Rose Rita’s face flushed. “I wish everybody would stop worrying about me,” she snapped. “My mom thinks there’s something wrong, Lewis keeps looking at me as if he thinks I’m going to roll over and die, and now you. I’m fine!”
Mrs. Zimmermann stared in astonishment. “Good heavens, Rose Rita! Don’t bite my head off.”
Rose Rita looked at her feet. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “I’m tired, that’s all.”
Later, after Rose Rita had left for home, Lewis asked Mrs. Zimmermann, “Do you think she’s sick or something?”
Mrs. Zimmermann began to fold the cloth that she had spread out on the table. She looked thoughtful and tapped her chin with her finger. “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “Rose Rita certainly doesn’t seem to be her usual lively self, but she’s at an awkward age for a girl. She’s having strange feelings that she never had before. And she’s always been very self-conscious. I wouldn’t be surprised if the other girls in school are making fun of her.”
That upset Lewis. “Why would they do that? She’s great!”
Mrs. Zimmermann shrugged and gave Lewis a sad smile. “You know that and I know that, Lewis, but Rose Rita isn’t so sure. When you’re a little different from all the others, they tend to pick on you. I don’t suppose Rose Rita’s classmates are intentionally cruel, but some girls can be thoughtless. Rose Rita is lucky to have a good friend like you. I think she’ll come through all the stress and strain very well, but you’ll have to let her feel sad and mopey every once in a while. Now, then: Do you want silver bells on your Persian slippers, or will they be all right just plain?”
* * *
By the following Saturday Lewis had carefully copied all the directions for their four tricks. After breakfast he headed downtown to return the books. It was a cool morning. Autumn was definitely on the way. Lewis wore his windbreaker over a red-plaid flannel shirt, but he still felt chilly when the wind blew in his face. He hurried down the hill and met Rose Rita at her house. She was wearing a baggy Notre Dame jacket that had belonged to her uncle. “Got it?” asked Lewis.
Rose Rita nodded and unzipped the jacket. Inside she had concealed the scroll. “I’ll be glad to get rid of this thing,” she murmured.
Lewis could only agree. Rose Rita looked terrible. Her eyes had dark circles under them, and they held a strange, haunted, anxious expression. She looked thinner too. The two friends walked downtown without saying anything to each other.
Their timing was perfect. They met Mr. Hardwick outside the National Museum of Magic just as he fitted his key into the lock. He looked up and smiled. “Lewis and Rose Rita! What a pleasure to see you again. Want me to take those?”
“No,” said Lewis quickly. “We’ll put them back for you.”
Mr. Hardwick opened the door. “In we go! Thanks, Lewis. That’s very considerate of you. I hope you found some good tricks.”
“We did,” replied Lewis. “We’re going to have a great act.”
Rose Rita, who had not said a word for many minutes, suddenly blurted out, “Mr. Hardwick, who was Belle Frisson?”
Mr. Hardwick switched on the lights, then turned and gave her a quizzical look. “Why, where did you hear that name? I didn’t think anyone remembered her.”
“Uh,” said, Lewis, “she was mentioned in one of the old books.”
Mr. Hardwick nodded and adjusted his glasses. “Let me see, what do I remember about Belle Frisson?” He clicked his tongue a couple of times. “Hmm. Well, to begin with, her real name was Elizabeth Proctor. Do you two know anything about the Fox sisters?”
When both Lewis and Rose Rita shook their heads, Mr. Hardwick said, “Come on upstairs, and I’ll tell you about them.” They followed him. He turned on the lights there too and told them to sit down. They sat in the comfortable chairs arranged around the card table. Mr. Hardwick said, “You have to understand that the Fox sisters were quite a sensation a hundred years ago. It began in Hydesville, New York, in 1848. Maggie and Katie Fox were fifteen and twelve years old. They claimed they started to hear strange, thumping noises at night. Do you know what a poltergeist is?”
Again Lewis shook his head, but Rose Rita said, “It’s some kind of ghost, isn’t it?”
