The Stone Child (15 page)

The books! Where were the books?

A terrible thought flickered through Eddie’s head. When
he’d dropped his bag, had he lost the books? Everything had happened so quickly, it was difficult to remember if the bag had seemed lighter when he’d retrieved it from the pile of leaves. He’d been so concerned with trying to escape those
things
.

He imagined the books sitting in the middle of Nathaniel Olmstead’s driveway—a place he had hoped to avoid for quite some time.

“Uh …,” he struggled to say. His face began to sting. He emptied the bag, but the only thing remaining was the big hammer at the bottom, which he quietly shoved in the back of his desk drawer.

“Eddie? Are you there?”

“Yeah,” Eddie whispered. “I’m here … but the books are gone.”

Every time someone slammed a locker door the next day at school, Eddie felt like jumping out of his skin. His heart raced when Ms. Phelps asked him a question about ratios. Out of the corner of his eye, Eddie thought he saw someone watching him in the mirror while he washed his hands in the boys’ bathroom, but when he turned to look, no one was there. The past couple days had taken a toll on his nerves.

Part of him was relieved that he had lost the books the night before. If it weren’t for Harris, Eddie thought he might want to take a big break from anything having to do with Nathaniel Olmstead. But the other part of him felt terrible that all the work they had done so far was gone. Now, even if they were actually smart enough to figure out what the code meant, they couldn’t!

They met after third period outside the gym. When
Eddie saw Harris, he gasped. Harris looked terrible. His hair was greasy, his eyes were glazed, and he looked like he’d just crawled out of bed.

“What’s wrong?” Eddie asked.

“I couldn’t sleep,” said Harris. “I kept wondering where we might have lost the books. I know last night you said you didn’t want to, but the only thing I can think to do is go back to the house and look for them.”

They heard a sneaker squeak on the linoleum behind them. When they turned, Maggie smiled. For the first time since he’d met her, Eddie thought she looked happy to see him. She brushed her dark hair out of her face and hiked her bag up on her shoulder. “Can I come?”

Eddie and Harris were speechless.

“Look,” said Maggie, “that was some crazy stuff up there in the woods last night. I can’t stop thinking about it.” When the boys didn’t answer her, she said in a playful tone, “Then I guess it’s not really worth showing you what I found.”

Harris rolled his eyes. “What did you find?”

“You’re not interested. Forget it.”

“Maggie …,” said Eddie, sounding more pathetic than he wanted to.

“This whole
boys-only
thing is so fifth grade,” she said. She smiled again. “Promise you’ll let me come, and I’ll tell you.”

Eddie turned to Harris. Somehow, he was certain what
she had to offer would be worth it. They both nodded. “You can come,” they said at the same time.

“Great.” Maggie slapped their shoulders. They both winced.

“So tell us. What did you find?” Harris said.

Maggie slipped her bag off her shoulder, reached inside, and dug around. “In the house last night, I overheard everything you said.” Harris started to protest, but Maggie interrupted. “Get over it.” Harris folded his arms but listened. “After you read that story about that creepy old woman, Eddie, you mentioned something about a code that matched up a couple of books you guys had.” She pulled two books out of her bag. “These books, right?”

“Oh, geez,” said Harris, turning pale, throwing his hands to the ceiling. “Thank goodness.”

“Whoa,” said Eddie, relieved.

“Guess we don’t really need to head back up to the woods, after all,” she said, smiling, and handed the books to Eddie. “You left them in my dad’s pickup,” she said. “He found them this morning. We were all pretty out of it last night when he gave you a ride home, so I guess you didn’t notice that they’d fallen on the floor. Still, if they’re so important, you might want to keep closer watch on them.”

“We’ll try,” said Harris, slamming his locker.

The second bell rang. They were all officially late.

“I’ve got to go,” Eddie said, inching down the hall.

“But I solved your code,” said Maggie smugly.

Eddie wasn’t sure if he heard her correctly, but when he saw Harris’s mouth drop open, he figured that he had. The hallways were slowly starting to empty, and Eddie’s heart started to race as he realized that the hall monitors would soon be at their stations.

