The Vengeance of the Witch-Finder

by John Bellairs

Behind him something dark bounded through the moonlight. It had no definite body, just a shapeless form, a shadow a little darker than the night. Lewis tried to get up, but he had twisted his ankle and it would not hold his weight. Where was Bertie? The horrible thing reached the opposite edge of the drive—

  It stopped dead.

  Lewis scrambled away on all fours, like a demented crab. Then Bertie was beside him again, pulling at his arm. His twisted ankle sent a flare of pain up his leg, but Lewis staggered to his feet. He looked back, sobbing.

  The hillside lay perfectly quiet in the moonlight.

  “It—it’s gone,” whimpered Bertie. “Whatever it was.”

  A soft breeze made the grass and trees rustle. Then a lone cricket began to chirp. Another one joined in, and then a third. Lewis realized that every living thing around the Manor had fallen silent when that horror had come from the vault. Now the world was beginning to breathe again. His flashlight lay in the grass, the metal gleaming in the moonlight. Lewis stooped and picked it up. “I wo-wonder if we’re suh-safe now,” he gasped. He wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his windbreaker.

  “D-do you think we should tell anyone?” asked Bertie, sounding as frightened as Lewis.

  Lewis suddenly got the shakes. He trembled violently, and he felt as if he were going to burst out screaming. “No,” he said. He sniffled and tried to control himself. “M-maybe it’s really gone for good. I th-think we’d better keep this to ourselves.”

  “Whatever you say.” Bertie sounded relieved. Lewis guessed that his friend dreaded what his mother might say about their noctural adventure. Lewis knew that he did not want to confess anything to Uncle Jonathan.

  They went inside, and Bertie went along with Lewis as far as his bedroom door. Lewis slipped inside, undressed, and climbed into bed. He lay there shivering and weeping. He thought back to the prayers he had learned as an altar boy. One of them came to his lips:

  In spiritu bumilitatis et in animo contrito

  suscipiamur a te, Domine.

  Humbled in spirit and contrite of soul,

  may we find favor with thee, Lord.

  He whispered the rest of the prayer, but it brought him little comfort. Lewis understood that something ghastly had come out of that mysterious vault. And he sensed that some terrible and insatiable force was now loose upon the world. He had no idea of when—or how—it would all end.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Jonathan knocked on Lewis’s door at seven-thirty. “Time for breakfast,” he called. “Up and at ’em!”

  The noise woke Lewis up. He hadn’t gotten much sleep after the wild chase of the previous night. He felt groggy and exhausted and miserable, but he climbed out of bed. It was a gray, cloudy morning. Everything outside appeared drained of life. In other words, it looked very much like an ordinary English day. Lewis sighed and got ready for breakfast.

  He found his cousin and his uncle downstairs in the small dining room. Mrs. Goodring had brought in a big platter of scrambled eggs, which Pelly boasted came from their very own hens. On another platter were a few pieces of British bacon, which Lewis thought was more like ham. There was also orange marmalade, fresh butter, a basket of warm toast, a large pot of coffee, and a small pitcher of cocoa. He nibbled on some toast and tried a few forkfuls of egg. He could barely swallow them, because he felt a little dizzy from lack of sleep and his stomach was queasy. Jonathan glanced at him with some concern. “What’s wrong, Lewis?” he asked. “Not getting sick, are you?”

  Lewis shook his head. “Just tired,” he mumbled. “I didn’t sleep very well last night. I guess I’m still not used to traveling.”

  Pelly smiled, but the smile was forced and strained. “Difficult sleeping in a strange place, what? Nothing to be ashamed of, my boy. Must be a family ailment. I’ve often noticed myself how hard it— What was that?” He sprang up from his chair and froze in a kind of crouch. His gray eyes grew round in alarm, and his gaze darted toward the window. Lewis gasped and spun to look over his shoulder.

  But he could see nothing unusual through the window. Nothing except the overgrown hedge maze halfway down the front lawn. He heard his elderly cousin sigh, and he looked back across the table. Pelly sank very gradually back into his chair, like a balloon slowly deflating. His face was pale, and beads of perspiration had broken out on his forehead. His silvery hair all stood on end in wild disarray, as if he had seen something truly hair-raising. He fished a large, frayed handkerchief from his side pocket and mopped his face. “Sorry,” he said with a sickly smile. “I could have sworn I saw someone sneaking about out there. Nerves, I suppose. I really should have guests more often. Simply out of practice as a host, I fear. The excitement of your visit has probably put me on edge—not that I mean to say you are unwelcome, you understand.”

