The Midnight Door

by Sam Fisher

  Morton had never before wanted so badly to be invisible.

  Wendy paused for the briefest of moments and then shot down the stairs, brushing past him without a word. Melissa rushed to the doorway and looked like she was about to call after her, but she saw Morton and her jaw dropped in shock and outrage.

  “You …” she began, but she seemed incapable of finding any more words and simply retreated into her room and slammed the door.

  Morton stood exactly where he was for what felt like a very long time, unsure what he was supposed to do now. He really hadn’t intended to eavesdrop on their conversation, but then again, he hadn’t exactly torn himself away either. He also didn’t quite understand what he’d heard. Could it be true that James and Wendy were actually dating? Surely James would have said something….

  Eventually he sauntered down the stairs and ambled around the kitchen, feeling useless and somewhat ashamed of himself, until James arrived home a few minutes later.

  “Where is everybody?” he asked.

  “Uh, Melissa’s in her room,” Morton said. “Not sure about Dad.”

  James accepted this news with a shrug and started setting out his homework on the kitchen table.

  “Uh, you’re late,” Morton said, deciding not to mention the argument. “Anything, uh, weird happen?”

  James sat down at the table and turned to face Morton. “I don’t know,” he said. “Probably not.”

  Morton found this to be a very strange answer. “What does that mean?” he prodded.

  Instead of answering the question, James asked Morton another. “Have you seen Brad recently?” he said.

  Morton suddenly remembered their previous encounter and slapped his head. “Oh, I completely forgot! I did see him, and I was supposed to tell you he was looking for you. I guess he found you, then?”

  “Kind of,” James said. “He left this note in my locker.”

  James produced a crumpled piece of lined paper from his pocket and handed it to Morton. It had a brief note in very splotchy, untidy handwriting, which read:

  Meet me at the park (u know where) after school or u will be sorry. I know all about Colby’s CAT.

  Signed: Brad

  PS u can bring yor bruther, but not that dork Robbie.

  “Colby’s cat?” Morton said. “That’s weird. Do you think he’s figured out what happened to all the cats and knows we were involved?”

  “That’s what I thought at first, but then I started asking around, and it turns out there’s nobody in school named Colby. So I decided I’d better go meet with him and find out what he meant.”

  “What!” Morton shrieked, utterly shocked by the calm nature of James’s revelation. “You actually did what he asked?”

  “I wanted to get to the bottom of it,” James said with a shrug. “Anyway, he didn’t even show up. I waited for half an hour and finally decided it was a prank.”

  “Oh, so that’s it,” Morton said, suddenly angry. “He’s playing mind games with you. Robbie always said he used to enjoy finding new ways to bully him, but I never thought he’d be this bad. You should give that letter to Finch.”

  “Maybe,” James said, seemingly unruffled by the whole affair. “So, what about you? Anything interesting happen to you today?”

  Morton was about to say no, but then remembered the X-ray Specs, which he still had tucked in his sweatshirt pocket. “Oh, yeah,” he said, pulling the glasses out and handing them to James. “Robbie found these.”

  At that moment Melissa stormed into the room, her face angry and hard.

  “Let me guess,” she said in a sardonic tone. “Flesh-Eating Spectacles. You put them on and they eat your brains out.”

  James gave her a quizzical look. “What’s wrong with you? Snarf ate your homework?”

  “No, stole my best friend actually,” Melissa shot back snidely.

  James was clearly confused by this comment, but before he could respond Morton pressed the glasses into his hands, hoping to distract him.

  “Really, you should try them on,” he said.

  James paused a moment and then put them over his eyes. His mouth opened in astonishment. “Wow! These are actually cool,” he said, suddenly jumping to his feet and looking all around the kitchen. “I can see everything! I can see what’s in the cupboards. I can even see through the walls.” James walked out into the dining room and stared up at the ceiling. “Look I can see my bedroom, and …” He paused.

  “And what?” Melissa said.

