The Strangers (5 page)

N
O PLACE IS
as silent as an empty school.

Even in the daytime, when all the lights were on and the sun was shining through the windows, Olive couldn’t find her way around the junior high. Now, in the echoing darkness, she made one terrified turn after another. Her goggles slipped irritatingly over her eyes. Her heart smacked against her ribs. Panic pushed her forward like a cold, heavy hand.

“I think we need to turn
the other
way, Olive,” said Rutherford, puffing in the blackness beside her.

“I believe he is correct, miss,” Leopold added. “We ought to retrace our steps and return to the gymnasium, in order to—”

“We
can’t
turn around,” Olive argued. “That thing is right behind us! We need to find someplace to hide!”

They reached a spot where two hallways met, forming a knot of even thicker darkness. Olive halted, unsure of which way to go. Her heartbeat thundered in her ears—and still, beneath its pounding, she could hear the rustle of footsteps coming closer.

“This way. Quickly,” Horatio commanded, bounding to the right.

Olive forced her legs back to a run.

They turned into another hallway, where a carpet of moonlight unrolled along the tiles beneath their feet. Olive glanced up, catching sight of the moon’s bony hook gleaming through the high windows, and looked down again just in time to see Horatio dart through a gap in the hallway walls. Everyone else rushed after him.

Olive took a hasty look around. They were inside a stairwell, where a flight of steps disappeared into the darkness above. The cats crouched in the doorway, out of sight of the hall. Morton’s robes flickered from the corner. Beneath the rhythm of her own heart, she could hear Rutherford’s muffled breathing. For several seconds, there was no other sound.

“I believe we lost it,” Leopold murmured at last.

There was another moment of silence.

Then Morton whispered, “Who do you think it is?”

Rutherford had an instant answer. “Well, it can’t be Aldous McMartin, unless Annabelle found some way to get him out of his portrait on her own, which is highly unlikely. It could be Annabelle herself, or someone in her employ who she sent after us. Or, I suppose, it might not be a costume at all.”

Morton’s eyes were the size of billiard balls. “What do you mean? You mean that thing is a real ghost?”

“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” said Olive, giving Rutherford a hard look.

Rutherford blinked. The three cats turned to stare at Olive, their eyes glimmering like stained glass.

“Maybe it’s just a high school student,” Olive went on. “Or some other kid trying to scare us.”

“What did you say?” Harvey blared. “‘Bells on high ringing through Paris’?”

“Shh!” Horatio hissed.

Everyone fell silent.

Olive held her breath. There was no noise from the hallway outside. On her hands and knees, Olive edged out of the stairwell and squinted along the dim corridor. A few yards away, just inside the alcove of a locked classroom door, she could make out the edge of a rotting gray robe.

“It’s still out there, just waiting for us!” she whispered, ducking back into the stairwell. “We can’t stay here!”

With Olive leading the way, they scrambled up the flight of stairs into yet another deserted hall. Posters for the Halloween carnival fluttered like spectral leaves as they rushed past. Olive dropped the sack full of candy that was crinkling much too noisily on her arm, and she heard the smacks of Rutherford and Morton letting go of theirs as well. Spilled candy clattered on the tiles.

“We shouldn’t have done this,” Olive panted to the others. “I’m sorry. I thought we would be safe, if we—”

“We
will
be safe, if we can just outrun it,” Leopold promised. “Follow me, men. And lady.”

The black cat veered to the right, toward an open set of doors. They plunged through the archway, following a flight of steps down, down, down, into a long and windowless passage.

“Where are we?” Olive asked Rutherford, who was gasping in the blackness beside her.

“I have no idea,” Rutherford answered. “And you know that I do not use those words, in that particular combination, often.”

“Is that thing still coming after us? Can you hear its thoughts?”

“As I don’t even know who or what it
is,
” Rutherford huffed, “I would have to stop and stare directly into its eyes in order to get a clear reading, and I find that thought rather unappealing.”

“Halt!” said Leopold, before Olive could ask another question. “We seem to have reached an impasse.”

Olive groped through the blackness. A smooth, solid surface sealed off the end of the corridor. This was a dead end. “Oh no,” she breathed.
“No.”
She gave the wall a desperate shove. Before them, the solid surface swung forward, sending the groan of disused hinges echoing through the passageway.

“It’s another door!” Olive shouted. “Come on!”

