The Tower at the End of the World (Action Packs)

by Brad Strickland

  “Evil magicians, eh?” said Jonathan with a scowl. “And what are they up to?”

  “Absolutely nothing,” said Mrs. Zimmermann. “At least, nothing that anyone can pin down. They seem to be practicing magic, but not using it for anything in particular. Unless, of course, they’re channeling it to you-know-who.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Lewis, feeling helpless and confused.

  Jonathan shook his head. “Frizzy Wig means, Lewis, that little bunches of these rotten apples may be brewing up some bad magic. But instead of using it themselves, they’re sending it to Ishmael Izard. He’s like, oh, like a toaster or an electric fan. He plugs into that flow of magic, and suddenly he’s the top dog. He’s got more power than any one magician ordinarily could control or handle. But I don’t understand—what do the bad guys get out of this? I’ve never known an evil magician yet that didn’t have some selfish reason for doing his misdeeds!”

  “Now, that I can’t tell you,” admitted Mrs. Zimmermann. “Lord knows what mischief they’re planning. But I have a sneaky suspicion that we’ve stepped into the middle of something extremely nasty. I’m beginning to be able to guess about some things. Jonathan, I don’t think you tripped and fell into your cellar. I think someone was poking around down there, searching for a trace of the Doomsday Clock that Selenna Izard tried to wind up. Maybe he didn’t know that Lewis had smashed it to bits.”

  “That would explain a lot,” reflected Jonathan grimly. “If Ishmael thought he could pick up that terrifying timepiece and start it tick-tocking again, he just might have been looking for it in the cellar. And a magician who can conjure up hallucinations and apparitions wouldn’t have had much trouble making me think I heard Lewis.”

  “So it’s possible he was here and after the clock,” mused Mrs. Zimmermann. “Fortunately for us and for the world, the clock is gone beyond repair.”

  “But what if he’s making a new one?” asked Lewis.

  Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann exchanged a long look. Mrs. Zimmermann said, “Lewis, that’s what we’re worried about. I can think of three reasons why Ishmael Izard might have wanted to get his hands on the Doomsday Clock. One, he wanted to wind it up fully and bring on the end of the world himself, as his twisted father tried to do. Two, he knew what the blasted thing could do and wanted to destroy it to protect the world. Or three, he wanted to stop it from running because he was creating a similar spell himself, and he knew that two spells based on the same kind of magic can cancel each other out.”

  Lewis swallowed hard. “M-maybe he was sorry for what his father tried to do. Maybe he just wanted to make sure the clock was destroyed.”

  Jonathan shook his head. “We can’t assume that, I’m afraid. I don’t think an innocent person would sneak around like that. And I’m certain that anyone who meant no harm wouldn’t scare you out of your skin the way someone did tonight, Lewis. Hmm. These things have a strange way of looking like coincidences. Florence, do you think our odd experience up on Lake Superior might tie in to all this?”

  “It’s possible,” agreed Mrs. Zimmermann. “After all, someone knew that Lewis was up on Ivarhaven Island. They had to, to send him the picture and the slip of parchment.”

  “Right,” said Jonathan. “By the way, Lewis, have you hung on to that little love letter?”

  “It’s in my wallet,” Lewis said. He pulled it from his jeans pocket, opened it, and took out the yellowish-white slip of parchment. He started to unfold it.

  Suddenly the material seemed to come to life. It wriggled disgustingly in Lewis’s hand. With a cry of alarm, Lewis flung it away. The parchment streaked for an open window, hit the screen, and fluttered wildly, like a moth beating its wings frantically, trying to escape. Mrs. Zimmermann sprang up at once. “Don’t let it get away!” she yelled.

  Jonathan lunged to the window. The parchment had found the edge of the screen and was trying to worm its way through the tiny gap between the screen and the windowsill. With a loud slap, Jonathan clapped his hands over it. He pulled it away from the window. For a moment it writhed visibly in his grip. Lewis had the strange impression that it was furious, that it was filled with hatred for them all.

