“James will be here soon,” said Aunt Helen. “We will all have lunch. I’ve prepared some watercress sandwiches and some spinach and tomato soup.”
“That’s fine, Helen,” said Uncle Jonathan, hiding a grimace. “How are you feeling these days?”
Aunt Helen dramatically placed a hand on her thin chest. “You would not believe, Jonathan, how I suffer from asthma. I say it’s all these atomic tests the government is doing out in Nevada. I’m sure that horrible fallout drifts right up here to Michigan, and it’s making everyone sick. I was reading in the paper just the other day about those mysterious cases of anemia you have down in New Zebedee. It’s atomic sickness, you mark my words!”
Lewis sighed. His aunt was a little nutty on the subject of atomic bombs. And she went on and on. She detailed all her symptoms and kept insisting that Jonathan and Lewis could have no idea of how much she suffered. Lewis thought he was suffering a good deal himself, but he didn’t dare say anything. After an hour or so, the front door banged and Uncle Jimmy came in. He was a skinny, balding man whose expression was usually weary and long-suffering. Lewis could understand that. Anyone married to Aunt Helen would become tired before long, and he would have to suffer a lot!
Lewis didn’t care much for the thin soup or the sandwiches, and after lunch, when Uncle Jonathan stretched and said how nice the visit had been, he was relieved. They went out and climbed into the car, and Jonathan turned to Helen and Jimmy, who had followed them out. “Nice to see you both,” said Uncle Jonathan. “You’ll have to come to New Zebedee and visit us one of these times.”
Aunt Helen put her hand to her chest again and gasped weakly. “I’m afraid I’m not up to a long trip,” she said in a weepy voice.
“Well, so long, all,” replied Jonathan. He turned the key and stepped on the starter. From beneath the hood came a discouraged sort of clunk, but that was all.
He tried again, and did not even get the clunk. “Battery,” said Uncle Jimmy, opening up the folding hood of the old car.
“James, don’t you dare get all filthy with motor oil,” warned Aunt Helen. “Those are perfectly good clothes you’re wearing.”
“Try it again, Jonathan,” said Uncle Jimmy, ignoring her, as he wiggled something under the hood.
Jonathan turned the key and stepped on the starter. The car gave out a pathetic little whining sound.
“Dead as a doornail,” said Uncle Jimmy. “No doubt about it. Well, I can run you into town and we’ll see if we can scare up a battery. Though this one’s not standard, you know.”
“I know,” said Uncle Jonathan, climbing out of the car. “I have the people down at the Bass Garage in New Zebedee keep one in stock for me, but they’re hard to find.”
They parked Lewis back in the parlor, where he sat and leafed through some of his aunt’s boring magazines, all about how to grow flowers and how to arrange furniture. Hours passed. By the time Uncle Jimmy’s Chevrolet rolled back into the yard, it was dark outside. For another half hour the two men tinkered with the Muggins Simoon, until at last it started. Then they came inside, oily and dirty, to the horror of Aunt Helen.
“We’d better get on the road,” said Uncle Jonathan as soon as he had cleaned up.
“You will do no such thing,” scolded Aunt Helen. “Why, it would be long past midnight before you could get back to New Zebedee! You and Lewis will stay here for the night, and you can get an early start first thing in the morning.”
Lewis gave his uncle a despairing look, but it was no use. They had a dismal dinner of fried salmon croquettes, lumpy mashed potatoes, and stringy green beans. Then Uncle Jonathan and Uncle Jimmy listened to a Detroit Tigers baseball game on the radio. Aunt Helen made up the guest bedroom for Jonathan. She brought an armload of sheets and a flat pillow into the living room. “Lewis, you will have to manage on the sofa,” she said with a sigh. “Try not to toss and turn all night! I’m sure it’s bad for the springs.”
Lewis was seething. When the ball game ended with a Tiger victory, everyone went off to bed. He stripped down to his underclothes and tried to get comfortable on the sofa. That was impossible. The sofa cushions bulged in the wrong places and sagged in the wrong places. Each cushion had a cloth-covered button in its very center, and even through a folded blanket and two sheets, they prodded Lewis in maddening ways. The pillow was almost useless. Even worse, both Aunt Helen and Uncle Jimmy snored, even louder than Uncle Jonathan, and before long the house sounded like a sawmill.