  James walked back into the kitchen and stared directly at Melissa’s stomach. “And I can see that you stopped off at the bakery on the way home and bought one of those extra-large chocolate chip cookies. Wow! You must have been hungry. You practically swallowed it whole.”

  “Oh, grow up!” Melissa said, snatching the glasses from his face. “This is serious. That’s two completely random acts of magic in two days.”

  “Actually, I don’t think it’s random,” Morton said. “Both the glasses and the laser are things you can buy from the back pages of Scare Scape. So maybe somebody just did one spell, or made one wish, and that’s affecting all the toys.”

  “It’s possible,” James said. “But I still can’t see why anyone would want to make all that junk from the back pages real. Anyway, at this point, it’s all just guesswork. What we really need is to find out for sure who bought King’s library.” At this James turned to Melissa. “How did it go with Jake?” he asked.

  “I’m working on it,” she replied.

  “Meaning you haven’t found out anything?”

  “Rome wasn’t built in a day, you know,” Melissa said, rolling her eyes.

  “Yes, but you’re not building Rome; you’re asking Jake for a simple favor. How hard can it be?”

  “If it’s so easy, why don’t you just ask him yourself?” Melissa retorted, her anger bubbling to the surface again. “In fact, why don’t you invite him to play tennis with you?”

  This comment clearly hit home, and James’s whole body went suddenly very still. Morton tried to think fast and come up with a way to defuse the inevitable and monumental argument, but thankfully didn’t need to. Dad breezed through the door at that very moment, carrying a large basket bundled in his arms and wearing an excited smile.

  “There you are,” he said. “You’ll never guess what, but I just found the remnants of a vegetable patch in the back garden. Just look at what I dug up.”

  Morton peered into the basket, which was filled with a dozen rather stunted and disfigured vegetables.

  “Uh, they’re kind of lumpy,” he said skeptically.

  “Ah, they’re real vegetables,” Dad said proudly. “Not those factory-farmed, over-bloated, cosmetically altered, gene-modified things you get in the supermarket.”

  “That’s nice, Dad,” James said. “But what are you going to do with them?”

  “I’m going to make a fresh vegetable stew,” Dad replied, and he went straight to the sink and started scrubbing.

  Melissa, who had been glowering at James, turned toward the door. “We’ll finish this later,” she said, and she headed back up to her room.

  Aside from the fact that Dad’s stew, when it finally materialized, appeared to contain more grit and gravel than the driveway, the rest of the evening passed without incident, or even argument, and even after Dad left for work, Melissa and James kept their distance from each other. Morton dared to hope that maybe they’d both decided to steer clear of the whole subject, but unfortunately that wasn’t the case. Sometime after he’d gone to bed, he heard raised voices coming from James’s room. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, and he had no intention of making the same mistake twice and going to listen, but it was clear that this was one of the worst arguments James and Melissa had ever had. He lay awake for a long time, wondering if they would ever truly be friends.

  Despite Melissa’s argument with James and her apparent reluctance to spend time with Jake, on Saturday morning she seemed to have a compl
ete change of heart. She appeared soon after breakfast wearing one of the few leftover outfits from her closet, and Morton overheard her talking to Jake on the phone. She laughed and joked and, if Morton hadn’t known otherwise, he would have sworn she was talking to one of her oldest and closest friends. Shortly after the call, she announced to Dad that she would be gone all day and not to expect her home until early evening.

  Not long after that, to Morton’s surprise, Wendy rang the doorbell. Morton greeted her and was about to explain that Melissa had gone out, when James ran to the door wearing his coat and scarf, and without any explanation the two of them left together. For some reason this left Morton feeling unusually lonely, and even though Dad was home, working away in his study, the house felt much bigger and emptier than Morton remembered it ever feeling before.