“Absolutely right,” said Mr. Hardwick. “The word is German and means ‘noisy ghost.’ Well, Maggie and Katie said they began to ask this thumping spirit questions, and it answered with one rap for yes and two for no. Later they worked out an alphabet code too. Their older sister Leah joined in, and the girls began to attract attention as spirit mediums. They would have séances, and the spirits of the dead would supposedly answer their questions. They became world famous. Eventually Elizabeth Proctor saw them perform. She was an unsuccessful actress at the time. She went back to her hometown of Savannah, Georgia, and put together a magic act that she claimed was based on ancient Egyptian sorcery. It was full of fake poltergeist phenomena. This time she succeeded. From about 1855 to the time she died in 1878, she toured the country as Belle Frisson.”
Rose Rita frowned. “She didn’t deal with real ghosts?”
Mr. Hardwick guffawed. “Well, neither did the Fox sisters,” he said. “In time they confessed it was all trickery. Lots of people believed that Belle Frisson had real magic power, but I’m sure it was all just part of the act. I think I’ve got a book that has a chapter on her. The writer halfway believed in her powers, so you have to take what he says with a grain of salt.” Pausing, Mr. Hardwick looked thoughtful. “You know, you could visit Belle Frisson’s grave if you wanted. She’s buried only about twenty miles from here, in a cemetery just outside of Cristobal.”
“Where’s that?” Lewis asked.
“Oh, it’s a small farm village southwest of here,” Mr. Hardwick said. “That little cemetery is quite unusual. It has half a dozen magicians buried in it.” He got up. “Let me find your book, and you can replace the ones you borrowed.”
They went into the next room, and Lewis began to put the books back on the shelves. Mr. Hardwick climbed up on a ladder and reached above his head for a volume, and as he did, Rose Rita quickly took the scroll from her jacket and shoved it back into its place, in an open-topped box. She jerked her hand away quickly. Something had popped up from the box as Rose Rita replaced the scroll. It was a big black spider, its body as large as a grape. It raised its two front legs threateningly, then darted behind the rows of books. Rose Rita looked at Lewis with wide, sick eyes.
“Here we are,” Mr. Hardwick said cheerfully, stepping down from the ladder. He held a worn old book, bound in deep olive-green leather. He handed it over to Rose Rita. “Be careful with this,” he said. “It was published in Chicago in 1885. It’s quite rare.”
“I’ll be careful,” promised Rose Rita. She took the book from Mr. Hardwick and thanked him, and then she and Lewis left. On the sidewalk outside, Rose Rita said, “Whew! I’m glad that’s all over.”
“So am I,” said Lewis. He glanced anxiously at Rose Rita. She still looked tired and drawn, and she had pulled her head down low because of the chilly wind. She held the old volume tight against her chest. Lewis wondered if it really was over—if whatever had been bothering Rose Rita was somehow tied in with Belle Frisson, the scroll, and the mysterious spider. He hoped that whatever they had started would end now. Maybe replacing the scroll would break whatever weird chain of events they had accidentally begun.
But he had his doubts.
CHAPTER FIVE
September passed. October began, with cool, crisp days filled with the scent of burning leaves. Rose Rita and Lewis practiced and practiced until they could do all four magic tricks perfectly. There was only one problem. Lewis still had not been able to rehearse the newspaper stunt with a live animal. “Maybe you could produce a bouquet of flowers instead of a chick,” suggested Uncle Jonathan a couple of days before the talent show.
Lewis shook his head impatiently. In some ways Lewis was a real perfectionist. Some things had to be done just right, or they were no good at all,
and the magic trick was one of them. He said, “Flowers wouldn’t be the same. Timmy Lindholm’s going to bring a chick in for me. It’ll be all right.” And he really thought it would. He had become very adept at swinging the stuffed sock into the newspaper without anyone seeing the move. Even Mrs. Zimmermann, who had sharp eyes for foolery, couldn’t quite tell how he produced the sock from the balled-up newspaper.
In fact, Lewis would have been very happy except for his continuing worries about Rose Rita. It was not that she had changed, exactly. She still practiced with him, she tried on the costume that Mrs. Zimmermann had made, and she went to school every day, the same as always. But Rose Rita had become even more withdrawn, silent, and absent recently. She went through their magic routine as if she had only half her mind on what she was doing. At school Rose Rita hardly talked to anyone. She hurried away from the little groups of girls that gathered on the playground or stood outside near the steps. In class she responded when the teachers called on her, but she stopped raising her hand to answer questions.
