The Sign of the Sinister Sorcerer

by Brad Strickland

  The second that happened, something snapped, and Lewis felt that he was back in his body again, with proper control. “What did you do to him?” Lewis asked.

  The man stared at him in evident amusement. “Do you think your little friend I have somehow enchanted?” he asked in his accented English. “That I perhaps have him in some way hypnotized? No!” He laughed, an ugly sound like a rusty hinge. “What did I do to him? Why, you stupid fool, I made him!” He twitched the wand, and Hal staggered to his side in a dreadful loose-limbed shuffle, his head lolling loose on his neck.

  “He is merely a puppet,” the man explained. “Nothing more than a hollow shell filled with a little magic, to allow me to roam and spy, listening with his ears, looking through his eyes. And now I need him no longer, so—”

  He pointed the wand at Hal, and zigzag streaks of green-white power struck out of Hal’s body like miniature lightning bolts being attracted by the pencil eraser. Hal jittered and twitched and jerked.

  And then he began to fall apart.

  Lewis yelped in terror. Hal’s left ear crumbled and flaked away, and his hair puffed into dust. His eyes shriveled, leaving two dark holes in his head. Cracks appeared all over his skin, and his flesh turned the sick gray-brown color of brittle oak leaves in autumn.

  With a crackling sigh, the boy fell apart in a poof of dust that pattered down onto the hardwood floor. Hal was gone. Nothing was left of him but a settling pile of horribly crisp flakes.

  “Now,” said the man, “allow me to introduce myself. I am Adolfus Schlectesherz, and if you do not help me find what I must have, my fine young man, I will make you what Hal Everit now is! Dust!”

  CHAPTER 11

  “ROSE RITA! WHAT HAPPENED?”

  Rose Rita groaned and opened her eyes. Everything was still dark—but then she realized that night had fallen. Mrs. Zimmermann was bending over her.

  “I—he—they’re in the house!” she wailed.

  “Who?

  “Lewis and that Mr. Whatzis, Schlectesherz! He’s Hal Everit!”

  “Come with me.” Mrs. Zimmermann seized her wrist, and as if power were flowing into her, Rose Rita felt better. She got to her feet and ran to Mrs. Zimmermann’s house. Inside, Mrs. Zimmermann picked up the phone. “First things first,” she said firmly, dialing a number. A second later, she said into the receiver, “Hello, Mrs. Pottinger! This is Florence Zimmermann. Rose Rita was helping me with a few things today, and before we knew it, it was dark! Yes, time does fly. It’s so late, I’d like to let Rose Rita spend the night here instead of sending her home. I just didn’t want you to worry. No, no trouble at all. I have extra nightgowns and a new toothbrush she can use—yes, thank you! I’ll send her back tomorrow!” She hung up.

  Rose Rita had practically been dancing in impatience. “We’ve got to go! Now! He may be doing something terrible!”

  “He may indeed,” said Mrs. Zimmermann. “But we are not going to be of any help if we go rushing in without knowing what we’re doing. Tell me everything, Rose Rita! Quickly!”

  Rose Rita spilled it all, including the anagram she had made of Hal Everit’s name. “You said he would have to play fair,” she gasped.

  Mrs. Zimmermann’s expression was grim. “Yes, and that is just the kind of smart-aleck clue that a man like Schlectesherz would leave! But I don’t see how he could manage to make himself young! That is very powerful magic indeed, and it should be far beyond someone who couldn’t even earn a wand.”

  “What is he after?” asked Rose Rita.

  “Only the senior project that he and Jonathan magically created together all those years ago. A magician’s first magically-made artifact binds and locks his power. If it’s something made by two people, then it holds magic from both of them. If one of them unmakes the artifact alone, then he or she becomes twice as powerful.”

  “Then—then Lewis’s uncle might have been—” Rose Rita broke off with a sob.

  “Murdered? Not by Schlectesherz. If one of the creators of a magical item is killed by the other, then that item not only loses all of its power, but it drains that of the murderer. And just breaking the item won’t work either. No, before he disposed of Jonathan, old Droopy Drawers would first have to go through the complicated magical process of unmaking their project to gain all of Jonathan’s power. That’s what the evil-hearted Schlectesherz is after—power!”

