Nobody -- not the butler, or the irritating boy, not Styg, not Spot, and certainly not Olive -- expected what happened next.

Still scowling at the boy up on the landing, Olive knelt down to stare the Deliryad directly in what one could assume to be its face. And she whispered something to it.

A twilighty whirlpool opened in the air above Spot, and with a startled yelp, he shimmered and dissolved into a cloud that wrapped itself out in a spiral to the edges of the foyer. For a moment, they were all consumed inside the dark, and it was extremely windy in the dusty mansion. Hats flew off of pegs, picture frames tilted, a stuffed eagle on a shelf tumbled away down the hallway. And then the cloudy black swirl uncoiled itself from around them all and Spot reappeared, panting and belly-up on the rug.

Styg whimpered. His fingernails had been wiped completely bare.

"I see you're good with pets," called Ferl from inside the cavernous umbrella stand into which he'd tumbled.

Styg lowered his head and forced his skin back to a hue that was reasonably human, though pallored and pocked with goosebumps. Olive squinted at the boy -- her first motion since the deliriad's appearance.

"Griffin," these are Styg and Olive," said Ferl. "They're here to help with the weeds, so you may thank them for coming to help us. And they both look like humans to me."

"I like the weeds," said Griffin.

The monster was still rumbling at Styg, and Ferl waved a hand at him. "You do know how to calm a deliryad, I hope," said Ferl. "Just give him what he wants." Styg looked around, lost. "Tell him a lie," Ferl said.

"I ... ah ... I'm not afraid of you," Styg whimpered, and the deliryad snapped its teeth at him, smoky particles dusting from its muzzle like the smoke of a gun.

"A better lie, please," said Ferl.

Styg wheezed. "I'm really good at gardening!" He yelled at the ceiling.

The monster paused, then turned and calmly wandered back to Ferl. From somewhere in the vicinity of its face, there was a crunching and swallowing noise.

"That's a bribe. It doesn't mean he likes you now," said the boy at the railing.

"I'm sorry to hear about your gardening skills," said Ferl. "Your mother specifically recommended you for weeding the grounds."

"Oh," said Styg, staring down at his teeth as they gnawed his lip, "I'm not BAD at it." Both he and Ferl sighed. "I wish I hadn't used that lie," he said.

"Make up another one," said the railing boy. "Make one up about her." He pointed straight like a spear into Olive's squint.

The deliryad followed the boy's arm, noticing Olive and taking an interest in her for the first time. It trotted over to her.

Its texture was fur, or tiny feathers, or maybe a silky skin -- it was impossible to tell as it advanced, its limbs like a giant grasping hand. It was a Deliryad, and it was the first one Olive had ever seen. Or at least, the first adult.

"This is Spot," Ferl said. "He belongs to Mr. Griffin."

"Well hello sir," Styg said to the monster, reaching out a hand. Olive didn't move -- not even a little. Spot's glinting eye studied Styg's hand, and then its mouth opened in an enormous jagged broken-glass snarl.

Styg backed up, his eyes wide and his skin instinctively taking on the paisley pattern of the wallpaper behind him. "He doesn't like elves," said a voice from above. "Not even to eat."

A slight boy of elevenish was standing at the balcony above a winding staircase, his arms slung over the rail and head resting at an angle. He didn't blink.

The door was opened by Ferl, but as Olive and Styg stepped into the musty foyer, she barely even noticed him. Instead, it was his companion that seized her attention -- a black shape, suggestive of a large-dog and so dark she couldn't tell, even as sharp sunlight cut into the house, where the creature stopped and its shadow began.

Ugh, the Grayling mansion. Other families Olive simply ignored, but this old viney estate -- she could feel a growl come over her every time she passed. The Grayling grounds stretched from one end of the Winding Woods to the other, curved around the longer shore of Sunken Lake, and once a year -- around August, usually -- a Cyclorn's nest would inevitably hatch in the clouds directly above.

In other words, it touched three different realms of Creatures. Four, if Styg's hunch about the Pit were correct; and if you could even consider the Pit a realm.

So when Olive overheard the Grayling's Proxy, a stumpy little Rock-Gnome named Ferl, first mention a summer job at the estate to the headmaster of her school, she felt instinctively that it was a bad idea. And when Styg's mom started talking it over with to hers, after one of Ferl's visits to the medicine wagon for Heart Wash, Olive's feeling of dread only grew. And grew. And grew until finally it became a certainty as she stood before the gates of the estate in late June, her family days gone on the Medicine Circuit and nowhere for her and Styg to go but in.

"You'd better be right about the pit being here," she said.

"I can't wait to find out!" Styg replied, grinning hugely at the mansion as he struggled with Olive's bookbag on one shoulder and his own on the other.

"Do YOU want to be there?" asked Styg.

"I don't want to be anywhere," Olive said into the lapels of her coat, staring at the sharp lump in the lining.

"Well, then, why don't you give yourself a nice summer by --"

"Look." Olive lifted her eyes to his. "I don't care. I don't care what I do this summer. I don't care what you do. I don't care if you drag me to the garden. And I don't care if YOU care. So stop it, stop caring."

"I'll try," said Styg. He looked confused. "Or ... I think I'll try. Maybe I won't. Whatever. I don't care?" He paused, then leaned forward and whispered, "but I really really want you to come."

"No," said Olive. And she thought it over and over again in her head, each one washing away the last like endless colorless coats of paint.

In her mind, she was six, clutching an empty bassinet with tears in her eyes. Her mom laid her sharp hand on Olivia's head, fingertips flared like peacocks. "I love my daughter more than anything else that there will ever be in the world," she said, and twelve-year-old Olive on the train sniffed and trembled, but invisibly. It was six years later, and her mother now continued the sentence, "but what I don't love is this darn attitude, and I wish you'd knock it the heck off."

"They don't want me there," she said, and she said it fast and it hurt.

"Anyway," he went on, "it's that or another summer with your folks on the caravan." Olive's parents sold snake oil -- actual oil made of snakes -- and every summer they traveled on the Medicine Circuit from town to town. When she was an adorable little child, Olive made for a convenient prop during their sales pitch. That was before she learned to scowl.

"Will you?" said Styg, repainting his nails for the third time that day. The jitter of the train left a rough purple edge on his cuticles. "It's only once a week. My mom knows the Graylings' butler, and he's supposed to be nice. Plus, aren't you curious about The Pit?"
Olive lowered her face around an arched eyebrow. "The Pit? For real? Do you know it's really ... real?"
"Oh, maybe," Styg waved the tiny paintbrush around in his flared-out fingers like a bobbing peacock, "there's only one way to find out."
"Yeah ... if it is," said Olive, "if it ... hm." The Pit wasn't much talked about among humans because nobody knew if it was true; and among the Creatures, it wasn't polite to mention. "A hole to nowhere," is how Olive's mother had once described it, and Styg's mother had put the topic to rest by adding, "a fine way to say goodbye for good."
Olive fingered the lump in the hem on her coat again, and thought.