Finally, somehow, Lewis drifted off to sleep. Perhaps because he was sleeping on the lumpy sofa, he dreamed that he was back at the Boy Scout camp near the woods and the flat stone, sleeping on the ground. He did not seem to have a tent or a sleeping bag, though.
In his dream, an owl hooted over and over, each hoot becoming longer and shriller, until they all blended in the sound of a whistle. It pulled him to his feet and made him walk, stiffly, over the meadow. A pale moon was high in the midnight sky, and in its faint light he saw what first looked like a group of boulders. But as he came closer, he realized that one of the shapes was really Stan Peters, lying on his back, and the other was a woman bending over the form of Billy Fox. She rose as Lewis came closer.
He stared dully down. Stan Peters was dead. His face was as pale as the moonlight, his flesh shrunken like a mummy’s. And as Lewis stared, Billy Fox took one gasping breath and then stopped breathing. He was dead too.
“You killed them,” said Lewis to the woman.
“To become more real,” replied the woman, though her sweet voice was only a whisper in his mind. “Hide their bodies.”
“Where?” asked Lewis.
“Beneath my stone.”
In the dream Lewis did not protest that he was not strong enough. He tugged at Stan’s leg and found that he was as light as a bundle of rags. He grabbed Billy’s foot and pulled. Dragging both of them, he walked down the hill.
The stone lay in the clearing, the same three-foot-thick flat boulder he had seen in real life. Lewis dropped Billy’s and Stan’s feet and tugged at the stone. It swung up as if on hinges, silently. Beneath it yawned a hole. Lewis shoved first Stan’s body and then Billy’s into the opening. He heard a clatter.
Looking down, Lewis felt a surge of nausea. The hole was perhaps six feet long and four feet wide, like a grave, but it was much deeper. Fifteen or twenty feet down, Billy and Stan had landed on a jumbled pile of bones. Thousands of people must have been buried here!
And to his horror, Lewis saw Billy’s eyes slowly open. From Stan’s mouth came a horrible moan: “You killed us! You let her drink our blood!”
Lewis slammed the stone down and spun around. The woman stood behind him, the moonlight shining right through her. She was a pale bluish-white, except for her lips.
Her lips were red.
“I need more food,” she whispered in his mind. “Perhaps that nosy girl Rose Rita. Or perhaps your aunt. No one would miss her . . .”
Something tugged at Lewis’s feet. He looked down. From beneath the stone a tentacle of darkness had crept. It had wrapped itself around both of Lewis’s legs. It was pulling, pulling with a terrible force. He knew he could not break away. He knew the shadow would drag him under the rock—
Lewis jumped up from the couch. The dead were screaming! Their cries echoed in his ears!
Then he heard Uncle Jimmy’s cranky voice: “Helen, what in the world are you bellowing for?”
Uncle Jonathan came from the guest room and knocked on Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Helen’s door. Uncle Jimmy opened it. What little hair he had was frizzed out around his ears. He looked like a daisy that had begun to wilt. “Bad dream,” he grunted.
Aunt Helen appeared behind him, rollers in her hair and her face terrified. “The curtains!” she shrieked. “The curtains came to life! They stared at me! Only they didn’t have any eyes!”
Past his aunt, Lewis saw the white curtains swaying in a breeze from the half-opened window. Just for an instant, they billowed into the shape o
f a face, a horrible pitiless face with no eyes, but blank holes where eyes should be. Then it was gone.
“It was just a dream,” said Jonathan comfortingly.
But he gave Lewis an uneasy look over his shoulder as he said it.
And despite the shock of having awakened to his aunt’s terrified shouts, Lewis smiled a little. “It was just a dream,” he said. “That’s all it was.”
CHAPTER NINE
By the middle of the third week in July, Rose Rita was feeling frantic with worry. She and Lewis had occasionally had tiffs before, as all friends do, but this one seemed to be getting really serious. She had expected him to call and mutter some kind of apology. She was more than willing to forgive him. Days had gone by, however, and she had not heard even one word from him.
