The Stone Child (12 page)

Eddie glanced over his shoulder, making sure no one, or nothing, was watching, but the hillside was empty. The orchard trees bristled as the breeze plucked at their barren branches. Eddie imagined the statue standing alone in the woods. The thought of her made him nervous.

“One. Two. Three!” said Harris. The wood ripped clean away from the nails holding it in place. It left a two-foot gap between the top and bottom board. Inside the gap was the doorknob. Harris turned it and pushed. The door swung open with a soft squeak.

Without hesitation, he lifted a leg and carefully stepped over the bottom board. He gripped the door frame, ducked his head under the top board, and swiveled the rest of the way inside. Eddie followed, swinging his first leg through, then his head and body. When he lifted his other leg over the bottom board, a nail caught his pant cuff. He fell face-first into Nathaniel Olmstead’s kitchen with an
oomph
. It didn’t quite hurt, but it took him a moment to catch his breath. Behind him, Harris quietly shut the door.

“Careful there,” said Harris.

“I’m okay,” said Eddie as he stood up. Only then did Eddie realize he was actually inside Nathaniel Olmstead’s
house. His heart was racing, for so many reasons. “Wow,” he whispered, and glanced at Harris, who looked as fascinated as Eddie felt. Even though the afternoon was sunny outside, inside the house was dark. Both boys reached into their bags, took out their flashlights, and flicked them on.

“Characters in Nathaniel Olmstead books are always checking under rugs and knocking on walls in case there are hollow spots,” said Harris, stepping forward into the gloom. “Keep your eyes open for stuff like that.”

Eddie made his eyes really wide and said, “I will.”

Harris chuckled nervously.

They wandered to the doorway of the crumbling dining room. Heavy curtains hung over all the windows, shutting out the light. Harris’s flashlight crisscrossed the floor and sent rainbows leaping toward the ceiling and walls. A small chandelier had crashed onto the circular table in the center of the room, scattering its crystals across a damp and molding rug.

In awe, the friends silently wandered through the dining room into the long room at the front of the house. The ceilings were so low that Eddie wondered if Nathaniel Olmstead ever bumped his head. They shone their flashlights everywhere, in case something was hiding in a dark corner. The light painted the shadows with circles of white.

The house was a mess. Strange old stuff had tumbled every which way, as if the place had been plundered by thieves. A sun-and-moon grandfather clock lay on its side
next to the front window. Its smashed cogs and winches were rusting as time pulled itself away from this place. An entire bookshelf was filled with spindly black antique typewriters whose wiry black keys seemed to have been wrenched apart by violent hands. Eddie desperately wanted to take one home to show his father, but he kept his hands to himself. A dusty globe had fallen onto a stained velvet couch. Victorian statues of sad and dramatic women nestled behind jumbled stacks of books on the floor.

“Where the heck is the basement?” said Harris. “I don’t see a door anywhere.”

“Check the floor,” said Eddie. “That’s where Gertie found the hatch.”

They continued to search. The house was bigger than it looked from outside. Eddie wondered if Nathaniel Olmstead would have disapproved of them. Two kids … breaking into his house, running from monsters, searching for answers … No, thought Eddie, Nathaniel Olmstead would not have had a problem with this. He probably would have written this story.

In the corner of the living room, Eddie discovered a doorway that led to a crooked stairway upstairs. He knocked the bottom step with the heel of his sneaker to see if it was hollow like the one Ronald Plimpton found in
The Rumor of the Haunted Nunnery
. But the step seemed to be ordinary. He glanced at Harris, who nodded him forward. Eddie took each
creaky step slowly, in case the wood had rotted. At the top of the stairs was a dark hallway. Anything might be hiding in the shadows. He stopped, afraid to move.

Harris scooted past him into the hallway. “Harris,” Eddie whispered, “wait!” But Harris turned into one of the bedrooms before Eddie could stop him.

“What’s wrong?” Harris said calmly from inside the room.