  The moment passed. The parchment hung limply from Jonathan’s fingers. He unfolded it, looked carefully at the markings on it, and then returned it to Lewis. “Be very careful with this,” he warned. “I agree with Florence: Your safety may depend on your treating this very protectively. Keep it in your wallet, and don’t take it out unless Florence or I ask you to. Understood?”

  Lewis crammed the parchment back into his wallet and hastily thrust the wallet into his jeans pocket. “Understood,” he said in a voice that squeaked with dread.

  Jonathan put his big hand on Lewis’s shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he declared. “No matter what Ishmael Izard, or Dirty Dan, or Seven-Toed Pete, or whatever he calls himself is up to, we’ll see it through together. The three of us will fix his wagon, all right.”

  “The four of us,” said a voice from the front door.

  Jonathan started, and they all spun around. Rose Rita stood in the doorway, her face very pale. “Something came scratching at my window as I was getting ready for bed,” she said. “I turned a flashlight on it, but all I could see were two glowing yellow eyes. Then it ran away from the window.”

  “You saw it?” gasped Lewis. “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I couldn’t,” confessed Rose Rita, sounding miserable. “My mom and dad were still up watching TV, and the phone’s in the living room. But I got dressed, and as soon as I could, I slipped outside. I wanted to make sure you were okay, so I ran over.”

  Lewis gave her a shaky smile. He knew that he would never have had the courage to go chasing off into the night like that. Not after having seen the dark shape with the glowing eyes! “Thanks,” he said.

  Rose Rita nodded and then tilted her head as she looked at Mrs. Zimmermann and Uncle Jonathan. “I heard some of what you were saying. It’s that picture someone sent Lewis, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Zimmermann. “Along with other things. But it may be dangerous, dear.”

  “I don’t care!” returned Rose Rita fiercely. “Nobody is going to push us around like this!”

  Jonathan threw back his head and gave his great, booming laugh. “I’d hate to have Rose Rita mad at me!” he announced. “All right, then. One for all, and all for one! We’ll be the Four Musketeers of magic, and we’ll soon find out what’s what. Now there’s one important thing left to do.”

  “What’s that?” asked Mrs. Zimmermann. “Say the word!”

  Jonathan grinned. “Why, Pruny Face! You have to go bring over the chocolate cake I happen to know you baked today. We all need a midnight snack to get our energy up!”

  Lewis didn’t think he could eat a bite. Somehow, though, once Mrs. Zimmermann did in fact bring over her delicious chocolate cake, he managed to pack away two big pieces.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Weeks passed. Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann spent a lot of time making sure that no evil lurked in the Barnavelt house. Rose Rita volunteered to help, and she and Lewis pitched in. The effort was monumental. The four began in the basement. They had to make sure that the passage where the Doomsday Clock had been hidden contained no secrets.

  After several hours of probing and searching, Mrs. Zimmermann announced that it was clear. “No booby traps, tiger pits, or ticking time bombs,” she stated with weary cheerfulness. “Heaven knows why this thing was built originally. It certainly is just as old as the house, which means that it wasn’t put here by Isaac Izard. My hunch is that the original builder started to create a storm cellar here but never got around to finishing it. Or maybe it was supposed to be a wine cellar. Anyway, there’s nothing sinister lurking here.”

  But that was only the beginning of the search. At Uncle Jonathan’s insistence, they went through the house from attic to cellar, hauling tons of useless old junk out. “What will the neighbors think?” fretted Mrs. Z
immermann as the pile of discarded old bureaus, broken chairs, moth-eaten curtains, and threadbare sofas mounted at the curb.

  “They’ll think crazy old Barnavelt finally got around to spring-cleaning,” chuckled Jonathan. “Even if it is July!”

  For Lewis the worst part of the whole week came when Jonathan unlocked the door on the third floor. It led into the old parlor where Isaac Izard had once sat for days on end, studying cloud formations through the big front window. Izard, a bitter and angry man, had decided that the whole world was against him. In revenge he planned to end the world. Of course, that would mean that he ended himself too, but as Mrs. Zimmermann observed, “Old Droopy Drawers hated this world so much that he was willing to swap for the next one.”

