Eye of the Forest

by P. B. Kerr

  She reached for the handle again, and turned it quietly. The door was not locked. But she did not open it yet, either. Layla knew that with a powerful magus like McCreeby, even a door squeak or a creaking floorboard could be put to some sinister use. There were some door squeaks that didn’t just raise the hairs on the back of someone’s neck but the whole neck and head with it until a person was strangled in midair. And creaking floorboards could turn into a kind of invisible bear trap with powerful jaws that could crush a man’s leg. There were even gusts of wind whistling through broken windowpanes that could be turned from the sound of a wolf howling in the distance to an actual timber wolf stalking you hungrily through the darkness.

  Layla wasn’t afraid of stranglers or bear traps or even wolves, but she was extremely wary of the unexpected. Even so, she still managed to brush away the cobwebs that covered the door to oil the hinges without thinking more than that these were home to just a few common house spiders. That was her first thought. Fortunately, it was not also her second thought: that was to remind herself that Virgil McCreeby was a keen collector of spiders and had made himself almost immune to even the most venomous arachnid. Very likely this was because he knew that whereas poisonous snakes were harmless to djinn, poisonous spiders and scorpions were quite lethal. Quickly, she closed the door again. Just in time, as she caught a glimpse of something large and hairy move in the room behind it. Much too large for a spider, she thought. And yet the movement had been triggered by the web, she was sure of that.

  Layla went back to the car to leave her body somewhere safe, thinking to make herself invisible before entering the warehouse. Reasoning that she might be gone for a while, she sat in the back where there was a bit more leg room, and locked the doors from the inside. Then she muttered her focus word and, for a moment, it was like growing taller, much taller, except that when she looked down, she found herself looking at the rooftop of the car.

  She floated back to the warehouse and through the front door. Immediately, she felt glad she had observed this small precaution because behind the warehouse door was what she took at first glance for a very large spider. Invisible eyes can take longer than physical ones to adjust to darkness, and it was at least a couple of minutes before she realized that what she was really looking at wasn’t a spider at all, but rather an unusual large antique engraving of what seemed to be a man on all fours, albeit one who had more than a little of the spider about him, for he was depicted crawling up or possibly down a wall.

  Invisibly, she moved forward to take a closer look at the engraving. Dressed all in black, with a white hourglass on his back, the strange man had long, horribly thin arms and legs, tiny hands and feet, and a head bent down so that only a white domelike forehead and a few straggling hairs could be seen. Not so much a spider man as a sort of human-spider. Layla thought it quite the most revolting picture she had ever seen — even outside the Museum of Modern Art — and reflected that an abandoned warehouse was perhaps the best place for it. But it was not something that seemed likely to cause her any harm.

  Backing away from the picture, she glanced around the cold and deserted entrance hall. From both sides of the hall a rickety old stairway led upstairs into deeper darkness. Several bentwood chairs were piled one on top of the other against one bare, damp wall and, in an empty fireplace, lay a large sleeping dog. Now dogs famously have a sixth sense and while they can’t see into the invisible world, they can sometimes feel when it has been disturbed, and Layla chose to ascend the stairway farthest away from the dog to find only that this led to a brick wall.

  Returning to the entrance hall once more she paused by the dog and, thinking that she might use its body for a while, she slipped under its mangy fur and even managed to take several stiff steps before she realized that the dog was dead. And that the only reason it had even looked alive was that it had been stuffed by an expert taxidermist. Doubtless, it had once been someone’s favorite pet.

  Leaving the dog’s stuffed body beside the fireplace, she started to mount the second set of stairs and hadn’t gone up more than a few steps when she heard something behind her. Looking around, she saw several dozen footprints in the thick layer of dust that covered the bare floorboards. For just a second, Layla thought that the footprints were her own. Then she looked behind the door and saw that the strange man crawling on all fours in the creepy engraving was no longer there. He was gone. But where? And was it possible that those were his footprints? She glanced around nervously.

