Dead Voices

Two beeps.

Coco hesitated. She knew she either had to trust the watch or not, but she could imagine all kinds of horrible things lurking behind those doors.

But she gathered her courage, took the door by the handle, and pushed.

It wasn’t a closet at all. It was a staircase. Coco, not expecting it, almost fell down the stairs. Gasping, she caught herself at the last second and peered in.

All the rattling closet doors had fallen silent. Brian’s voice was silent too. In front of her, a simple flight of creaky wooden steps led down into darkness.

Coco absolutely did not want to go down those stairs by herself. She wanted to run back to her mom, wake her up, and ask what to do. She wanted to go to sleep in a warm bunk bed and have this all have been a dream when she woke up. She wanted Ollie and Brian with her.

But she’d lost Ollie and Brian. And she wouldn’t get them back unless she was brave. She had to be brave.

“Do I go down there?” Coco whispered to the watch.

The watch beeped twice. YES.

Coco, sick with fright, thought of her friends waiting for her and gathered her courage. She hitched the Ouija board more firmly under her arm and went through and down.

Just as she went, somewhere out of sight, the bird clock whistled.

Coco prayed she had enough time.

13

OLLIE SPRINTED DOWN the stairs, hating the dark. Somewhere below her, she thought she saw a faint golden light. It was all that kept her from tripping and falling headfirst down the stairs. But the light also scared her. She didn’t know what had made it. She didn’t know what was waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs. The wooden steps creaked and snagged threads on her wool socks as she ran.

About halfway down, she realized that there were no footsteps following her. Ollie slowed, and then she stopped.

Utter silence on the stairwell. Ollie tried to quiet her panic-fast breathing, her racing heart. She wondered if Mother Hemlock and the black bear weren’t following because they didn’t

need to. Because all they had to do was stand guard at the door and Ollie would be trapped in the basement until it was too late. Had she just missed her last chance of getting out of this place?

Tears pricked her eyes. She swallowed them, tried to think. She wasn’t done yet! Coco and Brian would be somewhere, trying to help. But they were on the other side of the mirror. She didn’t know what they were doing. Or even what they could do.

Ollie looked back up at the faint shape of the door she’d come through. Go down? Go back up? How long until dawn? The golden light below flickered. Ollie didn’t know what was down there.

But she knew what was waiting for her up in the lobby.

Ollie ran as quietly as she could down the stairs.

They ended sooner than she was prepared for. Ollie lurched from the last step onto the stone floor of a basement so fast that she went sprawling painfully to her knees. She wrenched herself to her feet and looked around.

The basement was massive. Cavernous. Ollie, eyes open wide in the dark, turned in a nervous circle and glimpsed all kinds of things. Big lockers with labels like SUMMER CLOTHES, WINTER CLOTHES, HISTORY BOOKS, NIGHTGOWNS. There were old rusty tools and nails on the floor. She breathed the musty damp and slow decay. She took a few cautious steps farther in, watching where she put her feet.

The basement was utterly quiet. Utterly still.

Or—almost still. The light moved. It shone from behind a set of lockers. It flickered and steadied. Like a candle flame. But who could have lit the candle? Cautiously, straining her senses to hear and see, Ollie crept around the corner of the old lockers. She stopped short. The light came from an old-fashioned oil lamp. It burned by itself on a small, splintering table.

Ollie knew about oil lamps. They had a few in the Egg, for when the power went out. The hollow base was full of lamp oil; there would be a piece of cotton for a wick, threaded up into a hollow glass tube. If you lit the wick, it burned slowly and steadily. You could brighten and dim the light by adjusting the wick up and down.

But how had a lit oil lamp made it down there? In the dark basement, on that side of the mirror? Ollie hesitated, listening hard. She couldn’t hear anything but the sound of her own footsteps.

She went closer, examined the lamp. It seemed ordinary. Except that it was in the oddest of places. Had a ghost lit it? Did ghosts have lamps here?

Or was it Seth?

Maybe the lamp didn’t matter, Ollie thought. How was she going to get back through the mirror? After Alice went through the looking glass, all she had to do was wake up, and she was home. Ollie didn’t think that would work this time. Back in October, she and Brian and Coco had made it home from the other side of the mist because Ollie had a book that existed in both worlds. But there was no mist and no books this time.