The streetlight outside the house seemed unusually bright that night. Rose Rita stared at the window, and as time went by, the window began to gleam in the silvery light of the foggy streetlamp. Inside her room Rose Rita couldn’t really see anything—just black shapes where she knew her chair, desk, and bureau were. Her eyes began to feel heavy, until opening them seemed to be too much effort. Her breathing became slower and slower.
As Rose Rita nodded off, she tried in a dreamy, drifting kind of way to figure out what another dark shape was. She sensed it close by, and she forced her weary eyes open just a fraction to look for it. Yes, the shape was very close. It was tall and next to her bed. It might have been a coat rack with a coat or two hanging on it, except that she did not have one in her bedroom. Whatever it was, the form looked unfamiliar, as if it did not belong, and yet Rose Rita felt no surprise at glimpsing it there. A spicy scent wafted from it, dry and tingling in her nose, a little like sage and a little like cloves. She could have reached out and touched the form—it was that close to her bed—but she felt far too tired.
Instead, Rose Rita closed her eyes again and felt something touch her. The soft, dry hand on her forehead was Mrs. Zimmermann’s, she thought in drowsy confusion, touching her brow in soft, soothing strokes. “I hate them all,” murmured Rose Rita.
“I know you do.” The voice was just a breathy whisper, so soft it might have come from inside Rose Rita’s head. “Hatred is good. It can make you strong.”
“Mm.” Rose Rita felt keenly aware of her breathing, deep and regular. Her body felt as though it were floating on a cloud, billowy and soft.
“Your hatred can grow,” said the whispery voice. “It can do your will and be your eyes and ears. You can set it free. I can show you how to send it forth to do your bidding.” The dry hand stroked her forehead, soothing and light, barely touching her. “I come from the grave to tell you this.”
Cold fingers gripped Rose Rita’s heart. Her breath stopped. She struggled to breathe again, but she was paralyzed.
“It is airless in the grave, dusty and quiet. And you cannot move, cannot scream. You can only think. Think of the power you possessed once and will possess again. I know!”
Rose Rita felt as if her lungs were about to burst. She was suffocating; she fought for air. But the hand pressed against her forehead, hard, pushing her down, down.
The relentless voice went on: “I bring a gift. You have been chosen. Feed your hate! Make it strong! Call me back!”
The hand pressed down even harder, and Rose Rita lost consciousness. She tumbled into a terrible nightmare, full of scuttling spiders, sticky webs, and dark, misshapen creatures, partly human and partly animal. Hands that were partly claws tore at her. Faces with black bug eyes, with the grimacing mouths of lions, snarled at her. She heard laughter, mocking and hateful. Then everything grew quiet.
Rose Rita dreamed that she stood before a strange sculpture. It was a many-sided pillar taller than her. Atop the pillar rested a stone ball, pitted and worn—a ball so large that Rose Rita could not have encircled it with her arms. Letters had been carved in the base of the pillar, but because of its shape Rose Rita could not read them. She circled the sculpture, trying to follow one line of letters and make sense of them, but they were a jumble.
“Find me,” said the breathy, whispery voice she had heard in her bedroom. “Come and free me.”
Rose Rita looked around, but she could see no one. The dark ground stretched bare all the way to the horizon. The world might have been flat, with the sculpture at the very center. “Where are you?” Rose Rita called, her voice lost and tiny in the vast world.
“Find me,” repeated the voice.
Rose Rita turned back to the sculpture. She gazed at the stone ball. Was it turning, slowly rotating? She couldn’t be sure. For a long time she watched it. It was like staring at the minute hand of a clock, trying to see whether it was moving or not. Standing on tiptoe, Rose Rita reached up to touch the strange dark-gray sphere. The stone felt rough and cold beneath her palm.
And then something happened.
Two eyes opened. Eyes in the solid stone.
They stared at Rose Rita with a deep, piercing glare of hatred, looking so evil that Rose Rita gasped.
And then a stone hand emerged from the sphere near the eyes. It seized Rose Rita’s hand and froze around it. The grip was solid, cold, rough, and unforgiving. Rose Rita tried to pull away. She could not budge an inch.
