“Give it back to Mr. Hardwick,” Lewis told her.
Rose Rita bit her lip. She looked from Lewis to the door and then she shook her head. “The door locked behind us. I’d have to knock. He might get mad.”
“Why would he get mad?” Lewis asked.
Rose Rita gave him a pained look. “Because he might think I started to swipe it and then lost my nerve. This looks old—it must be valuable.”
Lewis took a deep breath. “Maybe we can sneak it back in when we return the books. There’s tons of stuff on those shelves. Mr. Hardwick probably won’t miss one little scroll for a week or so.”
“What if he does?” moaned Rose Rita. “Lewis, this isn’t like those books you have. This scroll has some kind of real magic about it. I don’t like it.”
Lewis nodded unhappily. He didn’t like real magic either. Not unless his uncle or Mrs. Zimmermann was firmly in control of it. Real magic could be unpredictable and deadly. “What’s wrong?” Lewis asked, noticing Rose Rita staring at her right index finger.
“This is where I cut myself,” Rose Rita said, holding her finger up so he could see it. There was a tiny curved white mark on it, like a quarter moon with its points facing downward.
Lewis’s flesh crawled. He hated cuts and puncture wounds, and he had a morbid fear of getting a deadly infection or tetanus from one. He asked, “Does it hurt?”
Rose Rita shook her head. “It feels sort of cold. Anyway, it isn’t bleeding.” She rubbed the scar with her thumb and made a face. “And it doesn’t solve my problem with this scroll.”
Lewis thought for a minute. Now that they were safely outside, he began to wonder if they’d really seen what they thought they had. Maybe the spider had just been hiding inside the scroll and had dropped out. Maybe the powder had been just something that fizzed when it got wet, like Bromo-Seltzer. Still, Lewis knew you should never take chances where magic might be concerned. “Look,” he said, “why don’t you let Mrs. Zimmermann have a look at the scroll? She’d probably know what to do with it.”
“And have her think I was poking my nose in where it didn’t belong?” asked Rose Rita fiercely. “Mrs. Zimmermann is my best grown-up friend. She’d think I was awful if I told her what I did.”
With a sigh Lewis said, “I guess I understand. Maybe you can just put it away until next weekend. We’ll try to sneak it back in then. Okay?”
“Okay,” Rose Rita said at last. “I don’t like it, but I can’t think of anything else. Maybe Mr. Hardwick won’t miss it. But I still feel like a thief.”
“You’re not stealing it,” Lewis pointed out. “You’re just borrowing it for a while. And you’re not even going to read it.”
“You can say that again,” Rose Rita told him.
* * *
They stopped at Rose Rita’s house, and she dashed inside for a few minutes. When she came out, she said, “I hid it in my room. I don’t even want to think about it until we can smuggle it back into the museum. Come on. Let’s go to your house and try to concentrate on getting our act ready.”
At 100 High Street, Lewis and Rose Rita sat at the study table and leafed through the books. They found some pretty good tricks. Finally they agreed that four of them might be easy enough to work out. One was a way to produce a live rabbit or dove from a crumpled-up sheet of newspaper. Another was a trick that would let Lewis seem to levitate Rose Rita. Covered with a sheet, she would appear to rise and float in the air. Actually, she would be holding a pair of fake legs and feet stretched out in front of her. If they could find a couple of big crates or cardboard boxes, there was another neat trick that would let Rose Rita vanish from one and appear in the other. Finally, with the help of a mirror, a chair, and a sword, they could make Rose Rita’s head appear to hover in midair, unattached to her body.
“Can we get all that stuff?” Rose Rita asked.
“I think so,” said Lewis. “I don’t know about rabbits or doves, but some of the kids live on farms. Maybe I could borrow a baby chick or duckling. That should work just as well. We can make the fake legs from some of your old jeans, some broomsticks, and an old pair of shoes. Uncle Jonathan can probably find us some big boxes. I know he’ll let us borrow his grandfather’s Civil War sword, and Mrs. Zimmermann has all kinds of mirrors in her house.” Lewis thought he might talk his uncle into getting him a special outfit too. A tuxedo, maybe, or perhaps some fancy Chinese or Indian robes. Or he could wear a turban and call himself Al-Majah, the Mystic Sheik. Rose Rita could wear a costume too. They discussed what would be best—maybe another tuxedo, or an Indian girl’s costume with harem pants. “We’ll need two pairs,” Rose Rita pointed out. “One for me, one for the fake legs.”
