The Stone Child (14 page)

“I was coming home from school this afternoon,” said Maggie, “riding my bike up Black Ribbon, when I saw you guys ahead, crawling through the gap in the fence at the bottom of the Olmstead driveway. I just wanted to find out where you were going, so I followed you.”

“You shouldn’t have,” said Harris, carefully placing
The Wish of the Woman in Black
next to where
The Enigmatic Manuscript
lay on the floor. “This is a dangerous place.”

“Then why are
you
guys here?” asked Maggie, even though she looked like she already had an idea.

“It’s a secret,” Eddie said. He felt his face flush, imagining the looks he would get in school tomorrow if anyone found out what they had been doing here. “You can’t tell anyone.”

“How long have you been down here?” asked Harris. “That stench. Maybe it was …”

Maggie blinked at him. “What, me? Thanks, but no. I smelled it too, when I finally crept down the ladder a few minutes ago. I was listening to you guys from the mouth of the fireplace. For a while I could hear you really well, but then you started talking quieter. So I came closer.”

“Maybe the stench really
was
from—” Eddie was interrupted when Harris poked him in the arm.

“The Woman in Black?” said Maggie. She shook her head. “I already knew that you were up to something really strange, but this beats all. Codes? Monsters? And all these books you were talking about? Whatever you’re doing, it’s creeping me out.”

Harris said, “That’s why you shouldn’t have followed us.”

“I’m sorry!” she said angrily. “But what I saw in the library last night was totally crazy. I’d been doing my homework, and then you guys showed up with that …
little monster
following you. And then … those weird words you spoke, Eddie. You can’t expect me to just be like,
Oh, okay, whatever … duh!
”

“It’s still none of your business,” said Harris.

“Maybe we should go,” suggested Eddie.

“Good idea,” said Harris. “You and me will finish this
later
.”

Eddie bent down and picked up the books from the floor,
steering clear of the dark hole. It almost seemed to sigh at him as he backed away from it.

Harris stomped toward the doorway where Maggie stood. “Excuse us, please!” he said, brushing past her and stepping onto the bottom rung of the ladder, which was bolted to the stone wall.

When Eddie followed, Maggie looked at him and said, “I said I was sorry.”

“It’s okay,” whispered Eddie. “It’s hard to explain it all right now.” As Harris climbed up the ladder in front of him, he turned around and scowled.

Once they crawled from the mouth of the fireplace, the three kids went out the back door. The sky was black, and a big moon peeked through thick clouds on the horizon.

“Wait for us!” Eddie called as Harris disappeared around the corner of the house. Eddie clutched the two books, one in each hand. He slipped them into his bag, then swung the strap over his right shoulder. Maggie walked silently next to him as they made their way across the hill and into the pocket of trees at the top of the long driveway.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” whispered Maggie as she ran forward to tug on Harris’s coat sleeve. He spun around and threw her a nasty look.

As Eddie caught up to them, his flashlight lit Harris’s sooty face from below. Harris appeared downright evil. Noticing the frightened look on Maggie’s face, he softened. “What’s wrong?”

Maggie glanced back toward the house. “Do you guys get the feeling we’re being followed?”

“You’re being paranoid,” said Harris, though he sounded uncertain himself.

“No,” said Eddie, “I feel it too.” The thought of the monsters from Nathaniel’s books hit him in the back, and he spun around, searching the shadows for movement. One of the large clouds had moved across the moon, so there was little light to see by. The woods at the top of the driveway were quiet and still. Eddie fought the temptation to call out into the darkness. He didn’t want to be answered.

“What was that?” said Harris, looking over Eddie’s shoulder.

Then they all heard it. From somewhere in the woods, a few feet up the hill, came the sound of fluttering—a wing, a leaf, a piece of paper. Bumps rose on the back of Eddie’s neck, as if an icy breeze had suddenly blown past.

“Is someone there?” Maggie asked, a little too loudly. She had turned even whiter than usual. Then she fell backward, tripping over her feet. Eddie rushed to help her, but Maggie’s eyes were fixed on the house, still partially visible through the trees. “Look!” she said. When Eddie turned around, he too almost tripped.