  “He must have had a screw loose,” Rose Rita added, puffing under the weight of a rolled-up carpet.

  “Of course he did,” returned Jonathan. “He was loony, nutty, and touched in the head. But that made him more dangerous, if anything. Luckily, he was also indecisive.” He went on to explain that Izard knew a spell to end the world. It would not even require a Doomsday Clock. But he had to say it at just the right moment, and he could know the right moment only when he saw certain cloud formations.

  “That happened twice,” continued Jonathan as they lugged the carpet out to the curb. “Twice over a forty-two year period of watching and waiting. But clouds change fast, you know. By the time Isaac was sure he had seen the right cloud formations, they had broken up. That’s what convinced him to set the Doomsday Clock a-ticking. But as luck would have it, his magic wasn’t the right kind to wind it up fully. Only his wife, Selenna, could have done that, and she died before the clock was finished.”

  They heaved the carpet onto the mountain of junk. It landed with a flump! and a choking cloud of dust. Lewis coughed and backed away from it. “Could we not talk about it?” he asked. “When I think about the Izards, I get so that every time I go inside, I think I hear that clock ticking.”

  “Okay,” agreed his uncle cheerfully. “No more Izard talk. Now, I think with maybe two more trips, we’ll have cleared out the third floor. . . .”

  Of course they didn’t clear the third floor out completely. Jonathan was a pack rat, and he kept all the really interesting stuff. They turned up thousands of stereopticon photos—pictures taken in the 1800’s. When you put them into a special viewer and peered through it, you saw a brown, three-dimensional world. There were circus scenes and pictures of Cape Cod, jungle scenes and the New York harbor before the Statue of Liberty was there, the Himalayan mountains and kittens chasing a ball of twine. They stored all these photos in huge cardboard boxes and took only a little time to look at some of them. Jonathan kept the parlor organs too, and any furniture that looked more like an antique than like junk.

  Mrs. Zimmermann helped, and she used a crystal ball to make sure they turned up no magical items, no evil influences. Twice during the week Jute Feasel, who worked for the Capharnaum County Public Works Department, drove up with a big dump truck to take away all the stuff they were discarding. Jute looked at the mountain of trash, cursed colorfully, and then hauled it all off, leaving behind a cloud of King Edward cigar smoke.

  Finally, on a rainy afternoon toward the middle of July, Jonathan, Mrs. Zimmermann, Rose Rita, and Lewis all sat around the kitchen table. They were exhausted and grimy. Mrs. Zimmermann had smudges of dust on her nose and cheek. Uncle Jonathan was sweaty, with his red hair plastered to his forehead and even his red beard limp. “Well,” he rumbled, “mission accomplished. Whatever the source of this nasty spell is, it doesn’t begin here.”

  “But at least we’ve finally given this mossy old manse the cleaning it’s needed for years,” said Mrs. Zimmermann. Distant thunder growled outside. She looked upward. “I hope all the windows are closed.”

  Jonathan nodded. “They are. All right, we’ve just about busted a gut—”

  Mrs. Zimmermann, who was once a schoolteacher, winced. “Jonathan, please!”

  Rose Rita laughed, and Jonathan winked at her. “Very well, Florence. We have very nearly perforated our internal integuments, with no luck. I suggest that the next step is to go back to Ivarhaven Island and check out the strange things that happened there.”

  Mrs. Zimmermann drummed her fingers on the table. “I’m not convinced it would do much good. Albert reports—”

  “You’ve been in touch with Grampa Galway?” asked Rose Rita, sounding surprised.

  “I certainly have,” Mrs. Zimmermann said. “Albert doesn’t know that I’m a witch, to be sure, and he doesn’t know about Jonathan’s sorcery. But he does know that the weird island we landed on somehow isn’t right. And he’s on the spot and in the best place to keep an eye on things.”