Lewis found that especially unusual. Rose Rita always waved her hand eagerly when the teacher asked something she knew. He also missed her tall tales. Rose Rita had once told him she wanted to be a famous writer when she grew up, and she certainly had the imagination. Often she would dream up some outrageous or funny story about their teachers or classmates and spin it out for Lewis with a straight face. She might tell how Bill Mackey, an annoying, gangly kid with big feet, had been kidnapped by Martians when he was a baby and raised on Mars. Since the gravity there is low, Rose Rita would explain, Bill grew to be a beanpole. The Martians brought him back when they discovered he was a human. They had wanted a monkey and had made a natural mistake.
Rose Rita had lots of wild stories like that one, but even though Lewis encouraged her to tell him one, she refused. Unlike Rose Rita, Lewis could never decide what he wanted to be when he grew up. Sometimes he thought it would be fun to be a photographer for National Geographic and go all over the globe taking pictures of dusty herds of elephants, lofty snowcapped mountains, and exotic dancers in Thailand or Tahiti. At other times he wanted to be an airline pilot, a research chemist, or an astronomer. Usually he could tease Rose Rita into making up a story about what life would be like if he were photographing crocodiles on the banks of the Nile or bending over a telescope on Mount Palomar, searching the night sky for comets. Lately, however, she didn’t even seem to listen to him.
The week of the talent show was so hectic that Lewis almost forgot to worry about Rose Rita. For many years the junior high students had performed the show in the school cafeteria. This year they would put it on in the municipal auditorium, the refurbished New Zebedee Opera House. Lewis had bad memories of that stage, and just standing on it made him nervous, but all the kids would have to perform there. The teachers had planned the talent show for the evening of October 9, a Friday. On Thursday afternoon they all had a dress rehearsal in the auditorium.
The New Zebedee Opera House was an old theater in the top two stories of the Farmers’ Feed & Seed building. It had a horseshoe-shaped balcony, rows of red-velvet-covered seats, and an ornate stage. The walls had been painted pink, with intricate designs in gold framing the stage. On one side was the grieving theatrical mask of tragedy, and on the other the laughing mask of comedy. Uncle Jonathan helped Lewis carry all his magical paraphernalia upstairs and put it out of the way backstage. The two of them had found two big cardboard boxes, which Lewis and Rose Rita had painted with tempera. One was red and yellow, and the other blue and purple. Rose Rita would climb into the red-and-yellow one, and after some hocus-pocus on Lewis’s part she would reappear in the blue-and-purple one. They also hauled up a sort of low sofa that Uncle Jonathan had knocked together from some scrap lumber, some cotton stuffing, and some upholstery material. It had casters so that it could roll on and off the stage, and Rose Rita would lie on it before the levitation stunt. Finally, they brought up the chair and the mirror for the last trick, the one in which Rose Rita’s head would seem to float in midair.
As rehearsal began, Lewis got into his costume and paced around backstage while Dave Shellenberger and Tom Lutz practiced their comedy act. They were imitating the comedians Bud Abbott and Lou Costello doing a baseball skit called “Who’s on first?” The other kids stood in the wings listening and laughing their heads off, but Lewis was too tense to watch. He saw James Gensterblum tuning up his guitar. James was wearing a gray-and-black striped shirt and gray pants, and his blue eyes were narrowed in concentration. “Hey, James,” Lewis whispered, “have you seen Timmy around?”
James shook his head. “Not since we left school. He should be here, though. He’s gonna juggle.”
For a few minutes Lewis watched James lower his head over his guitar and listen carefully as he tuned.
“Hey, Lewis,” James said suddenly. “Timmy just came in.”
Lewis looked in the direction James pointed. Timmy, an easygoing, tubby boy with curly black hair and a freckled nose, came backstage. He lugged a canvas bag, which he set down in a corner. Lewis hurried over to him, asking, “Did you bring it?”
Timmy sighed. “Aw, gee, I forgot, Lewis. I’m sorry.”
“I need that chicken,” said Lewis, annoyed at Timmy’s absentmindedness.
“I’ll get one for you. I just forgot.” Timmy took some bowling-pin-shaped Indian clubs from his bag. He rolled up the sleeves of his blue shirt. “I gotta practice now.”
