Curse of the Midions

by Brad Strickland

  “Lookin’s free, cully,” Betsy said. “Strange clothes you have there.”

  “Where are we?” Jarvey asked.

  “Call it the Den,” Betsy said. “Where we live, when we’re not runnin’ from the tippers or the pressers. Only you got to pay rent, see? Got any brass on you?”

  Jarvey furrowed his brow. “Brass? Money, you mean?”

  “American, is that?” the Indian-looking boy said. “Sounds posh, dunnit?”

  Jarvey fumbled in his jeans pockets. No money. Nothing. “I don’t have any, uh, brass,” he said. “Look, if I could get to the police—”

  The youngest kid, the one who had let them in, had flung himself on the floor. Now he sprang up, balling his fists. “Go to!” he yelled. “Want the tippers, do yer? What is he, Bets, some bloody spy?”

  “Dunno what he is,” Betsy said, holding out an arm to keep the boy back. “Talked about the place, though. The one by the river. And he has that book.”

  The boy stared. “Strike me! That ain’t the Book, though. Is it?”

  “Shut it, Puddler,” Betsy said softly. “Let’s have some jaw work and see what we can learn. All right, American. Tell us your name to begin with.”

  “It’s Jarvey Midion,” he began, “but—”

  Something exploded against him, and the next thing Jarvey knew, he lay flat on his back, with two of the boys pulling the youngest, the one Betsy had called Puddler, off him. Heaving for breath, Jarvey realized that the younger kid had plowed right into him, hitting him hard in the stomach. He groaned.

  “Manners, Puds,” Betsy said, hunkering down close to Jarvey. “True word, American? You one of them? A Midion?”

  “That’s my name,” Jarvey muttered, picking up the book, which he had dropped. “But people call me Jarvey.”

  Betsy nodded at the book. “And you use that, do you? You know the art?”

  “What do you mean, ‘art’? Everyone keeps saying that. I don’t know what it means.”

  “Tell us what you do know,” Betsy suggested.

  So he told them everything, from the arrival of the letter to his being shoved out of the carriage near the alley. None of them seemed to believe that he had flown over the ocean. One of the boys, the oldest one, tapped his head and rolled his eyes when Jarvey tried to explain the airplane trip.

  When he had finished, Betsy looked troubled. “You lot, scarper till I call,” she said, and without a word, the boys left the improvised room, ducking one by one through the blanket-hung opening.

  As soon as they were alone, Betsy sat beside Jarvey, who had pulled himself up to a sitting position, his back against a stack of crates. She said, “Look in my eyes, Jarvey.”

  His own eyes felt hot with tears ready to begin, but he defiantly looked into Betsy’s green gaze.

  She stared deep into him. “Right,” she said. “Now, the question. Do you or do you not have the art?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Jarvey said.

  Her lips barely moved. “Magic. Sorcery. The High Art. Can you do it or no?”

  Jarvey snorted. “No, I can’t. There’s no such thing.”

  Her eyes bored into him. “You sure of that?”

  A window shattering. Overhead lights blazing too bright, then exploding in sparks. A baseball bat blowing itself to pieces.

  “I’m not sure of anything,” Jarvey said at last. “But I can’t do magic, if that’s what you mean. Stuff sometimes just sort of happens, that’s all.”

  “So you can’t do magic, but you flew through the air, across the wide ocean.”

  “Sure, on an airplane,” Jarvey said. “A jet? An airliner?”

  She shook her head. “Never heard of such.”

  Jarvey groaned. “Where’s Hag’s Court?” he asked.

  “Never heard of that, neither.”

  “It’s not far from Kensington. Look, this is London, isn’t it?”

  To his surprise, Betsy’s eyes glistened as if she were about to weep. “Nah, cully, wrong there. This ain’t London Town. This here’s Lunnon, and Nibs—that’s Tantalus Midion, and I reckon he’s a relative of yours—made it with his art.”

  “That’s what someone else told me. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Nah, not by night tide, I s’pose not.” Betsy took a deep, thoughtful breath. “I can’t make you out at all, cully. You tell the truth, but your truth is cracked and crazy. Any gate, we saved your skin from the Mill Press. And if that is the right, true Grimoire, then you might be of use to us after all.”

