In school the next day, Eddie heard his classmates whispering to each other. He wondered how the rumor had spread so quickly that he’d held a flower under his tongue and spoken a strange language to a monster in the library. How many of his classmates had seen something similar in Gatesweed? Eddie tried to ignore the kids who looked at him funny. He had more important things to worry about than a few people who thought he was a freak.
As the clock ticked toward the final bell, Eddie felt his hands start to go numb. Part of him was excited to see Nathaniel Olmstead’s house from the inside, but another part of him was terrified. As the past few weeks had proven, Gatesweed was a weird place, and the possibilities for encountering danger were much greater than they’d been in Heaverhill. Having now seen a gremlin, the dogs, and the creepy Watching Woman graffiti, Eddie worried more than ever about Nathaniel Olmstead’s fate… and his own.
Eddie and Harris met at the bike rack after school. In his book bag, Eddie had brought a flashlight in case the house was dark, a hammer in case they needed protection from any strange creatures, and, of course, The Enigmatic Manuscript.
Before they unlocked their bikes, Harris reached into his bag and showed Eddie everything he’d brought too-a flashlight, a notebook, a pen-but when Harris revealed the final item that he’d tucked into his backpack that morning, Eddie couldn’t keep from laughing. In his hands, Harris sheepishly held a small bent piece of wood that had a smiling white kangaroo painted on it. “My mother got it as a gift from a customer,” he explained.
“That’s nice, Harris, but what are we going to do with a boomerang?” said Eddie.
“Hit something,” said Harris sharply. “It’s better than a stupid hammer. At least I can throw a boomerang.”
“Right. But let’s hope you don’t need to,” said Eddie.
Twenty minutes later, they’d made it to Nathaniel Olmstead’s estate. They laid their bikes near the road, climbed through the hole in the fence, and hiked up the long driveway. The sun sat low in the sky, painting the long cirrus clouds pink.
Once the boys reached the top of the hill, they walked around the corner to the back door of the house. It was nailed shut with a few horizontal planks of wood. “On the count of three,” said Harris, clasping the middle board in his hands.
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.
“You’re going to give me a heart attack screaming like that!” said Eddie.
Harris shrugged.
They raced back to the center of the room. Harris hammered the end of the crowbar into the crevice, then, using it as a lever, he was able to lift the stone. After a few seconds, he slid it the rest of the way out of its bed. From inside the hole came a soft wheezing sound-like something trying to catch its breath. Eddie backed away as Harris leaned forward. “Don’t tell me you’re going to stick your hand in there?” Eddie said.
Harris nodded. “I’ve got to. There might be an answer inside.”
“There also might be a monster inside,” said Eddie.
Harris rolled his eyes, and before Eddie could stop him, he thrust his arm into the hole up to his shoulder. He scrunched up his face and grunted a bit. “I can feel something… Eww!”
“Is it a monster?” asked Eddie, scrambling away from the hole.
“No. It’s not a monster, but, as a matter of fact, it is a little… moist.” He wrenched himself backward. In his hand, he clutched a small rectangular object. Using his coat sleeve, Harris brushed off the dust and dirt. “It looks like another notebook. Like the ones in the filing cabinet over there.”
There was something strange about the book in Harris’s hands. Its binding was damp, but somehow inside, the pages were dry. Harris’s flashlight gave the book a ghostly glow. He opened the cover.
As Eddie took a closer look, goose bumps rose all over his body. Inside the notebook was the familiar scratchy writing. And on the first page was the same symbol Nathaniel had drawn into the rest of the books.
“The Wish of the Woman in Black,” Harris read. “I haven’t read this one before.”
“An unpublished Nathaniel Olmstead book,” said Eddie. “Is this one written in code too?”
Harris’s hand trembled as he turned the page. He shook his head no. He stammered slightly as he read the first sentence aloud.
“‘In the town of Coxglenn, children feared the fall of night. It wasn’t the darkness that frightened them-it was sleep. For when they lay in bed and closed their eyes, she watched them.’”
He glanced up from the page and raised one eyebrow. “I wonder why he buried this one under a rock?”
The Wish of the Woman in Black? Why did that sound familiar? thought Eddie.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said. “We’ll finish reading it somewhere else.”
“I don’t want to have to come back later, in case there’s something else we need from down here.” Harris glanced at the book in his hands. “See how far we get?”
“Before what?” said Eddie. He shuddered, sighed, then settled into his place on the cold floor.
