The Strangers by Jacqueline West Page A

the leafless ash tree clattered softly. Olive was sure she wouldn’t be able to fall asleep, but her eyelids insisted on sliding shut, and she felt too hollow and heavy to pull them back up. There was a last whispering rush of wind, and then even the darkness disappeared.

9
    “ O LIVE,” CALLED HER mother’s voice.
    The voice was soft and far away, floating toward Olive’s ears through a wall of wispy gray clouds. A hand tapped lightly at her door. “Olive, it’s time to get up,” her mother called again. “You’re already running thirteen point five minutes late for the school bus . . .”
    Olive’s eyes slid open.
    Her bedroom was lit by gray morning light. A set of wire wings, two rumpled gloves, and a pair of painted goggles lay in a pile on the floor beyond the edge of her bed.
    Olive frowned down at the goggles. That’s right—this was the day after Halloween. That meant that this was Sunday. And
Sunday
meant that she didn’t have to go to school. She didn’t have to go
anywhere.
She didn’t have a thing to do but pour her haul of candy onto her bedspread and sort the treats into Most Delicious, Semi-Tasty, and Still Better Than Pickled Beets piles. Smiling to herself, Olive snuggled back into her pillows.
    The branches of the ash tree tapped gently at the windowpane.
That’s
what she had heard when she thought someone was knocking at her door. And her mother hadn’t been calling for her to get up, because her mother was—
    Her mother was . . .
    Olive sat up.
    The hollowness of the house seemed to widen around her. She could feel the stillness on every side, filling the rooms and hallways in place of the burbling coffeepot and clicking computer keys. Her heartbeat echoed in the emptiness.
    On the pillow beside her, a damp orange cat began to stir.
    “I hope we did not wake you,” said Horatio, running a paw over his whiskers. “You needed a good night’s sleep as much as I needed a bath.”
    Olive looked blearily around. Morton’s ghost costume lay crumpled on the rug. Leopold’s sash hung neatly over the back of the vanity chair. “Where is everyone?” she asked.
    “Harvey took Morton home some time ago. The morning light was making him uncomfortable. Leopold is surveying the grounds.”
    “Oh.” Olive pulled her knees to her chest, hugging herself tight. “Should you be guarding your territory too?”
    “I’ve been guarding
you,
” Horatio answered. He stopped brushing his whiskers, and his penetrating green eyes settled on Olive’s face. “You are not alone here, Olive.”
    Olive tried to give Horatio a smile, but the best she could manage was a twitchy grimace. “Actually, I’d
like
to be alone for a few minutes,” she said. “I need to change my clothes.”
    Once the cat had padded into the hallway, Olive hauled her legs out of bed and trudged across the room to her dresser. Her body felt as though it had been scooped out and refilled with wet sand. She could barely manage to yank a sweater over her head and wriggle into a pair of jeans.
    Once she was dressed, Olive shuffled out into the hall. Each creak of the floorboards seemed to thunder through the house. Sounds that disappeared on an ordinary day—the buzz of the refrigerator, the low breath of the furnace huffing from far below—hung in the air, startling and strange. Even the paintings along the staircase seemed to have noticed the change in the house. A dark glint shifted over their surfaces as Olive passed by, like multiplied shadows gliding after her.
    By the time she reached the foot of the staircase, Olive felt too heavy to take another step. She gazed down at the rug, still twisted to one side, and the candy scattered across the floor like colorfully wrapped hailstones.
    A board creaked on the front porch. Olive glanced up as Walter’s lanky silhouette paced across the windows. Leopold was out there somewhere, patrolling the lawn. Next door, a pair of odd but kindly witches was waiting to help her, and