Curse of the Midions (2 page)

His bat had exploded, and the ball had flown away. That wasn't the first time something strange had happened. In first grade, the class field day had been ruined by a steady, hard rain, and Jarvey had felt furious about not being able to go outside.

Then the classroom window had blown out, shattering into glittering shards, making Miss Daly scream in alarm. A suddenly pounding rain had whipped in on a cold wind. The class had to leave the classroom and go down to the cafeteria for the rest of the day.

Second grade, and Jarvey had been humiliated when he hadn't been able to spell a word at the board. The lights overhead had flared to incredible brightness, then had exploded, one after another, with tinkles of glass and puffs of smoke. Kids yelled and ducked under the desks. The whole school had lost power. The buses had come early that day.

But never had anything so disturbing happened outside, never on a baseball field.

In the dream, Jarvey's feet grew heavier and heavier as he tried to run the bases. He could barely move.

A crooked little monstrous creature waited at home plate.

“You're the Spriggan,” Jarvey said, wondering how he even knew that word.

“No,” the creature had said with an evil grin. “
You
are.”

 

Jarvey's eyes jerked open, and he rolled out of bed, his heart beating hard. Then he realized that it had all been another dream, one of the dreams he had come to dread. He crawled back under the covers, trying to control his rapid breathing.

His parents always told him he was imagining things.

After the window incident, they had explained that his anger hadn't caused the window to shatter. It must have been the force of the wind, his dad had insisted. And the classroom lights had blown because of a short circuit, and his home run had just shown that he was stronger and quicker than he knew. Of course, he had played badly in every other game, because his nerves were on edge waiting for something else to happen. His parents reassured him after his bad dreams too: He was just keyed up, excited, upset. Dreams didn't mean anything.

Jarvey wanted to agree with them, because if they were right, he wasn't—well, crazy. Even though crazy things happened around him sometimes, and more than once his parents had been called to a conference at school, when water pipes burst in Jarvey's presence or every computer locked up as he sat at a keyboard. Although his teachers insisted that he didn't
do
anything, the principal always gave him suspicious looks.

 

The light coming in through the window had a late-afternoon redness. Jarvey got out of bed, still feeling shaky from the nightmare. He went into the tiny bathroom and washed his face in cold water. That helped a little. Staring into the mirror over the round sink, Jarvey gazed at his own face. His dark blue eyes looked back at him accusingly, and the spray of freckles across his nose reminded him of being out in the sun, playing baseball.

Jarvey sighed. He supposed he had been unfair to his dad. Sometimes he wondered if his father was disappointed in him. The two of them weren't much alike. Dr. Midion had dozens of awards on his shelves for his academic work, going all the way back to grade school. Jarvey was lucky to keep a C average, with a few B grades sprinkled in. And though his father always came to the games, he never seemed all that enthusiastic about baseball.

Jarvey returned to his room, got dressed, and then pushed through the connecting door to his parents' room. “Mom? Dad?” The room was empty.

Jarvey felt a little wave of uneasiness. Maybe he should go down to the lobby and see if what's her name, Grace Macauley, knew where his parents had gone.

The dark corridor was a baffling maze. Jarvey made a wrong turn and saw a dead end ahead. He groaned in frustration—and the dim lights began to flicker and fade. Not again! He hurried back the way he had come. Something soft brushed his forehead, maybe a cobweb. Tiny legs crept across his cheek, and in revulsion, he swiped at his face. “Stop it!”

The lights steadied, and then he heard what sounded like a party downstairs, with people singing off-key and lots of laughter. The noise led him to the stairway, and at the bottom of the stair he saw Mrs. Macauley leaning on her counter, chatting with a knotty, bent, red-faced man whose nose looked like a potato. She noticed Jarvey and turned toward him with her big-toothed smile. “Hello, then! Had a good nap, have we, love?”

“Uh, fine,” Jarvey said with a shrug. “Do you know where my mom and dad are?”

“Went out on that will business, I think, around teatime. Oh, that would be about four o'clock. A man called round for them. Hang on, though—I think your dad left a note for you.” She rummaged in the cubbyhole and held out a folded scrap of yellow paper.

Jarvey unfolded it. It was his dad's scrawly handwriting, all right:

The note was signed
Dad
. Jarvey looked up from the paper. “He says he went to meet another Midion,” he began.

The potato-nosed man gasped. It sounded like a cross between a wheeze and a cough. “Midion? Midion? Did he say Midion?” His voice was high-pitched and screechy.

“Sammy,” Mrs. Macauley said in a warning tone.

The crooked old man squinted at Jarvey. “You one of them, then?”

“One of what?” Jarvey asked, bewildered.

“One of them wizards, that's what!” Sammy snapped. “One of them Midions, as meddles with powers they shouldn't!”

“Sammy!” Mrs. Macauley's voice cracked like a whip. “This young man is from America. He doesn't know anything about—that.”

“He's got the look of them, though,” Sammy said, and then to Jarvey's surprise the man began to chant:

 

“Sammy Crippen, you've had a pint too much!” Mrs. Macauley scolded. “Along home with you now, and don't worry this poor boy any longer with your silly superstitions!”