Harris read. “‘The ancient people who long ago lived in Coxglenn had built a wall made out of fallen trees, dead bushes, branches, vines, and mud to try and keep her out. It had not worked. Now what was left of the brush barrier was broken by the lane that led into town. Stretching into the woods, its many sharp pieces reached and scratched at nothing, like a blind monster searching for prey…’”
For the next hour, the boys sat in the basement and read the book by flashlight. Every twenty pages or so, whoever was reading handed the notebook off to the other. They both agreed that it was the scariest Nathaniel Olmstead book yet.
The characters in the book seemed to shriek across the blank movie screen in Eddie’s head, running in fear from the horrible Woman in Black, whose quiet rage made her arguably the most dangerous creature in the worlds of Nathaniel’s books. Whatever-or whoever-stood in her presence would rot slowly from the inside out.
Eddie thought the ending of the fifth chapter was especially scary. He didn’t want to stop reading, even though his legs were starting to go numb.
One night, when Dylan lay in bed staring at the ceiling, he heard a noise downstairs. It sounded like something scratching at the walls. He thought it might be a mouse or a squirrel that had accidentally found its way inside. He threw the covers off his bed, put on his bathrobe and slippers, and made his way down the stairs. When he flicked the light switch in the living room, nothing happened. The moon was new, so the room was pitch-black. The scratching continued from the other side of the room.
“ Mom?” Dylan called up the stairs. “Dad?” He hoped they would come down, but they did not answer.
A horrible odor filled the darkness. Seconds later, Dylan heard low, inhuman laughter. Something stood in the living room with him, and Dylan could hear its quick, shallow breath. The scratching grew louder and started to inch closer.
He froze. Thinking it was a dream, he pinched himself, but he was horrified to realize that he was already awake.
“Eddie,” Harris whispered. “Did you hear that?”
Eddie looked up from the page. He’d become so enthralled with the story, he’d begun to forget where he was. “Hear what?”
“It sounded like…” Harris stared off into the shadows through one of the stone archways in the nearby wall. Then he shook his head. “Forget it. Just keep reading.”
Eddie allowed himself to stare at the darkness all around him for a few seconds, listening for whatever sound Harris thought he’d heard. The silence of the basement was hypnotic. Finally, he picked up the book again.
Dylan opened the cabinet next to the potted palm and found a candle and a matchbook. He struck the tip of a match, and the spark erupted into the darkness. He lit the candlewick. The flame flickered tenuously before settling into stillness. Looking around the room, he didn’t see anything or anyone who might have made such laughter. But the horrible stench grew stronger. It was coming from the wall near the fireplace.
Cautiously, Dylan crept toward the mantel. When he reached the oriental rug in front of the fireplace, he noticed two strange lumps. Bending down, he could see the lumps were piles of familiar clothing. He trembled as he realized what he had found. His mother’s bathrobe was wet and soiled. His father’s pajamas smelled like rotten meat. Something terrible had happened to his parents. The rug underneath the laundry was dark, and the flickering candlelight revealed an oily sheen. Dylan held his hand to his nose to keep himself from becoming ill. Suddenly, the candlelight was out, and he was thrown into darkness.
“What’s that nasty smell?” said Harris, interrupting once more.
Eddie paused. After a moment, he smelled it too. “It’s almost sweet… like the garbage bins next to the parking lot at school. Where is it coming from?”
“All around,” said Harris. Then he looked at the book in Eddie’s hands. “Sort of like… exactly what’s happening to Dylan in the story.”
Eddie felt sick, and it wasn’t from the stench. He held out the book to Harris. “Y-your turn?” he stammered.
Harris took the book, smiling wearily as he began to read.
In the darkness, something brushed against his leg. Then something pulled his slipper from his foot. Dylan stumbled backward, turned, and ran. He scrambled along the wall to the front door.
Whatever had taken his slipper slithered across the floor behind him. He fumbled with the doorknob, and he flung himself into the night.
The thing chased him all the way down the driveway. Up the road to the right, Dylan saw headlights approaching. He waved his hands, trying to flag down the car. The light grew blinding, and the engine roared louder and louder. He realized it was not going to stop. From the shadows near the end of the driveway, a dark shape leapt at him. He jerked his body out of the way and fell on the far side of the road, just as the car sped by. It missed Dylan by inches. He heard a horrible wet thump and the squeal of tires.
