The Eye of Midnight Read online

  Tumbling into the entry hall, Maxine was surprised to find the front door slightly ajar. She gave it a puzzled look and pulled it shut, but she suddenly felt a disturbing tingle at the nape of her neck and let out a sharp gasp. She was not alone in the front hall. Two strangers stood behind her, pressed flat against the staircase. They wore coveralls and long black coats, with heavy boots and short-billed caps, and one of them carried a pair of hooked ice tongs across his shoulder. As she turned, both of them reached for something inside their long coats.

  “H-hello?” said Maxine warily. “Are you here to deliver the ice?”

  The men’s vigilance relaxed when they saw her face, and their hands returned to their sides.

  “Where is Colonel Battersea?” asked the man with the iron tongs, his words laced with a peculiar accent.

  Something about the men chilled Maxine to the bone. They had dark complexions and hungry eyes, and they moved stealthily, licking their lips as if they could taste her fear.

  “He’s upstairs somewhere,” said Maxine, growing more alarmed by the second. “He’ll—he’ll be down any minute.”

  She opened her mouth to call for Grandpa, but the man lunged at her, clamping his hand over her mouth like a pipe wrench. Maxine’s eyes bulged above his fingers. The man said nothing but forced her gaze to meet his.

  The second man inspected the room calmly, methodically. He rapped on the blue tiles of the fountain and opened the case of the old clock, then brushed his fingers across the keys of the typewriter and disappeared into the kitchen.

  The man who held Maxine looked down into her eyes with a soulless stare. He tilted her head sideways and scrutinized her profile, then shook his head indifferently.

  His confederate returned from the kitchen waving a wrinkled slip of paper that Maxine recognized straightaway as Grandpa’s telegram, and the two men exchanged words in a foreign tongue.

  There was a noise from above—footsteps on the stairs. The intruders glanced at each other and pushed Maxine aside, and then, as if they shared a single mind, they sloped toward the door. At the threshold the hindmost stopped and turned, producing a silver coin from his pocket.

  “Give Colonel Battersea our regards,” he said, tossing it at her feet.

  The door slammed shut behind him, and Maxine sank to the floor and sobbed.

  Grandpa’s voice drifted down from upstairs. “Coats and hats, both of you. It may be chilly this evening in the city,” he called. He carried his leather suitcase and was pulling on a pair of driving gloves as he descended, but when he saw Maxine, he took the last few steps two at a time and crouched at her side.

  “Are you hurt?” he asked, helping her to her feet.

  She shook her head slowly.

  “What happened?” asked William, pelting down behind.

  “They took it,” choked Maxine. “They took the telegram.”

  “Who? Who took the telegram?”

  “There were two of them, dressed like icemen. They had strange accents.”

  Grandpa peered out the window and opened the front door, but they were gone. The muscles in his jaw knotted, and he turned his attention to the grandfather clock. Opening the case, he stopped the pendulum and slid back an interior panel behind the counterweights to reveal a small brass knob. With a twist and a heave, the clock released from the wall and trundled out into the middle of the room like a prodigious drawer, pulling behind it a glass display case fully ten feet in length.

  “I knew that old clock was hiding something,” breathed William. He pressed his nose to the glass and gaped like a fish. The top shelf of the display case was lined with a long column of sinister daggers—black-hilted, razor sharp—each one glinting like a silver thorn. The bottom shelves housed an arsenal of pistols and scatterguns and a handful of grapefruit-sized clay spheres of indeterminate purpose.

  “What’s with all the knives?” William asked.

  “Hmm…,” replied Grandpa distractedly, “trophies, I suppose.” He opened the case and selected a worn Webley revolver, and the cousins watched with morbid fascination as he checked the cylinder and holstered it under his coat.

  “And these funny little clay pots?” asked William, plucking one from the case and tossing it casually in his hand.

