The Eye of Midnight

by Andrew Brumbach

  At length William swallowed down the last of a bowl of greasy fritters and licked his fingers.

  “Did you hear what he said? About locking Binny up with the colonel?”

  “I heard,” replied Maxine. “Grandpa is here somewhere.”

  William nodded. “I wish we could get our hands on those keys.”

  Maxine thought of the lifeless body sprawled on the floor in the next room. “He’ll kill us if he catches us, won’t he?” she murmured.

  “The Rafiq?” said Nura. “Yes. He is bir canavar—an ogre.”

  “He wants the Eye of Midnight pretty bad, though,” said William. “Maybe he’ll make a trade—Grandpa for the mirror.”

  “He doesn’t seem much like the bargaining type,” Maxine replied.

  “At least now we know why the gangsters had the mirror, though,” said William. “ST was working for the Rafiq.”

  “It still doesn’t make any sense,” Maxine said. “Why did the Rafiq need ST in the first place? Why didn’t he just send the fida’i to the harbor to steal the mirror themselves?”

  “The White Rat was a clumsy, ignorant servant,” said Nura in agreement.

  “It’s almost as if the Rafiq was trying to get his hands on the Eye of Midnight without the fida’i knowing about it,” said Maxine. “He made sure the room was empty before he mentioned it to ST.”

  William tugged meditatively at a rope of linked sausages. “Maybe we should leave the Rafiq a note,” he said. “Tell him we have the Old Man’s precious mirror and that we’ll hand it over when he lets Grandpa go free.”

  Nura lowered her head dejectedly and murmured something under her breath.

  “What’s wrong?” asked William. “Wasn’t that the plan? To use the mirror to ransom Grandpa?”

  “The mirror might buy his freedom, yes,” said Nura. “Though I doubt the Rafiq would honor any promise that he made. But Colonel Battersea is not the Old Man of the Mountain’s only prisoner.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Nura hesitated. “I have not told you everything,” she said at last, and her cheeks flushed. “You asked me before why my parents had sent me all alone to find Colonel Battersea—why they didn’t come themselves. The truth is, they could not. It was impossible.”

  Her face was hard, and she looked steadily at the cousins. “My parents both lie captive in the desert fortress of Alamut.”

  “They’re prisoners of the Old Man, too?” asked William in surprise. “How? Why?”

  “The Hashashin fell on us in the night,” said Nura slowly, and the cousins could see in her eyes that she was there now, reliving the terrible moment in her mind. “My parents sacrificed themselves so that I could escape. They had warned me that the Old Man might find us one day, and I knew what I was to do. I saddled our horse and fled for the coast with the Eye of Midnight, not certain if my parents were alive or dead. Only when I reached the household of Yusuf in Alexandretta did I learn that they had been carried away to Alamut.”

  “Yusuf?” broke in William. “The same Yusuf who sent Grandpa the telegram?”

  Nura nodded. “Yusuf is a man my father knew from long ago and trusted. A man he said was a friend of Colonel Battersea’s who would be of help if trouble ever found us.”

  “But why were your parents in trouble in the first place?” asked Maxine. “What did they do to make an enemy of the Old Man of the Mountain?”

  “They possessed the Eye of Midnight,” said Nura. “That in itself was enough. And when the Old Man had torn apart our home and discovered that the mirror was nowhere to be found, he took my parents as security for its return. Word came to Yusuf of their fate. They lie now in the Dungeons of Paradise, beneath the desert fortress of Alamut. If we give up the mirror to rescue Colonel Battersea…”

  She paused and shook her head hopelessly.

  “If we give up the mirror to rescue Grandpa,” said William, “then your last chance of seeing your parents again goes with it.”

  Nura nodded.

  William found an apple in a barrel at his elbow and polished it thoughtfully on his sleeve.

  “Well then,” he said, “I guess we’ll just have to get our hands on those keys.”

  “Come on,” said William at length, rising and brushing the crumbs from his jacket. “Let’s see what else is back here.”

