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.
3
The World’s a Stage
“Betsy!” 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?”
He squinted and saw a dim figure in the gloom ahead. It looked like Betsy, or anyway, it looked like a girl. He held the candle high, but its feeble light didn’t reach far enough. “Betsy?” he asked in a louder voice.
“Betsy.” The word came back in a sighing, whispery tone that made goose bumps pop up on Jarvey’s arms. The figure seemed to beckon. It turned and walked away to the left, into the darkness.
“Wait!” Jarvey hurried after her, and behind him the concealed door silently swung shut. He could barely see in this darkness, but the girl’s figure glided away from him, and he followed. It occurred to him that his footsteps were silent now, and glancing down, he saw in the faint circle of light from the candle a carpet of an intricate pattern, red and white, yellow and black, pale blue and deep maroon.
Jarvey heard something ahead and looked up, and his heart leaped. Betsy had stopped just ahead of him. He could see the gleam of her hair and the drab darkness of her servant’s dress. “Where did you go?” he demanded, coming up behind her.
She turned, and Jarvey almost dropped the candle. It wasn’t Betsy. It wasn’t even human.
The face looked like that of an ancient porcelain doll, crisscrossed with lines, with white plastery patches where the surface had flaked away. One eye socket was empty
and hollow, with spiderwebs inside, and the other eye was bleary and glazed. Half the nose was gone, broken off, and a big chunk of the left cheek had chipped away, leaving a hole the size of a playing card. Jarvey could see teeth inside.
“Welcome, sir,” the thing said in that whispery voice. “My name is Betsy. My name is Linda. My name is Mary. My name is Molly. My name is—” The head jerked, and the thing took a step closer. “May I take take take your hat your coat your stick your your may I thank you you’ve been a won wonderful aud aud—”
It stumbled, then fell forward. Jarvey jumped backward, and the creature landed flat on its face. It made a sickening crackling sound, and when it tried to push itself up, both of its arms broke at the elbow. Its wobbling head raised up. “Oh sir sir sir I seem to have fallen you are so kind thank thank thank you.” No expression in the voice at all, just a crazy whisper, and the remaining eye had fallen out. As the thing jabbered, its bottom jaw flopped wildly and fell off, leaving it looking like a horrible kind of mummy, still trying to talk: “faah haaa awww faah ... ” It tried to drag itself forward on its stumps of arms.
Jarvey couldn’t stand it. He turned and ran back into the dark, ran as hard as he could. He turned a corner and stepped onto nothing, rolled, and tumbled down a short carpeted stair.
He scrambled up, frantically reaching for the candle he had dropped, the weird candle that kept on burning. The second he gripped it, he heard something: a distant sound, rising and falling, like waves breaking on a beach.
Jarvey got up, his knees shaking, and saw that he stood in a kind of alcove, curtained off at the opposite side. It was difficult to tell, but in the light of his candle Jarvey thought the curtains looked like rich black velvet, gathered into many draped layers. The sound came from somewhere beyond them. Jarvey started forward and yelped in alarm when a firm hand touched his shoulder.
“No lights in the auditorium,” a whispery voice said, and a slim white hand plucked the candle from his grip. The man who had stepped from the darkness might have been made of darkness himself, except for his pale thin face and hands. His features were vaguely aristocratic, a long straight nose and firm chin, but he looked dead. Like the girl, he had skin crackled into a thousand zigzag pieces, and his eyes, a cloudy blue-gray, stared straight ahead in their sockets without moving. He had no chunks missing from his face, but his lips were so white, they looked bloodless. The man’s left hand, holding the candle, seemed to be mostly bones, barely covered by a parchment-thin layer of bleached skin.
“This way, sir.” With his free hand, the man reached out and parted the black curtains, and Jarvey hurried through the opening.
It wasn’t quite as dark, and now he could hear a man’s voice trembling in a kind of wail: “Oh, I have lost my love and life! Adieu, my fair, my darling wife. Report how my sad tale ends, report me true, I beg, my friends, that the world at large may know of poor Iacchalus and his tale ... of woe!”
Then another man’s voice: “Alas, he is dead, his spirit fled. His gallant heart has burst from sorrow. Friends, bear him away; we shall pause to judge and say what punishment to give his direst foe tomorrow.”
Jarvey came to what felt like a metal railing, and looking ahead he realized that far below him, shrunk to postage-stamp size by distance, a stage lay bathed in light. On it actors who seemed no bigger than ants moved slowly. The light faded as a curtain came down, and then an unseen audience, thousands and thousands of people, began to applaud, crying out, “Bravo!” and “Author!”
“It’s a theater!” Jarvey said, feeling both relieved and surprised.
Because it was certainly the largest theater he had ever been in, the largest he could imagine. He stood at the back of an enormous horseshoe-shaped auditorium, with curving banks of seats falling away before him, down to that far-off stage.
The curtain rose again, and in the spill of light from it Jarvey could just make out the actors, bowing to the applause. That was what had sounded like surf! They took bow after bow, and then one stepped forward to an ovation like thunder. The sound very gradually died down, and then the man who had been acting the part of Iacchalus said, “Thank you, kind friends, thank you. Now that we have given you a tale of sadness and tragedy, we shall lift your spirits next time with a comedy. Our next performance, I am pleased to say, will be one of your old favorites, the happy story of the four foolish lovers and their equally foolish families, newly augmented with striking original scenes and three new songs. Please return to see our humble offering of The Lovers’ Stratagem, or, Two Couples Uncoupled. Good night!”