  After about two cups of hot chocolate and a lot of loafing around, Morton finally faced the fact that he was going to have to do the rather sizable homework assignment Mr. Noble had given him, although he knew it was not going to be easy. Even though he was genuinely fascinated by carnivorous plants, his mind was in far too much turmoil to settle down to one thing. In fact, the way he looked at it, the whole of Dimvale was in too much turmoil, and he wondered how James and Wendy could simply go off and have fun when mysterious magic was spreading like measles through the streets. At least Melissa was trying to help solve the problem.

  Morton tried to push such thoughts out of his mind, settling down at the small desk in his bedroom and dragging out his schoolbooks. As he did so the tattered edition of King’s Gold that he’d found in Nolan’s locker slid to the floor. He’d stuffed it in his bag and completely forgotten about it. He bent down to retrieve it and discovered a small strip of yellow cardboard slipped in between the comic’s pages. He plucked it out and saw it was a bookmark. On one side were printed the words:

  Sydenham Crooks. Collectible Books. Odd, rare, and curious reading for those of odd, rare, and curious breeding.

  Morton presumed this was the bookstore where Nolan had bought the comic. Something about it rang a bell, though Morton couldn’t quite understand why. He definitely had never been there. In fact, he hadn’t been to any comic shops in Dimvale because he hadn’t had the time to seek any out.

  He began leafing through the comic absently, and when he reached the back, he noticed that one of the pages had been torn out. At the sight of this his stomach lurched, and not just because someone had abused a valuable collector’s edition. He knew exactly what had been on the torn-out page. Just to be certain, he quickly retrieved his own, mint-condition copy of King’s Gold from his shelves and flipped to the same spot. Sure enough, he was right. Both sides of the page that had been torn from Nolan’s comic were plastered with ads for toys, tricks, trinkets, and other whimsical items. Among them, of course, were X-ray Specs and the Antigravity Laser Cannon.

  Morton started to feel queasy. Surely this was too much of a coincidence? A couple of weeks earlier Nolan wouldn’t have even laid his eyes on a Scare Scape comic, and now he not only owned a fairly valuable collector’s edition, but he’d also torn out a page featuring items that in the last few days had been enchanted by some unknown spell.

  Morton now felt certain that he was missing something and he looked again at the bookmark. Sydenham Crooks. Collectible Books. It had already occurred to him that if anyone’s books could ever have been described as collectible, it would have been John King’s. It was entirely possible that this store could have ended up with some of his collection, but that wasn’t the clue his mind was grasping for. It was something else….

  It suddenly hit him like a blast of cold air, and chills ran through his entire body.

  Morton pushed his chair away from his desk, spilling his pencils across the floor, and dashed to the attic stairs. He bounded up the steps three at a time and burst through the door and headed directly to the small wooden box he’d previously tripped on, throwing it open and quickly locating the photo of the young John King standing in front of the store. He turned to read the writing on the back, just to be sure he was remembering it correctly. He was. The words clearly said My brother Syd and me, age 14. And the sign on the front of the store read Crooks Collectible Books.

  Sydenham Crooks. It was a very unusual name. Was it possible that this was the person in the photo, the person King called his brother? If so, was it then also possible that he would know something about what was happening in Dimvale?

  Morton knew that he had to find out, and he dropped the photo back into the box and practically flew down the stairs.

  “I’m going out!” he called to Dad as he raced past his study.

  “What? Where?” Dad began, looking up from his papers, but Morton didn’t linger to explain himself and continued out of the house and down to the shed where they now stored all the bikes. Morton’s scooter was there too, gleaming like new, and he realized he hadn’t even touched it since they’d moved in. At one time he’d used it every day on his paper route, which he loved, and when they first moved to Dimvale he had fully intended to get another paper route as soon as he could as a way to get to know the people in his neighborhood. But it hadn’t worked out like that at all. He’d been so wrapped up in strange magical events that he hadn’t had time to do anything normal.

  This had to change, he thought. They couldn’t hope to settle in to a new life in Dimvale while Two-Headed Mutant Rodents were breeding in the sewers and Bat Eyes were following them around. No. They had to put an end to these mysterious events once and for all, and he hoped more than anything that this Sydenham Crooks might be able to help them achieve that goal.

