14

When Eddie came home from school, his mother was sitting at the kitchen table, typing on her laptop computer. She was transcribing from a notebook, which was sitting on the table. She was so intent on the computer screen that she didn’t glance up at Eddie as he said hello. When he tapped her on the shoulder, she nearly fell out of her chair.

“Edgar!” she said, finally seeing him standing next to her. “You scared me!” She took a deep breath and flipped the notebook over. Then she closed the computer. “I’m sorry. I’m coming up to the scariest chapter of my story. I’ve been sitting here, frightening myself as I go along. Every little noise I hear makes me jump.”

“Sounds really scary,” said Eddie, wandering to the counter and grabbing an apple. “When can I see it?”

“I’ll be done within the next couple days, I think,” she said. She tapped her fingernails on the table. She seemed distracted. “I saw a sign for an open-mic night on Saturday, at the bookstore in town. The Enigmatic Manuscript, I think it’s called?”

“That’s Harris’s mother’s store,” said Eddie.

“I know. I’m considering reading a chapter or two. Will you come watch? I think you’ll like it.”

“Of course,” said Eddie, nodding as he took a bite of the apple. “I’m sure Harris will like it too.”

After a moment, she cleared her throat. “And on a more serious note, I received a phone call from school today.”

“Really?” said Eddie, forcing himself to smile blankly. “About what?”

“They said you cut your history and English classes. Is that true?”

Eddie steadied himself by leaning against the counter near the kitchen sink. He nodded.

“I thought you loved those subjects,” she said. “What’s going on?”

He didn’t know how to explain himself. Everything’s fine, Mom. Except that Nathaniel Olmstead believed that he’d done something to open some sort of gate, and now, for some reason, Gatesweed is filled with monsters.

“Edgar,” she said, “I’m very happy that you’ve been making friends here in Gatesweed, but if these kids are talking you into…” She paused, then shook her head. “Well, I hope you’ll use better judgment next time.”

“It won’t happen again,” he whispered.

“That’s for sure,” said Mom, opening her computer. “No television for the rest of the week.”

“Okay,” he said, trying to sound disappointed.

As soon as Eddie finished his snack, he brought his book bag upstairs and closed his bedroom door. He took out The Enigmatic Manuscript, The Wish of the Woman in Black, Maggie’s code key, and the notebook pages of their translations. He laid everything on his bed, turned on his lamp, and propped three pillows against his headboard. Leaning against them, he settled back and opened his own notebook. For a brief moment, the wood-grain face from the library table flashed before his eyes, but then he noticed Maggie’s handwriting meandering across the notebook page. He forced the strange image out of his head and began to read.

I took out my wallet, but she pushed my money away, shaking her head. She said something to me that I couldn’t understand, then turned around and walked through her darkened doorway, leaving me alone in the alley.

Chewing on the end of his pen, Eddie scanned the page several times before he finally opened The Enigmatic Manuscript to where they’d been when Mr. Lyons had appeared. What was going to happen? Would tonight be the night he finally learned Nathaniel Olmstead’s fate? Or would the story end as abruptly as the book about the Woman in Black?

Finally, Eddie started to translate. He worked through each paragraph, transcribing every letter, leaving behind big bunches of words, which he then went back and read every few pages. He found it easier to understand that way.

Nathaniel Olmstead showed the Romanian woman’s strange metal object to his friend, who was impressed. Being a student of antiquity, his friend assured him that the object was not Romanian and most definitely had nothing to do with vampires. He showed Nathaniel an article from a history textbook about the legend of an enigmatic “key,” which some people believed had once locked the gates of Eden.

“ Are you suggesting that this is the same ‘key’?” I asked my friend incredulously. “That I own the ‘key’ to the gates of Eden? ”

“ A fake, of course,” my friend told me, amused. “A replica. According to the descriptions I’ve read in several other texts, yours certainly fits the legend. What a strange souvenir! ”

At the time, I was not sure what I believed. According to the article my friend had provided, academics were interested in the stories people invented in order to make sense of their lives. This I understood. The myth of the Garden of Eden, the theory of the Big Bang, every single “once upon a time” you ever heard when your parents tucked you into bed-these help us imagine our own personal world. And wasn’t that the job of the writer? To create worlds? To invent myths? I’d finally found a topic about which I was excited. I was so interested in these theories that I studied as much as I could about my mysterious souvenir “key.” One day, I found a comprehensive article about “the real thing” in a book called The Myth of the Stone Children.

As Eddie read what he’d translated, he gasped. The Myth of the Stone Children? He thought of the statue in the Nameless Woods-she was a “stone child,” wasn’t she? Did the statue have something to do with Nathaniel’s experience in Europe? Finally, something was starting to make sense!

Glancing outside, Eddie noticed the sky quickly fading to night. Many of the leaves had fallen from the trees, so the bare branches were left in silhouette against the deep blue. They looked like bones clawing up from the earth. He licked his lips and got back to work.

The central mythology of the stone children was similar to many of the Judeo-Christian beliefs Nathaniel was familiar with-but there were also quite a few differences. According to the text he had found, some people believed that God created the world in seven days. When He was done, there existed a place called Eden -an enormous garden surrounded by a tall circular wall that protected the paradise from the yet unforged, darker realms. On either side of an ornate entrance stood two statues. Two stone children. One boy and one girl. The pedestals on which the children perched were intricately decorated with signs and symbols of the creatures who were to be kept out of paradise. Each child held a large blank book, marked by one of two Hebrew letters carved onto its cover-Yod on one book; Chet on the other.

Together the letters spelled the Hebrew word Chai, which roughly translated to the English word life.

“Maggie was right,” said Eddie aloud. Then the weight of his realization descended upon him. A stone child. Holding a large blank book. Marked by one of the Hebrew letters: Chet. Life, inside these walls… Was that what the symbols meant? Eddie wondered.

If Life was contained inside, then what had God left outside of the Garden? Was The Enigmatic Manuscript implying what he thought?

Eddie continued to read.

The gate where the stone children stood was guarded by an archangel whose job was to act as the Voice of God. He held the key to the Garden and watched it carefully. Whenever any creature was refused passage into the Garden, the archangel used the key to carve its image into the stone pedestals as a record of its depravity. The symbols illustrating the stone gate served as a reminder of which creatures were doomed to exile.

Eddie looked up, his heart thumping, his mouth dry. He put down the book and stood up. His head was spinning. He wanted to call Harris and tell him about everything he’d just read. The statue in the woods… she must be one of these stone children! The thought seemed incredible, but then again, so did everything that had happened to him in the past month. All the secrets, the codes, and especially the monsters, seemed like impossibilities from one of Nathaniel’s stories, but Eddie now knew they were not fiction.