Tracked by Terror (2 page)

“Don't know.” He rose and tucked the Grimoire into the front of his shirt. The tall, narrow book was safe there, but it felt strangely heavy.

Jarvey saw dim light all around, a steady faint glow. They had wound up in a long, straight corridor of some kind, made of veiny dark gray marble, floored with mosaic tiles of white and black. It might have been a hallway in a medieval castle, or in a fancy hotel. Candles burning in wall sconces about every twenty feet or so gave some light, and Betsy, always quick to think of what they might need, stood up shakily and plucked one of the candles out of its socket. She stared at it in evident surprise. “Look at this,” she told him.

The candle was a fake. Oh, it had a glowing flame and it gave off light, but the flame stayed just the same shape whether you turned the candle on its side or held it upside-down. And it gave off only light, no heat or smoke at all. Jarvey passed his finger through the flame several times and felt nothing.

“We need water,” Betsy said. “Then food. Let's go.”

Aching from his fall, Jarvey gazed into the distance. The hall stretched both ways as far as they could see. Betsy pointed. “This way's as good as any.”

He couldn't disagree with her, and so he trudged along beside her. They walked for what seemed like hours, following the twists and turns of the corridor, occasionally going up short flights of marble stairs, only to emerge in another hallway that looked exactly the same as the first. Betsy kept the candle, though it was of little use. Thousands of other candles stood in the sconces, filling the corridor with a dim yellow light that wore on Jarvey's vision and made his eyelids feel heavy as lead.

“Let's take a break,” Jarvey said at last, and Betsy nodded her agreement. He slid down to the cold floor and sat there with his back against the hard marble wall.

“Rum sort of place, this,” Betsy grumbled. “Nothing but a kind of long tunnel. Where have you landed us?”

“It wasn't my idea!” snapped Jarvey.

“Maybe it's a maze, like,” Betsy said with a thoughtful frown. “Maybe old Siyamon took your mum and dad and stuck them here to wander around forever. Think they'd be sharp enough to leave some clues?”

“With what?” Jarvey asked sarcastically. “There's only the stone walls.”

“There's the candles,” Betsy pointed out. “I dunno, maybe write on the walls with the wax or something.”

“Only there isn't any wax. Look at the candle,” he said. “It's not burning down at all.”

Betsy turned the candle around and even upside down, but the flame remained constant and the drips and dribbles of wax looked just as they had at the beginning. “Yeah, weird, that.” But then Betsy brightened immediately. “Anyway, this tells us that magic's going on here. So we must be in a world some Midion made.”

Wonderful, Jarvey thought sourly, a magical, everlasting candle. Great invention of some Midion or other. If it were only edible, it might be of some use.

As if she had read his thought, Betsy complained, “I'm getting really hungry.”

“Me too,” Jarvey acknowledged. “Ready to go?”

“I'm ready to slenk something to eat,” she said in a determined voice.

In Lunnon, Betsy had led an army of street kids, all of them expert at slenking, or stealing, food. There was only one catch. In this maze there didn't seem to be any food to steal.

So they wandered off again, lost in the seemingly endless corridor. They passed no doors at all, and Jarvey lost all track of the turns they took. “I think we're going in circles,” he said at last.

“Right,” Betsy replied grimly. “Look, can you use your magic to, I dunno, to force there to be a door to go through? To get us outside, some way? Or maybe we could try a different chapter?”

Jarvey gave her an exasperated glance. In the candlelight her copper-red hair gleamed, and the stiff clothes she wore—a gray skirt, a white blouse, and a bonnet—made her look like a character from an old movie. She had donned the clothes to disguise herself as a maid in Tantalus Midion's mansion, and the servant's garments were a far cry from the usual tatters she used to wear. “Look,” Jarvey said, “I keep telling you, I don't know how to use the book. I got us here, but if I try again, we may wind up someplace even worse. Let's save that until we get desperate, okay?”

Betsy shrugged. “Come on, then. Somebody made this passageway, so it must go somewhere.”

