The Midnight Gate (22 page)

“The what?”

“The shed! The one by the football field. The lift from the Other Side came up there, remember?”

“But it vanished! There isn't a door, and besides, old Frank will probably be there.”

“Who?” Elsie looked from one to the other. Her knowledge of the inside of the school was encyclopedic, but the outside was a mystery.

“The groundskeeper,” explained Steve. “He chased us out last time after we got back. He's not likely to let us poke around looking for hidden doors.”

“Well, let's at least look. If he's there, then we'll go ask the charnel sprites.”

Steve thought about this for a moment.

“Okay. But keep your eyes peeled. He always seems to know when anyone's skulking about down there. It's like he's got eyes in the back of his head.”

“Right,” said Elsie, slowly disappearing. “It's a plan. I'll go on ahead and let your parents know you're on your way. See you in a bit!”

Belladonna smiled as Elsie vanished from view, then she and Steve set off through the school toward the door that led to the games fields, their footsteps echoing along the silent corridors. It was strange how quiet school became when classes were in session; it was as if everyone vanished for forty minutes. As if the classrooms were in some other dimension and only rejoined our own at the sound of the bell.

Steve opened the door and looked around anxiously before leading the way down the patchy grass, past the netball courts and the school vegetable garden to the lumpy green expanse of the football field.

The shed was about ten meters behind the goal and looked like it probably predated school and field by several decades. It was made of planks of wood, roughly fastened over a sturdy timber frame. A century of summers and winters had blasted the wood to a uniform gray and much of it had warped and stretched, leaving long narrow gaps between some of the planks.

Steve peeked through one of the gaps.

“Can you see anything?” whispered Belladonna.

“It's too dark.”

He stood up and tried the handle. The door opened with a slight creak and they both darted inside.

“The lift was over here.” Belladonna walked over to an open area between some bags of grass seed and a selection of gardening tools.

“But how do we get it to appear? Maybe you should say some Words.”

Belladonna closed her eyes and concentrated. Nothing.

She opened her eyes. Steve was staring at her intently, waiting for something to happen. She closed her eyes again.

The Words still didn't come, but she heard something: a thud, followed by a rasping cough.

“Oh, no!” hissed Steve.

She opened her eyes. He was staring at something behind her.

She turned around slowly and found herself face-to-face with the tall, gaunt frame of the old groundskeeper.

Frank (no one seemed to know his last name) was an institution at Dullworth's. Belladonna had once heard Tiffany Brownlow tell someone that he'd been there back when her mother was a pupil at the school, and according to Tiffany, he'd been old even then. Of course, Tiffany had also said that her father was an MI6 agent stationed in Patagonia, when he was actually an IT specialist in Robinson's biscuit factory on the other side of town, which isn't quite the same thing.

“What's going on here?” growled the groundskeeper.

Belladonna tried a smile, but he didn't seem impressed. He just stared at her with his piercing, watery blue eyes and sucked at his teeth. The more she stared at him, the more daunting he seemed. His skin was old and sallow and seemed loose on his bones, as if he had once been a much stouter man and it just didn't fit properly anymore. His clothes hung loose as well, gray and threadbare, with a rolled-up tabloid newspaper stuffed into one pocket and the telltale greasy outline of a cigarette pack in the other.

“We were just…” began Steve, but his voiced trailed off in the presence of the watery blue eyes.

“It's class time, isn't it? Ain't you young hobgoblins s'posed to be learning something somewhere? For all the good it'll do you.”

“We need to get to the Land of the Dead.” Belladonna could feel Steve's stunned gaze drilling into the back of her head, but she didn't take her eyes off the old man. There was something about him. Something that made her feel he knew.

“Well, I daresay you'll get there eventually. And a sight quicker if you don't get out of my shed!”

“There was a door here,” persisted Belladonna. “Right here. It was a lift. It went to the Other Side and to the Sibyl.”

Frank stared at her and rubbed one arthritic finger against the stubble of his gray chin.

