This was not as strange as it sounds, because nobody used road atlases anymore except Oliver’s father, who distrusted phones, clouds, satellites, and anything that required him to agree to terms and conditions before telling him where to turn left.
The town was called Bellwether.
It sat between three hills, two creeks, and a county line that seemed undecided about which county it wished to belong to. The welcome sign had once read:
BELLWETHER
A GOOD PLACE TO GROW
But somebody had painted over GROW and written STAY in black paint.
Oliver noticed this from the back seat.
His mother did not. She was on the phone with the realtor, saying, “Yes, we found it. Yes, it’s charming. No, I’m sure the woods won’t be a problem.”
His father did not. He was squinting at the atlas and muttering, “This road isn’t here.”
Oliver said, “The sign says it’s a good place to stay.”
His mother glanced up. “That’s nice.”
“No,” Oliver said. “It used to say grow.”
His father folded the atlas with such violence that one of the corners tore. “Well, maybe they changed the town slogan.”
“Why?”
“Because towns do that.”
Oliver considered this. He had lived in three towns already, and none of them had ever changed slogans. The first had been The Friendly Hub of Commerce. The second had been Where History Meets Tomorrow, though Oliver had seen very little history and no tomorrow worth mentioning. The third had not had a slogan, which had seemed honest.
Bellwether had narrow streets, houses with porches, and trees that leaned over everything as if trying to hear secrets. The houses looked old but not antique. They looked like people who had once been young and were now pretending they had never cared about being young in the first place.
The Pikes’ new house waited at the end of Juniper Lane.
It was white, with green shutters and a red front door. Behind it stretched a lawn, and behind the lawn stood the woods.
Not a line of trees. Not a patch. Not a polite suburban screen of oaks and maples.
Woods.
Vast, thick, old woods, the kind that looked as though they had been there before anyone thought of roads or taxes or bedtime. The trees began just past the rusted wire fence at the back of the yard and went on forever, or nearly forever, which is close enough when you are eleven and standing at the edge of them with a cardboard box full of comic books in your arms.
His mother came up beside him.
“Pretty, isn’t it?”
Oliver did not answer.
“You’ll have room to explore.”
“I don’t know anyone here.”
“You will.”
“I never know anyone.”
His mother sighed, but softly, because she was kind and tired. “That’s not true.”
“It’s true enough.”
She touched his hair. He pretended not to like it. She pretended not to notice that he did.
Inside, the house smelled of old carpets, lemon cleaner, and someone else’s life. Oliver’s room was upstairs at the back. From his window, he could see the lawn, the fence, and the first ranks of trees.
That night, after the movers had gone and after dinner had been eaten from paper plates and after his father had said, “This is the start of something good,” in the voice adults use when they are afraid it may not be, Oliver lay in bed and listened.
Old houses make noises. He knew that. They creak, settle, sigh, tap, and occasionally sound exactly like footsteps when there are no footsteps.
But the noise Oliver heard did not come from the house.
It came from the woods.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Like a small hand knocking on wood.
He sat up.
The moon was bright enough to turn the window into a pale square. Beyond it, the trees were black. The knocking came again.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Oliver held his breath.
Then, very faintly, from somewhere deep beyond the fence, a child’s voice said, “Not yet.”
Oliver did not sleep much after that.
In the morning, his parents were busy being hopeful. His mother unpacked the kitchen. His father tried to make the internet work, failed, swore at the router, apologized to the router, and then swore at the town’s only service provider.
Oliver went outside.
The grass was wet. The air smelled green and mushroomy. He went to the fence.
It was an old wire fence with wooden posts. It had probably once been meant to keep something out or something in, but it had given up many years ago. One section sagged low enough for Oliver to step over.
So he did.
The woods accepted him without comment.
At first there were normal things. Leaves. Twigs. A beer bottle with moss growing inside it. A squirrel that looked at him as if he owed it money. Sunlight came down in gold strips. Somewhere a bird sang three notes over and over, as though practicing for a performance it would never give.
Oliver walked carefully. He had been told many times not to wander off. He had also been told to make friends, get exercise, be curious, and not spend all summer inside reading books about dragons, ghosts, detectives, or unfortunate orphans. Adults were full of contradictory instructions, and Oliver had learned to obey the ones that made sense at the time.
