The Dark Portal (The Gryphon Chronicles, Book 3) (33 page)

From the corner of his eyes, he measured
the distance to the cup, knowing full well that the second the beasts saw him reach for the wand, they would attack. They seemed to have figured out that a wand meant bad things for them.

He licked his dry lip
s, readying himself to make his move. He would have only about one second to cast the Petrificus spell, and it had to count for every gargoyle in the chamber. Who could say how many might still be lurking in the shadows? He would have to freeze them all at once, and then shatter them in rapid succession. Thirty seconds, or they’d come back to life.

Then have him for supper.

All right. Might as well try it.
He didn’t have much choice. Still, even as he braced himself to do it, he could hear Aunt Ramona’s direst warnings ringing in his ears.
“Never use the weapons of the enemy, Jacob. It is the most dangerous risk you can take.
It always ends up bringing terrible consequences.”

Oh, yes, he believed her, every word.

But he did not intend to end up as some half-gnawed foot in this godforsaken coalmine. Caves alone were bad enough, but he simply refused to get eaten.

Concentrate
.
Heart pounding, he suddenly shot out his hand and grabbed the ancient wand.

The gargoyles leaped, all flying at him at once;
in a heartbeat, Jake circled the wand over his head and screamed,
“Petrificus!”

His voice echoed in the hollow chamber as he flung out the spell in all directions, and the quart
z crystals amplified its magic.

The big gargoyles turned to stone just inches away from him and plummeted to the floor. The little imp, too, became a statue and tumbled off the quartz beam where he’d been sitting, smashing into bits when he hit the chamber floor.

The big ones merely chipped in places, and Jake, in a frenzy of survival, summoned up his telekinesis to finish the job. One after another, he lifted them off the ground using his powers and hurled the heavy stone statues into the distant wall of the chamber.

Boom!

Boom!

Boom!

They all smashed. He did not give them anywhere close to thirty seconds to come back to life.

But Aunt Ramona
was proved right once again. He had used the tools of the enemy and at once, bad consequences followed. For the impact of the massive stone statues slamming against the cavern walls rattled the unstable layers of hollowed-out rock.

Jake heard a terrible crack from the direction of the ceiling, followed by a mighty rumble. The last thing he heard was Red’s m
uffled roar from outside the chamber as the cavern collapsed all around him.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Trapped

When the rumbling stopped, the air was choked with dust and Jake lay coughing on the ground, knocked off his feet by the reverberations. He slowly sat up, waving the dust away from his nose and mouth, and squinting to see anything in the darkness.

Oh, no.
The cave wall where he had climbed through the opening had collapsed. Now it was a giant pile of rubble. He was cut off from Red and the outer world.

T
rapped in Garnock’s tomb.

Well, maybe he should’ve expected something like this after using the evil sorcerer’s wand. He threw it down in revulsion.
Worse, he noticed that the rush of air from the collapse had left his distant torch barely flickering.

I
f that flame went out, he’d be swallowed up in pitch-black darkness and never find a way out of here. Too bad he had used up most of his Illuminium leaving the trail behind them.

Since he had no intention o
f sharing Garnock’s tomb with the sorcerer’s skeleton and the dead gargoyles for the rest of eternity, Jake climbed unsteadily to his feet, and, still coughing, made his way over to the torch.

Garnock’s bones and his
spell-book and all the other things on his desk were still intact, though now coated in a layer of dust.

Jake bent down and picked up his torch, then blew on it gently, making the slow-burning tar that coated it glow a little stronger. “Come on, perk up. Don’t you dare go out on me.” The light it gave was still fe
eble.

He realized t
he air was so thick with crushed rock and dust particles that the flame couldn’t get enough oxygen to burn very brightly.
Aw, crud.
The last he checked, people needed oxygen, too. In short, he had no time to waste.

He held up the light once more and made sure the gargoyles were no longer a threat.

Indeed, the ugly beasts were beyond dead. They had been pulverized. Unfortunately, the yew wand from Plas-y-Fforest was lost, buried under the pile of rock where half the chamber had caved in.

