The Eye of Midnight Page 3

  “A door,” he whispered.

  Indeed, a yawning portal now loomed inside the stone archway. Steep steps tumbled down into the darkness below. Maxine and William stared at each other in amazement.

  Suddenly, Battersea Manor seemed much less boring.

  "We’re not going in there,” Maxine said, peering down the darkened staircase. “I mean, we should probably wait for Grandpa, don’t you think?”

  But the seductive voice of Adventure was already crooning softly in William’s ear, drowning out Maxine’s misgivings.

  “What do we need Grandpa for?” he replied. “Permission? If he were really all that worried about us getting into trouble, maybe he should have been here to keep us out of it.”

  Summoning his courage and taking his cousin firmly by the arm, William led the way through the secret door.

  The stairs creaked beneath them as they descended, their hands and feet groping blindly in the gloom. Maxine’s resolve grew weaker with each step downward, but she tried to reassure herself by glancing back to the top of the stairs and the thin shaft of light beyond the door.

  Presently the stairs ended, and the cousins perceived that they were in a sort of musty, narrow passageway. William shuffled on, but Maxine faltered at the thought of leaving behind the light at the top of the stairs.

  “Will, let’s go back,” she begged. “Please?” And then, in the same breath, she let out a scream.

  “What’s the big idea?” yelped William.

  “Sorry. Something brushed my face. I think it was a cobweb.”

  William waved his hand nervously in her direction.

  “I just felt it, too,” he said. “It’s a string or something.”

  He gave it a pull, and the passage filled with light. They squinted in the sudden brightness. When their eyes adjusted, they found that they were in a low passageway constructed of rough stone, empty except for a bare lightbulb above and a red door at the far end. The door was unmarked, save for an ornate zero that embellished the brass doorknob.

  William and Maxine looked at each other with puzzled expressions. And then, without pausing long enough to change their minds, they crept toward the door, turned the knob, and stepped across the threshold.

  The smells and textures were what captured Maxine first. The fragrance of incense combined with the somewhat less pleasant chemical undertone of formaldehyde. Heavy velvet curtains framed the inside of the doorway they had passed through, and to their left, a pair of leather chairs, cracked and burnished from years of use, faced each other on a threadbare Persian rug.

  William brushed past Maxine into the dim room, his face bathed in the eerie green glow of a murky glass tank that stood behind the old club chairs. As he approached, the water within stirred, and in the haze he perceived the slow movement of a dozen silvery piranhas, each profile showing a single cold eye and a sullen, malevolent underbite of razor-sharp teeth.

  Behind him, Maxine flipped a switch beside the door, lighting the entire room. William’s gaze drifted up the facing wall, pausing on a battered wooden propeller flanked by an assortment of harpoons and brightly feathered blowguns. A pith helmet sat atop a penny arcade shooting gallery, along with a set of rusty thumbscrews and a drugstore candy jar full of gleaming glass eyes, which stared, unblinking, in a hundred different directions. Exotic hunting trophies glowered down from the walls above—rhinos and Cape buffalo and an assortment of predatory cats, their jaws forever frozen in a succession of indignant snarls.

  The collection lined the shelves, hung from the ceiling, and crowded every corner. Dusty maps, pagan idols, and aboriginal boomerangs; glass jars with pickled biological specimens floating gray and limp in a chemical brine; signal kites and hubble-bubbles and tarnished helmets—and none of it inside a glass case or behind a velvet rope but everything right out in the open to pick up and examine. Suffice it to say, the basement was like nothing they had ever seen before, and indeed, like nothing in the rest of stuffy old Battersea Manor.

  “Have you ever seen so many amazing things in one place?” said William, stooping to examine a collection of iridescent blue butterflies and the stone bust of a handsome Egyptian princess.

  Maxine shook her head and turned in a slow circle, gaping at the hoard of oddities that surrounded her. It was a stupendous collection, promising hours of wide-eyed discoveries. But more compelling yet, to Maxine’s way of thinking, were the long rows of photographs that covered the walls—an enticing arrangement of windows to adventures past and parts unknown—and she studied each of them with fascination.

