Tracked by Terror

by Brad Strickland

  “Come back inside, son,” the father said, holding his hand out. “We must return to our rehearsal.” He patted the boy on the back, and they both disappeared through the door.

  As soon as they were gone, Jarvey sat up. “What happened to you?” he asked. “I looked everywhere!”

  “Stay down!” Betsy clamped a hand on his neck and pushed him so he lay on his side, hidden by the wheat. “I found a door that led backstage,” she said before he could speak. “I thought you were right behind me! I heard—”

  “I thought I saw you—”

  They stared at each other for a moment, and then they both laughed. It was a shaky, nervous kind of laugh, but still a relief “Those dolls,” Betsy said. “They wear out or something, and then—”

  “He makes new ones,” Jarvey said. “The old ones get put out in the hallways and just sort of wander around until”—he shivered—“until they fall apart.”

  “ ’S good to see you,” Betsy said. “You had enough to eat?”

  “Some.”

  “Get more out here. Lots of lovely fruits and things. Water too, not bad. D’you think your mom and dad are here?”

  Jarvey shook his head. “I don’t think so. I don’t know for sure, though. Look, do me a favor, and don’t go off by yourself again. I don’t like being on my own.”

  “Missed you too, cully,” she said with a shy grin. “But what is this place? A whole world that’s just a theater? Who are these people?”

  To answer her, Jarvey raised up on his elbow and reached into his shirt, where he had stuck the playbills along with the Grimoire. He pulled out a handful of them. “Look at these.”

  The first one, in very ornate lettering, was like all the rest except in a few details:

  Betsy leafed through the playbills, shaking her head, as Jarvey told her about seeing the crumbling creature in the corridor, the mysterious vanishing audience, and about the bizarre actor-dolls he had found in the dressing rooms. “I don’t think anyone but the family is even really alive here,” he finished. “They’ve turned this world into a theater where they’re always the stars.”

  “That’s crazy,” Betsy responded. “It’s like playacting when you’re little children. If no one is real except the Midion family, if there’s no real audience, then what’s the point?”

  “I don’t know,” Jarvey admitted. A stray, bent stalk of wheat was tickling his neck. “Do you think we might get up now?”

  “Well, perhaps,” Betsy said. “They seem to have gone. Maybe we should wait a bit, though.”

  But Jarvey was tired of lying down, with the Grimoire uncomfortable against his chest. “It’s okay. Come on.” He stood up and began to dust himself off.

  And at that moment the door, not a hundred feet from him, banged open and Augustus Midion stared straight at Jarvey with angry eyes and shouted, “Father! Father! Come quickly!”

  6

  Walking Shadows

  Jarvey dropped to his knees, thrust the Grimoire into Betsy’s hands, and said, “He hasn’t seen you! Keep it safe!” Then he leaped up and bolted, running for the orchards at the far side of the garden.

  Jarvey sprinted full-tilt, arms pumping. He circled away so that if Augustus was pursuing him he wouldn’t notice Betsy, but after a few hundred feet he realized he wasn’t being pursued. He leaped over a winding pebble-lined brook and then risked a glance behind him. At the far end of the mile-long garden, the door stood open, but he couldn’t see anyone standing in the doorway, and no one in the garden, unless Augustus was crouching, staring at him from the wheat or the rows of beans. Betsy was nowhere to be seen, and if the coast was clear, she’d be heading for him.

  Jarvey couldn’t take the chance that Augustus wasn’t somewhere out in the garden. He ducked down and hustled, taking a zigzag course. Sweat stung his eyes, and his chest began to ache from effort. Finally, in the shade of a triple row of apple trees, he had to pause to get his breath. He ducked behind a tree, stood up, and craned cautiously to look out. Still no sign of pursuit. Had Augustus and his father trapped Betsy?

