Spellbound: The Books of Elsewhere (14 page)

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Authors: Jacqueline West

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For a moment, Olive pressed her hand against the book’s open pages while her thoughts skittered around, getting nowhere. It was too late to lie. Rutherford had already seen too much.
“No,” she said at last, sounding rather pouty. “I haven’t. I’m looking for some ingredients, and then
maybe
I’ll try it. But I don’t know if I will.”
Rutherford dropped down onto his knees next to her, making Olive wriggle a few inches away. “What exactly are you looking for?”
Without speaking, Olive pulled the book around her body and plopped it between them. She pointed to the list of plants.
“Interesting,” murmured Rutherford. “Catnip, nettles . . . But I’ve never heard of bat berry. How will you identify it?”
“Something that looks like a bat, I guess,” Olive answered. “Or like something a bat would eat.”
Rutherford nodded. “And do you have a hypothesis about thorntooth?”
Olive shrugged. “I was just going to look for something that seems thorny. Or toothy.”
“Very logical,” said Rutherford with approval. “Of course, you may have to experiment several times, in multiple combinations, in order to limit the variables.”
Olive blinked at him.
“Do you want to do the nettles, or should I?” he asked, leaning over the clumps of plants.
Olive opened her mouth to tell Rutherford that
she
should do the nettles, and
he
should work on minding his own business, but she didn’t get the chance. At that moment, a voice hooted, “Rutherfooord!” and in the next moment, Mrs. Dewey was hustling past the corner of the big stone house toward the garden. Olive’s heart gave a panicky leap. Had Mrs. Dewey been watching them through the hedge? And, if she had, how much had she heard? Olive just had time to flip the spellbook shut and sit on it before Mrs. Dewey’s snowman-shaped shadow was falling over them.
“Rutherford Dewey!” Mrs. Dewey puffed. She glanced at Olive, and her mouth turned into a tiny pink smile. “Oh, hello, Olive dear,” she said. The smile disappeared like a popped bubble. “Rutherford Dewey, what have I told you about leaving those models of yours all over the dining room floor?”
“You didn’t move them, did you?” said Rutherford. “They’re all set up for a reenactment of the Battle of Bosworth.”
“I nearly broke my neck on them!” said Mrs. Dewey. “I want you to go home right now and put them where they belong.”
“Can I have just a little bit longer?” said Rutherford. “We’re in the middle of something very important.”
“Very important?” Mrs. Dewey repeated skeptically. Her round blue eyes wandered over to where Olive was sitting, and lingered for just a moment on the thing that Olive was sitting on. Olive felt her skin go rigid. Then Mrs. Dewey sighed, and her eyes trailed back to her grandson.
“What exactly are you up to, Rutherford?”
“It’s a science experiment. We’re trying to identify some unusual plants.”
“Oh?” Mrs. Dewey tilted her round head. “What are you looking for?”
“We’re looking for something called
bat berry,
” said Rutherford. Olive flashed him a look of horror. Rutherford ignored her. “That’s not its scientific name, of course, but that’s all we have to go on.”
Mrs. Dewey tugged up her dress so that the hem was just above her dimply white knees, and then she knelt between them at the edge of the garden. “Let me see,” she murmured. Her equally dimply hands rustled through a patch of leaves. “Ah, yes. Here we are.” There was a little snap, and Mrs. Dewey held up a black stalk covered with tiny blue berries, all coated by fine silvery hair. “Bat berry,” she said.
“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
 
“I
S 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
dis
proportionately 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 lowest 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.

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