  They wandered deeper in, foraging among the piles of supplies, until they reached the back of the storeroom and the foot of what they first believed to be a set of staggered shelves.

  Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be a rickety wooden staircase—so heavily burdened with jars and sacks and tins that their first conclusion was entirely understandable. Nudging aside a few casks and boxes, they picked their way to the top and bobbed their heads through a dark, rectangular opening in the ceiling above.

  They were looking out across an old attic with rough planked floors, and if the quantity of dust and cobwebs was any indication, the Hashashin rarely ventured here. They clambered up, and Nura raised her lamp to dispel the dark. All at once they perceived that the space was much bigger than they had first thought, opening out into a vast enclosure.

  Maxine stooped to grasp a soiled paper label that lay at her feet.

  THE DEVOITTE CO.

  “ADAMANT” Celebrated Spar Varnish

  “We must be in the old factory we saw from the graveyard,” she said.

  They were, in point of fact, standing amid the rack and ruin of the Devoitte Paint and Varnish Works—a dense jungle of wooden scaffolding and presses, decaying machinery and rusting pipes. The wheels of progress, grinding ever on, had reduced the factory to a dilapidated hulk.

  They prowled the creaking floors beneath a skeletal tracery of beams and swagged ropes. Stepping around the end of a long row of battered copper tanks, William happened to glance down at the floor and saw that there, beneath his feet, the rough wooden planks were edged with flickering light.

  He lay flat on his stomach and put his eye to a gap between the planks. “It’s the round room,” he said with surprise. “I can see the purple flame.”

  Maxine stretched out beside him. “Such an awful, nasty secret,” she murmured. “Upstairs the factory looks cold and empty, but it’s all a lie. The basement’s crawling with killers. The Hashashin can come and go through the graveyard, and the city never knows they’re here.”

  “How many of them are there, do you figure?”

  “Who knows? The place seems quiet now, though.”

  William crawled forward, keeping his eye just above the crack between the planks. “This could be our ticket.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean we might be able to find Grandpa without having to go down there and risk our necks.”

  Nura’s eyes swept the darkened attic. “It is huge,” she said. “It must cover the entire building below. We will have to look through many cracks.”

  They fanned out across the littered floor, treading softly.

  “I can’t see a thing over here,” Maxine whispered. “The ceilings on this side have all been plastered over.”

  “Hey, M,” said William. “Come have a look at this.”

  She trotted over, but as she reached the spot where William was standing, he caught her by the arm.

  “Careful,” he said, “that first step’s a doozy.”

  Maxine looked down at her toes. The floor ended in an abrupt edge that stretched away to either side of the factory. A black chasm lay below.

  Nura joined them at the brink. “What lies down there in the darkness, do you suppose?” she asked.

  “Beats me,” William said uneasily.

  “I guess we’ll know when the sun comes up,” said Maxine.

  “Right. In the meantime, we might as well get some shut-eye.”

  “Honestly, Will. How can you even think about sleep at a time like this?”

  “Sleep is pretty much all I can think about right now,” said William, rummaging through an aisle of scattered trays
and broken carts. He found a pile of discarded burlap sacks behind a sagging trough and flopped down with a groan. “We can figure out a plan in the morning, when it’s light enough to see.”

  Maxine started to protest, then realized that she was bone-tired herself. “Well, maybe just a short nap,” she said.

  Nura joined them, and they settled themselves as best they could on the lumpy pile of sacks. A huddled dole of doves warbled softly in the rafters above, and through a broken bank of mullioned windows and a ragged hole in the roof, a thin gust of wind rustled in.

  “What do you suppose our parents would say if they could see us now?” asked William.

  “It’s a good thing they can’t,” Maxine replied. “Mom especially. She doesn’t need to know anything about it. She’d be worried to death.” She tugged at a loose strand on the burlap sack beneath her. “I hope she’s sitting on a beach somewhere, without a care in the world—her hair tied up in a scarf and a dozen nurses waiting on her hand and foot.”

  “She’ll be all right, M,” said William. “Everything will be just like it was before she got sick. You’ll see.”

