The Curse of Deadman's Forest (12 page)

Keeping low to the ground, he trailed the maid as she walked quickly out of the garden, through the small patch of woods, and to the road that ran behind the house. Ian was grateful for the moonlight making her silhouette clearly visible, and continued for several hundred meters before he stopped abruptly because he realized Carmina had stopped. She stood out in the open, and next to her, parked on the
dirt road, was a pickup lorry with its lights off but the engine running.

Ian darted behind a nearby tree and peeked out just in time to see the cook walk straight to the cab of the lorry and hand over the journal. Ian could hear muffled words exchanged but wasn’t certain what might have been said before the driver handed several bills to her.

Behind him, he heard someone shout in alarm and he knew that Carl had likely alerted people within the house. Glancing quickly back, Ian could just make out lights coming on in the upstairs windows of the home, but when he looked again at the lorry, Carmina was already running quickly back toward the house. Meanwhile, the driver revved the engine and the lorry roared to life; then the engine sputtered and coughed and died almost immediately. The driver frantically attempted to turn it over, and Ian listened with a hammering heart as it whinnied and whined to no effect.

Carmina flew past Ian’s hiding place on her way back to the house, and just as she passed him, Ian made a split-second decision. He sprang from his crouched position and ran as fast as he could toward the back of the lorry, making it to the rear just as the engine finally caught. Ian latched on to the lorry frame and swung his leg over the lip, tumbling into the bed. The old thing sputtered and jolted forward and Ian had to lie down flat or risk falling out of the lorry as it began to move down the road. He’d barely had time to collect himself when something landed right next to him in the
bed, and Ian almost cried out in alarm before he realized that Carl was lying in a heap beside him, wearing a huge grin. “What are you
doing?”
Ian demanded.

“Same thing as you, mate!” Carl said, still wearing the grin. “I saw you climb in here, and I couldn’t very well let you go off alone, now could I?”

Ian then realized what a foolish thing they’d done and how much trouble they were likely in. “Where’s the earl?” Ian asked, close to Carl’s ear. He motioned his friend over to the corner of the lorry bed, well out of the driver’s line of vision.

“Back at the house,” Carl told him. “I woke the professor, who’d fallen asleep at his desk. The journal and the copy he’d been making were both gone, so I asked him to fetch the earl while I ran after you.”

“I don’t know where we’re going,” Ian admitted while the dark countryside whizzed past them.

“You don’t?” Carl said, and Ian suspected that it was starting to dawn on Carl how much danger they could both be in. “The earl will find us,” Carl added after a few moments, but Ian could hear the doubt in his voice. “The important thing is to get the diary back.”

“Yeah,” Ian said. “Any ideas on how we’ll do that?”

“I thought
you’d
have a plan.”

“Naw, mate,” Ian said. “I didn’t think past jumping into the lorry.”

“Uh-oh,” Carl murmured.

Ian had to agree. They were in way over their heads. The best they could hope for was that the earl had somehow
managed to follow them, but as Ian scanned the dark road behind them, he knew that wasn’t likely. “All right,” he said after a bit. “Let’s put our heads together and think of what to do when this lorry finally stops.”

For the next several kilometers, the boys talked through plans, none of which seemed very appealing, until they finally settled on simply waiting to see where the driver took them and assessing what to do then.

T
he lorry eventually stopped as the first rays of dawn began to turn the dark sky a murky purple. Ian sat up just a bit from his crouched position and took a look about. They seemed to have parked next to a large stadium and the heavy scent of livestock was in the air. “Gaw!” Carl whispered next to him, waving his hand in front of his nose. “What’s that smell?”

But Ian was prevented from responding by the sound of a motorcar approaching the front of the lorry. When he lifted his head just a bit more to see it, he had to squint into the headlights. For a moment he thought the car might pass, but it came to a stop just in front of their lorry. Ian noted that both engines continued to run. Worried that the headlights might illuminate him, he ducked back down in the bed and waited with Carl to listen to what happened next.

The boys didn’t have to wait long. Almost immediately they heard a door open, then shut, and footfalls clicked on the cobblestone as someone approached. “You have the
journal?” a woman asked, her tongue rolling thickly over the words. Her voice sounded very familiar to Ian.

