The old brick house still had electricity, presumably to fuel the alarm system. It was spooky inside anyway, furniture draped with white sheets, clocks stopped on the walls. Jenny kept having the same lurching feeling: familiarity-unfamiliarity. Back and forth, or sometimes both at once.
By far the worst was the basement. Jenny's legs didn't want to take her down the stairs. She'd seen this place last month in a sort of dream, a hallucination created by Julian-but she hadn't really been here in over ten years. Not since the day neighbors had heard terrible screaming next door and the police had clattered down the stairs to find five-year-old Jenny on the floor, arms scratched, clothes torn, hair a wild yellow tangle. And screaming. Screaming and staring at an open closet door with a strange symbol carved on the front. Screaming in a way that made the biggest policeman run back upstairs to call the paramedics.
The police thought her grandfather had done it to her. The scratches, the torn clothes. The blood. They paid no attention at all to the five-year-old's story about ice and shadows in the closet, about hungry eyes that had seen her and tried to take her. About how her grandfather had been taken in her place.
Instead, the police had thought her grandfather had been a lunatic-and just now, looking at the basement, sixteen-year-old Jenny could see why. Every wall, every bookcase, every available surface was jammed with charms of protection.
Not such a bad idea for somebody trying to summon up and trap demons. But, undeniably, it looked weird.
"Will you look at this stuff?" Audrey breathed, enthralled. "Some of it's junk, but I'll bet some of it's priceless. Like this." She stepped forward and lightly touched a silver bell on a shelf. "This is Chinese-I saw these when Daddy was stationed in Hong Kong. You ring them to clear away evil spirits. And that-that's a genuine Tibetan prayer wheel. And this-" She lifted a bracelet of agate and gold beads.
"That's Egyptian," Dee interrupted. "Seven strands, see? Aba says the number seven was sacred to the Egyptians." Dee's grandmother traveled a lot.
"And those are Russian icons," Audrey said, nodding at some gold-plated pictures. "Very rare, very expensive."
"And that's from the Qabalah," Michael said, joining the conversation triumphantly and pointing to a chart on the wall labeled Numerical Values of the Hebrew Alphabet. "Magical Hebrew divination system."
"A lot of this stuff belongs in a museum," Audrey said.
Jenny was busy trying to breathe. The room was heavy somehow-overloaded, oppressive. Stale air mixed with thick, quivering energy.
Magic, I guess, she thought, trying to feel as if she dealt with magical rooms every day. Well, that's what we came for. It's time to start the search.
She made herself go to her grandfather's desk. In her dream of this room-the dream created by Julian-her grandfather's journal had been lying open on the desk. In real life it wasn't so convenient. There was nothing on the desk but a faded green desk pad.
"Maybe on the shelves," she said.
She went to one of the bookcases and tilted her head sideways to read. It had been a brown leather-bound book, and she was sure she would recognize it when she-
"Found it!" she said, darting forward. She opened it to see her grandfather's heavy black handwriting, then looked back at the shelf. "Oh, God, but there isn't just one journal. There're three. We'll have to read through them all."
"We'll take turns, like you said." Dee nodded toward the stairway. "You and Michael go up and get some sleep-you're the most tired. Audrey and I can start reading."
Jenny slept for three hours on the living room couch-she couldn't face going into one of the bedrooms-and then went downstairs to take her place beside Michael. She chewed one of Dee's malt-nut Power Bars as she read. She wasn't hungry and she hated the texture of the protein bar, but she knew she needed the energy.
The journals were strange. Her grandfather had written everything up with the precision of a scientist, but what he was writing about was bizarre-and sometimes frightening. Almost all of it dealt with ways to call up the Shadow Men.
The Shadow Men, Jenny thought. Known by different names in different ages: the aliens, the faery folk, the Visitors, the Others. The ones who watched
from the shadows and who sometimes took people to-their own place. Jenny looked up involuntarily at the closet door which stood open, and something like a fist clenched in her gut. That was where they'd taken him.
Through that portal into-the other place, the place that existed alongside the human world, always there, never touching. The Shadow World.
Her grandfather had called them up because he wanted their power. But in the end they'd been too powerful for him.
A phrase from the journal caught Jenny's eye. Walker between the worlds. Her heart began to pound as she deciphered the dense black writing around it. Something illegible and then becoming a Walker between the Worlds myself, if the danger wasn't so great. There are several methods to-something else illegible-but the one I consider most likely to succeed would be the circle of runes....
"Runes," Jenny whispered. The magical alphabet that Julian and her grandfather had used to pierce the veil between the worlds. She looked at the drawing below the writing. "Michael, I've got it."
"Really?"
Jenny read a little further and her fingers tightened on the leather cover of the book. "Really. Get Dee and Audrey. And get a knife."
They'd brought Tom's Swiss Army knife, and Dee had a wicked-looking river knife with a five-inch blade. It was meant for rescuing kayakers who needed their ropes cut-quick.
"We have to carve these runes on a door "
said. "Then we stain them and say their names to charge them with power, and then we open the door."
"Stain them with what?" Michael said suspiciously.
