The Second Spy: The Books of Elsewhere: Volume 3 (22 page)

“She’ll be all right,” said Horatio.

Olive knew that she should feel relieved. She knew that lying in her own bed, with the painted Aldous destroyed and all of her friends surrounding her, was a pretty good place to be. But something was missing. Something…Olive twitched her buzzing fingers. No.
Someone.

“Morton!” she croaked.

“What about him?” asked Rutherford.

“He’s out there,” Olive panted. “On his own. With the painted Horatio.” Panic swelled in her chest like a growing fire as she realized just how long Morton had been out of sight, out of Elsewhere…“He’s going to run away!” she gasped.

“What are you talking about, Olive?” asked Horatio, from close to her side.

“He’s going to leave,” Olive managed, “and get lost or hurt and never come back!”

“We’ll find him, miss,” said Leopold. “Don’t worry.”

“Special forces are on the case,” Harvey added, leaping back onto the bed.

“Where did you see him last?” asked Rutherford.

“He was going downstairs. Following the other Horatio.”

“Stay here,” Horatio commanded. “Just keep moving your arms and legs. We’ll take care of this.”

The three cats zoomed out the door with Rutherford tiptoeing after. Olive heard their soft steps recede into the distance.

She stared up at the dark ceiling and tried twitching her fingers, one by one. They flared with little zapping burns. She stopped, feeling strangely exhausted. It was the middle of the night, after all, and she had been in and out of paintings, falling into pits, running through forests and hills and hallways. And her bed was so comfy…

But falling asleep was a terrible idea. Horatio had said to keep moving. And Morton and Horatio’s imposter were still somewhere in the house—or somewhere outside of it.

Olive kicked her feet nervously. She turned her head from side to side, which didn’t hurt too badly,
and then started to lift herself up on her arms, which hurt a
lot.

Olive dropped back on the pillows. She tried to listen to the sound of her blood moving through her body, imagining it flowing into the painted places, hissing and crackling and steaming like hot water hitting a sheet of ice. She could hear her heart beating in her ears,
thump, thump,
low and soft and steady.

Thump. Thump.

Then, from somewhere much farther away, she heard another thump.

Thump. Thump.

Olive turned her head to one side, craning toward the open bedroom door. The hallway lay beyond, glowing faintly with moonlight. It was empty.

But Olive heard it again.

Thump.
Very soft. Soft, but clear.

Olive’s heart began to beat a bit faster. The other thump did not speed up. And then Olive realized what the thumping was.

Someone was climbing up the stairs.

“Rutherford?” Olive called, in a whisper.

But the steps were slow, unlike Rutherford’s.

Thump.

“Horatio? Leopold?”

But these steps came one at a time, unlike the cats’.

“Hello?” Olive whispered.

There was no answer.

Thump.

The step was very soft. And very close.

Biting her cheek to keep from screaming, Olive rocked onto one side. Her legs and arms roared with pain as she rolled across the bed and slipped over its edge. She hit the floor with a light
smack
. Gathering the last bit of strength in her limbs, Olive wormed her way underneath the bed and froze, barely breathing, with her eyes peeping out beneath the dust ruffle, staring at the open door.

A soft creak came from the hall. A shadow glided along the floor, just inside the open doorway.

A figure stepped into that shadow.

Olive’s eyes traveled up from the hem of the long, prim skirt, to the starched shirt cuffs, to the string of pearls, to the pretty, changeless, terrifying face.

Annabelle’s eyes flickered around the room. They took in Olive’s vanity, with its rows of pop bottles, Olive’s cluttered dresser, the twisted blankets on Olive’s bed. Olive held her breath. Every other worry and plan and idea fled from her brain. All she knew was that she was playing out her own worst fears
backward
—Annabelle was the one standing in her bedroom, and
she
was the one hiding under the bed.

Annabelle’s eyes skimmed the room again, resting for one long, awful second on the rumpled bed. Then Annabelle stepped out of the doorway and glided off along the hall.

Olive lay under the bed, brain clicking, heart thundering.

What should she do? Where was Annabelle going, and what was she after? Should Olive confront her on her own? And with what? Should she scream for help, waking her parents, putting them in danger too, and bringing this whole teetering tower of fragile secrets crashing down?

There were no more sounds from the hallway.

Olive squirmed forward on her prickling palms and hauled herself out from under the bed. She crawled to the doorway. Moonlight painted the hall in shades of gray, leaving deep shadows at either end. Annabelle had vanished into the darkness.

Still crawling, breathing through her teeth, Olive
dragged herself down the hallway to the bathroom. She groped along the counter for the box of matches. At least she’d have one weapon against Annabelle…however weak it was.

Olive climbed like a wobbly monkey up the handles of the bathroom drawers until she was standing on both feet. Her legs still felt like they were asleep, but at least the pain had lessened. Olive staggered out of the bathroom and down the dark hall to the lavender room.

The door’s black mouth hung open, the antique furniture and Annabelle’s empty portrait frame glittering like teeth inside. The room was empty.

Olive edged down the hall, checking each room for Annabelle, just as she’d done every day for weeks. It had been frightening even in the middle of the afternoon, with daylight streaming through the windows. She had never imagined doing it in the black of night, all alone, with her body half paralyzed,
knowing
that Annabelle was already there.

She stumbled to the door of the blue room. It was empty too. Olive slid along the wall, clutching the matches even tighter as she passed the painting of the Scottish hills, where a small blurry patch had appeared in the foreground. But as Olive glanced at the canvas, she felt a draft of cold night air thread its way through her pajamas. For a moment, she thought
the wind had come from the painting, just as it had before…But without Aldous inside it, controlling the elements of Elsewhere, that couldn’t be. No—the breeze came from the pink bedroom, through the very last doorway in the long, dark hall.