  Many of the pictures were of a young man who must have been Grandpa, taken in some exotic locale, sometimes with a woman Maxine assumed was her grandmother, but more often with a group of dusty legionnaires or painted natives. In one, Grandpa’s left arm was bandaged and hung lamely in a sling, but his right arm still shouldered his rifle, and before him lay the limp form of a lifeless panther. In another, Grandma sat perched on his shoulders with a panicky expression while he waded across a wide stream, laughing devilishly at her predicament.

  They looked happy in the photos, hand in hand, young and strong. He was handsome and tall, with a wide, easy smile beneath a sweeping mustache—his eyes creased with a perpetual squint earned on cloudless plateaus and a thousand safaris. She seemed graceful and sturdy, in love and untouchable, like a woman who laughs at the future. In every picture her hair was piled in a stylish chignon, though inevitably a few unruly strands managed to escape, falling into her eyes and giving her a careless appearance. Maxine suddenly felt a throbbing ache at the thought that she would never have the chance to know her. She touched her grandmother’s face, then sighed and turned away.

  William, meanwhile, had just backed into a spherical object suspended from the ceiling. The thing was slightly larger than a baseball—withered and coffee-brown, like a spoiled apple hung in his cellar back home. It swung gently from a long tangle of black hair. He gave it a poke, and the wrinkled lump twisted slowly in the air until he found himself nose to nose with a tiny misshapen face.

  William worked down a dry swallow. The eyes and mouth were stitched shut, and a bit of bone pierced the nostrils, and although the skull had been removed and the blackened features were grisly and deformed, there was no question that it had once been human.

  “Ugh,” said Maxine, walking over with her nose wrinkled in disgust. “Grandpa’s sure got some strange ideas when it comes to decorating.”

  William prodded one of the stitched eyelids. “What? You mean you don’t have shrunken heads dangling from your ceiling back home?”

  “Will,” she said, “do you think he’s—do you think he’s normal?”

  “Normal?” he replied. “Do you mean ordinary? No, I think we can safely say our grandfather is far from ordinary.”

  “But do you think he’s—”

  “Bats? Off his rocker? It’s possible. He sure does collect some strange toys.”

  Maxine shuddered. “I don’t know if I can stay here all summer with a crazy old geezer.”

  “So maybe he’s got a loose screw or two,” said William. “What’s the difference? The way I figure it, we’re old enough to take care of ourselves.”

  “That’s an earful, coming from someone who can’t even match his own socks,” said Maxine, pointing at his ankles and rolling her eyes. “Listen, Will, we have no idea if we can trust him. As a matter of fact, we don’t know the first thing about him. What if he really is crazy? Or worse?”

  William frowned. “Aw, go on,” he said with a wave. “Next you’ll be telling stories about the bogeyman. It’ll all be all right. You’ll see.”

  The cousins soon lost all track of time in the bowels of the cluttered basement. The trail of curiosities led them farther on and deeper in, until at last they reached the remotest corner of the long room and found themselves at the foot of an enormous wooden crate.

  “Hmm,” murmured William. “What’s this?”

  The pine box stood on end, its
hinged front nailed shut, giving it an allure similar to the famous chest that Pandora opened once upon a time, with such dire results. And one detail in particular was impossible to ignore: in shape, the crate was very like a coffin. As the cousins’ eyes met, there was no doubt that they shared the same impression.

  “What’s Grandpa got in there?” asked William uneasily.

  The lid was pasted with several shipping labels and a conspicuous yellowed tag, which Maxine dusted off with her shirtsleeve.

  “Noli me tangere,” she read.

  “Is that Greek?” asked William.

  “Latin, I think,” she replied. “I’ve seen it before, in a book at school.”

  “What does it mean?”

  Maxine traced the words with her finger, racking her brain, and the translation came to her suddenly from the depths of memory.

  “ ‘Touch me not.’ ”

  William scuttled away, leaving Maxine alone with the crate for several uncomfortable moments before reappearing with a rusty claw hammer he had scrounged from an old toolbox.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Maxine asked suspiciously.