“You have the money?” the driver responded.

“Of course. But I want to see the journal first.”

Ian and Carl sat as still as possible. They heard some rustling sounds before, “There, you’ve seen it. Now hand over the money.”

The woman did not respond. Instead, her feet clicked away again; then another car door opened and closed before she came back to the lorry. “It is all here in my satchel,” she said, her voice sinister and uncomfortably familiar. Ian knew it, but from where? “Now, give me the journal and I shall think about paying you.”

“Think
about paying me?” the driver repeated, as if he couldn’t believe she would have the nerve to withhold his funds.

“The journal!” the woman snapped. “Give it to me!”

But the driver must have thought better about handing over the diary, because he replied, “I think I should keep it until you give me the money.” And then the boys heard something make a distinctly metallic clicking sound and Ian could almost sense the tension in the air ratcheting up several notches. “Hand over the money,” said the taxi driver. “Now.”

The woman seemed to hesitate but then she spat, “You
dare
pull a gun on me, peasant?”

“Give me the money,” the man repeated, his voice lethal.

Again the woman seemed to hesitate. “I will hunt you down and kill you,” she vowed. Ian felt something heavy thump into the back of the lorry right next to him. He
looked over and, to his horror, realized the woman had just thrown the satchel into the bed.

“You may try,” he told her. “But you will not live long enough to succeed.”

Again the woman spoke, but this time her voice was softer, almost soothing, and the things she told the driver sent the most frightful shiver up Ian’s spine. “Yes,” she cooed, ignoring his threats. “I shall enjoy killing you, Antolin. But not before I cut the throats of your wife and son.”

The man audibly gasped, but he seemed to recover himself quickly. “A lucky guess, Frau Van Schuft. You do not know my family.”

Ian’s eyes met Carl’s in the dim light. Carl’s face reflected all the shock Ian felt. They were both quite familiar with Frau Van Schuft and her evil master. “It was not a guess,
peasant,”
she taunted. “Your wife, Lera, and your son, Renaldo. They are in the flat just a few streets over, no?”

“I could kill you now, woman!” the man growled.

“Yes, you could,” she said with a small sigh, as if she didn’t have a care in the world. “But that would displease my associates—who are right now waiting for me—which would condemn your family to certain death. And you should also know that my associates would not stop at murdering your son and his mother … no, they would vent their fury on every member of your family. Your two brothers and your aging mother and father. Your parents are on the other side of the city, correct? They have a lovely little home, Antolin. I especially love the small garden in the back, where your mother keeps her chickens. And my loyal associates
would make sure to leave you for last so that you could feel the full measure of their revenge. Perhaps they would even make you watch.”

Ian’s mouth had gone dry. Frau Van Schuft spoke as if she were talking about something as casual as the weather. Finally, the man who had taken the journal from Carmina spat on the ground and said, “If I give you the journal, you must promise to leave me and my family alone!”

“Give me the journal, Antolin, and I’ll consider it.”

There was another long pause as the taxi driver must have been thinking about the mess he’d got himself into, and when several seconds ticked by with no more sound, Ian couldn’t resist taking a peek to see what was happening. With great care he lifted his head just a fraction and peered over the lip of the lorry. He could see the driver sticking his head out the window, staring angrily at Frau Van Schuft—who, Ian noticed, had taken great care to disguise herself, changing her long platinum blond hair to a short black bob.

Unfortunately, Frau Van Schuft must have sensed that someone was staring at her, because to Ian’s horror, her head snapped in his direction and their eyes met. For a fraction of a second, no one moved. Frau Van Schuft snarled and reached forward to grab at him, but the driver of the lorry must have got spooked, because he hit the gas and sped down the street.

Ian lurched forward to grab the side of the lorry bed as the driver began to turn the wheel sharply; then he saw something whiz out of the cab and land with a small thwack on the pavement. He realized in that instant that it must be the journal.

Without thinking it through, Ian grabbed Carl roughly by the collar and lifted him to his knees. “We’ve got to jump!”