A car door opened. Dylan heard boots on gravel, and a deep voice called, “You all right? ”
Dylan stood up and shouted, “Didn’t you see me? ”
A short, thin man stood next to a pickup truck. “Sorry, man,” he said, “I just came off my shift. Didn’t expect to see a kid in a bathrobe in the middle of the road at this hour.” The man looked down and then shouted. “Aww, geez, what the heck did I run over?” In the middle of the road lay a black lump about a foot in diameter. It was wet and shiny in the truck’s headlights. “It’s not yours, is it? ”
Mesmerized by the lump in the road, Dylan shook his head.
“ Some kid is going to be really unhappy tomorrow morning. Poor little thing,” said the man, taking a step closer to examine the mess.
The man bent over as Dylan shouted, “Get away from it!” But it was too late. A slick humanlike hand shot out of the wet puddle and grabbed the man’s collar. Dylan watched the man’s face turn dark and oily, his skin seeming to melt away like wax. Not even his screaming could be heard over the sound of a woman’s fierce laughter, ringing across the Coxglenn Hills.
Harris tossed the book to the floor. His eyes grew wide and he stifled a small whimper. “I just thought of something…”
“What’s the matter?” asked Eddie, sitting up straight.
“The Woman,” Harris said, staring at the book.
Eddie’s stomach turned to ice. Of course! That’s why the title had sounded so familiar. The Wish of the Woman in Black.
“Eddie, do you think…?” He didn’t need to finish. Eddie had already started nodding.
It was her-the woman from the Gatesweed legend. The ghostly woman the townspeople said haunted the woods. The Watching Woman from the graffiti.
“You know what this means?” Harris continued.
Eddie nodded again. “Nathaniel did write a story about her, after all.” Looking around the basement, he felt the shadows pressing on him. He shuddered as he came to a terrible understanding. “Does this mean that the Woman in Black is real? Just like the gremlins and the dogs in the lake?”
Harris only nodded slightly, as if he’d come to the same conclusion. “Maybe people in town aren’t crazy. Maybe they really have seen her. Maybe she is watching?”
Eddie took a deep breath, then exhaled, trying to remain calm. He spoke slowly and evenly. “Maybe there’s a connection between the handwritten books we found here in the basement and the creatures we’ve seen in Gatesweed…”
“What kind of connection?” said Harris.
Eddie shook his head. “Maybe he knew that some of his monsters were real. Did he think the Woman was real too? Could he have buried this book under the stone because he thought her story was too scary?” Suddenly, Eddie had a terrible feeling. “If it was too scary for him” he whispered, “then what the heck are we doing here?”
Harris continued to stare intently at the book on the floor. “We’re doing what Nathaniel Olmstead would have wanted us to. Solving the mystery.” He picked up the book again and turned to where he’d left off, but when he flipped the next page to continue reading the story, he yelped.
“What’s wrong?” said Eddie, shining his flashlight at Harris.
Harris held his hand in front of his face to block the light, but he didn’t hesitate before showing Eddie what was on the next page.
P B Z D Y F R H V J W L U
A Q C O E T G S I X K N M
“No way,” said Eddie. Quickly, he picked up The Enigmatic Manuscript from the floor. Opening the cover, he compared the strange writing to the letters they’d just found in The Wish of the Woman in Black. After a few seconds, he said, “Why would Nathaniel Olmstead have written the code in this book too?”
“I’m not sure.” Harris pressed his lips together and flipped one more page. He looked distressed. He held up the book and showed Eddie. The rest of the pages were blank. “This is where it ends. The Wish of the Woman in Black is incomplete. He buried the book without finishing it.”
Eddie felt empty. “That’s everything he wrote?” he said. “But how does the story end? And why doesn’t he actually explain what the stupid code means?” He tossed The Enigmatic Manuscript on the floor next to the hole, where it landed with a soft whap. “We were so close to finding the key. What are we supposed to do now?”
Something on the other side of the room sneezed, and the boys froze. The noise had come from the doorway near the secret fireplace entry.
After a few seconds of silence, Eddie whispered, “H-hello?”
Harris seemed to come to his senses and suddenly whipped his flashlight toward the doorway. “Who’s there?” he said. Then he reached into his bag and pulled out his boomerang. If Eddie hadn’t been so terrified, he might have laughed at the image of the kangaroo shaking in Harris’s hand.
Harris’s light illuminated a shapeless dark figure. It scrambled backward against the wall near the ladder. Its clothes were black. Its white hands clutched at its pale face.