They worked everything out. By the time Rose Rita left, Lewis was feeling better. The shock of the spider’s appearance had worn off, the two of them had solved the problem of the talent show, and things were looking up. Or so he thought.
* * *
When Rose Rita headed home, she walked slowly and thoughtfully. She kept rubbing her thumb over the white scar on her finger. It felt cold and numb. The day was cold too, and though a bright sun shone, to Rose Rita it seemed as if a veil had fallen, dimming the clear blue sky, cooling the September sunlight. She had the strangest feeling of not being quite there, as if she were only dreaming about walking home. Her mood was dark also. Rose Rita hated junior high. The other girls talked about only one topic: boys, boys, boys. Some of them made fun of her for hanging out with Lewis, who was short, chunky, and no good at sports. Rose Rita knew that the other girls made catty remarks about her. Behind her back they called her “beanpole” or “four-eyes.”
It wasn’t fair. Just because she had been born with long bones, straight hair, and nearsighted eyes, the others acted as if she weren’t as human as they were. Sometimes Rose Rita felt all mixed up. The things she had cared about all her life—history and baseball and her friends—now seemed childish and unimportant. Other things, like having gorgeous hair and wearing fabulous dresses, seemed more grown-up. Still, Rose. Rita thought the girls who spent all their time mooning over movie actors and singers and kids like Dave Shellenberger were drippy.
And as if she didn’t have enough on her mind already, the scroll waited in her room at the bottom of her sock drawer. She remembered the sharp pain of the paper cut and the eerie way the spider had come to life. Rose Rita had the uneasy feeling that Lewis was right. She should tell Mrs. Zimmermann about the scroll. Mrs. Zimmermann would understand—
Ugh! Rose Rita stopped dead in her tracks. She had walked into an invisible spiderweb, and it clung to her cheeks. Frantically, she brushed her face to get the sticky strands off. But she couldn’t feel anything. Not with her hand, at least.
Yet her mouth felt as if a web had been pulled across it, touching lightly and tickling. Rose Rita began to panic. What if it were some kind of magical web? What if it were connected in some way with the spider? “I won’t tell!” she vowed at last, and the feeling eased without quite going away.
Rose Rita hurried the rest of the way home, occasionally swiping at her face with the palm of a hand. She couldn’t rub away the sensation. It stayed with her into the evening. After dinner Rose Rita’s father, George Pottinger, liked to stretch out in an armchair and listen to a Detroit Tigers baseball game on the radio. Usually Rose Rita joined him, but on this Saturday night she just dragged herself upstairs to her room.
Rose Rita went to bed early. She lay there feeling weary, but she couldn’t sleep. She heard the sounds of her mother and father getting ready for bed, and then the house was quiet. Lying there, Rose Rita felt like screaming. No one understood her. Her mom and dad were kind and well-meaning, but they didn’t remember what being young was like. They never gave her good answers to her questions. Mrs. Pottinger fussed and fretted, and Mr. Pottinger always began, “In my day we didn’t have that problem.”
Uncle Jonathan and Lewis were good friends, but they couldn’t know what growing up as an ordinary-looking, even plai
n girl was like. Mrs. Zimmermann always listened sympathetically, but her advice was “Be what you are.” That was the problem. Rose Rita wasn’t really sure what she was, or what she wanted to be. She began to feel sorry for herself. Tears stung her eyes.
Somehow she must have drifted to sleep at last. She had one of those weird dreams in which she knew she was dreaming. It seemed to Rose Rita that she could fly, and she found herself floating along high above New Zebedee. Below her the town spread out like a scale model of itself, from Wilder Park to the quiet neighborhoods to the north. The trees were red, yellow, and orange. Traffic crept along. It looked like an ordinary fall day. She sailed over the junior high and saw a bunch of girls she knew standing outside, laughing and talking. Mischievously, Rose Rita decided to show off her flying talent. She dropped lower and lower over the girls, thinking that it didn’t matter if she scared them. This was only a dream, after all, and nothing she did would really hurt them.
As she slipped lower, Rose Rita could hear the girls giggling and screeching and acting silly, the way they always did. A brown-haired girl named Sue Gottschalk said, “She gives me the creeps, that’s all. I think she looks like a long, tall bag of bones!”
