The Midnight Door

by Sam Fisher

  Melissa noticed that Morton had seen the book and her cross expression shifted to one of guilt. “It’s not what you think,” she said.

  “No? What is it, then?” Morton said, feeling both betrayed and angry.

  “Well, the truth is, I don’t think James is right about this magical echo thing. Something else happened today that —” Melissa stopped suddenly and gave Morton a tortured look. “I can’t … I can’t talk about it.”

  “Why not?” Morton demanded with a mounting sense of outrage.

  Melissa pressed her lips together and seemed to be having some kind of internal struggle before giving the answer. “Because I promised James that I wouldn’t get you involved in any more magic,” she blurted out after a long pause.

  “What?! When?”

  “It was a few days ago, when we thought it was all over. James just sort of cornered me one night and made me promise that if anything weird or dangerous or magical were to happen again, we wouldn’t get you involved. At first I just sort of laughed it off, but he was deadly serious. He said that it was our job to protect you, even if it meant lying to you.”

  “But that’s ridiculous,” Morton said. “I don’t need protecting any more than you do.”

  “James doesn’t seem to think that’s the case. He was so serious about it he made me promise on … well, on Mum’s memory.”

  Only at these words did Morton realize just how serious James must have been.

  “Well, for your information, ten minutes ago I was attacked by a flock of Bat Eyes in my own bedroom,” Morton said matter-of-factly.

  “You were?” Melissa yelped, her mouth falling open in surprise.

  “Yes. So like it or not, I am involved. And from my point of view, it’s probably more dangerous if you don’t tell me what’s going on.”

  Melissa seemed to struggle a moment longer before speaking, but then let out a long resigned sigh, walked over to the satchel, and produced a limp black leathery object from inside.

  It was another Bat Eye, only this one was stone-cold dead. Morton stepped over to the small corpse and examined it closely. At first glance Bat Eyes looked a lot like ordinary bats with translucent veined wings tipped with menacing claws, but closer inspection revealed that the creature had one enormous demonic eye where its face should have been, and this specimen had dark oily liquid dripping from around its eye like thick black tears.

  “This is a Bat Eye, right?” Melissa asked.

  Morton nodded.

  “Thought so,” she said. “Seems like you’re not the only one they’re visiting. This one and a bunch of its creepy friends were following me home from school this afternoon.”

  “How did you catch it?” Morton asked.

  “Hit it with my purse,” she said casually.

  “Wow! You must have hit it pretty hard,” Morton said. “It’s as dead as a doornail.”

  “Oh, no, the purse just stunned it. After that I had to skewer it with a sharp pencil.”

  “Right,” Morton said, remembering again just how little tolerance for monsters Melissa had.

  “I don’t suppose you have any idea why they were following me, do you?”

  “Not really,” Morton said. “They’re mostly just spies. Other than that, they’re harmless. They can’t sting you or hypnotize you. They can’t even bite you because they don’t have a mouth.”

  “No mouth? How can it not have a mouth? Everything has to eat, right?”

  “That’s not actually true,” Morton said. “Mayflies are real insects, and they don’t eat.”

  “Then how do they survive?” Melissa asked.

  Morton was about to explain the life cycle of mayflies to Melissa, but she cut him off before he even got a chance to start.

  “You know what, I don’t need to know that right now. Tell me more about the Bat Eyes. If they’re spies, doesn’t that mean someone has to be controlling them?”

  “Usually,” Morton said. “In Scare Scape it’s mostly just the Zombie Twins who control them. But anyone can use them — I mean, anyone could use them, if they knew how to conjure them. They’re basically just like flying security cameras.”

  “And your Zombie Twin toys … ?”

  “Still sitting on my shelf,” Morton assured her.

  Melissa shot a glance over her shoulder as if she thought somebody was behind her. “So the question is, who would want to spy on us, and why?”

  “I’m not sure,” Morton said. “Did you tell James about this?”