  No, Jarvey told himself, that wasn’t likely. Bets was far too experienced at evading capture. He knew how she could find cover, how she could all but make herself invisible. She didn’t share the magical abilities of her grandfather, the mysterious Zoroaster, though. Jarvey remembered vividly how Zoroaster had once briefly turned both of them invisible, and how Jarvey was blind during the spell because his invisible eyes could not focus light on his invisible retinas. Betsy had no magic like that, but she was an experienced thief and she must have gotten away. She might even have sneaked inside the building and might be making her way back to—

  Jarvey shrank behind the gnarled black trunk of one of the trees, his hand gripping the rough bark. Augustus had just stepped outside the door, and with him his father. The two distant, tiny figures seemed to be arguing, though from this far away Jarvey could see very little of them and could hear nothing at all.

  He backed away until he came to the last and biggest tree, growing right up against the bare marble wall. Jarvey stretched to grasp the lowest limb, grabbed hold of it, and swung himself up. He crept higher in the tree, hauling himself from limb to limb to a place where leaves concealed him well, but where there was a little tunnel through the leaves that let him see the garden. The branches hung heavy with masses of fragrant apple blossoms, and if Jarvey hadn’t been so scared and exhausted, he might actually have enjoyed the climb, except maybe for the bees.

  Golden honeybees buzzed all around him, and from this height he could see rows of square white wooden bee-hives in a long line against the marble wall over to his left. Jarvey fanned with his hand, trying to discourage the honeybees from investigating his sweaty face. They were real insects, not illusions. Jarvey supposed the Midions needed them to pollinate the garden, and maybe to produce honey—wait, something was going on out there, something moving slowly toward him like a spread-out, gray mist.

  Jarvey gasped and scrunched himself small. Walking through the rows of crops, still far away but coming toward him, stalked a whole row of men in dark evening dress. Junius Midion must have summoned members of his phantom audience to join in the search. At the very center of the line, Junius and Augustus strode along, peering this way and that. Where was Bets? He couldn’t see her. He hoped she’d found a place to hide. If Junius Midion got his hands on the Grimoire ...

  But right now he had to worry about being caught himself. Jarvey desperately looked around for some means of escape. He had none. The tree was too far away from the next one for him to move over. He couldn’t climb down without the risk of being spotted.

  But perhaps he could climb higher! This was one of the tallest of the apple trees, and its old, twisted branches thrust up and up and then spread out in all directions. It might be just possible, Jarvey thought, to swing out onto a branch and reach the roof of the first terrace.

  He climbed slowly, inches at a time, not wanting to draw attention to himself and not trusting the old branches to hold him. At one point a curious bee landed on his face. Jarvey froze and felt the maddening itch as the insect crawled over his forehead, down his closed eyelid, and across his right cheek before taking off and buzzing away. Staying still and keeping quiet for that was about the hardest thing that Jarvey had ever done.

  The higher limbs were smaller and less sturdy. Jarvey found one that crooked out and overhung the terrace, and he swung his way out on that one, hand over hand, with his feet dangling, but the old wood creaked as though in warning, and the branch began to bend and shake. A few leaves fell spinning from the smaller twigs.

  With an effort, Jarvey got himself just far enough out and, stretching down, stood on tiptoe on the flat roof of the marble terrace, still gripping the branch. He released his hold carefully, letting the limb swoosh back up into place as slowly and quietly as possible. The marble underfoot had collected years of fallen apple-tree leaves, and these had decayed into a kind of mushy, slippery soil. Jarvey edged h
is way out of this mess and onto the smooth bare stone, backing and crouching at the same time. The ghostly searchers had walked more than halfway across the garden by then. If only they wouldn’t look up, Jarvey thought, he might be safe. However, from this point he couldn’t see much of the garden at all, except for the tops of the trees, and so he was out of sight of the searchers.

  The sinking sun beat down, so fierce that its heat felt almost like a physical pressure on his skin. After what seemed like an hour, he heard voices, first just the murmurous sound, and then the actual words. Junius Midion seemed angry. “You have interrupted our precious rehearsal time for this, my son. Well, here we are, and there is no boy. Augustus, are you satisfied at last that you were mistaken?”

  Augustus sounded dogged and upset when he replied, “I know I saw him, Father. A little ragamuffin of twelve or thirteen, a lot like Bates in Life on the Streets, or, The Beggars’ Tragedy.”

  “But we haven’t done that play in thirty or forty seasons now, and we haven’t had a Bates in ages,” Junius shot back. “Nor a boy of twelve or thirteen in any of our plays of late date.”