Rose Rita stared in horror. Her arm was turning gray and brittle. In a terrible wave, moving past her elbow to her shoulder, her body was changing.
Her flesh was turning to stone.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The next week passed as if Rose Rita had never awakened from that terrible nightmare. She almost felt that she really had been turned to stone. At least, her feelings were as cold as stone. She went to school every day. The other girls talked about her and giggled. Rose Rita ignored them. Lewis, who was suffering from merciless teasing himself, tried to apologize to her. She looked at him as though he were a mile away and didn’t say anything. When the teachers gave assignments, Rose Rita did them automatically, like a machine. She didn’t speak to anyone—not her mother or father, not Mrs. Zimmermann—about the hot little flame of hatred deep down inside her. It seemed to Rose Rita that the angry feeling was the only thing human about her, and she greedily kept it going.
Lewis invited her to his house for dinner a couple of times, but Rose Rita just shook her head. She was waiting for something—she did not know what it might be—but somehow she knew that if she talked and laughed with her friends, her precious hot flame of hatred might die. So she kept to herself more than ever, biding her time.
On the Monday afternoon ten days after the talent show, Rose Rita came home from school and found a basket of newly laundered clothes in her room. She began to put them away. She hung blouses and skirts in her closet. She put folded jeans on a shelf. And then she began to match her socks into pairs. Rose Rita opened her bureau drawer and saw something sticking out from under the socks. Something that looked like faded purple velvet. Frowning, Rose Rita burrowed down and came up with the scroll.
“I put this back,” muttered Rose Rita, turning the worn velvet cover this way and that. “I know I put this back in the museum.”
She trembled, feeling the skin on her arms break out in gooseflesh. From deep inside her mind came again a sinister, whispery voice: I bring a gift. You have been chosen. Rose Rita watched her hands pull the brittle old scroll from its cover. She felt she had no control over them. Her fingers unrolled the scroll as if someone else were making them move. She scanned the crumply tan-colored scroll that bore letters and figures drawn in ink that had once been black but over the years had faded to a rusty iron shade. Before, Rose Rita had read only the first part of the scroll, which said that it was the final testament of Belle Frisson. Now she was looking at the rest.
It made no sense.
The marks were not letters or numbers or even pictures, but just random-seeming strokes. Some of them led right off the top edge of the scroll, and others off the bottom. More nonsense chicken scratches covered the middle. Rose Rita had learned a little about foreign languages in school. She could read some Latin and French. In her schoolbooks she had seen reproductions of Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese pictographs, and other kinds of writing. The marks on the scroll did not look like any of them. They looked closer to Hebrew or Arabic than anything else, but Rose Rita did not think they were in either of those languages. She continued to unroll the scroll until she came to the very end, and then she gasped.
She saw something she recognized. She had seen it before in her nightmare: a many-sided pillar crowned with a huge ball. Rose Rita’s hands began to shake as she remembered the awful feeling of turning into stone. She hastily rolled the scroll back up and thrust it into its cover. Something moved in her room, just at the corner of her vision. Rose Rita whirled. Did a dark shadow, the size of a small dog, da
rt into her closet? She could not be sure. Rose Rita dropped the scroll onto her bed and reached for her desk chair.
Holding it the same way a lion tamer holds a chair to ward off the dangerous big cats, Rose Rita threw her closet door wide open. Her clothing hung there. Nothing moved. She saw no shadowy shape. However, on the floor of the closet lay the old green book she had borrowed from Mr. Hardwick at the museum. With everything that had happened, Rose Rita had not even looked at it. She set the chair down and picked up the old volume. Its leather cover felt pebbly and strangely slick. Rose Rita sat on the edge of her bed and opened the book and read the title page:
FORTY YEARS AMONG THE MAGICIANS
OR, MY FRIENDS THE FAKIRS, THE FAKERS, AND THE FABULOUS FRAUDS
by Joseph W. Winston
Stage Manager, Director, and Theatrical Producer
The Leavitt Press, Inc.