  “Of course,” said Jonathan smoothly. “Do you ever get any trespassers here, cousin?”

  Pelly fluttered his fingers in a dismissive gesture. “Oh, the odd tramp now and again. Mrs. Goodring feeds them and they go on their way. Barnavelt Manor is a very isolated estate, you know. If a disaster occurred and wiped us all out, I expect it would be weeks before someone in the village even noticed. Ha-ha.” His laugh sounded faint and artificial, and neither Jonathan nor Lewis joined in. “Well, that was a bad joke, I must say,” Pelly added in a lame voice.

  Lewis finished his cocoa and looked out the window again. The gray sky hung low and oppressive over the landscape. The light filtering through the flat cloud layer was weird and unusual. In it, the summer greens had taken on a lurid hue. The grass and trees looked yellow and ill in the muted gloom. And everything lay still and breathless, with not a blade of grass stirring. Lewis remembered a summer day like this back home. He and Jonathan had gone with Mrs. Zimmermann and Rose Rita out to Mrs. Zimmermann’s cottage on Lyon Lake for swimming and a picnic. They did not get to do either, because a black, threatening cloud had suddenly erupted in the sky. Within a matter of minutes, everything had grown dark and hushed. “Uh-oh,” Mrs. Zimmermann had said. “The calm before the storm.” And what a storm had broken out only a few minutes later! Lewis remembered how frightened he had been at the crackling, jagged forks of brilliant lightning, the explosions of thunder, and the howling of the wind. Lightning ripped the bark right off a tall pine tree down beside the lake. Later they learned that a tornado had whipped through the woods not three miles from the lake cottage.

  And this calm was a lot like that one, Lewis thought uneasily. Everything too quiet, too still. Except—

  He blinked and felt a chill. Was he dreaming? No, it was as he thought. Everything was as lifeless as a statue. Except the hedge maze. It was moving! The bushes stirred, and their thin branches waved and curled. It couldn’t be the wind, because the trees near the maze were perfectly still, their leaves hanging limp and motionless. And now that he noticed, the hedge twigs were clenching and unclenching. They did not look like branches touched by wind, but like long, leafy fingers clutching up at the sky. Lewis shuddered. Then he turned and looked wildly at Jonathan.

  Jonathan saw Lewis’s frightened expression and raised his eyebrows. “What in heaven’s name is the matter, Lewis?” he asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost with hairy feet and a ten-gallon hat!”

  Cousin Pelly frowned at him. Lewis looked back at the hedge maze. He blinked. The hedges were quiet again, just as unmoving as everything else. They might as well have been part of a landscape painting. Had he imagined it all? Lewis realized that Jonathan was waiting for some kind of answer. He swallowed his fear. “Uh—nothing, Uncle Jonathan,” muttered Lewis. “It just looks kind of stormy outside, that’s all. Uh, may I be excused? I’d like to say good-bye to Bertie before we have to leave.”

  “Of course,” said Pelly. “By all means. And we’ll have to see if we can plan something exciting for you two to do when you come back in August, what? Run along, Lewis.” Lewis slipped out of his chair and left the room. Just as he got outside the door, he overheard Pelly murmuring to Jonathan:
“One can’t blame the lad for being out of sorts this morning. I feel it too—don’t you? Some kind of dashed odd gloom in the air. As if something terrible is waiting to happen.”

  Jonathan spoke a reply too softly for Lewis to hear. He gulped. The air felt thick and heavy, as if something had sucked all the oxygen out of it. You’re being silly, Lewis told himself. He went in search of Bertie. His friend was in his own ground-floor bedroom, dressed but lying sprawled on the bed and listening to the radio. “Hullo, Lewis,” he said as soon as he heard the other boy’s footsteps. “I had a rotten night. How about you?”

