The Midnight Door

by Sam Fisher

  “For how long?” Melissa said.

  “Why, forever, of course.”

  “But … we’re just kids.” Melissa’s tone was one of utter disbelief. “Surely you can’t be that heartless.”

  Crooks turned suddenly, his cold eyes focused directly on Melissa’s. “I don’t think you’ve been listening, child!” he yelled, now almost crazed with anger. “A man who has had everything stolen from him can be nothing but heartless! I already told you King took everything from me. And I don’t just mean the books. Yes, he took those, but he also took my heart, my soul, and any chance I may have had of true happiness on the very same day that he murdered my mother and father.”

  Morton felt as though the marrow in his bones had been drained away. Could King really have been a murderer? Would he have killed in cold blood, just to gain access to a library of magical books?

  “That’s a very sad story,” Melissa said, clearly not at all concerned with the details of King’s life. “But I promise you we never knew John King, and after everything we’ve been through, I don’t consider myself a fan, so if you would be so kind as to let us go, we promise —”

  Melissa didn’t get to finish. Crooks growled angrily and the ring of creatures tightened around them. “Don’t patronize me! I’m not some crazy old man you can trick with nice words. You will never leave here, never! But unlike King, I’m no killer.”

  “So, you’re going to leave us right here,” Melissa said, turning up her nose in confusion, “until we’re like eighty years old?”

  “Not here, exactly,” Crooks said, and then he looked down at his book and quickly sketched again.

  Morton scanned the room wildly, expecting something else to materialize, but he saw nothing. Then, suddenly, there was a roar from Brad and he vanished completely from his cage. A moment later, Nolan too seemed to just drop out of existence.

  “I don’t think I like this,” Melissa said, pressing closer. Then, without warning, the marble floor beneath their feet just ceased to exist.

  Morton caught the briefest glimpse of what awaited him below — an intricate tangle of geometric lines, an immense, complex maze — and then he was falling.

  The world around him spun and he toppled weightlessly through the air until, with a merciless slap, the ground rose up and knocked the wind right out of his stomach, and he lay on the floor completely unable to move or think. Far above he could see the ceiling of the cavernous library, and he saw Crooks’s silhouette step to the edge of the hole in the floor and look down as he sketched. Morton realized that Crooks was not just filling in the gaps in the floor high above — he was also drawing a low ceiling on top of the maze. He was boxing them in.

  Morton jumped to his feet, ignoring the pain in his back and legs. He saw at once that he was in a corridor exactly like the passage to Crooks’s drawing room. It had a threadbare carpet running down the center and paneled walls with crude brass gas lamps on the walls. It seemed that Crooks had a limited imagination.

  “Is anyone hurt?” Morton said, turning toward the others, but then froze and blinked in astonishment.

  To his complete surprise he was utterly alone. He realized that though the others had been less than a dozen feet from him when they fell, they would now be in another part of the maze altogether. They would in fact still be just a few feet away from him but on the other side of the wall….

  His instinct was to run quickly up and down the passages closest to him, but he knew that the first rule of being lost in a maze was not to panic. He knew this because the first rule in every situation is not to panic, although this was not always an easy thing to avoid. He’d seen the size of the labyrinth from above before he fell, and he knew it was truly enormous. Every hour he spent trying to escape was an hour the Two-Headed Mutant Rodents would be eating their way through Dimvale.

  Suddenly a distant sound interrupted Morton’s thoughts. It was a faint, fluttering sound, like the flapping of a coat in the wind.

  Morton peered along the passage and at first could see nothing, but then, in the distance, a tiny speck of shadow appeared that grew rapidly in size until Morton recognized the dark leathery shape swooping toward him. It was a Bat Eye.

  A moment later the Bat Eye was upon Morton and it flew right up to him and began flapping above his head like a giant annoying insect. Morton’s worry shifted to anger at the thought of Crooks watching him through the creature, and he started jumping up and down and swatting at it.

