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Why are you crying? she wanted to ask. But it seemed impolite to ask that question of a grown-up, even if her face was streaked with the runoff from her tears. The woman didn’t reply; she darted a glance to the rocky path by the creek, then back to the water. Like she was looking out for something. Or someone. Ollie felt a chill creep down her spine.
Ollie was nearly within arm’s reach now. The woman smelled sour—frightened. Ollie, completely bewildered, decided to ignore the stranger elements of the conversation. Later, she would wish she hadn’t.
“Avoid large places at night,” the woman said. “Keep to small.”
When the mist rises, and the smiling man comes walking, you must avoid large places at night. Keep to small.
What’s the difference between a cat and a comma?” “Dad—” “Well?” “I don’t know, what?” Her dad grinned. “A comma,” he informed her, “is a pause at the end of a clause.” Ollie saw where this was going. “Dad.” “But a cat,” her dad finished blithely, “has claws at the ends of its paws.”
“Well, I only learned reeling and writhing,” Brian said conversationally to the top of her head. “And then the different branches of arithmetic—ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision.”
You might get to know characters in books, Ollie thought, but getting to know a human was an entirely different thing.
Really nothing to be scared of. It was beautiful. Except . . . A group of three scarecrows stood on the edge of the parking lot, smiling stitched-on smiles. Their garden-rake hands were raised to wave. The tips of the rakes gleamed in the sun. Ollie kept turning. More scarecrows. Scarecrows everywhere. Someone had set up scarecrows between buildings, in the vegetable garden, on stakes in the cornfield. Their hands were trowels or garden rakes. Their smiles had been sewn or painted on. Scarecrows, Ollie thought uneasily, should not be used for decoration.
“No, it’s not fair. But the tree gave us a gift. Even bad things can lead to good. Maybe in sad times, it helps to think of that.”
A big stone, with a plaque and a long list of names. Dust to dust, it said. But they will rise up out of the ashes. The schoolhouse fire, Ollie thought. There is a memorial, after all.
Jonathan Webster, Elizabeth Webster, said the bigger one, d. 1894. May the dead lie quiet. Ollie frowned. Caleb Webster, said the headstone on the left. Catherine Webster, said the headstone on the right. Ollie’s fingertips got cold. “Four graves, three stones,” said a raspy voice. “But only two sets of bones.”
Because before them, there were the Abenaki, and they had this land and farmed it and died on it and wrote their own ghost stories while people died of plague in the streets of London.”
Wherever you go in this big, gorgeous, hideous world, there is a ghost story waiting for you.
Quiet time, always quiet time, as if she could make her own head and heart be quiet.
Ms. Webster watched them go from the gravel driveway. As the sun hid behind clouds, the cheery expression seemed to leach out of her face, leaving it gray and old, exhausted. She looked just like she had crying by the creek, except this time her eyes were dry, her face hard.
Ollie was still staring out the window. The yellow autumn trees had turned black and spindly, as though winter had come in the last three minutes. The broad, smooth country road had become an old, cracked ribbon, running away and vanishing into the trees, still lapped in mist. Where were they?
Ollie’s mom had worn it that last day, and it didn’t work anymore. The watch gave wildly varying altitudes and completely inaccurate times; the compass did not point north. Now there was a countdown where the time should have been (45:02), and just below that, the digital readout said RUN in gray letters, flickering like the lights.
“They can move in the daytime,” said the bus driver, almost too low for her to hear. “Just not while anyone’s looking. They have to stand in the sunshine world too, see, to keep the door open, and that makes them weaker. More rules in the sunshine world, after all. But on this side of the mist—at night—there’s only his rules.
“Well,” said Ollie, “if we have disappeared, can we assume that this place is—somewhere else? Like a horrible sort of Narnia? Not our world at all? And when the mist rises, you fall through the door? Maybe the scarecrows sort of exist in both worlds? The bus driver said something like that. That they’re only dangerous here at night, something about them being partly in the sunshine world during the day.” Even to Ollie it sounded far-fetched.
“Okay,” said Coco, grabbing her own backpack. “But I really hope you guys know what you’re doing.” Nope, not at all, Ollie thought. She looked up at Brian and saw him having the same thought. She grinned suddenly. You can’t, she decided, be super scared for very long before you start just laughing or crying. And indeed, Brian snorted and then they were both laughing, and Coco was staring grumpily between them. Her pink-pale hair stuck up like she was a fuzzy baby bird, and somehow that made Ollie laugh even harder.
“There might be weird rules to this place that we don’t know about,” said Ollie. “But dehydration is real.”
