“Gawd. They’re comin’ after me. Listen: I followed ’em. I saw some of what they’re up to. Weird business. For a change. Looks like there are two more paintings still to go. But, ’old on to your ’at: I got one of the others back. Pinched it off ’em. I ’ave it with me. Remind me to blow me own trumpet later. Now, I know where the other two are. . . .”

The voice fell silent. Alex opened his mouth to speak when Harry started again, more urgently.

“Don’t like the look of this. Listen. They said something about Shadow Gate. I was ’iding back in the bushes, so I couldn’t ’ear clearly, but the girl definitely said it, more than once. Does that mean anything? Shadow Gate? And two more things: it’s not—”

Alex frowned as the voice cut off abruptly. He had an irrational desire to reach into the tape recorder and pull Harry to safety. He strained to hear, but there was nothing except the car, moving faster. His grandfather gently clicked the machine off. The silence felt bleak. Alex exchanged a grim look with the old man.

“Is that all there is?” he asked, as frustrated as he was anxious.

“Ah, yes. That’s when they got him.”

“What’s this Shadow Gate thing?”

“A legend,” the old man said, after a moment. He sat forward, hands interlaced, tapping his top lip with his knuckles. “Or a rumor of a legend. Very obscure. I haven’t heard that phrase in a long, long time. Even then it was only once or twice. I’d forgotten all about it, dismissed it as a fairy tale. I should know better.

“It was the story of a, well, a medieval sorcerer, Alex. A man who had lived a very long and very wicked life, and whose capacity for evil was matched only by his brilliance as a scholar of his particular dark arts. He had supposedly discovered many strange and terrible secrets, and the story went that he finally found a way to cheat death itself. Eternal life, see? All that nonsense. Supposedly, he conjured up this thing: the Shadow Gate, which would allow him to evade death’s grip.”

“So . . . what was it?”

The old man shrugged. “Some magical gimcrack. A . . . portal he called into being. An opening. Story went that, when death came for him, the magician opened this gate, then slipped through it and hid. Something like that. It all came at a hideously terrible cost, of course. There’s always a price to be paid in these stories, Alex. Always a cost. I’ve been dredging my memory for more details, but I never heard more than the bare outline, and I’ve forgotten most of that. I couldn’t even tell you where it was supposed to have happened. It’s not the kind of history that gets recorded in many books. And most of them were burned long ago.”