Tracked by Terror Read Online Free PDF Page B

“Jarvey will have to wind up in the theater sooner or later.”
    Because that’s all there was.
    Betsy was convinced of it. She had explored for hours, and so far as she could tell, this whole world consisted of the apartment kept by the actors of the Midion family, their small backyard garden (not that it was really so small to someone from crowded Lunnon), and all the rest of it was taken up in long corridors surrounding that enormous auditorium.
    Once she’d had a look around, Betsy’s sense of direction was unerring. From the apartment she turned away from the direction leading to the stage and followed a short hallway down to the garden door. It had no lock. In fact, there were none on any of the doors here. She supposed that the father of the acting family, or maybe the mother, was the one who had created this world, and he or she would be sure that no enemies were in it. No enemies, no need for locks. Not like Lunnon, she thought, where no one quite trusted anyone else.
    She opened the door and slipped into the garden, glad for a sight of the sun. She stood on what seemed to be the floor of a kind of rectangular crater. Except for the one door, the marble walls rose up from the soil unbroken on all sides. Terrace on terrace reared all around, each one a little more set back than the one it rested on.
    The garden was all the greenery in this whole world, as far as she could tell. It might have stretched a mile or a mile and a half on a side. A little stream meandered through it, rising from a mound of stone in one corner and running to a pool in the opposite corner. One whole section grew thick with pear and apple trees, and other areas had been planted with grains, vegetables, and some plants Betsy could not recognize.
    She had hidden in the orchard earlier that day and watched the four members of the Midion family come out to pick vegetables and to rehearse songs. At first she had wondered how this garden, big as it was, could possibly support a whole population, but gradually she had come to realize that these four were the whole population. The other actors and actresses, the audiences, were all illusions, conjured up by the Midion magic. None of them were real. The actors were some kind of walking, talking dolls, and the audience members were more like spirits or ghosts.
    And you don’t need to eat or drink if you’re only a doll or a ghost.
    But Betsy was neither, so she ate some fruit, then slipped back through the only door leading out of the garden. She made her way through the dim hallways until she heard the actors rehearsing their parts out on stage. She peeked inside the first dressing room, found it empty, and scavenged a few remnants from the actors’ meal. Wherever Jarvey was, she hoped he was not starving.
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    About forty feet away, Jarvey crouched in the women’s dressing room. Only one of the actresses remained there, apparently waiting for some cue. Jarvey tried talking to her and found that she, like the other woman, would do two things: recite her lines if given the right lead-in line and talk about the theater. Now, in an urgent whisper, he asked, “But just what is this theater?”
    The actress-doll turned her glassy eyes toward him. Prettily, she chirped, “The world is a theater. The theater is a world!” And she giggled, but then looked distressed until Jarvey softly clapped his hands.
    He had figured out that applause was the key. The strange actors and actresses would speak, in their fashion, as long as you rewarded them by clapping. They seemed to be hungry for that sign of approval. The doll-creature daintily inclined her head in a symbolic bow.
    â€œListen, have you seen a girl?” he asked.
    The actress-doll did not answer. “Her name is Betsy,” he added urgently. “She has really red hair, a lot redder than mine—”
    He broke off as another actress-doll, an older woman, came into the room and took her place