  William flashed her a devious grin, brandishing the hammer as he approached the wooden crate.

  “Oh no you don’t,” she said. “We are not opening up that box, Will.”

  “What an interesting suggestion,” he said innocently. “To be honest, the thought never even crossed my mind—but now that you mention it, count me in.”

  “Do you need your head examined?” she chirped. “The label says hands off.”

  “Don’t worry. If Grandpa asks whose idea it was, I’ll be sure to give you all the credit.”

  “Oooh,” said Maxine, grinding her teeth in aggravation. “I could just pinch you to death!”

  “Oh, come on, M, don’t be such a cold fish. Aren’t you even a little bit curious to know what Grandpa’s hiding in there?”

  Maxine folded her arms across her chest and thought for a moment. “I guess I am,” she said finally. “Maybe I need my head examined, too.”

  William started near the bottom, wedging the claw end of the hammer under the lid. He pried, and the first nail made an evil screech the cousins felt in the roots of their teeth. As the crack yawned, a shiny black centipede writhed out of the gap, and William recoiled with revulsion.

  “A stowaway,” he said, wiping his hands on his shirt before returning uneasily to his task.

  He worked his way up the lid, standing on a footstool to reach the final nail, which proved more stubborn than the rest. Maxine felt sure that he was about to pull the whole box down on top of them with a great crash, when suddenly the nail gave way, the lid sprang open, and William tumbled off the stool, bowling his cousin over in the process. The smell of mildewed packing straw filled the room.

  William and Maxine caught their breath and scrabbled backward on the floor.

  Towering over them was an ominous figure—eight feet tall at least—a colossal wooden statue stained as black as darkest midnight and polished to a gleaming luster. It was clad only in a crimson loincloth that brushed the floor between its widespread feet, and a spherical glass vial was slung round its neck on a thick gold chain.

  The figure’s sinewed shoulders and powerful haunches seemed to knot with menacing intent, and an evil-looking beard of braided horsehair hung down over the naked chest. But far and away the most disturbing aspect of the whole spectacle was the countenance that leered at them. Between a broad, flat nose and brutal brow, two deep-set eyes of black glass glittered wickedly and fixed the cousins with a malignant stare. The jaw was hinged, and the mouth hung open in an obscene gape, which conjured up the uncanny impression of a great black serpent prepared to swallow some enormous prey.

  “Wh-what is it?” whispered Maxine.

  William didn’t answer but crawled forward on hands and knees to retrieve an old envelope that had fallen from the open crate. Keeping a nervous eye on the wooden statue, he unfolded a yellowed letter and read the contents.

  My dear Colonel Battersea,

  It was immensely gratifying to receive your inquiry. As a professor of Near Eastern history and a collector of rare antiquities, I was fascinated to hear of the artifact you have in your possession, and hope that I may be able to shed some light on its substance and essence.

  Your wooden figure is highly unusual, but it is not unknown in this corner of the world. To put it plainly, it is a vessel of sorts—a supernatural receptacle for a being known as the jinni.

  The jinni, as I’m sure you are aware, is without physical body. The jinn are believed to be creatures of purest fire, and no mortal can lay hold of them, any more than a man may grasp a twisting flame. But the old legends say that in dark corners of the world, in dark times, men sought out forbidden knowledge and found the means to trick the jinn and capture them in lamps or flasks, like the one worn around the neck of your carved figure.

  In the end, though, these sorcerers realized that a bottled jinni was of no more use to them than a liberated one, and so in order to bend them to their purposes, they fashioned wooden statues—vehicles for the jinni’s smokeless fire—and they called these figures al-kaljin, or “spirit steeds.” Animated by the spirits of the jinn, the wooden marionettes were roused to stalk the world of men.