  Grandpa caught the sphere in midair and gave him a reproachful look. “Perhaps it’s better not to touch, my boy. The grenadoes contain Greek fire—a combustible concoction that explodes when the shells are shattered, igniting an inferno of startling proportions.”

  He turned the clay sphere over twice in his hands, checking it with care, and then replaced it gently.

  Maxine, understandably, had lost her train of thought for the moment, but it returned to her presently. “The men who took the telegram—they left you this,” she said, holding out the silver coin.

  William took it from her and raised it to catch the light. “It looks old,” he said.

  “A Persian obolus,” said Grandpa without even glancing up.

  “Is it supposed to mean something?” asked William, pocketing it.

  The colonel nodded. “It’s a threat of sorts,” he said. “The coin is meant to be placed in the mouth of a corpse, to pay the ferryman for passage to the shores of the dead.”

  The sun was high in the sky as the train left Hendon and rattled north into the countryside. Maxine and William sat across from Grandpa, faces drawn as they stared out the window. The wheels on the tracks beneath them clattered and whined as a series of telephone poles whisked by endlessly, almost imperceptibly, so that the passing world seemed to dance on the glass like a shimmering projection.

  The opening scenes were sleepy and rural. Scissor-tailed swallows swerved through impossible arcs in the warm, angular rays of early afternoon, Guernseys grazed contentedly on tufted green hills, hay barns freckled the fields, and an occasional horse cart rolled along beside a muddy canal. Gradually, farms gave way to houses, dirt tracks to streets; church steeples pierced the horizon, and bicyclists paused at intersections, watching the train rumble by. Neighborhoods blossomed, Main Streets swept past, and row houses stretched back from the tracks in long queues, dotted with women on stoops and children playing ball in the street.

  “Grandpa,” said William, watching the scenery flit past, “what’s going on? Why do you have to go into New York City?”

  The colonel stirred as if he’d been called back from someplace far away. “I have an appointment to keep,” he said. “It’s nothing you need worry about.”

  “Does it have something to do with your old job in the British government?”

  Grandpa sat up straighter, eyeing the other passengers on the train cautiously. “Trust me, my boy,” he said in a low voice, “the less you know about my affairs, the better. I’m bringing you along only because leaving you home alone was not an option. Indeed, it now appears that Battersea Manor is no longer safe.”

  “What did those men want with Maxine?” William asked.

  “It wasn’t Maxine they were after,” replied Grandpa. “It’s with me they have a score to settle. It seems they were rather keen to learn the contents of my telegram.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Maxine. “Why is that telegram so important?”

  “Egads,” said Grandpa. “Is there no end to your questions?”

  Maxine tried to mask a hurt look. “We were only curious,” she said.

  “Yes, well, curiosity has a habit of killing the cat, the saying goes,” replied Grandpa. “Not to mention larger, two-legged animals from time to time.”

  The cousins shifted uncomfortably in their seats.

  “Perhaps I’m overstating my case,” said Grandpa with a conciliatory wave. “After all, you seem to have survived your expedition into the Adventurers’ Club with no serious side effects.”

  “The Adventurers’ Club?” asked William tensely.

  “Yes, yes, of course—the room you found in the basement.”

  The cousins’ cheeks flushed scarlet.

  �
��Come now”—Grandpa chuckled—“you look as if I’d caught you with your hands in the biscuit tin. You didn’t really think I was ignorant of your little escapade, did you?” He leaned in close and tapped his nose conspiratorially. “It was fortuitous, really. An opportunity for me to see what the two of you are made of.”

  “So the whole thing was a test!” growled Maxine, folding her arms over her chest.

  Grandpa frowned at her. “Don’t be cross, my dear,” he said. “Life is full of tests. And in this particular case, you proved yourselves magnificently. Your discovery of the secret door and your efforts to animate the jinni were quite impressive.”

  “But how did you know?”

  “When I arrived home, the door to the basement was ajar. I may have heard a thing or two.”