“I wish.” But Jarvey cradled the Grimoire and plodded along after her, thinking that this seemed more like a nightmare than his dream of home had.

Jarvey suffered from such dreams often enough. Many times he had experienced things that were, well, strange, even when he was wide-awake. About a year earlier, he had sat in a dentist's chair, needing a small filling but dreading the screaming bite of the whirring drill, and a split second before the drilling began, every piece of electrical equipment in the dentist's office had burned out. Sparks flew, gray smoke puffed out, and the drill seized up and fell silent, leaving Dr. Thornton staring at it in astonishment. Other things like that had happened, especially at moments when Jarvey felt especially tense or excited. Windows had broken for no reason, and a baseball bat had once simply exploded in his hands. After an experience like that, Jarvey always had bad dreams.

In those earlier nightmares he had the power to change things, to make things happen. It was as if his mind were telling him that he had the power, the art, as Siyamon Midion had called it, to do magic. He could change things, transform things, but in his dark dreams, whatever he touched always became monstrous and turned on him.

It took very little for Jarvey's imagination to shift into high gear. What if they came suddenly on the dead, stiff bodies of his mom and dad? Or what if they made the turn and saw Jarvey's parents shuffling toward them, mindless, driven to insanity by the magic of the Grimoire? Or what if this was a world of ghosts—

“Come on!”

Betsy's irritated voice echoed with a hollow sound in the marble corridor. She had taken a lead of twenty feet or so. “What's your hurry?” complained Jarvey, trying to get a grip on his fears. He had begun to dread whatever might lie ahead, but he picked up the pace.

After traveling for what seemed like miles, at least to Jarvey, they finally found a door. Jarvey and Betsy paused before it. It opened off to the left. “Well,” Betsy said, “it's something.”

Jarvey gave it a dubious inspection. It appeared to be an ordinary door, made of some dark wood, with an ornate brass doorknob and no visible lock. “Yeah,” he said. “But what's behind it?” It could be ghosts, his imagination said.

“One way to find out.” Betsy reached for the knob.

Jarvey felt himself tensing. “Be careful!”

“Mm.” She turned the knob and pushed. The door swung open into a dark room. Cautiously, Betsy held up the candle.

The strain ebbed out of Jarvey. He almost laughed in relief

“It's a loo,” Betsy said. “Thank heavens!”

Jarvey hadn't heard the word loo before coming to London, but since then he had learned that it meant “bathroom.” This one looked like the bathroom in a public building: on one wall, a row of three old-fashioned sinks with hand pumps instead of faucets, and beyond them some wooden stalls.

“Me first,” Betsy said, sounding as if it was urgent.

Jarvey waited outside the door until she emerged again. “Water tastes all right,” she reported. “Wish we had a bottle or something to take some with us.”

Taking another candle with him, Jarvey went in and used the bathroom, finally figuring out how to flush. He had to grab a handle dangling from a chain and tug down on it. The water gushed down into the toilet from a big tank up near the ceiling.

He wondered how long it had been since anyone had been in the bathroom. No dust anywhere, but it felt little used, somehow. At least, though, it suggested there were people here, somewhere, if only they could find them. Ghosts didn't need toilets.

At the sink he pumped and gulped some water, quenching his thirst. “Okay,” he said, opening the door. “Let's go.”

His voice reverberated from the blank wall opposite.

“Hey!” he yelled.

The echo of the word died away, and Jarvey began to get a crawly feeling in the pit of his stomach.

He looked down the corridor to the right. They had come from that direction, a long, long straight stretch. The marble hallway shrank down in the shadowed distance to nothing. Betsy couldn't have gone that way, or he would see her.

To his left, the corridor went on for a few feet and then took a sudden turn. He went that way, turned the corner, and peered ahead.

The passage led to infinity, or at least to darkness. No one was there.

Like his parents, Betsy had disappeared.

Jarvey was alone.

“
B
etsy!” Echoes of Jarvey's voice filled the dim endless hallway, overlapped each other until they faded to an insane murmur. Jarvey gripped his candle and hurried ahead. She wouldn't have turned back, not Betsy. She would have gone straight ahead.

