A skeleton was inside the white linen robe—a skeleton with hollow eye sockets and a fierce grin. The skeleton had a horrible kind of flesh on its bones—for over every inch of its face, swarming and spinning, crawled millions and millions of tiny spiders, their eyes shimmering, their busy legs thrashing.
The skeleton’s grinning mouth moved, and the whispery voice said, “They weave me new flesh to wear. It will do. It will do.”
And then Rose Rita felt the firm clutch of two of the huge spider’s legs, one on each of her shoulders. Everything went dark. She fainted dead away.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Turn here,” said Lewis. Mrs. Zimmermann turned the wheel, and Bessie rolled off the highway and onto the lane leading out to the cemetery.
Jonathan Barnavelt, sitting in the backseat, said, “This is certainly a deserted patch of ground.”
Mrs. Zimmermann sniffed. “When villains and evildoers want to set up housekeeping, they don’t march right into the center of town, Weird Beard. They like to keep their nefarious activity under the cover of darkness and loneliness.”
Lewis stared straight ahead. The headlights made a wavering tunnel of light in the night. Finally the lane widened, and Lewis could see the jutting, rounded forms of headstones. “The big one in the middle is Belle Frisson’s grave,” whispered Lewis. Though he was willing to do anything to help Rose Rita, he had to face the fact that he was sick with anxiety.
The car jounced to a stop, and Mrs. Zimmermann turned the key in the ignition. “Well,” she said, “here we are. I suppose there’s no sense putting things off. Have you got the flashlights, Jonathan?”
“Right here.” He handed two long chrome-plated flashlights forward, and he kept another for himself. They were powerful six-cell lights, and they could throw a beam a long way. Before they had left New Zebedee, Jonathan had put new D-cell batteries into all three flashlights. When Lewis switched his on, the car flooded with bright white light.
“Let’s go,” said Mrs. Zimmermann, opening her door. They all got out.
The countryside was quiet. A light wind ruffled the dry leaves clinging to the trees. A solitary cricket chirped, its song slow, sad, and soft. Four or five silvery clouds drifted across the sky, faintly lit by starlight. The moon was low in the sky. Lewis stood for a few seconds, breathing in great lungfuls of the crisp, cool October air. His uncle put a hand on his shoulder, making Lewis jump a mile.
“Sorry, Lewis,” said Jonathan.
“That’s okay,” croaked Lewis, his throat dry.
They went down the central path of the cemetery. Halfway to Belle Frisson’s strange monument, Uncle Jonathan turned his light to the left. “What in the world is that?” he asked, and he walked between the headstones toward something long, brown, and snaky. Lewis heard a dry rustle as Jonathan picked up whatever it was. Then there was a rattling sound, and in a moment Jonathan was back.
“What is it?” asked Mrs. Zimmermann, shining her light toward Jonathan.
“It’s a scroll,” answered Jonathan. “A long, dry, brown scroll, made of parchment, I think.”
“That’s the one we saw in the museum!” cried Lewis. “The testament of Belle Frisson I told you about! Oh, my gosh, Rose Rita must have stolen it back again!”
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” said Mrs. Zimmermann. “Here, hold my flashlight.”
Lewis took it and shined it on the parchment as Mrs. Zimmermann unrolled it a little at a time. “Hmm,” she murmured, and “Oh,” and “Aha.”
“Come on, Haggy,” complained Uncle Jonathan. “This crumply dumpling means something to you. Tell us what the Cracker Jack prize is!”
“It’s a spell of unsealing,” she said slowly. “Its function is to unlock magically sealed secret places. But it’s strangely incomplete. And the parchment seems oddly . . . stretched. It’s as if it had been used in a tug-of-war by demons. I think all its magic may have been used up.”
“Let’s go,” said Jonathan urgently, taking the rolled-up scroll from her. “Let’s see what else we can find.”
They circled the monument. When he turned his flashlight on the central pillar, Lewis thought it looked different somehow, chipped and rugged. Then he realized that the carvings were no longer there. The stone looked as if someone had taken a hammer and a chisel and pulverized the pillar’s surface, erasing all the markings. He moved the circle of his flashlight lower and saw that a litter of stone chips now covered the top of the cube on which the pillar rested.
Mrs. Zimmermann touched his shoulder. “Lewis,” she said in a strange voice, “switch off your light. You too, Jonathan.”
Lewis did, and the darkness fell like a velvet curtain. Off in the distance an owl cried out, a low, lonesome Hu-hu-huuuu! Very faintly came a faraway train whistle, mournful and low. “Look up,” said Mrs. Zimmermann in little more than a whisper. “Look at that globe on top of the pillar.”
Squinting into the darkness, Lewis felt the hair on his neck and arms bristle. The dark stone sphere at the top of the pillar was—steaming. Green, faintly glowing vapors boiled from it, tendrils of mist that thinned and vanished as they evaporated. Jonathan cleared his throat. “Something is going on here,” he said. “Something evil. Are those fumes the ones you’d get from the Lamp of Osiris spell?”
