The Whistle, the Grave, and the Ghost

by Brad Strickland

  Father Foley sat across the room at his desk, doing paperwork and scowling down at it as if it were a sinful boy. For some time Lewis tried to get up the nerve to speak to him, and at last he succeeded. “Father,” began Lewis in a small voice, “may I ask you something?”

  The priest had a round face, but not a jolly one. Deep lines ran from his nostrils and dragged the corners of his mouth down in a permanent curve of disapproval. His dark eyes gleamed out from deep, dark sockets under heavy black eyebrows, though his wavy hair was snowy white. “What is it?” he muttered, sounding more absent-minded than disapproving.

  “Th-there’s a Latin word I was wondering about,” said Lewis. “I couldn’t find it in my dictionary. I w-wondered if you might know it.”

  Father Foley put the paperwork he had been studying aside. “Very well. What’s the word?”

  “Sibila,” answered Lewis.

  Father Foley froze for a moment. He raised one hairy eyebrow. “That’s a very strange word to ask me about!” His voice had become suddenly harsh.

  “I’m sorry,” said Lewis. “I’ve tried to look it up.”

  The priest shook his head and put a hand over his eyes for a moment. He growled, “Sibila. What a strange word.” He took his hand from his eyes and drew a deep breath. “All right, Lewis. Let’s work it out. What part of speech, do you think?”

  “A verb,” said Lewis promptly. “Imperative mood.”

  “Giving an order or command,” agreed the priest. “As in, ah, Spiritum nolite extinguere. Translate!”

  Lewis began to regret that he had brought up the whole matter. “Uh, ‘Do not extinguish the spirit.’ ”

  “‘Quench not the spirit,’” corrected Father Foley. “And where is that from?”

  “I—I don’t know,” confessed Lewis. “Um, the New Testament? Paul?” He knew that was a good guess, since Father Foley seemed very fond of the Epistles.

  “First Thessalonians, you little heathen,” shot back the priest, looking strangely angry. “I’ll ask you again after Mass tomorrow, and I’ll expect you to be quick with chapter and verse. Now, sibilare, as it happens, is a verb meaning, um, ‘to hiss.’ Though why anyone would command someone to hiss is beyond me. Back to work!”

  Lewis returned thoughtfully to his polishing. “Hiss and I will come”? That didn’t make much sense. He decided not to ask Father Foley about the name on the grave. With his luck, “Lamia” would turn out to be the name of some saint or martyr that he should know, and he’d be stuck with dusting the pews or mopping the rest rooms as punishment. Meanwhile, Father Foley kept glancing at Lewis in a suspicious way, as if he thought he were up to something. Lewis tried hard to look innocent.

  The day dragged on, but at last Father Foley finally set him and the other penitent boys free in the early afternoon. Lewis climbed onto his bike and rode over to the public library, a big gray stone-fronted building not far from the Civil War memorial. He wasn’t much surprised to see Rose Rita’s bike outside the building. She was kind of a bookworm, and she read voraciously, even over summer vacation. Lewis liked to read too, but he tended to focus on one subject at a time. He would read a whole series of detective stories or adventure tales for a month or six weeks, like those by Arthur Conan Doyle and Ellery Queen, H. Rider Haggard and Robert Louis Stevenson. Then he would get interested in something else, and his reading would be books of astronomy for a while, or books about ancient history.

  Lewis climbed the stone steps and pushed through the front doors. Mrs. Geer looked up over her half-spectacles and smiled. “Hi, Lewis,” she said in a soft voice. “You’re kind of late. We close in an hour and a half!”

  “I won’t be long,” said Lewis with a smile. “Where’s Rose Rita?”

  “The Reference Room, I believe,” the librarian said.

  Lewis went back and then turned to the right. The Reference Room was much smaller than the stacks, the big rooms with row after row of bookshelves. Lewis liked the quiet nook, though. It had high, arched windows that let in soft green light filtered through the trees outside. No one was there at the moment, apart from Rose Rita, who sat hunched over a huge tome. A big pile of books lay on the table beside it, as if Rose Rita had already been reading for a long time. Her toes were hooked behind the legs of her chair and her attention was so caught up that she didn’t seem to notice Lewis until he came and flopped into the chair next to her. Then she jumped.

