Grimoire: Tracked by Terror

He forced himself to open his eyes, dreading what he might see. At first everything drifted in his sight in a shifting gray, foggy blur: dim moving figures and floating patches of light, pale in the darkness. Then, almost as if by magic, his mother’s face materialized from the fog, close by, so close he could reach up and touch her if he had the strength. “Jarvey?” she asked softly. “Are you all right? How do you feel?”

His mom and dad hugged each other for a moment, and then in a strangely husky voice, his dad said, “You’re in the hospital, son. You got hurt a little. Do you remember what happened in the baseball game?”

Jarvey tried to shake his head and discovered he was rolling it back and forth on a soft pillow instead. And it hurt to do even that much. His forehead throbbed with waves of dull pain, making him wince and making his eyes water. A blood-pressure cuff was clamped around his right biceps, feeling far too tight. He croaked, “I don’t remember any game. What happened?” The weak sound of his own voice shocked him. He sounded exhausted and feeble, even to himself

“You got smacked hard by a line drive,” a third voice said. The voice sounded deep and hearty, a man’s voice, but it was one he didn’t recognize. Through the lingering gray fog, Jarvey could make out a white-coated figure standing at the foot of the bed. The drifting dimness concealed the man’s face. “Jarvis, you have a condition that we doctors call ‘traumatic amnesia.’ That means your brain got a little scrambled by a hard blow, so you probably can’t remember anything that happened to you during the game.”

“Not unusual. Now, while you were unconscious, you may have had some pretty vivid dreams. Don’t let them bother you. Your x-rays look fine. How do you feel?”

Jarvey felt incredibly achy. His muscles and joints hurt in a hundred different places. In fact, he felt less as though he’d been hit on the head than as if he’d tripped and fallen down a whole flight of stairs. “I hurt,” he said. “And I’m a little hungry.”

The doctor lifted his arm and glanced down at his watch. “Your nurse will be around shortly. Let her know if you’d like anything special for tea. Mr. and Mrs. Midion, Jarvey will be fine now. What he needs most is just plain ordinary bed rest, so say good-bye to him for a little while and we’ll let him watch the telly or whatever he feels like doing.”

Jarvey’s mom gave him a gingerly hug and a peck on the cheek, and his dad gave him a grin and a wave. Then the adults left, sort of vanishing into the fog, and he lay frowning.

The doctor had said “tea” as if it were a meal, and he had spoken of the “telly.” Those were British words, Jarvey thought, not American. “No,” he groaned. “Not again.”

He reached to rip off the irritatingly tight blood-pressure cuff It moved before he could touch it, feeling not like Velcro at all, but like something alive. It let go of his arm but grabbed his hand with strong fingers.

Jarvey yelped and tried to pull away, fighting the ghostly grip. The door banged open, and the doctor rushed in, brandishing a hypodermic needle that looked as though it were made for an elephant, a huge thing six inches long.

And the doctor’s writhing, triumphant face was the furious face of the spidery man who had crept over the chain-link fence in Jarvey’s nightmare.

A moment later Jarvey landed hard, with a crash that made yellow light flare behind his eyes. His chest heaved, trying to draw breath into his empty lungs. For a few moments he couldn’t remember clearly what had just happened, let alone take stock of where he was. The hard, hot surface below him seemed to heave and roll. When he forced his eyes open, he found he was staring straight up, but all he could see was a kind of billowing white emptiness.

One thing from his dream carried over into reality: the pain. Jarvey felt as if he had been struck by a car. His whole body ached miserably. At least he was breathing normally again. Now he saw that he lay far forward on the deck of a sailing ship, and the white, billowy nothing-ness he had been staring up toward was actually a huge rectangular sail. Beyond and above it was a blue sky filled with puffy white clouds. A bewilderment of ropes led up to the mast, and on the high yardarms crept men, their forms made tiny by distance, who were hauling on the sail. No one seemed to notice that two stowaways had just come aboard. Jarvey clutched his aching ribs and then looked around the empty deck in sudden panic. “Where’s the Grimoire?”

“I had it until we hit! Look for it!” Jarvey rolled to his stomach and pushed himself up to a kneeling position. His head reeled, partly from the shock of passage from Junius Midion’s world to this one, partly from the vessel’s movement. He and Betsy had almost missed the deck entirely. They had landed in the small triangular area at the very front of the ship, partly underneath the boom that stuck out forward and supported the jib sails. Coils of rope hung from cleats, and small chests cluttered the deck, each of them lashed down to ring bolts set in the wood. The Grimoire might have slipped behind one—if it hadn’t fallen into the water!

Jarvey hauled himself to his feet and looked wildly around. Gray ocean spread out on all sides, its restless surface streaked with white foam and crawling with waves. Now he could smell the salty ocean air, mixed with tar and the scent of sun-heated wood. Betsy went from one chest to the other, bending and peering. “I don’t see it!”

She slipped over the rail. Jarvey heard voices approaching, and he quickly scrambled up and over, dropping down onto a kind of platform attached to the bows. Ropes from it stretched tautly up toward the forward mast, and behind these ropes crouched Betsy. She held a finger to her lips.

Jarvey’s head spun a little. They sat on a plank a little more than a foot wide, their legs dangling, their hands clutching the thick ropes, and beneath their feet the ocean rose and fell, rose and fell, as the ship’s bow rode a wave or plunged down into a trough, sending a foamy spray of salt water flying. Jarvey fought back nausea. He was getting seasick.

Just behind him, on the deck, a man was speaking. “Unload these last. They are not important to the Nawab, but they should bring us a pretty profit.”

