Tracked by Terror (11 page)

He finally stopped when she began to yawn hugely. He settled down to sleep feeling a confusion of emotions. He had been almost happy while talking to Betsy. Baseball was one thing he was good at, that he knew top to bottom. Just for the time of their conversation, Jarvey had almost forgotten about all his troubles while talking about the game he loved. Now, however, knowing just how far away from the game he was, how unlikely it was that he would ever play again, he fought a rising tide of despair.

At least his dreams that night all involved pitching and batting. They woke up at first light, and Betsy said, “Today we find out for sure, right? Today we hit a run home!”

Jarvey knew she was just trying to cheer him up, but he could only muster a weak smile. Then Betsy pushed the fence board aside and they crawled out into the alley.

But when they reached the mouth of the alley, he forgot all about the plan.

That's when he saw the cobras rear up.

The snakes had surrounded them.

“
J
arvey!” Betsy's voice shook from fear and tension. Jarvey couldn't reply. The snakes had them penned in against the fence. Two gray-green cobras, their hoods spread and their yellow evil eyes sharp, had closed in behind them, and the other six arranged themselves in a deadly ring. All of them were huge, eight or ten feet from nose to tail, and all reared their hooded heads up three feet or more above the ground. Jarvey could hear them hissing, could see their black forked tongues flicking in and out of their fanged mouths, could even smell the musty, sour scent of them.

“Stay still,” Jarvey said, his throat feeling scratchy and tight. “Maybe they won't strike if—”

He broke off Two of the snakes, the two toward the street, were backing away, swaying as they did so. Their heads jerked strangely, almost as if they were gesturing for Jarvey and Betsy to come after them. The ones behind Jarvey and Betsy darted forward. Betsy said, “I—I think they want us to follow them.”

“No,” Jarvey said. “They're driving us. Don't get too close to them. They aren't friendly.” He and Betsy took a couple of steps forward, and the ring of snakes slithered to move along with them, the advance ones backing away, the ones at the side and to the rear following their every movement. People were out, but the moment the snakes and the two young people moved out of the alley and into the street, everyone just melted away, back into the shops and buildings. No one yelled or seemed surprised. They all simply turned away, averting their gazes, and slipped out of sight. Jarvey had the creepy feeling that the people had seen this kind of thing happen before, and that they knew where the cobras were taking them.

Once in the street, six of the cobras spread out behind Jarvey and Betsy. The two “leaders” turned and slithered forward, up the cobbled hill, toward the park. “What are they doing?” Betsy asked.

“I don't know. Maybe they're under the control of the Nawab. We're going toward his palace, anyway.”

Jarvey couldn't get over how quickly everyone had fled the streets. The place was like a ghost town, as if word of the snakes had raced ahead. They reached the park gates, and the line of snakes behind them drove them inside. When they came to a fork in the grassy lane, the cobras forced them to the left, away from the onion-domed towers of the palace.

They didn't go far. A tall wall, looking like stucco, sealed off one side of the park. The lane led to an iron-barred wooden gate. One of the gorillas in armor stood beside the wall, head lowered, glowering at them. As they approached, the creature pushed the gate open and gestured toward it. “What are you doing?” Jarvey asked, thinking that maybe, just maybe, animals could talk here.

The ape stared at him with its brown eyes, but it said nothing. “Come on,” Betsy said. “Maybe we can get away from the cobras.”

Before Jarvey could yell a warning, she broke into a run and hurtled through the open gate. The snakes didn't seem to mind, and the gorilla simply watched her pass by. So Jarvey ran too, rushing through the opening. Behind him, the gorilla slammed the gate with a hollow boom.

“Come on,” Betsy said from up ahead. On that side of the wall the lane had become a narrow, winding path leading into a dense tropical forest. Trees reared up to the sky, their limbs overhung with vines. Birds screeched and chattered, and the air zinged with a million insect sounds.

Jarvey looked back. The gate was still closed. Probably barred too, he thought. He said, “They threw us out of town!”

“Maybe they knew we don't belong here,” Betsy said. “Come on. There's bound to be a way back in.”

