Tracked by Terror by Brad Strickland Read Free Book Online Page A

concentrate on the grand climax and of course our curtain call. Remember, we perform on the evening after that.”
    â€œBut Father—”
    â€œAugustus, if it makes you feel better, I shall place a spell of warning on the garden and on all the doors. There cannot be an intruder, for where would he come from? But if anything is out of place or wrong, we shall know instantly just where it is and what it is.”
    â€œA spell will take you hours.”
    â€œAfter our rehearsal, I shall attend to it, Augustus,” Junius said firmly. “Come.”
    Jarvey heard retreating footsteps, and again he wormed his way forward on his stomach until he could peek over the edge of the terrace.
    What he saw startled him so much that he almost overbalanced and fell off the edge of the flat roof The whole row of top-hatted, black-coated men stood directly beneath him, about a foot away from the wall, facing the wall and staring straight ahead at the marble. Junius and Augustus were striding away through the bean rows some distance away, heading for the distant doorway.
    But the strange thing was that the men underneath him were dissolving. Their top hats were already transparent when Jarvey first caught sight of them, and in a few seconds they had disappeared. And then, horribly, the flesh and hair crept away from their heads, starting at the crown, revealing translucent, milky skulls that almost immediately grew as clear as glass and then vanished in shreds of gray vapor. The necks, the shoulders, the arms, the chests all faded to skeletal bones, and then the bones evaporated like mist in the sun. The whole process might have taken no more than ten seconds, but to Jarvey it seemed to stretch on and on.
    Even after the ghostly men had disappeared, Jarvey didn’t dare to come down for a long time. Far across the garden the forms of Junius and Augustus slipped inside the doorway. From here Jarvey could not even tell for sure that they had closed the door. With great caution he crept sideways, into the shade of the tree, and waited.
    At last, as the sun slanted lower in the cloudless sky, Jarvey stood up, walked out into the mushy layer of leaf mold, and made a leap straight upward. With hands already sore and blistered from his earlier climb, he caught the creaking branch and hauled himself into the apple tree again. He worked his way down, dropped to the ground, and began to search for Betsy. He couldn’t find her anywhere, and at last he limped toward the only doorway out of the garden. His leg muscles felt stiff and sore, and his throat felt parched. From a safe distance he could see the door was indeed shut.
    He hoped it wasn’t locked.
    Like a flat lid sliding over the top of a square box, a gray layer of cloud had swept in from behind him, shutting off the direct sunlight. Jarvey soon heard the patter of rain, then felt the first drops as he crossed the little winding brook in the center of the garden.
    He shivered. Even the rain was spooky, more like water drizzling from regularly spaced sprinklers than real rain. He wondered if Junius had arranged the weather on this odd world so that his garden would be watered every afternoon. Lunnon had experienced occasional storms, but Tantalus Midion, who had created that world, had not paid as much attention to detail as Junius. Lunnon had not even had a proper sun, just a diffuse, brassy glow in the sky. But Lunnon had people in it, real people, criminals whom Tantalus had brought to his world, kidnap victims whom he had taken by force, and their descendants, real flesh-and-blood people, not ghosts and robots. There the people were substantial, and the buildings had been made by their hands, not by magic. The weather in Lunnon and the surroundings was random and messy. Here everything seemed somehow sharp, substantial—everything but the people.
    But then, Junius probably was the one who had designed and created all the stage sets with their amazing impression