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skin. He didn’t push them away.
    “I want to go home,” he whispered. “I just want to go home.”
    His glasses itched terribly under his nose, but when he tried to adjust them, he realized that he couldn’t move his right arm. Or his left. Tendrils of grass and ivy slithered along his side. They twined around his ankles and wrists and held him tight.
    “What’s going on?” Jack squeaked, but a wave of moss covered his chest, and a tangle of roots pulled him into darkness. “Help me!” he yelled. “Somebody
help
me!” And in that last second—when the sky above him was reduced to a spot the size of the head of a pin—only one thought remained:
    Home.

Chapter Eight
Alone and Not Alone
    J ACK HAD A DREAM THAT THE HOUSE WAS MADE OF EYES —heavy lashed and pretty, but eyes nonetheless. Eyes that followed his every move, winked at his jokes, and welled up with tears for no good reason. In his dream, the eyes blinked in sequence, fluttering like waves from one end of the house to the other.
    And the eyes sang.
    Or maybe the house sang. In either case, it was beautiful, both hopeful and lonely all at once.
    He woke with a start and groaned, covering his facewith his hands to block out the glare of morning light blasting into the window.
    He was alive.
    Thank goodness.
    He gave a skeptical glance around the room. Which part, he wondered, was the dream? He brought his hand to his head and felt a hard, painful lump about the size of a walnut. He winced. Also, he was still wearing his muddy shoes, and his bed and body were covered with grass and moss and leaf bits. Strands of vine clung to his arms and legs, their spiraled filaments pressing against his skin, their papery leaves curling inward, like scrolls.
    How?
he wondered again and again and again.
How?
His skin had been itching terribly since he arrived in town, but the dirt and mulch made it a million times worse. He tried brushing the debris off of his arms and clothes, but there was too much of it. He covered his face with his hands and groaned. Rubbing his eyes, Jack rolled over, misjudged the distance to the bed’s edge, and fell with a thud on the floor. The floorboards squeaked and sighed. They were warm to the touch.
    “Ouch,” he said out loud, rubbing his left elbow. He paused and waited, but no one came running up to check on him. He stood, and the floor whined, as though sorry that he should have to go. “Anyone home?” Jack called. But no one answered.
    The shelves in his room, like the rest of the house, were crammed tight with books. Only one book sat alone,separated from the others by a handful of dried flowers in a glass vase on one side and the wall on the other. Jack slid the book off the shelf and let it fall, fluttering, into his hands. It was, he noticed, the same book that his uncle had given him on his first day at their house—the same book that he left on the couch when he took off the night before. Which meant that Clive and Mabel had read the note.
    Jack felt sick.
    The floorboards under his feet gave an impatient squeak. Jack sat down on the bed and flipped through the book.
    “
The Secret History of Hazelwood
, by Clive Fitzpatrick,” he read out loud. “Oh, sure. Just give me a book that
you
wrote,” he said, the weight of the obligation pressing against his chest like a stone. “I don’t know why he’s making such a big thing about it. It’s not even a
regular
book.” The house shuddered and groaned. The windows rattled.
A storm, I’ll bet
, Jack thought, and started reading.
    The pages were thick, gold-edged, and handwritten in an elegant, spidery script. Many pages had things glued on—pictures, old newspaper articles, old letters, maps, and pages from diaries. Clive had arranged the clippings in the center of the pages with a heading on the top and an explanation on the bottom. Sometimes his writing went on for several pages. Practically every page talked about magic. Some of them even read like fairy