Grimoire: Tracked by Terror

Jarvey opened his eyes in darkness. He lay tangled in sheets, and he was sweating so much he felt soaked. Jarvey kicked and writhed and flailed until he had unwrapped himself, flipped over onto his stomach, and then he saw the red digital display of his clock radio: 5:10.

And then he scrambled out of bed, his heart swelling painfully in his throat. This wasn’t déjà vu, and it wasn’t a bad dream. He remembered the terrible spinning sensation, the fall through space, the card with Betsy’s face, everything!

He wasn’t home. The people in the room next to his weren’t his parents. Something terrible had happened. Jarvey pulled his jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers on, then ran out to the landing, opened his parents’ bedroom door, and stood breathing hard, listening.

His father sat half up in bed, his hand on the bedside lamp. He was frozen in that attitude, like a department store mannequin, and beside him, Jarvey’s mom was just beginning to rise from her interrupted sleep. Jarvey walked stiffly over and looked at the time on the clock. It was 5:11, a couple of minutes before he had come in.

The ... actors weren’t ready to begin yet. Staring at his father, Jarvey had the sickening sensation that something wasn’t finished. Dr. Midion’s skin was slick, like plastic, not like real flesh, and his hair looked strange, more like something artificial than real hair. Jarvey backed away, turned off the light, and shut the door. He stood there breathing hard for a few minutes, and then he knocked, just as he had before.

His father clicked his bedside lamp on and sat up, his hair sticking every which way as he fumbled around on his bedside table for his glasses. “Jarvey? What time is it? What’s wrong? House on fire?”

Now he looked perfect, the image of Dr. Midion. Jarvey balled his hands into fists and said, “You’re not real! Who are you? What’s going on?”

“What’s wrong, sweetheart?” his mom asked, brushing her hair back out of her eyes. Jarvey groaned. It was his mom, it was—no, it wasn’t! It was some horrible creation like the actors in Junius Midion’s nightmare theater, pretending to be her.

His dad had finally found his glasses, and he peered through them at his watch. “Five fifteen on a Saturday morning! This is a fine way to start your summer vacation, son. What’s wrong?”

Jarvey stared at him. “You can’t say anything new, can you? Siyamon somehow figured out what I would ask, and he programmed you both to answer me, just like you were real, but you can’t handle anything he didn’t plan for.”

“Stop it!” Jarvey yelled. “I’ve been trying and trying to find you and get back to you, and he’s tricked me! Stop it, I know it isn’t real!”

When his mother began to step toward him, he turned and ran out of the room, down the stairs, and out onto the lawn. “Betsy!” he yelled. “Where are you? What happened?”

The earth began to shake so hard that Jarvey’s teeth clicked together. He staggered and stumbled, then fell to his knees on the lawn. “No! I don’t believe in this,” he said fiercely. “I don’t believe in Siyamon’s magic and illusions! This isn’t my house, and those aren’t my mom and dad!”

The ground under his knees and hands felt horribly wrong, mushy and soft, like mud. He rose again and then found his feet were sinking down into the earth. Floundering, half falling, Jarvey lurched to the driveway, dragged himself up onto it, and stood there staring at what was happening to his house.

The sky had become quite light, but not with sunrise. A flat, bronze radiance lit it, and the house looked strange and unreal in that light.

The house sagged horribly. A window slipped down into a drooling hole, the roof slowly sagged downward. The whole neighborhood was becoming a plastic, soggy goo. From the hole that had been the front door a few moments earlier, his father came, taking jerky steps. “Mow the lawn,” he gibbered. “Champ baseball lemonade mow lawn history college summer break baseball Jarvey lawn magic grimoire grimoire grimoire ...”

The figure fell on its face and in a horrifying way tried to crawl forward, but like the house, it was melting and rubbery. One leg stretched thin and broke off The fingers fell off and burrowed into the soft earth like pink worms. The eyes had fallen away behind the spectacles, and the creature stared at Jarvey with empty sockets as the dissolving mouth continued to babble in a terrible, liquid imitation of Jarvey’s dad’s voice: “Bebaw garrhhh jarrv ssssummmerrrrr ...” It trailed off in a gargling bubble, and the form collapsed flat, like a balloon emptying itself of air.

Jarvey backed away, desperately hoping that his mother, or the imitation of her, would not come out. He spun around. The neighborhood had dissolved. Now before him lay an endless flat expanse of brassy, sandy earth, all the way to a distant, vague horizon. The air felt thick in his lungs, and the heat, the terrible heat, was like an oven. When he turned back, he couldn’t even find the place where the house had stood, and he saw no trace of the awful creature that had imitated his father.

