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

onto his toes.
    Olive swallowed the giant lump in her throat. “Hello,” she whispered.
    “Well, hello!” said one of the men.
    “It’s a young lady!” said another man, the way most people would say “It’s a flying saucer!”
    “Bless my boots!” said the third man. Olive had never heard anybody say “Bless my boots!” aloud before, but it made her smile, and suddenly she felt much less afraid of these three men.
    “How on earth did you get in here?” asked the first man, removing his cap and scratching his head. Olive opened her mouth to explain, but the man went on. “Nothing ever changes here,” he said doubtfully.
    “Sometimes I think I’ve been laying the same stone over and over,” said the second man. “Seems this wall will never get finished.”
    The first man nodded in agreement. Olive hadn’t seen him put his cap back on, but there it was, perched on his head.
    The third man was still staring at Olive. “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” he whispered.
    Olive thought it best to ignore their questions. “What are you building?” she asked instead.
    The three men looked at one another. There was a long pause.
    “A wall,” the second man said at last.
    “Yes, a wall.” The third man nodded, relieved.
    “But a wall of what?” asked Olive.
    The three men looked at one another again.
    “You know, I can’t rightly say,” said the first man.
    “Weren’t we building a house?” asked the third man, frowning so hard that his eyebrows formed one fuzzy caterpillar across his forehead.
    “A house. That’s it! A house,” said the second man.
    “There was something funny about the house, though,” said the third man slowly. He looked up at the hazy white sky. “What was it?”
    “Special stones,” muttered the second man to himself. “Crazy demands. That giant cat always in the way. I’d never work for that old geezer again.”
    “For who? Who do you mean?” asked Olive, her thoughts reeling, but the second man was slowly hoisting the fallen rock back into place.
    “Shhh!” the first man hissed at the others, glancing over both his shoulders. “Don’t you say that name aloud.”
    “Something funny,” said the third man, still staring straight up into the air. “Something funny about the basement.”
    “The basement?” said Olive. Something plummeted in her stomach, like an elevator whose cable had snapped. Not the basement. Anywhere but the basement. Olive cleared her throat. “You did say the basement , right?” she asked, trying to push the tremor out of her voice.
    The three men stared at her, mildly confused. One of them nodded.
    “All right, boys, back to work,” Olive heard the first man say as she turned back toward the frame.
    “Come and see us again, young lady!” shouted the third man with a wave as Olive clambered out of the painting and back into the empty kitchen.
    Her heart was pounding. A stone house. A cat.
    The basement.

9
     
    O LIVE RUSHED THROUGH the house, gathering supplies. The more she thought about the basement, the less she wanted to go down there, but the faster she moved, the less time she had to think. It was like jumping into a chilly swimming pool—the moments she spent with her toes curled over the end of the diving board were always worse than the moment when she finally hit the water.
    Besides, if she hurried, she might have just enough time to explore the basement before her parents got home and started asking inconvenient questions about what she was doing in her least favorite part of the house. What would Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody say if they knew that their daughter thought she could talk to a cat and climb in and out of paintings? They would probably yank a strand of her hair and take it in for DNA testing.
    In her bedroom, Olive dug through the closet looking for a pair of slippers to wear for protection against the chilly stone floor. But there were no slippers to be found. Olive owned six pairs of slippers, but none of them