Everyone stumbled through the doorway into a vast, open space. It was far too dark to see the room’s dimensions, but the smacks of their footsteps reverberated against a ceiling that hung high above their heads, and the air felt cool and still. Rows of tiny white bulbs formed wide stripes along the floor. In the distance, one red light hung high on the wall, tingeing the darkness with a bloody haze.

“Are we still in your school?” Morton whispered.

Olive frowned around at the dim white lights. She took another step forward, and her knee nudged the first seat in a row that curved away into the darkness.

“I know where we are!” she called to the others. “We’re in the auditorium!”

“Olive, are you
trying
to let our pursuer know exactly how to find us?” hissed Horatio from the vicinity of Olive’s shins. “We ought to find another way out of here, before . . .” Horatio’s whiskers twitched. His ears flicked back, catching a trace of sound.

A split second later, Olive heard it too: the rusty groan of the passage doors.

The ghoul had followed them into the auditorium.

Behind the towering creature, the passage doors thumped softly shut. For a moment, the ghoul kept still, its hooded face turning from one of them to the other, taking in the cats, the dimly glowing ghost, the miniature professor, and the petrified jabberwocky in sweatpants. Olive knew just what Horatio had been about to say: They needed to find another way out, before they were trapped here. Alone. Far from the crowd, and the lights, and the teachers, and the exits. Just like they were trapped now.

Silence hung in the air like a blade about to fall.

And then several things happened at once.

“Run!” screamed Olive.

“Men, split up!” yelled Harvey.

“Men, stay together!” yelled Leopold.

“The light booth!” shouted Rutherford.

“The outer doors!” shouted Horatio.

“Olive!” screamed Morton.

At the explosion of sound, the ghoul gave a start, staring around as its prey darted in all directions.

Rutherford shot up one aisle. Horatio took another. Leopold and Harvey charged off into the rows of seats. Grabbing a wad of Morton’s sleeve, Olive hauled him toward the dim red light, which cast its glow over the steps that led to the stage.

Black boards thudded under their feet. Dragging Morton behind her, Olive rushed toward the stage’s closed curtains. There had to be a stage door on the other side. But there seemed to be no gap in the heavy black velvet, and another set of steps was crossing the stage, drawing closer and closer. The tremor of the floorboards threaded upward into her spine—

—and, with a sudden, audible
clunk,
every light in the room went out.

Without the spokes of white along the floor or the red glow of the work light, the air in the auditorium was as black as a jar full of ink.

“Olive?” whispered a voice from over her shoulder—a voice that
wasn’t
Morton’s.

Olive wheeled around just as a beam of light, bright and pure as a pillar of ice, speared through the darkness and shattered across the stage.

Morton let out a shriek.

Half blinded, shielding her face with one arm, Olive blinked into the blue-white glare. Inches away from her, near enough that she could have reached out and touched its rotting gray robes, stood the ghoul. It too was wavering and blinking into the light.

“Everybody freeze!” shouted Rutherford’s voice from the light booth, where the giant spotlight was aimed at the stage.

Nobody listened.

Morton had already flopped down and wormed his way under the hem of the curtains, away from the burning white beam. The cats leaped from the rows of seats up onto the stage, forming a protective barricade around Olive’s shins. Olive backed up until her wire wings caught in the curtains.

Only the ghoul stood still.

Its skeletal frame was bathed in the light. Olive imagined its knobby hand reaching up and pulling back that hood, revealing a heap of long, dark hair, and a pair of pretty, icy, painted eyes. But it wasn’t dissolving, as the living portraits of Annabelle or Aldous would have.

In fact, it seemed to be
shivering.

Olive wriggled her wings free of the curtain and took one tiny step forward. From the sunken pits of the ghoul’s face, two wide blue eyes watched her warily.

“Take off that mask,” she commanded.

The ghoul reached up with two bony hands. There was a sound like a rubber band stretching, and then the mask and hood were gone, leaving only a very skinny, very tall, very young man—a young man with stringy red hair, bulbous blue eyes, and a nervous expression—to stare back at her.

“Who are you?” Olive demanded.

The young man’s mouth worked from side to side, as though the answer had gotten stuck in his teeth. He hunched his shoulders around his long, skinny neck. He cleared his throat with a startlingly deep rumble.

“Walter,” he said, in a very, very low voice.

“Why are you following us?”

“Mmm. Because I’m—um—” Walter swallowed, and Olive could see his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his scrawny neck. “Because I’m your bodyguard.”

“
Y
OU’RE
WHAT
?”
SAID
Olive.

Walter drew his head even closer to his shoulders and folded his lanky arms across his chest. “I’m your bodyguard,” he repeated, in a deep, slow voice.

