by Robin Jarvis
Spencer pulled him to his feet. “I’ve just shot my first gunslinger!” he yelled. “So don’t mess with me!” And he pushed him to the fence.
Alasdair couldn’t run much further. The camp’s rations didn’t furnish the energy for chasing around. He was out of breath and light-headed, but he could hear the Punchinellos crashing through the trees behind him. They were getting closer all the time.
Captain Swazzle moved swiftly. Bezuel had cast the cumbersome chinchilla coat aside, but Yikker had the lead. Stinkboy was close. The guard’s hooked nose could smell the sweat and the fear on the air.
Alasdair was almost spent. He hoped the others had managed to get away. But when he heard the distant shot as Spencer put a bullet in Garrugaska’s brain, he didn’t dare try and guess what that signified.
And then Yikker came springing out behind, hollering in his pinched voice, the cassock flapping round his stunted legs.
“Stinkboy!”
There was a crack like thunder and Alasdair’s right leg went from under him. The next moment he was rolling on the ground. His leg felt hot. He clutched it. Blood was soaking through his jeans. The hunt was over.
Lying there, he saw Yikker prowl closer, sniffing and eyeing him dubiously. He ripped the black material from the boy’s head and Alasdair’s sandy hair was shaken free. Yikker screamed and stamped his feet in a fury.
“You not Stinkboy!”
Captain Swazzle and Bezuel came scuttling to his side. Their savage eyes flashed at the wounded lad and they stroked their guns.
Alasdair glared back defiantly and, in a loud, undaunted, clear voice, he began to sing.
Oh flower of Scotland,
When will we see your like again
That fought and…
The woods flared and shook as the Punchinellos emptied their guns.
On the other side of the camp, on the main forest road, the lorry driver heard the crackling barrage of gunfire and threw his hands up.
“That’s it!” he barked. “I can’t stay any longer! They’ll be here next – and so will most of the nearest village. It’s twenty past. I’ve waited too long already. I’ve got to go! Get in the back with the rest.”
Maggie caught his arm. “Please!” she implored. “Just a few minutes more. They’ll be here, I know it!”
“Should never have believed it in the first place,” the driver blamed himself, pulling away and marching round the rear of the vehicle. “It was a stupid bloody risk. Do you know what it took to mobilise and set this up so fast? Do you know how far we’ve come? And for what?”
He peered into the darkness in the back of the lorry, where the escaped children were huddled together. The man softened.
“Least we got you out,” he said kindly. “That’s something.”
He gestured for Maggie to climb up with them.
The girl hesitated. She’d kept him waiting here far longer than he was supposed to. She had to face the truth. Spencer and Lee hadn’t made it.
Maggie nodded slowly and was about to climb up, when she heard the sound of someone running through the trees.
She turned apprehensively. It could be the guards. No – it was them!
“Lee! Spencer!” she cried, running to meet and hug them. “Oh, you’re filthy!”
The driver stared at the newcomers, intrigued. One of them was carrying a strange skull attached to a stick. He had thought Maggie’s wand was an unusual thing to bring out of an internment camp, but that was even more peculiar.
“Which one of you is the Castle Creeper?” he asked.
Lee frowned at him.
“You’re in the front with me,” the driver said. “You two, in here.”
Maggie and Spencer clambered into the back and he closed and locked the doors.
Lee got into the cab and the man started the engine. The lorry rumbled off. “We’re not going far in this,” the driver told him, keeping his eyes on the dark road ahead.
“Don’t mind where we’s going,” Lee muttered. He didn’t know why he’d let Spencer drag him to this. He was dead inside.
“There’s an army helicopter waiting for us, just under a mile away.”
Lee didn’t answer.
“Not our army,” the man explained, plugging the silence. “This country has had it. So has most of Europe. Any day now, America is going to follow.”
“You don’t say.”
The man’s gaze left the road a moment. “You can’t imagine how exciting this is for me,” he said.
“What?”
“Meeting you, the Castle Creeper. When they told me you were in that camp, I just wouldn’t believe it. Couldn’t get over it. It’s an honour and a privilege!”
“Autographs later, yeah?”
“Sorry, it’s only – I never really thought you’d even exist. Just another false hope. But you’re the first genuine, tangible hope we’ve had so far.”