Was it the Woman in Black? Had she finally come after them, to turn them into piles of black ooze just like she had done to the characters in Nathaniel Olmstead’s book? But then Eddie quickly realized he was wrong. The Woman in Black would never cower from her victims.
“Would you please stop shining that in my eyes?” asked the figure.
“Who are you?” asked Harris. His fear seemed to drain away as he stood.
The figure brought her hands away from her face, squinting at the light, as Harris ignored her plea and continued to shine it at her. Finally, Eddie reached out and lowered Harris’s arm so that the beam of light fell on the floor at her feet. “It’s Maggie,” said Eddie. “Maggie Ringer.”
“You scared the hell out of us!” Harris screamed. His voice echoed through the underground chamber. He raised the flashlight and shone it at her face again. “What are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same question,” said Maggie harshly. She stared at them defiantly, flaring her nostrils like a cornered animal. After a few seconds, she lowered her voice and said, “If you take that light out of my eyes, I’ll answer.”
Harris grunted and lowered the light again.
“I was coming home from school this afternoon,” said Maggie, “riding my bike up Black Ribbon, when I saw you guys ahead, crawling through the gap in the fence at the bottom of the Olmstead driveway. I just wanted to find out where you were going, so I followed you.”
“You shouldn’t have,” said Harris, carefully placing The Wish of the Woman in Black next to where The Enigmatic Manuscript lay on the floor. “This is a dangerous place.”
“Then why are you guys here?” asked Maggie, even though she looked like she already had an idea.
“It’s a secret,” Eddie said. He felt his face flush, imagining the looks he would get in school tomorrow if anyone found out what they had been doing here. “You can’t tell anyone.”
“How long have you been down here?” asked Harris. “That stench. Maybe it was…”
Maggie blinked at him. “What, me? Thanks, but no. I smelled it too, when I finally crept down the ladder a few minutes ago. I was listening to you guys from the mouth of the fireplace. For a while I could hear you really well, but then you started talking quieter. So I came closer.”
“Maybe the stench really was from-” Eddie was interrupted when Harris poked him in the arm.
“The Woman in Black?” said Maggie. She shook her head. “I already knew that you were up to something really strange, but this beats all. Codes? Monsters? And all these books you were talking about? Whatever you’re doing, it’s creeping me out.”
Harris said, “That’s why you shouldn’t have followed us.”
“I’m sorry!” she said angrily. “But what I saw in the library last night was totally crazy. I’d been doing my homework, and then you guys showed up with that… little monster following you. And then… those weird words you spoke, Eddie. You can’t expect me to just be like, Oh, okay, whatever… duh!”
“It’s still none of your business,” said Harris.
“Maybe we should go,” suggested Eddie.
“Good idea,” said Harris. “You and me will finish this later.”
Eddie bent down and picked up the books from the floor, steering clear of the dark hole. It almost seemed to sigh at him as he backed away from it.
Harris stomped toward the doorway where Maggie stood. “Excuse us, please!” he said, brushing past her and stepping onto the bottom rung of the ladder, which was bolted to the stone wall.
When Eddie followed, Maggie looked at him and said, “I said I was sorry.”
“It’s okay,” whispered Eddie. “It’s hard to explain it all right now.” As Harris climbed up the ladder in front of him, he turned around and scowled.
Once they crawled from the mouth of the fireplace, the three kids went out the back door. The sky was black, and a big moon peeked through thick clouds on the horizon.
“Wait for us!” Eddie called as Harris disappeared around the corner of the house. Eddie clutched the two books, one in each hand. He slipped them into his bag, then swung the strap over his right shoulder. Maggie walked silently next to him as they made their way across the hill and into the pocket of trees at the top of the long driveway.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” whispered Maggie as she ran forward to tug on Harris’s coat sleeve. He spun around and threw her a nasty look.
As Eddie caught up to them, his flashlight lit Harris’s sooty face from below. Harris appeared downright evil. Noticing the frightened look on Maggie’s face, he softened. “What’s wrong?”
Maggie glanced back toward the house. “Do you guys get the feeling we’re being followed?”
“You’re being paranoid,” said Harris, though he sounded uncertain himself.
“No,” said Eddie, “I feel it too.” The thought of the monsters from Nathaniel’s books hit him in the back, and he spun around, searching the shadows for movement. One of the large clouds had moved across the moon, so there was little light to see by. The woods at the top of the driveway were quiet and still. Eddie fought the temptation to call out into the darkness. He didn’t want to be answered.
“What was that?” said Harris, looking over Eddie’s shoulder.
