Tracked by Terror by Brad Strickland Page A

Silence
    â€œ D on’t open the book!” Junius Midion snarled at his son. They stood in the last dressing room, the one the Midion family used. “Augustus, I warn you!”
    Augustus had carried the Grimoire into the room and had placed it on the table in front of one of the mirrors. His fingers twitched, and he had reached forward, had actually begun to open it, but when Junius Midion cracked his cane down on the cover with a sharp sound as startling as a gunshot his son had taken a reluctant step back. “Augustus, listen to me. We shall deal with the Grimoire in good time. Go bring the girl.”
    As a disgruntled-looking Augustus turned and left the dressing room, Junius roughly shoved Jarvey backward into a chair. “Now, my fine young fellow, you owe us a considerably detailed explanation. Who are you, and what have you done? Why have you brought the Grimoire here? Don’t you realize how very dangerous that is?”
    â€œI know,” Jarvey said through clenched teeth. “It can destroy this crazy world you’ve built.”
    â€œLook at me!”
    Jarvey found himself unable to resist the stern order. Junius stared into Jarvey’s eyes, frowning. “I see. You are actually one of us. You fit the old rhyme so exactly, midnight eyes, hair like rusty gold. What is your name, boy?”
    â€œI’m a Midion,” Jarvey said. No use in hiding that.
    â€œMidion is an ancient and fearsome name. How do you come to have the Grimoire?”
    â€œI got it from the man who was writing the latest chapter,” Jarvey growled. “I’ve had it for a long time now.”
    â€œAh. The latest in the line of sorcerers to hold the book, and yet you are so young. What year do you come from, back on the dear departed Earth?”
    Jarvey returned his stare with as much defiance as he could muster. “I left Earth about a hundred and seventy years after you did,” he said.
    â€œSo long after my own time! Dear me. I’m sure the cultured world of your age still remembers the famous Midion Theatrical Family. And tell me now, what world were you building when you blundered into mine? That’s quite against our family rules, you know, one sorcerer interfering with another’s paradise.”
    â€œI wasn’t building any old world,” Jarvey said. “I was trying to get out, not in.”
    Junius frowned. “You need not lie to me. A Midion has but one use for the Grimoire, and that is to create the world of his delight. For me and my family, that world is the theater, with all its divine illusion and rewards. For my younger brother, it was to be a world of hunting and stalking. One of my remote ancestors even created a frozen world of human statues, where no one at all lived and moved but he. To each his own, you see. Now, you—”
    â€œFather!”
    Junius whirled on his heel as Augustus appeared in the doorway. “What’s happened now?”
    â€œShe’s gone.”
    â€œWhat? Impossible. She was unconscious...” Junius turned back to Jarvey. “Or did she exist at all, I wonder? Was the girl real or a phantasm?”
    â€œI don’t know what you mean.”
    Junius stood back, with one hand almost caressing the cover of the Grimoire, and began to chant something softly. A column of air beside him shimmered, grew misty, and then began to take on the vague outlines of a human shape. At first a milky white skeleton, then a blur of hair, flesh, and clothing, and—Jarvey could not help shivering—a duplicate of the vanished Katrina, but a Katrina undecayed and in the full bloom of youth and beauty, had shimmered into existence.
    â€œKatrina Four,” Junius said. “My dear, you are to play the role of lady’s maid to the countess. Your first line is in Act Two, Scene One. The cue is ‘Pack all my trunks.’ ”
    â€œOh, dear, m’um, I shall never be able to survive a long sea