Eye of the Forest

by P. B. Kerr

  “I did what I did,” Dybbuk said angrily. “But it sure doesn’t make it feel any better that everyone told me not to do it. And what would you do? If you were in my position? John? Philippa? What would you do if you lost all of your power? Wouldn’t you try anything to get it back? Of course you would.”

  “We all of us have to live with the consequences of our actions,” said John. “That’s what life is all about.”

  “Easy to say,” said Dybbuk. “But not so easy to do.”

  It was Philippa’s turn to be angry now. But not with Dybbuk. She was angry with Zadie.

  “I can understand why he’s doing this,” she told Zadie. “He was always headstrong. It’s you I don’t understand. How could you be in cahoots with them? How could you betray my confidence like that?”

  Dybbuk took Zadie’s hand. “Leave her alone,” he told Philippa. “She did it for me.”

  “I love him,” said Zadie. “That’s why I’ve been helping them since we got here. Delaying you with those monsters to help Buck and McCreeby catch up with us when we fell behind. Putting clues on the ground so that you would think an expedition party had gone ahead of us. I want to help Buck get his power back.” She looked at Dybbuk and smiled warmly. “I’d do anything for him. I don’t expect someone like you, Philippa, to understand something like that. After all, who could fall in love with someone like you?”

  McCreeby smiled and waved his hands mysteriously in front of Zadie’s face. “L’amour, toujours l’amour,” he said. “Love conquers all.”

  “Speaking of conquest,” said Philippa, trying to ignore Zadie’s hurtful insult. “What happened to your friend Pizarro and his conquistadors? Where are they now?”

  Zadie gave Philippa her most sarcastic smile and then shrugged.

  “The last time I saw them they were in a pitched battle with your friends, the Xuanaci,” she said. “And serves them right, too.”

  “That’s right,” said McCreeby. “That’s right, Zadie. I agree with you. Listen to my voice and only my voice. Forget everything else. Only my voice matters.” He waved his hands in front of her face again.

  “You’ve hypnotized her, haven’t you?” said Nimrod. “That’s why she’s helping you. She only thinks she’s in love with Dybbuk. Because you’ve told her she is. To help persuade her.”

  “What rubbish,” said McCreeby. He glanced nervously at Dybbuk. “Of course she’s in love with my young friend.”

  But Dybbuk now gave him a strange look.

  “Aren’t you, Zadie?”

  “Yes,” said Zadie. But there was something in her voice that sounded mechanical and automatic. “I’m in love with him. Always have been. Always will be. Love. L’amour, toujours l’amour.”

  “You see?” McCreeby smiled and pointed at the door in the Eye of the Forest. “Well,” he said. “I’m sorry to break up this very touching reunion, but we have to go in there. Clever of you to work out how to untie the knot on the door lock, Nimrod. Myself, I should just have cut it with a machete and been done with it. Like that other famous chap from Greece.”

  “It wasn’t me who solved the secret,” said Nimrod. “It was John.”

  McCreeby smiled at John.

  “Then it was clever of you, boy. Perhaps you will now go ahead and conquer the known world. Oh, yes. One more thing. My information is that there’s a rope bridge made of human hair that leads all the way to Paititi. Would that be correct?”

  “Correct,” said Philippa.

  “And the guardians? The Inca king mummies.”

  “They’ve gone somewhere else,” said Philippa. She shot a sarcastic smile back at Zadie. “To help the Xuanaci.”

  If she and John were being honest with McCreeby it was because they were anxious about their father.

  “As usual, McCreeby, you are very well-informed,” said Nimrod.

  “I like to read,” he said. “It gives one such an unfair advantage over those other humans who look only to television and radio for their information.”

  “In which case,” said Nimrod, “hasn’t it occurred to you that, perhaps, Ti Cosi sought to mislead his Spanish chronicler? That the kutumunkichu ritual will actually bring about the Pachacuti? The great destruction?”

  “I come back to my previous question, Nimrod. If that kind of destructive force had been available to the Incas, don’t you think they’d have used it against Pizarro? No, I don’t think the kutumunkichu ritual will actually bring about the Pachacuti.” McCreeby shook his head and lifted up his backpack. “But nice try all the same.”

