The Books of Elsewhere, Vol. 1: The Shadows by Jacqueline West Read Free Book Online Page A

his suit with his napkin.
    In the upstairs guest bathroom, there was a small watercolor painting of a woman wrapped in a bath towel dipping her big toe delicately into a bathtub. When she noticed Olive watching her, the woman gave an indignant squeal and plunked down in the water, leaving just her head in view.
    In the blue bedroom, Olive leaned close to the painting of the fancy ballroom, so close that she could see the swirls and streaks of paint in the dancers’ clothes. She wasn’t going to climb in, she told herself. She was just going to watch. The painted musicians came to life, clanging and plucking in an out-of-practice fashion at their horns and violins. The dancing couples broke their regal poses and went back to tripping on their hems and stepping on each other’s feet. Olive giggled out loud. The dancers glared at her. One tuba player stuck out his tongue.
    Olive went back downstairs to the library, where the computer stared at her with its big blank eye. Her parents’ work was stacked in carefully planned piles on all of the flat surfaces, and pinned to some of the vertical ones.
    There was a painting between two bookshelves that was one of Olive’s favorites in the whole house. It showed a group of girls in a flowery meadow, holding hands in a wavy circle. They wore wreaths of wild-flowers in their hair and long, soft Grecian dresses. These girls looked cheerful and friendly. They didn’t look like they would frown and shrug their shoulders if Olive tried to talk to them. Besides, they were young, and their Grecian dresses didn’t look that different from Morton’s nightshirt. Maybe they knew something about him.
    Putting on her bravest smile, Olive grasped the painting’s gilded frame and then leaned forward slowly, until her nose touched the painting. With the same feeling of pressing her face through warm Jell-O, Olive fell through the frame and landed in the soft, sweet-smelling meadow.
    The laughing girls stopped laughing. They let go of each other’s hands and stood still, glaring at Olive. One of them nervously demolished a daisy; another glanced over her shoulder at the sky.
    “What are you doing here?” demanded the girl in the center of the broken circle.
    Olive shuffled her feet. She dug her fingernails into her palms. “I . . . I just wondered—I mean, I thought you might know a little boy named Morton.”
    “Keep your voice down! He’ll hear you,” hissed a girl with long blond hair.
    “You shouldn’t be here,” said the center girl. “You’re going to get us all in trouble. Go away!”
    Olive felt several cold, paint-smooth hands pushing her back toward the frame. She toppled clumsily out of the painting, bumping her head on a bookshelf as she landed. The spectacles slipped off her nose and thumped against her chest on their long chain. Olive looked back up at the painting. The dancing girls had gone back to their formation, although now their smiles looked strained and insincere. Olive rubbed her sore head. Morton had been scared of something watching him too, but at least he hadn’t pushed her out of a painting.
    Olive’s footsteps echoed in the dusty library.
    She trailed along the hall to the kitchen. Just beside the kitchen door hung a small painting of three men building a wall out of stones. The men wore old-fashioned caps and jackets. They looked a bit dirty, but sociable, like they wouldn’t mind having company. Then again, she’d been very wrong about the dancing girls.
    Olive hesitated. For a moment, the things she wanted to know wrestled with the things she hated to do. But finally, she put on the spectacles, stood on her toes, and put one arm into the painting, clamping it over the bottom edge of the frame. Then with great effort, she pulled herself sideways onto the patchy ground of the building site.
    The three men stopped working and stared at her. Their mouths fell open. One of them dropped the rock he was holding, and had to jump aside before it rolled