The Eye of Midnight (3 page)

Outside, the dreary day had surrendered feebly to night, and the windows in the library turned to dark mirrors. William had prowled off in hopes of finding some clue to Grandpa's whereabouts and maybe something to eat as well, leaving Maxine to potter listlessly about the empty room.

Her eye landed on the spine of a thick, leather-bound book lying on the mantel above the fireplace, and she mounted the hearth for a closer look at the gilt cover—a beautiful maiden kneeling on a silk cushion before the throne of a brooding sultan—but the pages inside were covered in strange, swooping characters, and she could make no sense of them. She closed the book in disappointment and was just stepping down from the hearth when she noticed a curious symbol carved on the front of the stone mantelpiece: a solitary zero inscribed within an embellished medallion—the identical twin of the emblem she had seen above the doorbell.

“Wadja lookigat?” said an unintelligible voice by her ear.

Maxine jumped. Behind her, William's greasy lips and bulging cheeks hovered over her shoulder. “I found something to eat,” he said with a hard swallow, raising a half-gnawed turkey leg.

“So I see,” said Maxine with a look of thinly veiled disgust. “Do you want to make yourself sick? That's probably spoiled, you know.”

“The ice in the icebox hasn't all melted, so it can't be over three or four days old.”

“Three or four days? How long has Grandpa been gone, anyhow?” fretted Maxine. “I mean, honestly, Will, there must be some mistake. Maybe he forgot we were coming.”

“Aw, you worry too much,” he said. “Have a bite of turkey.”

Maxine frowned and pushed his hand away.

“Do you think he even wants us here?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, when our parents asked Grandpa if he would take us for the summer, well, he really couldn't say no, could he? Not with my mom being so sick and all…”

William wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. “I thought it was Grandpa who suggested the whole thing.”

“Really?” she said. “Why would he? He's never shown any interest in us before.”

“No, I guess he hasn't,” said William.

“So what are we supposed to do now? Clean out his icebox, sit in his easy chair, go upstairs and find a bed? It's like ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears.' ”

William snorted, but his attention had drifted to something else.

“Hold this,” he said, handing her his turkey leg.

“What are you doing?” asked Maxine. She watched as he tugged on one of the blackened andirons in the fireplace.

“Looking for the hidden lever,” he said, scanning the room. “The entrance to the secret room is almost always in the library. All you have to do is find the lever.” He braced himself against a section of the bookshelves and put his back into it, but the shelves refused to budge.

“You've been spending too much time at the movies,” said Maxine. “This is just a disagreeable old house. We're more likely to die of boredom this summer than anything else.”

“Says you. Old places like this always have a trapdoor or an underground passageway—someplace where Grandpa keeps his pirate treasure and dead bodies.”

He pulled hard on a brass candleholder attached to the wall, and it came off in his hands with a shower of crumbling plaster.

“Will! What on earth? Are you trying to get us in trouble our first night here?”

William shrugged and tucked the candleholder behind the drapes. “Maybe it's not in the library after all. Let's go check the rest of the house.”

He rattled out of the library and down the main hall, tapping on every knothole and peering behind every picture frame along the way. Maxine sighed and followed along halfheartedly. They paused at the old grandfather clock, but just as William began to open the glass case, the doorbell rang.

The cousins both turned sharply and stared at the front door.

“Maybe it's Grandpa,” whispered Maxine.

“Why would he have to ring his own doorbell?” replied William, and without giving his cousin a chance to reply, he trotted to the door and opened it wide.

A dark, rawboned man stood on the front step. He wore plus fours and high boots, and his beard was long and matted. His eyes darted furtively as he scanned the moonlit drive, and then he turned to face the open door. Seeing the children, he frowned with dismay.

“I was expecting Colonel Battersea,” he said.

“Can we help you, mister?” asked William.

The man made a circle with his thumb and forefinger and held it to his chest, watching the children for a response. Maxine and William stared back blankly.

The stranger's brow knit with concern, and he glanced back over both his shoulders. “I have a telegram,” he said, his voice low. “It's vital that this reach him.” He handed them a sealed envelope. “You'll make sure he gets it?”

“Of course,” said Maxine. “May I tell him whom it's from?” She blinked at him expectantly, but the man turned without a word and hurried down the steps.

“Well, that was odd,” said Maxine. She closed the door and glanced at the envelope, then leaned it against Caesar's bust on the pedestal beside the staircase. “He seemed awful jumpy about something, didn't he?”

“Say what?” mumbled William, looking the old clock up and down again, as if he had forgotten the strange visitor entirely.

Maxine groaned. “You're still thinking about your secret door, aren't you?” she said.

“Notice anything unusual?” he asked, rapping on the sides of the case.

“Besides the fact that it's the biggest clock I've ever seen? No.”

The clock really was gigantic. It was taller than a grown man and as wide as a cart horse.

“Look behind it,” he said.

“I can't,” she replied as she walked around it. “There's no gap. It's sort of…attached to the wall.”

“There's something else,” he said, pressing his ear to the cabinet. “Have a look at the side table.”

She glanced at the table beside the clock. An empty vase and a black telephone flanked an old Royal typewriter. In front of it, a silver letter opener stood fixed in a block of cork. Maxine wiggled the blade free and tested the point with her finger.

“Is it Grandpa's murder weapon, do you think?” she said, holding it delicately between her thumb and forefinger with a look of mock horror.

“Very funny. I mean the typewriter. Why would he keep it in the front hallway? Shouldn't it be in the study or something? And why is there a wire coming out of it?”

Maxine bent and looked under the table. A cord snaked down the table leg from the back of the typewriter and disappeared into the wall beside the clock.

“It's weird, isn't it?” said William. “Like maybe the typewriter can send out some kind of electrical signal.”

Maxine frowned skeptically, but William stepped up to the typewriter and cracked his knuckles like a piano maestro.

“O-P-E-N S-E-S-A-M-E,”
he muttered as the ebony keys clattered beneath his fingers. He stopped and stared at the grandfather clock expectantly, but nothing happened.

“B-A-T-T-E-R-S-E-A,”
he said, trying again.

The clock seemed indifferent to his advances, and William's brow twisted in frustration, but he continued to peck away with admirable tenacity.

“Knock yourself out,” said Maxine. “There's nothing here. No revolving bookshelves or scandalous letters or bodies stuffed in the walls.” She turned away and had just made up her mind to wander back to the library when she froze in her tracks. Her gaze had landed on a familiar symbol engraved on the letter opener in her hand—the same strange symbol she had seen on the doorbell and the mantelpiece. Her eyes narrowed, and she turned back toward the clock.

“Slide over,” she said with a nudge. William obliged, retreating to the blue mosaic fountain, where he sat down on the lip of the stone basin beneath his cousin's hanging coat. Maxine squinted at the typewriter, shook her head, and pressed the number zero.

From somewhere inside the walls, the cousins heard the faint squeal of metal on metal.

The skin on Maxine's arms prickled like a cucumber, and her eyes shot to the tall case beside the stairs, but the old clock's even tick continued without pause.

Then, from a spot just above William's head, there came a mechanical clunk.

He raised his eyes slowly and craned his neck backward until he was looking at the coat hooks directly above him. While he watched, the blue mosaic swung inward on unseen hinges.

“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.