The Sign of the Sinister Sorcerer

by Brad Strickland

  Beneath the picture, the caption read: “Three members of the Order of the Golden Circle, Edinburgh, ca. 1888. This very active occult society investigated magic, pursued its control, and researched enchantments. Members strictly adhered to the Rule of Three, forming teams of three members each for their investigations. Among its membership it included such luminaries as William, Lord Litton; accomplished barrister Sir Michael Moreland; and the poet and essayist Aubrey St. John, who reportedly went permanently and irremediably mad at the age of twenty-nine as a result of his studies of forbidden lore.”

  The Rule of Three.

  There it was again. Lewis left his uncle’s room, turning out the light on the way, and padded downstairs in his bare feet, turning on lights all the way through the first floor. “Uncle Jonathan?”

  He strongly suspected, though, that his uncle had gone out somewhere. He had heard the creak of the stair and the closing of the door. Lewis opened the front door, stepped out onto the porch and into the warm, dark night, and looked off to the side. Mrs. Zimmermann’s kitchen light glowed warmly yellow, and he caught a glimpse of her moving past the window. Lewis had been holding his breath. Now he let it out in a deep sigh of relief. He had no doubt that his uncle had gone over to consult with Mrs. Zimmermann.

  And if that was so, everything would be all right. Lewis trusted both of them absolutely. Whatever strange thing was going on with floating, hooded characters in the shadows, with glowing orange letters, with the Rule of Three, they could take care of it.

  Things couldn’t get too bad.

  Lewis went back to bed, and after half an hour or so, he heard the front door open and close again, and then the heavy tread of his uncle on the stair. The same loose stair creaked—it was the sixth one down from the top, and Uncle Jonathan was always planning to nail it firmly down “one day soon.” A minute later, Lewis’s bedroom door opened softly. Lying on his side in the bed, his eyes nearly shut, Lewis saw the familiar silhouette of his uncle outlined in the hall light. “Sleep tight,” Uncle Jonathan said softly before shutting the door again.

  Lewis relaxed. Some kids his age might resent having a parent or guardian check on them while they slept, but Lewis felt much more secure knowing that Uncle Jonathan had taken the time to glance in. He fell asleep not long after that and slept deeply and well.

  The next couple of days passed uneventfully enough. By the time Friday rolled around, Lewis’s black eyes had faded to a mottled purple and green color and the swelling was gone. Uncle Jonathan gave Lewis his weekly allowance of five dollars, in the big round silver dollars that Lewis loved because they were so heavy and solid they made him feel as though he had a ton of money. Lewis dutifully dropped one in his bank. He had started a savings account a couple of years before, and he saved a dollar a week. Whenever he had accumulated ten dollars, Uncle Jonathan would take him to the bank and he would deposit them to his growing fortune. He already had nearly $120.

  “I think I’ll go see a movie,” said Lewis. “Want to go?”

  “What’s playing?” asked Uncle Jonathan.

  Lewis got the newspaper to make sure, then said, “Conquest of Space.”

  “I’ll pass,” his uncle said with a chuckle. “I can never understand all that science-fiction foofaraw. Why not see if Rose Rita wants to go with you?”

  “I’ll call her.”

  Rose Rita said she was bored and immediately agreed to see the movie with Lewis, Dutch treat. He walked over to her house and they went on down the hill into town. Rose Rita bought her ticket, and then Lewis reached into his pocket for his four silver dollars. He must have made a horrific face, because Rose Rita said, “Hey, what’s the matter?”

  Lewis pulled his pocket inside out. It had a frayed hole in it, and it was empty. “I lost my allowance!” he wailed.

  “Hey, come on, it’s not that bad. We’ll backtrack and find it.” Rose Rita tucked her ticket into her pocket, and they started back.

  “Silver dollars?” asked Rose Rita.

  “Yes,” said Lewis. “Four of them.”

  “They should be easy to spot.”

  They walked along slowly, gazes glued to the ground. Lewis reasoned, “They must have fallen out when we were on the grass, because I would have heard them if they’d hit the pavement.”

  That narrowed things down to the lawns in front of Lewis’s and Rose Rita’s houses, the narrow strip of grass between the street and the sidewalk where Lewis had crossed first High Street and then Mansion, and the street corner at the end of Mansion Street. A couple of times Lewis was fooled, once by a smashed-flat bottle cap glinting in the sun and once by a discarded gum wrapper half-hidden in long grass.