  Jarvey lay on his stomach and inched forward. He peeked over the edge of the terrace and saw Junius and Augustus nearly below him, under the shade of the trees. Beyond them, the phantom army of searchers wavered in the sunlight, looking transparent and insubstantial. None of them thought to look up.

  From twenty feet below Jarvey, Junius Midion chuckled, a rich, self-satisfied sound. “Son, I think I know what is happening. You have a wonderful imagination, the great Midion gift of invention, and it is acting up a bit just at present. Like your father, you are destined to be a great playwright as well as a talented and successful actor. Perhaps your first effort might be titled The Ghost Boy, or, The Intruder in the Garden, eh?”

  Augustus nearly snarled, “Don’t make fun of me, Father! I know what I saw.”

  “My boy, those of us who have become celebrated on the stages of the world—”

  This time Augustus sounded positively angry with his father: “Celebrated? Father, they used to laugh at your tragedies and boo at your comedies! Until you used the Grimoire to create the World Theater, no one appreciated your plays or our acting!”

  “They were fools,” Junius said coldly. “Fools and philistines, who had no true understanding of the muses of comedy and tragedy! The greater their loss when we left them behind forever. I’m surprised you think of them at all, boy, after so much time has passed, after their idiotic disapproval has been swamped with the love and adoration our audiences here have shown us for our efforts. This is much better. Now we have audiences who understand us, who always applaud! Don’t you agree, all of you?”

  Even though the hot sun was wringing sweat from him, Jarvey felt a chill pass down his spine as a chorus of low, whispery voices began to rustle like wind in the trees: “Astonishing performance, sir!” “Excellently well written!” “Very moving!” “I’ve never laughed so much!” The voices died down gradually to a distant hum and then to silence. Though the words were enthusiastic, the tone of the voices sounded infinitely sad and dreary to Jarvey.

  “Could there be anyone in the trees?” Augustus demanded in a peevish sort of way. “If he got this far, surely he’d think to climb.”

  Jarvey ducked back.

  “Look up,” Junius ordered. “Look carefully. Is there a boy concealed in the trees, my friends?”

  Again came the chorus of weirdly identical voices: “No, sir.” “Nothing, sir.” “I see no one, sir.”

  Augustus was not satisfied. “Maybe I should climb up in one of them just to make sure. If he got this far, he might have—”

  Then Junius sighed. “Come on, son. We really have no time for this just at present. I want to finish with Act Four today, so tomorrow we can concentrate on the grand climax and of course our curtain call. Remember, we perform on the evening after that.”

  “But Father—”

  “Augustus, if it makes you feel better, I shall place a spell of warning on the garden and on all the doors. There cannot be an intruder, for where would he come from? But if anything is out of place or wrong, we shall know instantly just where it is and what it is.”

  “A spell will take you hours.”

  “After our rehearsal, I shall attend to it, Augustus,” Junius said firmly. “Come.”

  Jarvey heard retreating footsteps, and again he wormed his way forward on his stomach until he could peek over the edge of the terrace.

  What he saw startled him so much that he almost overbalanced and fell off the edge of the flat roof The whole row of top-hatted, black-coated men stood directly beneath him, about a foot away from the wall, facing the wall and staring straight ahead at the marble. Junius and Augustus were striding away through the bean rows some distance away, heading for the distant doorway.

  But the strange thing was that the men underneath him were dissolving. Their top hats were already transparent when Jarvey first caught sight of them, and in a few seconds they had disappeared. And then, horribly, the flesh and hair crept away from their heads, starting at the crown, revealing translucent, milky skulls that almost immediately grew as clear as glass and then vanished in shreds of gray vapor. The necks, the shoulders, the arms, the chests all faded to skeletal bones, and then the bones evaporated like mist in the sun. The whole process might have taken no more than ten seconds, but to Jarvey it seemed to stretch on and on.

  Even after the ghostly men had disappeared, Jarvey didn’t dare to come down for a long time. Far across the garden the forms of Junius and Augustus slipped inside the doorway. From here Jarvey could not even tell for sure that they had closed the door. With great caution he crept sideways, into the shade of the tree, and waited.