Chicago, Illinois
1885
Rose Rita turned a few pages and then began to read what Mr. Winston had to say about magicians:
Stage conjurors are among the cleverest people on earth. They delight in controlled confusion, misdirection, and wonderful sleights that deceive us and delight us. Time after time I have witnessed some seeming miracle and have been utterly baffled, only to learn later of the absurdly simple means the artist has used to create the illusion of the miracle. I must admit to curiously mixed feelings in such cases, for part of me is delighted at the cleverness of the performer, whilst another part is annoyed at my own credulity and lack of observation.
And yet, on a few memorable occasions in my four decades of traveling from theater to theater, often in the company of such wonder workers, I have encountered what just possibly might be the real thing. Does magic truly exist? Gentle reader, I will leave the question to you. I intend only to bear witness to the half dozen or so performers whose tricks I could never fathom, whose sleights I could never penetrate. Were they tricksters only, or were they perhaps masters of powers most of us cannot even imagine? You be the judge.
Rose Rita turned more pages. She found a whole long chapter headed “Belle Frisson: Or, Speaking to the Spirits.” Before reading it, Rose Rita stopped at an old-fashioned steel engraving, all dark cross-hatched lines. It showed a woman with a thin, oval face, large, piercing, dark eyes, and jet-black hair. She wore an Egyptian head-band with a round medallion in front, and on the medallion was an engraving of a spider. Her somber eyes seemed to stare right into Rose Rita’s. Rose Rita turned the page very quickly.
And then she stared at another picture, a grainy photograph this time. It showed a flat cemetery with headstones crowded thick. At the center of the picture was a monument far taller than the stones around it. Rose Rita had seen it before. It was the many-sided pillar with the stone ball on top. The caption of the photograph read, “Belle Frisson, née Elizabeth Proctor, lies buried beneath this strange monument. People report that the ball slowly revolves, with no visible power. Does her spirit still strive to reach us? Who can say?”
Feeling very odd indeed, as if she might be the only one who could answer that question for sure, Rose Rita began to read the chapter about Belle Frisson.
* * *
As for Lewis, he despaired more and more as the days went past. Surprisingly, the source of his trouble was not teasing. He found that the other kids didn’t make fun of him nearly as much as he expected. The talent show was soon forgotten as other topics came up, such as the high-school football games and the approach of Halloween. Oh, every once in a while someone would cluck like a chicken as Lewis walked past, but more people seemed to remember the “Who’s on first?” routine that Dave and Tom had done. The boys had come in third, and lots of people thought they should have won the contest.
Lewis’s growing concern came from the way his best friend was behaving. Rose Rita’s coolness bothered Lewis a lot. He did not have very many friends, and Rose Rita was the one who understood and liked him best. One afternoon as he and his uncle were raking leaves, Lewis talked to Jonathan about her, and his uncle sympathized. “Growing up is a very rough process,” Jonathan told him, leaning on his rake. “Your feelings get bruised, and you don’t think you can ever make it, but somehow most people do. Give Rose Rita time to live down her embarrassment, and things will be fine.”
“I messed everything up,” said Lewis sorrowfully, sweeping wet maple leaves into a musty-smelling scarlet-and-yellow pile.
Jonathan patted him on the shoulder. “Accidents happen. Do you know the notion I had when everything started to go wrong? I thought, ‘Lewis and Rose Rita could still save the day if they just turn the whole act into a comedy routine.’ But I had no way of telling you that.”
Lewis piled his batch of leaves onto the large heap that the two of them had made in a corner of the yard. He considered what his uncle had said, and he wondered why he had not had the same idea at the time. It was true—people had laughed more loudly at him and Rose Rita than they had at Tom and Dave, who had been trying to be funny. If only Lewis had come up with some way to make his bumbling seem part of the act, everything might have turned out differently. Only he hadn’t, and the talent show had been the worst night of his life.
That Friday Mrs. Zimmermann invited everyone down to her cottage on Lyon Lake. It was too late in the year for swimming, but the cottage was a peaceful place, with a nice view and a cozy atmosphere, and Mrs. Zimmermann said she hoped Rose Rita would come along. Rose Rita turned her down, though, so the party consisted of just Mrs. Zimmermann, Uncle Jonathan, and a subdued Lewis. Mrs. Zimmermann outdid herself at making a tasty dinner, with grilled pork chops, fluffy stuffed baked potatoes, tangy sauerkraut, freshly baked bread, sweet creamy butter, and an enormous apple pie with ice cream for dessert. They ate everything off her purple plates, wiped their lips with purple napkins, and sighed in contentment.
