The driver looked all around and then whispered, so that she could barely hear, “They are strong at night, remember? They have clever, grabbing hands, but stiff, and they can’t grab you if they can’t reach you.At night!”
“Who are they?” Ollie whispered, but the driver didn’t answer. He only reached out, and pulled the lever that opened the doors. It was getting darker. The trees dripped, although it wasn’t exactly raining. More of a thick, sticky mist, like being inside a cloud.
Ollie had been inside a cloud once. Her mother had taken her paragliding. Her mother loved flying. Any kind of flying.
Her father had said,No, Ollie is too little,but her mother had only said,Don’t worry, Rog,and taken Ollie anyway. Ollie’s mom wasn’t scared of anything.
But maybe she’d been scared on that last flight, in the little single-engine. Ollie dreamed of the crash, even though she hadn’t seen it. She hadn’t seen the fire afterward, or the bits of broken plane stuck in a tree, the things that haunted her nightmares. She only overheard her relatives talking about it. Her father had brought the cracked watch to her at school, holding it tight in his sweaty fist. He’d sat her down right there on the bench next to the hickory tree.
Ollie had heard him out, not saying anything. Heard him out until she couldn’t bear to listen anymore, and then she yelled and grabbed the watch and ran, ran for her bike, pedaled to their house, never mind the freezing rain. She had run upstairs soaking wet, shivering, to hide in her window seat. She hadn’t cried. She couldn’t bear to cry. Crying meant it was all real, and she didn’t want it to be real.
Instead she opened a book at random, read until her eyes went blurry, and then read some more. She hadn’t stopped for days. She hardly ate; she didn’t sleep at all. Her dad would come up, red-eyed from crying himself, tap on her door, leave her food, go away again. She wouldn’t talk to him. She barely saw him. He brought her pies, cakes, all of her favorite things. She didn’t touch them.
Maybe, she kept thinking, when she came back from one of those other worlds, when she woke up from book dreaming, she would come back to a world where her mother wasn’t dead.
She hadn’t.
But she kept her mother’s watch, even though it was broken. Ollie never took it off until she got home at night and then it spent its nights under her pillow. Now, as Ollie stepped into the road, she glanced down at it. 27:04, the watch said now.RUN.
Sunset at 6:03, Ollie remembered. Twenty-seven minutes sounded about right. She would have to trust it.Maybe the advice was good too.RUN. Ollie bit a knuckle, considered the place where the driver had pointed to the little gap in the fog, the skinny path.
There was a scarecrow on her side of the road. It was peering around a tree, one garden-rake hand uplifted, wearing an old black suit. It looked like the scarecrow whose hat Brian had adjusted. That couldn’t be right.
“Hey, Ollie!”
Ollie shrieked and whipped around. Coco Zintner hopped awkwardly down from the last step of the bus, right into a green puddle. Ollie glanced down at her watch. 24:08.
“Are you really leaving?” Coco asked, splashing over.
“Yes,” said Ollie. The back of her neck was prickling. She found herself keeping an eye on the black-suited scarecrow.
“I’m sorry about earlier,” Coco said.
“It’s okay,” said Ollie, but she was barely listening. She had decided. She strode toward the woods.
“Where are you going?” Coco asked, hurrying up beside her. “Why are you going so fast?”
“The woods,” said Ollie, trying to sound surer than she felt. “The bus driver said,Best get moving.I’m moving.”
Coco bit her lips. “I’m going with you. They’re too mean on the bus.” She showed Ollie the gummy end of her hair, and her lip quivered. “And I’m scared,” she added. “This place is weird.”
“Okay,” Ollie said, a little relieved thatsomeonewascoming with her, that she wasn’t the only one afraid. Even if it was Coco Zintner. “If we go into the woods,” she said, trying to make the decision more rational than it was, “we can angle back toward the farm. There’s probably a shortcut in there. We’ll be back before we know it.”
“Look, a path!” said Coco, pointing to the gap in the trees. “That way.”
Ollie had meant to go that way, but she didn’t like Coco taking charge.
“Well, yes,” said Ollie. “But, Coco—”
Coco didn’t hear. She was already running ahead, slipping in puddles. Ollie followed. They crossed the grassy, overgrown space between the road and the trees. To get to the path, they had to pass the black-suited scarecrow. It did look a lot like the one Brian had pointed out earlier. Maybe they’d made two identical ones. It stood there with mist lapping around its knees, smiling blankly.
Just as they reached the first jumpy shadows of the forest, another voice yelled, “Hey, wait!”
Both girls turned around. Coco seemed to shrink into herself, but then she scowled and crossed her arms. “No boys allowed,” she told Brian as he jogged across the asphalt.
Brian raised a brow. “This isn’t summer camp, Cocoa Puff,” he said. “Have you two completely lost it? Mr. Easton said to wait. He’s coming right back. You’re going to get inso muchtrouble.”
“I don’t think Mr. Easton is coming back,” said Ollie. “It’s almost dark.”