  “I didn’t hear you,” she said, her expression serious.

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you,” returned Lewis. “What’re you reading?”

  Rose Rita turned back a few pages, then pushed the reference work over to Lewis. He glanced at the title: Great Poems of the English-Speaking World. Then he frowned. Rose Rita had the book open to the first page of a poem by John Keats. Its title was “Lamia.” He read the first few lines:

  Upon a time, before the faery broods

  Drove Nymph and Satyr from the prosperous woods,

  Before King Oberon’s bright diadem,

  Sceptre, and mantle, clasp’d with dewy gem,

  Frighted away the Dryads and the Fauns . . .

  “Pretty flowery. What’s it about?” asked Lewis.

  Rose Rita lowered her voice to a whisper: “A monster!”

  Lewis gulped. He felt a stirring of dread, and hated himself for being so timid. Oh, he could take campfire stories now and then, but he knew very well they were just make-believe. It was one thing to sit beside the red embers of a dying fire at night and hear Billy Fox tell some goofy story about a mad hermit who never existed. It was completely different to hear Rose Rita talk about possibly real monsters in broad daylight. Taking a deep breath, Lewis said, “And Lamia . . . ?”

  “Is the monster,” said Rose Rita. “She’s some kind of serpent that can turn into a woman, or vice versa. I haven’t finished the poem. I’ve found other stuff too, including a nifty ghost story by M. R. James that has a whistle in it, although it’s just fiction. But look here.” She dug another thick volume from a stack on the table. “I’ve marked the place.”

  Lewis took the book. He read the title, A Compendium of Myth and Legends of All Nations, and opened the volume to the place marked by a slip of paper. He immediately found the entry on the right-hand page:

  Lamia (lã’-mi-ä): a female vampire. In Greek mythology, Lamia was a queen of Libya, beloved by Zeus, but punished by Hera. Hera caused Lamia to fall into a trance and kill her own children by drinking their blood. Her grief drove Lamia insane. She was further cursed when Hera took away her eyelids, so that she could never close her eyes to shut out the horrors she saw. Her body changed, becoming half serpent, half woman. Driven by her envy of mothers whose children yet lived, Lamia delighted in luring them away and destroying them. She could still assume the form of a beautiful woman, but had also become a bloodthirsty fiend who killed children and young men. Her name was used by the Greeks and Romans to frighten children into good behaviour, and has become a synonym for a female witch or vampire.

  A hard lump had formed in Lewis’s throat. He swallowed it down with difficulty. “B-but that’s just a myth. There aren’t any real vampires. And even if there were, one wouldn’t be buried a few miles outside of New Zebedee!”

  “The word can also mean ‘witch’ in Latin,” replied Rose Rita. She dropped her voice again. “And we know there are such things as witches. There’s Mrs. Zimmermann, who’s a good witch, but there are also bad witches. That’s the kind Gert Biggers wanted to be, and she almost killed Mrs. Zimmermann and me just by trying to become one.”

  Lewis nodded. Rose Rita had told him all about Gert Biggers, who had lived up in the northern part of the state, and whose hatred for Mrs. Zimmermann had ended at last when the evil woman was herself transformed into a tree. “Is that all?”

  “Not by a long shot,” said Rose Rita. “I looked and looked and finally found sibilare in a huge old Latin dictionary.”

  “It means ‘hiss,’ ” said Lewis. “I found that out.
”

  Rose Rita gave him a mildly surprised look through her round spectacles. “Yes, it does. But it could also mean ‘whistle.’ ”

  Lewis felt sick. “‘Whistle and I will come,’” he said. “That makes sense.”

  “But what will come?” asked Rose Rita. “I think you’d better let Mrs. Zimmermann take a look at that whatsis. She’s an expert on magical talismans and amulets and things, and it should be right up her alley.”

  “Okay,” agreed Lewis. With his overactive imagination, he could just picture something huge and scaly creeping from beneath that rock in the woods and slithering toward him, called by the piping of that whistle. “One thing I know for sure, I’m not gonna blow this.” He reached into his pocket for the whistle. Then he turned a strained face to Rose Rita. “It’s gone!”

