Curse of the Midions by Brad Strickland Page B

enough. Behind him, Betsy dropped through the trapdoor. Jarvey drew close enough to one of the big round ventilators to have a reasonable amount of daylight, and then he pulled out the Grimoire and studied its covers.
    The way to find his parents, Zoroaster had said, lay in the Grimoire. He tugged at it, but it remained obstinately shut, as though the pages had been glued together. Jarvey took some minutes building up his nerve, then tapped the front cover with his finger and said, “Open!” in what he hoped was a commanding voice. Nothing happened. He took a deep breath and muttered, “I, Jarvis Midion, command you to open!”
    The book seemed unimpressed.
    Jarvey sighed and inspected the volume. The brass hinges gleamed dully against the pebbled, brownish red surface, and the brass catch could be flicked open easily enough. Still, regardless of what Zoroaster might have believed, the pages obstinately refused to open. Even for a Midion.
    Clutching the book against his chest, his chin resting on the top edge, Jarvey thought about the weird moment when Siyamon Midion had given an order in a strange language. What had it been? Abracadabra, or something like that? Jarvey strained, but he could not quite bring back the strange syllables he had heard just before Zoroaster had barged in, yelling for him to beware the book. Jarvey could recall his own terror, the heart-stopping sensation of being turned inside out, of falling endlessly. He could see in his mind’s eye long, crooked streaks of red and blue lightning. He could remember hearing shrieks and moans from the book’s fluttering pages.
    Not the words, though, not the spell that Siyamon had shouted just before the world had gone crazy. And if he could remember them, what then? He shuddered at the thought of the Grimoire opening once more, pulling him from Lunnon into some even worse place, if that were possible.
    Zoroaster might have helped, but he had disappeared again, and Jarvey couldn’t just wait around for him. There was only one other alternative. If he wanted to learn something about the magic that controlled the book, he had to find his way into the palace.
    The trapdoor opened and closed, interrupting Jarvey’s thoughts, and in a moment Betsy joined him, a look of triumph on her face. “Not too bad,” she announced. “They keep a larder of food here for night meals, for most of them eat in the palace kitchens by day. I took a bit from here and a bit from there, and no one’s likely to miss any of it. Cheese, biscuits, grapes, apples, even some chocolates. Help yourself.”
    They began to munch on the food. Jarvey tilted his head. “You’re talking different,” he said.
    She shrugged. “On the street you learns to talk street talk, cully. Away from the street, you can speak more properly if you wish.”
    Jarvey didn’t say anything, but he seemed to hear Charley’s voice whispering inside his head: “Wonder what else she’s been hidin’ from you, mate.”
    Impulsively, Jarvey said, “Tell me more about your mother.”
    â€œDon’t know much. I haven’t seen her in ages, and I don’t think I can find her, at least as long as old Nibs runs this town. What you and I have to do is take it away from him.”
    Jarvey shook his head. “Why did he make Lunnon in the first place?”
    She laughed without really sounding amused. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about that. Well, for one thing, he’s old, really old. In the year 1848, he would have been about seventy. Now you say that in the real world, the world where he came from, a hundred and sixty years or so have gone by. So he’s two hundred and thirty, right? In real time, he’d be long dead by now. In book time, he stops aging. He stays the same as he was when he came into the book. So he made this place in order to live forever. And why did he make it with the Toffs and the rest