Lewis gasped, his heart racing. The creature scrambled up to the roof and then rose into the sky, as if it were climbing an invisible strand of spiderweb. “What is it doing here?” he asked nervously.
“I have no idea,” said Jonathan, craning his head out and looking into the sky. “Whatever it is, it’s gone now. Florence, I think we have to have a council of war about this. That was no real spider. It’s a creature of magic—and of evil. And I have the feeling that Rose Rita is in terrible danger.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The next day was a cool, breezy Saturday. Lewis had taken to dropping in at the National Museum of Magic for half an hour every weekend to talk to Mr. Hardwick and his poker friends. On this Saturday he did not go but hung around the house, fighting the feeling that something horrible was coming, like a storm building up on the horizon.
Uncle Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann were deep in conversation in the study. Lewis had told them all about what he had seen, and they were worried. They were so busy that Lewis felt like an intruder. Finally Jonathan kindly told Lewis it might be better if he paid his usual visit to the museum. “Florence and I aren’t much company for you right now,” explained Jonathan, “and I really think Mr. Hardwick appreciates your interest in his museum. It might take your mind off your troubles, anyway.”
Lewis wanted to forget his troubles more than anything else. He found his windbreaker and stepped out into the crisp morning. He walked toward downtown thoughtfully, and when he passed Rose Rita’s house, he crossed to the other side of the street and kept looking anxiously at the trees, half expecting to see a horrible gray shape there, ready to drop down and seize him.
Nothing happened, though. He saw nothing in the trees more strange or frightening than dead leaves, a few fat black squirrels, and one or two old, ratty-looking birds’ nests. When Lewis got to the museum, he found that Mr. Perkins was late, and the other three men were sitting around trying to fool each other with card tricks while they waited for him to arrive. “You never did tell us how your magic show came out,” said Mr. Hardwick as he shuffled the deck of cards and then made the jacks pop up from the top one by one. Lewis sighed and told the whole ghastly story.
All three of the magicians listened sympathetically. Mr. Mussenberger assured Lewis that such accidents were common. “Try dressing up in a floppy clown outfit and doing tricks on live TV,” he said comfortingly in his rumbling voice. “I’ve had rabbits misbehave and children give away the secrets of my tricks on the air, and once I produced a big, delicious bottle of Twin Oaks milk, took a huge swig, and spat all over the camera lens because it had turned sour!”
“Even Houdini made mistakes,” little Johnny Stone said, reaching for the cards. “Once or twice he had to be rescued when his escapes went wrong. He used to tell a story about how he was doing an underwater escape in the winter, and when he got out of the crate he was locked in, he found himself trapped under the ice in the river! He said he had to swim half a mile on his back, breathing the little bit of air sandwiched between the ice and the water. He got back to shore only seconds before he would have frozen.”
Lewis could picture only too clearly the dark water and the terrible barrier of ice, and he could almost feel the deadly embrace of the frigid river. “Did that really happen?” asked Lewis in awe.
Mr. Stone winked. “It made a good story, anyway,” he said. “Did you see Houdini’s milk can downstairs?”
Lewis shook his head. Mr. Hardwick got to his feet. “Well, there’s no time like the present!” he said. They trooped downstairs, and Mr. Hardwick showed Lewis the big galvanized milk can, as tall as Lewis. Eight Mammoth padlocks held the lid tightly closed. “Imagine climbing into that thing and letting someone lock you in,” said Mr. Hardwick. “Imagine how dark and tight it would be in there. No light and no air.”
Lewis shuddered at the thought. And then something else struck him. Mrs. Zimmermann had spoken about finding Rose Rita in the janitor’s closet after the talent show. Lewis remembered that Rose Rita was claustrophobic—being in closed-in places gave her the screaming meemies. Hiding in a closet was a very unlikely thing for Rose Rita to do. “Excuse me?” Lewis asked. Mr. Hardwick had stopped talking and was looking at him.
“I can see you were imagining being inside this thing,” said the museum owner. “I asked, Can you also imagine how in the world Houdini managed to escape when it was locked this way?”
Lewis shook his head. “It looks impossible.”
“It can be done,” said Mr. Stone smugly.