  “You lost it?” demanded Rose Rita. “When was the last time you saw it?”

  “I dropped it in my pocket this morning,” murmured Lewis. “I’m sure I did. It was on a chain, but I didn’t want to wear it.” He stood up and felt in all his jeans pockets. Nothing but a handkerchief, his front door key, and his thin wallet.

  “Where have you been?”

  Lewis shook his head. “Just around the house. And then I had to go to the church to help clean. Then I rode my bike here.”

  Rose Rita hopped up. “Let’s go. We have to look for that thing. If it really is magic, it could cause all kinds of trouble.”

  They rushed out, with Lewis staring intently at the floor of the library, the front steps, and the pavement and grass around his bike. No luck. He led the way back to the church, with Rose Rita pedaling along behind him and to his left. The whistle could have fallen out of his pocket, reasoned Lewis, when he was on the bike. But if it had, it was no longer anywhere on the ground that he could see.

  They reached the church, and Lewis went inside. Father Foley was just leaving his office. “What is it?” he asked in an exasperated kind of way as Lewis came hurrying toward him.

  “I think I might have dropped something,” said Lewis in a small voice. “May I look for it?”

  “Be quick,” snapped the priest, holding the door open.

  Lewis took a fast look at the floor and even thrust his hands down under the cushion of the chair he had been sitting in. Nothing. He thanked Father Foley, who gave him a curt nod of acknowledgment. As he was turning away, Father Foley suddenly said, “Lewis!”

  “Yes, Father?” asked Lewis, stopping dead in his tracks.

  The elderly priest stared hard at him. “Where did you come up with that Latin verb?”

  Lewis shrugged. “I read it somewhere.”

  “In a book?” demanded Father Foley.

  “Probably,” said Lewis, unwilling to discuss the whistle.

  “Very well,” said Father Foley, turning away.

  Lewis hurried to join Rose Rita outside. “It wasn’t there.”

  They rode their bikes back to Lewis’s house on High Street, their eyes on the ground the whole way. Still no luck. In front of Lewis’s house, they rested, leaning their bikes against the wrought-iron fence. “Well,” said Rose Rita, “maybe it’s for the best. Chances are it wasn’t a mystical doohickey at all. It was probably just some dog whistle or something. Good riddance to it.”

  Lewis brightened a little. “Hey, that’s probably right,” he said. “ ‘Whistle and I will come’! It sort of makes sense if it’s a dog whistle, doesn’t it?”

  “Sure,” agreed Rose Rita. “Maybe Lamia was even the name of somebody’s faithful dog. In the old days of the pioneers, someone could’ve been heading west in a covered wagon and camped near New Zebedee. And in the dead of night, a huge grizzly bear attacked! The dog charged! The bear hit her with a swipe of its paw! But the settler had enough time to grab his musket and shoot the bear. Only the poor dog died of her wounds—” Rose Rita broke off. “What are you looking at me like that for?”

  Lewis shook his head. “You made fun of me when I thought a settler’s wife might have been buried under that stone. Now you’ve put a dead dog there! What an imagination. You can make a story out of—out of two beans and a rusty nail!”

  Rose Rita sniffed. “I’ll be a famous writer one of these days. See if I’m not.”

  “So, do you think we should bother Mrs. Zimmermann?” asked Lewis.

  Rose Rita thought for a moment. “Well, it couldn’t hurt, could it? She won’t make fun of us, and if there was something spooky about that tin whistle, she’d be the one to know.”

  They went next door to Mrs. Zimmermann’s cozy house. She welcomed them in with a smile. Lewis liked his next-door neighbor’s living room. Everything was purple, Mrs. Zimmermann’s favorite color: The carpet and the sofa and the chairs were all purple, and the walls were covered in pale pearly-white wallpaper with a pattern of purple violets. Even the paintings that hung on the walls had splashes of purple in them.

  “Now then,” said Mrs. Zimmermann after she had served them some lemonade and some wonderfully light meringue cookies that simply dissolved on their tongues, “you two either have something on your minds or up your sleeves, so I will ask politely. What’s troubling you?”