The curtain fell for the last time on the stage, but now chandeliers dangling on long chains were creaking down from high openings in the ceiling, and a warm yellow wash of candlelight streamed from them, illuminating the crowd below. Jarvey had never seen so many people assembled in one place in his whole life, not at football games, not anywhere. The men all wore dark evening clothes, long black coats, white shirts, white ties, and top hats, and the women wore a rainbow of old-fashioned evening gowns, shimmering blues and reds. The men and women alike murmured as they turned to leave, all of them sounding very pleased with the play they had just seen. Jarvey caught fragments of their comments: Splendid voice . . . moved to tears ... another triumph ... glorious, glorious.
Jarvey dodged aside as a torrent of people made their way up the slanting aisles toward the passages he had just left. Nobody seemed to notice him as he stared up at the passing throng. All around the auditorium, crowds of men and women poured into the aisles. Jarvey gawped at them because he felt vaguely bothered by something. Lots of the people looked very much alike. There were about half a dozen different models of men, half a dozen models of women. All the men with dark mustaches looked enough alike to be brothers, if not twins. All the blond women in dark dresses were nearly identical, and so it was with the other models as well. And the conversations repeated themselves too. For twenty or thirty times, Jarvey heard identical-looking men tell identical-looking women, “We must come back for the comedy. I know you’ll enjoy it.”
Finally the last few straggling people walked past him, and as they left through the black velvet curtains and stepped into the dark passageway, a sudden silence fell. Jarvey brought up the rear of the group. He ducked through the curtain and stopped in his tracks, feeling the hairs on his arms prickling.
The old man who had taken his candle stood alone, like a statue. No one else was in the passageway. But it should have been jammed! The audience members hadn’t had time to go anywhere.
They had vanished the same way Betsy had disappeared, seemingly into thin air. They seemed to have faded away, like—well, like ghosts.
Jarvey somehow didn’t want to follow them out into the darkness. He turned back and reentered the auditorium. In the helpful light of the chandeliers, he found a long aisle and walked down it, toward the stage. The auditorium was so huge that, looking up, he couldn’t even see the ceiling at its highest point. The chandeliers seemed to be dangling down from infinity.
As he passed row after row of seats, Jarvey noticed something else. The carpeted floor and aisles lay clean, cleaner than any theater he had ever seen. No scrap of litter lay anywhere, and the seats all had been neatly folded up. After walking for what felt like a mile, he reached the front of the theater and only then did he realize how large the stage actually was. It was a lot bigger than his front yard back home, and the set on it looked gigantic. It represented a street in some city, vaguely reminding Jarvey of pictures he had seen of ancient Rome. Substantial three-storied marble-fronted houses, their fronts decorated with stone columns, formed the backdrop. A fountain in the center of the stage featured mermaids and soldiers in armor, and from a central column it jetted real water in a gurgling spray.
Separating the stage from the auditorium was a deep U-shaped pit with chairs arranged in orderly rows. It might have been the orchestra pit, Jarvey supposed, though he hadn’t heard any music accompanying the play. No steps led down into the pi
t from the auditorium, but the drop wasn’t all that great. He clambered over the low brass railing, let himself down until he dangled a few feet off the ground, and then released his grip, falling the last little distance.
His landing made a sharp thump, but no one seemed to be around to hear it. He found a metal ladder fixed to the back wall of the pit, and it allowed him to climb up onto the stage.
Jarvey stood blinking for a moment. Bright light streamed in from somewhere, though he couldn’t spot its source. The radiance bathed everything on stage, though. He walked to the center of the platform and to his surprise saw that the realistic fountain was simply a flat cardboard cutout. Pale blue streamers blew in a jet of air. He had thought it was real water, but from up close he could see that it was not only fake, but sort of shabby-looking too. How had something like that fooled him?
And now he could see that the three-dimensional street of Romanesque houses was simply a flat painting as well. It didn’t look convincing at all from here, although from far away he would have sworn that it was real.
Jarvey cautiously explored the left side of the stage, stepping into the wings. A wilderness of taut ropes and stacked weights cluttered the wall there, and a curtained-off doorway led to what seemed to be a row of a dozen dressing rooms, all of them empty. Long tables stood against walls lined with mirrors. Empty chairs had been thrust back away from the tables. A faint scent a little like the waxy aroma of crayons hung in the air.
The last dressing room, and the grandest, was a little different, though. A table in the center of this one held a silver bowl, and the bowl held some withered fruit, pears and apples. They weren’t fresh and they certainly weren’t crisp, but Jarvey devoured every bite of them.
He drank too, from an old-fashioned sink in that room. He noticed a long rack hung with a couple of dozen costumes, wrinkling his nose at the smell of stale sweat hanging over the outfits. On the long tables before the mirrors, wig stands without faces gazed at him balefully. When he moved up and down the length of the makeup table, he had the sense that the wig stands silently turned to keep him in sight.
Tracked by Terror Page 2
