The Strangers by Jacqueline West Page B

in the house one door beyond that, a boy and his grandmother were probably just waking up and beginning to collect the ingredients for a new set of spells.
    She
wasn’t
alone.
    Olive took a deep breath.
    Then she knelt down and began to gather the candy back into its bowl, counting the pieces out loud to herself as she went.
    When she’d dropped in the last one (there were eighty-four pieces, she was almost sure), Olive pushed herself back to her feet. She looked around the empty hallway. She’d left the hall lights burning all night long, but in the morning sun, they looked watery and faint, like cellophane wrappers with nothing left inside. She switched them off, watching the paintings on the walls dim from glinting sheets of color into something darker, and a thought struck her so suddenly that it almost knocked her back to the floor.
    What if—somehow—Annabelle had been able to trap Olive’s parents Elsewhere? What if they were stuck there right now, watching Olive drift through the empty rooms while their bodies turned slowly into paint?
    “Horatio!” Olive screamed.
    The cat appeared at the head of the stairs. “What?” he asked. “What did you find?”
    Olive darted to the bottom step. “Horatio—the grimoire is safe, isn’t it?”
    “It remains in the very spot where I hid it myself.”
    Olive clutched the front of her shirt. “And I’ve still got the spectacles—but what if Annabelle found some other way to put my parents Elsewhere?” She wrapped both hands around the banister, clutching it so hard her wrists ached. “Wouldn’t that be the worst thing she could do? Trapping them right here, in their own house, where we wouldn’t even think to look for them?”
    “Olive, it is extremely unlikely that Annabelle could have—”
    “Stop!” Olive shouted. “You sound like Rutherford! Please, Horatio, I have to make sure. It might already be too late!”
    Horatio’s whiskers twitched. “Very well. I’ll tell Leopold to search the paintings on the main floor and Harvey to examine each canvas in the attic. You and I will search upstairs.”
    “Yes!” Olive exclaimed, scrambling back up the staircase as Horatio flew down. “And please hurry!”
    Olive tore to the left, toward her parents’ end of the hallway. In the small white room on the right, which contained nothing but stacks of unpacked boxes, Olive shoved the spectacles onto her face. The room’s only painting depicted a grumpy-looking bird on a fencepost. As Olive plunged through its frame, the bird took off, squeaking and squawking into the sky. The rest of the painting was uninhabited. A few stalks of grass shivered against the fence, and the green field and blue sky loomed around her as solidly as walls.
    “Mom!” Olive called. “Dad!” But even the grumpy bird had stopped squawking.
    In her parents’ bedroom, Olive swallowed a sob at the familiar sights and smells: her mother’s chalk-dusted brown cardigan hanging over the back of a chair, the minty scent of her father’s aftershave, and the big white bed, with its perfectly symmetrical arrangement of pillows. But there wasn’t time to sprawl on the bed and cry, messing up all of its right angles.
    Olive dashed across the room, hanging on tight to the bottom of the picture frame as she pushed her head into the painting of an old-fashioned sailing ship. A blast of salty ocean wind whished through her hair. Below her, the purplish waves rippled and roared.
    “Dad! Mom!” she shouted over the sound. “Are you here?”
    There was no answer.
    Olive waited, watching the ship rock slowly back and forth, never getting closer to its port. Then she pulled herself back through the jelly-ish surface and dropped to the bedroom floor.
    In the room’s other painting, a tall, slender man sat reading a book in a gazebo, surrounded by a lush green garden. He bolted to his feet, dropping his book and catching it awkwardly again as Olive clambered through the frame.
    “Holy cats!”