Maggie shoved another loose piece of hair behind one ear and said, “How do you guys feel about cutting class?”

Inside the school library, they found a quiet table in the reference section—an isolated spot toward the back of the room, hidden behind several large shelves near the windows.

Maggie took a piece of paper out of her book bag and placed it on the table, facedown, next to
The Enigmatic Manuscript
and
The Wish of the Woman in Black
. She zipped up her black hooded sweatshirt, then pushed her dark, messy hair behind her ears. On her wrist, she loosely wore several black rubber bands, which she adjusted before resting her skinny hands on the table in a businesslike manner.

Eddie remembered that she’d told him about liking science and math. Funny, he thought as he stared at her, in her Goth costume she looked more like she’d be into magic and mystery stories. Maybe she was, but she just didn’t know it yet.

“I don’t mean to sound like a total jerk,” Maggie began,
“but before I tell you anything, I want to know what’s going on here.”

“Lots of stuff is going on here,” said Harris. He picked up
The Enigmatic Manuscript
and tapped its spine on the table. “What do you want to know?”

Maggie thought, took a deep breath, and then said, “Well … everything.”

Before the next bell rang, Eddie managed to tell Maggie most of what had happened to him since coming to Gatesweed. She spent several seconds silently contemplating his story. Then she turned to Harris and said, “You seem to be a Nathaniel Olmstead expert, so what do
you
think is going on here, Harris?”

Harris smiled and leaned forward to answer. “After everything that’s happened to Eddie and me, I’m beginning to think Nathaniel Olmstead’s monsters chased him out of Gatesweed.” Then his smiled dropped, as he seemed to recall the previous night’s events. “Chased him out … or something worse.”

Maggie and Eddie glanced at each other. “That would mean the monsters in Nathaniel Olmstead’s books are
real,”
she said.

“When the Watchers chased us through the woods last night, they certainly looked real, didn’t they?” said Harris.
“You’ve heard of the curse. And you
saw
what happened in the library.”

“Yeah, but …” After a moment, she closed her eyes and shook her head. “There’s got to be a rational explanation for all of this.”

“Every single thing that’s happened to us so far seems to be connected to Nathaniel Olmstead’s stories,” said Eddie. He opened
The Enigmatic Manuscript
to the front page. “We were hoping this book might give us a clue why.” He looked into Maggie’s eyes. “You said you solved the code. Please. Will you tell us how?”

Maggie sighed and hugged her rib cage. “Last night, I flipped through the two books,” she said. “I remembered what you’d said in Nathaniel Olmstead’s basement, Eddie. About the code appearing in both books. You need a code key in order to read it, right? After I stared at it for a while, I had an idea. Since there were only two lines written at the end of the Woman in Black book, I counted the letters. There are twenty-six of them. No more. No less. And they’re all different. See? Only one of each.” Maggie opened to the last page of
The Wish of the Woman in Black
. Eddie looked at the letters Nathaniel Olmstead had scrawled there.

Maggie was right. There were twenty-six letters. She sounded as excited as Eddie felt, when she added, “What else do you know that has twenty-six letters?”

Harris nearly toppled over in his chair. “No way!” he said.

Before Eddie was able to yelp too, Maggie reached out and turned over the piece of paper on the table. At the top, she had drawn out the answer for them to see.

“A is below
P
,” she explained. “B is above
Q. C
is below
Z
. And so on. Simple, really. Each letter has an opposite. In the text, he just switched their places. That’s his key.”

“Did you try it on the code?” said Harris. “Does it work?”

Nodding her head, Maggie pushed the paper toward him. “He broke the words up into groups of three letters. And he doesn’t use any punctuation. It’s hard to read, but I think he was trying to make it more difficult to find a pattern.” She handed him a pen. “See for yourself,” she said.

Harris laid
The Enigmatic Manuscript
open and used Maggie’s code key as a reference as he started to translate the first few sentences. Eddie drummed on the table as Harris wrote. When Harris gave him a dirty look, Eddie folded his hands in his lap.

