Johnny froze. For a moment he just stood there watching. Eddie hadn't seen him yet. He was busy slinging away, throwing sidearm and then overhand, imitating the motions of a big-league baseball pitcher. His aim was pretty good. Pieces of broken glass lay at the base of the wall. Johnny wondered what he ought to do. Should he just slink on past, go about his business? Normally that was what he would have done. But Johnny was feeling strange. A force was rising up inside him, something irresistible. It was this force that made him do what he did next.
"Hey, Eddie!" he yelled suddenly. "You made Phil steal my prayer book, didn't you? You rotten flatheaded creep, I hope you fall down a manhole and break your other arm! You hear what I said, you rotten creep? You hear me?" Johnny gasped and turned pale. He hadn't meant to yell like that. It had all just come pouring out of him, almost as if somebody else was using his body and his vocal chords. Now what was going to happen?
Eddie turned around slowly. His mouth was set in a tense scowl, and his eyes were like two gray stones. When he spoke, his voice was dangerously calm.
"Come over here and say that, John baby."
Johnny was terrified. He wanted to run, but his feet wouldn't move. Even with a broken arm Eddie could make mincemeat out of him. The muscles in both his arms were like ropes, and his chest was like a cement wall. He would break his glasses and give him two black eyes and a split lip. He would beat Johnny to a pulp.
"I... I..." Johnny began, but he couldn't get the words out. Rooted to the spot with fear, he watched as Eddie began walking slowly toward him. And then something strange and totally unexpected happened. Johnny felt a sharp pain in his ring finger, and it seemed to him that the yellow stone flashed. And then a strong wind began to blow. It sprang up out of nowhere and blew past Johnny. The bushes that grew in the courtyard flailed madly to and fro. Bits of paper sailed up into the air, and a cloud of yellowish dust flew at Eddie. Coughing and sputtering, Eddie staggered backward. The wind blew harder and threw him, stumbling and reeling, against the brick wall. Bottles flew this way and that, and when Eddie stuck out a hand to steady himself, it came down on a piece of broken glass.
Eddie howled and jerked his hand toward his mouth. He sucked at the bleeding cut. Then silence fell. The wind died as suddenly as it had sprung up, and the yellow dust settled. Eddie looked at Johnny, and Johnny looked at Eddie. And which of them was more frightened it would have been hard to say.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was a bright, sunshiny Saturday in May, and the professor was up on the square Italian cupola that jutted above the roof of his house. He was wearing overalls, his mouth was full of nails, and he had a hammer in his hand. The cupola had windows all around and a tiled roof with a silly wooden finial sprouting from it. All around the cupola rickety scaffolding had been built, and attached to the cupola roof was a fantastic framework of wooden slats, braces, joists, and whatnot. Someday, when it was finished, this framework would support an elaborate radio aerial. The professor was a wild Red Sox fan. He loved to listen to the Sox on the radio while he corrected his students' papers. The problem was this: WITS in Boston was the only station that carried the baseball games, and its signal was pretty faint by the time it reached Duston Heights. But the professor was confident that his superduper whizbang aerial would solve the problem. He had been reading up on aerials in Mechanix Illustrated and other handyman magazines, and in his study was a blueprint that he had drawn up, all by himself. Now if he could only get the job done, everything would be fine.
But as he worked the professor frowned and muttered to himself. He was worried. Not about his work but about Johnny. It was May 10, ten days after Johnny's run-in with Eddie Tompke. And in all that time the professor had not seen Johnny to talk with, not once. Normally Johnny came over three or four times a week for chess and conversation and chocolate cake. But not now. At first the professor had felt hurt. Then he had told himself that he was an old fool, that Johnny had— no doubt—found some young friend who was fun to be with. But then he began to watch for Johnny out of the front windows of his house. And what he saw alarmed him. Johnny was never with anyone. He always walked alone, head down, briefcase in hand. And he looked awful. His face was very pale, and there were dark circles under his eyes. He looked as if he had not slept for a week.
And so the professor was concerned. He wanted to know what was wrong. So far he had resisted the urge to butt in on the Dixons' family affairs. He couldn't imagine that Gramma and Grampa were mistreating Johnny. That did not seem possible. But then, what was going on?