  He looked at Dybbuk and Zadie. “Come on, you two. Let’s get moving.”

  “What about my dad?” asked John.

  “He’ll be all right,” said McCreeby. “Provided no one tries to follow us or to interfere. As soon as I’m safely out of Peru, I’ll call Mr. Haddo and tell them to let him go. Simple as that. Believe me, I have no interest in incurring the wrath of your mother, Layla.”

  “To say nothing of my own wrath,” said Nimrod.

  “Which is why I shall have need of six wishes, I expect. You see, Nimrod? I’ve thought of everything.”

  McCreeby opened the door in the Eye of the Forest and, closely followed by Dybbuk and Zadie, he walked on through. At which point all three disappeared.

  “I dislike that man intensely,” said Groanin.

  “So do I,” said Nimrod, closing the door behind them.

  “Now what? I say, now what?”

  “You heard what McCreeby said. Our hands are tied, Groanin.”

  “Normally,” said John, “when someone is kidnapped, you try to find them before the ransom is paid.”

  “That’s not so easy when you’re up the Amazon,” said Groanin.

  “If only your mother were in New York,” said Nimrod, “instead of Brazil.”

  “We need to get a message to her,” said Philippa. “We need to tell her to go home and look for Dad.”

  “Does anyone have the telephone number of Dr. Kowalski?” asked Nimrod. “Her plastic surgeon.”

  “No,” said Philippa. “She didn’t give it to us. Besides, McCreeby took our satellite phone.”

  “So we’ll make another,” said John.

  “Not here,” said Nimrod. “Not in this place. Remember?”

  “All right,” said John. “We leave this place. Make a phone somewhere else.”

  “Why not use djinnternal mail?” said Philippa. “It’s probably quicker.”

  She was referring to the facility that exists between mature djinn who are also brother and sister, whereby it is possible for one to swallow something and it then to appear in the other’s mouth. No matter how far apart they might be.

  “It’s normal to telephone first and warn the other person,” said Nimrod. “The last time Layla sent me something by djinnternal mail, I was in the dentist’s chair. It was very embarrassing.” He shrugged. “On the other hand, it might take a while to find Kowalski’s number. And time is of the essence in this case. I mean, the sooner she finds your father, the sooner we can go after Virgil McCreeby and stop him.”

  CHAPTER 20

  IN SEARCH OF MR. GAUNT

  Dr. Stanley Kowalski pushed himself away from the wall on which he’d been leaning and handed Layla Gaunt a hand mirror and a photograph taken more than a year before the terrible accident that had destroyed her original face and body.

  Layla looked from one to the other and then back again, for several minutes until, recognizing herself for the first time in months, she smiled broadly.

  “I can’t believe what a great job you’ve done,” she said. “I look exactly like my old self. And I mean exactly. I absolutely couldn’t tell that this face didn’t start out as my own. That’s how good a job you’ve done. Among plastic surgeons you’re a genius, do you know that? A genius.”

  Dr. Kowalski took the match he’d been coolly chewing out of his mouth and smiled modestly. “Cut it out.” He hardly dressed or behaved like a surgeon at all. Underneath his white coat
he wore a plain gray T-shirt, a pair of jeans, and heavy work boots.

  “No, it’s true,” insisted Mrs. Gaunt. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was magic.”

  “You know something?” said Kowalski. “That’s what all my patients say. If only they knew, huh?”

  “That you’re a djinn? If they knew that, Stanley, they’d probably expect the impossible. Instead of the mere miracles you actually perform.”

  “If it was anyone else but me doing it, plastic surgery like the surgery you’ve had would be impossible, of course.” The doctor shrugged modestly. “But most people who come in here just want to look like a better version of themselves. Not someone completely different, like you did, Layla.”

  “Look who’s talking. You’re hardly the guy I remember from school.”

  Dr. Kowalski scratched himself and put the match back in his mouth. He was an unusual man in that he looked exactly like a famous movie actor — now dead — named Marlon Brando. Not the old Marlon Brando who had appeared in movies like The Godfather, but the young Marlon Brando who had appeared in movies like A Streetcar Named Desire. Years before, Kowalski’s djinn father, Victor, who was a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills, California, had, at his son’s request, made Stanley the spitting image of an actor many people once thought the handsomest man in the world. Doctor Stanley Kowalski even spoke like Marlon Brando.