  “Yes!” Melissa groaned. “He insists it’s all part of his echo theory. Says they’re not dangerous and we shouldn’t worry about them.”

  “But you don’t agree with him?” Morton asked. “You think we should use magic?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far, but I wanted to find out what our options are. Unfortunately we don’t seem to have any. The book is pretty much useless.”

  Morton felt a twinge of disappointment. “Are you sure?” he asked.

  Melissa shrugged. “Take a look for yourself.”

  Morton hoped Melissa was wrong and made his way over to the book, which was still lying in the middle of the floor. He sat down cross-legged in front of it and stared for a moment at the large black jewel on the cover, once again experiencing flashes of memory from the time when Mr. Brown had first pulled the book out of its green velvet pouch, and half wishing that none of it had ever happened.

  Morton pushed the memories aside and spent the next few minutes leafing through the frayed handmade pages. There were over a hundred spells and potions in the book. For the most part though, it seemed to be a random disjointed collection with no particular sense of organization or purpose.

  There were spells for conjuring violent thunderstorms, potions to make your enemies literally speechless, several spells involving fire, and incantations for bringing inanimate objects to life. There were also the spells they already knew about, like Brown’s spider-walking spell, and a lot of very sinister rituals that allowed you to conjure creatures from parallel dimensions, which is how Mr. Brown had conjured the Galosh. But after only a few minutes of searching, Morton knew that Melissa was right. There was nothing about undoing magic or getting rid of unwanted pests. In fact, the only spell that had anything to do with existing animals was one to make them fatter, which presumably would have been very useful for starving sorcerers in days gone by but hardly helped in the current situation. Despite this, Morton did briefly consider the idea of making the rats hugely fat, wondering if that might make them easier to catch, but then decided that was exactly the kind of spell that could backfire and make matters far worse.

  While Morton read, Melissa paced slowly around the attic, clutching her arms around herself tightly, clearly unhappy to be here again. “So?” she said when Morton finally closed the book.

  “I guess James was right,” he sighed. “Unless we want to conjure a Galosh and get it to eat the rats, this book’s not much use.”

  “Well, we definitely don’t want to do that,” Melissa said. “Magic is already spreading like fire through Dimvale, and we don’t need to add to it.”

  “Spreading like fire,” Morton repeated. “Where did you get that phrase?”

  Melissa shrugged. “I think I just made it up. Why?”

  “Because I feel like I’ve heard it before, or read it somewhere …” And then Morton remembered exactly where he had read that phrase before, and had a sudden burst of excitement.

  “Of course!” he shrieked. “King’s diaries! We need to read King’s diaries.”

  “Uh, you mean the ones Brown said he burned right after pushing King down the well?” Melissa said.

  “Exactly!” Morton said, leaping to his feet and heading to the stone font in the center of the room. Melissa looked at him with confusion, but Morton pushed his hand into the flakes of black ash that still filled the font and, as he expected, found the charred remnant of a handwritten book, exactly where he’d left it.

  “This must be one of King�
��s diaries,” he explained. “It’s almost completely destroyed, but I remember reading a couple of lines that didn’t make sense at the time. They said, ‘spreads like ink on blotting paper, or fire in a forest,’ and now I think I know exactly what they meant. I think King was writing about magic. I think it was a kind of warning about the way magic works. Which means that this whole diary probably talks about magic. It might be exactly what we need to understand what’s going on.”

  “Uh, am I missing something?” Melissa said, “Because right now that looks a lot more like something Dad cooked on the barbecue than a book.”

  “Yes, but that doesn’t matter,” Morton said, carefully placing the blackened fragment on the side of the font and picking up The Book of Portals, “because we have this.”

  Melissa continued to stare blankly at him.

  “There’s a spell in here for reversing the effects of fire,” he added. “Look.” He turned to a page with a drawing of a burning castle.