After a while, he found the path.
It was narrow and nearly hidden under leaves. But once he saw it, he could not unsee it. It wound between the trees with the confidence of something that knew exactly where it was going.
Oliver followed.
The woods changed as he walked. The trees grew larger. Their roots rose from the earth like sleeping snakes. The air became cooler. The bird stopped singing. Once, Oliver thought he saw something white moving between the trunks, but when he turned his head there was only a birch tree peeling in the shade.
He almost turned back three times.
The fourth time, he saw the treehouse.
It stood in the arms of an enormous oak at the center of a clearing.
Treehouse was too small a word for it.
It was a little house, really, built high among the branches, with crooked walls and a roof shingled in what looked like bits of slate, bark, and old license plates. A rope ladder hung from a hatch in the floor. There were windows with curtains. There was a tiny porch. A weather vane shaped like a running child spun at the peak, though there was no wind.
Oliver stared.
The treehouse stared back.
This is a difficult thing to explain unless you have ever seen a building that was watching you. Houses have faces sometimes. Two windows and a door are enough. But this treehouse did not have a face. It had attention.
Oliver said, “Hello?”
The rope ladder twitched.
He stepped back.
The rope ladder went still.
On the trunk of the oak, about level with Oliver’s chest, someone had carved words into the bark.
NO PARENTS.
NO DOGS.
NO KINGS.
NO CRYING UNLESS YOU MEAN IT.
Below that, in smaller letters:
KNOCK FIRST.
Oliver looked around the clearing. “On what?”
The hatch in the floor of the treehouse opened.
A wooden bucket dropped from the darkness on a rope. It descended until it hung in front of Oliver’s face.
Inside the bucket was a brass doorknocker shaped like a fox.
Oliver, who had never been foolish in the heroic way boys in books often were, considered going home.
Then he thought of his room full of boxes, his father arguing with the internet, his mother pretending this was a fresh start, and an entire summer in a town where he knew no one.
He lifted the doorknocker.
It was cold.
He knocked on the air.
Once.
Twice.
The third knock sounded from inside the treehouse, deep and hollow, as though he had knocked on the door of a cathedral.
A voice above him said, “State your name and your grievance.”
Oliver looked up.
A face peered down from the hatch.
It belonged to a girl with short black hair, solemn brown eyes, and a smudge of blue paint across her nose. She looked about Oliver’s age, except for the eyes, which looked older than adults and younger than babies.
“My name is Oliver Pike,” he said. “I don’t have a grievance.”
The girl frowned. “Everybody has a grievance.”
“I just moved here.”
“That will do.”
The rope ladder unrolled fully, its wooden rungs knocking against the trunk.
“Come up, Oliver Pike.”
He climbed.
The inside of the treehouse was larger than it should have been.
This is something people say about many things that are not actually larger than they should be. A closet looks deeper in the dark. A suitcase holds more than you remember packing. A day at school lasts three hundred years.
But the treehouse was truly larger.
From outside, it had seemed the size of a garden shed. Inside, there was a room big enough for ten children, maybe twenty, with rugs on the floor, shelves on the walls, and a round window showing a view of the clearing below. Another doorway led into a hallway. The hallway had more doors. One door was painted red. One was covered in feathers. One was very small and had a brass plaque that read FOR EMERGENCIES AND MICE.
The girl stood in the middle of the room.
“I’m Mabel,” she said.
“Do you live here?”
“Sometimes.”
“Who built this?”
“The first children.”
“What first children?”
“The ones who came before the town learned to behave.”
Oliver looked at her.
Mabel looked back.
He decided to ask a different question. “Are there others?”
“Of course.”
She clapped twice.
A boy slid feet-first down a rope from a hole in the ceiling and landed in a crouch. He was thin and pale, with hair the color of straw and a grin that was missing one front tooth.
“This is Thomas,” said Mabel.
“Dead Thomas,” said Thomas cheerfully.
Oliver stared.
Thomas bowed. “Don’t worry. It’s not catching.”
