Max Quick

by Mark Jeffrey

  Wet, venomous eyes watched Ian from the brush.

  “Oh, no,” Max whispered, having a sickening premonition.

  He turned the page, sweating.

  A swollen red moon throbbed in the sky.

  Several hours seemed to have passed.

  Ian was walking in the garden on this page. Oddly, he seemed entirely unconcerned now. They could barely make him out: He was facing away. But the back of his ragged prep school outfit was unmistakable.

  The red moonlight revealed crimson shadows of fur and teeth and snouts and pointed ears.

  The next page sucked the air from Max and Casey’s lungs.

  Ian’s shredded clothes hung from branches. Blood splattered the door of the observatory. And blood splashed the marble busts.

  Wolves with yellow eyes, snarling and snapping, rolled on their backs. The crimson moon above was a bag of blood, ready to burst.

  “Oh, Ian!” Casey cried.

  Suddenly, a squeaking metallic noise startled them both. With sickening horror, they saw that someone was trying the front door.

  Someone was trying to get into the study!

  Johnny Siren!

  Max’s heart lurched in his rib cage. Instantly, he jumped up. He grabbed the door handle and slid the bolt.

  Whoever was on the other side had not expected this. They wiggled the handle furiously, as if they couldn’t believe it was now suddenly locked.

  They began banging on the door.

  “Who do you think it is?” Casey asked.

  “Siren,” Max whispered. “Who else? This is his house, after all.”

  BAM!

  A heavy thud against the door startled them both. The person on the other side was now body-slamming it, trying to break in. The door lurched in the frame. But it held.

  BAM!

  After several moments, the noise stopped.

  When it didn’t start back up again, Casey spoke. “Do you think that Ian is . . . dead?”

  Max sighed. “I don’t know. I mean, he’s only been gone for a few minutes, and in the Book, it looks like it takes hours for the wolves to get him. So we might still have time. It might not have actually happened yet.”

  “But the Book shows it happening,” Casey said.

  “Right. But we don’t know if that’s showing the future or the present or what.”

  Casey pondered this for a moment and then said, “What if we change what happens in the Book? I mean, what if we rip out a page?”

  Max nodded appreciatively. “Hey . . . yeah. That’s a great idea, Casey. Let’s try one of the earlier pages,” he said. Casey opened the Book to the first page where Ian was standing on the path.

  “Tear out the page where he’s on the bridge.”

  Casey gripped the page and tore. The page ripped out easily enough. But then it turned to slick black ash in her hand and vanished in a puff of dark smoke, and without missing a heartbeat, the same page grew back in the Book.

  “Grrr!” Max said. “Well, there’s our answer. It’ll just regenerate itself. There’s no way we can change what happens.”

  BANG! BANG! BANG!

  The pounding was back and once more the door lurched in its frame.

  Max jumped up and reinforced the door with his shoulder. A strong fear gripped him that the door might not hold this time.

  Johnny Siren’s ice white face cut across his vision.

  “Casey! Help! Push!” he screamed.

  But Casey didn’t move. She just stared curiously at Max. Her thoughts were dancing near the edge of something important, but she hadn’t quite got it yet.

  “Casey! C’mon! Help!” Max looked at her like she was nuts.

  Then her face lit up with realization.

  “Max. Listen to me. That’s Ian on the other side of that door.”

  Max looked at her incredulously. “What?”

  “Open the door.”

  “Are you nuts? It’s Siren! If I open the door—”

  “No, Max. Think about it. There’s an observatory in the Book. And Ian said there was one out in back of the mansion as well.”

  Max shook his head in protest.

  “Listen to me!” Casey insisted. “Look around you. We’ve been picking up things without having to unstick them. Does this place look like it’s in the Pocket?”

  Max blinked.

  “Look outside, Max!” Casey shouted. Max’s head snapped up to the skylight. “It’s nighttime. You can see stars! We’re not in the Pocket right now! We’re in the mansion in the Book!”

  She was right.

  In that case, if he didn’t open the door . . .

  Then he would be responsible for Ian’s death. It would be his fault.