But from somewhere he heard a voice, a mocking voice with an English accent: “This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.”

Laughter, mocking and cold, was the only reply. “You could have them back,” the voice said from everywhere at once. “Your mother, your father. Your life. All you have to do is surrender the book, you know.”

“No,” he said, trying to sound a lot braver than he felt. “It wouldn’t be real! You’d trap us in some world you created and make us believe we were home.”

“Not I,” the voice said, and now Jarvey began to have the feeling that it wasn’t the voice of Siyamon Midion after all. It didn’t sound as old, as silky, as insinuating as the old man’s voice, for one thing. “My master might trouble with you, but not 1. If he left matters to me, I would squash you like an insect.”

Jarvey closed his eyes. Who was that? It wasn’t Tantalus, or Junius, or Haimish Midion. “Where are you?” he demanded, opening his eyes again. “Let me see you!”

“I am outside,” the voice responded. “And you are inside. You could let me in, though. Use the book and let me in, and then we shall talk.”

Jarvey wanted to run, to pound something, to fight back. But he had nothing to fight against. He stood in the center of a flat desert beneath a featureless sky. There was nothing to hit. He felt furious at the unseen voice. “Betsy, where are you?” he yelled at the top of his lungs.

“She is lost in a book at the moment,” the voice returned mockingly. “If you would simply open the book and—”

Jarvey saw something moving, and he ran toward it. He had thought it was someone lying on the sand, trying to sit up. No, what he saw was made entirely of sand. A mound of it was stirring, looking like a miniature sand dune in sped-up motion, coming toward him as he ran. He stopped a few feet away.

The sand was becoming the image of a person—of Betsy. A statue of sand, perfect in every feature, as if Betsy were crawling toward him on her stomach. The sand head looked up blindly, and the sand mouth opened. “Jarvey?” the voice asked, like Betsy’s, but distant and thin.

“It isn’t real,” the sand Betsy said. “Not in the book. Not in the book. Siyamon’s man, not Siyamon. Don’t believe him. It isn’t real. Use your art.”

A dry wind sprang up, and the Betsy statue dissolved, the grains of sand trailing out in long streamers. Jarvey reached for them and felt the stinging grains pelt his skin.

But he did. He had used it in Lunnon. He had made himself unnoticeable in Haimish Midion’s jungle world, had called down a bolt of lightning when he and Betsy had been trapped in the forest. How had he—?

He thought back to all the strange things that had happened around him, to the time when he had been angry because of a canceled field trip and the windows of his school had blown out. And the time when he was upset because he had made a mistake at the board, the electrical circuits in the school had fried themselves. The time when the pressure had been on him in a ball game to get a hit, and his bat had exploded as he smacked a home run.

When I’m upset, he thought. Or when I’m good and mad. That’s when I can call on the art. That’s when I can do magic.

And he thought of the terrible trick he had almost fallen for, of the imitation of his father and his mother. The man whose voice was taunting him had made them, had prepared the trap. He would crush Jarvey like a bug, like an insect.

Jarvey saw in memory the white, pale face of the spidery man in his nightmare. He had seen it before. When Siyamon Midion had ushered him into his car, his Rolls-Royce, that man had been at the wheel of the car. Siyamon had even mentioned his name. A strange name, not Midion, not a relative, but...

Jarvey grabbed handfuls of hot sand and squeezed them. What was the name? Haimish Midion had contemptuously told his brother that a good magician could control anything if he knew its true name! And Siyamon had said the man’s name. If only Jarvey could remember!

They were in the Rolls~Royce, and Siyamon was taking Jarvey to Bywater House, Siyamon’s mansion outside of London. Siyamon was toying with his silver-headed cane and his voice was droning on and on. What had he said?

“... you will enjoy a tour of my home, perhaps tomorrow, as they and I are attending the reading of the will. I shall have Mr ....”

Mr.—Mr. what? Siyamon had said the name, an odd name, and it was almost on the tip of Jarvey’s tongue. If he knew it, he could do something. If he could remember the name, the name of—

Thunder crashed from the brassy sky. Jarvey felt a surge of anger. “Rupert Henge!” he shouted again. “This isn’t real! None of this is real! I don’t believe in it! I want to see the truth! Now!”

The world swirled around him, but Jarvey sprang to his feet and stood firm. The desert vanished as though swept away in a sandstorm. Instead of the desert, there was a room, a dim room with gray walls, and standing a few feet away from Jarvey, his expression somehow fearful and furious at once, was the pale-faced spider of a man. He raised his hands.