Spell of the Sorcerer's Skull

by John Bellairs

  When he had finished his little tale, Fergie turned to Father Higgins with a puzzled frown on his face. "So, if it wasn't you, Father... then who the heck was I following?"

  "Who indeed?" muttered the priest, smiling grimly. "I'll tell you this, though, Byron: Divide and conquer is an ancient maxim for those who want to grind others into the dust. But as for all the rest of the whys and whats and wherefores of this affair... well, I think we'll have to wait a bit before we can say anything." He put his hand to his head and winced. "Right now," he added with a painful grimace, "I think I could do with about six dozen aspirin. Or a slug or two of that brandy that I was going to use to get the professor hammered."

  "Hammered?" said the professor, blinking in astonishment. "Higgy, what in blazes are you talking about?"

  "I'll tell you later," said Father Higgins, chuckling. "In the meantime, let's get ourselves off of this rotten, cursed sand spit. And don't call me Higgy, Rod. You know I can't stand that!"

  The four weary adventurers climbed into the motor-boat. Father Higgins pulled the starter cord, and they were off at top speed, heading back toward Vinalhaven. When they got to the island, Father Higgins and the boys took the professor to the Lobster Pot Inn, where he had a hot bath and a much-needed shave. After he had gotten freshened up, the professor found—to his great surprise—that there were clean clothes and freshly shined shoes laid out for him. Father Higgins had taken them from the professor's house, using the key that the professor had left across the street with Grampa Dixon. There were clean pajamas too, and the professor undressed, put on the pajamas, and threw himself into the extra bed in Father Higgins's room. He was asleep in half a minute.

  The next morning, while they were all waiting down at the dock for the ferryboat, Father Higgins told the professor all that he knew about the weird incidents that had led all of them on an expedition out to Cemetery Island. He explained about the Saint Anthony "messages," the skull, Johnny's midnight vision, and everything. The professor listened to all this calmly, and when Father Higgins was through, he snorted indignantly.

  "Huh!" he muttered. "So some evil spirit decided that he was going to make mincemeat of me. And if this Warren Windrow hadn't scrawled one of his dream-thoughts down on the flyleaf of a book, I might not be standing here right now. The 'great reckoning,' the settling of accounts, would have happened to me! But there's still a lot in this business that is pretty murky. When I get home I'll have to see what I can do to clear things up."

  "I think you oughta rest when you get home," suggested Johnny gently. He was afraid the professor would get sick if he exerted himself too much, after all he had been through.

  "Rest, ha!" said the professor, glaring arrogantly around. "I never felt better or fitter in my life!"

  When Professor Childermass got back to his gray stucco house on Fillmore Street, he found that things were in pretty much of a mess: several windows were broken, the aerial on the cupola was in danger of falling down, and the house was full of grime and dust. But with the help of Grampa Dixon, Johnny, Fergie, and some neighbors, he managed to get the old place fixed up in next to no time at all. And he found that his job at Haggstrum College was still waiting for him. Still, he kept wondering why he had gotten kidnapped in the first place. What forces of demonic magic had been at work? These and some other puzzling questions still remained, and so the professor decided to take a quick car trip up to his ancestral family home in Vermont. He rooted around in the attic, and since he belonged to a family that never threw anything away, he was able to find what he wanted. Not long after he got back, he announced to his friends that he was going to have a party to celebrate his return. A backyard cookout, no less.

  And so, on a warm evening early in June, all of the professor's friends were gathered on the lawn behind his house. There were Gramma and Grampa Dixon, Father Higgins, Fergie and Johnny, and Professor Charles Coote of the University of New Hampshire, who was an expert on black magic. Professor Childermass had had some long-distance phone conversations with his old friend, and now he was planning to consult with him further so that some of the loose ends in this crazy business could be resolved.

  The professor got all done up in one of his tasteless summer outfits: grass-stained khaki wash pants, a magenta short-sleeved shirt covered with yellow monkeys and guitars, a big apron with witty sayings all over it, and a puffy chef's hat. Then, with tight-jawed determination, he grilled hamburgers and hot dogs on the brick backyard stove that he had not used in at least fourteen years. He felt rather inept and clumsy, and he dropped more than one burger into the fire, but with the aid of lighter fluid and Father Higgins's expert advice about handling charcoal, he managed it all without once losing his temper.