  But they didn’t find even one of the missing silver dollars. Lewis trudged back into his house and looked in all the rooms he’d passed through. Uncle Jonathan saw him and asked what was up, and when Lewis explained, his uncle inspected his torn jeans pocket and clucked his tongue. “Sorry about that, Lewis! I guess it’s time to retire those pants of yours to the rag bag. Well, I’ll tell you what: So you won’t miss your movie, I’ll advance you two dollars on next week’s allowance. Go put on some intact jeans so you won’t lose these, and then go see your sci-fi adventure.” Uncle Jonathan handed Lewis two dollar bills.

  Lewis changed his jeans, and then he and Rose Rita jogged back down to the theater. They had missed the coming attractions and the newsreel, but they got there in time to see a Chilly Willy cartoon and the feature.

  Lewis scrunched down deep in the theater seat and barely paid attention to the show. He kept thinking that losing his allowance was the second bad thing that had happened to him in just that week.

  And he couldn’t help wondering—what was coming next?

  CHAPTER 5

  AS THEY CAME OUT of the movie, Lewis saw Hal Everit walking along the sidewalk, just poking along with his hands in his pockets. Rose Rita called out his name. Hal looked back at them, hesitated, and then sheepishly came over. “Hi,” he said tentatively. “Uh, I’m glad you didn’t get hurt too bad, Lewis.”

  “I really got knocked for a loop,” said Lewis flatly. “But I’m okay.”

  “I—look, I’m sorry that I ran away,” muttered Hal. “I thought I’d killed you! I mean, I was pretending I was doing magic, and then you just fell off the bleachers! It—it scared me. I’m sorry.”

  “You didn’t cause it,” said Rose Rita. “It was an accident.”

  “We told you magic doesn’t really work,” Lewis reminded him. “If it did, I’d ask my uncle to cure these by magic!”

  “Two black eyes, huh?” asked Hal. “I had a couple of black eyes once.”

  “What happened to you?” asked Rose Rita.

  “I fell off a scaffold,” replied Hal, and something in his tone seemed very odd, very cold, to Lewis. It was as if he blamed someone for his fall. “But I was okay. I had a couple of tricks up my sleeve that saved me.”

  Lewis jingled the fifty cents in his pocket. “Rose Rita and I were going to stop at the drugstore for a soda,” he said.

  Hal’s face was expressionless for a second, and then he smiled. “I’ve got a little money. Mind if I tag along?”

  “The more the merrier,” said Rose Rita.

  “Thanks. Really, Lewis, I’m glad you didn’t get hurt worse. I felt like I’d called lightning down from the heavens to strike you!”

  “Well, I don’t blame you, and it wasn’t as bad as lightning,” conceded Lewis, hoping that Hal wouldn’t continue to apologize over and over.

  They went into Heemsoth’s Rexall Drug Store and took seats at a round table. The chairs were made of fussy twisted steel rods painted white, with puffy red leather seats that whooshed when you sat on the cushions, and the table had a matching red Formica top. Lewis ordered a vanilla ice-cream soda, Rose Rita a chocolate malt, and Hal produced enough dimes from his pocket to buy himself a root beer float. “Did your accident scare your uncle?” asked Hal.

  Lewis, sipping his soda through two stra
ws, nodded. “Just a little,” he said. “I think it upset him at first when Rose Rita called him and told him I’d been bopped on the head, but he saw it wasn’t serious.”

  Hal nodded and then asked, “Hey, I’ve been wondering. Do you know how much those magic kits and stuff you were talking about might cost?”

  Neither Lewis nor Rose Rita knew. But Lewis said, “You can check them out if you want—the museum is just down the street. But even if you don’t have the money to buy a kit, there are lots of magic tricks that don’t cost anything. You can get them out of books. Rose Rita and I learned how to do some for a talent show once. There’s a cut and restored rope trick that’s really easy. That’s when you take a piece of rope, let someone use scissors to cut it in half, and then magically put the rope back together without a knot.”

  “How do you do that?” asked Hal.

  Rose Rita winked. “It’s a trick,” she said. “But Lewis is right. There are card tricks, and rubber band tricks, and mind-reading tricks, all for free.”

  “How do you do a mind-reading trick?”

