The Eye of Midnight Read Online Free Page B

top of the stairs.
    “Will, let’s go back,” she begged. “Please?” And then, in the same breath, she let out a scream.
    “What’s the big idea?” yelped William.
    “Sorry. Something brushed my face. I think it was a cobweb.”
    William waved his hand nervously in her direction.
    “I just felt it, too,” he said. “It’s a string or something.”
    He gave it a pull, and the passage filled with light. They squinted in the sudden brightness. When their eyes adjusted, they found that they were in a low passageway constructed of rough stone, empty except for a bare lightbulb above and a red door at the far end. The door was unmarked, save for an ornate zero that embellished the brass doorknob.
    William and Maxine looked at each other with puzzled expressions. And then, without pausing long enough to change their minds, they crept toward the door, turned the knob, and stepped across the threshold.

    The smells and textures were what captured Maxine first. The fragrance of incense combined with the somewhat less pleasant chemical undertone of formaldehyde. Heavy velvet curtains framed the inside of the doorway they had passed through, and to their left, a pair of leather chairs, cracked and burnished from years of use, faced each other on a threadbare Persian rug.
    William brushed past Maxine into the dim room, his face bathed in the eerie green glow of a murky glass tank that stood behind the old club chairs. As he approached, the water within stirred, and in the haze he perceived the slow movement of a dozen silvery piranhas, each profile showing a single cold eye and a sullen, malevolent underbite of razor-sharp teeth.
    Behind him, Maxine flipped a switch beside the door, lighting the entire room. William’s gaze drifted up the facing wall, pausing on a battered wooden propeller flanked by an assortment of harpoons and brightly feathered blowguns. A pith helmet sat atop a penny arcade shooting gallery, along with a set of rusty thumbscrews and a drugstore candy jar full of gleaming glass eyes, which stared, unblinking, in a hundred different directions. Exotic hunting trophies glowered down from the walls above—rhinos and Cape buffalo and an assortment of predatory cats, their jaws forever frozen in a succession of indignant snarls.
    The collection lined the shelves, hung from the ceiling, and crowded every corner. Dusty maps, pagan idols, and aboriginal boomerangs; glass jars with pickled biological specimens floating gray and limp in a chemical brine; signal kites and hubble-bubbles and tarnished helmets—and none of it inside a glass case or behind a velvet rope but everything right out in the open to pick up and examine. Suffice it to say, the basement was like nothing they had ever seen before, and indeed, like nothing in the rest of stuffy old Battersea Manor.
    “Have you ever seen so many amazing things in one place?” said William, stooping to examine a collection of iridescent blue butterflies and the stone bust of a handsome Egyptian princess.
    Maxine shook her head and turned in a slow circle, gaping at the hoard of oddities that surrounded her. It was a stupendous collection, promising hours of wide-eyed discoveries. But more compelling yet, to Maxine’s way of thinking, were the long rows of photographs that covered the walls—an enticing arrangement of windows to adventures past and parts unknown—and she studied each of them with fascination.
    Many of the pictures were of a young man who must have been Grandpa, taken in some exotic locale, sometimes with a woman Maxine assumed was her grandmother, but more often with a group of dusty legionnaires or painted natives. In one, Grandpa’s left arm was bandaged and hung lamely in a sling, but his right arm still shouldered his rifle, and before him lay the limp form of a lifeless panther. In another, Grandma sat perched on his shoulders with a panicky expression while he waded across a wide stream, laughing devilishly at her predicament.
    They