The professor drove in another nail. The framework creaked and shuddered, and the professor growled at it. He ordered it to hold together. From somewhere below a door slammed. The professor glanced over and saw Johnny plodding down the front steps of his house. Now he was moving along the sidewalk, head forward, hands folded behind his back. Oh, this is just unbearable! grumped the professor to himself. I have got to go see the Dixons, or I will go out of my ever-loving mind! And slowly he began to clamber down the scaffold.
A few minutes later the professor was knocking at the front door of the Dixon home. Presently the door rattled open. There stood Grampa. He was wearing a blue denim apron, and his sleeves were rolled up. In one hand he held a hypodermic syringe. The professor was not surprised at this. He knew that Gramma Dixon had diabetes and that Grampa had to give her an insulin shot once every day. Normally in this kind of situation the professor would have made some sort of wisecrack. He would have called Grampa Young Dr. Malone or some such thing. But he was not in a wisecracking mood. And he could see from Grampa's long face that he was not feeling very jokey either.
"Hi, Henry," said the professor, smiling faintly. "All right if I come in?"
"Sure. Come on out to the kitchen. It's shot time, as you can see. It'll be over in a minute."
The professor followed Grampa out to the kitchen. There he found Gramma, sitting at the white enameled table. The sleeve of her dress was rolled up, and on the table was a bottle of rubbing alcohol. Nearby lay some wads of cotton. The professor sat down, and he politely turned away his face as Grampa shoved the needle into Gramma's arm. Then, when it was over and Grampa was rinsing the hypodermic in the sink, the professor cleared his throat harrumphily.
"I came over to talk to you two about Johnny," he began. "I... well, I'm a bit worried about him."
"So 're we," said Gramma, frowning. "He don't sleep good at night, an' he has bad dreams. Woke up screamin' an' yellin' to beat the band the other night. Scared the dickens outa me, but he wouldn't tell us what the heck was wrong."
"He don't eat good, either," added Grampa as he dried the glass hypodermic tube with a linen towel. "Just picks at his food like a little bird. I asked him the other day if somethin' was wrong, but he said no, everything was fine. Can you beat that? I don't know what to make of it. Do you know what's eatin' him, Rod? I mean, you're his friend an' all, so I thought maybe..."
"Well, you thought wrong," said the professor gloomily. "I haven't seen him to talk to in about two weeks. I came over here hoping that you two might enlighten me." The professor gazed disconsolately around the room. He looked at the hexagonal red electric clock that hung over the stove and at the rack of test tubes that stood on the windowsill. "I saw him going somewhere the other night. Do you know where he goes?"
Grampa shrugged. "Far as I know, he goes down to the church. He says he wants to light a candle for his mom an' pray. I don't see anything wrong with that, do you?"
The professor shook his head. "No. Not if that's what he's really doing. But you know—with your permission —I think I'm going to follow him one of these nights to see where he goes. I'm good at tailing people. I was an intelligence officer during World War I. My code name was the Crab."
Gramma laughed loudly, and the professor glared at her. "What's so funny about that?" he snapped. "I don't see anything to laugh at, do you, Henry?"
Grampa bit his lip and shook his head solemnly. And then, to cover up the
giggling fit that had come over him, he rushed over to the stove and poured the professor a nice hot cup of coffee. Gramma, Grampa, and the professor talked for a while longer, and they cooked up a scheme: Grampa would call up the professor the next time he knew that Johnny was going on one of his nighttime visits to the church. Then the professor would shadow Johnny, and... well, they all three hoped that this would help them get to the bottom of the mystery. They cared for Johnny a lot, and they did not want anything bad to happen to him.
As it turned out, the three conspirators got a chance to put their plan into action sooner than they might have expected. That evening at dinner Johnny announced that he was going down to the church to pray. When? Oh, around eight o'clock. Gramma looked at Grampa, and Grampa stared at the saltcellar. Both of them tried hard to act unconcerned.
Gramma smiled weakly and said in a falsely cheerful voice, "Well, that's fine! I sure think it's good when a boy your age goes to church without bein' dragged there by the heels." Then she looked hard at Johnny and added in a more serious tone, "Johnny?"