Olive lunged through the door, holding her matches ready.

Annabelle wasn’t there.

The windows had been pulled wide open. Their lacy curtains rippled in the chilly breeze. Filtering through the lace, a distant streetlamp scattered its glow across the room, catching on something that had not been there before.

Standing in the center of the bedroom, its drop cloth pooled around its wooden legs, was Aldous’s easel. Aldous’s
empty
easel. The portrait of Aldous McMartin was gone.

26

“S
O ALDOUS AND Annabelle are together again,” said a voice in the darkness behind her.

Olive whirled around and almost toppled off her feet. Rutherford stood behind her, armed with his squirt guns.

“Rutherford!” Olive gasped. “You scared me!”

“I apologize,” said Rutherford, with a little bow. “That was not my intention.”

Olive nearly smiled. In fact, she nearly said something like,
That’s all right,
or
I’m so glad to see you,
or
Thanks for coming to find me,
but she stopped herself in the nick of time. She was still angry at Rutherford, after all—even if it was suddenly very difficult to remember just what she was angry
about.
She worked her face into a frown. “How did you—”

But Rutherford hurried on without meeting her eyes. “She must have heard you coming. I think she likes having the element of surprise on
her
side. She’s probably taking the portrait someplace safe, reformulating her plans.”

“But how did you know she was here?” Olive demanded. “How did you know about Aldous’s portrait?”

Rutherford jiggled on his feet for a moment. “I’ll explain later,” he said. “We still haven’t found Morton, or the false Horatio. We could call him The-fake-io. Or Horati-faux. Get it?”

“No,” growled Olive.

“I suppose we should get back to searching,” said Rutherford.

Olive wobble-stomped past him before he could confuse her any more. She was able to make it to the head of the stairs by leaning on the banister and making lots of little aggravated grunting noises. Gripping the railing tightly, she struggled down the first three steps in the time it would usually have taken her to get down the stairs, out the front door, and all the way to the edge of Linden Street. Rutherford stayed beside her, bouncing with obvious impatience.

“That’s it,” he urged in a whisper. “Just ten more steps to go. That’s only a little more than three times as many as you’ve already done.”

“You sound like my dad,” Olive grumped, edging her toes onto the next stair.

Before she could put her rubbery foot down, there was a soft
bang
from below.

“That sounded like a door closing,” said Rutherford.

Olive gave up on walking down the stairs in the usual fashion. Instead, she sat down and scooted the rest of the way on her backside, with Rutherford hustling beside her.

Harvey streaked through the foyer in front of them, skidding to a halt at the foot of the staircase. “Suspicious activity detected,” he hissed into his imaginary transistor watch.

“What was that?” whispered Leopold, racing silently down the hall from the basement.

“It came from the library,” Horatio murmured. The big orange cat had been watching from the shadows at the foot of the staircase, keeping so still that no one had noticed him until now.

The five of them slunk across the entryway toward the library’s heavy double doors. Olive pressed her ear to the polished wooden panels. There were no sounds from the other side. Grabbing the handles and giving one quick push, Olive threw the doors open.

Moonlight fell through the library’s tall, narrow windows, outlining everything in bands of soft blue.
The frame around the painting of the dancing girls glittered gently. Rows of books bound in every color were bleached to shades of silver and gray. And, in the middle of the room, on the center of the large, faded rug, sat the
other
Horatio. His silhouette glinted like metal. His painted eyes barely flickered.

Venturing into the room, Olive glanced around, confirming what she’d already feared. Morton wasn’t there.

Horatio—the
real
Horatio—stepped slowly onto the edge of the rug, facing his identical enemy.

“You,” he murmured. “You
monster.
”

“You,” murmured the painted Horatio. “You
moron.
”

“You are the moron,” snapped Horatio. “You’re still held in the McMartins’ thrall, blind to the pointless cruelty of everything they do.”

“Don’t lecture me, you traitor,” the painting snapped back. “The thought that
I
have turned into
you
sickens me.”

“Don’t lecture
me,
you shortsighted fool.” Horatio stepped forward. “In time, you would have done the same.”

“I most certainly would
not.
” The painted Horatio took a step forward too.

“You most certainly
would.
” The two Horatios stood nose to nose, their identical whiskers twitching, their matching green eyes glaring at each other. It looked as
though Horatio was arguing with his own reflection. The vision was so extremely odd that Rutherford, Leopold, and Harvey simply stared at it, not moving, not speaking. Even the dancing girls in the painting seemed to be watching from the corners of their eyes. Olive wavered at the edge of the room, tugged between rushing back into the darkness to search for Morton and staying to make sure that the painted cat wouldn’t get away.

“In time, you would have come to see things exactly as I have,” Horatio went on. “You would have seen that the McMartins were no better than the ordinary people who—”

“Yes,
ordinary
. Implying
not special.
”

Horatio shook his head angrily. The painted Horatio shook his too.

The real Horatio spoke next. “You serve these malignant beings not because you admire them, but because you fear them.”

“
You
serve a dimwitted girl for absolutely no reason at all.”

“I no longer serve anyone,” growled Horatio.

“Then what is the point?” the painting growled back.

Horatio halted, struck speechless for the first time.

“What is the point of you? Of your existence?” the painted Horatio pressed on. “What is a familiar
without a master? Will you simply dawdle through the millennia as a useless
housecat?
”