  “We couldn’t wake it up,” William said. “The magic words didn’t work.”

  “No, of course not,” replied Grandpa. “Fortunately for you, my jinni speaks Arabic. It doesn’t understand English, be it the Queen’s or your tragic American variation.”

  Maxine’s brows lowered skeptically. “You mean it’s all true? That stuff we read in the letter about bringing the jinni to life?”

  “Ah, now that’s a dodgy business, trying to rouse a jinni,” said Grandpa with a wink. He paused for a moment, and the twinkle in his eye dimmed, as if Maxine’s question had called to mind some other, darker matter.

  “Perhaps—perhaps I should tell you a story,” he said. “As I recall, your parents were rather partial to my bedtime stories.”

  He cleared his throat and motioned for them to sit back in their seats.

  “Long ago and far away,” he said, “there lived a crafty old jinni—”

  “The same one you’ve got in your basement?” asked William.

  “No, no, of course not,” said Grandpa impatiently. “Now sit quietly and listen.

  “On a rocky crag in the middle of the desert, the jinni built a mighty fortress, and there inside the soaring parapets he sat and nursed a lust for power and conquest. He could not accomplish his ambitions alone, he realized, so he gathered about him a host of servants—a veritable army, raised from the desert sands.

  “The jinni was full of dodges and deceptions and diabolical tricks of every sort, but he had one trick in particular that trumped all others. Within his secret chambers he kept a mirror. This mirror was believed to have certain magical properties. It was said that in it the jinni could see all things—things past, things yet to come, and things that were far away. And by the glamour and sway of the magic mirror, he compelled his servants to carry out his every command.

  “With the help of the mirror, the old jinni’s power swelled, and in time it came to pass that all the desert lands around him fell under his hand. Yet even this was not enough, and his aims grew bolder still, and in the end he set his mind to conquering the whole world.

  “His grand scheme met with an obstacle along the way, however. While his attention was focused on the far reaches of his empire, an unexpected threat found him—a threat much closer to home. One day while his back was turned, a desert fox crept into the jinni’s fortress, and she stole the magic mirror.

  “He cursed and raved, the old jinni, and his power was shaken. He did his best to conceal the loss of his prize from his servants, but all the while he was searching, hunting far and wide for the fox, hoping to recover what was stolen and to take his revenge.”

  Grandpa produced a silver pocket watch from inside his gray suit coat. He opened it and stared at something on the inside of the case, lost in thought.

  “He never found her,” he said at last. “And he never found the magic mirror.”

  The cousins squinted at him expectantly.

  “Is that it?” asked Maxine. “Is that how the story ends?”

  But Grandpa didn’t answer. He closed his watch again, and he suddenly looked old and tired.

  “So I thought,” he murmured. “Perhaps I was wrong.”

  The old colonel fell silent and turned toward the window, and presently his narrative was eclipsed by the drama outside as the row houses along the tracks shouldered skyward. Snug bungalows were replaced by tall storefronts and then again by still taller tenement buildings draped with laundry that waved as they passed. In the streets below, automobiles honked at traffic lights, streetcars squealed on their winding rails, and young men idled under streetlamps, until at last the train plunged into the North River Tunnel and emerged with a great rush on the east banks of the Hudson in a thunderous finale of steel spires and mighty stone towers.

  The train rolled on through the long gray canyons and pulled into Penn Station with a slow, grinding stop. The passengers collected their parcels, a sleeping sailor across the aisle yawned and rubbed his forearms, and the doors opened onto the rumbling city.

  “Here you are,” said Grandpa, slipping William a dollar bill. “Some folding money in case the two of you get hungry later. Don’t flash it around.”

  They stepped down from the train into the crush of passengers that trudged along the platform. The cousins paused and turned in place two or three times in an attempt to get their bearings, but they would have had better luck trying to hold their ground in the middle of a swift river—a far less hostile place, in truth, than where they stood now.