Billy and Stan had been in the news again recently. They seemed to be doing better in the hospital in Detroit. Their blood count, whatever that was, had returned to almost normal, and they were able to get out of bed. Still, the doctors did not want to let them leave the hospital. No one could understand what was wrong with them to begin with, and the doctors wanted to find out what had given them such severe anemia in the first place. They were going to have to have a lot of tests, and doctors in New Zebedee were being asked to report any suspicious or unusual cases with symptoms like theirs.
Every day Rose Rita called Mrs. Zimmermann to ask if she had learned anything else about the grave in Richardson’s Woods, or about the whistle. Every day Mrs. Zimmermann’s answer was no. She always cautioned Rose Rita not to worry herself too much, but that was like cautioning a fish not to swim. Rose Rita just couldn’t help worrying. Finally, able to stand the suspense no more, Rose Rita rode her bike over to High Street, but not to visit Lewis. She went straight to Mrs. Zimmermann’s house.
Mrs. Zimmermann let her in, and the two of them sat in her kitchen, munching gooey chocolate chip cookies and drinking milk. “He’s turned weird,” complained Rose Rita.
“Lewis, you mean?” asked Mrs. Zimmermann, her eyes twinkling behind her spectacles.
Rose Rita nodded. “I know he’s worried about that whistle and the stone in the woods. He thinks he’s set free some kind of ghost. I understand all that. But I’m on his side. He didn’t have any reason to bite my head off.”
Mrs. Zimmermann sighed. “Well, sometimes we have to make an allowance or three, Rose Rita. I know you only mean to help Lewis, but there are times when the menfolk think they don’t need any help. They are almost always wrong, of course, but that doesn’t keep their silly male pride from getting dented when we women dash in, all flags flying, to take charge and set things right.”
“It wasn’t like that!” But Rose Rita twisted in her chair with the uncomfortable feeling that, yes, it was at least a little like that. She stared glumly at the table. A white tablecloth with embroidered violets in a bright shade of purple covered it. She rubbed her finger over one bumpy violet. “Back when Lewis had that magician’s amulet that lured him off into the wilderness, you came to the rescue!”
Mrs. Zimmermann shivered. “Ugh. Yes, indeed, and a fat lot of good it did! That evil ghost was so strong that when I tried a spell on it, it drained away all my magic power for a couple of years! Much more, and I think it would have killed me. And even so, I wasn’t the only reason it lost the fight, as you well know. Lewis had a lot to do with that himself.”
“But we helped him!” insisted Rose Rita.
Mrs. Zimmermann gave her a wrinkly smile. “And we will help him again! But you can’t just go jumping onto your horse and riding madly off in all directions at once, you know. Believe me, Rose Rita, I have been trying to learn about lamiae and even silver whistles, but all I’ve turned up is such a deal of skimble-skamble stuff that it makes my head ache! The history of real magic is all tangled up with folklore, fairy tales, and just plain lies. It’s hard to find a needle of truth in such a messy haystack of ignorance!”
Rose Rita stopped picking at the embroidery on the tablecloth and took a bite from a cookie. “But I hate just doing nothing! Has the book you sent for come?”
Mrs. Zimmermann patted Rose Rita’s free hand. “Not yet, but I know it has been shipped. I expect it tomorrow or the next day.”
Rose Rita put down her half-eaten cookie. “Well, in the meantime, is there anything Lewis can do to make himself safe?”
“I don’t know for sure,” said Mrs. Zimmermann slowly, thoughtfully touching her forefinger to her chin. “I’d say the main thing was not to blow that blamed whistle if he should come across it again. Some magical amulets don’t work on the first try. They gain power gradually as the owner tries them out. You know the old saying, ‘Third time’s a charm’? Sometimes that’s literally true.”
“I’m going to go right over there and warn him,” said Rose Rita. “I don’t care if he does think I’m meddling in things I shouldn’t. I think he’s a—a stubborn pig-headed donkey!”
Mrs. Zimmermann chuckled. “Heavens, Rose Rita! You have quite a way with words. But if Lewis is still brooding, be understanding. I’m sure that he’s worried about those scouting friends of his who are in the hospital.”
Rose Rita’s mouth opened in surprise. “You know about Billy and Stan?”