“No,” said Lauren Muller. “She’s not a bone—she’s the dog!”
They all roared with laughter. Sue said, “That gives me a great idea. My pop’s promised me a puppy for my birthday. If it’s a girl, I’m going to name it Rose Rita!”
Rose Rita felt her face turn hot and red. They were talking about her! Rose Rita had always thought that some of the girls, such as Sue, were her friends. Now she wanted to shrivel up and die. She wanted to fly to the moon and never come back.
“No,” said a strange, breathy voice, a woman’s voice. “Running away is no good, not with your powers. Use your strength. Teach these unworthy ones a lesson.”
Rose Rita could not see anyone who might have spoken. Twirling slowly in the air, Rose Rita asked, “Who is that?”
“A friend.” Now Rose Rita could tell that the voice was in her mind, and not coming from outside. “Drop down, down, and take one of them. Take Sue. That will show them!”
Rose Rita grinned. Yes, that would show them! She’d snatch Sue right off the ground and scare the daylights out of her. Rose Rita began to drop lower, lower, slowly, and then she stretched out her long, shiny, hairy arms—
Eight of them!
Rose Rita looked down at herself and screamed in terror. She wasn’t flying—she was dangling from a spiderweb. Her body had become a huge bloated thing, hairy and blue-black and round as a ball. She opened her mouth to scream, and she found she could make only a hissing noise. Thick green venom drooled out of her mouth.
She had become a giant spider!
CHAPTER FOUR
Rose Rita woke up panting and thrashing. She threw her covers off and jumped out of bed. She turned on the light. Her familiar room looked the same. Her goldfish swam in their tank; the high, black bureau stood against the wall; her math homework lay spread out on her desk. And she was her normal, tall, skinny self. Rose Rita was a sensible girl who did not believe in letting something as unreal as a dream bother her. Still, just remembering the nightmare made her shudder with revulsion. Barefooted, she went to the bathroom and got a drink of water. When she returned to her bedroom, she looked at her bedside clock. It was past two in the morning.
“I should be sleepy,” Rose Rita muttered. “But now I’m wide awake.” She straightened out her sheets and cover. Should she read for a little while and see if that made her sleepy? She had just started a novel by C. S. Forrester about a brave naval captain back in the days of the Napoleonic wars. Rose Rita went to her bureau to get it. Then she remembered the scroll. It lay in the top drawer, just a few inches away from her hand. Slowly, as if her hand had a mind of its own, it pulled the drawer open. The scroll was there, along with her miniature Little Duke playing cards, her set of Drueke chessmen, and a little carved wooden farmhouse-and-barn set that Mrs. Zimmermann had bought for her during a trip to Pennsylvania. Rose Rita didn’t plan to take the scroll out. She just wanted to look at it, to make sure it was still there.
Somehow, though, Rose Rita found herself back in bed, with pillows propped up behind her. She carefully removed the rolled-up scroll from its cloth wrapper. Like Lewis, Rose Rita had decided that the spider might have just been hiding in the scroll. She didn’t want another ugly surprise like that. The parchment felt soft, dusty, and leathery. Rose Rita unrolled it a little. The edges were frayed and worn, but the scroll was not too badly damaged. A peculiar, musty, spicy scent rose from the old parchment. It was not unpleasant, but it seemed a little unsettling. Rose Rita unwound more of the scroll, revealing lettering.
It looked like handwriting. Maybe the ink once had been black and bold, but time had faded it to a dreary, dull brown, almost the color of dried blood. Rose Rita blinked at the strange phrases:
The Last Testament of
Belle Frisson,
The Greatest Sorceress of Her Age
Reading this gave Rose Rita a strange feeling. She remembered Mr. Hardwick’s sign in the window of the magicians’ museum. The words were obvious exaggerations—they were kind of funny. Mr. Hardwick’s sign had the humor of a tall tale. But the heading on the scroll didn’t seem funny at all. Whoever Belle Frisson was, Rose Rita thought, she had actually believed herself to be the greatest sorceress of her age. Suddenly the night outside seemed darker. Anything might be waiting out there beyond her closed window. Peering in at her. Watching her.