“Back
in?”
Jarvey demanded. “Are you crazy? The snakes are behind that wall!”

“And the Grimoire's back in the hideout,” Betsy said.

Jarvey groaned. He'd been so frightened by the deadly snakes that for a moment he'd forgotten the book. “You're right. What do you think we should do?”

“Get in, get the book, and hop onto a ship and hide,” Betsy said promptly. “Or else try to use the Grimoire again.”

“Okay, how do we get back inside?”

“We'll simply have to find the end of the wall,” Betsy said.

Easier said than done. They couldn't always stay within sight of the barrier, because the underbrush grew thick and dense off to their left. Jarvey felt bewildered, on the verge of panic. Moving from the theater of Junius Midion to the ship and then the town had been disorienting enough, but this wandering in the wilderness threw his sense of direction completely off. They had to pick their way through the trees and brush, and now and again some animal bellowed or howled in the distance. The air felt as thick and wet as steam. Moisture dripped from the leaves, like a slow rain, and when a drop splashed Jarvey's neck or face, it felt almost as warm as blood.

As they pushed on, the trees on either side of them crowded thicker and darker, and the trailing vines looped down as if trying to slow their progress. Finally they hit a thicket they couldn't force their way through, a tangled barrier of thorny vines and interwoven saplings. “No good,” Betsy panted. “We'd need saws and axes to cut our way through this mess.”

“Go back?” Jarvey asked.

“Can you find the way?”

Jarvey shook his head. “I got lost about five minutes after they threw us out,” he confessed. He squirmed. He didn't like the heavy, humid gloom under the trees, or the sense that the screeching, yowling animal sounds had been coming closer. They climbed over the tortuous roots of a huge tree with a lumpy, knotted trunk, its dark gray bark deeply grooved in an odd diamond pattern. “Let's rest,” Jarvey said.

They sat on one of the gnarled roots, and Betsy leaned back, squinting up into the green canopy overhead. “If we could only see the sky, we might have some sense of direction. We could at least judge the time.”

“But we can't,” jarvey said. “Maybe—”

The root beneath him moved, surging slowly. Jarvey yelped in surprise and leaped up, and Betsy scrambled to her feet at the same time.

The tree opened two huge misshapen eyes and stared at them.

Jarvey felt frozen. Two round lumps on the trunk of the tree had split, and the splits had widened. Vast eyes, pale woody brown with black pupils, gazed at him without any trace of emotion. Beneath the eyes a horizontal slash opened—a mouth of sorts—and in a weirdly creaking voice, the tree spoke: “The hunt has begun. The Nawab has entered the forest.”

“Hunt?” Betsy said, her voice rising in pitch. “What's being hunted?”

“You are,” the tree said. The eyes and mouth closed and sealed themselves. A moment later it was just a tree again.

“Oh, no,” Betsy said.

“He's hunting for us,” Jarvey said. “He's somewhere in the jungle.”

“Worse than that, he's hunting us. We could wind up with our heads hanging on his trophy wall or something! Come on. We can't stay here.”

They trudged on, winding between stands of trees, pausing every so often to listen for sounds of pursuit. Hours dragged by, a long, dreary time of trying to find a passageway through the forest, backtracking, and trying again—long, exhausting, frustrating work. They heard nothing but the clamor of birds and the buzz and rattle of insects. “This is hopeless,” Jarvey gasped. “We don't know which way were going. We don't know where the Nawab is. We don't even—”

A clatter of wings and an explosion of high-pitched shrieks burst out not far away. Jarvey spun around and saw a dozen or more bright green birds speeding through the trees, dodging the trunks and banking to the left and right as they fled some disturbance. One of the birds wheeled sharply in the air and landed on a branch just above Betsy's head, ruffling its feathers and shaking its wings. It was the color of a parrot, but it didn't look like any parrot Jarvey had ever seen, but more like a smaller version of a vulture, despite its coloring.

From its perch above them, the bird cocked a beady eye at Betsy and opened its beak. “Here they are! Here they are!”