Lee took something from his pocket and cleaned the mud from it with his fingers. The owner of this pink diamanté had been his hope. The doors to painful memories began to swing open in his mind. It was unbearable.
“You look exhausted,” the driver said. “You can sleep on the flight. There’ll be plenty of time. We’re going a long way away. One of the last few places on earth still safe from the book and that Ismus maniac. Fingers crossed we don’t get shot down by the RAF. What’s that you’ve got there?”
Lee turned the heart-shaped stud over in his fingers. “Belonged to a friend of mine,” he said.
“I’m sorry. They didn’t make it?”
The boy returned the stud to his pocket. He had made up his mind.
“She’s just fine,” he said, staring out at the night. “I’ll be giving it back to her real soon.”
The lorry bumped and tore down the forest road.
Lee looked more closely at the intense, scruffily bearded man behind the wheel. By the dim glow of the dash lights, he could see how thrilled the guy was.
“So what’s your name?” he asked.
The driver reached over and shook his hand.
“My name’s Martin Baxter,” he said.
STANDING ON THE balcony of the Ty Warner Penthouse suite of the Four Seasons Hotel, a cashmere blanket wrapped round his shoulders, the Ismus leaned on the glazed railing and breathed deeply. The air up here was invigorating. The pain had abated, but not the anger. He looked down on the raging fires.
It was a magnificent, torrid spectacle. There was practically one in every block and too many to count in Central Park. The night sky was aglow with ruddy flame and the skyscrapers of Manhattan flickered with angry light. Over the East River a subway train was burning on the Williamsburg Bridge. Appropriately enough, the Statue of Liberty was in darkness.
This was one of the last cities in America to surrender to the power of Dancing Jax. Only Boston, San Francisco and Las Vegas still resisted with any sizeable force, but nowhere as violently as here. The National Guard had been called out, but now even they were battling among themselves. The Ismus listened to the shots, explosions, wailing sirens and screeching tyres a while longer with a rapt expression on his face, as if enjoying a symphony. Then he returned inside, closing the French doors behind him.
The disturbances of New York were silenced immediately and the air-conditioned opulence and serenity of the suite welcomed him once more. He gazed around at the members of his Court. The three Black Face Dames were stationed outside the private elevator, although the hotel itself was defended by a cordon of police, who each wore a playing card pinned to their uniform. The Harlequin Priests stood either side of a marble fireplace and the Jockey was on the telephone.
“Haw haw haw,” the Jockey laughed into the receiver. “I don’t care who you are, Mr President, the Holy Enchanter is a very busy bee and not taking any more irksome calls. Now stop pestering him or I shall have to come play pranks on you and be fearsomely naughty. You won’t like that!”
Hanging up, he skipped to one of the other windows an
d flung the handset over the balcony.
“What a pushy nuisance!” he remarked. “Just because he’s discovered he’s a knight of the House of Clubs he thinks he can annoy you at any hour. That’s his fourth call since midnight. I’ll be so glad when the castle replica is completed in England and we shall be free of these freakish contrivances. How they annoy one.”
He glanced at the plasma screen above the mantle. The news reports showed crowds of the newly converted marching through the streets and fighting with the misguided idiots who dared oppose the spread of the sacred book. Kate Kryzewski was there, doing pieces to camera, with the chaos and pitched battles fulminating behind her. She was dressed from head to toe as the character Columbine, in pretty, patched rags, with a tambourine at her waist. The Jockey licked his lips in appreciation.
“Where is the Lady Labella?” the Ismus asked abruptly.
The Jockey started then grinned. He tittuped to the master bedroom, beckoning all the way.
The High Priestess was lying on the bed within. She was sound asleep. The Queen of Hearts and the Queen of Spades were sitting with her. They rose when the Ismus looked in and curtsied.
The Holy Enchanter stared at his consort, sleeping peacefully on the bed, and covered her with the blanket from his shoulders. Then his attention shifted to the infant in the crib close by.
“The young princeling is quiet as the Jack of Diamonds’ magic slippers,” the Queen of Hearts said, beaming. “Why, he’s a delight to watch over.”