  “Here,” Jarvey said, holding out the book. “If you want this, take it and call it my rent—”

  Quick as a snake, Betsy pulled herself away from him. “Nah! Don’t hold that thing towards me! If it is what you say it is, I wouldn’t touch it for a thousand pound! They do say that whenever that thing opens in front of people, it transports them away.”

  “T-transports them?”

  “Grabs ’em body and soul, and pulls them from their life and their world into somethin’ else. That book’s a work of art, it is, and I’ve heard older people say that none but a Midion can use it.” Betsy crouched. “You keep it, but don’t try to open it. Not for your life. You’d best grab yourself a corner and sleep if you can. Look, don’t try to get away, see? We sleeps light, and we don’t rightways trust you yet.”

  She whistled, and a moment later the four boys came back in. Without looking away from Jarvey, Betsy said, “Right, then. He’s true story, so far as he knows, and he’s Artless. No brass on him, but he bears the Midion name, and that might just be worth somethin’ to somebody. All sleep now, and in the morning we’ll sort it out.”

  Jarvey didn’t have to do much to get ready for bed. The oldest boy, whose name seemed to be Plum, showed him where the toilet was. It wasn’t much, just a trough of running water, but Jarvey wasn’t picky by that time. He did see that they were in a vast basement room, with ancient, cobweb-strung beams high overhead and crumbling brick walls all around.

  They went back to the improvised room, where the other three boys were already snoring. Betsy sat brooding in the corner closest to the curtain-hung doorway. Jarvey hesitated beside her, then said, “Look, I’m kind of hungry.”

  “You too, cully?” She gave him a fierce grin. “We’re all sharp set. Bed now, over there.” She jerked her head toward a kind of pad in the corner, made up of odds and ends of carpet and fabric. “We’ll see about getting vittles for you in the morning, if we decide you’re to be let live. Go on, go on, bed now.”

  Jarvey knelt and arranged the carpet ends and bundles of cloth as well as he could. He stretched out on it. Across the room, Betsy blew out the candle, and darkness flooded in.

  Jarvey turned this way and that, squirming, trying to make himself comfortable and reasonably warm. He dragged some of the rough cloth over himself as a makeshift blanket. His bruises and scrapes twinged dismally. All around him, the other kids snored, coughed, muttered in their dreams. Jarvey’s neck began to cramp.

  After a few minutes, Jarvey sat up in his improvised bed and wrapped the book in some scraps of cloth. He slipped it under his head. It was a hard pillow, but by that time exhaustion had caught up, and he was past caring. Right now, he would give anything to return to that dreary hotel with his mom and dad. Confused, worn out, and more than a little afraid, Jarvey did the impossible: He fell asleep.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Cold Light of Day

  From the depths of sleep Jarvey surfaced suddenly, thrashing and yelling. He opened his eyes and saw the crate-walled room in a thin gray light. He was alone. As he scrambled up, he remembered the book and unwrapped it. The hanging blanket that served as the door had been twitched aside, and a little light seeped through the opening.

  He peeked out. The cavernous basement had a few high, small windows, and through these, dusty bars of daylight slanted in, buttresses against the dark wall. Jarvey could see nothing through the windows. They were fifteen feet above the floor, and their panes had been so
bleared with grime that they were barely translucent.

  The room stretched out for a hundred feet or more, and fifty feet from side to side. A double row of pillars helped to support the raftered ceiling. Six huge panels, heavily outlined in two-foot-thick timbers, looked like trapdoors that opened up to a floor somewhere above. Dust lay thick everywhere, and scuttling spiders had strung their webs over the bricks and every other surface. Corroded gear wheels the size of dinner plates littered the stone floor, and a few broken-down machines, bigger than automobiles, crouched against the far wall, some upright, some on their sides.

  Where had everyone gone? Jarvey wandered until he found a single splintered door. It was unlocked, and it creaked open on rusty hinges when Jarvey tried it. A steep ramp led up into what looked like an alley, narrow and dark between featureless walls of sooty brick.

  Jarvey fished in his pocket until he found the crumpled card that Zoroaster had forced on him. Did the man really know where his mom and dad might be? Zoroaster had admitted lying to him, but he seemed to be Jarvey’s only hope. Jarvey studied the engraved script on the card: Lord P. Zoroaster, Ruling Council. Beneath that was what had to be an address: 3, Royal Crescent.