Johnny laid down his fork and stared back at Gramma. He felt defensive. His guard was up. What did she want to know? "Yeah, Gramma? What is it?"
The tone of Johnny's voice was so unfriendly that Gramma was startled. She glanced quickly down and began to toy with a piece of celery on her plate. "Well... your grampa and me were wonderin' if... if you felt okay these days. I mean, if there's anythin' on your mind, we could... well, kinda help you with it."
Johnny's eyes were stony. "I don't know what you're talkin' about, Gramma. I'm all right. I just wanta go down to the church to pray tonight, that's all. Is that okay with you?"
Gramma nodded helplessly. And that was the end of the conversation. The meal went on in silence. After dessert Johnny went upstairs to his room, closed the door, and bolted it. He sat down on his bed and stared around at the old-fashioned furniture. The tall gloomy clothespress with the scrolled decorations on the front. The marble-topped bureau with the mirror. The bristly brown armchair, the old pictures in heavy black frames, and the Motorola radio on the scarred black end table by the window.
And then the hard, tense look on Johnny's face melted. He burst into tears.
Ever since the first of May, Johnny had been living inside a nightmare. He was hearing and seeing strange things, and he was doing things without knowing why he did them. He felt that he was in danger—terrible danger—but he was scared to death to tell anybody about it.
First there was the figurine. It was magic, it was enchanted—he knew that now. Every morning, as regular as clockwork, Johnny would get out of bed, take the figurine from its hiding place, stroke it, and say the prayer to Thoth and Toueris. He had to—he wasn't sure why he did this, but he knew he had to. And at night sometimes, as he was lying in bed trying to sleep, Johnny would hear whispering coming from the closet where the figurine was hidden. Sometimes he almost thought he could figure out what the whispering voice was saying. And there was the ring. It was magic too. It was connected with the figurine in some way that Johnny didn't understand. He wanted to take the ring off, but he was scared to. It hurt his finger sometimes, made the bone of his finger ache and throb, so that he wanted to cry out with the pain. But something in his mind, an insistent voice, told him that he couldn't take the ring off, not even for a minute. If he did, awful things would happen to him.
And then there were the dreams. Over and over, every night, Johnny had the dream about R. Baart's antique shop. Over and over the old lady in the green eyeshade chased him through endless rooms, up endless cobwebbed staircases, or dragged him down into dark, earth-smelling, wormy graves. And he would wake up many times during the night, and he would look around wildly, convinced that there was somebody in his room. But when he turned on the lights, there was never anyone there.
Johnny blew his nose and wiped his eyes. He smiled wanly. One good thing had been accomplished: Eddie Tompke was scared to death of him. After that afternoon down by the factories Eddie had avoided Johnny like the plague. Whenever he passed Eddie on the stairs or in the lunchroom or wherever, Eddie would give him this goggle-eyed, frightened stare and hurry past. Johnny had always daydreamed about having power, the power to scare off bullies. But now that he had the power, he didn't want it—not if it was going to make him feel like this. Johnny was miserable, utterly miserable. He wanted to tell Gramma and Grampa that he was frightened, but something—the ring, or some other awful and evil force —forced him to keep his mouth shut. Johnny felt like somebody inside a glass-walled soundproof prison. He pounded on the walls, but nobody heard. He screamed, but no sound came out.
Nervously Johnny glanced at the Big Ben alarm clock that ticked loudly on his bureau. It was a quarter to eight. He'd better get a move on. He didn't want to stay out too late. And where was he going? He was going to St. Michael's Church, to see if he could find Mr. Beard, the little man who had given him the ring. Mr. Beard had said he would see Johnny in about a week's time. But had he meant a week exactly, or what? Johnny didn't know, but he did know one thing: He desperately needed to talk to the man. Night after night he had gone down to the church hoping that Mr. Beard would show up. But he was never there. Did Mr. Beard know that the ring was magic? That was another large question in Johnny's mind. If he did know, that meant that he was evil, that he had conned Johnny into taking the ring. For his own peace of mind Johnny wanted to think that Mr. Beard was a nice guy, that he hadn't known anything about the awful powers that lay hidden in the ring. Somewhere Johnny had read a story about a magic amulet that hadn't seemed magic until somebody said a secret prayer over it. Maybe this was what had happened. Maybe the ring had passed down through Mr. Beard's family for generations, and nobody had known that it was enchanted. And then Johnny had aroused the sleeping magic with his prayer to Thoth and Toueris. And what about the figurine? That was another deep, dark, frightening mystery that Johnny couldn't fathom. But he felt that he could deal with the blue figurine if he could ever get the ring off his finger. He was hoping, hoping frantically, that Mr. Beard would turn out to be an okay guy, that he would be willing to help. If he knew something about the ring, something that would allow Johnny to get rid of it, then, later, he would take a hammer and smash the smiling blue idol into a million million tiny blue pieces.
