Bedtime Story (49 page)

David studied the markings cut deep into the metal door. Captain Bream had come around the hill to the magus, and the two stood a short distance behind him; the soldiers who had accompanied them stood watch on the other side of the hill.

“Can you open it?” the captain asked sharply. “I can have one of the men bring round a horse to pull it open.”

“I think I can do it,” David said, looking into the cut-away edges. Sure enough, there was a handprint carved into the stone wall on each side of the door.

And, again as at the cave in the canyon, it took only the slightest pressure from his hands, which fit firmly into the stone handprints, to trigger the ancient mechanism.

The metal door opened with a sound like that of a seal breaking. David stepped back as a gust of fetid, swampy air rushed through the widening entrance.

Both the captain and the magus wrinkled their faces in distaste.

This smells worse than the cave in the Rainbow Canyon
, Matt said.

David stepped back from the door and took a deep breath to calm himself. The weight of the leather bag that the magus had brought, packed with everything that had come out of the first cave—the stone and the map, the sack of mysterious red sand—hung heavy on his shoulder.

David was grateful for its weight: it kept him anchored, focused, when all he wanted to do was run.

“You’ll want a torch,” the captain said.

“I think …” David began, stepping into the doorway. “Yes.” He wiggled a torch free of the bracket on the wall. “Someone already thought of that.”

He fumbled with the tie to the small leather bag of matches attached to the handle of the torch. Striking the match on the wall of the alcove, he touched it to the sticky torchhead and smiled as it burst to life.

“Well,” he said, shifting from foot to foot.

The captain took a step forward, his hand falling to the hilt of his sword. “I’m coming with you.”

The magus laid a hand on the captain’s arm. “You can’t.”

The captain jerked his arm away and looked at the old man as if he had just slapped him. “We have no idea what dangers await him in there.”

“We
do
know,” the magus replied, “that the prophecies require the one chosen to face alone whatever awaits him. It is up to Dafyd now.” He looked at David for emphasis.

The captain was silent. He let his hand fall away from the hilt of his sword.

David turned quickly and stepped into the darkness.

Sarah was waiting for me. I had suggested to Jacqui that we should get something from Chinatown for dinner, and offered to pick it up. Alchemy was closed by the time I got there, but Sarah unlocked the door before I had a chance to knock, and led me through the dim store.

I had spent the afternoon with Jacqui and David. She was eager to demonstrate the simple activities they had been working on while I was gone.

“Are you ready for another walk?” she asked him quietly before taking his hand in hers.

At her touch David swung his legs over the side of the bed and slid down.

I followed them out the front door, down the porch steps and through the yard. It was a terrible sight. His halting, shuffling gait, his stiff legs, the lurch in his movements.

“He’s doing so well, isn’t he?” Jacqui said over her shoulder as I followed a few steps behind.

The sunlight had caught her hair, and for a moment I had a vision of the future: Jacqui white-haired and aging, her face wrinkled but still beautiful, leading our son, forty or fifty years old, on his daily walk through the neighbourhood. Caring for him like a toddler for the rest of his days, making arrangements for his care after we were gone.

“He’s doing great.”

In the kitchen behind Alchemy, Nora pulled me in for a rough hug and a dry kiss on the cheek.

“I’m glad you’re back safely,” she said, turning back to the table.

“It was only New York,” I said as I took my bag off my shoulder.

She shook her head. “I’ve been reading through these,” she said, touching a stack of papers on the table in front of her: the photos I had taken of the lexicon, blown up to eight-and-a-half by eleven. “This is a dark, dark mind you’re dealing with.”

I glanced at Sarah as I sat down. “Took’s been dead for more than fifty years.”

“That doesn’t matter. This”—Nora touched the pages again—“does not bode well for anyone who comes in contact with it. Merely possessing that book is more than enough to draw dark forces against you.”

“I don’t have the book.”

“What?” they both said.

“It was stolen,” I said. “Last night. In New York.” It was hard to believe it had only been the previous night. It seemed like another lifetime.

I gave them a brief account of my time in New York, from my lunch with Tony Markus to my days at the library and my conversations with Ernest. I left out any mention of Marci, except to say, “The book was stolen from my hotel room last night.”

“Chris,” Sarah said. “Without the book we can’t—”

Her mother cut her off. “Wait, this is important. You think it’s this editor who has taken it.”

“I think so,” I said, suddenly wary in the bright focus of her eyes. “He was desperate to get his hands on it.”

“And you’re sure”—she stressed the word—“that it couldn’t have been anyone from the library?”

“Pretty sure,” I said cautiously. “They didn’t even know about the book until yesterday morning, and by then …” I couldn’t explain why I could rule out the Hunter Barlow’s involvement without telling them about Marci. “I don’t think it could have been them,” I finished, more weakly than I would have liked.