Carl responded immediately by lunging toward the side of the lorry, grabbing hold, and launching himself out of the bed. Ian jumped right after him and landed with a hard thud on the ground before rolling over and over on the pavement. “Ow!” Carl moaned from a few paces away. “That hurt!”

Ian crawled to Carl’s side, his shins aching from the fall. “We’ve got to get the journal!”

“Go, mate!” Carl said, rubbing his ankle. “Hurry, before Van Schuft gets to it!”

Ian pushed off the ground and limped as fast as he could back to where he thought the journal had landed. In the distance he could hear the sound of someone running toward him and he knew it had to be that dreadful woman. Desperately, he searched the ground for the diary, and with a rush of relief he spotted it near a gutter, but at that very moment, a small gust of wind lifted the cover of the book, and the paper the professor had been copying the scroll onto flittered from between the pages and blew into the gutter. Ian gasped when he realized that hours of the professor’s work had just been lost—but there was nothing he could do. As fast as he could, he darted to the mouth of the gutter and grabbed the journal, then turned to run back to Carl.

Behind him Frau Van Schuft yelled, “You there! Stop!”

Ian ignored her and dashed to Carl’s side. His friend was attempting to stand. “Did you get it?” Carl asked.

“Yes, mate, can you walk?”

Carl took one small wobbly step just as something that
sounded like a car backfiring echoed loudly behind them. In the same instant, something smacked into the wall of the building next to them hard enough to send a spray of grit and bits of brick into the air. “She’s shooting at us!” Ian yelled, grabbing Carl’s sleeve and pulling him along the edge of the long building.

Carl limped beside him, not uttering a single word of complaint about his injury while the boys looked about for a place to hide. Behind them Ian could hear footfalls approaching, and when he risked a glance back, he saw Frau Van Schuft closing in, her arm raised and, just as he’d suspected, a gun in her hand. “Hurry!” Ian shouted as another BANG sounded and more brick splintered off the wall nearby.

The boys ducked sideways into an alley and were nearly hit by a motorcar turning the corner. The driver honked at them and Ian pulled Carl flat against the wall of the narrow alley, dropping the journal.

To his dismay, he quickly realized that the car had run over the diary and torn the cover and several of the pages right off. “The journal!” he cried after the car passed.

Another loud BANG sounded from the end of the alley, and something hot grazed the top of Ian’s left ear. The pain was immediate and intense and he dropped to his knees, clasping the side of his head.

“We’ve got to run!” Carl shouted, trying to lift Ian to his feet.

Ian squinted against the pain and reached forward to grab the diary. Several more pages came loose, and it was as if the bound volume wanted to disintegrate in his hands. He
desperately clutched at the papers nearby but he had to leave the front cover and the few pages attached to it while he staggered to his feet and hurried to get away from Frau Van Schuft, who was quickly closing in on him.

“I’ll kill you both!” she shouted, and Ian felt certain she would make good on her threat.

“This way!” Carl called as he ducked down a two-lane street with a good deal of traffic already flowing in the early morning.

Ian realized that Carl assumed Frau Van Schuft would not fire her gun with so many people and cars about. He could only hope that his friend was right.

“We’ve got to cross the street!” Carl insisted, and to Ian’s horror, his friend darted right into the middle of traffic. Cars screeched, horns blared, and Ian’s heart felt like it would burst out of his chest.
“Carl!”
he shouted.

Miraculously, Carl managed to dart forward just before a large bus skidded past the spot where he’d just been standing. A few more car horns and angry fist wavings later, his young friend made it safely to the other side. Turning around, Carl motioned for Ian to follow.

Ian clutched the pages of the journal to his chest as he tried to find a hole in the flow of traffic so that he might cross as well, but just as he was about to dash to the middle of the road, he was grabbed roughly by the collar and dragged backward. “Let me go!” he shouted, reaching back with one hand to try to free himself.

Above him Frau Van Schuft’s face was contorted in fury, and Ian found her surprisingly strong. Her grip on his shirt
was ironclad and she pulled him with hard yanks into the doorway of a closed shop. There she pinned him against the hard wood and shoved her gun into the middle of his belly. “Well!” she crowed triumphantly. “You are not the One we’ve been looking for, Ian Wigby, but I’m told your death will assure us a victory all the same.”