  Stuffing the card back into his pocket, Jarvey crept up the incline, holding the book tight. The alley was narrow, only about three feet side to side. To his right, it ran for fifty feet and then bent around the corner of the huge building and vanished in darkness. To his left he saw light. When he reached the alley mouth, Jarvey paused, his jaw dropping.

  Early-morning light made a cloudy sky milky-white. A ghastly throng of men, women, and children trudged past in the street, all of them wearing coarse, ragged gray clothing, most barefoot. Their heads drooped, and they all looked hopeless, helpless. In the washed-out light of morning, the soot-streaked buildings loomed like forbidding prison walls. A few heavyset, tough-looking men in black strode beside the crowd, brandishing six-foot-long staves. Now and then one of them yelled and struck out at a straggler, who would cower, cry out, or stumble.

  Jarvey shrank back into the shadows. One of the guards jerked his head around, his eyes narrowing. Jarvey backed away as the man shouted to one of the other guards and then came toward him, brandishing his heavy staff.

  Looking wildly around, Jarvey realized he had no choice—he had already retreated past the entrance to the basement. He hurried through the alley, away from the street and the man, took a sharp left turn and found himself in a dead-end passage between two crumbling brick walls, a passage no more than a yard wide.

  Trapped! Jarvey whirled, but already he heard the crunch of the man’s boots out in the main alley. He’d be caught, forced into that line of hopeless people—

  Tucking the book inside his shirt again, Jarvey looked around frantically. Suddenly an idea struck him. He braced his back against the right wall and pressed his feet against the left one. He walked a little way up the wall, holding himself there by the pressure of his back, and then hitched himself up. Back and forth, first moving his feet, then his back, he crept up until he was a good twelve feet or more above the ground.

  Then he froze. The man with the staff had reached the mouth of his dark, narrow passage. Jarvey tried to force his heartbeat to slow and held his breath. The leather-clad man leaned in and peered down the blind alley to the far end. He sniffed, like a bloodhound.

  His muscles trembling, Jarvey thought desperately: Don’t see me! Don’t see me!

  The guard looked up.

  Jarvey swallowed. He would be taken, and the guard would find the Grimoire—

  The guard below continued to sweep his gaze up, past Jarvey. And then he turned on his heel and walked away, his footsteps echoing and fading as he strode back toward the street.

  Jarvey felt as if he would fall. How could the guard have missed him? He had looked straight at Jarvey, but had seemed to look through him.

  Climbing down was much worse than climbing up had been. Jarvey stared at his sneakers as he inched down, and in the darkness he saw something strange: Sparks danced around the toes of his shoes as he took baby steps downward, silvery white sparks like tiny bolts of lightning. They faded as he crept down, sweat running into his eyes.

  He stood at last in the mouth of the passage, swaying on his feet. Timidly, Jarvey peeked out. The alley lay deserted, and he hurried back to the ramp and the cellar, wondering what fate he had just escaped. A scrawny arm reached out from the doorway, snagged his shirt, and dragged him inside before he could fight back or yell out.

  It was one of the rangy kids—Jarvey dimly remembered that Betsy had called him Charley—who gave him a brown-toothed grin. “Nah, then, you don’t wanna go out in the street. Not healthy, if you catch my meanin’.”

  Jarvey pulled away from the boy’s grip. “What was going on? Those people?”

  “Bein’ driven to work, is all.” Charley had an unruly mop of black hair. He brushed it out of his eyes and snuffled as if he had a cold, and carelessly wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “So you’re a Midion, are you?”

  “Yeah,” Jarvey said unwillingly. “What about it?”

  “Nothin’, only”—Charley leaned close and lowered his voice, and his foul-smelling breath made Jarvey wince—“only, watch out for our Bets, if you know what’s good for you. Full of plans, that one is, but she don’t always think of what her plans might mean for the rest of us.”

  “O-okay,” Jarvey muttered. “I—I’m going over here.”

  “Suit yourself,” Charley said carelessly. “Me, I’m guardin’ this here door for the time being. But you remember what I said, right? I don’t know as how I’d trust Bets all that far. She’s got a head on her, but she looks out for herself before she thinks of anybody else.”