  A word or two about the particulars of the process are probably in order. To breathe life into the wooden colossus, the glass flask containing the jinni’s imprisoned spirit is placed inside the open mouth, and in due course an abraxas, or an abracadabra, as you would call it, is spoken aloud. The precise words, in this case, are “Rise and obey,” and when the command is uttered, the dark eyes of the al-kaljin will flicker, the rigid limbs will turn supple, and dead wood will rise, compelled to do the master’s bidding.

  There is more that could be said, of course, about the origins of the al-kaljin and the secrets of the jinn. I have never had the opportunity to put the lore to the test myself, but if you happen to attempt awakening the creature, please send word, as I would be most interested to learn of the results.

  Until that time, I remain, indubitably,

  Your humble servant,

  Baltasar Anawi, PhD

  University of Damascus

  William folded the letter and scratched his forehead thoughtfully with his hammer.

  “A jinni,” murmured Maxine, approaching the wooden figure and tapping the glass flask with her finger.

  “So,” asked William, “are you game?”

  “Game for what?”

  “Waking it up, of course. What else?”

  Maxine’s face clouded.

  “I mean, we wouldn’t actually make it do much,” said William. “Have it turn around and touch its nose…ask it to say its name. Maybe we could get it to dance the Charleston.”

  “Can it grant wishes, do you think?” asked Maxine.

  “I expect. Every self-respecting jinni I’ve ever heard of can grant wishes.”

  Maxine’s thoughts flitted to her sick mother.

  “All right,” she said. “Do it quick, before I change my mind.”

  William obliged, mounting the stool again to stand face to face with the creature. He grasped the vial and prodded it delicately into the figure’s yawning maw as if he were feeding a goldfish to a moray eel.

  “Now we’re on the trolley,” he muttered, descending from the stool and taking a large step backward. He cleared his throat nervously and pointed at the creature.

  “Er…Rise,” he said. “Rise and obey.”

  The figure showed no sign of life. It stood silent and still, with never so much as a twitch.

  “Maybe try and sort of…close the mouth a bit,” Maxine suggested.

  William raised his eyebrows at Maxine’s recklessness with his fingers, but he gave it a decent effort, gingerly forcing the heavy jaw up until it closed partially on the vial.

  “Rise and obey!” he said again, louder this time. He pulled away and watched the figure closely for a moment
.

  “Aw, this thing is a big hoax,” he said with disappointment. He shrugged at Maxine and turned his back on the crate.

  At that moment they were startled by a noise upstairs. Heavy footsteps crossed the floor above them. A voice called out.

  “Grandpa!” said William. “He’s home!”

  Maxine blinked at him in a panic.

  “We shouldn’t be down here, Will!” she cried. “We shouldn’t have opened the box!”

  William slammed the lid of the crate and tacked it shut with a single nail. Tripping over the clutter in the basement, the cousins scrambled for the stairs.

  Maxine and William slunk from the darkened stairway and found the entry hall unoccupied. Breathing a sigh of relief, they pulled the secret door shut behind them and tiptoed toward the library.

  “Good evening,” said a voice above them.

  The cousins both jumped like tripped mousetraps, and their eyes shot to a tall, gray-haired gentleman descending the stairs.

  “I didn’t startle you, I hope,” said Colonel Battersea in a plummy British accent. “I was just looking for you in the upper halls.” If he knew of their visit to the basement, he showed no sign of it.

  “Welcome to Battersea Manor,” he said. “Maxine, I presume. And this must be William.”

  The cousins weren’t certain whether he expected a hug or a salute, but the old colonel settled the matter by offering an outstretched hand.

  “Where’ve you been?” asked William. “We thought you’d forgotten all about us.”

  “Eh? Forgot about you?” replied Grandpa. “Oh yes, yes of course. My apologies. I had every intention of being here upon your arrival, but I’ve had a bit of urgent business to attend to, and I’ve only just now returned.”

  Grandpa’s face was lined with years, and his handlebar mustache was gray now, but his eyes still glinted with the vitality of the man in the photographs downstairs. His features might have been carved from flint; taken in total, they hinted at an intimidating intellect. He leaned against the banister and loosened his tie, then gave a long sigh. His mind seemed elsewhere.