  “Get out of here! Go! Go away, you horrible thing!” he yelled, but the Bat Eye maintained a safe height, waiting until Morton grew tired before swooping again.

  “Leave me alone!” Morton shouted, feeling his anger slowly fading to despair. “Haven’t you seen enough?”

  But the Bat Eye clearly had no intention of moving off, and in fact was joined by two more of the creatures. They all dove at his head but stopped short of actually touching him. Morton thought this was very strange behavior. Why would Crooks want to use Bat Eyes to annoy him? Surely a clutch of Electric Killer Eels or a swarm of Dragon Flies would be better suited to the task.

  Morton’s despair faded for a moment and a curious suspicion bubbled up inside him. He noticed that between each swoop the Bat Eyes were fluttering off to the end of the passage, almost as if they were trying to lead him….

  Realization flashed into Morton’s brain with such intensity that his entire body felt suddenly hot. It wasn’t Crooks who was watching him, nor had it ever been Crooks following them around with Bat Eyes. It was King!

  Suddenly it all seemed so obvious. Of course, if King could perform magic, which it seemed he could, then he could conjure Bat Eyes, and if he could conjure Bat Eyes, then he wouldn’t have to be blind. He could have used Bat Eyes to be his own eyes. Hadn’t Mrs. Smedley even said that there were always bats around his house? That would explain how he had been able to see well enough to write his diary, and it explained how he had been able to outwit Brown when Brown tried to kill him in his attic. It also explained why the Bat Eyes had visited Morton the night he’d discovered the box of King’s photographs. Obviously that wasn’t an accident. King had wanted him to find that box.

  Why or how King could be using Bat Eyes from beyond the grave was not so clear, but Morton knew he’d done it before, with the Zombie Twins.

  The Bat Eyes swooped at Morton again, and this time he followed them along the corridor. As he had suspected, now that he was following them, they stopped swooping altogether and simply continued flying through the maze. Morton’s heart began racing with excitement as the Bat Eyes picked up speed with each turn until very soon he had to run merely to keep up.

  Finally, after about ten minutes of running, he rounded a sharp ninety-degree corner and collided at full speed with a tall, bony figure. The figure shrieked in surprise and then, before Morton even realized who it was, it threw its arms around him and squeezed him so tightly that he thought his ribs were going to crack.

  “Morton, thank heavens,” Melissa said. “We thought we’d never find you.”

  Melissa released Morton from the tight hug, and he noticed she had a white wool twine tied around her waist.

  “Wendy’s scarf,” Melissa explained. “We decided to split up to find you, but Wendy made sure we wouldn’t lose one another. She wanted to use my silk sweater too, but I told her —” Melissa stopped short and looked up in horror at the Bat Eyes, which were now fluttering patiently overhead.

  “It’s not what you think,” Morton said. “They led me to you.”

  At that moment James, Robbie, Wendy, and Nolan came around the corner followed by a lumbering Brad, who looked far less human than the last time Morton had seen him.

  Everyone rushed over to Morton and made various expressions of relief and happiness to have found him, but the Bat Eyes seemed to grow impatient and began swooping down at their heads and flying off down the hall in a repeated pattern as they had done before.

  “What’s going on?” James said, swattin
g at them.

  “I can’t explain it,” Morton said, “but I think they’re trying to help.”

  “What if it’s another trap?” Nolan said, ducking his head nervously.

  “We’re already in a trap,” Robbie said. “How much worse can it get?”

  “Well, a lot, actually,” Melissa said. “But I don’t think we have many other options, and Brad’s looking pretty hungry, so I think we should go.”

  Everyone else seemed to agree with this, and Morton led the way, once again following the Bat Eyes, which now flew with such clear direction that they looked to Morton more like small black eagles than bats.

  This time the journey seemed to go on forever and Morton felt as if they were going in circles, but finally, just when he thought they’d have to stop for a rest, something began to change. The wooden panels started to fall away in decay until only the bare stone beneath was visible, and then, up ahead, the passage forked into three.

  “I think this is the intersection we passed on the way down,” Morton said.