  It took him a little longer to get downtown than he’d hoped, mostly because he still wasn’t completely familiar with Dimvale, but eventually he ended up on Main Street and quickly located Wardle Lane, which was the address printed on the back of the bookmark.

  The street turned out to be a very narrow lane with only a few small neglected-looking stores.

  Morton dismounted his scooter and walked slowly along until he came to a store with a peeling old wooden door and a large cracked window. Despite the decrepit facade, the sign itself looked new and appeared to be hand painted in flowing gold letters. It read:

  SYDENHAM CROOKS, COLLECTIBLE BOOKS

  Morton peered in at the display and was surprised to see only three books propped up on a makeshift shelf. The books were nautical journals of some kind and they were covered in fine gray dust. When he’d seen the bookmark he’d imagined a large, brightly lit store, with a cozy corner that sold fresh-baked muffins and had a constant flow of well-dressed customers. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

  To his own surprise, Morton started to feel afraid. There was something unnerving about the isolation of this store, the way the window was almost empty, and the way the sign, though freshly painted, seemed somehow to lean to one side. And then Morton suddenly realized that he’d left the house without telling anyone where he was. If something happened to him …

  Morton shook himself. He knew better than to let his imagination run away with him. He had no reason to fear going into a bookstore in broad daylight, although now that he was here he wasn’t sure exactly what he was supposed to do.

  He decided to play it by ear and pushed through the door without further delay. A small brass bell jingled above his head and the thick, damp aroma of mildew and old coffee wafted over his face. Despite the sparse display in the window, the store itself was crammed to bursting with books. It was also much larger than it looked from the outside, with several separate rooms linked together, all with very tall ceilings. Each room was lined with high, densely packed shelves that were sagging under the immense weight of the books upon them. Not only that, but many of the books seemed to have tumbled like falling rocks into sloped mounds at the foot of each stack of shelves, leaving a maze of narrow pathways winding through the store.

  Morton turned to close the door. The bell over the door jingled a second time, and a short, stoc
ky man appeared from behind a heavy velvet curtain at the end of a narrow alcove. Morton couldn’t help noticing that the curtain, which was a lush royal green and hanging from brightly polished brass rings, looked out of place in this dim, dusty store. Morton also noticed that mounted directly above the curtain was a clock, which obviously wasn’t working because both hands were pointed directly up at the number twelve, and it was long past lunchtime.

  The man who had emerged from behind the curtain was wearing a loose-fitting cotton suit and a slightly crooked red bow tie. He was carrying a large leather book, which he snapped shut the moment he saw Morton. Morton examined him closely, trying to decide if he in any way resembled the teenager in the photo he’d found. There was a certain roundness to the man’s face that vaguely resembled that of the boy in the picture, but aside from that, it was difficult to say.

  “Yes?” the man said, carefully pulling the curtain closed behind him, giving Morton a brief glimpse of a small dark room beyond.

  “Uh, do you have any comics?” Morton said, suddenly wishing he’d thought more carefully about what he intended to say.

  The man sniffed disapprovingly and adjusted a paper note pinned to the curtain that read Staff Only Beyond This Point.

  “This is a specialty bookstore,” the man said, staring down at him as if he were a beetle on the floor. “We don’t sell comics or children’s picture books.”

  Morton felt his lips go dry and for a moment was lost for words. He’d hoped to bring the conversation around to King casually, but if this store didn’t sell comics, that might be difficult.

  “Are you sure?” he persisted. “A friend of mine said he bought an old Scare Scape comic here. You know, they’re famous around here because John King was one of the artists and he used to live in Dimvale.”

  The man, who Morton now presumed had to be Sydenham Crooks, froze on the spot. His cloudy gray eyes grew wide and his breath seemed to stifle in his throat. For a fleeting moment Morton imagined a deep anger swelling inside him. But then the moment passed and Crooks turned his back on Morton and climbed a tall stepladder to arrange books in a high display cabinet.