2
Passage to Nowhere
Jarvey couldn’t even force himself to yell, “Hang on!” He had felt once before the terrible power of the Grimoire, like an amusement-park ride designed by a homicidal maniac. Jarvey had tried to concentrate on finding his parents, but he couldn’t keep his mind focused on that, not when the whole world felt as if it were running down a bathtub drain and pulling him with it. He heard a loud clattering and thought, Pages—that’s pages turning.
In the next instant, they landed with a crash and tumbled down onto some hard surface. Jarvey had hit hard on his left side. For a few seconds he lay gasping for breath and at last sat up feeling half stunned. “Where are we?” Betsy asked.
“Don’t know.” He rose and tucked the Grimoire into the front of his shirt. The tall, narrow book was safe there, but it felt strangely heavy.
Jarvey saw dim light all around, a steady faint glow. They had wound up in a long, straight corridor of some kind, made of veiny dark gray marble, floored with mosaic tiles of white and black. It might have been a hallway in a medieval castle, or in a fancy hotel. Candles burning in wall sconces about every twenty feet or so gave some light, and Betsy, always quick to think of what they might need, stood up shakily and plucked one of the candles out of its socket. She stared at it in evident surprise. “Look at this,” she told him.
The candle was a fake. Oh, it had a glowing flame and it gave off light, but the flame stayed just the same shape whether you turned the candle on its side or held it upside-down. And it gave off only light, no heat or smoke at all. Jarvey passed his finger through the flame several times and felt nothing.
“We need water,” Betsy said. “Then food. Let’s go.”
Aching from his fall, Jarvey gazed into the distance. The hall stretched both ways as far as they could see. Betsy pointed. “This way’s as good as any.”
He couldn’t disagree with her, and so he trudged along beside her. They walked for what seemed like hours, following the twists and turns of the corridor, occasionally going up short flights of marble stairs, only to emerge in another hallway that looked exactly the same as the first. Betsy kept the candle, though it was of little use. Thousands of other candles stood in the sconces, filling the corridor with a dim yellow light that wore on Jarvey’s vision and made his eyelids feel heavy as lead.
“Let’s take a break,” Jarvey said at last, and Betsy nodded her agreement. He slid down to the cold floor and sat there with his back against the hard marble wall.
“Rum sort of place, this,” Betsy grumbled. “Nothing but a kind of long tunnel. Where have you landed us?”
“It wasn’t my idea!” snapped Jarvey.
“Maybe it’s a maze, like,” Betsy said with a thoughtful frown. “Maybe old Siyamon took your mum and dad and stuck them here to wander around forever. Think they’d be sharp enough to leave some clues?”
“With what?” Jarvey asked sarcastically. “There’s only the stone walls.”
“There’s the candles,” Betsy pointed out. “I dunno, maybe write on the walls with the wax or something.”
“Only there isn’t any wax. Look at the candle,” he said. “It’s not burning down at all.”
Betsy turned the candle around and even upside down, but the flame remained constant and the drips and dribbles of wax looked just as they had at the beginning. “Yeah, weird, that.” But then Betsy brightened immediately. “Anyway, this tells us that magic’s going on here. So we must be in a world some Midion made.”
Wonderful, Jarvey thought sourly, a magical, everlasting candle. Great invention of some Midion or other. If it were only edible, it might be of some use.
As if she had read his thought, Betsy complained, “I’m getting really hungry.”
“Me too,” Jarvey acknowledged. “Ready to go?”
“I’m ready to slenk something to eat,” she said in a determined voice.
In Lunnon, Betsy had led an army of street kids, all of them expert at slenking, or stealing, food. There was only one catch. In this maze there didn’t seem to be any food to steal.
So they wandered off again, lost in the seemingly endless corridor. They passed no doors at all, and Jarvey lost all track of the turns they took. “I think we’re going in circles,” he said at last.
“Right,” Betsy replied grimly. “Look, can you use your magic to, I dunno, to force there to be a door to go through? To get us outside, some way? Or maybe we could try a different chapter?”