  “ ‘Reversing Effects of Promethean Spoil’?” Melissa said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I think Prometheus was supposed to be the god who stole fire from Mount Olympus. Or was he a demigod?” Morton mused.

  “Oh, yeah, now I remember,” Melissa said. “Why do these ancient books always find complicated ways to say simple things?”

  Morton didn’t bother answering the question, but instead looked carefully at the spell described on the page. He was surprised at just how simple it looked. It required only that you carve some odd symbols onto a piece of wood before reciting a simple verse. Melissa also read the page quickly over his shoulder.

  “Well, that looks easy,” she said. “But you’re not suggesting we actually do it, are you?”

  “Of course, we have to do it,” Morton replied. “It’s our only hope of finding out what’s really going on in Dimvale. I mean, what do we have to lose?”

  “You mean, aside from taking the risk that the spell backfires and turns us both into wiener dogs?”

  “Can you please be serious?” Morton pleaded.

  “I am being serious,” Melissa said. “It’s dangerous, and I promised James I was going to protect you from magic, so unless you can get him to agree to it, I have no intention of —”

  “Get me to agree to what?” a voice from behind them said.

  Morton and Melissa both jumped and spun around to look at the open hatch. There, standing on the stepladder, was a very cross-looking James. He clambered the rest of the way up into the attic and shuffled over to them wearing his slippers and tartan robe.

  “Come on, then, you might as well tell me what’s going on,” James said. “I’ve heard enough to guess, but I’d rather get the story straight.”

  Morton quickly summarized the night’s events, and he could see by James’s expression that the intrusion of the Bat Eyes came as a shock.

  “For the record, I’m with Morton,” Melissa said. “I think we should use magic. I only voted against it earlier because you made me promise.”

  James glanced around the room in agitation. For a moment Morton thought he was about to lecture them again, but he didn’t. He simply let out a sigh and said, “Okay. You have a point. This does seem to be getting out of hand.”

  Morton felt a wave of relief wash over him. He was certain that this was the right thing to do, and he opened The Book of Portals to the spell he’d found.

  “But I do have one request,” James added. “If we’re going to play with magic, can we at least go and do this outside, just in case it, I dunno, explodes or something?”

  Both Morton and Melissa agreed that this was a good idea and it didn’t take them long to relocate. They ended up huddled around Dad’s potting table, which was tucked away right at the bottom of his newly planted garden. Melissa brought a wooden ruler from her schoolbag and a chisel from Dad’s pink toolbox and with surprising skill carved the two complex symbols onto the ruler. They then placed the ruler on top of the charred diary fragment and Morton recited the verse.

  Take this spark of Promethean spoil.

  Take this wood of time’s long toil.

  Take this charm of reconstruction.

  Take this charm of reproduction.

  Take them now, as each the same,

  And return that stolen by force of flame.

  The very moment the last word left Morton’s lips, the ruler cracked loudly and turned a frosty white, the whole thing suddenly covered in a thin coat of crystalline ice, and then slowly shifted from white to a warm shade of orange and, with a sudden crackle, the entire thing burst into red-hot flames.

  Everyone stepped back, shielding their faces from the intense heat. Morton was relieved that they’d heeded James’s warning.

  The ice itself seemed to be burning and melting into a strange blue liquid, which began to flow out, almost like a living entity, enveloping the diary in small rivulets of blue fire. Then Morton saw that which he’d barely dared hope for. Beneath the softly rippling blanket of flame, curled pages were unfolding like flowers on a spring morning, their blackened shells fading to crisp supple whiteness. Morton saw scrolls of King’s neat script emerging from the ashes, and with each new page the book grew steadily larger and thicker until at last the soft leather binding spread out over the whole and finally there was the book, in its entirety, presumably exactly as King had left it almost a year earlier.

  Morton expected the blue rivulets of flame to subside and die away, but they showed no signs of stopping. James looked curiously at Morton. “So what are we supposed to do now?” he said. “Throw a bucket of water on it?”