  “Lewis is in there with him, all alone! We have to help him!”

  “So we do. Come on!”

  Mrs. Zimmermann grabbed her umbrella, and she and Rose Rita marched back across the lawn. The Barnavelt house stood completely dark, but when Rose Rita looked closely, she saw an occasional small sliver of yellow light beneath a door here or beside a window sash there. Something was blocking the light that should have streamed from the windows. It looked as if some giant had poured India ink down the chimney of the house, filling every room to the top.

  Mrs. Zimmermann murmured a spell and swept her wand through the air. Rose Rita bit her lip. Suddenly revealed, and creeping over every inch of the house, were what looked like snakes, glowing green misty vipers that writhed and crawled over and under one another.

  “The Serpent Lock,” growled Mrs. Zimmermann. “No wonder you got knocked off the porch! That’s a strong protective spell. I don’t know how someone like Schlectesherz could have pulled it off.”

  “Maybe—maybe he used your magic,” said Rose Rita, and she haltingly told about the spell Hal had persuaded her and Lewis to try.

  “That’s it,” said Mrs. Zimmermann grimly. “He could never have broken through my magic from outside—but once inside its field of power, he could change and alter it, and that’s just what he’s done! He’s turned my own magic against us! Step back. I’m going to try something.”

  Pointing her wand at the front door, she said something else. Rose Rita saw a purple beam of light stream out and strike the writhing mass of vaporous snakes where the front door should be. The creatures squirmed away from the surging beam, leaving a growing oval that soon revealed the whole door. “I thought there might be just enough of my own touch left in the spell to let me do that. Come on,” said Mrs. Zimmermann. “We should be able to get in now. Don’t touch the walls! And don’t look into their horrible little red beady eyes!”

  Breathing fast, Rose Rita followed her. Mrs. Zimmermann reached out gingerly, grasped the doorknob, and opened the door. “Inside, quick!”

  They rushed through, and Mrs. Zimmermann quietly closed the door behind her. “Now,” she whispered, “not a word until I get some sense of what is going on.”

  Just then Rose Rita heard muffled voices from somewhere toward the back of the house. She shot Mrs. Zimmermann an inquiring glance, but the witch shook her head and formed the word wait on her lips without actually making a sound.

  Rose Rita balled her hands into fists. She couldn’t stand much of this! She wanted to—to do something!

  Mrs. Zimmermann grabbed her arm above the elbow and pulled her into the darkened parlor. She silently swung the door almost closed and stood so that both she and Rose Rita could look out. Into Rose Rita’s ear she whispered, “Wait. Can’t use my magic because he’s changed it. Might kill us if I tried. Be quiet and wait.”

  Rose Rita felt sick. Lewis came stumbling in with a thin man close behind him, a man wearing a faded monk’s robe. He held a wand in his hand, a thin, yellow, shimmering wand, and it was pointed at Lewis’s back. “Where?” the man asked in a harsh voice.

  A shuddering Lewis pointed toward the coat stand. “That?” growled the man. He flicked his wand and snapped, “Reveal!”

  Green light shimmered on the coat stand for a moment, and then it faded away. “Nothing!” the man said. “Lie to me, will you?”

  “No,” gasped Lewis. “I swear! Up until Uncle Jonathan vanished, it showed p-pictures of strange lands and even alien p-planets! It’s the only magic mirror in the house that I know about, but now it’s all tarnished and dark!”

  The ma
n stared at the mirror in a kind of baffled rage. “Potbelly Barnavelt couldn’t be that good! That he would be smart enough to hide the invaluable mirror in plain sight, so that my puppet never took a close look at it, I might believe. But he can’t have the power to disguise the mirror against my spell of revelation! I put something of myself into it too, you know!”

  “I d-don’t know,” insisted poor Lewis, and the agony in his voice made Rose Rita’s heart hurt. “He never told me how it was made!”

  “I will disperse any of your uncle’s magic that might linger on it. Then we will see.”

  “There isn’t any magic!” wailed Lewis. “It’s all gone!”