  Rose Rita looked at Lewis, and he began to explain about finding the whistle. He carefully described it, adding the translation they had discovered for the inscription and the bit about the flat stone in the woods with the words “Here lies Lamia” carved on it in Latin. Rose Rita chipped in with what she had been able to learn.

  Mrs. Zimmermann thoughtfully touched a finger to her chin. “Hmm. Well, none of that strikes a chord with me. You don’t usually hear of magical whistles, you know. Bells, yes, and spirit trumpets and such. In my study of magical amulets, however, I never ran across mention of an enchanted whistle. And of course I know about Keats’s poem, but that’s based on an old legend. Where exactly is the stone, Lewis?”

  “It’s northwest of town,” replied Lewis. “There’s a bridge, with a place next to it that was wide enough for Mr. Halvers to park the bus. Then we hiked for a couple of hours across some meadows to the campsite. The woods are downhill from that, toward the river.”

  “Yes, Richardson’s Woods. I know just the place you’re describing, but I’ve never heard anything sinister about it. I wonder if your uncle would be willing to let us pile into his antique car and go out to have a look at it tomorrow. It’s probably nothing, but it sounds worth the trip. And you’re right, Rose Rita. It could be a relic from pioneer days, or even earlier, when French explorers were passing this way through unexplored territory.”

  They all trooped next door, and Uncle Jonathan readily agreed to the trip. “We’ll take off after Mass and make a picnic of it,” he announced. “Rose Rita, we’ll swing by your house and pick you up about twelve-thirty. Is that okay?”

  Rose Rita, whose parents were Baptist, nodded. “Sure. We’ll be home from church by then. Pastor Williams isn’t very long-winded. Just give me a few minutes to change, that’s all.”

  So it was all arranged. Lewis went to bed that night feeling relieved. Maybe, he thought, it was just as well he had lost the whistle. It was one less thing to worry about.

  But in his dreams he saw the stone, with moonlight shining on it. He seemed to be standing nearby, staring as if fascinated. The stone began to quiver, and strange noises came from it, low moans and a kind of hissing. Faint red light shone from cracks in its surface. And something flowed from beneath it, something dark and rippling.

  At first Lewis thought that somehow water was running from under the stone, as if a spring were beneath it. But the patch of darkness was not water. It moved beneath the moonlight, catching glimmers on its oily black surface. It crept over the rocks in the clearing, and Lewis stepped slowly away from it, as if it were a living creature and he did not want to attract its attention.

  Then his feet rustled in something. Somehow the edge of the clearing was deep in dry leaves, though autumn was months away. The moving patch of darkness stopped. Then, incredibly quickly, it
flowed toward Lewis. He moved faster than he thought he could. He bolted forward. He leaped up onto the mossy stone covering the grave.

  The dark, shapeless form flowed into the dry leaves. They heaved and rustled. Then—then, somehow—they stood up!

  Lewis felt his heart hammering. The leaves were clinging together, making a shape that was roughly human. It shambled toward him, its head thrust forward and slowly swinging from side to side. Moonlight fell on it, and Lewis saw that instead of eyes, the weird face of the thing had just two hollow pits.

  It was blind.

  But then it dropped to all fours. It lowered its face to the ground. And it shuffled closer, hissing.

  It could smell him.

  Lewis backed away, trying to be quiet. He came to the edge of the stone. He took a step down—

  And felt dry hands close over his ankle!

  With a gasp, Lewis sat up in bed. His heart thudded as if it were about to burst. His right ankle was all tangled up in the sheet.

  He told himself to get a grip. With an effort, he straightened out the covers and lay back down, hoping that his hammering heart would slow down.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Lewis shivered, though the Sunday afternoon was bright and warm. His uncle stood beside the mossy stone with the strange inscription and shook his head. “Never heard of this,” he admitted, “and I’ve lived in these parts all my life. Haggy, what do you say?”

  Mrs. Zimmermann looked very odd. Because of the hike, she had donned a pair of riding breeches. They were khaki, not purple, but she also wore a big floppy-brimmed purple hat and a purple sweater. She carried her rolled-up umbrella, sometimes leaning on it as if it were a cane. She walked all the way around the stone, her head tilted thoughtfully. “I’ve never heard of it either, but that doesn’t prove anything. And I can’t feel anything particularly bad or good about this spot.”