Jarvey shrugged, feeling helpless.
Time crawled by until noon, and when the mail carrier drove her little truck down the street, Jarvey went out to meet her. She handed him a bundle of letters, magazines, and catalogs, and he sorted through them as he walked back to the house. A magazine about history that his dad subscribed to, catalogs from clothing stores and gift stores, a water bill from the county, three or four credit-card offers from banks, and a square envelope addressed to Jarvey. Probably a birthday card, he guessed, since his birthday was coming up in a couple of days.
No heavy, creamy envelope with foreign stamps on it. Jarvey breathed a sigh of relief as he dropped the mail into the basket on the hall table. “Mail’s here,” he called, and then he took the square envelope addressed to him up to his room.
Sprawling down on the bed, Jarvey tore it open, and took out the card inside. Huh, he thought, strange kind of birthday card. No picture on it at all, just a blank white card, folded. Maybe it had a funny message inside.
He opened it up and found the inside of the card was just as blank and white as the outside: no picture, no funny saying, no check from his grandmother, nothing at all. He turned the card over and over, frowning at it, wondering if it was some kind of prank.
And then the card squirmed in his grasp.
Jarvey caught his breath. The white cardboard was pulsating, swelling and shrinking like a balloon. Suddenly a blister rose up on the surface, became an oval, and the oval became a white mask of a face. It opened blank eyes, and in a whispery voice, the face spoke to him: “It’s not real! None of it is real!”
With a startled gasp, Jarvey flung the card away. It burst into smoke, a silent explosion, and the smoke faded.
The envelope was gone too. All evidence of the card’s existence had vanished.
But Jarvey remembered the face, remembered the voice, and he recognized both of them.
“Betsy,” he said.
13
This Is the Way the World Ends
Jarvey opened his eyes in darkness. He lay tangled in sheets, and he was sweating so much he felt soaked. Jarvey kicked and writhed and flailed until he had unwrapped himself, flipped over onto his stomach, and then he saw the red digital display of his clock radio: 5:10.
“No,” he groaned. It was all happening again.
And then he scrambled out of bed, his heart swelling painfully in his throat. This wasn’t déjà vu, and it wasn’t a bad dream. He remembered the terrible spinning sensation, the fall through space, the card with Betsy’s face, everything!
He wasn’t home. The people in the room next to his weren’t his parents. Something terrible had happened. Jarvey pulled his jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers on, then ran out to the landing, opened his parents’ bedroom door, and stood breathing hard, listening.
No sound at all—he heard nothing, no breathing, no snoring, nothing. He turned on the light.
His father sat half up in bed, his hand on the bedside lamp. He was frozen in that attitude, like a department store mannequin, and beside him, Jarvey’s mom was just beginning to rise from her interrupted sleep. Jarvey walked stiffly over and looked at the time on the clock. It was 5:11, a couple of minutes before he had come in.
The ... actors weren’t ready to begin yet. Staring at his father, Jarvey had the sickening sensation that something wasn’t finished. Dr. Midion’s skin was slick, like plastic, not like real flesh, and his hair looked strange, more like something artificial than real hair. Jarvey backed away, turned off the light, and shut the door. He stood there breathing hard for a few minutes, and then he knocked, just as he had before.
He heard his father’s voice again: “Hmm? What is it? Come in.”
Jarvey opened the door and said, “Who are you?”
His father clicked his bedside lamp on and sat up, his hair sticking every which way as he fumbled around on his bedside table for his glasses. “Jarvey? What time is it? What’s wrong? House on fire?”
Now he looked perfect, the image of Dr. Midion. Jarvey balled his hands into fists and said, “You’re not real! Who are you? What’s going on?”
“What’s wrong, sweetheart?” his mom asked, brushing her hair back out of her eyes. Jarvey groaned. It was his mom, it was—no, it wasn’t! It was some horrible creation like the actors in Junius Midion’s nightmare theater, pretending to be her.
“Is Siyamon doing this?” Jarvey demanded.
His dad had finally found his glasses, and he peered through them at his watch. “Five fifteen on a Saturday morning! This is a fine way to start your summer vacation, son. What’s wrong?”