“A-plus, Jonathan,” replied Mrs. Zimmermann. “And you know what that means.”
“I don’t,” said Lewis in a hushed tone.
Mrs. Zimmermann turned her flashlight back on as Jonathan walked around the grave. “It means sacrifice,” she said. “Someone has been killed here. Oh, maybe not lately—not this year, or even this century. Still, an unholy rite was performed here. That’s the kind of light people used to call a ‘corpse candle,’ or sometimes a ‘will-o’-the-wisp.’ It’s a product of sudden death—a kind of unfocused haunting.”
From the other side of the monument, Jonathan Barnavelt called, “Take a look at this.”
They went around. Jonathan was shining his flashlight at the ground. There, resting on the grass, was a flashlight, two waxed-paper-wrapped sandwiches—and a green-bound book. Jonathan picked it up, and opened it. “Forty Years Among the Magicians,” he read aloud. He leafed through the book. “It has a chapter on Belle Frisson,” he said.
“Rose Rita got that from Mr. Hardwick at the museum,” Lewis recollected. “So she has been back here.”
Mrs. Zimmermann turned the beam of her flashlight back toward the tomb. “I’ll bet anything she brought the scroll and worked the spell. Or the spell worked itself, more likely. Lewis, is that pillar all bashed up?”
“Yes,” said Lewis, “it is. It had marks on it—carvings that didn’t really make any sense. They’re all gone now.”
“A self-activating spell,” said Mrs. Zimmermann thoughtfully. “Wherever Rose Rita is, she’s gone through some magical portal. We’ve got to find out how to follow.”
“How do we do that?” asked Jonathan, sounding frustrated and angry. “You said all the magic is gone from the parchment scroll.”
“We do it,” said Mrs. Zimmermann, “by becoming detectives. Jonathan, Lewis, we can’t do anything else here, at least not tonight. I have an idea or two about discovering how to work that spell again—because a magician can activate the spell, you know. It doesn’t have to work itself. However, I have to figure out exactly how it was worded, and that might take some time. Let’s head home. We have until Friday night.”
Four days, thought Lewis. Only four more days!
* * *
As soon as school was over on Tuesday, Lewis hurried home. Mrs. Zimmermann was there, sitting at the dining-room table. She had stacks of paper around her, and she had scribbled all over them. The scroll was there too, looking very fragile and brittle now. Jonathan Barnavelt sat quietly on the other side of the table, deeply engrossed in the book he had retrieved from the cemetery. He looked up and gave Lewis a weak smile. “Hi,” he said.
“Have you done it?” asked Lewis.
“Pa
rtly,” responded Mrs. Zimmermann. She looked exhausted. Her wrinkled face was strained and drawn. “From the picture of the tomb in that book, and from the parts of the letters on the scroll, I’ve got about eighty-five percent of the spell figured out.” She showed Lewis how the edges of the scroll had been meant to line up with the carvings on the tomb. Together, the markings on the tomb and the scroll came together to make up letters, which literally spelled out the incantation. The trouble was that some of the markings on the scroll were just vertical lines. There was no telling if they were meant to be the downward strokes of T’s or I’s, or perhaps lower-case l’s. Other markings might be the tops of F’s or E’s, or of B’s or R’s. Guesswork could fill in a lot of the words, but some were very strange indeed.
Mrs. Zimmermann rubbed her eyes. “If only I knew what the tomb markings were,” she said. “That would make life easy!”
“Can’t we try what you’ve got?” asked Lewis. “It might work!”
Jonathan shook his head. “Sorry, Lewis. It has to be the complete spell or nothing. You see, a spell controls and binds the magic. If you tried a spell without all the words, it might not work at all, or the magic might react in uncontrollable ways. You might accidentally turn yourself into a frog, or let demons loose in the world, or produce a live chicken from under your robes.”
Lewis groaned.
With a forced laugh Jonathan said, “I’m sorry about that chicken crack. I’m tired, I guess. I’ll fix us some dinner, and then we’ll go back to studying this sinister scroll.”
Mrs. Zimmermann pushed a stack of papers away. “I’ll fix the dinner,” she said. “I’m tired of Fuzzy Face’s gourmet ham sandwiches! Tell me what the book says about Belle Frisson while I cook, Jonathan.”
Jonathan summarized for them. The information was meager and not very helpful. “The author of the book thought she was probably just another trickster,” Jonathan finished, “although he admitted she did some very startling and baffling effects. No wonder. Clearly, Elizabeth Proctor—or Belle Frisson, as she called herself—was in touch with mysterious powers and forces. There’s one odd thing. She seems to have amassed a fortune over the years, but it was all spent on her funeral. Years before her fatal accident she’d arranged for a strange troupe of people to come whenever and wherever she died to prepare her tomb and bury her. That sounds like she was plotting something.”
“I agree,” said Mrs. Zimmermann, rattling pots and pans. “I believe Belle Frisson was determined to come back from the dead.”
