Tracked by Terror (8 page)

Some of the milling crowd climbed up onto the edge of the stage, while others roamed the auditorium, looking under seats, going out through the passageways, even scanning the high ceiling. Jarvey shuddered as the mindless things plodded past him, splitting into two streams, one going off into the wings on the left, the other on the right.

Augustus stood behind Jarvey, gripping the back of his shirt. Jarvey stared longingly at the Grimoire. It was just ten or twelve feet away. If he could only reach it ... but that was hopeless. Junius had not stirred from his place beside the book stand. Even if Jarvey could somehow pull himself free from Augustus's grip, Junius would snatch the book up before Jarvey could take more than a step or two.

Jarvey whispered to Augustus, “I wouldn't let him send the Grimoire away if I were you. That will leave you trapped here in the theater forever.”

“Quiet,” Augustus grunted, poking him.

Jarvey felt nervous sweat creeping over his face. “I'd go crazy, acting in these stupid plays for all eternity, with nobody real at all.”

“Be
quiet,”
Augustus warned, giving Jarvey a shake.

Junius heard that, and he turned and took the few steps over to them. “What are you arguing about?”

“I was telling him that if you send the Grimoire away, he'll have to do just what you want him to do forever,” Jarvey replied. “I don't think he likes that.”

“You
are
a fool,” Junius said. “Isn't he, son?”

Augustus didn't reply for a moment. Then he said querulously, “Father, he has a point. This is the world you wanted, not the one I want.”

“It is our world, and that's an end,” Junius pronounced. “Don't listen to this young troublemaker, son. I don't know how he muddled his way into our world, but he has no real power, of that I'm certain. He can't even defend himself against a simple magical attack—”

Jarvey jerked around, staring toward a dark corner of the wings, and yelled, “No! Leave her alone! Let her go!”

Instantly, Junius turned, raising his arm. Augustus let go his hold on Jarvey's shirt at the same moment, and he and Jarvey leaped forward, both reaching for the Grimoire.

In the second or two that it took Junius to realize that Jarvey had faked him out, the book stand crashed to the stage, and Augustus and Jarvey dived to the floor, wrestling for possession of the Grimoire like two football players falling on a fumbled ball.

“Get out of the way!” shouted Junius, dancing from side to side.

Jarvey kicked and rolled and twisted, trying to wrench the tall, narrow volume from the grip of the older boy. “Let—go!”

“It's mine!” Augustus growled, pummeling Jarvey's shoulder with one hand while he tried to pull the book free with the other.

Just as he lost his grip on the Grimoire, Jarvey saw Junius's lips move, saw his pointing finger, and with all his strength rolled aside as an invisible blast of magic struck Augustus, causing him to scream in pain and drop the Grimoire. Jarvey dived for it, retrieved it like a football player recovering a fumble, and then scrambled to his feet, dreading the spell that would hit him at any moment—

“Here!” Betsy's voice! She had thrown back a trapdoor and stood in the black square. “Look out!”

Too late. Junius's spell made Jarvey's legs go dead under him, and he toppled forward. Betsy grabbed his shoulders as he went sprawling, and she dropped down, hauling him with her. Dimly, Jarvey realized she had been standing almost on the top rung of a tall ladder, but she lost her footing and they both fell. Jarvey clung to the Grimoire as they spun through the air, then gasped as he landed on his back, the breath rushing from his lungs. Betsy had him by the shoulder and was dragging him, and up above he saw a square of light, the opening of the trapdoor in the stage above.

Clutching the Grimore to his chest, Jarvey panted, “Clclose! Close now! I command it!
Close and be sealed!”

And something happened, some force rushed out of him. He felt it, and a moment later the trapdoor overhead slammed shut with an echoing crash. He had borrowed enough magic from the Grimoire to do that.

But how could they escape from beneath the stage itself?

His legs tingled with a terrible pins-and-needles feeling, as though he had been badly shocked, but at least some feeling was creeping back. “Come on,” Betsy gasped in the dark. “Can't you walk?”