At first, he saw nothing unusual—trees, shadows, passing moonlight. Darkness and more darkness. But then, Eddie’s eyes adjusted. It seemed that the empty spaces between the
trees had filled, as if each black shadow solidified into a long, tall body. Eddie sensed slight movements, as if the forest itself were letting go of something it had been holding back.

Leaves crunched as a breeze rustled the forest floor.

Moving away from the empty spaces between the tree trunks, with almost imperceptible fluidity, the shadows revealed themselves as dozens of cloaked beings. Without having taken a single step, the beings materialized where Eddie, Maggie, and Harris stood at the top of the driveway. Under each hood was a stark white face. Their lips were pulled back, and what might have been a smile on any other living creature, here, was anything but.

Eddie rubbed at his eyes, then whispered, “It’s happening again.”

Harris stepped forward, clutching the boomerang. “Watch out, you guys,” he whispered to Eddie and Maggie, before calling to the creatures, “Leave us alone!” Harris pulled his arm back over his shoulder, then, with a quick flick, whipped the small piece of wood forward and sent it flying. Eddie was almost impressed as he watched the boomerang soar into the shadows, but the feeling disappeared when one dark creature swiped at it with a clawed hand and the boomerang simply vanished with a soft
whoosh
.

Suddenly, both of his hands were yanked backward, by Maggie on one side and Harris on the other. They pulled Eddie farther down the path, and the three kids ran.

Every tree they passed seemed to let go of another empty space that turned into a hooded creature. They appeared at every angle. Eddie nervously bit the inside of his lip, so hard he tasted blood.

Bare branches extended across the driveway, as if trying to scrape at them. Harris shouted as his cheek split open. Maggie screamed as she lost a tangle of hair. Eddie was sure the trees themselves were in on it. He heard the left side of his coat split down the back as something ripped clean through it.

Eddie’s bag slipped off his shoulder and toppled into the brush. Harris and Maggie continued to dash down the driveway, the flashlight’s beam bobbing in the inky shadows. “Wait!” Eddie called. But it was no use. Skidding to a clumsy halt in the middle of the overgrown driveway, Eddie spun around. His bag lay on the forest floor, obscured by a small pile of leaves.

He started to scramble toward the bag when he realized that an enormous figure stood over him, cloaked in a filmy transparent shadow like black gauze. Eddie looked up into its face. Its swollen, piglike eyes dared him to look away. Its mouth grew wide as Eddie watched, showing him sharp teeth set in a round skull covered with pasty greenish-white skin. Eddie tried to scream, but nothing came out. The wind blew through the treetops, and like a candle flame the figure wavered before materializing again. Eddie saw the rest of the creatures behind the one towering over him. They were
scattered throughout the forest and up the driveway like chess pieces, waiting and watching.

“Eddie!” Harris and Maggie called to him from down the hill.

“Urgh,” was all Eddie could muster. His tongue felt like old parchment. His voice was gone—fear had sucked it from his throat. He waited for the creature to descend upon him, but standing there, he realized it had frozen in place. As he struggled to swallow the cold night air, Eddie stared into the horrible face of the monster, and an idea began to fill him with courage.

Since moving to Gatesweed, Eddie had met the dogs from
The Rumor of the Haunted Nunnery
and encountered the gremlin from
The Curse of the Gremlin’s Tongue
. Eddie knew that he was now looking at the Watchers—the Witch’s hench-creatures who had followed Gertie from the woods into the basement of the old farmhouse. Yesterday afternoon, Eddie had read about them in
The Witch’s Doom
. They were real too. And he knew how to beat them.

“Eddie!” Harris’s and Maggie’s voices shocked Eddie out of his stupor.

He shouted, “Stay where you are! Don’t move. I’ll be there in a second.”

Keeping his eyes focused on the Watcher in front of him, Eddie reached forward and picked up his book bag. He slipped it onto his shoulder and took a step backward. The
Watchers remained frozen, tied to their shadows, unable to move. As Eddie inched farther away, they stopped grinning. Once he was twenty feet away, they closed their eyes and opened their mouths in anguished, silent howls. Eddie tried his best not to stumble over the rocky path. All the creatures needed was for him to look away for a moment. He concentrated, then called to his friends to direct him.