“That was wonderful, Florence,” said Jonathan with a broad smile that shone through his red beard. “I don’t think you’ve ever done better.”
“Why, thank you, Weird Beard,” returned Mrs. Zimmermann. Then she sighed too, and her expression became serious. “I’m only sorry that Rose Rita wouldn’t come. I’m worried about her.”
Stuffed and happy for the moment, Lewis felt his heart sink. “I am too,” he admitted. “She barely talks to me anymore.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Zimmermann, sipping a cup of coffee, “Rose Rita is at an age when she hates to be embarrassed. It may take her quite a while to get over it.”
Jonathan put his hand on Lewis’s shoulder. “Lewis is having a rough time too,” he said. “He’s going to have to put up with all sorts of corny jokes about his act laying an egg for a long, long time.”
Lewis couldn’t help grinning. It really helped that neither his uncle nor Mrs. Zimmermann played down what had happened, or tried to tiptoe around it. They talked about it right out in the open, just as if Lewis were an adult. He liked that about his uncle. Jonathan Barnavelt had a knack for making Lewis feel comfortable even about horrible things like his failure in the talent show.
“Well, Lewis,” said Mrs. Zimmermann playfully, “do you plan to give up the stage forever?”
Lewis shrugged and used his fork to toy with a few crumbs of pie crust still on his plate. “I don’t know. I think everything would’ve been all right if I hadn’t tried to use that chicken. Learning the tricks was a lot of fun.”
“Hmm,” said Jonathan. “You know, every year there’s a big magicians’ meeting over in Colon, where a magic-supply house, Abbot’s, is located. Maybe next year we can drive over and you can pick up some tricks—that is, if you want to.”
Lewis laid his fork down. “I’ll have to think about it. Right now I sort of want to be an astronomer. That way I could work in an observatory at night, when everyone else is asleep, and I could look at planets and stars through a telescope instead of being looked at.”
“There’s a lot to be said for that too,” said Jonathan, chuckling. “And now I think it’s only fair if
we do the dishes to show our appreciation for this magnificent meal.” He took a quarter from his pocket. “We’ll flip to see who washes and who wipes.”
“Uncle Jonathan,” said Lewis, “is that your trick two-headed quarter?”
For a second Jonathan looked utterly flummoxed. Then he threw his head back and laughed. “Curses! Foiled again! Your choice, Lewis—wash or wipe?”
* * *
They had driven down to Lyon Lake in Bessie, Mrs. Zimmermann’s purple Plymouth, because Mrs. Zimmermann said she didn’t trust Jonathan Barnavelt’s driving or his antique car. They drove back late at night. The oaks and maples grew close to the shoulder of Homer Road, making dark tunnels through which the car whizzed. Lewis knew the moon was just about full, but the thick, dark clouds covered it completely. Now and then a gusty wind swept whirling dry leaves through the glare of the headlights. Lewis, sitting in the backseat, looked between Mrs. Zimmermann and Jonathan to peer out at the road ahead.
They bumped across the railroad tracks and back into New Zebedee. All the stores were dark and locked. Mrs. Zimmermann turned onto Mansion Street, and a moment later Lewis glanced at Rose Rita’s house. He felt frozen for an instant, and then he yelped.
Mrs. Zimmermann stepped hard on the brake, and Bessie screeched to a halt. “What in the name of Heaven?”
“Look!” said Lewis. “Look at Rose Rita’s house!”
Jonathan rolled down the passenger window. In a shaky voice he asked, “Is that a dog?”
“No,” replied Lewis. The dark shape moving in jerks and starts on Rose Rita’s porch was big enough to be a collie or a Labrador, but it was no dog. It had stalky legs, far too many of them.
“It’s a shadow,” said Mrs. Zimmermann uncertainly. “Just the shadow of a tree.”
The dark shape ran straight up the wall in unnerving silence.
“No,” Jonathan said tensely. “It’s no shadow. It’s a spider—a spider as big as a steamer trunk!”
The Specter from the Magician's Museum Page 6