Pressed against Olive’s legs, the three cats fluffed their fur and made themselves as large and important as possible. Harvey forgot he was supposed to be a hunchback, and stood up like a stuffed cat in a museum. Leopold looked so tightly inflated that Olive feared the tip of one of her wings might pop him.

“She already
has
a guard,” snapped Horatio. “Three of them, in fact.”

Walter looked surprisingly unsurprised by the talking cat. “These are the familiars,” he rumbled. “I’ve heard about them.”

“Wait,” said Olive, before too many more questions could pile up and crush her first one. “What do you mean, you’re my bodyguard?”

Walter’s knobby shoulders shifted. “Mmm . . . I was supposed to follow you,” he began. His voice was so deep that it seemed to be coming from someplace a few floors below his body. “I was supposed to watch. Make sure you were safe. I wasn’t supposed to scare you. You weren’t even supposed to know.” Walter paused, his eyes darting anxiously from one of them to another. “But you kept running away. So I had to run after you. And now . . .” Walter kneaded the hollow ghoul’s mask in both hands. “Mmm,” he grumbled deep in his throat. “Now my aunt’s going to be so mad.”

“Your aunt?” Olive echoed.

Walter’s eyes widened. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you. They’re trying to stay undercover.”

“‘They’?”

“Oh, no.” Walter closed his eyes. “Could you—mmm—could you turn off that light? It’s hard to think.”

There was another
clunk
from the light booth. The spotlight clicked off, the floor lights blinked on, and Rutherford emerged into the aisle, leaving one row of houselights glowing dimly behind him.

“You’re Rutherford Dewey,” said Walter as Rutherford hurried down the aisle. “And that’s the Nivens boy. The one trapped in the painting,” he added, nodding at the lump behind the curtains.

Morton’s head poked out from behind the velvet, his eyes glaring at Walter beneath his lifted hood.

“Well,” said Olive, “since you seem to know everything about us, it might be fair if you told us a little about
you.
”

Walter sighed a deep, rumbling sigh. He rubbed his head with the empty mask, making his hair stand up in uneven reddish spikes. “Mmm . . .” he said again, looking so uncomfortable under everyone’s scrutiny that Olive almost felt sorry for him. But not quite.

“I belong to a group that opposes dark magic,” Walter began at last. “The S-M-U-D-S.”

“The Smuds?” said Rutherford. He stood at the edge of the stage, staring intently at Walter’s face.

“The—mmm—the Society of Magicians United against—mmm—Dark Spells,” Walter explained. “I’m a junior member. Sort of. Or an apprentice. Almost.” He blinked at Rutherford. “That’s how I know your grandmother. And we know about all of you.” His eyes fluttered over the rest of them.

“Are you here because of the increased threat from the McMartins?” Rutherford asked.

Walter nodded. “We know what’s been happening in their house. But we were supposed to stay undercover. If you didn’t know we were watching the house, then—mmm—then the McMartins might not know either.”

“We thought
you
were Annabelle,” said Morton angrily, crawling out from the curtains to stand beside Olive.

“Or something Annabelle had summoned,” Olive added.

“No,” said Walter. “I’m just a dope whose aunt is going to yell at him.” Head bowed, he glanced around at the circle of wary faces. “Can I—can I at least escort you home?”

Leopold’s chest inflated even further. “We do not require an additional escort,” he huffed.

“No. I know you don’t.” Walter’s deep voice softened. “Mmm . . . I just meant I could go
with
you. Safety in numbers.”

Leopold gave a puffy harrumph.

“What do you think, Rutherford?” Olive asked.

Rutherford nodded slowly. “I think Walter is telling the truth,” he said.

“Very well,” said Horatio. His eyes gave Walter a last sharp scan. “Then let us return to the house. Some of us would rather
not
spend the night attired in green paint and plastic snouts.”

A jabberwocky, a ghost, a professor, three cats, and one tall gray ghoul wound their way back through the junior high school and out the open front doors. The cats kept a watchful eye on Walter, Olive noticed, but once the group had passed through the school doors, they turned most of their attention back to the dark lawns and quiet streets.

Morton hadn’t said a word since they’d left the auditorium. The paint in his costume had faded to a mild green glow, and he kept his eyes fixed on the sidewalk. Olive wasn’t sure if it was the prospect of going home, or the fact that the night had been far more frightening than fun that was dampening Morton’s mood. Maybe she didn’t
want
to know. There was nothing she could do about either of those things now. Still, she stuck close to Morton, keeping several feet of space between herself and the flapping edges of Walter’s long gray robes. She wasn’t sure what to think of Walter yet—but if Rutherford saw no reason to doubt him, then there was nothing in his mind to earn their distrust.