  The man stared at him. Then he did an odd thing. With his free left hand, he began to sweep his fingers through the air, as though trying to catch invisible cobwebs. “Can it be? How can it be? I did not kill him! His wand is unbroken! Or is it?” With a furious jerk, he flung the front door open and hissed some strange words out into the darkness. “We shall know in a moment.” He chuckled grimly. “The people in this stupid little town are such fools! Do you know that if the school had ever checked to find just where Hal Everit lived, the address would have been a tomb in the cemetery? Ah—here it comes!” He held out his hand, and with a solid smack something flew in through the doorway and into his palm.

  He held it out before him. “No,” he said. “Not broken.”

  Rose Rita heard Lewis gasp.

  The thing that had sailed in from the night was his uncle’s magic wand.

  CHAPTER 12

  “YOU WANT THIS?” ASKED Schlectesherz, teasing Lewis with the cane. He held it almost within reach, then sneeringly moved it away as Lewis tried to grab for it. “Take it!”

  “You don’t have any right to it!” said Lewis furiously. “It’s Uncle Jonathan’s!”

  “Yes,” derided the magician. “It is your uncle’s, the great lump, the fool who thinks magic should be used to amuse snot-nosed children. And of course you have no magic yourself. You must truly be a great weakling. He’s never taught you a thing!”

  “I don’t even want to learn to do magic!” Lewis said. “I’m—I’m—not—”

  “You’re not brave enough!” Schlectesherz closed the front door. “Not like me! I see what I want, and I take it. You will never have that kind of courage, never! You idiot, didn’t you realize that my pet puppet Hal waved my wand and caused that ball to hit you? That got you and your uncle out of the way, but not long enough! I sent Hal into your house, then and again after he made you fall on the stair, and that time he took the wand so that Barnavelt could not against me act if he suspected anything, but the puppet could not find what I sought!”

  “You’re nothing but—but a rotten thief!” said Lewis, feeling his face glowing hot with anger and frustration. “You’re no magician. You just steal what other people have!”

  “You think so? You say this is your uncle’s property?” The bearded man held the cane at the center and offered it to Lewis. “Very well. Here. Take this. Hold it. Your uncle will sense that, wherever he is. He will know that you have the wand—and that I have you! If he is somehow keeping a spell of concealment on this mirror, that will make him take it off!”

  Lewis held the cane. It felt dead and heavy in his hands. He couldn’t sense his uncle’s presence at all, and as badly as he wished he could do magic at the moment, he had no idea of how he could even try to wield the wand. He fought back frightened, angry sobs.

  Schlectesherz had backed cautiously away, his wand still leveled at Lewis’s chest. “Jonathan Barnavelt!” the man shouted. “If you can hear me, you know what I can do to your nephew! I can make him blind and mindless! I can shut him up in a tomb with scuttling flesh-eating spiders and hungry worms! I can freeze him like a statue so that he will for a thousand thousand years live but will be unable to move or make a sound or even breathe in all that time! I’ve learned so much since our master humiliated me! When in my homeland a mob tried to hang me, I lived by virtue of my magic! I have even won my own wand!”

  Lewis stood nervously grasping the cane almost as if it were a baseball bat. He thought he might take a swat at Schlectesherz—but the man was out of reach, and something told Lewis that if he made a false move, that yellow wand would freeze him again in a second. He thought furiously, Uncle Jonathan, if you can hear me, don’t do what he says! He won’t do anything to me as long as he can’t get what he wants!

  A long silence dragged on and on. “Tell him, boy,” the man said menacingly, moving his wand in threatening little circles. “Tell him to take his protective enchantment off the mirror right now, or else I promise you, you will think an agonizing death a good alternative to what I plan to do to you!”

  “Uncle Jonathan!” shouted Lewis. “Don’t do it! He can’t hurt me if he doesn’t have the mirror!”

  “You think not, eh? You foolish boy, I warned you!” Schlectesherz drew his arm back, his hand raised almost to shoulder height, pointing the wand—it seemed to flicker, now just a yellow pencil, now a long yellowish magical scepter—and at that moment the mirror in the coatrack suddenly began to flash scarlet, as though a silent thunderstorm raged in its depths.

  “Ah!” shouted the magician, taking a step back. “You have made a wise choice, Jonathan Barnavelt!”

  Rays of crimson light spiked out of the mirror, peppering the hallway walls with spots of bloody, glowing scarlet. The entire surface glittered with flashes of red. The light went out, came back, went out, and came back—three times!