  “I don’t think so,” Morton said, and he reached forward and tapped his hand briefly on the blue rivulets of flame. As he had suspected, the fire was cool to the touch. It felt almost like cold water running over his fingers.

  Melissa gaped in amazement. “You can actually touch it!”

  “More to the point,” Morton said, “we can read it.” And he lifted the book into his hands and opened it where a frayed ribbon marked a page. He could hardly believe his eyes. There, as plain as day, were what he presumed were the last written words of John King.

  “It’s … it’s incredible,” Morton said after reading the first few pages rapidly to himself. “I mean, it’s not what we thought at all.”

  “Really, we wouldn’t know,” Melissa said. “You’re hogging it.”

  “Maybe you could read it out loud?” James suggested.

  “I don’t know where to start,” Morton said, feeling utterly overwhelmed.

  “Start at the end,” Melissa said. “That way we’ll know what his last thoughts were.”

  “Okay,” Morton said. “This is the last entry.” And he turned his attention back to the diary and began to read.

  November 22nd

  Why does fate conspire to bring me such ill luck? Surely I have had more than my share. Yet now, when I must focus all my energies on the task at hand, this buzzing annoyance, this wandering dung beetle of a man who goes by the name of Rodney Brown, has somehow learned that I possess a copy of The Book of Portals.

  “Mr. Brown!” Melissa said. “That means he must have written this close to the end of his life.”

  “Not just close to the end,” Morton said. “I think this might have been written the very same night he died. Listen.”

  When Brown first came to me in search of one of my many books, I tried to play dumb. I told him his notions of magic were pure fallacy. I rather glibly suggested he forget his silly fantasies and find a wife before age stole the last of his opportunities from under his nose, as it is wont to do, but I underestimated the level of his obsession. A few weeks ago he revealed that he has stolen a pagan sculpture, a crude reproduction of a much older diabolical form, but potently magical nonetheless, and I realize now that Rodney Brown could be a danger to himself and others. He has many foolish ideas about magic and understands nothing of its true nature. For one thing, he has the mistaken impression that The Book of Por
tals is the most powerful magical book in existence. I have no idea where he got such a ridiculous notion and no intention of informing him otherwise. I can’t even imagine what devious plans he would cook up in his shallow pan of a brain if he discovered that my library contains a hundred such books, most of which contain far more potent magic than the eclectic collection of mismatched spells in The Book of Portals.

  “King’s library had hundreds of books on magic?” Melissa said in astonishment. “Books with even more powerful magic than The Book of Portals?”

  Morton nodded. “I never really thought about it before, but it only makes sense. I mean he must have had over a thousand books, and there has to be more than one book of magic in the world.”

  “Wait a minute,” James said. “Didn’t Wendy say that King’s books all got sold off in an auction?”

  Melissa nodded. “She’s told me several times about the day the auctioneers came and emptied the entire house into two big moving trucks. Everything was sold off.”

  “Sold off? But that means anyone could have bought his books,” James said with a grim look on his face.

  Melissa made a snort of annoyance. “Exactly what I was just thinking! For all we know everyone in Dimvale has one of King’s books sitting on their shelf. Half the kids in town could be messing around with dangerous magic. It’s a wonder any of us are still alive.”

  Morton thought again about Derek and wondered absently if he might have somehow come into possession of one of King’s books and been experimenting on his own. That might explain what happened to his gun….

  “Read some more,” James prompted, and Morton turned his attention back to the diary.

  For better or worse, Brown is ignorant and completely devoid of imagination. He obviously does not know it was tradition among the cults of that region to perform the sacrificial rites in the same month that the statue was carved, which unfortunately means that Brown is in possession of a truly dangerous talisman. For this reason, I must at all costs get the gargoyle from him. If he learns that it is already capable of granting wishes, he will no doubt use it, and it will almost certainly bring ruin and disaster upon all involved.