Jarvey stared at him. “You can’t say anything new, can you? Siyamon somehow figured out what I would ask, and he programmed you both to answer me, just like you were real, but you can’t handle anything he didn’t plan for.”
“Thunder?” his mother asked, reaching for her robe. “Is it raining?”
“Stop it!” Jarvey yelled. “I’ve been trying and trying to find you and get back to you, and he’s tricked me! Stop it, I know it isn’t real!”
When his mother began to step toward him, he turned and ran out of the room, down the stairs, and out onto the lawn. “Betsy!” he yelled. “Where are you? What happened?”
The earth began to shake so hard that Jarvey’s teeth clicked together. He staggered and stumbled, then fell to his knees on the lawn. “No! I don’t believe in this,” he said fiercely. “I don’t believe in Siyamon’s magic and illusions! This isn’t my house, and those aren’t my mom and dad!”
The ground under his knees and hands felt horribly wrong, mushy and soft, like mud. He rose again and then found his feet were sinking down into the earth. Floundering, half falling, Jarvey lurched to the driveway, dragged himself up onto it, and stood there staring at what was happening to his house.
The sky had become quite light, but not with sunrise. A flat, bronze radiance lit it, and the house looked strange and unreal in that light.
And it was melting.
The house sagged horribly. A window slipped down into a drooling hole, the roof slowly sagged downward. The whole neighborhood was becoming a plastic, soggy goo. From the hole that had been the front door a few moments earlier, his father came, taking jerky steps. “Mow the lawn,” he gibbered. “Champ baseball lemonade mow lawn history college summer break baseball Jarvey lawn magic grimoire grimoire grimoire ...”
The figure fell on its face and in a horrifying way tried to crawl forward, but like the house, it was melting and rubbery. One leg stretched thin and broke off The fingers fell off and burrowed into the soft earth like pink worms. The eyes had fallen away behind the spectacles, and the creature stared at Jarvey with empty sockets as the dissolving mouth continued to babble in a terrible, liquid imitation of Jarvey’s dad’s voice: “Bebaw garrhhh jarrv ssssummmerrrrr ...” It trailed off in a gargling bubble, and the form collapsed flat, like a balloon emptying itself of air.
Jarvey backed away, desperately hoping that his mother, or the imitation of her, would not come out. He spun around. The neighborhood had dissolved. Now before him lay an endless flat expanse of brassy, sandy earth, all the way to a distant, vague horizon. The air felt thick in his lungs, and the heat, the terrible heat, was like an oven. When he turned back, he couldn’t even find the place where the house had stood, and he saw no trace of the awful creature that had imitated his father.
But from somewhere he heard a voice, a mocking voice with an English accent: “This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.”
“Where are you?” Jarvey yelled. “Siyamon, where are you?”
Laughter, mocking and cold, was the only reply. “You could have them back,” the voice said from everywhere at once. “Your mother, your father. Your life. All you have to do is surrender the book, you know.”
The Grimore. But he had lost the Grimoire!
“No,” he said, trying to sound a lot braver than he felt. “It wouldn’t be real! You’d trap us in some world you
created and make us believe we were home.”
“Not I,” the voice said, and now Jarvey began to have the feeling that it wasn’t the voice of Siyamon Midion after all. It didn’t sound as old, as silky, as insinuating as the old man’s voice, for one thing. “My master might trouble with you, but not 1. If he left matters to me, I would squash you like an insect.”
Jarvey closed his eyes. Who was that? It wasn’t Tantalus, or Junius, or Haimish Midion. “Where are you?” he demanded, opening his eyes again. “Let me see you!”
“I am outside,” the voice responded. “And you are inside. You could let me in, though. Use the book and let me in, and then we shall talk.”
Jarvey felt his anger rising. “Shut up! Liar!”
“You shall feel differently in a few hours. Or a few years. Or a few hundred years,” the voice said.
Jarvey wanted to run, to pound something, to fight back. But he had nothing to fight against. He stood in the center of a flat desert beneath a featureless sky. There was nothing to hit. He felt furious at the unseen voice. “Betsy, where are you?” he yelled at the top of his lungs.