Another child emerged from behind a curtain. She had red braids, round glasses, and no shadow. Oliver noticed this because sunlight came through the round window and her feet made no darkness on the floor.
“Petra,” Mabel said.
“Misplaced Petra,” said Petra.
“Misplaced?”
“I know exactly where I am,” Petra said. “Nobody else does.”
Something in a cabinet coughed.
Mabel opened it. A small boy tumbled out, wearing pajamas, rain boots, and a saucepan on his head.
“Barnaby,” Mabel said.
Barnaby waved.
“Why was he in the cabinet?” Oliver asked.
“Spies,” Barnaby whispered.
“Whose spies?”
Barnaby pointed at the window.
Oliver looked.
The trees stood quietly.
“That’s what they want you to think,” Barnaby said.
Mabel took Oliver by the shoulders and turned him gently toward the center of the room. “This is the Parliament of the Treehouse. We meet on Wednesdays, storm days, days with omens, and whenever somebody new comes.”
“What do you do?”
“We keep the town from swallowing itself,” said Petra.
“We fight monsters,” said Thomas.
“We hide from our parents,” said Barnaby.
“We investigate irregularities,” said Mabel.
Oliver thought about this. “What kind of irregularities?”
Mabel smiled without showing teeth.
“Today? You.”
They gave him tea in a chipped cup.
It tasted like hot apples and thunderstorms.
They asked him questions.
Was he an only child? Yes.
Had he ever been left behind somewhere by accident? Once, at a museum gift shop.
Did he ever talk to things that did not talk back? Sometimes, but mostly books.
Had the town welcome sign changed for him? He told them about GROW and STAY.
At this, the other children went quiet.
Even Barnaby stopped checking the cupboard for spies.
Mabel said, “That’s bad.”
“How bad?”
“Bad enough.”
“Bad enough for what?”
Nobody answered.
Then Thomas said, “Show him the room.”
Petra said, “Not yet.”
“He’s involved now.”
“He knocked,” said Barnaby. “That’s legally binding.”
Mabel looked at Oliver with pity, which he disliked more than fear.
“Come on,” she said.
They led him down the hallway to the red door.
Up close, Oliver saw that the paint was not red paint. It was wax. The whole door had been sealed over and over with red candle wax. Names had been pressed into it with pins, thousands of names, some so old the letters had softened.
Mabel put her palm against the door.
“Rules,” she said. “Do not speak your full name inside. Do not take anything offered by someone who knows your birthday. Do not look too long at any face you recognize. And if you see yourself, be rude.”
“Why?”
“Because politeness is how it gets in.”
Oliver wanted to say he had changed his mind. He wanted to say he should go home, that his mother would be worried, that his father needed help losing arguments with the router.
But Mabel had already pushed open the door.
On the other side was Bellwether.
Not the real Bellwether. Not exactly.
It was Bellwether made of memories, broken clocks, birthday candles, old school photographs, and dust. Streets ran in impossible directions. Houses leaned inward. The sky was the color of dishwater. In every window, something moved just out of sight.
At the center of it all rose a black tree with no leaves.
It was enormous. It grew from the roof of the town hall, splitting the building in two. Its branches spread over the town like fingers.
Hanging from the branches were treehouses.
Dozens of them.
Hundreds.
Some were tiny. Some were grand. Some looked like castles. Some looked like birdcages. Some looked like ordinary bedrooms.
From each one came a sound.
Laughter.
Crying.
Whispering.
Knocking.
Oliver felt his stomach turn.
“What is this place?”
“The Underbell,” said Petra.
“The town underneath the town,” said Thomas.
“The place where Bellwether keeps what it doesn’t want to lose,” said Mabel.
Oliver looked at the hanging houses. “Are those children?”
“They were,” Mabel said.
The black tree creaked.
Far away, or perhaps very near, a voice called, “Oliver?”
It was his mother.
He stepped forward.
Mabel grabbed his arm. “Don’t.”
“But that’s—”
“No. It’s not.”
The voice came again, soft and worried. “Oliver, honey? Where are you?”
He pulled against Mabel’s hand. “She’s looking for me.”
Petra said, “Your mother doesn’t call you honey.”