“Who are you?”

“I'm Belladonna Johnson and I'm the Spellbinder. This is Steve Evans, the Paladin.”

He looked at them both for a moment before he spoke.

“And I'm the King of Siam.”

“Um … you don't seem surprised,” said Steve. “You've heard of the Spellbinder before, haven't you?”

“I have. So if you're the Paladin, then where's this Rod of Gram I've heard so much about?”

Belladonna stared at the old man. That made
two
people at the school who seemed to know more about their new roles than they knew themselves: Mrs. Jay and now the groundskeeper. She chewed at her lip and considered that it couldn't be mere chance. Why were Mrs. Jay and Frank here? Was it to watch out for them? No, that couldn't be it. Or if it was, then they were doing a spectacularly bad job.

“It's in my pocket,” said Steve, his face tense with suspicion. “But it's just an old plastic ruler. It doesn't work in this world.”

“Huh. I'd always heard it works everywhere … if there's a supernatural creature about. Show it to me.”

Steve rolled his eyes, reached into his jacket pocket, and took out the ruler. Almost immediately he found himself holding not the ruler but a large green and silver shield.

Before Belladonna even had time to register her surprise, he grabbed her and pulled her back behind him.

“What are you!?”

Frank nearly doubled over with laughter, his watery eyes streaming with tears. He shook his head helplessly as his shoulders heaved up and down, then took off his flat cap and wiped his eyes with it.

“Oh, that was good!” he gasped between guffaws. “You should've seen your face!”

Steve didn't lower the shield, but stared grimly at Frank as he laughed and laughed until the newspaper fell out of his pocket onto the ground behind him. The old man turned to pick it up and it was then that they saw it.

Or, rather, them.

Two more watery blue eyes in the back of his head.

Belladonna felt her mouth drop open as Steve lowered the shield in amazement before quickly holding it up again.

“Surprise!” yelled Frank, spinning around to face them again.

“I knew it!” said Steve. “I knew there was no way you could've seen me move the roller last term.”

“I see a lot more than that,” said Frank. “I see just about everything.”

Belladonna was just about to ask what he meant when the old man pushed up the sleeves of his jacket and opened the front of his shirt.

She gasped and stepped back. It wasn't possible. How could they never have noticed before? Every inch of him was covered in watery blue eyes, blinking in the dim light of the shed.

“But—” Steve couldn't stop staring. “But … why?”

“What d'you mean ‘why'?” asked Frank. “Because that's the way I am, just like you're the way you are. Though I'll never understand how you people get by with just the two. You must miss almost everything.”

“How many do you have?” asked Belladonna.

“'Bout a hundred, give or take. There's always some of 'em awake, so I generally get put to guard things.”

“Like the lift.”

“Like the lift. Back when I was younger, I guarded more dangerous things, but now … well, this suits me. I make me own hours and I get to go home and watch the telly of an evening. 'Cept this time of year, of course.”

“This time of year?”

“Day of Crows. I sleep here in the shed until we're clear of the Day of Crows. Do it every year, just to be on the safe side.”

“Why? What's the Day of Crows?” asked Steve.

“It's the day that's neither winter nor spring, when the ways to Nine Worlds become little more than a veil, and as easily torn. I'm here to make sure nothing that didn't oughta tries to slide through this here door.”

Belladonna glanced at Steve; she had a bad feeling about this and could see that he did too.

“And when exactly is it?”

“I told you. It's the day that's neither winter nor—”

“Yes, we got that,” said Steve. “Could you be a little more specific?”

“March the second.”

“That's in three days,” whispered Belladonna. “That's why they're here.”

“Why who are here? You'll have to speak up; my hearing's not what it was. Time was, back in the day, I could hear a satyr a mile away. And smell him too. But no more. Even the eyes aren't what they were.”