  At last, as the sun slanted lower in the cloudless sky, Jarvey stood up, walked out into the mushy layer of leaf mold, and made a leap straight upward. With hands already sore and blistered from his earlier climb, he caught the creaking branch and hauled himself into the apple tree again. He worked his way down, dropped to the ground, and began to search for Betsy. He couldn’t find her anywhere, and at last he limped toward the only doorway out of the garden. His leg muscles felt stiff and sore, and his throat felt parched. From a safe distance he could see the door was indeed shut.

  He hoped it wasn’t locked.

  Like a flat lid sliding over the top of a square box, a gray layer of cloud had swept in from behind him, shutting off the direct sunlight. Jarvey soon heard the patter of rain, then felt the first drops as he crossed the little winding brook in the center of the garden.

  He shivered. Even the rain was spooky, more like water drizzling from regularly spaced sprinklers than real rain. He wondered if Junius had arranged the weather on this odd world so that his garden would be watered every afternoon. Lunnon had experienced occasional storms, but Tantalus Midion, who had created that world, had not paid as much attention to detail as Junius. Lunnon had not even had a proper sun, just a diffuse, brassy glow in the sky. But Lunnon had people in it, real people, criminals whom Tantalus had brought to his world, kidnap victims whom he had taken by force, and their descendants, real flesh-and-blood people, not ghosts and robots. There the people were substantial, and the buildings had been made by their hands, not by magic. The weather in Lunnon and the surroundings was random and messy. Here everything seemed somehow sharp, substantial—everything but the people.

  But then, Junius probably was the one who had designed and created all the stage sets with their amazing impression of reality. Why should his world look false when he was such a master of illusion?

  Jarvey reached the door at last, soaked to the skin and miserable, and tried the handle. It opened immediately.

  Jarvey tiptoed down the hallway, and as he was passing a darkened doorway, someone inside went “Psst!” making him jump about a foot.

  “It’s me,” Betsy hissed from the darkness. “Here’s where they live!”

  Jarvey ducked inside the doorway. First he
passed through an alcove, then into a cluttered room thickly furnished with overstuffed chairs, sofas, and love seats. Colored-pencil sketches of Junius, Augustus, Honoria, and Sarah Midion almost covered every wall in the room, the pictures showing their subjects in various theatrical costumes: pirates, soldiers, ancient Greeks and Romans, and kings, queens, princesses, and princes. With a rush of relief, Jarvey saw that Betsy had laid the Grimoire on a table. On top of it she had opened a large scrapbook. “Look at this,” she said.

  The pages seemed very old, yellowed and brittle with age. Pasted in the scrapbook were dozens of newspaper and magazine stories, all about Junius and Sarah Midion. Some were dated. Jarvey saw one that came from the year 1822.

  All of the articles were reviews of plays that the Midions had done back on the real Earth. Jarvey didn’t have to read many to understand that Junius Midion’s reputation as actor and playwright had been pretty miserable back in those days. The kindest of them said one of the plays was “not actually completely foul.”

  “According to these, they’re all horrible actors,” Betsy said.

  Jarvey told her what he had overheard in the garden. “I was right,” he finished. “Junius Midion got hold of the Grimoire and used its magic to build a world where everyone would always love him and his family. Now he can make up any play at all, and it’s always a hit.” He reached for the Grimoire, and Betsy, who never liked to be close to the book, shivered a little. “Come on, we’ve got to get out of here. Maybe we can leave tonight, when the family’s asleep. But we can’t let them catch us in their apartment.”

  “But your mother and father—”

  “I don’t think they could be here in this world,” Jarvey said. “When Siyamon Midion tried to trap me in the book, he told me to turn to the very last chapter. This can’t be the last chapter in the book. It must’ve been written even before the Lunnon one you came from, because the date’s earlier. When I tried to use the Grimoire, we went the wrong way. Siyamon would probably put my mom, my dad, and me in the chapter he was writing, not just stick them somewhere else in the book. Come on. Let’s get someplace where we know we’ll be safe and I’ll open the Grimoire and get us out of here.”