“She is lost in a book at the moment,” the voice returned mockingly. “If you would simply open the book and—”
“Betsy!”
Jarvey saw something moving, and he ran toward it. He had thought it was someone lying on the sand, trying to sit up. No, what he saw was made entirely of sand. A mound of it was stirring, looking like a miniature sand dune in sped-up motion, coming toward him as he ran. He stopped a few feet away.
The sand was becoming the image of a person—of Betsy. A statue of sand, perfect in every feature, as if Betsy were crawling toward him on her stomach. The sand head looked up blindly, and the sand mouth opened. “Jarvey?” the voice asked, like Betsy’s, but distant and thin.
“Here. Help me!”
“It isn’t real,” the sand Betsy said. “Not in the book. Not in the book. Siyamon’s man, not Siyamon. Don’t believe him. It isn’t real. Use your art.”
“I don’t have any art!”
“You do. Use ... use it ....”
A dry wind sprang up, and the Betsy statue dissolved, the grains of sand trailing out in long streamers. Jarvey reached for them and felt the stinging grains pelt his skin.
He knelt in the sand, his head bowed. “I don’t have any art,” he whispered.
But he did. He had used it in Lunnon. He had made himself unnoticeable in Haimish Midion’s jungle world, had called down a bolt of lightning when he and Betsy had been trapped in the forest. How had he—?
He thought back to all the strange things that had happened around him, to the time when he had been angry because of a canceled field trip and the windows of his school had blown out. And the time when he was upset because he had made a mistake at the board, the electrical circuits in the school had fried themselves. The time when the pressure had been on him in a ball game to get a hit, and his bat had exploded as he smacked a home run.
When I’m upset, he thought. Or when I’m good and mad. That’s when I can call on the art. That’s when I can do magic.
And he thought of the terrible trick he had almost fallen for, of the imitation of his father and his mother. The man whose voice was taunting him had made them, had prepared the trap. He would crush Jarvey like a bug, like an insect.
Jarvey saw in memory the white, pale face of the spidery man in his nightmare. He had seen it before. When Siyamon Midion had ushered him into his car, his Rolls-Royce, that man had been at the wheel of the car. Siyamon had even mentioned his name. A strange name, not Midion, not a relative, but...
What was it?
Jarvey grabbed handfuls of hot sand and squeezed them. What was the name? Haimish Midion had contemptuously told his brother that a good magician could control anything if he knew its true name! And Siyamon had said the man’s name. If only Jarvey could remember!
They were in the Rolls~Royce, and Siyamon was taking Jarvey to Bywater House, Siyamon’s mansion outside of London. Siyamon was toying with his silver-headed cane and his voice was droning on and on. What had he said?
“... you will enjoy a tour of my home, perhaps tomorrow, as they and I are attending the reading of the will. I shall have Mr ....”
Mr.—Mr. what? Siyamon had said the name, an odd name, and it was almost on the tip of Jarvey’s tongue. If he knew it, he could do something. If he could remember the name, the name of—
“Henge!” Jarvey said suddenly. “Rupert Henge!”
Thunder crashed from the brassy sky. Jarvey felt a surge of anger. “Rupert Henge!” he shouted again. “This isn’t real! None of this is real! I don’t believe in it! I want to see the truth! Now!”
The world swirled around him, but Jarvey sprang to his feet and stood firm. The desert vanished as though swept away in a sandstorm. Instead of the desert, there was a room, a dim room with gray walls, and standing a few feet away from Jarvey, his expression somehow fearful and furious at once, was the pale-faced spider of a man. He raised his hands.
“Then see the truth—and die!” shouted Rupert Henge.
14
The Unwritten future
Henge thrust his hands forward, fingers spread, and an invisible fist smashed into Jarvey, knocking him right off his feet. The wind huffed out of his lungs as he hit the wall behind him, but he didn’t fall. Henge made a flapping gesture, and Jarvey slid up the wall, stuck there like a bug on a windshield. “Midions aren’t the only ones who can wield the art,” Henge said, a ghastly grin splitting his face.
“What—what will Siyamon say when you tell him you didn’t get the book?” Jarvey gasped out.