Then they all heard it. From somewhere in the woods, a few feet up the hill, came the sound of fluttering-a wing, a leaf, a piece of paper. Bumps rose on the back of Eddie’s neck, as if an icy breeze had suddenly blown past.
“Is someone there?” Maggie asked, a little too loudly. She had turned even whiter than usual. Then she fell backward, tripping over her feet. Eddie rushed to help her, but Maggie’s eyes were fixed on the house, still partially visible through the trees. “Look!” she said. When Eddie turned around, he too almost tripped.
At first, he saw nothing unusual-trees, shadows, passing moonlight. Darkness and more darkness. But then, Eddie’s eyes adjusted. It seemed that the empty spaces between the trees had filled, as if each black shadow solidified into a long, tall body. Eddie sensed slight movements, as if the forest itself were letting go of something it had been holding back.
Leaves crunched as a breeze rustled the forest floor.
Moving away from the empty spaces between the tree trunks, with almost imperceptible fluidity, the shadows revealed themselves as dozens of cloaked beings. Without having taken a single step, the beings materialized where Eddie, Maggie, and Harris stood at the top of the driveway. Under each hood was a stark white face. Their lips were pulled back, and what might have been a smile on any other living creature, here, was anything but.
Eddie rubbed at his eyes, then whispered, “It’s happening again.”
Harris stepped forward, clutching the boomerang. “Watch out, you guys,” he whispered to Eddie and Maggie, before calling to the creatures, “Leave us alone!” Harris pulled his arm back over his shoulder, then, with a quick flick, whipped the small piece of wood forward and sent it flying. Eddie was almost impressed as he watched the boomerang soar into the shadows, but the feeling disappeared when one dark creature swiped at it with a clawed hand and the boomerang simply vanished with a soft whoosh.
Suddenly, both of his hands were yanked backward, by Maggie on one side and Harris on the other. They pulled Eddie farther down the path, and the three kids ran.
Every tree they passed seemed to let go of another empty space that turned into a hooded creature. They appeared at every angle. Eddie nervously bit the inside of his lip, so hard he tasted blood.
Bare branches extended across the driveway, as if trying to scrape at them. Harris shouted as his cheek split open. Maggie screamed as she lost a tangle of hair. Eddie was sure the trees themselves were in on it. He heard the left side of his coat split down the back as something ripped clean through it.
Eddie’s bag slipped off his shoulder and toppled into the brush. Harris and Maggie continued to dash down the driveway, the flashlight’s beam bobbing in the inky shadows. “Wait!” Eddie called. But it was no use. Skidding to a clumsy halt in the middle of the overgrown driveway, Eddie spun around. His bag lay on the forest floor, obscured by a small pile of leaves.
He started to scramble toward the bag when he realized that an enormous figure stood over him, cloaked in a filmy transparent shadow like black gauze. Eddie looked up into its face. Its swollen, piglike eyes dared him to look away. Its mouth grew wide as Eddie watched, showing him sharp teeth set in a round skull covered with pasty greenish-white skin. Eddie tried to scream, but nothing came out. The wind blew through the treetops, and like a candle flame the figure wavered before materializing again. Eddie saw the rest of the creatures behind the one towering over him. They were scattered throughout the forest and up the driveway like chess pieces, waiting and watching.
“Eddie!” Harris and Maggie called to him from down the hill.
“Urgh,” was all Eddie could muster. His tongue felt like old parchment. His voice was gone-fear had sucked it from his throat. He waited for the creature to descend upon him, but standing there, he realized it had frozen in place. As he struggled to swallow the cold night air, Eddie stared into the horrible face of the monster, and an idea began to fill him with courage.
Since moving to Gatesweed, Eddie had met the dogs from The Rumor of the Haunted Nunnery and encountered the gremlin from The Curse of the Gremlin’s Tongue. Eddie knew that he was now looking at the Watchers-the Witch’s hench-creatures who had followed Gertie from the woods into the basement of the old farmhouse. Yesterday afternoon, Eddie had read about them in The Witch’s Doom. They were real too. And he knew how to beat them.
“Eddie!” Harris’s and Maggie’s voices shocked Eddie out of his stupor.
He shouted, “Stay where you are! Don’t move. I’ll be there in a second.”
Keeping his eyes focused on the Watcher in front of him, Eddie reached forward and picked up his book bag. He slipped it onto his shoulder and took a step backward. The Watchers remained frozen, tied to their shadows, unable to move. As Eddie inched farther away, they stopped grinning. Once he was twenty feet away, they closed their eyes and opened their mouths in anguished, silent howls. Eddie tried his best not to stumble over the rocky path. All the creatures needed was for him to look away for a moment. He concentrated, then called to his friends to direct him.