  Layla’s answers were not slow in coming. A cold current of air slipped down the chimney and into the fireplace, turning the entrance hall as cold as a meat locker. This sudden change in temperature served to make her a little more visible than before and therefore more vulnerable to attack. It was all that the strange human-spider from the engraving needed. The hideous thing dropped from the ceiling right into the middle of Layla’s ectoplasmic being and with its loathsome mouth parts — the creature had no nose, just a mass of solid tissue around a mouth opening that served as a straw through which it began to suck at her spirit — made a hideous slavering noise like a wet vacuum cleaner.

  Suddenly, Layla realized just how well McCreeby had guarded this place against a djinn like her: The creature from the engraving was an exorbere, a special kind of elemental, which was once used by ancient druids conducting exorcisms to suck spirits and other invisible things into its gut. Something similarly horrible had happened to poor Mr. Rakshasas, who had not been seen since a terra-cotta warrior had absorbed him at the Temple of Dendur in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

  She felt some small part of her detach from her invisible being and disappear inside the exorbere. And then something else. She was being slowly sucked into oblivion.

  CHAPTER 21

  THE TEARS OF THE SUN

  What do you think will happen?” Philippa asked Nimrod. “If they complete that ritual you were talking about? The Kutu-mun-something.”

  It was now almost an hour since Dybbuk, Zadie, and Virgil McCreeby had gone through the door in the Eye of the Forest. And Nimrod’s party was still pondering its next course of action. Groanin had made some more tea, which was what he always did when no one could think of anything else to do. This is the English way: If in doubt of anything, sit down and drink a cup of tea while you have a jolly good think about what you’re planning to do. It’s one of the principal reasons why Britain once had the largest empire the world has ever seen. John and Philippa didn’t much like tea, and neither of them wanted to rule the world — they just wanted to see their father safely returned home and their South American expedition successfully concluded. So they drank some lemonade instead.

  “The kutumunkichu? I honestly don’t know,” said Nimrod. “But nothing good, I fear. Dybbuk is playing with fire.”

  “I’ll say,” said John, and laughed. “Almost literally.”

  Nimrod frowned a puzzled sort of frown. “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that you should have seen the look on his face when I put the tears of the sun in his hand. It was the weirdest thing, but those golden disks were quite hot. Well, one of them was, anyway.”

  There was a longish silence while Nimrod finished his tea. And then, almost as if John’s words had only just caught up with him, Nimrod said, “John, what did you say? About the tears of the sun?”

  “One of them was hot.”

  “Hot? How hot?”

  John shrugged. “I dunno. Hot. Not burning hot like it was on fire so that you’d drop it. But too hot to have against your skin for very long. Not hot like it’d been in a fire. But hot like it’d been lying in the midday sun. Or on a radiator. That kind of hot.”

  Nimrod looked up at the thick tree canopy from which very little really hot sun ever penetrated, and then across at John’s backpack. “How could one disk be hot?” he wondered aloud. “All three were inside your backpack.”

  “That’s right,” said John. “I mean, I thought that was kind of weird, myself. But at the
time, I guess I had other things on my mind. I only just remembered it, actually. What with McCreeby and Buck and what’s happened to Dad and that witch Zadie and everything else, it sort of slipped my mind.”

  “But why should the tears of the sun get hot inside your backpack?” Nimrod got up and went to look inside John’s backpack. “Why? It’s not like they were in sunlight. Or near the fire for Groanin’s kettle.”

  Groanin lifted his kettle off the fire and poured some more boiling water into the pot. “More tea, sir?”

  “No, not at the moment. Thanks, Groanin.”

  Nimrod lifted the flap of the backpack and began to toss John’s possessions onto the forest floor as if he was urgently searching for an answer.

  “Hey, be my guest,” said John. “That’s just my personal stuff, you know? Nothing important. Help yourself, okay?”