Henge’s whole face jerked in a snarl of rage. For a moment he hesitated, but then he pulled his hands back, and Jarvey plummeted five feet to the floor, landing with a shock that made him bite his tongue. He collapsed to his hands and knees and crouched there, waiting for his lungs to work properly again.
“Where is the Grimoire?” Henge asked.
“Where you’ll never find it,” Jarvey managed to gasp, hoping he sounded more certain than he felt.
“You thought we’d never find you,” Henge said with a sneer. “But Master Siyamon has ways of tracking you. Especially when you sleep. Do you enjoy the dreams he sends you?”
The nightmares. Jarvey closed his eyes. Siyamon had sent the nightmares to torment him. “He thought I’d panic and use the book, didn’t he?” Jarvey asked in a voice of fury. He opened his eyes and glared at Henge. “He knows when I use the book, doesn’t he?”
“He is the master of the Grimoire. What do you think? Give me the book, boy.”
Jarvey got unsteadily to his feet. “Where are we now?”
“That is of no importance. Give me the Grimoire.”
Jarvey shook his head. “No. You can’t find it, and Siyamon wouldn’t let you use it. So where are we?”
“I could make you feel greater pain than you’ve ever dreamed possible.”
“Maybe so,” Jarvey said. “But it wouldn’t do you any good, not if you really want the book. Look, I’ll—I’ll answer a question for you if you answer one for me. Where are we? We can’t be in a world created by the Grimoire.”
For a long moment Henge stared at him with a look of utter hatred. “Midions,” he said finally. “You are all alike, aren’t you? And not just in looks. He is stubborn, too. Very well. This”—he spread his hands—“this is not a world, not as you know the ones the Grimoire leads to. It is a state of mind, a place of illusion. It can seem very real. It could be your way of being with your parents again. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
Jarvey shook his head. “Not in the way you mean, not with some kind of robot things that talk like my parents and look like them, but that don’t really exist.”
“Now my question,” Henge said. “Where is the book?”
“Sorry,” Jarvey said softly. “You asked a question already, and I answered it.”
Henge growled like an animal and drew his
hand back. Jarvey, hanging on to the memory of the horrible things that had almost convinced him they were his mother and father, raised his own hands and yelled something at the same moment: “Protect me!”
Henge shot his hand forward, but a yard from Jarvey’s face, the air burst into crackling flame, red, green, orange tongues curving back and around Jarvey, as though he were standing in a crystal dome and the fire couldn’t reach him. He felt a numbing vibration, as if the whole world were being jackhammered apart, but he held his hands up, pushing against the magic Henge had directed at him.
The man stepped back, his chest heaving, his eyes wary. “You do have some of the art,” he said. “Well, well. My master believed you would be helpless.”
“Yeah, well, Siyamon’s a liar. You should know that if you’ve worked for him long.”
“I wonder, though, how long you can keep up your defense. Not long enough, I suspect.” With the speed of a striking rattlesnake, Henge lashed a hand toward Jarvey.
Flinching, Jarvey tried to divert the force, but he was a second too slow. Heat washed over him, and the walls shimmered away to gray boiling mist. In an instant he stood in a featureless landscape, surrounded by ragged, roiling gray fog. Jarvey sensed rather than saw that Henge was charging him, and he quickly yelled, “Let me see!”
The fog did not dissipate, but he did see, in a way— Henge’s shape showed up as a dull red human-shaped glow, already pitching forward to grab him. Jarvey pivoted faster than he ever had on the baseball diamond, and Henge barely missed him. “You can’t see me!” Jarvey said urgently, hoping with all his being that he could pull it off “You can’t see me at all!”
He backed away. Henge had rushed past him. His flickering red shape turned slowly, arms spread out. “You can’t hide,” he said. “Not in here. Not in my illusion.”
Jarvey edged farther away, not daring to breathe loudly. He couldn’t see Henge in any detail, just that vague, glowing silhouette, but from the way the figure swung its head from side to side, like a bear standing on its hind legs and swiveling to test the breeze for scents, he guessed that his spell was holding. He wasn’t invisible, but Henge didn’t seem to be able to locate him.
Tracked by Terror Page 11