Johnny got up and glanced nervously around the room. He stared at the closet door, and for a second he had the horrible unreasoning fear that the door would open and the blue figurine would come waddling out, like a windup toy soldier. Johnny shuddered and left the room, turning out the light as he went.
Outside, in front of the house, Johnny paused. It was a chilly May evening. He was glad he had his suede jacket on. He glanced up and down the street. Lights were on in most of the houses, but the professor's house was a dark mass of shadow. He was probably out at the movies or visiting one of his friends. Johnny felt alone and frightened. He listened to the wind that was rustling the new May leaves on the trees. Suddenly he had a great urge to rush across the street into the professor's house and turn on the living room lights and sit there until the professor came home. Johnny could do this if he wanted to. The professor had given him a door key—it was on the key ring in the pocket of his jacket. Johnny pondered. Then he felt a sharp twinge of pain in his ring finger, and that made up his mind for him. The professor couldn't help him with the ring. He had to find Mr. Beard. Johnny clenched his teeth. He turned suddenly to the right, like a soldier making a turn on a drill field. Swinging his arms, he began to march down Fillmore Street.
The sound of Johnny's footsteps grew fainter and then died away. He had disappeared into the darkness at the end of the street. Now, out of the shadows that shrouded the professor's house, a figure stepped. It was Professor Childermass himself. He was wearing his ratty tweed coat and a wide-brimmed felt fedora. On his feet were tennis shoes. With quick, springy, soundless steps he began to move down the sidewalk, and soon he too had disappeared.
When Johnny got to th
e church, he was—once again —disappointed. There was nobody there but Mrs. McGinnis. Mrs. McGinnis was a tall, big-boned, and rather silly old lady who wore floppy wide-brimmed hats and held her head to one side, as if she lived in an attic room with a sloping ceiling. She was kneeling in the front pew and thumbing her rosary beads. Johnny was more than disappointed—he felt almost desperate. What had happened to Mr. Beard? Why didn't he come here anymore? But as Johnny was turning away to go something caught his eye. Something small and white lying on the seat of the last pew. It was a piece of note-paper with writing on it. Probably it was somebody's grocery list. Why was he wasting time gaping at it? But it was oddly fascinating all the same. Johnny bent over and picked the note up. He saw spindly, scrawly handwriting. The note said:
Meet me in Duston Park.
Yours very truly, Robt. Beard
Johnny was startled and a bit amused. What an odd duck Mr. Beard was! And why had he left the note here in the back pew, in the darkness? How could he be so sure that Johnny would find it? Nevertheless, he had found it. And he knew where Duston Park was. It was over on the other side of the river, about a fifteen minute walk from the church. Should he go? Johnny felt that he had to. He set his mouth in a determined frown. Abruptly he turned and walked out of the church. The swinging doors queaked and quacked behind him as he went.
Duston Park was over in Cranbrook, which was the snooty part of Duston Heights. The park was a long grassy triangle with a rail fence around it. It was surrounded by houses and one tall white colonial church. Inside the park were benches and a few young maple trees, and in the center of the park was a bronze statue of Hannah Duston. She stood there, tense and defiant, on her high granite pedestal. In one hand she held a tomahawk, and in the other, ten Indian scalps. Hannah was a famous woman. She had scalped ten Indians long ago on an island in the Merrimack River, to get even with them for having murdered her baby right before her eyes. On the base of the statue was a list of the people who had paid for the statue and an inscription in Latin. But her name was not on the statue, and unless you knew the story of Hannah Duston, you might have wondered who the lady with the hatchet was and what she had done.
The Curse of the Blue Figurine Page 8
