Tracked by Terror (14 page)

“No.” Jarvey's mom put her cool hand on his forehead. “Are you sure it wasn't a dream, sweetheart?”

Jarvey didn't think he had a fever, though his face felt hot with embarrassment. “Um, I don't know, Mom. What day is today?”

“It's Saturday,” his mother said promptly. “Oh, the date? It's the first day of summer break.”

“For you, anyway,” his dad added. “I still have finals left to give before college is out for a week. Come on, what did you think you heard, Jarvey?”

Jarvey shook his head. “Must've been a dream, I guess. It's all mixed up.” He paused and then said, “Dad, what's a grimoire?”

His father's eyebrows rose in evident surprise. “A what?”

“A grimoire,” Jarvey said. “It's a word I, uh, heard somewhere.”

His father scratched his head, further ruffling his brownish-blond hair. “Book of some kind, isn't it? Like a book about magic and that sort of thing?”

“Do we have one?”

Samantha Midion guided Jarvey over and made him sit on the foot of the bed. “Jarvey, you're not making a lot of sense. What are you talking about?”

“I thought there was a Midion Grimoire,” Jarvey said slowly. “A book of magical spells and stuff Over in England.”

His mother and father exchanged a questioning glance. Then his dad said, “That must have been one doozy of a dream. Well, I've never heard of a Midion Grimoire, in England or anywhere else. I seem to associate grimoires with medieval alchemists, the guys who kept trying to turn lead into gold, without much success. Anyway, it's an odd time of the morning to get curious about old books. Right now I'd suggest that you go back to bed and back to sleep for at least two more hours, champ. This is summer break! Get the most out of it!”

“Okay.” Jarvey pulled away from his mother's arm and plodded out. He felt strangely dizzy and disoriented. The whole house was hot. Back in his room he switched on the radio and moved the pointer up and down the dial until he found a public radio station that was broadcasting the news. According to the newscaster, the temperature was in the high seventies and the date was the third of June. But wait, they had flown to England on the afternoon of June 6, hadn't they?

Or had it been a dream?

Jarvey pinched himself, and the pinch hurt. He'd read or heard somewhere that you could wake yourself from a bad dream if you could pinch yourself hard enough, but nothing happened. What did that prove? He couldn't get back to sleep, and so he dressed quietly and tiptoed downstairs. He opened the door and looked out across the quiet lawn. Vaguely he remembered something terrible about the moon, but he couldn't see a moon at all, just the scattered, fading stars of early morning. He went back inside, to the family room, and switched on the TV.

Old movies, infomercials selling everything from get-rich-quick books to machines designed to make you lose weight, reruns of old, old TV shows, news and weather, everything looked normal as he used the remote to surf the channels. And the on-screen display agreed that today was the third of June, and if the year was right, he was still eleven until Thursday rolled around.

But how could that be? Jarvey remembered months and months of other things happening. He remembered ... what was her name? A red-haired girl who had helped him somehow. And Lunnon, a place called Lunnon, and a theater. No, he thought with a frown, the theater had to be part of a dream, a building as big as the whole world, ghosts in the seats, a strange family acting out the plays. Couldn't be real. For that matter, time got all messed up in dreams. Sometimes he'd had nightmares of playing baseball, of smacking a good, sharp line drive and then running toward first base, except he was running in slow motion, hardly able to drag one foot in front of the other, while the other players raced around the field to scoop up the ball, make the throw to first, and put him out.

Still... still, he remembered, vaguely, a whole series of things that had to take weeks, if not months.

Restless, he switched off the TV and went back up to his room. His wall calendar had June 9 circled in red and in the space next to the date, in his own handwriting, were the words “Baseball tryouts.” He wanted to ... to pitch, that was it. This year he wanted to pitch. He'd been practicing. Donny Russell was good, but Jarvey thought he could beat him at pitching, could ... could get the position....

But hadn't tryouts already happened? He tried to remember and thought of the big chain-link fence around the field and ... a big spider? No. This must have been a dream, he told himself

But he had to miss the tryouts, because they were set for the Friday after his family had flown to Lunnon. No, to ... to London. To Hag's Court, the place was called.

He went back down to the den and turned on the computer. There was one way to check. He started the Internet browser his dad used and did a search for “Hag's Court in London.” The search engine responded “Your search did not produce any result.” Okay, then, he thought, how about grimoire? This time he found an article that told him a grimoire was a book of magical information written between medieval times and the eighteenth century. The word came from Old French and was akin to grammar, because a grimoire dealt with the structures of magic spells, as a grammar book dealt with the structure of sentences ... and so on. Nothing about the Midion Grimoire anywhere. Nothing about the Midions, for that matter, at least his own family.