  Late in the evening the party goers were all sitting in lawn chairs talking quietly and sipping drinks.

  "Now, then," the professor began in his best brusque, no-nonsense manner, "I suppose you'll all be wanting to know what I found out when I went up to Vermont to poke around in my ancestral attic."

  "You had bloody well better tell us," said Professor Coote dryly, "or we'll roast you over what's left of the fire."

  The professor harrumphed a bit and paced nervously back and forth puffing at his cigarette and blowing out little thin streams of smoke. Suddenly his face relaxed, and he smiled. "I suppose," he began, "that Higgy here has spilled the beans to those who weren't in on the hunt for me, and that therefore everybody knows that what happened had something to do with Warren Windrow, the man from Cemetery Island who was hanged because he tried to kill my dear old Granduncle Lucius. Are you all with me thus far?"

  Everybody nodded, and some murmured yeah's and uh huh's.

  "Good!" said the professor, and he began to pace again. "In order to fill in the missing pieces of this rather insane jigsaw puzzle, I took a little jaunt up to my ancestral home, where I rooted about in the attic. There had always been a story in the family that Uncle Lucius had kept a diary, but no one had ever seen it. So I poked about in his steamer trunk—the same one that had gone with him when he took a clipper ship to California and back—and I found the diary sewed up in the lining of the trunk. And imagine my surprise when I discovered that the secretive old cuss had written the diary in classical Greek!" The professor smiled in a self-satisfied way. "Little did Lucius know that his grandnephew would become a scholar and learn to read—"

  "Oh, cut out the bragging, Roderick!" said Professor Coote, interrupting. "We all know you can read Greek! So tell us what you found out!"

  The professor was somewhat taken aback, but he recovered his composure and went on. "Hm... what I found out... yes, yes, of course! Hem! Well, to begin with, I discovered that Lucius was an even more unpleasant man than I had ever imagined he was. You see, after Windrow was hanged, Lucius bribed some officials so that he could have the body turned over to a small medical school in San Francisco. Medical students can always use fresh cadavers, which they dissect and dismember in various ghoulish ways. Well! Good old Lucius extracted from the doctors the promise that they would turn Windrow's skull over to him when they were finished with the body."

  Gramma made an awful face. "His skull!" she exclaimed. "What kind of a man was your uncle, to do a thing like that?"

  The professor wrinkled his nose. "He was a very vengeful and nasty man. Also possibly unbalanced. And he had read a lot of ancient history, and he was planning to do what the Scythians did with their enemies—namely, to make a drinking cup out of poor Windrow's skull. It would be the final humiliation of the man who had dared to lay murderous hands on him. But, alas, Lucius had bitten off more than he could chew. He didn't know anything about Warren Windrow's background. I didn't, either, until I started digging, but I discovered that the Windrows were a family of witches and warlocks. They lived all over the Penobscot Bay area, on Matinicus and Vinalhaven and in Thomaston and in Camden. And the reason why they kept moving around was this: They kept getting pitched out of wherever they were living because of their nefarious and
diabolical practices.

  "Ah, but good old Lucius knew nothing of this, so he put Windrow's skull in a hatbox and took it back with him. He went to live at our old place in Vermont, and the hatbox wound up on a shelf in his bedroom closet. Years passed, and oddly enough, Lucius never got around to making his Scythian drinking cup. However—as he records in his diary—he found that the skull obsessed him. He would take it out of its box every now and then, in the privacy of his room, and he would rub and caress it. He never seems to have understood why he did this. Weird, eh?"

  "Hey, professor?" said Fergie, speaking up suddenly.

  "Yes, Byron? What is it?"

  "Didn't... well, I mean, didn't your uncle's family think it was kind of batty for him to keep somebody's skull in a hatbox in his room? Did any of them say anything about it to him?"

