Ondine let her hair fall away from his wrist and turned to the shark, her eyes flashing red as every scale on her body stood on edge. Gills fanned, she screamed, and every fish swimming nearby fled. As the shark dipped and swam away, Ondine’s scales smoothed and her eyes dimmed, now calm and purple. “Come,” she whispered, and for a moment, all Oliver could do was stare at this creature that dragged him along in her wake.

The cave’s centerpiece was a giant stone table, or maybe it was an altar upon which Oliver was destined to be sacrificed. At the rear of the cave a rounded driftwood door hid another room; on the other side, a golden chest with a huge padlock sat half-buried in the sand.