Nora bit her lip and looked away. “And this editor, he doesn’t have any magical training?”

“I … I really doubt—”

“Chris, this is important. If that book were to fall into the hands of even a novice magician, the damage—”

“I don’t think he has any magical training,” I said. “He just seemed like he was desperate for his next best-seller.” Precisely the reason I had contacted him in the first place.

“Chris,” Sarah said. “The lexicon is useless without the spell.”

“I do have this.” I reached into my bag and dropped the photocopy of
To the Four Directions
onto the table. “I made it before I went to New York, so Jacqui could read it to David while I was gone.”

“Well, it doesn’t address the problem of the actual book being out there …” Sarah said as she started to flip through the pages.

I turned to Nora. “The photos turned out okay?” I asked. “You’re able to read them all right?”

She nodded. “I almost wish I couldn’t.” She looked down at the top photograph. “The man behind these words was a very dark individual. Angry. Violent. Devoted to the pursuit of power. If he wasn’t evil, he was as close as anyone I’ve ever encountered.”

“You can tell all of that from a dictionary?” I asked.

Sarah had stopped glancing through the photocopies. “It’s a matter of tone and emphasis. You know words. Well, the symbols are like words. Sometimes they have multiple meanings. Denotations and connotations.” She glanced down at the top image. “Took has accentuated the negative aspects of each sign to draw out the darker elements. He’s reduced an active symbolic language to its blackest, most dangerous …”

She trailed off as she realized that Sarah was looking at us, her face drawn and tight.

“What is it?” Nora asked.

“It’s not going to work,” Sarah said quietly, biting her lower lip.

I felt like I was going to pass out. “What?”

She passed the photocopy of the novel’s cover to her mother. Nora held the page up, looked at it for a moment, then lowered it to the table.

“I’m sorry, Chris,” she said, sadness verging on despair. She slid the paper toward me.

It took me several seconds to see what was wrong. “Shit,” I muttered, letting the paper fall to the table. All of the symbols on the cover were blurred, as if the book had moved while it was being copied. Or the symbols themselves had.

“Some magical elements, especially if a spell is active,” Sarah said haltingly, “they’re resistant to mechanical reproduction.”

I could make out most of the detail in the large Sunstone symbol, if I squinted.

The smaller symbols around the edges of the cover, though, were lost, shapeless stretched blobs without shape or definition.

This smells like a swamp, David thought.

He stopped just inside the doorway. The flickering torch lit a small vestibule. At its far end, he saw a narrow stairway, identical to the one in the Rainbow Canyon.

Here we go again
, Matt muttered.

David could hear the faintest hint of fear in the other boy’s words. The last time Matt had gone down a staircase like this, he had died.

Of course, Dafyd had died too.

David lifted the torch high enough to illuminate the top three stairs. Taking a deep breath, though, he gagged.

“Dafyd?”

David jumped at the sound of the magus’s voice. He had forgotten that the captain and the magus were standing just outside.

“It’s just a little stuffy in here.”

“Is it safe to go on?” the captain asked.

David wasn’t sure how to answer. The air stank, and left a sour thickness at the back of his throat.

If there wasn’t enough oxygen, the torch would go out
, Matt reassured him.

“I should be fine so long as the torch stays lit,” he said. “If it goes out, I’ll come back.”

Running
.

“That took longer than I expected,” Jacqui said, when I arrived back at the house with the Chinese food. I had been gone more than an hour, and I had to remind myself that it was just an observation, not a criticism.

“It was busy,” I said, setting the food on the coffee table. “Wednesday night. Who would have guessed?”

We ate in the family room, sitting on the couch across from David’s bed, hunched over our plates. Neither of us said much of anything.
Jacqui had given him dinner while I was gone, but she fed him a little from her plate.

When we were finished, leftovers in the fridge, Jacqui asked, “Do you want to help me get David ready for bed?”

“Sure,” I said. “I should know what’s what.”

She looked at me for a long moment. “Well, the first thing we have to do is take him to the bathroom …”

Toilet. Teeth. Face washed. Then back into the living room for a new diaper, a clean set of pyjamas. It seemed to take forever, even the simplest of actions a complicated series of steps. I guarded my reaction every moment. Jacqui was so proud of him for being able to brush his own teeth, with only a little help. I smiled in all the right places.

This is my life now
.

“And now it’s storytime,” she said, picking up the photocopy of
To the Four Directions
from the coffee table where I had set it down under the bag of Chinese food.

She held the book out to me. “Would you like to do the honours?”

I knew the significance of the gesture. Jacqui was acknowledging my craziness, what little she knew of it, and accepting it. But the sight of the book was almost enough to make me break down again.

I tried to smile. “Why don’t you?” I pantomimed a cigarette. “I’m gonna go out to the porch.”