  Nimrod ignored him. And by now everyone was grouped around John’s backpack, wondering what Nimrod might find that could explain why the tears of the sun had been hot.

  “I could have something private in there,” said John. “Like what?” said Philippa.

  “If I told you it wouldn’t exactly be private, now would it?” John told her, with unerring logic.

  “Zadie’s the one with the secret life, John, not you,” said Philippa. “Can you get over that double-crossing little witch?”

  “I think I’ll get over it a lot quicker than you will,” admitted John. “What I can’t get over is Buck being in love with her.” Her shrugged. “Or her with him. I mean Buck was always a pretty prickly guy.”

  “He was that,” muttered Groanin. “And no mistake.” “I didn’t even know he and Zadie were friends,” said Philippa.

  “I don’t even understand that much. I’d have said that Zadie was way too annoying for him.”

  “Isn’t that always the way?” said Groanin. “Nothing perplexes us quite like our best pal’s choice in a partner. Eh, sir?”

  “Do I have to remind you all that Zadie has been hypnotized?” said Nimrod.

  “It seems you did,” said Philippa. “Sorry.”

  “Hmm,” said Nimrod, and tossed something in the palm of his hand. It was the piece of yellow rock Philippa had brought up from the underground tunnels. “I thought as much. This is the culprit. The uranium sample. It is still quite warm. Here. Feel it.”

  He tossed the rock to Philippa who let it fall to the ground, without even attempting to catch it. “Thanks, but no thanks,” she said. “If it’s hot, it’s hot for a reason that doesn’t sound safe.”

  But Muddy picked it up and looked at it more closely. He was used to handling hazardous things. Like guns and cigarettes. And the odd crocodile.

  John shook his head. “I knew that rock was dangerous.” He started to refill his backpack with all the things Nimrod had thrown onto the ground. “Hey, you don’t suppose it’s contaminated my underwear, do you?”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it, bro,” advised Philippa. “There’s nothing on this planet that’s more hazardous than your underwear.”

  “Funny,” said John. “Real funny.”

  “The rock shouldn’t be dangerous,” said Nimrod. “Not unless —”

  “Not unless,” said Philippa, “those three gold disks weren’t made of gold at all, but something else? Something that reacts badly to being near uranium.”

  “Yes, indeed,” said Nimrod. “Go on.”

  “Well, might it be that the tears of the sun only looked like gold? That the tears were only disguised with a thin layer of gold so as to conceal what they really were? I mean, suppose those Incas just dipped them in gold.”

  “Exactly,” said Nimrod. “Clever girl. Now then. What could they be made of? If my memory serves there was only one disk out of three that seemed much heavier than normal gold.”

  “How about lead,” suggested Groanin. “I say, what about lead? There were lots of folk who used to gild a bit of lead and pass it off. Counterfeiters and coiners. It’s why folk still bite gold coins. To check that they’re the real McCoy.”

  “Not lead,” said Nimrod. “Lead doesn’t react with uranium.”

  And then he swore loudly.

  It was the first time the children had ever heard their uncle curse and for a moment, they were a little shocked.

  “Wash that man’s mouth out,” said Groanin. “Swearing in front of young’uns like that. You should be ashamed of yourself, sir.”

  “Forgive me, everyone,” Nimrod added quickly. “But I suddenly had a very, very bad thought.” And then he was silent for longer than a minute and walked nervously around the camp, shaking his head and wringing his hands.

  “Are you going to tell us what it is or are we going to have to club it out of you?” demanded Groanin. “Sir.”

  “It might be best not to know,” Nimrod said darkly. “I mean, there’s a lot I know that sometimes I wish I didn’t. What was it Mr. Rakshasas used to say? It is better not to remember what is best forgotten and better never to forget what is worth remembering.”

  “What rot,” said Groanin. “I say, what rot. Tell us and be done with it, man, or I’ll never make tea for you again.”