  “Max. Please! Before it’s too late.”

  Gritting his teeth, Max pulled the bolt back and threw the door open.

  Ian crashed into him, panting. Both tumbled back onto the ground.

  For a split second, they just looked at each other in surprise. Then they jumped to their feet, slammed the door shut, and slid the locking bolt in place—in just the nick of time.

  Heavy wolf bodies slammed against the wood. It rattled hard. They snapped and snarled on the other side of the door. Barking and howling filled the air.

  “Ian!” Max and Casey shouted at once.

  “Am I glad to see you two!” Ian said. “Did you know there are nasty wolves in those woods? They’re everywhere! You try running up a mountain sometime—especially if you can’t whoosh!”

  Quickly, Ian told Max and Casey what he had seen.

  “This whole mountain is ringed with these obelisk-things. I think they make Siren’s whole mountain immune to the Pocket. That’s why I couldn’t whoosh! Of course, I noticed that the first time I was here, but I didn’t know why—until now.”

  “So, what, we’re in a pocket of normal time . . . inside of stopped time?” Max asked.

  Ian nodded. “Yeah. That’s also why the wolves are starving now.”

  “What do you mean?” Casey asked.

  “Well, when the Pocket first hit, those wolves got caught on the wrong side of those obelisks. The animals they normally hunt, you know rabbits or whatever, some of them were probably inside the perimeter also. But they’ve eaten them all. They’re starving now and desperate enough to attack a human.”

  Max gulped. “I almost got you killed, Ian. If it hadn’t been for Casey here, I would have never opened the door. Casey, you saved Ian’s life.”

  But Casey wasn’t listening. She was staring at the Book again. “Uh-oh. The Book didn’t change even though we saved Ian.”

  What?

  Max looked down. Casey was right. The Book was open to the page showing Ian’s clothes ripped to shreds. The picture was still the same. Nothing had changed.

  Since Ian was safe, why did the Book still show him getting killed?

  After all, everything else the Book showed happened.

  Siren’s words played in Max’s head: The tyranny of the page is absolute.

  As in . . . a page of one of these Books?

  Max had a terrible feeling they were missing something important.

  But Casey’s head was already elsewhere. “Hang on a second,” Casey said. “According to the Book, you’ve been running up the mountain for hours. But for Max and I, it’s only been, like, ten minutes.”

  Ian blinked. He hadn’t expected that. “It has?”

  Max nodded. “Could the Book have somehow sent you back in time a few hours?”

  Ian carefully picked up the Book.

  The bloodcurdling sound of wolves howling filled the air.

  Glass crashed in a nearby room. Then came the horrible tap-tap-tap of sharp claws on the wooden floor.

  The wolves had smashed their way through windows! They were in the mansion!

  “Open the Book!” Max and Casey screamed at once.

  “What?” Ian yelled. “Are you two insane?”

  The pack entered the study and Max saw that Ian was right; they we
re rangy and lean. Too lean. They growled and snapped. Rheumy yellow eyes dripped with hunger.

  “Do it!” Casey shouted. “We have no choice now!”

  Ian opened the Book. With a terrific effort of concentration, they tore their gaze from the wolves closing in . . . and focused their attention down on the Book.

  The trio stood on a white path before two sandstone obelisks. Casey and Max both recognized it from the illustration.

  It was daylight, Casey mentally noted. They were now a few hours in the past, just as Ian had been. She looked up.

  There were two suns in the sky. There was the one from the Pocket, the one partially covered by the eclipse. And there was a second sun, shining through whipped marshmallow clouds. This new sun hung at the edge of a hole in the sky directly over Siren’s mountain.

  But even now, this second sun was heading for the horizon; it was late afternoon in Siren’s private oasis of normally flowing time. A sort of shimmer marked the boundary between it and the Pocket.

  “There!” Max said, pointing. A figure picked its way up the rockface of the mountainside. “Look!”

  It was past-Ian.

  Ian gasped when he saw his past self.