  “Swell view, eh, kid?” said a barrel-chested man, shouldering William aside with a passing glare.

  Lingering was obviously impossible, and they fell in step behind Grandpa, who pressed ahead with fixed purpose.

  “Where are we headed?” William called out.

  “The Algonquin Hotel,” said Grandpa over his shoulder. “We’ll check in and get you situated for the evening. Once the two of you are both asleep, I must leave the hotel for an hour or two.”

  “In the middle of the night?” said Maxine.

  Grandpa nodded. “My rendezvous is at midnight,” he said, “under the Hare Moon.”

  “The Hare Moon?”

  “You’ve heard of the Harvest Moon? It’s the name given to Luna in the month of October. But other months have different names. Now we are in the moon of May—the month the Indians called the Milk Moon. In China it is known as the Moon of the Dragon. But back in England my grandfather always called it by its old European name—the Hare. It was almost full last night, and tonight it will be in all its glory.”

  “ ‘When the hare grows fat…,’ ” muttered William, repeating the lines from the telegram.

  “What’s that, my boy?” Grandpa called back.

  “Oh, nothing,” said William, and he trotted to catch up.

  They had just reached the end of the platform, where the plodding procession slowed at the foot of the cast-iron staircase that led to the overlooking concourse, when the man in front of them dropped his traveling bag. The case burst open, spilling out a heap of papers at his feet. The man sank to one knee and fumbled for the loose leaves, bringing Grandpa and the children to a standstill, along with everyone behind them. William bent to help, but the colonel pulled his grandson firmly to his feet. His eyes darted warily from side to side, and his hand groped inside his coat.

  Behind them, a square-jawed stranger in a dark suit caught Colonel Battersea’s arm, pinning it to his side. In the same instant the bumbling man at their feet abandoned his scattered papers and rounded on them. Grandpa aimed a kick at the man’s head, but the attacker arched like an eel, and the boot only grazed his temple. With a furious rush he took the colonel by the lapels and drove him backward into the crowd, bowling William and Maxine to the ground as he went. Grandpa shouted something to them as the two men carted him off, but the words were swallowed up by the whistle of a locomotive on the next track that shuddered to life with a thudding jolt and a heavy squeal.

  A blast of steam engulfed the platform, and the cousins struggled to their feet, whirling frantically, squinting for a glimpse of Grandpa’s silver hair or his battered leather suitcase. The engine churned out of the station, the seething vapor dissolved, a
nd William and Maxine found themselves alone amid a spreading drift of trampled papers. They dashed up and down the platform in a panic, but it was in vain.

  Colonel Battersea had vanished.

  The cousins staggered up the stairs toward the concourse in a daze. A railroad policeman stood at the railing above them. Spotting his navy-blue uniform and gold badge from a distance, Maxine and William snapped to life and barreled up to him.

  “Officer, come quick!” said William, tugging at his sleeve. “It’s an emergency!”

  “Beat it, you two,” he said with irritation.

  “Honest, sir!” cried Maxine. “Somebody just kidnapped our granddad!”

  “I’ve been standing here for an hour, kid. I never saw a thing.”

  “But he was right down there! I’m telling you, Officer, you couldn’t miss it!”

  “And I’m telling you it never happened,” said the cop, swinging his billy club indifferently on a loop around his finger. He bent over them and scowled.

  The cousins slumped in bewilderment, realizing that any slim hope of rescuing Grandpa was slipping away by the minute. They launched into another round of appeals, but the officer waved his hand.

  “Listen, you got a problem, go file a report. Stationmaster’s office is by the central entrance.”

  Pelting away, they traversed the main concourse, a monumental cathedral of glass and steel that vibrated like a great beehive, swirling with shopping bags and felt fedoras and steel-toed boots. They wormed their way through the crush, invisible beneath the sea of adults that surrounded them, and managed to reach a small window on the far side of the great hall with a sign above it that indicated they had found the stationmaster’s office.