  “That’s quite a threat, Groanin.” Nimrod smiled wryly. “Very well. I was thinking this: that the heaviest of the three disks might have been made of pure polonium.”

  “Never heard of it,” said Groanin. “I’ve heard of the Palladium. I saw Judy Garland live at the London Palladium once. When I were a lad. Marvelous stuff. Now that lass could sing.”

  “There is a rare earth metal element called palladium,” said Nimrod. “But I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about another metal called polonium.”

  “Well, I’ve never heard of it,” said Groanin. “I say, I’ve never heard of your polonium.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t have, probably,” said Nimrod. “It’s not the kind of metal you find in some loose change in a butler’s trouser pocket. In fact, it’s extremely rare. It was discovered only as recently as 1898. By Pierre and Marie Curie.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Philippa. “If it was only discovered in 1898, how come a disk made from polonium has been passing as an Incan artifact in the Peabody Museum for the better part of a century? Either Hiram Bingham was lying about where he found those tears of the sun, or —”

  “Or the Incas discovered the secrets of pitchblende five hundred years before the Curies,” murmured Nimrod. “Yes, exactly.”

  “Pitchblende?” said John. “What’s that?”

  “German miners used to come across a rock they called pitchblende, which was full of metals that were considered too difficult to extract.”

  “I might have known them Germans would be involved, somehow,” said Groanin.

  “In fact,” continued Nimrod, “one of the metals in pitchblende was lead, another was uraninite, which is a major ore of uranium, and another was a new element that the Curies managed to separate from the pitchblende. They named this new element polonium after Marie Curie’s native land of Poland.”

  “Happen they did the right thing,” said Groanin. “Them Poles have always been good at causing trouble. 1939 for one thing.”

  “Groanin, you’re a racist,” said Nimrod. “Yes, sir,” said Groanin.

  “But how would the Incas have managed something like that?” asked John. “They were just a bunch of savages, weren’t they? Not scientists.”

  “Now you sound like Francisco Pizarro, John,” said Nimrod. “He was also a racist.”

  “Sorry,” said John. “You’re right, of course. In their own way I guess they were pretty civilized.”

  “You’re also forgetting that Manco Capac was a djinn,” said Nimrod. “He knew secret things about all of the atomic elements that were not then known to man. Do you remember your Tammuz? In Egypt? And what I told you about how a djinn makes things from the fire that burns within? And how an understanding of all the atomic elements is essential to understanding how djinn power works?”

  “Sure,” s
aid Philippa. “The inner fire? It’s called the Neshamah.”

  “Then perhaps you remember how I also told you how we djinn use that energy source to affect the protons in the molecules possessed by objects.”

  “Of course,” said Philippa. “You told us how making something appear or disappear requires us to add or remove protons and thereby change one element into another.”

  “Or how subtracting neutrons from the various atoms of a rock will make it disappear,” added John.

  “Exactly,” said Nimrod. “Well, don’t you see? Djinn power is just simple physics. Or to be more accurate, simple nuclear physics. The Spanish belief in the existence of a city of gold may not have been fantasy. One of the reasons the Incas possessed so much gold in the first place was that Manco Capac was very good at turning lead into gold. And here’s another thing: It’s impossible to understand how lead works without also understanding how its isotopes work.”

  “An iso what?” said Groanin. “What’s an isotope? And speak English for Pete’s sake.”

  “Isotopes are different forms of the same element. The same element with a different number of neutrons. Lead has four stable isotopes and one common radioactive isotope.”

  “Radioactive,” said John. “I was kind of hoping you wouldn’t use a scary word like that.”

  “I’m afraid I had to,” said Nimrod. “You see, it’s my belief that Manco Capac managed not only to isolate polonium five hundred years before the Curies, but that he also understood the fundamentals of radioactive physics. And that one of the tears of the sun we just handed over to Virgil McCreeby might actually be the detonator for a crude nuclear bomb.”