“Oh, get a grip,” Rose Rita told herself. She thrust the scroll back into its cover and under the socks again. Climbing back into bed, she lay wakeful for a long time. Finally she slipped into an uneasy sleep. Vague dreams made her toss and turn, but she did not wake up again until morning.
* * *
For the rest of the week Rose Rita and Lewis practiced every day after school. Lewis would be the star of the first trick. And later Rose Rita would take center stage for a trick of her own. Lewis and Rose Rita would come out onstage, and he would introduce them both. Then she would pick up a sheet of newspaper from a low platform on the stage. Rose Rita would display the newspaper, holding it so the audience could see both the front and the back. Then she would fold it again and hand it to Lewis.
Lewis would take the newspaper and hold it up, open it wide, and say a magic word. Then he would crumple the paper into a ball. He would tear away the paper, like someone peeling an orange, and the live dove—except it would be a chick or duckling—would peep out. At least that was the way the trick was supposed to work. In their rehearsals Lewis had no live animal.
Instead, Lewis practiced until he could successfully produce his stand-in chick, one of his uncle’s white socks, stuffed with more socks. Doing the trick really wasn’t too hard. As the magic book explained, the key to sleight of hand is misdirection. That meant Lewis had to make the audience suspect the trick was in one part of the presentation, when it really was elsewhere. In this case the audience would be looking closely at the newspaper as Rose Rita paraded back and forth, opening it, showing both sides, even shaking it. The newspaper was not gimmicked, however.
The real trick was that Lewis had made a sort of cloth swing from a handkerchief and some strong black thread. While Rose Rita was showing the paper, Lewis would hook two loops of the black thread around his right thumb. He gently held the handkerchief, in which the stuffed sock rested, against his side with his right elbow. His robe would cover it. When Lewis spread the paper wide, he moved his elbow away from his side, and the sock swung out. The open sheet of paper concealed it from the audience. Lewis crushed the paper carefully around it. Then, as he held up the ball of newspaper, he slipped his thumb out of the string. When he tore away the paper and took out the imitation chick, he left the handkerchief and the black string in the ball of paper. The audience would be so surprised at the appearance of the living bird that they wouldn’t even think about the paper anymore. At least, t
hat was what the book promised.
When Lewis and Rose Rita had practiced several times, they showed their presentation to Uncle Jonathan, who laughed when he saw one of his old socks magically come out of the newspaper. “I guess I’m lucky you didn’t decide to produce my underwear!” he said with a grin.
Lewis, who was wearing his bathrobe as a substitute for his costume, snickered. “It’s supposed to be a chick,” he explained.
“Well, you could certainly have fooled me,” said Uncle Jonathan. “Rose Rita, you did a great job of showing off the newspaper. I was sure the trick would be to rig it up somehow.”
“Thanks,” replied Rose Rita.
Lewis looked at her uneasily. Rose Rita had been acting funny all week, dreamy and lost. Her mind seemed to be miles away. Yet she did just as well at school as she always did, and she certainly didn’t mess up the magic act.
On Wednesday they went over to Mrs. Zimmermann’s house. Mrs. Zimmermann was sewing their costumes for them. Lewis would wear a silvery turban with a big peacock plume in the front; a short velvet cape, black on the outside and lined with purple; a loose purple tunic; and loose scarlet pants. Mrs. Zimmermann was even sewing covers for his shoes from the same silvery material as his hat. It would look as if he were wearing Persian slippers with curly toes. Rose Rita would have on a purple outfit that left her arms bare. Baggy harem pants, plus golden slippers, completed the costume. Mrs. Zimmermann was also preparing a headdress for Rose Rita, made up of fake pearls strung on a netting of gold-colored thread. And she would wear a gauzy purple veil too.
“You’re going to look like mystics from the fabled East,” Mrs. Zimmermann told them with a grin after she had finished measuring and sketching. She was a good artist, and she showed them pictures of the way they would look in the costumes. As a reward for their patience Mrs. Zimmermann had served up some of her wonderful chocolate-chip cookies and milk. Munching a cookie, Lewis asked that the cape be cut a little fuller, so that he could hide his chick under it for the first trick. Rose Rita just looked at the pictures and nodded. She didn’t touch her cookies and milk. Mrs. Zimmermann’s expression became a little concerned. “Are you feeling all right. Rose Rita?” she asked.
The Specter from the Magician's Museum Page 3