  The professor shook his head. "No. They didn't know the skull was there. When Lucius showed up at the old homestead back in the mid-eighteen-fifties, everyone must've assumed that a hat was in the hatbox. And the old boy never let out a peep about his sordid little secret. Of course, they went through his belongings after his death, but... Well, I'm getting ahead of my story."

  The professor paused to pull his burned-out cigarette butt from the jade holder. He stuck a new one in and lit it. "To continue," he went on, spewing clouds of smoke as he talked, "the years passed, and things did not go well with Lucius—I got this part of the tale from my father, since I was just a wee little kid when Lucius died. Everything he tried to do flopped, and in the end he became a gloomy hermit who spent a lot of time in his bedroom. On the evening of the day after Christmas, in 1883, Lucius died mysteriously. A few days later, when the members of the family opened his bedroom closet, and took the lid off the hatbox, guess what they found!"

  "An empty hatbox?" suggested Johnny.

  The professor shook his head solemnly. "No. Guess again!"

  "I give up," said Johnny.

  Fergie shrugged. "Okay, okay! It's a trick question. They found the skull, right?"

  The professor's eyebrows rose, and he made a puckery face. "Well... yes and no. That is, they found the skull, but they didn't know they had found the skull."

  "Huh?" said Fergie, gaping.

  In a flash, Johnny guessed. "Oh, my God!" he exclaimed, and he clapped his hand over his mouth.

  The professor turned to Johnny, and he made a little mock-courteous bow. "Go to the head of the class, young man! Yes, indeedy! What they found was a teeny-tiny skull, the same one that wound up on the shelf by the fireplace in the dollhouse room that some of us here have seen. You ask, how could this be? Well, remember, Warren Windrow was a young warlock. And after he had gotten his revenge on Lucius, his evil, disembodied mind had thought up a way to pass on the curse. Aaaand, since no one in the Childermass family knew that a full-size skull had been in the hatbox, nobody guessed that the lovely delicate miniature was a real skull!"

  Johnny turned very pale. Cold beads of sweat formed on his forehead, and he realized that everyone was looking at him. He felt ashamed and hung his head. "I... I should've got rid of it right away," he mumbled. "I mean, I shouldn't've picked it up in the first place."

  The professor smiled and patted Johnny on the shoulder sympathetically. "Don't be too hard on yourself, John," he said softly. "The evil spirit of Warren Windrow probably intended for you to pick up the skull. And as you discovered later, it's not an easy matter to throw a thing like that away. But to continue with the story: Marcus Childermass—my father—took the skull away and kept it in his room, and, under its evil influence, he went to work on the Childermass clock. He'd had some experience in carpentry, so the idea wasn't totally—"

  "Wait! Wait!" exclaimed Professor Coote, waving his hand in the air like a student who knows the answer. "I think I've discovered a hole in this story!"

  The professor folded his arms and pretended to look annoyed. Then he unexpectedly burst out laughing. "Yes, I know you think you've found a hole, you in sufferable pedant! But I'll plug it for you while you wait. You want to know how come my father didn't get blitzed by the power of Windrow's skull. And the answer is this—he never touched it. I mean, his fingers never actually came in contact with the filthy thing. I don't know for sure that this is the answer—I'm just guessing. But Dad was a meticulous, fussy man—a lot like this Mr. Finnick you folks have told me about, though I will hasten to add that my father was a good deal more warmhearted! Anyway, I think Dad must've handled the skull with tweezers, and that was what saved him. I, on the other hand, was not so lucky. My finger grazed the skull that night in the Fitzwilliam Inn, and it nearly got me killed. I'm just lucky I have such good, kind... " The professor's voice trailed off, and he turned away. He was crying now, and he tried to cover it up with a fit of coughing and harrumphing.

  Professor Coote jumped up and ran to offer the professor his handkerchief. He took it and blew his nose several times, and he muttered something about Russian cigarettes. Then everybody got up and went to the card table that stood by the brick stove and poured themselves more drinks. For a while after that, the party goers just milled around and talked quietly.