“I do indeed,” replied Mrs. Zimmermann tartly. “I don’t live in Outer Mongolia, you know! And I know that those two are bullies and that they take a particular delight in pushing poor Lewis around. Whatever is wrong with them, I’m sure Lewis feels guilty about it. He’s just the sort to think he’s behind all the woes of his friends and his enemies, like Joe Bfstplk!”
Despite her feelings, Rose Rita had to smile at that. In a newspaper comic strip called “Li’l Abner,” Joe Bfstplk—and how Mrs. Zimmermann had managed to pronounce that name, she could not say—was a lumpy, chinless little guy who was the world’s worst jinx. He walked around with a dark cloud over his head. He was always trying to help his friends, and always his best efforts caused some kind of calamity. “But Lewis isn’t like that,” objected Rose Rita. “Not really.”
“That doesn’t keep him from feeling sometimes that he causes trouble or that the whole world is against him,” pointed out Mrs. Zimmermann. “You’ve had days like that, Rose Rita. I’ve had days like that. Everyone has. The trouble with Lewis is that he thinks it’s just him. Maybe the best thing a good friend could do is just be ready when he needs her. ‘They also serve who only stand and wait,’ as John Milton said.”
That really wasn’t enough to satisfy Rose Rita. When she saw Jonathan Barnavelt come out of his house a few minutes later, she hurriedly said good-bye to Mrs. Zimmermann and rushed out to catch up with him. She did, about halfway down the street. He greeted her with some surprise. “What’s cooking, Rose Rita? I haven’t seen you for days. You look all done in.”
Rose Rita shrugged. “I’m okay. I came over to ask about Lewis. I haven’t heard from him in a while.”
Jonathan stroked his beard. “Hardly anyone has,” he muttered. “He’s been grouchy and cranky and snappy lately. In fact, if those three were all members of the Seven Dwarfs, Lewis could be any one of them!”
“Is he doing okay?”
They walked along side by side. “He’s turned into a hermit,” said Jonathan slowly. “He comes out of his room for meals, but except for that, he hardly says three words a day to me. I think he’s still really worried about that stone out in Richardson’s Woods, and about the whistle he found and then lost.”
“He thinks he caused a couple of the Scouts to get sick,” explained Rose Rita. She rapidly filled him in on what had happened to Billy and Stan as they walked toward town.
When she finished, Jonathan looked serious. “Thank you for telling me the whole story. Florence and I have talked about Billy and Stan, of course. But I’ve never heard of a magic whistle that could summon up an illness, and neither has she. Our feeling is that it’s probably just a coincidence that the two of them got sick. They pal around together, and if one of them caught some kind of
germ, the other probably would get it too. I don’t know. This doesn’t seem like magic, but that’s something that Florence and I will keep in mind. Still, it’s something that Lewis would worry about, all right. It’s just like him to take something like this to heart,” he observed.
“Then you don’t think the whistle had anything to do with Billy and Stan getting sick?”
Jonathan answered her with quiet assurance: “Strolling along here in broad daylight, no. But then, I’m a fuddy-duddy grown-up, and if I were Lewis’s age, and half afraid of my own shadow, or if it were a dark, dark night—well, that might be another story! Do you remember a few years ago when there was that polio scare?”
Rose Rita did. It was the year she was eight. A kid came down with a case of polio, and everyone in New Zebedee had panicked. The Athletic Field had closed, and lots of families had left town. Fortunately, the victim had not had a serious case, and he had almost completely recovered, and happily Dr. Jonas Salk had come up with a vaccination that kept people from getting polio these days. Still Rose Rita recalled how frightened and worried her mother had been. “I remember all about it,” she told Jonathan.
“Well, Lewis found an old newspaper with that story in it the year he came to live with me,” Jonathan went on. “My gosh, how that boy fretted! Every little ache or itch or tickle meant he was coming down with polio, and he actually hid from me one day to keep me from catching it! Lewis has what you might call an overdeveloped organ of guilt. That’s one reason I’d like Father Foley to ease up on him a little. Lewis gets himself into a stew over every little thing, and he’s such a worrier that the slightest little problem sometimes flummoxes him. And then something very serious comes along and that just about pushes him over the edge. I’m glad he has a friend like you, Rose Rita.”
The Whistle, the Grave, and the Ghost Page 8