Oliver stopped.
This was true. His mother called him Ollie when she was happy, Oliver when she was serious, and “my love” when she thought he was asleep.
The voice changed.
“Ollie?”
Now it was his father.
“Ollie, buddy, come here a second.”
Thomas made a face. “It learns quickly.”
The black tree bent toward them, though there was no wind and no reason a tree that large should be able to bend at all.
Something hung from the lowest branch.
A small wooden sign.
Words burned themselves into it while Oliver watched.
OLIVER PIKE
ONLY CHILD
NEWLY ARRIVED
AVAILABLE
Mabel swore.
It was an old-fashioned swear, the kind a pirate might use when stabbed at dinner.
“What does available mean?” Oliver asked.
“It means the town has noticed you,” Petra said.
Thomas drew a wooden sword from his belt. It looked like a toy, except the edge was dark and wet.
“Noticed me for what?”
Mabel shut the red door.
The treehouse room returned around them, warm and sunlit and full of rugs.
Nobody spoke for a moment.
Then Barnaby, from inside the emergency mouse door, said, “Sacrifice.”
Mabel glared. “Not sacrifice.”
“Replacement,” Petra said.
“That’s worse,” Oliver said.
Mabel sighed. “Bellwether is old. Older than the maps. Older than the county. People came here because the soil was good and the winters were mild and children stopped dying of fevers when they crossed the town line.”
“That sounds good.”
“It was. At first. But towns are like people. If they are praised for one thing long enough, they become vain about it.”
Thomas nodded. “Bellwether became vain about keeping children.”
“Keeping them safe?” Oliver asked.
Mabel looked away.
“Keeping them,” Petra said.
The treehouse creaked around them.
Mabel continued. “Every so often, the town chooses a child who does not belong strongly enough anywhere else. New children are easiest. Only children are easiest. Lonely children are easiest.”
Oliver thought of the welcome sign.
A good place to stay.
“What happens to them?”
“They grow down instead of up,” said Thomas.
Oliver did not want to understand this, so of course he did.
“They become part of the Underbell,” Mabel said. “A room. A street. A voice in a window. The town remembers them forever.”
“That’s horrible.”
“It thinks it’s love.”
Oliver laughed once, because the alternative was making a much smaller and more embarrassing sound. “Can I leave?”
“Of course,” said Mabel.
He stood.
“Can I leave Bellwether?”
Mabel did not answer.
That evening, Oliver tried to tell his parents.
He did not tell them everything, because even at eleven he understood that there are limits to what adults can hear before they begin to smile in a worried way.
He told them he had found an old treehouse.
His mother said, “That sounds wonderful, but be careful.”
He told them there were other children.
His father said, “Good. See? Friends already.”
He told them the town was strange.
His mother said, “All new places feel strange.”
His father said, “Give it a chance.”
Oliver looked from one to the other and realized something cold and simple.
They wanted Bellwether to be good.
They needed it to be good.
His father’s job had moved them here. His mother had said the mortgage was a miracle. They had painted hope on this house before they ever arrived, and now they could not see the mold growing under it.
That night, Oliver dreamed he was sleeping in his own bed, except his bed was high in a tree, and the branches rocked him gently.
A voice said, “You will like it here.”
He opened his eyes.
The ceiling above him was leaves.
Standing at the foot of the bed was a boy who looked exactly like Oliver, except his smile was wider and his eyes were full of tiny green shoots.
“You will like it here,” the other Oliver said again. “Everyone does, eventually.”
Oliver sat up. “Who are you?”
“I’m what comes next.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It is where you’re going.”
The other Oliver held out his hand.
In his palm was a small wooden key.
“Take it.”
“No.”
“It opens your room.”
“I have a room.”
“Not a real one. A room made just for you. Shelves for your books. A window that looks into every place you miss. Parents who never argue. Summers that never end. Nobody leaves unless you ask them to.”
Oliver wanted to say no again, quickly and bravely.
But the problem with temptation is that it does not offer you things you hate.
He thought of all the towns he had left. All the almost-friends. All the lunch tables where seats were taken. All the times adults had said, “You’ll adjust,” as if he were a crooked picture frame.