Leaning on her, Jarvey staggered to his feet. He felt as if the floor were heaving and rising and falling like the deck of a ship in a storm, but he lurched along in the dark. Betsy threw open a door ...

And they burst into one of those endless marble hallways.

A dismal shout rose from a group of the audience members off to their left. Jarvey spun and raced away from them, with Betsy pounding along close beside him. The corridor turned a sharp corner to the right, and as they turned it, Jarvey saw a door opening not far ahead.

His heart sank as Junius Midion stepped through, his face a mask of fury. Jarvey skidded to a stop. “Do it!” Betsy yelled, grabbing his arm. “Do it before he gets his hands on the book!”

“A-abrire,”
Jarvey shouted, his fingers fumbling at the catch that kept the book closed.

He felt Betsy's grip tighten on his left arm.

Ahead of him, Junius pointed and shouted,
“Frater!.”

As if it heard Junius, the book flew open, an invisible hand reached out, and Jarvey heard Betsy scream in alarm as the book pulled them inside.

D
arkness roared in Jarvey's ears like a strong wind. For a moment he didn't know where or even who he was.

He forced himself to open his eyes, dreading what he might see. At first everything drifted in his sight in a shifting gray, foggy blur: dim moving figures and floating patches of light, pale in the darkness. Then, almost as if by magic, his mother's face materialized from the fog, close by, so close he could reach up and touch her if he had the strength. “Jarvey?” she asked softly. “Are you all right? How do you feel?”

His father's bespectacled face loomed over her right shoulder. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

Jarvey had to close his right eye to focus on his father's hand. “T-two,” he said. “What happened? Where am I?”

His mom and dad hugged each other for a moment, and then in a strangely husky voice, his dad said, “You're in the hospital, son. You got hurt a little. Do you remember what happened in the baseball game?”

Jarvey tried to shake his head and discovered he was rolling it back and forth on a soft pillow instead. And it hurt to do even that much. His forehead throbbed with waves of dull pain, making him wince and making his eyes water. A blood-pressure cuff was clamped around his right biceps, feeling far too tight. He croaked, “I don't remember any game. What happened?” The weak sound of his own voice shocked him. He sounded exhausted and feeble, even to himself

“You got smacked hard by a line drive,” a third voice said. The voice sounded deep and hearty, a man's voice, but it was one he didn't recognize. Through the lingering gray fog, Jarvey could make out a white-coated figure standing at the foot of the bed. The drifting dimness concealed the man's face. “Jarvis, you have a condition that we doctors call ‘traumatic amnesia.' That means your brain got a little scrambled by a hard blow, so you probably can't remember anything that happened to you during the game.”

“I don't,” Jarvey said, squinting, trying to make out the doctor's face.

“Not unusual. Now, while you were unconscious, you may have had some pretty vivid dreams. Don't let them bother you. Your x-rays look fine. How do you feel?”

Jarvey felt incredibly achy. His muscles and joints hurt in a hundred different places. In fact, he felt less as though he'd been hit on the head than as if he'd tripped and fallen down a whole flight of stairs. “I hurt,” he said. “And I'm a little hungry.”

The doctor lifted his arm and glanced down at his watch. “Your nurse will be around shortly. Let her know if you'd like anything special for tea. Mr. and Mrs. Midion, Jarvey will be fine now. What he needs most is just plain ordinary bed rest, so say good-bye to him for a little while and we'll let him watch the telly or whatever he feels like doing.”

Jarvey's mom gave him a gingerly hug and a peck on the cheek, and his dad gave him a grin and a wave. Then the adults left, sort of vanishing into the fog, and he lay frowning.

The nurse would come in soon to ask what he wanted ... for
tea?

The doctor had said “tea” as if it were a meal, and he had spoken of the “telly.” Those were British words, Jarvey thought, not American. “No,” he groaned. “Not again.”

He reached to rip off the irritatingly tight blood-pressure cuff It moved before he could touch it, feeling not like Velcro at all, but like something alive. It let go of his arm but grabbed his hand with strong fingers.