Mr. Hardwick agreed, “Oh, of course it can be done. Still, Houdini did it with style. He may have been more an escape artist than a magician, but you have to admit, he did everything with style.”
Someone tapped on the door, and Mr. Hardwick grinned. “That must be the late Mr. Thomas Perkins,” he said, going to the front of the store.
It wasn’t Mr. Perkins. Lewis was amazed when Mr. Hardwick opened the door and Rose Rita stepped inside. She looked as if she hadn’t slept very well for days. Dark circles made her eyes look tired and sunken, and her hair was even stringier than usual. She held a green book close to her chest. “Hi,” she said quietly as she handed the book to Mr. Hardwick. “Thanks for lending this to me.”
“You’re certainly welcome,” replied Mr. Hardwick.
Rose Rita had not noticed Lewis. She licked her lips. “I’d like to keep it a little longer, if you don’t mind. Uh, do you ever go to that cemetery you were telling us about? The one where Belle Frisson is buried?”
“Now and then,” said Mr. Hardwick. “Some of my old friends are buried nearby, and my wife and I visit their graves. A surprising number of magicians have chosen to be buried there and over in Colon, you know.” He handed the book back to Rose Rita. “Keep this as long as you want.”
“Are you going soon?” Rose Rita asked anxiously.
Mr. Hardwick thought for a moment. “Hmm. Now that you mention it, I haven’t made the trip in a while. Maybe Ellen and I will drive down tomorrow.”
“May I go too, please?” asked Rose Rita.
Mr. Hardwick said, “Why, sure, if your parents don’t mind.” He turned and asked, “Lewis, would you like to tag along?”
Lewis could not answer for a moment. Rose Rita’s eyes had darted toward him when Mr. Hardwick had spoken, and an expression of furious anger had flickered across her face. Then, like a flash of lightning, it was gone, and her face had the worrisome, slack expression Lewis had seen too often lately. He stammered, “S-sure, I guess. I’ll have to ask my uncle.”
“By all means,” said Mr. Hardwick. He looked out the door. “Well, Tom Perkins is parking his old rattletrap across the street, so our poker game can begin at last.”
Lewis said good-bye to Mr. Hardwick and the others, and he and Rose Rita walked away. Lewis murmured a few words to her, but Rose Rita either grunted or shrugged in response. When they got to her house, she just walked away from Lewis without a word. Lewis had the eerie feeling that somehow the person he had walked from the museum with really wasn’t Rose Rita. She’s like a walking corpse, he thought. The idea made him feel nauseated and weak. If Rose Rita was not living inside her body, then who was?
Or, even worse—what was?
* * *
When he got home, Lewis found Mrs. Zimmermann and Uncle Jonathan still sitting in the study. Jonathan was behind the big desk with the green-shaded lamp, an untidy stack of books at his elbow. Mrs. Zimmermann sat in one of the big armchairs, busily knitting something that looked like a long purple scarf. She rarely knitted, but sometimes when she had to do a lot of thinking, she dragged out her yarn and her needles and started to work on something that might turn out to be a baggy sweater, a comforter, or a shawl. She always said that whatever turned out surprised her just as much as anybody, since she simply began to knit with no object in mind.
Both Mrs. Zimmermann and Uncle Jonathan glanced up as Lewis came in and settled into the other armchair. “You look bewitched, bothered, and b
ewildered, Lewis,” said Mrs. Zimmermann as her needles clicked away.
Lewis nodded. “I thought about something a while ago,” he said, and told Mrs. Zimmermann how odd it was that Rose Rita had chosen to hide in a broom closet.
“I’ve already mentioned that,” replied Mrs. Zimmermann. “In fact, Jonathan and I have been talking about how strangely Rose Rita has been acting lately—she isn’t quite herself. We’ve been doing a little research on that—and on the spider thing we all saw at her house.” Lewis shivered when Mrs. Zimmermann said that. She gave him a strained sort of smile, as if she were trying to look happier than she really felt. “Cheer up! Fuzzy Face and I have been looking through his volumes of mystic lore, and we think that whatever that grim gray beastie was, it probably can’t hurt Rose Rita.”