Finally, Harris laid down his pen and picked up the paper. It trembled in his hands. He cleared his throat and slowly worked through what he’d written. “‘I have made an enormous mistake.’”

Wide-eyed, Harris glanced up at them before continuing. “‘The creatures have come through the door, Gatesweed is on the verge of catastrophe, and I realize now that it is my fault. The Woman in Black will haunt me until I use the pendant to open the gate for her too, but I can’t. I won’t. I’ve seen what she can do. Instead, I must stop her. I fear I may fail, but I have no choice. And so I must write my own story.’”

Harris dropped the paper, his mouth open in shock. “Holy cow,” he said quietly, staring at the paper. “‘The creatures have come through the door’? ‘Gatesweed is on the verge of catastrophe’? And it was Nathaniel’s fault?”

“But … what does it mean?” said Maggie.

“It means you were right, Maggie,” Eddie whispered. “You’re a genius. That was the secret. The key was right
here
. In
The Wish of the Woman in Black
.”

“We’ve got some answers now, which is amazing, but we also have more questions,” said Harris. He glanced at the paper in his hand and read through it several more times to himself. When he was done, he looked up. “Where is this gate he’s talking about? And what is this pendant-thingy? And what does writing his own story have to do with anything?”

“And what about the key itself?” said Eddie. “Why would Nathaniel Olmstead have written the code key in this book and then buried it in his basement?”

“He obviously didn’t want anyone to find it,” Maggie said.

“I have a question about the code too,” said Harris. “What about the symbol on the first page, the one that’s carved onto the statue in the woods? Pi is part of the Greek alphabet, not ours.”

Maggie shook her head. “That’s not pi,” she said, pointing at the first page of
The Enigmatic Manuscript. “
I think it’s Hebrew.”

“Hebrew?” said Harris. “Do you know what it says?” “It doesn’t say anything,” said Maggie. “It’s only a letter called
Chet
.”

“Chet?” Eddie repeated. “Why do you think it’s carved onto the statue?”

Maggie shook her head.

Harris thought to himself for a moment before turning to Eddie. “Where did you say your parents found this book?”

“The Black Hood Antiques Fair—a few months ago, I think,” said Eddie. “North of the mountains?”

“I wonder how it got up there?” said Harris. “I mean, doesn’t it seem like Nathaniel Olmstead would have wanted to keep this book down in the basement with all the other ones he wrote by hand?”

“Only one way to find out, I suppose,” said Maggie,
pushing the pen and paper toward Harris. “Better hurry, before someone discovers we’re missing.”

“Here,” said Eddie, pulling out a spiral notebook. “We’ll all work at the same time.” He laid
The Enigmatic Manuscript
on the table so each of them could see it.

They worked for the next two periods. Whenever they heard someone approach, they scattered, hiding in separate aisles of books. Returning to the table, each of them continued to translate a part of the page. When they were done, together, they would read their parts aloud, before going on to the next page. In this manner, they slowly but surely began to piece the story together.

At first, the book was filled with fairly standard autobiographical information. It was interesting, but as he continued to read, Eddie wasn’t sure why Nathaniel felt the need to write his life story in code. Nothing about his reading ghost stories late into the night seemed all that scandalous.

Then Eddie learned something about Nathaniel Olmstead he didn’t already know.

From early on, Nathaniel didn’t think he had enough talent to be a writer. He never thought his ideas were any good. Saving his allowance each week, he sought inspiration at second-run monster movies in his hometown of Coven’s Corner, but afterward, when he went home and took out his notebook, all he could imagine was what he’d seen that afternoon.
Nearing high school, he became interested in the ancient mythologies, old cultures, and world histories upon which many of the stories he read or watched were actually based. These interests led him to a degree in English and a minor in history from New Starkham College. After graduation, he spent a year traveling the world. He saw pyramids in Egypt, castles in Ireland, canals in Venice, Aztec ruins in Mexico, glaciers in Alaska, and volcanoes in Hawaii. He thought these sights might inspire him to write—but for some reason, his ideas never solidified into anything more than a glorified diary.