  “What about the island?” asked Lewis, whose night-mares were beginning to feature the sinister dark tower looming above the trees.

  With a shake of her head, Mrs. Zimmermann said, “Nothing, really, Lewis. Albert reports no more materializations of the place, and he hasn’t found anyone else in the area who wants to talk about it. He has double-checked the charts and maps, and an island that size doesn’t show up on any of them. In fact, as far as he can tell, the place where the island is should be marked by one rather big, unlovely rock sticking up above the waves. He can’t even find that.”

  Rose Rita pushed her glasses up and rubbed her eyes. “Maybe just anyone can’t see the island,” she suggested. “Maybe we could see it because we had two magicians on the boat.”

  Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann gave each other an astonished look. “Of course!” bellowed Jonathan, pounding his right fist into his left palm. “Rose Rita, you’re a genius! What do you think, Florence?”

  “It could be!” said Mrs. Zimmermann, her voice excited. “It could very well be! If the island is protected by a magical field—or if it doesn’t even belong to our world—”

  Lewis didn’t like the sound of all this. “How could it not belong to the world? We walked on it! It wasn’t something we imagined!”

  Mrs. Zimmermann smiled reassuringly. “Oh, it was real enough, Lewis. But it’s like—well, this is very hard to explain. You know how two soap bubbles will touch and suddenly stick together? Well, imagine for a moment that the universe we know isn’t the only universe. Maybe there are lots of them. And at times, two of them might touch and for a moment stick together at the point where they meet, like two soap bubbles. At such places, something that is not really part of our world might appear in our world.”

  Rose Rita said slowly, “It’s really part of the other universe, but it’s right at the point where they stick together.”

  “Correct,” said Uncle Jonathan. “Now, I’m no scientist, but I know that people like Professor Albert Einstein think such things are possible. But because their business is science, not magic, they don’t know that a powerful magician might be able to call the two soap bubbles together and hold them there. Maybe a scientist would say that the island we saw is part of another dimension. Maybe it’s a part of our world, but it’s in the wrong time. It could have existed before the last Ice Age, or maybe it’s from five thousand years in the future. When we went through that shimmery barrier, we might have gone backward in time, or forward.”

  “Or sideways, or inside out and upside down,” put in Mrs. Zimmermann. “The truth is, we don’t know. We have a strong suspicion, though, that the island doesn’t belong to our world. It’s here through some kind of magic, and that’s what we have to check out.”

  Lewis’s heart was beating a little too fast. “But if it takes a magician to even see the island, that means—”

  “We’ll have to go back,” said Jonathan gently. “Or at least one of us will.”

  “No!” yelled Lewis. “My gosh, Uncle Jonathan, Mrs. Zimmermann says that practically every bad wizard in the world is shooting power to Ishmael Izard! You could get killed!”

  Mrs. Zimmermann sighed. “That is not what I meant, Lewis. Ishmael Izard—if indeed it is he—has some foll
owers scattered across the world. Perhaps he has hundreds of them. Still, that is far from ‘every bad wizard in the world.’ And believe me, Jonathan and I know all about the dangers involved. We plan to be very, very careful indeed.”

  “Both of you?” wailed Lewis. “And you’re gonna ditch me here?”

  “No one’s going to ‘ditch’ you, Lewis,” his uncle told him patiently. He thought for a minute. “Actually, Lewis has a good point, Florence. There’s no reason for both of us to go tearing up to Ivarhaven Island. We could be wrong. Maybe the Final Hour isn’t what this is all about. Someone should stay here and keep a finger on the pulse of things. And since you have people all over the globe reporting to you, it makes sense that I should go.”

  Lewis felt like bursting into tears. Wouldn’t anyone listen to him? Mrs. Zimmermann made a tutting sound with her tongue. “You wouldn’t be equipped to handle anything really bad, you know,” she reminded Jonathan. “As you yourself say, you’re really more of a parlor magician. Whereas I can call on some pretty powerful enchantment if push comes to shove.”