“It isn’t that, exactly,” said Lewis with a sigh. He told them about meeting Rose Rita at the museum. “She wants to go with Mr. Hardwick to this grave tomorrow,” he finished. “And I don’t want to go along.” He bit his lower lip. If he had dared, he would have confessed that the idea of traveling down to Cristobal scared the wits out of him. He did not like spooky cemeteries. Nor did he relish riding twenty miles into the country in the backseat of a car with Rose Rita—not when she was acting so odd.
Jonathan Barnavelt exchanged glances with Mrs. Zimmermann. “Haggy Face,” he said, “this opportunity might be the very answer to our problem. Do you agree?”
Mrs. Zimmermann perked up. “I surely do. Enough sitting around and moping and wondering what disaster is going to happen next! I say it’s time for action, and I say that Lewis can be a big help.”
Jonathan tugged at his red beard. “I think Florence is right, Lewis,” he said slowly. “You see, we believe that Rose Rita has somehow come under a magical attack. In order to fight it, we have to know what’s behind it—or more to the point, who’s behind it. So you’ll have to be our eyes and ears. I think you should go along on this trip and see what you can get out of Rose Rita.”
Lewis sighed helplessly. “She won’t even talk to me,” he said.
Mrs. Zimmermann clicked her tongue irritably as she dropped a stitch. She worked back over it and said, “That’s why you’ll have to be sort of a secret agent, Lewis. Oh, I know it’s not nice to spy on your friends, and ordinarily I’d never suggest such a thing. In this case, though, Jonathan is right. I can practically feel my thumbs pricking, like the witches’ thumbs in Macbeth. Something wicked is coming our way, and we’ll be sunk if we don’t learn what we’re dealing with. You’ll have to be observant, and you’ll have to remember every little thing. But it could save Rose Rita.”
Lewis pondered that as he watched Mrs. Zimmermann’s needles busily add another row of stitches to the growing garment. Finally he took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said at last. “I don’t like it, but I’ll do it.”
And so it was settled. Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann conferred all afternoon, and dinner was a hurried affair of cold chicken sandwiches and potato chips. Throughout the evening Lewis was restless. He wandered around the house, searching for something he could not name and would not recognize if he saw it.
The old mansion was a great place to live, and Lewis loved it there. Each room had its own fireplace, and every fireplace was made of marble of a different color. The upstairs rooms were rarely used, and a great variety of junk was stored there, including trunks of Barnavelt stuff that dated from before the Civil War, a wheezy antique parlor organ, and a stereopticon with about five hundred three-D sepia-toned photographs of everything from the Pyramids of Egypt to a tightrope walker poised on a wire high above Niagara Falls. Usually Lewis could while away a rainy day very happily, just exploring and trying out the wonderful things he found.
But that Saturday evening he felt at loose ends. He was too nervous to sit still, and he had nothing to keep him occupied. So he roamed instead. He spent a little while sitting on the back stairs, gazing at the stained-glass window. Jonathan had cast a spell on it, and it changed every time you looked. Sometimes there were strange scenes that might be from another planet—tall smoking volcanoes, weird twisted trees, and inexplicable buildings in the shapes of spheres, cones, and cylinders. Usually there were more earthly subjects—a knight slaying a dragon; shepherds playing lyres, tambouras, and syrinxes while tending their sheep; or four angels dancing the tango.
That evening the stained-glass window showed a road stretching through a landscape of rolling, wooded hills. The sky above the road was a dark purply blue, about the color of a Vicks VapoRub jar. The hills were a deep, gloomy green, and the road wound between them like a flat gray snake. The picture seemed to pull Lewis in, and he imagined traveling down that mysterious road under the strange and threatening sky. What would lie at the end? He sighed, got up, and went to see if there was something to watch on TV.
Later that night, in bed, Lewis brooded over his sense of coming doom. He was frightened without knowing what frightened him. He felt trapped. He sensed that some evil intelligence was watching him, knowing what he would do and planning to destroy him. The sinister image of that winding road kept returning to his mind, and he kept wondering what terrifying end the road might have. Lewis tried to tell himself not to be such a coward, but that did no good. Lewis just wasn’t the kind of person who could ignore doubt and danger. His chest ached, and he felt terribly alone. A prayer came into his mind, the one that began Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, and as he lay in the dark he whispered it aloud. He finished with the words “Quaesumus, ut eiusdem fidei firmitate ab omnibus semper muniamur adversis.”