When Eddie followed hesitantly, he half expected to see the horrible face of the Wendigo hovering outside the window, watching through the dirty glass for trespassers such as themselves. But there was nothing except more furniture, shadows, and dust. He shook his head, convinced he’d officially read one scary story too many.

“This is so cool,” said Harris, rushing forward to the big bed. He bounced on it. Dust billowed up in clouds around him. “This must be where he slept.”

Reluctant, Eddie joined his friend, removing his bag and lying next to Harris for a few moments, staring at the ceiling, and listening to the creaking of the old house.

Something thumped downstairs. “What was that?” asked Eddie, sitting up and looking into the hallway. Harris sat up too. They listened for a moment.

Then Harris said, “It’s probably nothing. … Right?”

Eddie hopped off the bed and clutched his bag, feeling the weight of his father’s hammer at the bottom. Suddenly, he
felt foolish. What good would a hammer be against the gremlin they’d met last night … or against something worse?

They wandered back downstairs. In the long living room, a creak came from the wall near the chimney. Together, the boys stepped forward cautiously.

The mantel above the fireplace was dark wood, intricately carved with flowers and fat cherubs frozen in silent song. Underneath it, a pile of birch wood had been carefully arranged upon a pair of imp-shaped andirons. A squat ceramic vase filled with dead, colorless flowers was perched on the left side of the mantel. Eddie’s flashlight bounced off the mirror hanging on the wall above the hearth.

The vase crashed to the floor and Eddie jumped onto the nearest chair. His shout was interrupted by Harris’s apology.

“Sorry!” said Harris, standing next to the andirons. “My bag knocked it.” He bent down and examined the fireplace itself, carefully avoiding the shards of shattered ceramic. Crawling forward slowly, Harris stuck his head through the archway.

“What are you doing?” asked Eddie. He imagined hulking black dogs growling in the corners of the room. But this place wasn’t like the woods, Eddie told himself. This was only Nathaniel Olmstead’s house. There were no monsters here. Right?

“In
Horror of the Changeling
, Elise finds an envelope in the fireplace,” said Harris.

“Oh yeah,” said Eddie, leaning forward. He felt as if they were both peering into a gaping mouth. What if the fireplace decided to chomp? He frantically skittered backward, catching his coat sleeve on one of the andirons. Suddenly, the room shook. A loud scraping sound came from inside the chimney, like stone sliding against stone. Eddie yelped, thinking the house was about to collapse—but when he noticed Harris smiling by the glow of the flashlight, he realized that his friend had been right. The back wall of the fireplace had opened up. They had actually found a secret passage! How clever of Nathaniel. It
was
just like one of his books. Eddie had once thought these sorts of things existed
only
in books like Nathaniel’s.

“Nice job, Eddie,” said Harris as he quickly crawled all the way inside. The opening was about three and a half feet tall and nearly the same width. At the back of the fireplace, the tunnel bent like an elbow. Harris quickly disappeared around the corner. “You coming?” His voice echoed from the shadows.

Crawling on his hands and knees, Eddie felt the soot and grime clinging to his skin. The walls were made of large damp rocks. Moss grew in several places where water had seeped through the cracks. He followed the stone path past the andirons and to the right, where it stretched for a few feet before dropping off.

“Harris?” he called.

“Down here,” said Harris.

Eddie peered down to find a small ladder, about six feet high, bolted to the wall. At the bottom, Harris’s flashlight bobbed across a stone floor. Eddie gripped the cold metal rungs and lowered himself. The thought of Gertie crawling away from the Watchers at the end of
The Witch’s Doom
gave Eddie goose bumps, but he had to keep going.

Another archway greeted him at the bottom of the ladder. He ducked through it and followed Harris’s flashlight into a small cryptlike basement with a low ceiling. Spiderwebs draped from the rickety rafters like decaying curtains. Someone had piled a few boxes and stacks of newspapers along the walls. A dark, empty doorway gaped on each side of the room.

“Check it out!” said Harris from across the room. “It looks like some sort of … office or something.”