Jarvey picked up a chunk of wood and threw it at the bird. He missed, but it squawked and flew away in the direction taken by the others in its flock. “Some hunt,” Jarvey said. “Everything in the forest is aware! If the Nawab gets tired of hunting us, he just has to ask a tree, or a bird, or a dumb lizard! Maybe even the rocks!”

“I wonder if the trees move,” Betsy said. “Because if they do—”

“Ugh! Don't even talk about it!”

“No,” Betsy said urgently. “If the trees can move, don't you see, they're
herding
us. We have to fight against them. I had the strangest feeling back there in the thicket that the trees somehow got closer together as we neared them. I think they were deliberately shutting us off If we could get past them, we might get away. Or at least we might find the wall.”

“Okay,” Jarvey said. “I guess it's worth a try.”

“This way.”

They broke off in a new direction, and sure enough, the trees began to grow closer and closer together. They came to another thicket, or maybe just an extension of the first one, close-packed and impenetrable. “What now?” Jarvey asked.

“We go over it,” Betsy said grimly. “That one there is tall enough. Climb quick, take it by surprise.”

She led the way to a tree that had bent, crooked branches sprouting from the trunk almost from the ground up. She scaled up into the tree, climbing from branch to branch almost the way she would have climbed a ladder, and Jarvey followed her, scrambling as fast as he could. The branches began to tremble under his hands, and then something grabbed his foot.

At first, Jarvey thought he had snagged his foot in the fork of a twig. He jerked his leg, and whatever had his ankle only tightened. He looked down in irritation and thought he would faint. A snake had seized his ankle, a thin green snake!

He almost lost his hold on the branch and actually slipped down a few inches. The green coil on his ankle loosened—it wasn't a snake after all, he saw, just one of those hanging vines. He reached down to tear it loose, and it whipped forward, wrapping itself around his wrist. “Aghh!”

“What's wrong?” Betsy was already high above him. The thinner branch she had seized was swaying ominously, as if trying to throw her off She looked down, then descended toward him. “Here, I'll help.”

Another loop of the vine seized her wrist, and when she jerked back, it tightened. “What is this thing?”

“It's some kind of trap.” Jarvey took a few deep breaths. “Don't fight it, Bets. It's worse if you pull against it.” He had gone limp, and he cautiously pulled his ankle out of the loosening loop. “I don't think it wants to hurt us. It's just trying to keep us from climbing.”

Betsy had grabbed the vine and tugged at it, trying to rip it in two. She winced as a loop of the rope-like thing flipped toward her head, as if trying to choke her.

“Don't fight it!” Jarvey said urgently. “Look, I'm loose.”

With a shudder, Betsy relaxed her arm, and the loop of green vine unwound until she was able to slip her wrist out. “All right. It wants us to come down. I see. Ready?”

“For what?”

“Climb!” Betsy clambered up the branches, nearly leaping in her haste, reaching for one, grabbing it, hauling herself up, and already grabbing the next.

Jarvey swung himself up after her, dreading the clutch of another vine. He heard the twigs beneath him swish as the vine lashed toward him, even felt the slap of the vine against his foot, but it just missed. “Come on!” urged Betsy from far overhead. “I can see—”

She screamed as the tree
threw
her. That was the only word for it. The branch that she was on whipped up and down, like a person shaking water off one hand, and Betsy lost her hold. Jarvey made a desperate grab, closed his hand on her wrist, and felt himself nearly jerked out of the tree himself The vine caught up with them and wrapped itself around their ankles, tugging them toward the earth.

“It's no good,” Jarvey said. “ It won't let us.”

“All right,” Betsy said. “All right, you—you plant! We're climbing down!”

“What did you see?” Jarvey asked.

“The wall,” Betsy said. “I'll tell you when we're down.”

The vine refused to release its hold on them until they reached the ground. As they touched the earth again, it unlooped, freeing them. “The trees are even thicker now than they were when we started to climb,” Jarvey said. “They do move somehow.”

“Magic,” Betsy said. “The wall's over that way. Not too far. I could see the roofs of the buildings in the town. Harbor's off to the right. I could just glimpse some of the masts. Maybe if we—”