Sammy's face clenched in a grim, disapproving expression, and he headed for the door. He paused for a moment, looked back at Jarvey, pointed a bony finger, and said, “Soul cold as death!” Then he was outside, walking away briskly.

“What's . . . what's wrong with him?” Jarvey asked in a shaky voice.

“Just a drop too much of good brown ale,” Mrs. Macauley muttered. “Look, though, I might as well tell you the way of it. This part of London is named Hag's Court because of one of your ancestors, Agnes Midion. Back in the days of old Oliver Cromwell, they took Agnes prisoner and executed her as a witch—hanged her on the green just behind this very house, so they say. Her father, Septimus, pleaded with them to spare his daughter's life, but those old Puritans were sure she was a witch and so, well, they killed her. They do say that after she died, not a blade of grass ever grew again on what came to be called the hag's ground. Over time, this part of town began to be known as Hag's Court, in her memory, like. Oh, I know it sounds crazy, but, well, people here have long memories. Are you hungry, then?”

Jarvey was, though his stomach had a strange feeling in it, crawly and wriggly, as if he'd swallowed a handful of squirming live bugs and they weren't happy about the experience. “I could eat something.”

“Fish and chips? Local treat!”

Jarvey's mouth watered. “Sounds good.”

“Hang about, and I'll have you a tray ready. You can take it back up to your room if you'd like your privacy. Oh, what to drink? Lemonade? It's fizzy here, you know. Yanks always are surprised by that. Or how about a Coke?”

“Coke's fine.”

A straight chair, like the one in his room, stood tucked into a little niche. Jarvey sat on that and leafed through a bewildering English newspaper for a few minutes while Mrs. Macauley disappeared through a pair of double doors into the pub. Jarvey tried to make sense out of a column on cricket, wondering what “bowling a googly” meant.

“Here we are, then.”

Jarvey glanced up. Mrs. Macauley was back at the counter, holding a shallow wooden tray holding a plate with crisp-looking golden fish and—french fries! Maybe they were out of chips. “Thanks,” Jarvey said. He carried the tray up the stairs and settled down in his room with the tray across his knees. He took a sip of Coke. It was warm. Didn't they know about ice in London? Maybe they had lost the recipe.

The fish was very tasty and the “chips” were good too, better than the fast-food french fries back home. Jarvey wolfed the food down, finished off the tepid soda, and let out a satisfying burp.

After washing the grease from his hands in the little bathroom, Jarvey went into his parents' room to watch TV. The small set could get only five channels, and one of them seemed to be in French. He sat on the edge of the bed and watched a comedy for a while—at least the sound track had a laughing audience on it—but the accents of the actors were hard to understand.

Eight o'clock passed, with no sign of his parents. “They're going to owe me big for this,” Jarvey said aloud. He was beginning to feel nervous.

Someone rapped twice, sharply, on the door, and Jarvey jumped right off the bed. His throat felt as if he'd swallowed a rubber ball. “Who is it?” he said, trying to make his voice deep.

The doorknob creaked, then turned, and the door opened, swinging slowly outward. In the growing opening, Jarvey glimpsed a hunched-over, skinny, shadowy figure. Light from the room fell on lank gray hair, and under that a wizened, ratty face, the face of a gaunt man whose burning dark blue eyes bored right into Jarvey's.

“Who are you?” Jarvey squeaked.

The man didn't answer for a second. Then, in a raspy, hoarse voice, he growled, “You're a Midion, all right. Hair like rusty gold. Eyes midnight blue. I've come to warn you, boy, you and your father and your mother. Heed me! You're all in danger. Beware the book!” His hand, a pale, crooked claw, scrabbled at the door for a moment and then swung it shut with a bang. He was gone, leaving Jarvey feeling dazed, his heart pounding.

Jarvey came out of his stunned trance as if he had just felt an electric shock. “Wait!” Jarvey was at the door in two steps, and he had it open at once. He stood frozen in the doorway, staring out into the empty corridor.

It was impossible. The man couldn't have vanished that fast.

But vanished he had, as if he had dissolved into the dark, musty air in the hallway.

Message by Night

Jarvey closed the door and leaned against the wall, feeling his heart thudding hard inside his chest, as though he had just completed a hard sprint. He told himself to be cool, but then a shrill warbling sound made him jump as if he had just touched a live electric wire. With a gasp of relief, he realized the noise was just the telephone beside his parents' bed.

Jarvey got to it as it rang a second time. For a moment he paused with his hand on the receiver. To calm himself, he took a deep, deliberate breath, swallowed his apprehension, and answered the phone with a somewhat shaky “H-hello?”

“Son!”

Jarvey breathed out a lungful of air, sudden relief at the sound of the familiar voice making his muscles go limp. “Dad! Where are you? Are you okay? Why—”

“Calm down, now. We're quite well, thank you very much. However, we want you to see this fantastic place,” his father's voice said. “You'll love it. Now, I know it's a little late. You needn't worry about it. We'll move back to the hotel tomorrow, after the will business is taken care of, but you really have to see this wonderful Midion mansion. Get ready—your great-uncle and his driver are already on the way to pick you up.”