His mom and dad came downstairs at about eight, dressed but still looking a little sleepy. “You feeling better, champ?” his dad asked at the breakfast table.

“Yeah,” Jarvey said slowly. “I guess I am. I had a really weird dream last night. I thought we flew to England because you came into an inheritance.”

Dr. Cadmus Midion laughed. “I wish! I'm afraid we're pretty much stuck at home this summer, because I've agreed to teach three summer session classes at the college. But we've been talking about a vacation. Maybe next year we'll actually be able to go to London, Paris, and Rome for a couple of weeks. We'll see.”

They ate their cornflakes, and when his dad finished reading the morning paper, Jarvey took it to his room and went through it page by page. It was the ordinary, everyday local paper, with a big front-page story about the building of a new church, another about a car crash that destroyed a truck and a car but didn't hurt anyone too badly, and other stories about normal commonplace things. Even the comic strips were familiar.

His dad began mowing the lawn, the same exact way he had mowed it the week before they drove to the airport to fly to London—no, that hadn't happened. But as he started out to help, Jarvey paused to pour his dad a tall glass of ice water and thought, I've done this before. He tried to shrug off the feeling and took the glass out to his dad. “Thanks, son,” Dr. Midion said, taking a long sip and then fishing out his handkerchief to wipe his sweaty face.

Jarvey shivered, and thought to himself, He's going to say this will be a scorcher of a summer and he wonders if it's because of global warming.

“Hot already,” his dad remarked. “Going to be a scorcher of a summer, I think. I wonder if global warming is causing this.”

Jarvey closed his eyes. He had been here and done this already. He felt that he already knew everything his dad was going to say and do. The letter would come by noon, the long creamy envelope all the way from London, England, instructing Dr. Midion to be present on June 8 for the reading of the will of Thaddeus Midion, late of Hag's Court.

But he forced a smile and took over the lawn mower, trimming the front lawn into increasingly smaller rectangles until he finished the job. His mom made lemonade for the family, and sitting at the table and sipping from the tall, frosty glass, Jarvey asked, “What is it when you already know what's going to happen? When it's like you've lived through that moment before?”

His mother frowned a little. “You mean déjà vu? That's sort of a psychological state, I think.”

“French term,” his father put in. “It means ‘already seen.' It's kind of a creepy sense that everything that is happening right now has happened before. I read somewhere that it's caused by a lag between what you see or hear and the way your brain processes the information.”

Slowly, Jarvey said, “I think you're going to get a letter from England today, Dad.”

“I don't think I've ever received a letter from England in my whole life,” Dr. Midion said, sounding surprised. “What makes you say that, son?”

Jarvey shrugged, feeling helpless.

Time crawled by until noon, and when the mail carrier drove her little truck down the street, Jarvey went out to meet her. She handed him a bundle of letters, magazines, and catalogs, and he sorted through them as he walked back to the house. A magazine about history that his dad subscribed to, catalogs from clothing stores and gift stores, a water bill from the county, three or four credit-card offers from banks, and a square envelope addressed to Jarvey. Probably a birthday card, he guessed, since his birthday was coming up in a couple of days.

No heavy, creamy envelope with foreign stamps on it. Jarvey breathed a sigh of relief as he dropped the mail into the basket on the hall table. “Mail's here,” he called, and then he took the square envelope addressed to him up to his room.

Sprawling down on the bed, Jarvey tore it open, and took out the card inside. Huh, he thought, strange kind of birthday card. No picture on it at all, just a blank white card, folded. Maybe it had a funny message inside.

He opened it up and found the inside of the card was just as blank and white as the outside: no picture, no funny saying, no check from his grandmother, nothing at all. He turned the card over and over, frowning at it, wondering if it was some kind of prank.

And then the card squirmed in his grasp.

Jarvey caught his breath. The white cardboard was pulsating, swelling and shrinking like a balloon. Suddenly a blister rose up on the surface, became an oval, and the oval became a white mask of a face. It opened blank eyes, and in a whispery voice, the face spoke to him: “It's not real! None of it is real!”

With a startled gasp, Jarvey flung the card away. It burst into smoke, a silent explosion, and the smoke faded.

The envelope was gone too. All evidence of the card's existence had vanished.

But Jarvey remembered the face, remembered the voice, and he recognized both of them.

“Betsy,” he said.

J
arvey 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.

“No,” he groaned. It was all happening again.

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.

No sound at all—he heard nothing, no breathing, no snoring, nothing. He turned on the light.

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.

He heard his father's voice again: “Hmm? What is it? Come in.”

Jarvey opened the door and said, “Who are you?”

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.

“Is Siyamon doing this?” Jarvey demanded.

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.”

“Thunder?” his mother asked, reaching for her robe. “Is it raining?”

“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?”