Jarvey’s pride was hurt, but in fact he felt happy just to cling to his ropes and rest there. How long had it been since he had eaten? He couldn’t remember, but at the moment he felt that he would throw up everything he had ever swallowed in his life if he moved at all. Betsy took a cautious look over the rail, then slipped over as quietly as a sea breeze.

Jarvey tried focusing his gaze ahead on the horizon, hoping that would keep his stomach from lurching so much. He sat in the shade of the ship now, with the sun low in the sky over to his left. The day had the hot feel of afternoon about it, so with sunset to his left, Jarvey guessed they were sailing north.

A cottony pile of clouds had built up dead ahead, purple on their shadowed side, pink and white on the sun-ward one. Squinting, Jarvey could just make out a dark gray smudge of land at their base.

A moment later, a triumphant Betsy swung back over, clutching something under her left arm. “Got it! It was behind the box right in the front, wedged tight. Here.” She grimaced as she passed the volume over.

Betsy squirmed. “Dunno. What if your mother and father are here? Best to wait, maybe, until we know where we are. I’d say hold on a bit. Keep it safe.”

Safe! What if Jarvey dropped the book now, a few feet above the ocean? Carefully he tucked it into his shirt. He had become so used to carrying the thing that it felt almost like a part of him. “Well, anyway, we can’t sit out here all night,” he said to Betsy. “What are we going to do?”

But it felt like hours and hours as the ship responded to the winds, the men trimming the sails sometimes within earshot but most of the time not. At last the light faded, the sky darkened and stars came out, and Betsy said, “Let’s go. Hold on to the book.”

She was as sure-footed as a cat, and about as silent. They climbed over the rail, and she led the way through the darkness back toward the stern of the ship. Two men stood at the wheel, just behind the middle mast, talking about the weather. In the darkness a crouching Jarvey and Betsy slipped past without their noticing.

A wooden lifeboat or longboat or something hung from two tall metal hooks. Betsy worked at the cords holding a canvas cover over the boat, tight as the head of a drum, until it grew loose enough for them to squirm underneath it and drop into the boat. The air trapped under the canvas felt humid and hot, stiflingly so, and Jarvey gasped as he crawled into the swinging boat. “Now what?” he asked. It was as dark as the bottom of a coal mine.

Jarvey clenched his jaw. No, as he had tried and tried to explain to Betsy, he wasn’t a magician, not really. Tantalus Midion, the evil master of Lunnon, had taunted him about that. True, people in his family were sometimes born with a talent for magic, just as they tended to be born with dark blue eyes and blond hair streaked with reddish tones. The magic missed some of them, though. Jarvey’s dad was as ordinary as a warm day in June, and though Betsy was a remote cousin of his, she couldn’t do magic either.

And while it was true that magical things sometimes happened around Jarvey, he had no idea how to control them. But Betsy kept insisting that he should be able to perform magic. He growled, “Abracadabra, I want light. See? Nothing happened.”

Betsy grumbled, “You’re not even trying.” Jarvey felt her fumbling with something and then she found his hand and thrust something into his grip. “Here, make one of those strange candles, like the ones in old Junius’s theater.”

Betsy was nothing if not stubborn, sometimes annoyingly so. “Try! You made that trapdoor slam shut! And you could make people not notice you back in Lunnon, when they were hunting you! Remember how those strange candles looked and felt. Then command that piece of wood to be just the same. Picture it. Imagine it.”

“I might as well imagine a turkey dinner and a hot bath,” grumbled Jarvey. He tried, though. Holding the wooden peg, he visualized in his mind the candle he had taken from the sconce back in the theater. The candle had been lighter in weight, and the surface felt smooth and cool, not rough and splintery. The flame was a teardrop of cool yellow light. He tried to persuade himself that he was holding the candle at that moment.

Jarvey squeezed the thing he was holding. Did it feel somehow waxier, more like a candle than wood, or was he just fooling himself? He couldn’t tell. “Let this candle give us light,” he said.

Unreasonable anger filled Jarvey, partly because he still ached, partly because he took Betsy’s sigh as a sarcastic hint that she didn’t think much of him. “Light!” he snarled, so loudly that Betsy shushed him.

But something happened at last. Jarvey blinked. The candle was giving a kind of glow. It was so dim that the difference between darkness and its light was hardly any difference at all, but at one end of the thing he held, a spherical red spark shone. He could barely make out Betsy’s face.

The candle obstinately refused to burn any brighter, but gradually their eyes adjusted to the feeble gleam. Betsy found a row of wooden kegs tucked under the forward seat of the lifeboat. A tin cup was tied to one of the kegs, and she undid the cord. Then she pulled a cork that plugged the nearest keg and held the cup beneath the gush of water that poured out. It was very warm and tasted of wood, but they drank it anyway. After pounding the cork back into place, Betsy squirmed toward the stern and after a few minutes came back with a bulky package wrapped in what felt like thick canvas soaked in wax. “Ship’s biscuit,” she said, peeling the canvas away. “Here.”

The flat thing she handed him was nearly as hard as a rock, but Jarvey crunched it and immediately felt his hunger rise. They found that by dribbling a little water on the biscuit, they could soften it enough to chew and swallow.

“Easy for you to say.” Jarvey couldn’t blow out the flame, because the candle had no flame, just a little round red glow about the size of a marble. It didn’t even feel hot. Finally he pulled the cork from the water keg, stuck the candle into the hole, light first, and shut off the glow that way.

Then Jarvey stretched out as well as he could, tried to ignore the constant movement, the pitching and rolling, and the sick feeling that he was lost.