The Books of Elsewhere, Vol. 1: The Shadows Read Free

bear.
    “Good. He’ll protect you,” said Mrs. Dunwoody, heading back toward the door. “But I’ll leave the hall light on, just in case.”
    The door clicked shut behind her mother. Olive lay very still, wide-awake, listening to her mother’s footsteps fade away down the hall. Then she swung her legs carefully out of bed, making the bedspread rustle as little as possible.
    Olive peeped out the door and looked down the hallway in both directions. Her parents were closed inside their bedroom. The hall lamp sent a soft glow over the thick carpet and made the polished wood along the walls glint like brass. She tiptoed out and stood in front of the painting. The row of houses cowered on their twilit street. Olive grabbed the frame. She pulled and pulled and pulled, but the painting wouldn’t move. It felt almost like the painting was part of the wall itself.
    Olive walked quietly along the hall toward the stairs, looking carefully at the other paintings. They seemed even stranger in the dim light than they had earlier in the day. One showed a big bowl of fruit, but they were fruits Olive had never seen in any grocery store. They were funnily shaped and strangely colored, and a few of them were sliced open to show bright pink or green centers with glistening seeds. Another painting depicted a rocky, treeless hill and a crumbling stone church, far away in the background. She hadn’t noticed it before, but when she squinted and leaned very close, Olive thought that she could make out the bumps and crosses of distant gravestones.
    Just to check, she yanked on the frame of each painting. None of them budged. She was just reaching the head of the stairs when something to the left caught her eye. In the big painting of the moonlight and the forest, something had changed.
    At first Olive thought that the light looked different, as if the painted moon itself had moved. But no—the moon hung just where it had before, behind the leafless trees. It was something about the shadows. Olive moved closer, watching. The shadows suddenly rippled and bent, and within the shadows, a pale splotch darted out of the undergrowth. Olive froze, staring at the white path. She blinked, rubbed her eyelids with her fingertips, and looked again. Yes—there it was. Something was moving inside the painting, a tiny white shape flitting between the silhouettes of the wiry trees. Olive held perfectly still. She didn’t even breathe. The tiny white shape made one more quick plunge toward the path, then dove back into the thorny black forest. And then the painting, too, was perfectly still.

     
    Olive bolted back to her bedroom, jumped into the bed, and yanked the covers over her face. Then she lay as still as she could and listened. The house’s creaks and groans were almost covered by the thumps of her own heart. But not quite.
    In every place that Olive’s family had lived, there had been other people nearby. On the other side of the apartment walls, neighbors moved around in their matching sets of rooms, talking, eating, going about their own lives. Even if Olive couldn’t hear them, even if she had rarely spoken to them, she knew they were there. Here, it was just Olive and her parents . . . and whatever it was that flitted through the shadows on that painted forest path.
    For a long time, Olive listened. The house moaned and whispered. Wind shushed across the window. Finally, curled in a very tiny ball, with Hershel standing guard on the pillow beside her, Olive fell asleep.

3
     
    O LIVE WOKE UP rather late the next morning. Her father had already left for his office, but her mother was still in the kitchen, having a third or fourth cup of coffee and arguing with a science program on public television.
    “Good morning, sleepyhead,” Mrs. Dunwoody chirped as Olive stumbled in and pulled a stool close to the counter. “Do you want toast or cereal this morning?”
    “Cereal, please,” said Olive, yawning.
    Mrs. Dunwoody poured Olive’s