“What do I have to give you?” Oliver asked.
The other Oliver smiled.
“Only the growing-up part.”
Oliver woke on the floor.
His window was open.
There were leaves on his pillow.
In the morning, his mother found him at the kitchen table staring at nothing.
“Bad dreams?”
He nodded.
She kissed the top of his head. “New house dreams.”
“Can we move back?”
She looked so sad that he wished he had not asked.
“Oh, Ollie.”
That was the whole answer.
After breakfast, he went to the treehouse.
Mabel was waiting at the bottom of the ladder.
“You saw yourself,” she said.
“He offered me a key.”
“Did you take it?”
“No.”
“Were you polite?”
Oliver hesitated.
Mabel closed her eyes. “How polite?”
“I asked what he wanted.”
“That’s not terrible.”
“I didn’t say thank you.”
“That helps.”
Thomas dropped from the ladder behind her. “We need to cut his name down.”
“From the black tree?”
Thomas grinned. “Obviously.”
Oliver waited for someone sensible to explain why this was impossible. No one did.
Petra emerged from the woods carrying a satchel. Barnaby followed with a butterfly net, a rolling pin, and what appeared to be a stuffed rabbit with nails driven through it.
“Is that a weapon?” Oliver asked.
Barnaby looked offended. “This is Mr. Nubbins.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You should be.”
Mabel handed Oliver a coat.
It was blue, too heavy for summer, and had brass buttons shaped like acorns.
“Put this on.”
“Why?”
“It belonged to a boy the town forgot to finish eating. There’s still some stubbornness in it.”
Oliver put it on. It smelled of rain and pencil shavings.
They entered the Underbell through the red door.
This time, the false town was waiting.
Church bells rang, although there was no church. Doors opened as they passed. Faces peered out.
Oliver saw his third-grade teacher. His old dentist. A girl from his last school who had once lent him an eraser shaped like a hamburger. His grandmother, who lived in Florida and sent birthday cards with five dollars inside.
Each face watched him with hungry fondness.
“Don’t look,” Mabel said.
“I’m trying.”
“Try harder.”
They moved through the streets toward the town hall and the black tree.
The air smelled of dust, syrup, and dead leaves.
A woman stepped from a doorway holding a plate.
“Oliver,” she said warmly. “You must be starving.”
On the plate was a sandwich cut diagonally. Peanut butter, honey, no crusts.
His favorite.
Petra slapped it out of the woman’s hand.
The woman hissed. Her jaw opened too wide, and beetles poured from her mouth.
Thomas stabbed one with his wooden sword.
“Rude,” Oliver said weakly.
“Exactly,” Petra replied.
They ran.
The Underbell did not like this.
The street stretched. The tree seemed no closer. Windows slammed. Shadows reached. Somewhere behind them, something big began to crawl across rooftops.
Barnaby blew a whistle.
No sound came out, but every door on the street burst open at once, and from each doorway rushed cats.
Not ordinary cats.
Some were transparent. Some had too many tails. One was wearing a judge’s wig. They swarmed past Oliver’s legs and up the walls, hissing at the thing on the rooftops.
“Cats are outside town law,” Barnaby explained.
“Why?”
“Because cats.”
This made a certain amount of sense.
They reached the town hall.
Up close, the black tree was worse. Its bark looked like overlapping hands. The branches were hung with signs, toys, shoes, ribbons, lunchboxes, and small wooden doors.
Oliver’s sign dangled from a low branch.
OLIVER PIKE
ONLY CHILD
NEWLY ARRIVED
AVAILABLE
Thomas climbed first, quick as a squirrel. Petra followed. Mabel pushed Oliver toward the trunk.
“Climb.”
“I’m not good at climbing.”
“Then be bad at it quickly.”
Oliver climbed.
The bark was warm.
It pulsed under his fingers.
Halfway up, the tree spoke.
It did not speak in words. It spoke in feelings.
Stay.
Rest.
Be loved.
Be kept.
No more moving.
No more starting over.
No more being the new boy.
Oliver pressed his forehead against the bark.
For one terrible moment, he wanted to sink into it.
Then the blue coat tightened around him, hard as a hug.