"Blood. What else? Don't worry, Michael, I'll take care of it. Let's use the door to the basement-not from the downstairs side, from the other side. It's smooth, good for drawing."
It was funny how simple and everyday it seemed, doing what her grandfather had said he wouldn't try because it was too dangerous. Nobody said, "Are we really going through with this?" Nobody kibitzed-not even Michael. They went about it the same way they'd built the pressed-wood stereo cabinet in Tom's bedroom. Michael read the instructions from the journal aloud; the others followed them.
"Two circles, one inside the other. It doesn't say how big they're supposed to be," Michael said. "But leave room for the runes to go in between them."
Jenny sketched the circles freehand on the smooth oak door with a felt pen.
"Okay, now the runes. First, Dagaz. It goes right at the top and it's shaped like this, like an hourglass on its side," he said. Jenny sketched the angular shape at the top of the inner circle. "It says here that Dagaz is like a catalyst. It represents times like twilight and dawn, when things are just changing. It 'operates between light and darkness.'"
Dawn. Jenny thought about the brilliant blue of the Pennsylvania dawn-and about eyes that were just that color. Julian was like Dagaz, she thought. A catalyst, operating between light and darkness. One foot in either world.
"The next one is Thurisaz, the thorn. It goes to the right-no, a little farther down. It's shaped like-look at this. A straight line with a triangle attached to the side. Like a thorn sticking out of a stem."
"There are a lot of fairy tales about thorns," Audrey said grimly. "You get pricked with a thorn or a spindle or a needle and then you die, or go blind, or you sleep forever."
Silently Jenny drew the rune.
"The next one's Gebo. It stands for a lot of things: a gift, sacrifice, death. The yielding up of the spirit. It's shaped like an X, see?"
Sacrifice. Death. A queer shudder went up Jenny's backbone. She stared at the book. It was a straight X, not like the slanted X of the rune Nauthiz, the one that her grandfather had carved on the closet to restrain the Shadow Men.
"See, Jenny?"
She nodded and drew. But the strange feeling didn't go away. A bad feeling-and it was connected with Gebo, somehow. Gebo the rune of sacrifice. Something was going to happen....
Not now. Not right now. In the future.
Michael's voice startled her. "Next is Isa. It's a rune for the power of primal ice. It's just one straight line, up and down."
Jenny tore her mind away from the thought of sacrifice and made herself draw.
"Kenaz, the torch. It's for the power of primal fire, and it's shaped like an angle, see. ..."
"Raidho, for movement, traveling. Like riding a horse. For protection walking between the worlds. It's shaped like an R... ."
"Uruz, the ox ... it's shaped like an upside-down U- "
"I know, Michael." Uruz was the rune on the game box that Julian had sold her. "It's supposed to look like ox horns pointing downward, ready to pierce the veil between the worlds," Jenny said. "Is that the last one?"
"Yeah. Now we carve it."
Carving the runes wasn't as hard as Jenny had expected. The door was good thick wood, but the runes were all straight lines and angles, which was much easier to carve than any rounded shape. Still, there were times when Tom's Swiss Army knife stuck or slipped. Jenny was a little frightened of how sharp it was.
And she was worried about the blood. How was she going to do it? She was scared of razor blades, and a pin was out of the question. If they were going to stain all these runes, they'd need a lot more blood than you could squeeze out of a pinprick.
Don't think about it now. When the time conies, you'll just have to use the knife-and hope you don't cut your finger off.
Just then the problem solved itself. The knife slipped.
"God!"
Jenny felt a flash of something, gone almost too quickly to identify as pain. She dropped the knife, and she could feel her eyes widen as she stared at her hand-wondering in that first second how bad it was.
Not bad. A half-inch gash across the meat of her thumb. The lips of the wound showed white before bright red welled up to obscure them. Blood began to slide down her thumb.
Jenny felt just slightly sick. Seeing inside your skin-even a little way insidewas disconcerting.
"Quick, use it," Michael said. "Don't waste it-that stuff's precious."
The cut was beginning to sting. Jenny looked around for something to use as a pen, then collected the blood on top of one fingernail and began to trace the runes that were already carved. It stained the pale grooves in the wood a clear light red, the color of a teacher's red ballpoint pen.
Audrey and Dee did the rest of the carving, and Jenny stuck to her gory task. She had to squeeze the cut in the end, but there was enough blood to go around.
The final product of their labors was slightly wobbly but impressive. Two concentric circles, with the runes running between them. Looking at the carving, Jenny wondered for the first time what somebody-a neighbor, say-would think if they caught the kids doing this. Destroying property. Vandalism. As bad as gangs spray painting graffiti.
Jenny didn't care. She was still operating in crisis mode, in which all normal rules were suspended. She and the others had stepped out of the mainstream, into a place where anything could happen and the only rules were their own. It was scary-and tremendously liberating. Jenny felt as if she were flying toward Tom on wings of fire.
Take him from me, will you? she thought to Julian. I don't think so. By the time I'm done with you, you'll wish you'd never started this Game.
Dee was regarding the circle critically. "So what now? How does it work?"