Walking backward all the way down the driveway, he eventually found Harris and Maggie crouched behind a tree near the hole in the iron fence. Even though he could no longer see the Watchers through the dense trees, he knew they must still be at the top of the hill, so he kept staring in that direction. He was too frightened to even risk blinking.

“Come on! Let’s go!” said Harris as Eddie finally made it to the fence. “What are you doing?”

“Can I borrow your flashlight?” said Eddie. Harris handed it to him with a frustrated groan. Eddie shone it into the woods up the hill with a sigh of relief. “They’re allergic to light,” he explained. “They can’t follow if you watch them,” said Eddie, staring up the driveway.

“What do you mean—they can’t follow you if you watch them?” said Maggie. “Is that how you got away? You walked backward through the woods? How did you figure that out?”

Eddie nodded. “It’s how Gertie got away in
The Witch’s Doom
.”

“Of course!” said Harris. “I remember those things! They were really horrible.”

“
The Witch’s Doom?”
said Maggie. “I don’t get it. Are you saying those things came from a Nathaniel Olmstead book?”

As Eddie nodded yes, the flashlight splashed her face with a ghostly glow from underneath. Even with a smudge of dirt on her nose, she looked so pale that, for half a second, he thought she looked like the statue in the woods, but when her voice wavered, he knew she couldn’t be anyone but herself. She looked between the two boys skeptically, as if they might be playing a joke on her.

Maggie thought about that for a second. Even though she still looked confused, she nodded, seeming to understand what they were saying. “Do we have to walk backward all the way back home?” she asked. “My dad’ll kill me if I bring home several dozen giant shadowy demons.”

Despite everything, Eddie laughed. Harris joined him.

“I don’t think they’ll follow us,” said Eddie. “They need the shadows, and even though it’s only half-full, the moon is probably too bright outside of the woods. In the book they only appear when it’s very dark out. But just to be sure, I’ll keep my eyes behind us until we get somewhere safe. You guys can guide me.”

“My pleasure,” said Harris, brushing aside the vines that covered the hole in the fence. Eddie stumbled backward as
Maggie and Harris steered him through. He prayed that the Watchers were no longer watching.

They picked up their bikes and walked them up the hill to Maggie’s house, where her father begrudgingly agreed to pile everyone into his pickup for a ride back into town. As they passed the entrance to Nathaniel Olmstead’s overgrown driveway, the moon returned from behind a small bank of clouds, and Eddie finally felt safe. He knew the Watchers would never set foot past the shadows where the trees ended and the moonlit asphalt began.

Eddie was sitting at his desk to distract himself with math homework, a task he expected would be nearly impossible after the evening’s events, when his mother knocked on his bedroom door. She’d reheated his dinner and brought it up to him, along with the cordless phone.

“It’s for you,” she said, resting the large antique silver platter on the comforter folded at the end of his bed.

“Thanks, Mom,” he said. She kissed his cheek before heading into the hallway and closing his bedroom door.

“Hey!” Harris said. He sounded exhausted. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. How ‘bout you?”

“Freaked out,” said Harris. “Those things were scarier than the dogs from the lake. Scarier than the gremlin.”

Eddie silently noticed that he didn’t include the Woman
in Black. Despite the horror of meeting the Watchers, he knew they both understood that meeting
her
would be worse.

“Where did they come from?” said Eddie.

“I’m not sure,” said Harris. “In
The Witch’s Doom
, the old woman tells Gertie that legend during the town meeting, remember? She says the Watchers haunt the woods once the sun goes down.”

“Right,” said Eddie. “Maybe the same thing happens up at the Olmstead estate.”

Harris was quiet. Eddie could hear him breathing over the phone.

“What’s wrong?” Eddie asked.

“I was just thinking … if those things live in Nathaniel Olmstead’s woods now,” said Harris, “did they arrive
before
or
after
he left?”

Eddie shook his head. “Let’s not think about that,” he said, changing the subject. “I feel like we’re closer than ever. Did you get a chance to look at the code in the new book? I think it was different from the code in
The Enigmatic Manuscript
. Why don’t you check?”

Harris paused before answering. “I don’t have the books.
You
have the books.”

“Oh right,” said Eddie. “I forgot.” He grabbed his open book bag and dug through his notebooks and folders.