He heard a boy’s voice in his ear, not quite his own.
Don’t be stupid. Bite if you have to.
Oliver bit the tree.
The tree screamed.
So did Oliver, because it tasted like pennies, dirt, and old birthday cake.
“Good,” Thomas shouted from above. “Very good. Horrible, but good.”
They reached the branch.
The sign hung from a nail made of bone.
Mabel handed Oliver a pair of scissors.
They were silver and much too cold.
“You have to cut it,” she said.
“Why me?”
“Because it’s your name.”
Oliver grabbed the sign.
The moment his fingers touched it, he was back in his bedroom, or something pretending to be his bedroom.
His parents stood by the door.
His mother was crying.
His father looked ashamed.
“We’re sorry,” his mother said.
“We should have asked what you wanted,” his father said.
“We’ll move,” said his mother. “Anywhere you like.”
Oliver held the scissors.
His mother opened her arms.
“My love,” she said.
And that was how he knew it had almost won.
Because it had used the right words.
Almost.
Oliver took a deep breath.
“You’re not my mother,” he said.
The room darkened.
His mother’s face folded inward like paper burning.
“No,” it said.
His father’s mouth split into a smile full of roots.
“But we could be.”
Oliver cut the string.
The false room shattered.
He was back in the tree, clutching the sign as the black branches thrashed.
Every treehouse hanging above them began knocking.
Tap tap tap.
Tap tap tap.
Tap tap tap.
Children’s voices filled the Underbell.
Some cried.
Some laughed.
Some begged.
Some screamed, “Me next!”
The branch beneath Oliver cracked.
Mabel grabbed him.
Thomas shouted, “Down!”
But Oliver was looking at the signs.
Hundreds of names.
Maybe thousands.
Children who had been available.
Children who had stayed.
Oliver did something foolish then, in the heroic way boys in books often do.
He swung the silver scissors at the next sign.
The string snapped.
Somewhere above, a treehouse burst open and poured out sunlight.
Mabel stared. “Oliver—”
He cut another.
Then Petra was beside him, cutting with a knife. Thomas hacked at strings with his sword. Barnaby climbed past them, Mr. Nubbins clenched in his teeth, yanking signs loose with both hands.
The black tree convulsed.
The town hall split wider.
The Underbell shrieked with the voices of every adult who had ever said, “Stay where I can see you,” and meant something else entirely.
Names fell like leaves.
As each sign dropped, a treehouse opened.
Children came tumbling out.
Some were dust. Some were birds. Some were only voices. Some were old women and old men wearing the faces they had lost. Some ran. Some climbed higher. Some simply vanished, which might have been the same as going home, and might not.
The black tree bent double.
Its branches swept through the air.
One caught Thomas and flung him into the sky. He whooped as he went, which was very like him.
Petra lost her glasses and found a shadow instead.
Barnaby rode a cat in a judge’s wig down the trunk, shouting legal objections.
Mabel seized Oliver’s hand.
“Now we run.”
They ran.
Behind them, the Underbell fell apart in pieces.
Streets curled up like ribbons. Houses coughed out memories. The church bells rang backward. Oliver saw the sandwich woman chasing her own beetles with a broom. He saw his other self standing at a window, green eyes wide and furious.
“You could have been happy,” the other Oliver said.
Oliver stopped.
Mabel tugged his hand. “Don’t talk to it.”
But Oliver was tired of not talking.
“No,” he said. “I could have been kept.”
The other Oliver opened its mouth.
Before it could answer, the judge-cat leapt through the window and tackled it.
Oliver ran.
They reached the red door as the Underbell folded in behind them. Mabel shoved Petra through. Barnaby dove after her. Thomas fell out of the ceiling somehow, landing in a heap, laughing.
Oliver was last.
Just before he crossed the threshold, something caught his ankle.
A root.
It wrapped around him tightly.
The black tree’s voice filled his head.
You are lonely.
Oliver could not deny this.
You are afraid.
He could not deny that either.
You want to belong.
He thought of his mother kissing his hair.
His father pretending not to be scared.
The old house.
The boxes.
The town.
The vast woods.
Mabel reaching for him from the doorway.
Thomas shouting.