  “Sure, I’ve changed.” Kowalski shrugged again. “For the better. And you know why? Because I wanted to be comfortable. That’s always been my motto in this business. Be comfortable with yourself. And if you can’t be that, then you change yourself until you are comfortable. Simple.”

  “Thanks to you, I feel more comfortable with myself than I have in ages.” Layla looked at both profiles, one after the other, and then kissed Kowalski on the cheek.

  Kowalski looked embarrassed.

  “No, really, I am very grateful. Now then. You’ve known me for years, Stanley. We were at school together. So tell me honestly. Surgery is one thing. I look like myself again. But am I still glamorous?”

  “I never met a dame yet that didn’t know if she was glamorous or not without being told. Sure, you’re glamorous, Layla. Like you always were. Beautiful with a cherry on top.”

  Layla smiled happily. The next second, however, she started to cough in a horrible choking way and put her hand onto to her chest.

  “What’s the matter?” Kowalski asked anxiously. “Are you all right?”

  “Bottle me,” said Layla, and uttered some more gurgling choking noises that sounded like steam emerging under pressure from an espresso coffee machine. “There’s something coming up in my throat.”

  By now she had guessed what was happening and how an object — whatever it was — came to be traveling up from her stomach and into her windpipe. “It’s my brother, Nimrod.” For a brief moment she cursed Nimrod for using djinnternal mail without telling her, but then another moment passed and she put her hand up to her mouth and spat the object onto the palm of her hand. “Djinnternal mail,” she said.

  “That’s a relief,” said Kowalski. “For a moment I thought it might be some kind of reaction to the plastic surgery. That can happen sometimes. Just the idea of looking like someone else can stick in people’s throats.”

  Layla Gaunt unfolded a message written on greaseproof paper and read it quickly.

  “I have to get back to New York immediately,” she said. “Possibly even quicker than that. My husband, Edward, has been kidnapped.”

  “That’s too bad. Do you know who’s behind it? The Ifrit?

  The Ghul?”

  “Nimrod thinks they’re mundanes.”

  “Asking for trouble, aren’t they? Messing with a djinn like you?”

  “Yes,” Layla said grimly. “They are.”

  Since it seemed unwise for Layla to risk creating another whirlwind — she hadn’t forgotten the one she’d released on New York from the roof of the Guggenheim Museum — Kowalski drove her to an airport. But not just any airport. He drove her to an airport belonging to the Brazilian FAB, the aerial warfare branch of the Brazilian armed forces. Layla had decided to hitch a ride aboard the fastest airplane she could find which, as Kowalski had informed her, was — in Brazil at any rate — the new Mirage 2000 jet fighter, with a top speed of more than fifteen hundred miles per hour.

  The pilot, a captain named Alberto Santos, had little choice in the matter of course since Layla put a powerful djinn binding on him. So that when Santos took off he was quite convinced the person sitting in the seat behind him was none other than a major brigadier in the Brazilian Air Force.

  Before she took off, Layla thanked Kowalski for all his help and kissed him again.

  “Oh, stop, please, you’re embarrassing me,” he said. “Besides, I haven’t finished helping you yet.” And he proceeded to point out that since New York was almost five thousand miles from Rio de Janeiro and the jet had an operating range of about nine hundred miles he was going to have to get on the phone and impersonate the real major brigadier — who just happened to be a client of Kowalski’s, and who’d had an operation to make him look more obviously heroic — to divert a series of refueling jets into their flight path.

  The flight was a smooth one, at least until Captain Santos decided to demonstrate what a proficient pilot he was, and performed a series of aerobatic maneuvers that would have had anyone but a djinn like Layla reaching for the sick bag. Otherwise things went well until, less than four hours after taking off from Rio, the Brazilian jet entered American air space near New York and a squadron of USAF F-15 fighter eagles was scrambled to intercept it.