The Ismus ignored her and stared down into the cot. The baby was awake. Livid stains of minchet juice discoloured his plump, innocent face and his wide blue eyes roamed over the tall, gaunt figure who peered in at him.
A crooked smile hooked the man’s mouth. He knew the child was not his. It was the son of Labella’s previous partner. Before Dancing Jax, Labella had been called Carol and the man she abandoned in order to become the High Priestess of Mooncaster was Martin Baxter. This was the dissident maths teacher’s son.
The Ismus chuckled softly to himself. It amused him greatly to have the enemy’s child in his power. A sudden, impulsive idea occurred and he glanced purposefully at the window. The penthouse was on the fifty-second floor – a truly dizzying height. He reached into the crib and let the baby’s tiny fingers close about one of his own. Then he broke into harsh laughter.
The Jockey and the Under Queens could not begin to guess what was so comical.
“No,” he told himself, becoming solemn once more. “That would be a waste of resources. You’re going to prove very useful, aren’t you, my little princeling? Very useful indeed.”
He swept out of the bedroom and the Jockey followed.
“Fetch me another phone,” the Ismus told him. “I want to speak with my publisher.”
“More foreign editions?” the Jockey chortled.
“No, I wish to discuss something new with them.”
“New, my Lord? I do not understand.”
The Ismus turned his dark, glittering eyes on him. “Dancing Jax was always conceived as the first volume in a two-book sequence,” he said. “Every bestseller must have a sequel. The public demand for the continuation of a blockbuster product must be satisfied. I’m going to give my readers what they want.”
The Jockey’s eyes almost fell out of his head. “A sequel?” he spluttered. “How can there be a sequel? It is a chronicle of our lives there – our gateway to them.”
“Then call it a furtherance to the world of Mooncaster. The first took only nine years of my life to write. I have been planning the follow-up for eighty years.”
“This is stunning news.”
“Oh, it will be more than stunning,” the Ismus promised. “Much more. Dancing Jax was only the baited trap; the second book is when the jaws close and bite down hard on this dirty little world.”
“My Lord?”
“Don’t you worry, just fetch me a phone.”
The Jockey moved away uncertainly, the caramel leather of his costume creaking with every step. He halted then wheeled around. “May I ask,” he began nervously. “What will this furtherance be called?”
The Ismus stared out at the troubled night. “I would have told the title to Jangler first,” he said with profound regret.
“Who, my Lord?”
The Ismus was about to dismiss him, irritably, but sighed. Not one of the converted remembered the Lockpick. He had been completely erased.
“The next book,” he told him, “will be called Fighting Pax.”
Dare to enter the Wyrd Museum, where fantasy meets the seriously sinister…
In a grimy alley in the East End of London stands the Wyrd Museum, cared for by the strange Webster sisters – and scene of even stranger events.
Wandering through the museum, Neil Chapman, son of the new caretaker, discovers it is a sinister place crammed with secrets both dark and deadly. Forced to journey back to the past, he finds himself pitted against an ancient and terrifying evil, something which is growing stronger as it feeds on the destruction around it.
Brought out of the past, elfin-like Edie Dorkins must now help the Websters to protect their age-old secret. For outside the museum’s enchanted walls, a nightmarish army is gathering in the mystical town of Glastonbury, bent on destroying the sisters and their ancient power once and for all…
Revisit the chilling, fantastical world of the Wyrd Museum in this sepell-binding sequel to The Woven Path.
The thrilling conclusion to the chilling trilogy.
Something has come to disturb the slumbering shadows and watchful walls of the Wyrd Museum.Miss Ursula Webster is determined to defend her realm to the last as the spectral unrest mounts. Once again, Neil Chapman is ensnared in the Web of Fate, facing an uncertain Destiny. Can he and Edie avert the approaching darkness, or has the final Doom descended upon the world at last?
Copyright
First published in hardback in Great Britain
by HarperCollins Children’s Books 2012
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,
77-85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB.
Visit us at www.harpercollins.co.uk
Illustrations copyright © Robin Jarvis 2012
ISBN 978-0-00-744802-9
Robin Jarvis asserts the moral right to be identified as the author and illustrator of the work.
DANCING JAX FREAX AND REJEX. Text copyright © Robin Jarvis 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © JANUARY 2012 ISBN: 978-0-00-745344-3
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