Petra holding out her hand.
Barnaby yelling, “Bite it again!”
Oliver smiled despite himself.
“I think,” he said, “I already do.”
And he kicked the root with his free foot.
Not heroically.
Not gracefully.
Hard.
The root let go.
He fell through the red door.
Mabel slammed it shut.
The wax seals melted. The names on the door glowed once, bright as fireflies, and then went dark.
For a long while, nobody moved.
Then Thomas said, “Well. That was irregular.”
Petra began to laugh.
Then Mabel laughed.
Then Barnaby laughed so hard his saucepan helmet fell over his eyes.
Oliver laughed too, though he was shaking.
After a while, Mabel helped him stand.
“What happens now?” he asked.
She looked around the treehouse.
It seemed smaller than before. Still impossible, still warm, still strange, but less hungry around the edges.
“Now?” she said. “Now we make new rules.”
“Can I go home?”
“Yes.”
“Will Bellwether let us leave someday?”
Mabel smiled.
“It may have to.”
Oliver climbed down the rope ladder in the late afternoon.
The woods looked ordinary again, or as ordinary as woods can look after you have seen the town underneath them. He walked back along the path, over the sagging fence, and across the lawn.
His mother was on the back porch.
The moment she saw him, she stood.
“Oliver Pike.”
Serious voice.
Then she ran down the steps and hugged him so tightly he could hardly breathe.
“Where were you? We were worried sick.”
He hugged her back.
“In the woods.”
His father came out behind her, pale and angry and relieved. “You can’t just disappear like that.”
“I know.”
“We were about to call the police.”
“I know.”
His mother pulled back and looked at him. “Are you all right?”
Oliver thought about this.
There were leaves in his hair. His hands were scratched. His coat was gone, though he did not remember taking it off. In his pocket was the wooden sign with his name on it, now blank.
“I think so,” he said.
His father looked toward the trees. “We may need to put up a better fence.”
Oliver smiled.
“That won’t help.”
His parents stared at him.
He said, “I’ll explain some of it.”
“Some?” said his mother.
“The believable parts.”
That evening, Bellwether changed.
Not so anyone would notice all at once. Towns are sneaky when they are embarrassed.
The welcome sign at the edge of town lost a word. The black paint peeled away in the night. By morning it read:
BELLWETHER
A GOOD PLACE TO
No one could agree what word had once come after.
The internet began working.
A family on Hawthorn Street found a girl asleep in their attic who had gone missing in 1978. She was still ten years old and very annoyed that nobody had saved her any cereal.
At the library, all the overdue notices turned into moths and flew away.
Three elderly people woke with memories of childhood friends they had forgotten and spent the day making phone calls, weeping, and baking pies.
In the woods behind Juniper Lane, the old oak stood in its clearing.
The treehouse remained.
But the carved rules changed.
NO PARENTS WITHOUT INVITATION.
NO DOGS UNLESS THEY ARE EXCELLENT DOGS.
NO KINGS.
NO TOWNS EATING CHILDREN.
CRYING PERMITTED.
KNOCK FIRST.
Below that, in fresh letters, someone had added:
OLIVER PIKE IS NOT AVAILABLE.
Summer came properly after that.
Oliver did not become popular, because life is not as tidy as stories and because popular is a strange thing to want once you have helped overthrow a municipal child-eating memory tree.
But he did make friends.
Mabel came and went. Thomas taught him how to fall out of trees without dying, which Thomas admitted was easier for him than for most people. Petra found her parents, who were very old and very happy and very frightened, and visited them on Sundays. Barnaby founded a committee to investigate the squirrels.
Oliver’s parents never understood the whole story. This was probably for the best.
They did understand that Oliver was different.
Not less lonely exactly.
Loneliness does not vanish because one has had an adventure. It is not a dragon to be slain or a curse to be broken. It is more like weather. It comes and goes. Some days it rains.
But now, when Oliver felt lonely, he knew the way through the woods.
He knew where to knock.
And sometimes, late at night, when the moon was bright and the house had settled into creaks and sighs, Oliver heard the treehouse knocking back.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Not yet, it had said once.
Now it said something else.
Come up.