  Seconds later they were under fire. Captain Santos took evasive action but it was an unequal combat. There is only so much a Mirage can do against four F-15s and when a warning signal in the cockpit told them that a missile had locked onto their tail, they had little choice but to eject.

  They parachuted down into the sea where a naval vessel was already steaming into the area to pick them up. But Layla had already decided she couldn’t afford to be arrested. Not when she was in possession of her old face. So as soon as she hit the water, she let herself sink beneath the surface, conjured herself a self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, a wet suit, and some fins, and, under the noses and binoculars of the sailors searching for her, swam all the way to the Long Island shoreline.

  Meanwhile, the poor Brazilian air force captain was arrested. Mrs. Gaunt resolved to go to his assistance, but only later, when the more pressing business that had brought her back from South America was concluded.

  She came ashore at Westhampton, which was a lucky break for her. From Westhampton Beach it was but a short distance to the Gaunt family’s summer house in Quogue. And under cover of the encroaching darkness, she walked quickly home. Once there, she changed her clothes, made a light supper and, using the computer in her husband’s study and the code word Nimrod had given to her through the djinnternal mail message, she logged onto the Web site to search for the kidnappers’ video.

  As soon as Layla had viewed the film she enlarged one frame onto a computer, analyzing the smallest details of what she could see for some clue as to where the video had been made. Finally she found what she was looking for: Behind her husband’s cage, in the very corner of the frame, was a tall arched window and after magnifying what was visible through this window several times she ended up with a tantalizing picture of the edge of an old suspension bridge.

  “Where is that?” she murmured thoughtfully.

  She stared at this picture for a long, long time before she realized that she recognized this bridge. It was the Brooklyn Bridge across New York’s East River. And from the angle of the concrete piers and the Manhattan skyline beyond, she was able to deduce that her husband was on the Brooklyn side of the bridge in a building somewhere immediately underneath the bridge itself.

  Back on the computer, Layla searched for images of Brooklyn and its famous bridge and in a matter of minutes found a like
ly location. Right under the bridge was a promenade and a semi-derelict waterfront building called Molloy’s Warehouse. The warehouse had tall arched windows just like the one in the video.

  Molloy’s Warehouse was where her husband was being held by Virgil McCreeby’s followers.

  Her eyes narrowed angrily as she looked at a picture of the warehouse and imagined what her husband must have been going through.

  “I will have such revenges on these creeps,” she muttered darkly. “I know not yet what they may be. But they will be the terrors of the earth.”

  It was dark by the time she got to Brooklyn in her car. The bridge was noisy with traffic and a strong cold wind was blowing off the East River. With powerful binoculars, she scanned Molloy’s Warehouse, especially the arched windows. It was a curious, eerie-looking place, like something from a bad dream someone was having in a nightmare. Made of limestone with a steep red tile roof and two polygonal towers, there was only an ancient sign with the name MOLLOY’S WAREHOUSE across the L-shaped stoop to say that it was a warehouse and not a miniature, Romanesque castle. From the outside, the place looked quite deserted. But that was no reason to assume that she had been wrong or that Virgil McCreeby wouldn’t have taken a few anti-djinn precautions, just in case. Even a djinn went carefully where Virgil McCreeby was involved.

  She went up to the splendid entranceway with its twin arches, noting the ornamental letters on the stones over the front doors. Like runic letters, she thought, as used by the ancient druids. These were common enough in England and Germany, she knew, but rarely ever seen in New York. Layla was about to put her hand on the door handle when her keen nostrils collected the scent of something strange on it. Something that smelled like flowers but was much stronger.

  Taking her hand away, she bent closer and sniffed fastidiously at the door handle like a suspicious leopard sensing a hunter’s trap. And in the moonlight she saw a tiny frozen wave of something greasy thickly smeared on the handle. It was an unguent of some kind!

  Something scuttled through her memory as she remembered what the smell was that was in her nostrils. The unguent. It was a skin-absorbed enzyme made from the venom of a deathstalker scorpion which, if she’d put her hand on the handle, would have left her paralyzed for several hours, perhaps longer, depending on how concentrated it was. Realizing she’d had a lucky escape, Layla muttered her focus word, and a few seconds later, her hands were safely inside thick leather gloves.