  “And look what’s behind him,” Casey said. A swirling snake of fur swept between the trees, keeping a measured distance. It was the wolf pack.

  But something happened even as Casey said this.

  The wolves stopped and sniffed the air. The timbre of their barking changed. They had scented new prey; more meat was nearby.

  Quickly, the pack abandoned past-Ian and started heading toward present-Ian, Casey, and Max.

  “Uh-oh,” Max said. “They smell us now! Run!”

  The trio bolted toward the obelisks.

  In a panic, Max realized he wasn’t whooshing. They were running like normal people, just as Ian had said.

  Already, wolves were visible through the trees. Two in the lead were terribly fast, barking and snapping as they chased, white foam slicking the corners of their mouths.

  Max wasn’t sure whether they’d make it past the obelisks before they were upon them . . .

  Ian was already wheezing; his body was exhausted from the first run up the mountain. He couldn’t take another sprint for long.

  The wolf pack was very, very close. Max could feel hot dog-breath on his neck. They would pounce any second. Their teeth would rip into flesh, their claws would maul and rip and . . .

  Max, Casey, and Ian lunged past the obelisks and skidded on their bellies through the debris of the forest floor.

  The wolves followed. But as they crossed the boundary of the Pocket, they slowed down. Unlike Max, Casey, and Ian, they were not immune to the Time-stop. Their barks became lower and lower pitched, until they were no longer audible.

  In the end, the wolves hung in the air, frozen in mid-leap.

  The wolves still on the other side of the obelisks skidded to a halt when they saw this. They were perplexed by the vision of their comrades frozen in mid-bound, but they understood enough to be afraid. They hung back, barking at the odd sight for several moments. Then, they turned and once again pursued past-Ian up the mountain.

  Chapter 11

  Texas Farmhouse

  For some time, the trio whooshed across the Texas landscape. It was a featureless sandpit of doom. Nearly three Pocket-days had passed since Siren’s mansion—and the wolves.

  Ahead, a cyclone hung time-frozen in midspin.

  The vast inky swirl had apparently chewed through several miles before the Pocket had hit. A trail of raw, ripped earth lay behind it. Upturned clay—red as a wound—marked its passage.

  But at the moment, the cyclone was as harmless as a yawn. The threesome stopped only yards away from it. Casey stared up at the churning throat of debris.

  “We probably shouldn’t be standing here,” Casey said to Max.

  “You’re right,” Max replied. “If the Pocket suddenly ended, we’d all be dead.”

  But Ian was oblivious to this. He sketched the Serpents and Mermaids logo with his finger on the funnel. “Hey. Pretty cool, eh?” he said with a goofy grin.

  “We should keep moving,” Max said. “The land is flat for miles around and we’ll be easy to spot from the air.”

  As they headed eastward, Ian became more terrified of UFOs suddenly appearing in the sky. His eyes were drawn ever upward, always looking.

  But they didn’t see any. The only thing up there was the ever-present eclipse.

  Still, they took turns keeping watch as the other two slept.

  It was no trouble at all to find an empty motel room when they wanted to stop for the day. Of course, they had to find a place that didn’t use card-swipe electronic locks on the doors. Then all they had to do was swipe the keys from the front desk.

  Food had likewise been easy to come by. Even hot food. On their first day of traveling together, Ian had entered a Mighty Burger and swiped a piping hot Double Deluxe burger off a tray and wiggled it into the Pocket’s time frame. The moment he had done so, steam poured from the bun.

  “See? Still hot! The Pocket is like a ‘hot refrigerator,’” Ian had said with a grin. “We used to do this all the time in the Serps. Well. At least until we’d picked off most of the hot food in town, that is. Not much of that left now.”

  Max and Casey had glanced at each other and then had followed Ian’s example.

  “After all, we’ve got to eat,” Ian had said between bites. “It’s survival, plain and simple.”

  The eclipse was more pronounced in Texas. The trio was approaching the totality, where the sun was completely blotted out. Only a thin crescent of burning yellow was visible beneath the eerie black disc. The rest of the sky was deep navy blue, the edge of twilight.