  At a little after ten o'clock, Gramma and Grampa announced that it was bedtime for them. They thanked the professor for the party and ambled on home, arm in arm. Johnny and Fergie discussed their narrow escape for a while, and then Fergie went into the house to use the bathroom, and Johnny drifted over to join the professor, Father Higgins, and Professor Coote. The three men had wandered down to the far end of the backyard to look at the sad remains of the professor's vegetable garden. He had been away during the spring planting season, and the plot of ground was just a weed-grown mess.

  "By the way, Charley," said the professor, "are you sure Finnick didn't have anything to do with this business? I mean, it's a bit hard for me to believe that he and his museum just happened to be out on Vinalhaven, near the place where Warren Windrow lived. Isn't it possible that he's a member of the Windrow clan?"

  Professor Coote shook his head. "No, I don't think it's likely. Finnick is a pretty detestable person, I gather, but that doesn't make him a sorcerer. As unlikely as it may seem, his being out on Vinalhaven is exactly what it seems to be—a ridiculous, insane coincidence."

  The professor rubbed his chin and looked doubtful. "Well, Charley," he said slowly, "I know you're an expert on hocus-pocus and abracadabra, but still... "

  "Professor Coote?" said Johnny, interrupting. "Could... could I ask you something?"

  Professor Coote turned and smiled at Johnny. "Yes, John? You look upset. What is it?"

  Johnny wrinkled up his forehead and bit his lip. "Well, I was just wondering... that is, do you think the curse of the skull and the dollhouse and Warren Windrow is over for good?"

  Professor Coote sloshed the brandy in the snifter he was holding. Then he reached out and nicked some fluff off the top of a tall, stalky weed that was growing in the professor's garden. "I was afraid someone would ask me about that," he said in a grave, troubled voice. "And the answer is, I don't know for sure. I'm an expert on magic, but there is a lot I don't understand about it. However, I will say this: The curse was interrupted at the precise moment when it was supposed to have ripened. That is, Roderick here was to have been killed on the anniversary of the day and the hour when Warren Windrow met his end on the gallows. But at that point our friend Father Higgins here came charging in like a Notre Dame fullback, and he dispelled the curse by using the power of the True Cross, and one of the oldest, most potent incantations in the world. By the way, Tom, where on earth did you dig that piece of wizardry up? I know it in Celtic, and in Old Icelandic, but I wasn't aware that it had been translated into English."

  Father Higgins sipped his whiskey and smiled. "It's part of an old hymn called 'Saint Patrick's Breastplate.' I've known it since I was a kid, but it never occurred to me that the thing might have magical properties until a couple of years ago. I was playing it over on the organ one night when nobody was in the church,
and then it hit me, and I said to myself, This isn't a hymn, this is a charm! And darned if I wasn't right!"

  Johnny swallowed hard. "You mean... you mean you didn't know it would work when you came chargin' up the hill to save us?"

  Father Higgins shook his head. "I most certainly did not! I felt like it was two out in the ninth, and I was comin' to bat with a toothpick in my hands. But we must never underestimate the power of invocations to the Blessed Trinity."

  "Or the power of ancient Irish superstitions," Professor Coote added, chuckling. "You see, John, magic is a rather uncertain science—or as some would have it, a pseudoscience. So to finish what I was saying earlier, if you and Roderick here will just manage to stay away from Cemetery Island for the rest of your lives, I don't think there'll be any problem."

  "Don't worry," muttered the professor as he sipped his sherry. "I'll give the place a wide berth! As for this summer, I plan to hang around Duston Heights and work on my golf game and listen to all the Red Sox broadcasts. In fact, I'll probably spend so much time with my ear glued to the radio that I'll never get my new book written."

  "Book?" said Johnny innocently. "I didn't know you were writing a book, professor."

  The professor glared. "Of course I'm writing a book—or rather, I was, until I got whisked off to that island paradise off the coast of Maine. You remember the book, Charley. The one on the causes of the Napoleonic Wars."

  "Ah, yes!" said Professor Coote, grinning mischievously. "That book! Well, Roderick, if you don't get it finished, it'll be a small loss. After all, who would ever want to read it?"

  "Whaaaaat?" roared the professor, waving his burning cigarette. "Do you dare to insinuate that I, Roderick Childermass, Ph.D., could ever write a dull... "