The endless marble corridor was making him feel trapped, claustrophobic. He wanted to run, but run where? It took all of Jarvey's nerve for him to move forward one step at a time, to walk down that strange stone hallway without giving in to blind panic. He had passed no other doors. Where had Betsy gone? How could she have just vanished? He couldn't believe she had left him on purpose. She might be in trouble, might even be—

No. He wouldn't think about what might have happened. That would just get his imagination started, and he'd wind up scaring himself even more. He'd just concentrate on finding her.

But a treacherous thought slowly began to creep into his head. He had the book, the Grimoire, tucked under his left arm. If he had to, he could open the book, speak the spell, and escape from this place. He could escape, but Betsy would have to remain behind.

Then wherever he wound up, he would be alone. But it might be better to be alone, not to have to worry about Betsy, not to have to look out for her—

Where had that thought come from? Betsy had saved his life more than once! She had looked out for him in Lunnon. He couldn't leave her here. Jarvey fought the idea, having the irrational feeling that the Grimoire resented him, that it had a will of its own and was trying to hurt him. The untrustworthy tome could quite easily dump him into someplace even worse than this one, though that was becoming hard for him to imagine.

As his legs grew tired of carrying him, Jarvey forced himself not to whimper. He felt a drumbeat of fear, dread, and uncertainty, keeping time with his slowing steps. He yearned to be out of this strange, shadowy passageway, but Betsy was his friend, and he couldn't just leave her. More, he also knew that he needed help and that Betsy was his most reliable friend. She had stood by him in Lunnon and she had promised to help him find his mom and dad.

So forget the book, he told himself. He couldn't leave his only friend stranded here, in this place, whatever it was.

Walking alone and weary in the dimness, Jarvey had begun to think of one of his father's reference books. It was a big old volume, full of black-and-white photos of relics from the Middle Ages in Europe. One chapter was about the Catacombs of Paris, whole underground streets where the dead lay buried, their dry, dusty bones tumbled on shelves and heaped on the floor. Jarvey couldn't keep one photo out of his mind. It showed a high shelf packed tight with piles and heaps of skulls, their empty eye sockets gazing down at the camera, their fleshless grins seeming to taunt the living. Jarvey had looked at that picture and shivered sometimes, thinking of what it would feel like to be trapped in that dim tomb, stared at by the ranks of the dead. He remembered a poem his class had read, something about an Ancient Mariner. Someone in the poem had walked along a midnight road but didn't dare turn his head because he knew “a fearful fiend did close behind him tread.”

The thought made Jarvey even more jumpy, and he continually turned to look back over his shoulder. Jarvey couldn't get rid of the feeling that something stealthy and hidden was trailing him at that moment. The echoes of his own footsteps, though muffled, tricked him into believing feet pattered along behind him. He began to imagine he saw fleeting glimpses of a shadowy form in the dimness far behind, that when he turned around to look,
something
stopped moving off in the distance. He kept thinking if he could twist around quickly enough, he might actually see it move.

Then he looked back once too often, tangled his left foot on his own right ankle, and stumbled, sprawling sideways. His shoulder hit the marble wall on his right—

—and Jarvey felt it give! Rubbing his shoulder, Jarvey reached for the candle he had dropped and held it up. In its steady glow he saw a crack now, the rectangular outline of a doorway. He might have passed a thousand of them without suspecting it, so closely did the marble fit.

And, Jarvey realized, maybe Betsy had made the same discovery! That might account for her sudden disappearance. Jarvey pressed one edge of the door, but only succeeded in closing it. He pushed at the other side, and it tilted open again. This time he got his fingers on the opposite edge and tugged. The door swung open in utter silence, and warm air billowed into his face, air faintly scented with perfume and peppermint. Everything ahead lay in deep darkness, but Jarvey had the impression of a bigger space than the corridor, something like a lobby or an anteroom.

He thought he heard a faint rustling sound. “Betsy?” he said in hardly more than a whisper. “Betsy? Is that you?”