  Maxine sighed and hugged her knees to her chest. “She used to call me Blossom,” she said, and William and Nura couldn’t tell if she was talking to them anymore or just remembering aloud. “Like something small and pretty, you know? Something worth stopping to admire.”

  William let Maxine’s words linger for a moment.

  “What about you, Nura?” he asked. “You must be missing your folks, too, huh? I guess you must think about them all the time.”

  Nura didn’t answer. She pulled the cigar box from her haversack and ran her finger along its edge, lost in reflection.

  “I owe you both a great debt,” she said. “You have placed yourselves in gravest danger for me—faced killers and entered darkened tombs—all to help me recover the mirror, when you could have left the city and returned to your grandfather’s house. For all this and more, I offer my eternal friendship and my deepest thanks.”

  Maxine put her hand around the small girl’s neck and pulled her close until their foreheads touched. “Well, gee, Nura,” she said with a grin, “we accept your offer of eternal friendship. As far as I’m concerned, meeting you is the only redeeming thing about this whole wretched mess. I’d be awfully sorry if I hadn’t.”

  Nura bent her head shyly. “I have no brother or sister,” she said, struggling to find the words, “and unlike both of you, I have never known any cousin. But now we have found one another, and I am very happy. You are…” She faltered. “You are family to me,” she said, clearing her throat and twisting the corner of her scarf.

  William put his arm around her awkwardly and gave her shoulders a squeeze.

  Nura’s face broke into a grateful smile, and she looked as if she had just unburdened herself of a heavy load. She sat between the cousins, motionless for a while, deep in thought. Then she rubbed her eyes and yawned, and soon her head sagged against William’s shoulder and her breath came in long, even intervals.

  “Sweet dreams, kid,” he said.

  “She’s not as fragile as she looks, is she?” said Maxine. “It’s funny, but I think I feel the same way she does. Connected, I mean. I’m not sure why—we hardly know her at all.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. We know her name, don’t we? At least her first one.”

  “That’s true.” Maxine giggled. “Nura…It sounds funny, doesn’t it?”

  “It means ‘light,’ ” said Nura without opening her eyes.

  Maxine gasped and pinched her arm. “That’s a nasty trick, you know, eavesdropping on your friends like that.”

  Nura laughed, for the first time since they had met her, perhaps, and then she closed her eyes again and recited softly:

  “Ash-sha‘b as-salik fi az-zolma absara nur ‘azim.”

  “Is that your name? Your full name?” asked William. “It’s kind of a mouthful.”

  She shook her head. “Ancient words. My parents chose them for me as a namesake. They speak of a people living in darkness and of a great light.”

  Nura’s thoughts bent homeward, to days that lingered only in her memory: her mother, picking dates in the cool of the evening when the grove was fragrant with laurel and honeysuckle; her father, reading to her by firelight, his rough hand on her head where it lay in his lap.

  “Ana…Baba…,” she whispered. “Where are you now? What has become of you?” She held the package close, as if it were a life preserver and she were floating in a vast ocean.

  Maxine brushed the hair from the small girl’s forehead and pulled her checkered scarf up under her chin. Nura smiled and scratched her nose, but her eyelids never lifted.

  Above them the doves ruffled their feathers and settled on their perch. The night was cold now, and blighted. Maxine hugged her arms tight to her chest and stretched out on their makeshift mattress, wrinkling her nose at the disagreeable pong of mineral spirits and dusty hemp. She had never felt so lost and terribly afraid. These desolate thoughts were only in her head, of course, but Nura, on the edge of dreams, must have heard them all the same. She reached out and found Maxine’s hand, and soon they both lay fast asleep.

  They awoke to shouts and the sounds of screeching metal and groaning ropes. Morning had come and gone, and the afternoon sun slanted in through the dusty windows of the factory. William, Maxine, and Nura rubbed their eyes and lifted their heads cautiously, remembering where they were.

  “What’s all the racket?” muttered William.

  The sounds were coming from the direction of the pit.