  “So where are they leading us now?” Melissa said.

  A few seconds later Melissa’s question was answered when the tireless Bat Eyes finally stopped their headlong flight and began to flutter in tight circles right in front of the now familiar green velvet curtain.

  Morton felt a wave of relief wash over his body and looked up at his saviors, but they were already fluttering away, vanishing back into the darkness from whence they came. Morton watched them go with a growing sense of wonder. He had no idea how he had done it, but he knew that somehow John King had once again come to their rescue from beyond the grave.

  Morton crept quietly up to the green velvet curtain and inched it ever so slightly to one side to see the squat figure of Crooks pacing nervously up and down, muttering under his breath and wringing his hands. A moment later Morton saw what was troubling him. The street beyond the window was heaving and writhing with a solid mass of dark, bristly fur. Two-Headed Mutant Rodents were everywhere, scraping at the glass and nibbling around the door frame. Crooks paced a moment longer and then darted over to the small desk behind the cash register, where The Book of Parchments lay open. He picked up a pencil but paused over the blank pages, then started muttering again as if unsure what to do.

  Morton let the curtain drop and put his finger to his lips. “He’s in there,” he said in the softest whisper he could manage.

  “Never mind Crooks. Where’s the book?” Brad said, louder than Morton would have liked.

  Morton put his finger to his lips again and looked back at Brad. His whole body was starting to change now, and he was twitching and shivering as if every inch of him was in pain.

  “He has it,” Morton replied. “But I think we need to make some kind of a plan.”

  “We just need the book!” Brad roared, fumbling inside his raincoat to retrieve the bottle of tonic. When the bottle appeared, Morton saw with dismay that it was now completely empty. Brad nonetheless put it to his cracked silvery lips and sucked at it like a man dying of thirst in the desert. It did him no good. He dropped the bottle to the carpeted floor and curled over, making a sound of anguish. Smoke poured out of his mouth like polluting smog from a factory chimney. An immense yellow cloud filled the passage, blocking all visibility, and when the fog cleared moments later Brad was barely recognizable. His face had swollen to almost twice its size, and lumps were bubbling up on his chin like hard purple mushrooms. His eyes were now almost as big as his fists, and his shoulders had swelled into small mountains of lumpy gristle. Everybody took several steps back as he drew himself to his full, intimidating height.

  “Out of time!” he growled, his voice now barely comprehensible, and he yanked the curtain aside and shot across the room toward Crooks like a stampeding elephant.

  Crooks looked up just in time to see the large lumpy creature hurtling toward him and managed to dive out of the way. Brad collided with the small desk, which collapsed completely under his weight, spilling pencils, papers, and The Book of Parchments to the floor. Crooks, who had stumbled onto his back, saw the book amid the rubble and managed to swipe it up quickly. Brad then rolled clumsily back to his feet and once more shot toward Crooks with a ferocity unlike anything Morton had ever before seen.

  Crooks, however, had just long enough to snatch a pencil from his lapel pocket and scribble randomly on the open page before him. The pencil lines materialized like a web of steel in the air and Brad collided with the mesh and became instantly tangled, crashing to the floor with a loud thud. But Crooks didn’t stop there. He scribbled feverishly in his book until Brad was so completely enmeshed that almost nothing of his body could be seen.

  “Stop!” Wendy shrieked. “You’ll suffocate him!” But Crooks didn’t seem the least concerned with this.

  “Out!” he commanded, clambering to his feet. “Out into the open where I can see you, or I will do worse than suffocate him.”

  Everyone complied with his instructions and shuffled out from behind the curtain to stand beside the now immobile form of Brad.

  “You idiots!” Crooks shrieked, like a teacher reprimanding naughty children. “You’re even more stupid than I thought. You conjured a plague of rats? Why?”

  “We didn’t conjure them,” Melissa said. “They just started breeding. We thought you knew that.”

  “I knew nothing of the sort,” Crooks said. “These things are out of control. They’ll destroy the whole town.”