  Rose Rita gave Lewis a calculating smile. “You remember enough?” she asked.

  Lewis chuckled. “I think so.”

  “Let’s show him.”

  Lewis turned his back to them. “All right. Tell Hal to choose something.”

  Lewis heard Rose Rita whispering briefly to Hal. Then there was a pause, while Hal must have been pondering on what item to choose. Hal whispered his decision back to Rose Rita in a voice far too faint for Lewis to hear him. Finally, Rose Rita said, “Lewis, Hal is thinking of something special. It’s here in the drugstore. Let’s see if you can guess what it is. Don’t miss!”

  Lewis turned slowly back around. “Mm,” he said, closing his eyes. “I must get in tune with the spirits!”

  “Collect yourself. Ready now?” responded Rose Rita.

  Lewis opened his eyes and glanced off to his left. “I’ll bet he chose that great big red glass of strawberry pop,” he said, pointing to a big fake iced drink on the wall above the soda counter.

  “How’d you do that?” demanded Hal, his jaw hanging open.

  Lewis laughed. “It’s a code,” he explained. “First Rose Rita told me the target was in the drugstore, so I listened close to her next sentence. When she said, ‘Let’s see if you can guess what it is,’ her first word told me to look to my left, because ‘let’s’ and ‘left’ start with the same two letters. If you’d chosen something on the other side, she would have said, ‘Right, try to guess now.’ If it had been in the center, she would have said, ‘Send your thoughts out and guess.’ Send, center, see? Then when she said ‘Don’t miss,’ the second word told me to look in the middle. If she’d said ‘Don’t lose it,’ the second word would have told me to look low, and ‘Don’t hide your guess’ would mean to look high.”

  “Because middle and miss both start with M-I,” Hal said, nodding.

  Rose Rita chuckled. “Then I said ‘Collect yourself. Ready now?’ Lewis knew that ‘collect’ meant the color of the target was coming. And then I simply told him what it was, but you didn’t notice. Collect, color, ready, red, you see? Lewis just looked to the left for something in the middle of the wall, colored red. The big glass of strawberry pop. Except it’s not really glass, it’s plastic, of course.”

  Hal blinked. “That is really pretty smart! You had me fooled, kids,” he said.

  Lewis shook his head modestly. “There isn’t much to it when you know the secret and practice it. If you want to borrow a book on conjuring tricks, I have one that Rose Rita and I used when we did our talent-show act.”

  “That would be great,” said Hal.

  He walked back with them and Lewis went up to his room and found the book. Hal took it, shyly thanked Lewis, and set off down the street with the book open, reading as he walked. “I hope he doesn’t wander out into traffic,” said Rose Rita.

  “He’ll be okay,” said Lewis.

  Then came Saturday morning. Lewis woke up feeling better than he had since Monday. His headache was completely gone, his eyes looked better, and all in all, Lewis was ready to take Rose Rita up on some of her suggestions. Maybe they could ride their bikes around town, down to the waterworks and back, or maybe they could go for one of Rose Rita’s hikes, exploring places they’d never really looked at closely. As he came out of his room, Lewis heard Mrs. Zimmermann’s voice downstairs and smelled delicious aromas. That meant his breakfast was going to be more exciting than his usual bowl of Cheerios.

  Lewis took the back stairs, which came out next to the kitchen, but somehow he stumbled on the third step from the bottom, flailed for his balance, and took a giant plunging step all the way to the floor. Pain shot through his leg, and he yelped.

  “What in the world was that crash?” Mrs. Zimmermann appeared in the kitchen doorway, a spatula in her hand and a look of surprise on her face. “Lewis! Not again!”

  Uncle Jonathan pushed past her. “Did you fall?”

  Lewis sat at the bottom of the stair, clutching his left ankle and groaning. “I—ouch!—took a bad step!”

  And so instead of having a tasty breakfast, Lewis wound up being driven to the emergency room in the hospital, where the nurses summoned Dr. Humphries as they prepared to X-ray his ankle. Lewis had to lie on a cold metal table first on his back, then on his right side, and then on his left side, while the nurses took the X-rays. Then he had to sit for about an hour while they were developed. Mrs. Zimmermann and Uncle Jonathan at least were there to keep him company.