  Even though whooshing was physically effortless, nobody could do it all the time. The concentration required to do it safely was mentally exhausting.

  You had to take breaks.

  At present, the trio was walking on a dirt road alongside a cornfield.

  “Does the entire state of Texas look like this?” Casey asked. “You know. Scrubgrass. Dirt. Rocks. Repeat?”

  “Pretty much.” Max nodded. “And just when you think you’re done, there’s Texas and more Texas ahead.”

  “So you’ve been here before?” Casey asked.

  That caught Max off guard. “Yeah,” he said finally. But he couldn’t remember when.

  Ian changed the subject. “What did you make of Siren’s house?”

  Max seemed relieved to have something else to talk about.

  “Well. All the weird things we’ve seen so far seem to come from ancient Egypt or something,” Max said. “There was the Whispering Stone thing from the museum. And now, in Siren’s house, we have the Books . . .”

  “But there were no Books in ancient Egypt,” Ian cut in. “They only had, like, scrolls.”

  “How do you know?” Max asked. “Were you there?”

  “Okay. Then what about the UFOs?” Ian said. “They have to use technology to fly. They’re not ancient at all.”

  “But they don’t look like technology,” Casey said. “You haven’t seen one up close like we did back in Starland. They actually do look ancient.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Ian said finally.

  “So what are we dealing with here?” Max asked. “Is this stuff all, like, magic?”

  Ian shook his head. “There’s no such thing as magic.”

  Casey cocked an eyebrow. “Stopped time? Books that transport you? Whispering Stones? Sounds like magic to me.”

  “It’s not,” Ian said. “It’s just science so advanced that it seems like magic to us.”

  But Max wasn’t convinced. “Okay, what’s with all the Egypt stuff then? Maybe it’s Egyptian magic. There are people who think the pyramids were built using something we don’t understand today.”

  “Whatever it is, it’s not magic,” Ian concluded. Then he said, “You do realize that this Siren guy is several hu
ndred years old.”

  “What?” Max said, jolted out of his own thoughts.

  “Well, there are photos of him on that wall going back to 1864 at least—I saw one of him in the Civil War. There was even a painting of him from the Renaissance, I think. That would have been in the 1500s.

  “The point is this: I think Siren is an alien.”

  Something inside Max revolted at the thought of that. “But he looks human.”

  “So he’s an alien that only looks human. So what? Maybe it’s a disguise or something. But it explains why he’s so old.”

  “Then why was he calling that Jadeth woman?”

  Ian shrugged. “Maybe he’s trying to get back to his home world or whatever. I mean, he was taking pictures of some planet I’ve never seen before.”

  “But then why did they go to the trouble to actually stop time?” Max said. “That doesn’t make any sense. If Siren was just looking to hitch a ride, they could have picked him up in a cornfield late at night or whatever. You said it yourself. They’re looking for something. That’s why time is stopped.”

  “I’m not arguing,” Ian said. “But I still say Siren is an alien.”

  It was only several minutes later that Max realized that Casey had gone silent when the topic of Siren had come up.

  It was on the fourth day that the UFOs appeared.

  Three of them came out of the east. They were just pinpricks of light at first. Then, swiftly, they grew in size until they were almost directly overhead.

  Ian cried out in terror.

  “Down!” Max shouted. “In the corn! Now!”

  The trio whoosh-crawled awkwardly between time-frozen stalks.

  “Stay still!” Max whispered. “Don’t move.”

  The ships passed overhead. Each was a mountain of jewels and light.

  Ian saw that they were just as Max had described: They did not appear to be constructed of any sort of technology. There was nothing electronic- or metal-looking whatsoever.

  Instead, the craft’s material appeared to be more like sleek obsidian and shined marble. Each was covered with light-gushing rubies, sapphires, and emeralds. Shafts of brilliant, piercing light soaked the gloom. A smell of ozone danced in the air. It crackled with static electricity like just before a thunderstorm.

  On the bottom of the craft were hieroglyphs. Max nudged Ian and pointed up silently. Just like the Books. And the Whispering Stone.