Rutherford, in fact, was acting downright
friendly.

“But that is the problem with dressing up as a dinosaur, of course,” he opined to Walter as a cold rush of wind swept along the sidewalk, battering them with a swirl of dry leaves. “There are so many potential inaccuracies. Benjamin Davis’s costume seemed to imply that a Tyrannosaurus rex had five-fingered claws and a zipper along its spine.
Highly
implausible.”

“Mmm,” said Walter agreeably.

“Of course, dinosaurs are one of my areas of semi-expertise,” Rutherford went on. “What about you? What types of magic have you been studying? Are you an expert on any particular methods or subjects?”

“Mmm . . .” said Walter. “Well, I’m interested in conjuration. But my aunt doesn’t think I have the gift. She’s a messenger,” he added, a hint of admiration lightening his deep voice. “She can communicate with the dead. And she says . . . mmm . . . She says they don’t have any messages for me.” Walter paused for a moment. “That means I won’t succeed at anything hard. So I’ve been learning basic spells. Protection. Summoning. Mmm. Stuff like that.”

“So have I!” said Rutherford. “What do you think of substituting Picklox for Hookweed in a basic keyhole spell? Of course, it’s not authentic to the spell’s medieval roots, but . . .”

They turned the final corner, and Olive’s mind traveled away from Rutherford and Walter and Morton to hurry up the slope of Linden Street.

The trick-or-treaters had vanished as suddenly as they’d appeared. Here and there, the nub of a candle continued to sputter behind a pumpkin’s fading smile. Most of the neighbors had switched off their porch lights, leaving their houses dark and unwelcoming.

But none of them were quite as dark and unwelcoming as the Nivens house.

Morton’s older sister, Lucinda—the closest thing to a friend that Annabelle McMartin had ever had—had lived for decades in that quiet gray house, hiding her painted skin from the daylight, keeping its rooms spotless and its garden neat. Now clusters of crabgrass sprouted in the cracks of the walkway. Thistles and creeping vines invaded the once-perfect rose beds. Grass and weeds grew high around its walls, as though they were trying to help the house itself to disappear.

When they reached its walkway, Morton stopped so abruptly that Rutherford, who had been rattling off a list of medieval herbs, smacked directly into him.

“Someone’s in there,” Morton whispered.

“What are you talking about?” Olive followed Morton’s eyes toward the silent gray house. In one upper window, where the pane of glass had been shattered, pale curtains twitched gently in the wind. “Oh, that? It’s just a broken window, Morton.”

“No.” Morton shook his head. “There’s someone in there.” The cats stopped to cluster around them. Rutherford and Walter leaned closer. “I saw a light,” Morton went on. “It
moved
.”

Walter straightened up and gave the street a long, careful look. “This way,” he said softly. “To the back.”

Before anyone could question him, he had taken off across the overgrown lawn.

The rippling hem of Walter’s costume made a darker trail across the dewy grass. Dead leaves crackled beneath Olive’s feet as she hurried after him, with Rutherford, Morton, and the cats close behind. They edged around the corner of the house, through a clump of withered hydrangeas, into the shelter of the house’s back wall. Through the nearest windows, Olive spotted a flicker of light—the faint, floating glimmer of a candle gliding through the house’s quiet rooms.

She glanced down at Morton, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was watching Walter, who had stopped at the back door, with one hand pressed against the wood. Walter’s voice was soft, but Olive caught the stream of words it carried—words from some other language, low and smooth and strange.

“Walter?” she breathed. “What are you doing?”

Walter didn’t answer.

The door creaked open before them. A breath of air drifted out of the darkness inside, cold and smoky with the scent of dust. Somewhere in the depths of the house, the glimmering light bobbed and brightened.

Walter stepped over the threshold.

Morton followed him.

“Morton, wait!” Olive whispered, darting after him through the gaping doorway. The cats brushed against her legs, keeping close.

Rutherford hurried behind. “I’m not sure this is wise,” Olive heard him say, before the door banged shut, leaving them all sealed in the dark.

Olive blinked around. She could feel one of the cats pressed against her leg, and she could see the dying glow of Morton’s sleeve, but everything else was black. Walter’s voice rumbled up from somewhere nearby, startling and dangerously near, like the thunder of an approaching storm.

“We’re here,” he called into the darkness.