  At last Dr. Humphries came back into the room with the pictures. He hung them up on a light board. They looked like negatives, dark gray with the bones showing in misty white. The doctor said, “Well, Lewis, despite your best efforts, you did not fracture your ankle. You’ve got edema, which is our fancy medical term for swelling, and you won’t be running any sprints for a few days. I’ll wrap it in an elastic bandage. I think it would be better if you hobbled about with a crutch for a few days too, like Tiny Tim. Jonathan, keep ice on it over the weekend and if the swelling hasn’t gone down a lot by Monday, bring Lewis to my office. Lewis, you stop trying to crack yourself up! But I think you’ll be on the mend in a day or two.”

  Then they had to go to the drugstore to find a crutch short enough for Lewis to use, and what with one thing and another, they didn’t get back to the house until after noon. Uncle Jonathan helped Lewis out of the garage, and they went to the back door of the house, which they had left standing wide open in their haste. In the kitchen, Lewis looked sadly at the big pan of congealed scrambled eggs on the stove and the cold muffins in their tin. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Nothing to be sorry about!” boomed Uncle Jonathan. “But you’re going to have to be a little more careful, Lewis. It won’t be much of a summer vacation for you if you go on getting bumped and banged around.”

  “It’s all over now,” said Lewis, settling into a chair.

  Mrs. Zimmermann looked at him strangely. “What do you mean?”

  “That was the third thing,” explained Lewis. “The Curse of Three, remember? I got clocked by a foul ball, I lost my allowance, and now I’ve sprained my ankle. Bad things come in threes, and this is the last one.”

  Mrs. Zimmermann touched her chin with her forefinger. “Hmm. And just where, pray tell, did you learn of that particular meaning of the Rule of Three?” She glanced sharply at Uncle Jonathan.

  He threw up his hands. “Don’t glare at me like that, Haggy Face! I swear I never once mentioned anything about that silly superstition to Lewis!”

  “No, I read it in an old book,” said Lewis. “The book called it the Curse of Three. Rose Rita says it’s just nonsense, but I’ve had a feeling something bad was going to happen.”

  Mrs. Zimmermann sniffed. “Lewis, I think Rose Rita is closer to being right than you are. Yes, there’s an old folk belief that bad things come along in packages of three. However, bear this in mind: If a voodoo priest on the island of Haiti curses
a man, that man will grow ill and die! Yes, he absolutely will. However, if the same voodoo priest curses the very same man, but doesn’t let his victim know he’s cursed, nothing happens! Do you see what that means?”

  Lewis said slowly, “You mean that if someone just thinks three bad things in a row are going happen, he sort of makes them happen?”

  Uncle Jonathan said, “Yes, or he makes too much out of small coincidental accidents that normally he’d just ignore. Yesterday you lost four silver dollars. Well, that’s irritating, to be sure, and I know you miss the clinking of your weekly haul, but it was really no big deal, was it?”

  Lewis shook his head. After all, he had been able to see the movie and enjoy a treat with Rose Rita and Hal. “But this really hurts!” he complained.

  “I’m sure it does,” said Mrs. Zimmermann. “And I’m truly sorry you injured yourself. But you were running down the stairs, weren’t you?”

  Lewis nodded sheepishly. “Because I smelled breakfast.”

  “Ah,” said Uncle Jonathan. “It’s your fault, Florence! You incited my nephew to an accident by felonious aroma! Speaking of which, let’s get rid of these cold eggs and make us some breakfast, or lunch, or brunch, or lunfast, or something. I could eat a horse with the hooves and the saddle!”

  “You’re always hungry,” said Mrs. Zimmermann, but she dumped the eggs, rolled up her purple sleeves, and went to work. In half an hour, they had an enormous egg and ham omelet to split, along with the warmed-over muffins (which were not bad at all) and some hash-browned potatoes. Lewis was as hungry as his uncle, and the two of them ate eagerly.

  Mrs. Zimmermann had her usual small portion and sat sipping her coffee while the other two finished off the feast. “All right,” she said. “As you know, I very rarely do things like this, because you don’t squander good magic on trivial tasks, but after today’s excitement, I am certainly in no mood to wash dishes. So—” She reached behind her chair and produced her old umbrella, which had a handle in the shape of a gryphon’s talon gripping a small crystal ball. She stood back, aimed the umbrella at the table, and spoke a quick rhyme in some musical language that might have been Welsh.