“We don't know who they are,” said Steve. “But we think they're using Belladonna to call pieces of the Dark. We didn't really know why, but—”

“Ah, you're thinking they'll be using the Day of Crows to slip into this world. Well, so they might. But why do you want to go to the Land of the Dead?”

“We have a…” began Belladonna. “That is, we think we have a charm that might stop the Dark Times. Nine coins, but the ninth is supposed to be in the land of sleep—”

“We reckoned that was the Land of the Dead.”

“Yes. It's in the House of Dust, apparently. We don't know where that is, but we thought someone there would know.”

“Oh, I can tell you that for nothing,” sniffed Frank. “That'll be the House of Ashes, won't it?”

“Um … thanks,” said Steve. “But that really isn't much help. House of Dust, House of Ashes—just names.”

“No. The House of Ashes.
The
House of Ashes.”

Belladonna and Steve stared at him, none the wiser, and Frank put his hat back on in disgust.

“What on earth do they teach you at this school? And you the Spellbinder and not knowing.”

“The job didn't come with a manual, you know,” said Belladonna testily.

“The House of Ashes is on an island in the middle of a lake. Grendelmere, I think it's called. It's where
she
lives.”

“And she would be…?” Steve was getting visibly annoyed.

“The Queen of the Abyss.”

“The ruler of the Land of the Dead?”

“Yes, and more besides. But I wouldn't go there if I were you.”

“Have you been?” asked Belladonna.

“Do I look dead? No, I have not.”

“Well, then how do you—”

“I just know. I've heard. It's not the kind of place that anyone should go to on purpose.”

Belladonna could hear the fear in his voice and for a moment she thought that perhaps they didn't have to go—perhaps there was another way. But she knew there wasn't. If the Proctors had been doing all of this in preparation for the Day of Crows, then she and Steve had to act now, and the parchment and the nobles were all they had to go on.

“We have to go,” she said, stepping forward. “Please, could you call the lift?”

Frank looked from one to the other, then shook his head and sighed.

“It's your funeral.” He stamped his foot once. “Going down!”

The dark marble box that was the lift immediately shot out of the ground, filling the shed with dust and grass seed. The door slid open, revealing the sumptuous interior, and Steve jumped inside. Belladonna held out a hand to Frank.

“Thank you … What is your real name? It isn't Frank, is it?”

“No. It's Argus, and you might want to save your thanks or otherwise until afterward,” he said, shaking her hand. “If there is an afterward, that is.”

“Thank you, Argus.”

She joined Steve in the lift and smiled at Argus as the door slid shut.

“Ready?” said Steve, shoving the ruler back into his pocket.

“We are going to be in so much trouble,” sighed Belladonna. “D'you have any idea how much school we've already missed?”

“You see,” grinned Steve, leaning forward to press the button marked
U
for Underworld, “there's always a bright side.”

 

16

Dragon Milk

“HANG ON,”
said Steve. “There were only three buttons before.”

Belladonna glanced at the marble panel that had boasted a mere three buttons the last time they had used the lift. Now it had more than a dozen. Some were marked with letters or numbers that were familiar to her, but others were labeled with unfamiliar dots, dashes, and flourishes.

“Well,” said Steve, “I suppose last time we were here, all the doors were closed.”

“And now they're open,” whispered Belladonna, staring at the jeweled disks. “They're all worlds. Different worlds.”

“They can't
all
be worlds,” said Steve. “There are only nine worlds. But I suppose the lift could stop in more than one place in some worlds. If they're … you know … busy with lots of different countries and stuff.”

Belladonna looked at him and grinned. “Busy?”

“Yeah, doing stuff … like … Oh, never mind.”

He scoured the panel, located the correct button, and pressed it.

For a moment after he pressed the button, it seemed as though the cold marble box wasn't going to move, but then it lurched violently to the right before springing backward, hesitating, juddering a bit, then suddenly scooping down at an alarming speed, like the first drop on a roller coaster. It then slowed, bounced a couple of times, and the doors opened. Belladonna stepped forward to leave but was hauled back violently by Steve.