A desk with spindly legs sat along the far wall. Next to it stood a tall wooden filing cabinet. One drawer was open.

“Is this where he worked?” Eddie said, trying to calm his frazzled nerves. “How creepy.”

“Maybe this is just where he kept stuff he didn’t want anyone to find,” said Harris. He propped his flashlight on top of the filing cabinet, then reached inside the open drawer. He pulled out what appeared to be a hardcover notebook. He opened it. After looking it over for several seconds, he gasped. “Oh my gosh, Eddie, you have to see this!”

Eddie rushed over to the desk, and Harris showed him the notebook. On the first page, the words
The Ghost in the Poet’s Mansion
were written in scratchy penmanship. Underneath the title was the symbol Eddie had found in his copy of
The Enigmatic Manuscript
.

Harris flipped through the entire notebook, shaking his head. “It looks like a handwritten copy of a Nathaniel Olmstead book.”

“Someone wrote the whole thing out by hand?” said Eddie.

“That’s what it looks like. Just like
The Enigmatic Manuscript
. Only this one isn’t in code.”

Eddie glanced inside the open drawer. There were more notebooks, their spines facing up. He reached inside, took out another one, and opened the cover.

“Whoa,” Eddie whispered.

On the front page were the same scratchy handwriting and the weird symbol Harris had found in the other notebook, but this one was
The Wrath of the Wendigo
, Nathaniel Olmstead’s third book. Eddie put the notebook on the desk and picked up another one—
The Revenge of the Nightmarys
. And another—
The Egyptian Game of the Dead
. And another—
The Cat, the Quill, and the Candle. “
Are these notebooks all filled with his original stuff?”

“I guess so,” said Harris. He bent down and knocked on the stone floor.

“If he wrote these himself, they’re probably worth tons of money,” said Eddie.

Harris shook his head. “Yeah, but we’re not here for money.”

Eddie blushed. “I know that,” he said. He reached into his bag and pulled out
The Enigmatic Manuscript
. Opening the front cover, he compared the handwriting on the first page to one of the other handwritten books. “Look … Here, where it says
Nathaniel Olmstead …
you can see the writing is the same. The same person who wrote
The Enigmatic Manuscript
wrote these books.”

“So then it
was
Nathaniel who wrote them,” said Harris, glancing up from where he knelt on the stone floor.

“All clues point in that direction,” said Eddie. “This is his house, after all. But what does it mean? Why did he write all of his books by hand? And why did he keep them in this secret room?”

“Doesn’t look like this room was his only secret,” said Harris. “Look at this.” He ran his finger around the outer edge of the stone on which he was perched. “This one is different. There’s no mortar keeping it in place. Just like the one Gertie finds in
The Witch’s Doom.”
He blew at the crevice where the other stones met it. Dirt and dust flew from the crack. When Harris rapped his knuckles against it, the stone
sounded hollow. “Help me out.” The two knelt down opposite each other, but after trying to lift the stone, they realized that it was stuck. Harris said, “Do you think there’s something down here we can use to pull it up?” He glanced around. “What about that hammer in your bag?”

Eddie laughed and unzipped his bag. He reached inside and handed the hammer to Harris. “Hammer one. Boomerang zero.”

“Very funny.” Harris jammed the claw side of the hammer into the space between the stones. He jimmied it back and forth. It wiggled a tiny bit, but it wouldn’t give. “Dammit,” he said.

Eddie stood up. “Didn’t Gertie use a crowbar in the book? Maybe that, along with the hammer, will do it?”

“If we can find one, sure,” said Harris.

They picked through a few boxes in each corner of the room. Eddie searched near the empty doorway and felt that the darkness seemed to stare at him. Icy air crawled across the floor toward him. Frustrated and scared, Eddie scrambled away from the doorway. “This place is giving me the creeps.”

“Really?” said Harris sarcastically, glancing up from another box. “Whatever for?” Then he let out a yelp, and Eddie nearly fell over. “I found it!” He knelt near one of the empty dark doorways on the other side of the room, holding a small crowbar over his head.