  Jarvey clutched the book to his chest and stumbled away to the stack of crates that walled in the Den. Back inside, he crouched miserably in his corner.

  Then, after what seemed like ages but really couldn’t have been more than an hour, he heard a rattle of laughter. The blanket flipped aside, and six kids came running in, doubled over, each of them clutching something, all of them chuckling. One of them was Betsy. Charley sauntered through after her, smirking and smoothing his untidy black hair away from his forehead.

  “Got your sleep in, then, did ya?” Betsy asked with a wide grin. “Time for eating, innit? Here, cully!”

  She tossed something at him, something the size of a softball, and he caught it. It was round, or mostly round, with one flat side, and it was, as far as he could tell in the dimness, gray. “What is it?”

  “Bread!” one of the boys snapped. “Lumme, Bets, this is a strange ’un and no mistake!”

  Jarvey wrenched at the lump until it broke apart. It was bread of a sort, dense and heavy. He nibbled at it. Not much taste, but his empty stomach grumbled so loud that he wolfed it all down. “Here, wash it on its way,” Betsy said, holding out a quart-sized bottle bound in brown leather strips. “Careful of that, now. Cost a lot o’ slenkin’, that did!”

  It was tea, lukewarm and unsweetened, but that didn’t make any difference. Jarvey drank half the bottle, then when one of the other boys reached out, he handed it over. “Sl-slenkin’? What’s that?” Jarvey asked.

  “Whippin’! Nippin’! You know—stealin’!” Charley rolled his eyes. “You don’t know nothing, do you?”

  “Stealing?” Jarvey said, surprised. “You mean—didn’t you—don’t you have any money?”

  “Left my brass in my other trousers, I did,” the boy with the bottle, the one named Plum, said. “Green he is, Bets. Dump him, says I, or it’s the Mill Press for you and him both, most like.”

  “What’s the Mill Press?” Jarvey asked. “Look, I don’t know who you are and I don’t know where I am—”z

  “Leave us, you lot,” Betsy said as a couple of the kids exchanged a dubious look. Then they all scrambled out, Charley herding the younger ones ahead of him. When they had gone, she sat beside Jarvey. “All right, then, let’s educate you. Hav
e you been out and about enough to see anyone—anyone ’sides us, I mean?”

  Jarvey’s throat clenched. “This morning when I first woke up. I went outside.”

  “Not a good idea.”

  “I was going to see Lord Zoroaster, the man who talked to me about my parents. He lives somewhere called the Royal Crescent.”

  “Long way from here, Jarvey,” Bets said. “And Lord Z ain’t one of Nibs’s favorites right now. Tryin’ to see him, well, that might be dangerous.”

  “He told me he knew where my mom and dad are!” Jarvey said hotly. “I’ve got to find them. Anyway, I didn’t go because there was a crowd of people in the streets. Some men in black leather coats were guarding them, and one of them—”

  Betsy interrupted, “Yeah, shift change, that would’ve been. Right, then. Them’s mill hands, see? When the tippers or the pressers find someone out past curfew, or when someone does somethin’ out of line, or when the tippers just feel like it—”

  “Tippers?”

  “The men in black leather. Constables, policemen. The men all had clubs, right? Tipstaves, they call ’em. Tippers, see? Keeps order, they do. Anyway, the press goes by night, and the tippers by day, an’ if they put hands on you, you go with them, see? Into the mills. And if you’re as might be lucky, then you’re there for maybe twenty years, if you can live that long, and then you get a second chance at obeying orders. Or if you’re not lucky, you draw a life sentence, or more likely you die at the machines before your sentence is up, and then your troubles are over, right?”

  “What mills?” Jarvey said. “What do they do?”

  An angry, brooding expression crept into Betsy’s face. For a moment she didn’t answer, but took a drink from the bottle of tea. Then she growled, “In the mills they make things for the Toffs, mostly. Clothes, furniture, fancy scents, jewelry. Some work in the cookeries, bakin’ the bread, dressin’ the meats, makin’ the wines and all for the Toffs to eat. Sometimes we can slenk some, see? Nip into a storehouse or cookery, grab a bit o’ bread or a pan of smoked fish, maybe. Get caught at that, it’s life in the mills, but we don’t get caught, ’cause we’re Dodgers, see?”