  “What?” roared Schlectesherz. “No, impossible! There is no three! There are only two! The old man I killed in a magic duel! You lie!”

  And then from the parlor door something white streaked through the air. It smacked hard into the mirror and with a loud glassy crack! the mirror shattered, half of it falling out of the frame and tinkling as it fell. The white thing thudded to the floor, unbroken, and rolled to Lewis’s feet. He recognized it at once. Someone had thrown the ceramic knickknack in the shape of a baseball with the words “Souvenir of Tiger Stadium” written on it in red script. Lewis remembered that it had been on a shelf above the TV set.

  The parlor door opened all the way, and Mrs. Zimmermann stepped out. She grasped her tall wand with the purple star flaming at its tip, and she held it as if it were a lance, its business end pointed at the dumbfounded evil sorcerer. “That will be enough!” she said. “Adolfus Schlectesherz, I have broken your mirror and have taken your powers!”

  “You interfering old witch! I’ll show you my powers!” Schlectesherz raised his wand—

  And with a crack, Lewis swept his uncle’s cane in a slashing arc, swinging it as if it were an axe. He couldn’t use it to do magic—but he could use it to break something as small as a pencil!

  A silent explosion of green light flooded the hall. The evil magician shrieked, “No!” He lifted his wand, his mouth open in shock, and he stared at what he held: a broken-off yellow pencil, three or four inches of it missing.

  The green light spurted from the broken end and immediately condensed like a fog, forming a swirling whirlpool in midair. At the center of it, a white oval of light appeared and swelled in an instant to an irregular, pulsing, six-foot-tall glimmer. A moment later, a familiar, rumpled figure came barrel-rolling out of it. Uncle Jonathan yelled, “My wand, Lewis!”

  A cursing Schlectesherz threw down the stub of his wand and raised his hands, fingers crooked like talons, and snarled a magic spell. He was half a heartbeat too slow. Uncle Jonathan, clutching his own wand, spoke a quick charm and the snaky green bursts of light from the evil magician’s fingers simply evaporated before they touched him. “You’ve lost your little wand,” said Uncle Jonathan. “Its power to do more mischief has ended, but now all the spells you created with it are frozen in time and turning against you. You know what that means—you have to pay for all the evil your spells have caused. And to begin with, you have to be taken to the prison you created for me!”

  “No,” said
Schlectesherz, wringing his hands together as though Uncle Jonathan’s spell had made them ache. “I beat that imbecile Marville, and I’ll beat you, if I have to batter you senseless with your own cane! Marville was always Number One in our group, you Number Two, and I Number Three, the least of them—but I shall be greatest! You pompous fat windbag, I’ll—”

  “You will what, Adolfus?”

  Lewis gasped at the sound of the level, calm voice. Standing in front of the whirling pool of light was a man dressed in the flowing maroon robe of a member of the Golden Circle. He raised his long-fingered hands and lowered the hood that hid his face. It was the side-whiskered Dr. Marville, much as he had looked in the photo, except now his whole being seemed filled with a clear, strong light. “You did not defeat me, Number Three,” the apparition said tranquilly. “You merely killed me, and that is not the same thing. Now come! I order you to follow me!” He stepped back into the pool of light, beckoning.

  “No!” whined Schlectesherz, writhing and squirming, sweat dripping from his face. “No, you can’t make me go!”

  But it seemed he could. Leaning desperately backward, Schlectesherz resisted with all his might. The effort was useless. A horrified Lewis saw that his body, like that of Hal Everit, was dissolving, unraveling into roiling, whipping streamers of muddy gray smoke. They went swirling and twisting into the whirlpool of light, and the magician became less and less substantial, fading away to transparency. He screamed and twitched and shrieked, and suddenly even the sound was being pulled away, like the sound of a distant retreating train whistle late at night. The spiral of light lost its sickly green color, became clear and white, pulsed strongly, and then Schlectesherz simply wasn’t there any longer.

  The light blinked out.

  Lewis stood trembling and gasping, not completely sure of what had just happened, or whether it was over yet.

  “Everyone okay?” his uncle asked, running a hand through his rumpled red hair. “Florence, Rose Rita, glad you could make it. What day is it?”