Walking backward all the way down the driveway, he eventually found Harris and Maggie crouched behind a tree near the hole in the iron fence. Even though he could no longer see the Watchers through the dense trees, he knew they must still be at the top of the hill, so he kept staring in that direction. He was too frightened to even risk blinking.
“Come on! Let’s go!” said Harris as Eddie finally made it to the fence. “What are you doing?”
“Can I borrow your flashlight?” said Eddie. Harris handed it to him with a frustrated groan. Eddie shone it into the woods up the hill with a sigh of relief. “They’re allergic to light,” he explained. “They can’t follow if you watch them,” said Eddie, staring up the driveway.
“What do you mean-they can’t follow you if you watch them?” said Maggie. “Is that how you got away? You walked backward through the woods? How did you figure that out?”
Eddie nodded. “It’s how Gertie got away in The Witch’s Doom.”
“Of course!” said Harris. “I remember those things! They were really horrible.”
“The Witch’s Doom?” said Maggie. “I don’t get it. Are you saying those things came from a Nathaniel Olmstead book?”
As Eddie nodded yes, the flashlight splashed her face with a ghostly glow from underneath. Even with a smudge of dirt on her nose, she looked so pale that, for half a second, he thought she looked like the statue in the woods, but when her voice wavered, he knew she couldn’t be anyone but herself. She looked between the two boys skeptically, as if they might be playing a joke on her.
Maggie thought about that for a second. Even though she still looked confused, she nodded, seeming to understand what they were saying. “Do we have to walk backward all the way back home?” she asked. “My dad’ll kill me if I bring home several dozen giant shadowy demons.”
Despite everything, Eddie laughed. Harris joined him.
“I don’t think they’ll follow us,” said Eddie. “They need the shadows, and even though it’s only half-full, the moon is probably too bright outside of the woods. In the book they only appear when it’s very dark out. But just to be sure, I’ll keep my eyes behind us until we get somewhere safe. You guys can guide me.”
“My pleasure,” said Harris, brushing aside the vines that covered the hole in the fence. Eddie stumbled backward as Maggie and Harris steered him through. He prayed that the Watchers were no longer watching.
They picked up their bikes and walked them up the hill to Maggie’s house, where her father begrudgingly agreed to pile everyone into his pickup for a ride back into town. As they passed the entrance to Nathaniel Olmstead’s overgrown driveway, the moon returned from behind a small bank of clouds, and Eddie finally felt safe. He knew the Watchers would never set foot past the shadows where the trees ended and the moonlit asphalt began.
Eddie was sitting at his desk to distract himself with math homework, a task he expected would be nearly impossible after the evening’s events, when his mother knocked on his bedroom door. She’d reheated his dinner and brought it up to him, along with the cordless phone.
“It’s for you,” she said, resting the large antique silver platter on the comforter folded at the end of his bed.
“Thanks, Mom,” he said. She kissed his cheek before heading into the hallway and closing his bedroom door.
“Hey!” Harris said. He sounded exhausted. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. How ‘bout you?”
“Freaked out,” said Harris. “Those things were scarier than the dogs from the lake. Scarier than the gremlin.”
Eddie silently noticed that he didn’t include the Woman in Black. Despite the horror of meeting the Watchers, he knew they both understood that meeting her would be worse.
“Where did they come from?” said Eddie.
“I’m not sure,” said Harris. “In The Witch’s Doom, the old woman tells Gertie that legend during the town meeting, remember? She says the Watchers haunt the woods once the sun goes down.”
“Right,” said Eddie. “Maybe the same thing happens up at the Olmstead estate.”
Harris was quiet. Eddie could hear him breathing over the phone.
“What’s wrong?” Eddie asked.
“I was just thinking… if those things live in Nathaniel Olmstead’s woods now,” said Harris, “did they arrive before or after he left?”
Eddie shook his head. “Let’s not think about that,” he said, changing the subject. “I feel like we’re closer than ever. Did you get a chance to look at the code in the new book? I think it was different from the code in The Enigmatic Manuscript. Why don’t you check?”
Harris paused before answering. “I don’t have the books. You have the books.”
“Oh right,” said Eddie. “I forgot.” He grabbed his open book bag and dug through his notebooks and folders.
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.”