Compared to the prospect of eventually running
out of air, though, losing the wand seemed the least of his worries. Trying to shrug off a frisson of dread, he joked to himself about what a remarkably bad day he was having. First Petunia Harris practically trying to kiss him. Abduction by pixies. Hungry gargoyles, and then seeing poor Derek and Helena swept away.

Now this. If he lived to see the morning, he would count himself most fortunate.

Beyond his own fears, however, there was a Gryphon outside the caved-in chamber who sounded beside himself with panic, poor thing.

H
e could hear Red roaring, apparently running back and forth along the other side of the rockfall, calling for him, and stopping every now and then to dig through the rocks as best he could, obviously desperate to rescue his young master.

Jake leaned closer
to his side of the mound of tumbled rocks and boulders and yelled, “Red, I’m all right! Can you hear me, boy? Over here! I’m alive and the gargoyles are dead!”

“Caw?” The Gryphon’s muffled query now came directly from the opposite side of the rock-pile.

“I’m not hurt. Try not to worry, big fellow. I’m fine. I just need to find another way out of here.”

“Caw!” Red eagerly replied. Then Jake heard the dear beast starting again to try to scratch away the stones
, as if he’d dig him out with his bare paws.

“Red, stop! I don’t know if that’s the best idea
, boy. The whole thing is unstable. If we’re not careful, we’ll shift the weight wrong and the rest of the chamber will come down and crush me. We don’t want to start another rockfall. Just hang on and let me take a look around. There’s got to be other way out of here.”

Red gave an unhappy yowl in answer
, as if to say,
“If there were, Garnock would have used it.”

Jake suddenly remembered he had Risker.
“If all else fails, I still have my magic dagger. Remember how Odin said the blade can cut through solid rock? I’ll saw my way out of here if I have to, don’t you worry. I hate caves. I am not going to die down here.”

Well, as
long as I don’t run out of air.

“Becaw,” Red answered
uncertainly, and Jake could almost picture him nodding his feathered head and gathering himself after that scare.

“Right, so give me a
few minutes to take a look around. Maybe I’ll find something useful.” Knife in one hand, torch in the other, Jake returned warily to the skeleton’s desk.

Though finding an exit was paramount, this chamber certainly seemed like it must have been Garnock’s secret wizarding headquarters in life.

Jake figured if he had to be trapped in here, he might as well seize the chance to try to learn more about the sorcerer. Maybe he could even dig up a clue about how to defeat him.

He bent down
and blew the thick layer of dust off the page of the skeleton-sorcerer’s grimoire, which had been left open all these centuries.

“Blimey,” Jake murmured as he held the torch up and saw what Garnock had been w
orking on just before he died. The ancient grimoire was open to a page titled
‘The Spell of a Hundred Souls.’

Unfortunately, the instructions, the ingredients list
for whatever potion was involved, and the details of the spell were written in Latin, so Jake had no idea what it said. It would have to wait for Archie to translate, but it might well yield the secret of what devilry the black fog fellow was up to right before he ran out of air.

Jake ripped
‘The Spell of a Hundred Souls’
page out of the spell-book. Folding it up, he put it into his pocket, then scanned the dark lair one last time before he tackled the task of trying to find an exit.
Anything else important?

Just then, a
ghostly glimmer caught his eye, a bluish-white spirit orb in the black shadows.

Jake’s eyebrows show up.
Crikey! There’s a ghost down here?

He took a few steps toward the faintly glowing ball of spectral energy. “Hullo? Excuse me?”

Maybe it couldn’t hear him. It just kept floating on its way. It never held still, continually skimming back and forth along the chamber walls, up and down, to and fro in all directions, as though it were searching for something.

Probably a way out, Jake thought with a chill down his spine. He wondered if the ghost had been trapped down here the whole time with Garnock.

“Er, pardon me, spirit, could I speak to you, please?”