  They craned their necks to find the source, but their view was obscured by a pair of enormous cast-iron boilers that stood some ten feet beyond the precipice and rose from the unseen depths toward the ceiling high above. The boilers had been invisible in the gloom the night before, but now Nura and the cousins wondered how they could ever have missed them. Their cylindrical surfaces were knobbed with rivets and wheeled valves, and iron ladders were bolted to their sides.

  Moving quietly, the trio crawled forward to a spot with a better view, flattened themselves to the floor, and peered over the brink.

  Maxine exhaled weakly. “Heaven help us,” she whispered.

  They were looking out over an immense space. The room below had once been the main factory floor of the varnish works, but apart from a towering iron furnace on the far wall, the decaying equipment had all been carted out to make room for a kind of broad amphitheater. Black banners lined the walls, and the ever-present twelve-pointed star was painted large on the center of the floor. The room was teeming with Hashashin.

  “They’ve turned the factory into some kind of temple,” said William.

  Down on the floor, in front of the unlit furnace, a wide wooden stage had been constructed, fronted with a broad flight of steps, and on this stretching dais there sat a great black chair, flanked by smaller versions of the same—six seats on either side.

  A pair of fida’i turned a spoked windlass on one side of the room, straining against a system of ropes and pulleys that hoisted a spiked iron gate. When it was fully raised, the fida’i tied off the windlass and threw open a towering double door just beyond the iron teeth of the massive portcullis, and a pair of horses pulling a heavy cart clopped down a ramp outside. They passed beneath the spikes and came to a stop, stamping and snorting on the factory floor. A dozen of the Hashashin gathered around, and a long wooden crate was heaved down from the cart.

  “That box looks awfully familiar,” Maxine whispered.

  The fida’i shouldered the crate and bore it up the steps like somber pallbearers, then laid it on the dais and crowded near.

  There was a great stir around the box. One of the Hashashin brought a crowbar and bent over the crate, prying open the lid. The pack of fida’i gave a heave, and a shining black statue rose from the packing straw, towering over the cloaked men.

  “Hey! They’ve got a jinni just like Grandpa’s!” whispered William.


  “That is Grandpa’s jinni, blockhead,” hissed Maxine. “They must have ransacked the manor.”

  The wooden figure was raised on a pedestal behind the great chair, its widespread legs straddling the throne while its menacing stare surveyed the temple.

  “That’s not all they’ve got,” said William. “They must’ve found Grandpa’s weapons case, too.”

  The fida’i rifled through the packing straw at the bottom of the crate, and now they held aloft the shining blades and the small clay spheres.

  But at that instant every head in the temple turned as a door opened between the two boilers, directly beneath Nura and the cousins. A tall individual appeared, crossing the great hall and making his way to the dais.

  The Rafiq mounted the steps and approached the towering black silhouette. He climbed up onto the throne and stood on the seat, studying the statue thoughtfully for a moment, face to face, grasping the glass orb that hung round its neck and inserting it between the open jaws so that the gold chain draped from both sides of the creature’s mouth like a bridle. The Rafiq’s face creased in a sardonic smile, and he sat down in the large black chair and inspected the room, watching the preparations with satisfaction.

  A group of gray-haired men entered, carrying small stools and enameled bowls with flashing instruments inside. They placed the stools beside the twelve chairs and arranged the bowls on top. Small bundles, wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine, were laid beneath the seats. An enormous bass drum stretched with animal hide was rolled up in front of the steps, and behind the dais the doors and vents of the furnace were opened wide and other servants brought wood and arranged it inside.

  “It looks like they’re getting ready for some kind of ceremony,” said William.

  Maxine elbowed Nura. “Are they going to wake the jinni?”

  Nura shrugged, clueless.

  “Something bad is getting set to happen, that’s for sure,” said William. “We’ve got to think of a plan to spring Grandpa, and the sooner the better.”

  “Shhh!” said Maxine. “He’s headed this way!”

  The Rafiq had risen from the black throne and was crossing the temple floor toward them. The children ducked their heads and cowered as he passed between the boilers and disappeared beneath them.