Read Online Spellbound: The Books of Elsewhere by Jacqueline West - Free Book Online

parents would tell all the scientists from the college about you, and they’d all want to do tests on you and dissect you and genetically clone-splice you or something.”
    The closet got very quiet.
    Olive leaned her head against the wooden door. “Morton . . .” she began, as gently as she could. “I—”
    But his voice interrupted her. “There’s a painting in here.”
    Olive frowned. “Why would anyone hang a painting in a closet?”
    “It isn’t hanging. It’s leaning. I can feel it. Look.”
    The closet door swung open. Morton stepped out of the darkness, shoving aside a few musty wool coats and pointing to the closet’s back corner. There, lit by a beam of watery moonlight, a picture frame glinted around a painted canvas.
    On their knees, Olive and Morton dragged the painting out into the blue room for a better look. Inside the heavy frame was a picture of a ruined castle, its stones crumbling beneath a night sky.
    “Do you think it’s one of his paintings?” Morton whispered.
    “Well, I know how we can find out for sure,” Olive whispered back as Harvey swaggered into the bedroom to announce that the coast was clear.
    A moment later, the three of them were climbing through the picture frame, into a cool, damp, mossscented night. So it was one of Aldous’s paintings—one that Olive had never explored before. While they teetered across the mossy rocks that led down to the moat, she wondered how long it had been waiting in the closet, and who had put it there in the first place, in a spot where no one would ever get to look at it.
    The trio paused at the drawbridge. Harvey gazed at the crumbling stone walls before them and shook his head sadly. “The years have not been kind to Windsor Castle.”
    “I don’t think it’s supposed to be—” said Olive.
    But Harvey was already marching over the drawbridge, with Morton at his heels. Olive wobbled across the slippery planks behind them.
    Inside the castle was a wide, stone-paved courtyard. If the courtyard had ever had a roof, it wasn’t there anymore. Above the edges of the crumbling walls hung a dark sky spotted by a few changeless silver stars.
    “Ah, what glorious memories Windsor Castle holds, even in its ruins!” said Harvey, bounding away across the paving stones. “What pageantry! What duels! What executions!”
    As Harvey leaped up the steps to the parapet, reminiscing happily to himself, Olive and Morton searched the courtyard’s chilly corners. There was no sign of an important book anywhere. A big, empty, roofless room in a big, empty, crumbling castle seemed like an awfully unlikely place to leave an important book anyway.
    “It’s not here. I’m sure of it,” said Olive with a sigh as a flagstone she’d shoved aside wiggled itself back into place. “Sir Walter Raleigh! We’re ready to go!”
    As Olive and Morton passed through the arch leading to the drawbridge, Olive thought she heard something clatter in the distance behind them—something that sounded like a pebble kicked across the flagstones. A second later, she heard the soft rattle of the pebble rolling back to its original spot.
    “Harvey? Is that you?” she called.
    Harvey’s green eyes blinked up from the darkness near her shin. “No, Your Majesty. Do you not recognize Sir Walter Raleigh, your most loyal knight?”
    “I meant, did you make that noise?”
    “What noise, Majesty?”
    They all listened. There was no sound—nothing but the soft swish of the water in the moat rippling against its banks.
    “I hear nothing, Your Majesty,” said Harvey.
    “Me neither,” said Morton. “Your Majesty . ”
    Olive narrowed her eyes at Morton. “Thanks, Sir Pillowcase . Let’s go look in the next room.”
    With Harvey leading the way and Morton and Olive hurrying behind, they crossed over the drawbridge to the mossy bank. Olive took a last look back at the castle, standing silent and dark under the night sky. Then, together, they climbed out of the painting,