Finally noticing him, it stopped abruptly
on the far end of the chamber and spun in midair to face him, no doubt surprised.

Since the
first question every ghost asked was always a shocked
“You can see me?”
he volunteered the answer.

“Yes, I can see you,” he informed it.
“I’m Jake.”

H
e expected the orb to turn into a full-bodied apparition so that he could see who he was dealing with, like the other ghosts at the séance.

He would have guessed it was
one of the miners coming back to brood over the place of his death.

But
the orb did not reveal itself as an apparition. Instead, it zoomed straight over to him, and when he saw it up close, his eyes widened as he realized his mistake. The ball of light was not a spirit orb, technically speaking.

It was a head.

A ghost-head. A skull, actually, its jawbone working up and down like it was trying to talk, but couldn’t.

Jake gulped.
Well, you don’t see that every day,
he thought. Although the ghost-head was certainly startling, he wasn’t exactly scared of it. He found it rather comical, actually, in a pitiful way, which was probably bad of him.

But at once, he
had a strong suspicion of who this head belonged to.

He winced at the memory o
f the poor Headless Monk stumbling around the chapel ruins, searching all this time for his…

“
You wouldn’t happen to belong to Brother Colwyn, would you?”

Floating right before his eyes, the ghost-head nodded in excitement, bobbing in midair while its
jaw worked as if to say,
I am! Have you seen my body?

Or perhaps:
Help!

Poor man. Isabelle
must’ve been right, Jake thought. Only dark magic could have done this to the friar. Maybe Garnock had used an enchanted blade or something.

Whatever the case, Jake resolved
to help him.

“Really sorry
about what Garnock did to you,” he mumbled. How awful for Brother Colwyn to have been stuck in the same tomb with his murderer all these years.

Jake shuddere
d on the Headless Monk’s behalf, but he was puzzled. “Why didn’t you leave when the others broke out of here? When the miners blew up the wall, I mean?”

The ghost-head nodded toward the wall of shelves, then swept toward it.

Jake followed, torch in hand, as he picked his way among the rubble of broken stone gargoyles.

Arriving at the shelves, he saw what Brother Colwyn wanted to show him—his actual skull. After murdering the monk, Garnock must have set his grisly trophy
on display here all those centuries ago.

Now it was
nothing but pearly white bone.

He stared at it for a long moment. “I see. Something about the spell he used to do this to you keeps you from straying too far from your actual skull.”

The ghost-head nodded.

“So, er, we’ve got to bring your skull back to where the rest of your bones are buried? Does that sound about right?”

The head cocked sideways as if to say,
I think so.

“All right, then.”
Jake grimaced in disgust, not at all eager to touch a real human skull, but he knew that, whatever happened, he was getting out of here.

If he left the gross thing behind,
Brother Colwyn would never rest in peace as he deserved.

When Jake considered how the monk had helped the Lightriders—and paid such a terrible price for it—returning the head to the body was the least that he could do.

So Jake took off his scarf and draped it over the ancient skull, using the cloth to pick it up. He swaddled it in the fabric, then tied the ends into a sort of satchel so he could easily carry it over his shoulder.

“We’ll have you back in one piece in no time,” he assured th
e ghost-head. “Say, you wouldn’t happen to know another way out of here, would you?”

The ghost-head
went very still, staring at him for a moment. Jake wasn’t sure if it was thinking or just hesitating. At last, it nodded slowly.

Jake
immediately brightened. “Really? Excellent! Let’s go, then! Oh, but hold on—I’ve got to tell my Gryphon first.” He dashed off to give Red the good news. His loyal pet hadn’t budged from the other side of the rock pile. “Hey, Red! Guess what?” he called. “Brother Colwyn’s ghost-head is in here—”

“Becaw?”

“You know, the monk who helped the Lightriders? Never mind, long story. The important part is, he knows a way out of here. I’m not sure how long it’ll take or where I might come out, but I’m going to follow him. So go back to Plas-y-Fforest and tell the others not to worry, I’m all right. I’ll see ’em when I see ’em.”