  “Same here,” admitted Lewis. “And today everyone is feeling upset.” He sat in a high-backed Victorian chair and looked out the window. He was grateful that the windows in Bertie’s room had a view of the back lawn, the distant, empty barn, the hen run, and the vegetable garden. Lewis had seen enough of the front lawn and the terrible hedge maze. “We’ll be leaving in an hour or so, I guess,” said Lewis. “I hope it’s all over.”

  “What?” asked Bertie.

  Lewis shrugged, and then realized that Bertie could not see him shrug. “I don’t know,” he said. “Whatever it was we started last night. I wish we’d never gone into that stupid maze. I wish I’d never read about old Martin Barnavelt and his stupid trial for witchcraft.”

  “Well,” said Bertie reasonably, “we did, and you did. What’s done can’t be undone. The question is, what is left to do? What do you think?”

  Lewis grimaced. He hated having the weight of that decision on his shoulders. He felt helpless and small and weak. He hadn’t meant to bring anything evil down on the household! Now Bertie was asking him what they should do. How was he supposed to know? He thought for a minute. What would Sherlock Holmes do? Of course, Holmes had never had a case quite like this, involving a real ghost—or at least something like a real ghost. True, there was the matter of the Hound of the Baskervilles. Everyone had thought the Hound was some kind of spirit. Maybe what Holmes did in that story was the answer. Lewis cleared his throat. “Uh, Bertie, remember how Sherlock Holmes sent Dr. Watson to Baskerville Hall?”

  Bertie smiled. “Sure. That’s one of my favorites!”

  “Well,” said Lewis, “that’s what I want to do in this case. You are my Dr. Watson. Your job is to occupy Barnavelt Manor here and keep track of everything. I’ll write out our itinerary for you. You can get your mom to send me a postcard in care of whatever hotel we’re staying in to alert me if anything goes wrong.”

  Bertie shook his head. “I don’t know. Wouldn’t that mean I’d have to tell her about—about what you and I did last night? And the hedge maze, and the horrible sounds? I really don’t want to, you know.” He sounded frightened.

  Lewis got up and began to pace the floor. “Well, why don’t we think up a code? Just work some phrase into the message that would tell me how everything is going. You could say, ‘The weather has been wonderful here,’ if things are all right. If anything bad should happen, you could say, ‘We had a storm recently.’ How is that?”

  “No, that wouldn’t work,” said Bertie in a reasonable voice. “Because what if we had a week of rain and I wanted to report that things were all right? Or what if it was sunny and old Growly came out of the maze? I couldn’t say the day was stormy, then. My mum would think I’d gone right off my chump if I didn’t even know what the weather was like.”

  “Right,” said Lewis, mentally kicking himself for overlooking the obvious. “I hadn’t thought about that. Okay, what about this? Our code words for everything’s being ordinary will be ‘wonderful’ and ‘fine’ and ‘good.’ If you work one of those into a message, then I’ll know Barnavelt Manor is normal and everyone is all right. But if something goes wrong, then write a message with ‘frightfully’ or ‘awfully’ or ‘terribly’ in it. Then I’ll know you need help, and somehow I’ll get Uncle Jonathan to come straight back to Barnavelt Manor.”

  Bertie agreed that this was a good idea. He repeated the code words a couple of times to make sure he would remember them. Lewis got a pad and pencil and wrote out a list of hotels and cities where he and Jonathan would be staying. Lewis promised to keep in touch by dropping Bertie a card at least once a week. Soon after that, Jonathan hunted Lewis up. Cousin Pelly had fired up the engine of the cantankerous Austin Seven, and it was time to leave.

  The automobile trip out to the railway station was subdued. On the platform, Pelly shook hands with Jonathan and Lewis. “Well,” he said, “you two have a ripping holiday, and then hurry back to stay with us for a week or so. Can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed meeting you both. There are still lots of stories yet to tell.” His words sounded hearty, but his smile flickered uncertainly on his anxious face, like a candle flame fighting a cold breeze. Jonathan and Lewis boarded their train. Lewis looked out the window. The last thing he saw was Cousin Pelly standing tall and dejected on the platform, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders stooped. He looked like a frail and sad old stork.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  In the days that followed, Lewis shook off some of the melancholy that had descended on him. He and Jonathan took a ferry across the English Channel, and then a train to Paris. There they saw all the sights: the Louvre Museum, the Champs Élysées, and the Eiffel Tower, among other things. They ate at sidewalk cafés and stopped on the Left Bank of the Seine to watch art students dabbing away at landscapes. They shopped in more out-of-the-way little stores, and Jonathan showed off his French, which was barely adequate to order a meal or to ask, “How much is this, please?”

