Chapter 1

In January of 2006, a who's who of young starlets began disappearing. It started out with Jessica Biel, who had ducked into the bathroom at the opening of a small boutique in L.A. She never re-emerged. Three days later, an unofficial taskforce consisting of the F.B.I., the L.A.P.D. and the seemingly omnipresent paparazzi could find neither hide nor hair of her. It was as if she had stepped into that bathroom and vanished off the face of the earth. A week later, Jessica Alba stepped into her trailer on the set of the second 'Fantastic Four.' Thirty minutes later, a production assistant pounded on her door for fifteen minutes. When security opened up her trailer, there was no sign of her. Security had reported that she had not left the lot.

In the weeks that followed, panic ensued in the ranks of the glitterati. Young, beautiful women were disappearing left and right. Bodyguards were hired, electronic surveillance systems were installed, overtime was authorized for police forces. It didn't matter. At some point, the young woman in question would be alone, even if for a second. That second was enough. Another young starlet disappeared.

Police forces world wide united to search for these missing young women. No rock was left unturned. Interpol was working with MI5 who was working with the FBI who was working with the Russian Federation Security Services who was working with ... well, you get the idea. It didn't matter. Women kept on vanishing, never to reappear. No trace was ever found of them, their ultimate fate unknown.

And just as mysteriously as it started, it stopped. But not before 32 young, beautiful women disappeared. The authorities had no idea where to look. But that was the problem. They were looking for where. They should have been looking for when...

That's where I come in. It's 2012 and I just turned 18. But before I get to this part of the story, I guess I should jump back to 2006, or even better, 2004, when the story really starts. My name is Jack. Not James or John or Jonathan. But Jack. I like the name myself, if for no other reason then it drives my pretentious parents nuts. I'm named after my grand-uncle Jack, who was the family ne'er-do-well who still managed to acquire a fairly vast fortune. About a year before he died, he changed his will, stipulating that he would leave his wealth to the first child of one of his siblings (or sibling's offsprings) who named one of their offspring after him. Mom was already two months pregnant, so I was the winning baby. Good thing I wasn't born a girl. I'm pretty sure they would have named me Jack anyway. Uncle Jack was worth a lot of money.

My Mom (Uncle Jack's niece) had married into a family with a prestigious name but no money to back it up. Dad's a lawyer, Mom's an architect. They do well, but they worked for their money. The inheritance from Uncle Jack let their money work for them now.

I think Dad and Mom both resented the fact that they owed their good fortune to the whimsical wishes of the black sheep of Mom's family. I was the youngest of their five children, and the only one with a common name like 'Jack.' I was something of a sore spot to them, I suppose, a constant reminder of what they had to do for money. So although I was never mistreated, there was always something of a distance between us.

At age 10, I was your average kid. I played baseball, read comics and was just starting to discover that girls were not only different, but they were different in a very nice way. That's when I got the inheritance Uncle Jack left for me.

It was a steamer trunk full of odds and ends. A chessboard with carved pieces from somewhere in Central or South Asia. One of those expanding telescopes that you see in the pirate movies. A couple of old books that might have been worth something if they had been in decent shape. Things like that. My parents rummaged through the chest to make sure that there wasn't anything that might "corrupt the morales of an impressionable young boy" or that should be kept in their safe keeping for when I "became of an age to appreciate such things." No such things in the chest. So I was given the admonishment of not letting these things clutter my room, and given free reign.

To be honest, my friends and I were especially enthralled with the telescope, and I was just learning how to play chess, so having another chess set besides one with plastic pieces was a big boost to my desire to play chess. But I quickly became disinterested in the chest and slid it to the back of my closet.

When I was 11, I was doing a project for school and remembered this old looking wooden globe in the chest that might be useful. By that time, other items of mine had found a final resting place in the chest, so it took some time to dig around for the wooden globe. In the process, I found a secret panel.

As I pulled out a piece of paper, all sorts of ideas were running through my head. I knew my Mom and Dad always spoke disparagingly of my Grand Uncle Jack, but enough of the tales surrounding him had made their way to me to make me think this could be a map to a secret treasure of some kind. Instead, I pulled out a yellow piece of paper torn from a legal pad where the words 'Say Your Name' were scrawled on it in almost illegible writing.