  Morton stared at Crooks curiously. “How can you not have known that?” he said.

  Crooks glanced at him but didn’t seem to understand the question.

  “You don’t actually know much about magic at all, do you?” he added.

  “More than you!” Crooks spat childishly.

  “Yes, but not more than John King,” Morton said.

  “What does that matter? He’s dead, and now I have reclaimed my father’s library. Soon I will learn far more than he ever knew.”

  Crooks’s response confirmed what Morton was already beginning to suspect about him, but he had no time to dwell on that right now. Right now he had to come up with a way to get that book from Crooks’s hands before Crooks had time to dispose of them in a more permanent manner. Melissa was obviously thinking the same thing, because she nudged Morton with her elbow and pushed something into his hand. Morton looked down to see the empty Colby’s CAT bottle and noticed that Melissa was glaring over toward the window.

  Morton looked over and could see nothing but a stepladder, some books, and, beyond that, a heaving ocean of fur roiling down the street outside. He looked questioningly back at her and she gave him a small nod and then stepped forward so that she was standing directly between him and Crooks.

  “Are you sure King is dead?” she said in a conversational tone that was more suited to a Sunday afternoon tea party than the bizarre scene they were currently inhabiting.

  Crooks appeared surprised by both the question and Melissa’s seeming lack of fear.

  “Of course I am. He drowned in his own well. Everyone knows that.”

  “Well, everyone’s heard that,” Melissa said, “but can you be sure it’s true?”

  Crooks’s whole body tensed and he glanced quickly around him like a hunted man. “He would never have parted with his books while he lived,” he said.

  Melissa pouted her lips and swayed her head from side to side, at the same time elbowing Morton in the ribs. Morton looked again at the bottle with no clue what Melissa intended for him to do.

  “But it sure would throw you off if he was alive,” Melissa went on, overly exaggerating the word throw. “I mean it would shatter your whole world, wouldn’t it, if that turned out to be the case?”

  Now Morton thought he understood what Melissa intended, and even though it was perhaps the craziest idea Melissa had had to date, he couldn’t think of a better one, so, while Crooks was still nervously pondering Melissa’s questions, Morton gripped the heavy glass bottle as firmly as he could in his
small hand and hurled it with all his might at the cracked pane at the front of the store. The bottle shot straight through the glass, causing it to splinter into a dozen jagged fragments, which toppled out into the street with a loud clatter.

  Suddenly a fetid stench filled the air, and the squealing, scampering sound of ten thousand Two-Headed Mutant Rodents burst in upon their ears. Crooks let out a scream of surprise and turned to face the gaping hole as the swarm of ravenous creatures leaped over the windowsill and spilled across the floor in an unstoppable wave of fur and teeth.

  “Are you insane?” he shrieked, but Melissa was already on the move and she leaped clear across the room and kicked The Book of Parchments free of Crooks’s hands, sending it spiraling into the air. Morton watched it flip around like a many-winged bird and raced over and caught it just before it fell directly in the path of the ever hungry swarm of rats.

  In the next instant they were surrounded. Morton felt the now familiar sensation of needle-sharp claws grasping at his legs at the same time that he saw rats leap up at Melissa and Crooks.

  Crooks shrieked again and stumbled backward, away from the inexhaustible rush of Two-Headed Rodents, and then turned on his heels and bolted down the alcove. The instant he had pulled the curtain closed behind him, it turned to the solid wall Morton had seen on his first visit, but he didn’t have time to be amazed by the sight. The Rodents were now attacking everyone, leaping onto their legs and climbing up their bodies. Morton began kicking and swatting to get them off, but he knew there were too many.

  “Quick! Behind the curtain!” Wendy yelled, and she clambered up onto a bookshelf and turned the hands of the clock back to midnight. The solid painting turned again to a soft hanging drape, and both Wendy and Melissa bounded through. James followed and held the curtain open, beckoning to the others.

  “Come on, it will close soon.”

  “But what about Brad?” Morton called, looking at the motionless mass of wire mesh.