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."