To say I was disappointed would have been the understatement of the year. My buried treasure fantasy came crashing down around me. I crumpled up the piece of paper and threw it at my waste basket. I turned away, not seeing that the crumpled piece of paper had missed the wastebasket and ricocheted to behind my desk.

About a week later, I was working on my computer and had a wood carved pawn in my hand when it slipped out of my fingers and went behind the desk. I bent down to get it and saw the crumpled piece of paper. I uncrumpled it, then remembered where I had found it. I read over it again, and tried to think why someone would put something like that in a secret panel. Maybe, I thought to myself, it means there are more secret panels! This could be a clue of some sorts!

I spent the next few hours going over that chest. I poked, pried, cut, knocked ... whatever I could do to find more secret panels and compartments. Nothing. I grabbed the piece of paper. If it were something I could punch, I would have by now.

"OK, what are you a clue to? Did someone just put you in there to drive me crazy? What's my name? My name is Jack Sherrington, but what does that have--"

I stopped, stunned into silence. As soon as I said my name, another question appeared on the paper. This one asked 'Who are you named after?'

I wasn't feeling very adventurous right then. Things like this did not happen in the real world. Truth be told, I was probably thirty seconds from wetting myself. Hey, don't be judgmental! I was eleven years old, and voodoo shit like this did not happen outside of computer games and DVD's!

To this day, I do not know where I got the courage to speak up instead of tossing that paper away and running out of the house as fast as I could. Maybe the ghost of Uncle Jack was sitting there, giving me courage. Whatever. I stuttered out 'Jack Lehman.'

Instantly, both questions disappeared and a letter appeared in its place.

The letter directed me toward the dilapidated books that had come in the chest. It gave me a spell on how to restore them. I was still feeling like I was somewhere in a dream that could plunge into a nightmare at any moment. Nonetheless, I dug out the four books, and chanted the spell. With a blink of the eye, all four books were restored to normal. The letter directed me to read the one that was Uncle Jack's journal, and to take precautions that I wasn't interrupted. I quickly locked the door and got to reading.

The first thing in the journal was instructions on how to restore the illusion of the books being almost destroyed. That was a good thing to learn, inasmuch as I wasn't able to read the books uninterrupted. The journal itself took weeks, and I found myself going over and over it again.

Uncle Jack was one of the last great explorers of the little nooks and crannies of the world. He would have probably have felt right at home among the great English explorers of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. He had been to spots where few civilized men had ever gone, even in this age. Spots where even fewer civilized men are able to emerge with their hide intact. He had chased down hundreds of legends and myths, and debunked 99.9% of them. But there was always the small fraction which ended up being truer than you could hope for.

Magic did exist in the world. Magic of a sorts, anyway. Uncle Jack just assumed it was a process that hadn't been fully developed or explained yet, but which had its own set of laws, that any type of systematic research would reveal. The other three books contained a list of spells which were found to work.

Most of them were useless. Well, not exactly useless. One, for example, was a spell that let you produce a quarter from behind somebody's ear without using sleight of hand. Of course, you had to have a quarter in your pocket at the time of the trick, and the spell itself was indistinguishable to a casual observer from the sleight of hand trick. And some of the spells which might prove useful had ingredients that would be fairly difficult to get. Especially considering that some of the animals that the ingredients were extracted from were on the Endangered Species List.

One or two, though, were quite useful. One let you read the surface thoughts of other people. Another granted you very temporary invisibility. It lasted for just a few hours. And it was disspelled if you came in contact with another person. So it might be good for hiding or eavesdropping, but that was about it. That one I used to sneak into the cheerleader's dressing room one time, but that's another story entirely.

Then there was the chessboard. The chessboard was called 'The Young Man's Legacy.' The spell was such that the board could be prepared so that a young man, upon reaching his majority, would have at his beck and call, an army or harem of his choosing. The spell had to be set up before a young man's majority, and would be his to call upon at that age.

I wasn't sure what exactly the spell meant by the age of majority. Uncle Jack had found it when he was 42, too old to prepare it. I didn't know if I would be too old or too young. I assumed 11 was still too young, but I really didn't know what the guidelines were. Uncle Jack was vague on this as well. Unlike Uncle Jack, though, I had the internet. What I found was that the age of puberty (13 or so), was considered the age of ascension into manhood by a lot of ancient (and current!) cultures.