Jarvey gave her an exasperated glance. In the candlelight her copper-red hair gleamed, and the stiff clothes she wore—a gray skirt, a white blouse, and a bonnet—made her look like a character from an old movie. She had donned the clothes to disguise herself as a maid in Tantalus Midion’s mansion, and the servant’s garments were a far cry from the usual tatters she used to wear. “Look,” Jarvey said, “I keep telling you, I don’t know how to use the book. I got us here, but if I try again, we may wind up someplace even worse. Let’s save that until we get desperate, okay?”
Betsy shrugged. “Come on, then. Somebody made this passageway, so it must go somewhere.”
“I wish.” But Jarvey cradled the Grimoire and plodded along after her, thinking that this seemed more like a nightmare than his dream of home had.
Jarvey suffered from such dreams often enough. Many times he had experienced things that were, well, strange, even when he was wide-awake. About a year earlier, he had sat in a dentist’s chair, needing a small filling but dreading the screaming bite of the whirring drill, and a split second before the drilling began, every piece of electrical equipment in the dentist’s office had burned out. Sparks flew, gray smoke puffed out, and the drill seized up and fell silent, leaving Dr. Thornton staring at it in astonishment. Other things like that had happened, especially at moments when Jarvey felt especially tense or excited. Windows had broken for no reason, and a baseball bat had once simply exploded in his hands. After an experience like that, Jarvey always had bad dreams.
In those earlier nightmares he had the power to change things, to make things happen. It was as if his mind were telling him that he had the power, the art, as Siyamon Midion had called it, to do magic. He could change things, transform things, but in his dark dreams, whatever he touched always became monstrous and turned on him.
It took very little for Jarvey’s imagination to shift into high gear. What if they came suddenly on the dead, stiff bodies of his mom and dad? Or what if they made the turn and saw Jarvey’s parents shuffling toward them, mindless, driven to insanity by the magic of the Grimoire? Or what if this was a world of ghosts—
“Come on!”
Betsy’s irritated voice echoed with a hollow sound in the marble corridor. She had taken a lead of twenty feet or so. “What’s your hurry?” complained Jarvey, trying to get a grip on his fears. He had begun to dread whatever might lie ahead, but he picked up the pace.
After traveling for what seemed like miles, at least to Jarvey, they finally found a door. Jarvey and Betsy paused before it. It opened off to the left. “Well,” Betsy said, “it’s something.”
Jarvey gave it a dubious inspection. It appeared to be an ordinary door, made of some dark wood, with an ornate brass doorknob and no visible lock. “Yeah,” he said. “But what’s behind it?” It could be ghosts, his imagination said.
“One way to find out.” Betsy reached for the knob.
Jarvey felt himself tensing. “Be careful!”
“Mm.” She turned the knob and pushed. The door swung open into a dark room. Cautiously, Betsy held up the candle.
The strain ebbed out of Jarvey. He almost laughed in relief
“It’s a loo,” Betsy said. “Thank heavens!”
Jarvey hadn’t heard the word loo before coming to London, but since then he had learned that it meant “bathroom.” This one looked like the bathroom in a public building: on one wall, a row of three old-fashioned sinks with hand pumps instead of faucets, and beyond them some wooden stalls.
“Me first,” Betsy said, sounding as if it was urgent.
Jarvey waited outside the door until she emerged again. “Water tastes all right,” she reported. “Wish we had a bottle or something to take some with us.”
Taking another candle with him, Jarvey went in and used the bathroom, finally figuring out how to flush. He had to grab a handle dangling from a chain and tug down on it. The water gushed down into the toilet from a big tank up near the ceiling.
He wondered how long it had been since anyone had been in the bathroom. No dust anywhere, but it felt little used, somehow. At least, though, it suggested there were people here, somewhere, if only they could find them. Ghosts didn’t need toilets.
At the sink he pumped and gulped some water, quenching his thirst. “Okay,” he said, opening the door. “Let’s go.”
His voice reverberated from the blank wall opposite.
“Hey!” he yelled.
The echo of the word died away, and Jarvey began to get a crawly feeling in the pit of his stomach.
He looked down the corridor to the right. They had come from that direction, a long, long straight stretch. The marble hallway shrank down in the shadowed distance to nothing. Betsy couldn’t have gone that way, or he would see her.
To his left, the corridor went on for a few feet and then took a sudden turn. He went that way, turned the corner, and peered ahead.
The passage led to infinity, or at least to darkness. No one was there.
Like his parents, Betsy had disappeared.
Jarvey was alone.