In English they meant “We beseech Thee that by our steadfastness in this same faith, we may evermore be defended from all adversities.”
After his prayer Lewis felt a little better. He faced an adversity that he couldn’t even begin to understand, and he hoped that his plea for help would be answered. At last, still tossing and turning, he fell into a light and troubled sleep.
CHAPTER NINE
Sunday was one of those fall days with a deep blue sky and the kind of high, wispy, streaky cirrus clouds called mares’ tails. Mr. Hardwick and his wife, Ellen, a slight, brown-eyed woman who wore slacks and a straw sun hat, called for Lewis in their blue-and-white Chevrolet. Rose Rita was already in the backseat, and Lewis joined her. They didn’t talk much on the trip to Cristobal; Rose Rita was still distant and quiet. Lewis stared out the car window instead as they passed farms with old red barns, their roofs bearing “Chew Mail Pouch” advertising signs. Mr. Hardwick was a good, careful driver, and they took their time.
Cristobal was hardly a town at all. New Zebedee was pretty small, but Cristobal was just a crossroads with a feed store, a general store, and a gas station. Maybe because New Zebedee had once been in the running to be named the capital city of Michigan, its houses tended to be old and rather elegant, Victorian affairs with towers, gingerbread decorations, and gabled roofs. The houses in Cristobal were more modest, little white frame buildings with small yards.
Mr. Hardwick drove through Cristobal. They passed a big brick church with a cemetery nearby, but they didn’t stop. Then they were out in the country again, and Mr. Hardwick turned down a winding side road. After a mile or so the road simply ended at another cemetery, this one small and square. A freshly painted old white wooden fence encircled the graveyard. Mr. Hardwick stopped the car, and everyone got out. Lewis looked around. The cemetery had no trees at all. Many of the tombstones were old and granite. They were not fancy. Instead of being carved into angels, urns, and monuments, these stones were simple slabs with rounded tops, weathered and gray and splotched with green circles of lichen. One marker stood out.
Mr. Hardwick had taken a basket out of the Chevrolet’s trunk. It contained two pairs of gardening gloves, grass clippers, and a few other tools. “Ellen and I will tidy up some of the graves,” he said. “Both of you can wander around if you like. Rose Rita, that big monument in the middle is Belle Frisson’s grave. It’s pretty strange. You might want to have a look
.”
The grass was a little high in the cemetery. Lewis thought that people probably came out occasionally to keep things neat. Many of the graves had flowers on them, some bright and fresh, others brown and withered. He and Rose Rita walked slowly toward the center of the cemetery, the gravel crunching under their feet. One of Lewis’s superstitions was that something bad would happen to him if he stepped on a grave, so he trod carefully.
“Sure is big,” said Lewis as he and Rose Rita stopped in front of the mysterious tombstone. The whole monument rested on a square base ten feet long on each side. Atop the base was a stone cube five feet on each facet, then a many-sided pillar that rose for about ten feet, and finally at the summit a gray ball at least three feet in diameter. For some reason it had several faint chalk marks on it. Everything, from the base to the ball, was a gloomy-looking dark gray granite. The cube that supported both the pillar and the ball had words engraved on it:
BELLE FRISSON
(Born Elizabeth Proctor)
1822-1878
She Waits to Live Again
Lewis could hear the click-click of grass clippers behind him. He looked up from the inscription. The pillar on top of the cube wasn’t very thick, maybe two feet or so in diameter. It had marks carved deeply into it, curlicues and lines, but they were not letters. Lewis looked at the ball again. Something about it made him feel very apprehensive.
Rose Rita was slowly walking around the grave, studying the pillar intently. Lewis had had enough. He turned and hurried back down the gravel path to the Hardwicks, who were trimming the grass around a headstone inscribed with the name “Frederick Jeremy McCandles: The Great Candelini.”
“Weird monument, isn’t it?” Mr. Hardwick asked Lewis. The museum owner patted his forehead with a handkerchief. “Belle Frisson’s, I mean. She died here, you know.”
The Specter from the Magician's Museum Page 7