Jarvey yelped and tried to pull away, fighting the ghostly grip. The door banged open, and the doctor rushed in, brandishing a hypodermic needle that looked as though it were made for an elephant, a huge thing six inches long.

And the doctor's writhing, triumphant face was the furious face of the spidery man who had crept over the chain-link fence in Jarvey's nightmare.

“Now I have you!” shrieked the man, raising the needle high, ready to plunge it down.

“Jarvey, wake up!”

Betsy's voice, soft but urgent in his ear.

Jarvey tried to roll aside, toppled out of the bed, and felt himself falling. “It was a dream,” he gasped in midair.

A moment later Jarvey landed hard, with a crash that made yellow light flare behind his eyes. His chest heaved, trying to draw breath into his empty lungs. For a few moments he couldn't remember clearly what had just happened, let alone take stock of where he was. The hard, hot surface below him seemed to heave and roll. When he forced his eyes open, he found he was staring straight up, but all he could see was a kind of billowing white emptiness.

“Are you all right?”

Betsy's voice, from somewhere close by. Fighting panic, Jarvey whispered, “I think I'm blind.”

Something more or less pink waved in front of his face, and he focused on Betsy's hand. “See that?”

With a groan, Jarvey pushed himself up. “I was dreaming. I thought ... Where are we?”

Beneath her coppery hair, her face was bunched up in an expression of concern. “On a boat. At sea.”

One thing from his dream carried over into reality: the pain. Jarvey felt as if he had been struck by a car. His whole body ached miserably. At least he was breathing normally again. Now he saw that he lay far forward on the deck of a sailing ship, and the white, billowy nothing-ness he had been staring up toward was actually a huge rectangular sail. Beyond and above it was a blue sky filled with puffy white clouds. A bewilderment of ropes led up to the mast, and on the high yardarms crept men, their forms made tiny by distance, who were hauling on the sail. No one seemed to notice that two stowaways had just come aboard. Jarvey clutched his aching ribs and then looked around the empty deck in sudden panic. “Where's the Grimoire?”

“I don't know. Didn't you hold on to it?”

“I had it until we hit! Look for it!” Jarvey rolled to his stomach and pushed himself up to a kneeling position. His head reeled, partly from the shock of passage from Junius Midion's world to this one, partly from the vessel's movement. He and Betsy had almost missed the deck entirely. They had landed in the small triangular area at the very front of the ship, partly underneath the boom that stuck out forward and supported the jib sails. Coils of rope hung from cleats, and small chests cluttered the deck, each of them lashed down to ring bolts set in the wood. The Grimoire might have slipped behind one—if it hadn't fallen into the water!

Jarvey hauled himself to his feet and looked wildly around. Gray ocean spread out on all sides, its restless surface streaked with white foam and crawling with waves. Now he could smell the salty ocean air, mixed with tar and the scent of sun-heated wood. Betsy went from one chest to the other, bending and peering. “I don't see it!”

“Has to be here somewhere,” Jarvey said, taking a staggering step to help her look.

But Betsy turned and tugged his arm. “Someone's coming! Follow me.”

She slipped over the rail. Jarvey heard voices approaching, and he quickly scrambled up and over, dropping down onto a kind of platform attached to the bows. Ropes from it stretched tautly up toward the forward mast, and behind these ropes crouched Betsy. She held a finger to her lips.

Jarvey's head spun a little. They sat on a plank a little more than a foot wide, their legs dangling, their hands clutching the thick ropes, and beneath their feet the ocean rose and fell, rose and fell, as the ship's bow rode a wave or plunged down into a trough, sending a foamy spray of salt water flying. Jarvey fought back nausea. He was getting seasick.

Just behind him, on the deck, a man was speaking. “Unload these last. They are not important to the Nawab, but they should bring us a pretty profit.”

“Aye, sir. 'Twill take most of tomorrow to empty the holds. Save these for the day after, then?”

“Yes. And after the crew has finished unloading them, let the men know they may have the next three nights ashore before we sail again.”

“Aye, sir.”

The voices rumbled off into the distance. “Where do you think we are?” Betsy asked.

Jarvey stared at her. “How should I know?”

“You opened the book!”