The Eye of Midnight (5 page)

In the middle of the night, Maxine woke to the wind moaning outside her window. Her bedroom was on the third floor of the manor, and the treetops groped at the pane. But it was something else that had stirred her from sleep.

“M!” whispered a voice outside her door.

“Will? Is that you?”

“Yeah. Are you awake?”

“No,” she said.

The door creaked open, and William slipped through.

“What are you doing sneaking around in the dark?” asked Maxine.

“Nothing.” William shrugged. “I just couldn't sleep. I can't get my mind off the jinni. When I lay my head on the pillow, I still see those glittering eyes and that grinning mouth.”

“Just be glad it never came to life,” said Maxine, taking some comfort in the fact that her cousin had not escaped their adventure entirely unscathed.

“You don't want to go down and try again, do you?” William asked.

Maxine sat up in her bed. “In the middle of the night? No thanks. We shouldn't have been in there in the first place,” she said. “I'm sure Grandpa must have seen us come up through the secret door.”

“Aw, so what? Don't you think maybe he
wanted
us to find the basement? That it was all just part of the test?”

“What test?” she said. “There is no test.”

“Oh no? What was the little interrogation in the kitchen all about, then? Grandpa's trying to measure our character, see what we're made of.”

“That's silly, Will. You're inventing things.”

“Maybe. He didn't exactly welcome us with hugs and kisses, though, did he? One thing's for sure—he's not the sort of granddad who sings you to sleep in his rocking chair. He'd rather meet you with blades at dawn, if you know what I mean. Lunge, parry, feint—that's what it's like talking to Grandpa.”

Maxine pondered this, watching the shadows of the tree limbs braid across the moonlit floor, but her thoughts were interrupted by a creak in the hallway outside.

“Did you hear something?” she whispered, listening carefully. The corridor was quiet now.

“Must've been a hant,” said William. He turned out the lamp on the night table and made a low groaning sound that rose and fell in a tortured wail.

“Stop that,” said Maxine, groping for him in the dark and tossing a pillow in his direction.

“I told you this place was haunted,” he said with a wicked chuckle.

“Let me go to sleep, would you?”

“All right, I'm leaving.”

He tiptoed to the door.

“Good night, Will,” said Maxine.

“Good night, M,” said William, and the door clicked shut behind him.

Maxine's eyes opened to dawn's pale light seeping through her dormer window. An elusive dream lingered in her mind, but try as she might, she couldn't bring it back. She crawled from her bed, following a strange urge.

The house was still, and she padded barefoot down the hallway, past the uneven snores in William's bedroom. Climbing a flight of stairs at the back of the house, she found herself in an unfamiliar corridor. The rooms here had undoubtedly belonged to the Battersea children once upon a time, wallpapered with faded barnyard animals and circus tents, all empty apart from a few forgotten pieces of shrouded furniture that had been pushed to darkened corners. Pictures and toys and books were gone. An eerie, unnatural witching hung over the space. Maxine began to feel a desperate need to uncover some trace of the living—something that proved her mother had been here once, that she had known this place.

At the end of the hall Maxine found the nursery. The room was sad and dreary, full of echoes. An empty crib stood against the wall beside a dusty, half-draped wardrobe. She approached the wardrobe uncertainly, as if it were a giant jack-in-the-box, and, pushing aside the dingy sheet, she threw it open. There was nothing inside.

Sighing, she glanced across the room at a colorfully painted door, and even though every other closet on the floor had been a disappointment, she decided she would check it all the same. The knob yielded to a halfhearted tug, and the door swung wide.

Maxine let out a gasp.

Here at last she had discovered the resting place of her mother's childhood. Small coats and dresses hung neatly above worn black boots. Sagging shelves held dolls and hoops and balls and bats. The air smelled of mothballs and old leather. Maxine burrowed among the hanging garments, feeling them all around her on her arms and face. She pushed through to the cool smoothness of the back wall, then turned around and slid to the floor, where she sat and peered out from behind the clothes.

The faint toll of church bells echoed somewhere far off, and she listened, sitting perfectly still like the china dolls beside her. She touched the cherub lips of the closest one and wondered where her mother might be now. On the deck of a ship, maybe, taking the sun, recovering her strength and thinking of Maxine.

Her eye flitted absently around the closet, and something peculiar stirred her from her daydreams: a pair of names had been scratched on the inside of the doorframe.

Helen and Eddie

Helen was her mother, and Eddie—that was Will's father, her uncle Edward.

Beneath these, she found a strange scrawl:

Keep the secret, never tell,

unless you want your throat to swell.

Her fingers trembled as they traced the words. She pictured her mother and uncle crouched inside the closet, sharing some concealed confidence. She wondered how long the words had rested there in the dark, unread and unspoken, hidden from every human eye until this very moment.

There was something else. A photograph had been tucked into the baseboard: a faded picture of a teenage boy standing with a suitcase on the front steps of Battersea Manor, and on the back a single letter and a date:

D—June 1909.

“Who could this be?” she wondered aloud.

Downstairs, the old grandfather clock chimed the half hour, calling Maxine back to the present. She yawned and thought of her soft pillow and warm bed, but as she stood to go a battered milliner's box on the shelf caught her eye. Inside she found a lovely red hat that smelled faintly of perfume, and though it had no tag or monogram, the old felt cloche was pierced by a long hat pin set with a bright ruby—her mother's birthstone.

The hat fit perfectly. She tucked the strange photo under the inner band and, clutching her new treasure to her chest, Maxine crept back to her bed.

Later that morning the cousins stumbled down into the kitchen, rubbing sleep from their eyes. A small, matronly woman stood at the stove stirring a bubbling pot, her steel-gray hair pulled back in a fist-sized bun of formidable tautness and immaculate symmetry. Colonel Battersea was already at the kitchen table, going through a stack of mail.

“Good morning, William, Maxine,” he said. “Though it seems you've managed to sleep most of the morning away. I don't suppose you drink coffee? No, your parents are more responsible than that, I'll wager. All the same, it looks like you could use it, eh?”

William mumbled something incoherent and flumped down at the table.

“Ah, bad dreams, perhaps. Well, no matter, you're young and resilient. Mrs. Otto, don't you have any oatmeal for these children?”

Mrs. Otto shot him a withering look. “Give me half a moment, won't you? They've only just come down.” She ladled out the oatmeal and slid a bowl in front of each of the cousins while the old colonel opened another letter from the stack in front of him.

“By the way,” said Maxine offhandedly, tilting a pitcher of milk over her bowl, “a telegram came for you yesterday.”

Grandpa's face darkened abruptly, and he pushed aside the post.

“Is that so,” he said. He slid back his chair and rose to his feet, leaning over her. “And when were you planning to mention this?”

“I don't know,” replied Maxine, glancing nervously at William. “Just now, I guess. I kind of forgot about it.”