Dead Voices

But, little Ollie had said, I don’t know how to only think of now.

Breathe, her mother had said. Breathing is what you’re doing right now. So breathe. Think of that and nothing else.

So Ollie breathed, and thought of that and nothing else, and so she didn’t cry when Brian and Coco ran up to the mirror like they’d been shot from a cannon. As though Seth had been holding them back somehow. She didn’t know what Seth could do, Ollie realized. She didn’t know anything about him. After they’d made it home safely the last time, she’d tried to forget the smiling man altogether.

It had never occurred to her that he might not forget them.

Ollie couldn’t see her friends’ faces very well, since there was only the weak glow of the fire to illuminate them. But Ollie didn’t need to see their faces well. She knew them by heart. They were closer than a brother and sister would have been. They were her best friends.

Brian and Coco were both trying to talk at once. But Ollie put a hand up. They went quiet. Breathe. Ollie felt strangely calm now.

“Mr. Voland is the smiling man,” said Ollie. “He found us; he’s come back.” She could see him just at the edge of the mirror, watching them. He could probably hear everything they were saying.

Her friends stared at her. Coco’s mouth and eyes were round and ridiculous with horror.

“He says I’m stuck here,” said Ollie, talking fast, trying not to think too hard about what she was saying. “Unless I find the way back through the mirror before dawn.” Ollie put her palms on the mirror to illustrate. “But I don’t know how to do that. He says you can help me, but if we fail, then you’ll be trapped on this side of the mirror too. So—” Ollie swallowed hard. “Better you don’t help me. If you go to bed, and sleep, it’ll be okay in the morning.”

Brian said, “Owl, don’t be an idiot. We’re going to help you.”

“But you can’t!” Ollie snapped, and lost her fragile control over herself. She pressed her hands desperately against the glass. “Brian—Coco—our parents—my dad—they can’t lose you too. Better one of us than all three of us.”

“Ollie,” said Coco, “Brian’s right. We’re not leaving you. And—why do you believe that guy, anyway? He’s the smiling man? He’s a big huge liar! He lied about being Mr. Voland. He’s probably been lying this whole time about Mount Hemlock, about ghosts, about all of it. Maybe he’s lying about this too. We’re going to help you. Hang on, okay? Just hang on. We’ll get you out.” Coco put both her tiny hands on the glass, right against Ollie’s on the other side. But Ollie couldn’t feel it. There was a mirror between them. Coco’s eyes were huge and shining with intensity now. “It’ll be all right, Ollie. It will.”

“I love you,” said Ollie to her friends, just as their eyes widened. Coco and Brian both started to shout a warning. Ollie didn’t hear it, though. She stopped hearing sound through the mirror a second before a gray bony hand fell on her shoulder.

“Got you!” said a low, dead voice, right in her ear. “Bad girl, talking out of turn. It’s the closet for you until you learn some manners.”

11

COCO SAW THE gray-faced woman sneaking up behind Ollie, and she screamed a warning. She saw Ollie’s lips move, asking what, but Coco didn’t hear anything. It was like a movie that had suddenly been muted. Brian was pounding his fists on the glass. “Ollie!” he was shouting. “Ollie!”

Coco had a swift, horrible glimpse of the woman digging her bony fingers into Ollie’s arm, wrenching her around, and dragging her friend, struggling, across the dining room. Coco could see Ollie’s mouth move as she yelled. Brian was still banging on the glass, as though he could force a way through. But Coco didn’t think they could.

Coco then did one of the biggest, hardest things she’d ever done in her whole life. She turned away from the mirror. She turned away from the sight of her best friend being hauled away somewhere she and Brian couldn’t follow. She pressed her lips together. She pressed her hands to her sides so they wouldn’t shake. She couldn’t help Ollie by shouting. She could help her by figuring out what was going on.

Coco marched right across the dining room and stopped in front of Mr. Voland—Seth—the smiling man. He was beside the fireplace, watching the scene in the mirror opposite, laughing with such giddy delight that he’d sunk down on a chair. When he looked up at her, he had to wipe actual tears of laughter from his eyes.

“Well?” he asked her, still snorting.

Coco didn’t say anything for a moment. She was swallowing the urge to scream at him, or to beg like a little kid for him to bring Ollie back. She knew that wouldn’t help. Instead she tried to think.

Coco hadn’t actually met the smiling man in the corn maze, the way Ollie had. Ollie had confronted him on the platform in the middle of the corn maze, in the world behind the mist. But Coco and Brian hadn’t seen her do it. They’d been on the ground, held by scarecrows. The only things Coco knew about the smiling man came from what Ollie had told her about that night. And from reading an old book called Small Spaces.

So Coco didn’t know very much about him. She’d imagined him, of course, and she’d seen him in her nightmares. But her imagination had supplied a cloud of bats around the smiling man’s head, smoke coming out of his nostrils, snakes wrapped around his wrists, and his smile the empty grin of a skull. Her nightmares had given him a thin, nasty voice and a face always in shadow.

But in real life, the smiling man wasn’t like that at all. He still looked a little like plain Mr. Voland, with freckles across his nose. But now his smile was cruel and happy and wild, and his light-and-dark eyes seemed to take over the rest of his face. Looking at him, Coco wondered how she’d ever thought even for a second that he was just an ordinary person.

She took a deep breath. She saw that Mr. Voland—Seth—had taken Ollie’s watch. He was wearing it on his own wrist. Coco felt faintly sick, seeing it there. Her mind raced.

She said slowly, “So you are the smiling man. You had blond hair before.”

“What’s a face?” remarked Seth. “Just another kind of deception.”

“Did you come back here just to trap Ollie behind the mirror?”

“Yes,” he said. “For she beat me once. And I do not like to lose.” He gave her a flicker of a smile. She really hated that smile. Behind her, Brian had stopped shouting and thumping on the mirror. There was the swish of his feet in socks on the floor as he came up beside Coco. A sideways glance showed her the shine of furious tears on Brian’s face.

“Ollie said there was a way for her to get back to this side of the mirror,” Coco went on, choosing her words, trying to think. “If she can find it.”