  However, even with all the touristy distractions, Lewis did not neglect his promise to keep in touch with Bertie. On the morning of their arrival in Paris, Lewis immediately sent a picture postcard off to him. Then on the last day of their stay in the French capital, Lewis received a card from Bertie. Bertie’s mother had beautifully clear, old-fashioned handwriting. The message was,

  Dear Lewis,

  Thanks ever so much for the wonderful card. I hope your and your uncle’s holiday is lots of fun, and I’ll be glad to see you back here again in August.

  Your friend,

  Bertie

  Lewis sighed in relief and began to feel a little better. The very first thing he had noticed in the message was the code word “wonderful.” At least their system was working and everything was calm and normal back at Barnavelt Manor—so far.

  Jonathan and Lewis continued their journey. They left Paris for Marseilles, a French seaport on the Mediterranean Sea, and from there they traveled to Rome with its Vatican City. Then they continued down the coast of Italy to Naples, where the great volcano Vesuvius sent plumes of vapor into the blue Italian sky. Lewis was fascinated by Pompeii, which had once been a Roman city. The volcano had erupted violently in A.D. 79, and a rain of volcanic ash had buried Pompeii, petrifying everything just as it had been on that last terrible day. It was spooky to walk the dead streets and think about the crowds of panic-stricken Romans fleeing from the wrath of Vesuvius. It made Lewis very jumpy. What if the mountain should blow its top again? Then in two thousand years people might come to see Lewis and his uncle, turned to stone in the streets of Pompeii. A fossilized Jonathan would still be holding his stone Kodak up to take a picture, and a fossilized Lewis would pose smiling in front of an ancient Roman temple. Just thinking about it gave Lewis the creeps.

  But the volcano slumbered on, and the two travelers continued their vacation. At every stop Lewis sent a flurry of brightly colored picture postcards. Most of them went back to New Zebedee, to Rose Rita and Mrs. Zimmermann. Lewis shopped conscientiously for these, trying to find cards that were appropriate. For Rose Rita he chose cards with pictures of castles and cannon and armor, and for Mrs. Zimmermann he looked for cards showing lots of purple flowers. But any postcard would do for Bertie, although Lewis tried to find pictures that Mrs. Goodring could easily describe to him. Lewis sent cards to Bertie practically every other day. Meanwhile, two more cards came from Bertie, each one containing a code word
to signify that life continued untroubled at the Manor.

  As the trip went on, Lewis not only began to feel a little easier in his mind; he also began to feel better physically. Every day he and Jonathan walked for miles to see the sights. In many of the countries they visited, the food proved strange and unpalatable—at least to Lewis’s taste. He did not understand how the French could relish snails, or the Germans blood-red sausages oozing oil onto a bed of pungent sauerkraut. Even when the food was delicious, like the wonderful Italian pasta, Lewis had surprisingly little appetite. All the fascinating new sights distracted him, so for once everything around him was more interesting than food.

  As a result, Lewis did not eat nearly as heartily as he always had back home. It was in Italy, while they were touring Venice, that he first noticed the resulting change. He was getting dressed one morning when for some reason his belt felt funny. He looked down. Ordinarily he fastened the belt in the very first hole. The leather had a groove worn in it where the buckle clamped it down. This morning the belt was too loose when he fastened it in that hole. Lewis tightened it. The belt fastened in the next hole snugly but comfortably. His waist had shrunk by about an inch.

  Lewis blinked. He remembered the insulting names the boys at school were always calling him: Blimp, Tubby, and Lard Ass. A long time ago one of the boys, Tarby, had called him a fatso and had sneered, “Whyncha lose some weight?” And Lewis had tried, but without any success. Once he had even sent off for a Charles Atlas bodybuilding book, but the exercises were boring and he kept at them for only a few days. He had just about resigned himself to being fat all his life. Now without even consciously trying, he had lost some weight. And when he thought about it, he never felt really hungry. Lewis grinned. Oh, boy, he thought. If I can just keep this up, won’t Rose Rita and Mrs. Zimmermann be surprised!