Lewis frowned as Timmy began to toss and catch the three clubs. Timmy was pretty good at juggling, but he had a lousy memory.
Rose Rita came out of the girls’ dressing room. She had changed into her costume. James and Timmy looked at her and grinned, but she didn’t seem to notice them. “You ready?” Lewis asked her.
Rose Rita just nodded.
Their magic act came after Tom and Dave’s “Who’s on first?” routine. Mrs. Fogarty, their English teacher, sat in the auditorium, along with Uncle Jonathan and a few parents. One of the parents, Mr. Lutz, was helping backstage. He put on a record that Lewis gave him, “Saber Dance.” As soon as the music started, Lewis stepped out from behind the curtains.
Footlights and spotlights shone in his face, dazzling him. He could hardly see anything out in the audience—just the gleam of light reflected in Mrs. Fogarty’s spectacles. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said in a squeaky, frightened voice, “I am the Mystifying Mysto, Master of Illusion! Let me introduce you to my beautiful assistant, the Fantastic Fatima!”
Rose Rita came out from the wings holding the newspaper. She went through the act just as they had practiced for weeks, and Lewis produced the sock, calling it “a live chick, produced by magic!” He began to feel better when someone, probably his uncle Jonathan, applauded. They did the other tricks without a hitch and then took their bows. The curtain fell, and Lewis and Rose Rita got their stuff offstage with James’s help. “That was great,” James whispered as Timmy’s juggling music began.
“Thanks,” Lewis said. He felt drained. Now that his turn was over, his knees began to shake, and he was dizzy. To Rose Rita he said, “I think we’ve finally got it down.”
Rose Rita just shrugged, as if she didn’t really care.
* * *
Friday was horrible. All day long the talent show tormented Lewis. He hated the thought of going out onstage in front of everyone. Though he tried to tell himself that everything would go well, doubts and fears kept nagging him. He decided that Rose Rita was right. She often called him a worrywart and accused him of always looking on the dark side. Lewis hated when he did that, but he couldn’t help himself. Now he kept imagining all kinds of disasters that could happen. Whenever he thought about forgetting his lines or making some stupid mistake, his hands felt cold and his stomach churned. He could not keep his mind on school, and his math teacher snapped at him, “Lewis, pay attention!”
Lewis wanted to practice after school, but Rose Rita shook her head and drifted away, walking toward home. Lewis slouc
hed along behind her with his hands in his pockets. Because of the talent show none of the teachers had given homework, and he had no books to carry, but he was in a foul mood. Deliberately walking slowly, he watched Rose Rita up ahead. He was beginning to think she wasn’t much of a friend. She didn’t seem to care about their act enough to practice one last time.
As they headed up Mansion Street, with Lewis fifty feet behind Rose Rita, he felt cold all over. Rose Rita was walking beside the privet hedge in front of Martha Westley’s house. The yard was Mrs. Westley’s pride and joy, and the hedge was neatly trimmed. Lewis squinted. Something dark was creeping along at the base of the hedge, right beside Rose Rita. It looked like a steel-gray kitten or puppy, except that it moved strangely, in jerky darts. It looked more like an impossibly big insect than anything else.
Rose Rita passed the hedge, and the dark blob moved out of its shadow. Lewis’s throat was dry. When the shape moved from the shade into the sunshine, it simply vanished, becoming as transparent as a soap bubble. Rose Rita walked on alone. Still, Lewis had a hard time getting his breath. In the single instant before it had disappeared, the shape had looked as if it had long, busy legs and a round, shiny body. It looked like a spider the size of a kitten.
Rose Rita turned at her house and went up the steps and inside. Walking slowly past, Lewis peered this way and that, staring hard at the piles of autumn leaves along the curb, at the roots of hedges and bushes. He could smell the fall scent of burning leaves, and he could hear the dry rustling of more leaves overhead. The rustling made him jerk his gaze upward. What if the sound wasn’t just the wind? What if that horrible creature was lurking up there, ready to drop its cold, clutching body onto the back of his neck? Lewis broke into a frantic run. He did not stop until he had slammed the door of his house safely behind him.
The Specter from the Magician's Museum Page 4