“I think you’ve hit it, Florence,” declared Jonathan. He turned and stared at the kitchen calendar. “She died on Halloween 1878. I think she’s planning to come back this Halloween. So on Friday at midnight, when the date changes from the thirtieth to the thirty-first—”
He left the rest of the thought unspoken. He didn’t need to say any more. The idea was too terrible to put into words.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Rose Rita rose from unconsciousness like a diver slowly swimming to the surface of deep, dark waters. Her first impression was that she had been dreaming. Everything that had happened since the day she had first found the scroll seemed faraway and hazy, like a dimly recalled nightmare. For just a few seconds, Rose Rita felt safe and cozy and warm.
Then she opened her eyes to the repellent green light, and she knew it had all been real. She found herself sitting on one of the two thrones, and she tried to get up. She could not stir. She could barely even move her head. She looked down at herself, and her eyes grew wide with terror.
Rose Rita’s whole body had been wrapped in glistening spider silk. Except for her head she was encased in a cocoon. She might have been a mummy, wrapped in yards and yards of bandages pulled tight around her. Her stomach lurched as she remembered the touch of that huge spider’s prickly legs on her shoulders. It had spun its silk around her, the way an ordinary garden spider would spin silk around a trapped insect. Even her hair felt as if it had been plastered to the back of the throne with more silk. Rose Rita had just enough slack to breathe. Her arms had been tied to the arms of the throne, her hands bound to two balls that felt like polished metal. She could not even turn her head.
From the corner of her eye she could glimpse another figure, seated beside her. It was the horrible spider-crawling skeleton. From it came a breathy voice: “There is no need to struggle. You will have no lasting pain, and after that you will not even care. Your mind will continue to work as your body withers away, slowly, slowly, over a hundred years. Its life force will feed me. You will be a part of me in a way. You should be flattered.”
“Let me go,” said Rose Rita. No longer terrified, no longer paralysed, now she was just plain angry. “You let me go, or you’ll be sorry!”
The insinuating voice ignored her. “What will you think of, here in the dark, as I have been for all these years? I believe you will go mad very quickly. Alone in the tomb, with only a spider for company. Yes, I believe you will be quite insane before many weeks have passed.”
Rose Rita did not answer. She struggled fiercely to break free, but the clinging spider silk was tough. She could barely wriggle. “Let me go!” she yelled again.
“Foolish child,” sneered the voice. “When my body was broken, I reached through the curtain of death to work my will. At my bidding was my tomb fashioned, and at my bidding did my slaves sacrifice one who had been my best friend to Neith, the Weaver of the World. Do you think that I, who would not hesitate to command that, would allow you to escape? No, child, you are my lifeline, my tie to the world. Not for all the treasures of the East would I release you!” The voice chortled, a harrowing, raspy sound. “When the time comes, and it is very close now, my pet will seize you and bend you forward. It will bite you just once, on the back of the neck, and I am afraid that will be very painful. Then I shall leave you. Behold, already I grow strong.”
Rose Rita gritted her teeth to keep from crying out. The skeleton beside her moved! With creaky, slow jerks, it raised itself to its feet. It took a wobbling step, and Rose Rita shut her eyes.
The tiny spiders had woven a skin of white spiderweb over the skeleton. They were beneath it, for the creature’s flesh literally crawled. The empty eye sockets glowed with a red inner light. The mouth had become a straight slit, revealing dry, yellowed teeth. Beneath the linen robe the chest heaved, as if the monstrous thing were breathing.
“You do not think I am lovely?” mocked the voice. “Wait, child. When you have been . . . prepared, when I draw strength and sustenance from you, then this flesh will seem as real as yours. I shall be beautiful! I shall walk the Earth again! This time I shall master the weak mortals around me. After your usefulness has been drained, there will be another, and another. I shall live forever!”
Rose Rita opened her eyes. The skeleton stood before her, swaying, as if it were hardly strong enough to stand. It stepped aside, collapsing back onto the throne with a muffled clatter of bones. “My pet is coming,” the voice whispered.
With dread in her heart Rose Rita glared out at the room. Creeping over the round platform was the enormous spider. “No!” screamed Rose Rita.
“The time draws near,” said the voice. “The time draws very near.”
* * *
By Friday, the day before Halloween, Lewis was growing frantic. The police were searching everywhere for Rose Rita, without success. Mr. and Mrs. Pottinger had offered a reward, but of course that would do no good. Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann were at the end of their rope. They had tried everything from books on cryptography and code breaking to the most powerful spells that Mrs. Zimmermann could think of, but nothing helped.
Lewis stayed home from school that day, too anxious to attend. Late that afternoon the phone rang, and Jonathan answered it. He came back to the kitchen, where Mrs. Zimmermann and Lewis waited, with his face set in a grim expression. “That was George Pottinger,” he said. “The police have found something after all. A woman named Seidler picked up a girl who said her name was R
owena Potter out west of town, and she dropped her off near the cemetery. The state police searched around and found Rose Rita’s bicycle in a cornfield. Now they believe that Rose Rita has run away.”
Mrs. Zimmermann sighed. “Oh, if only we knew the rest of this blasted spell. I think I have everything except seven words, but they are words of power. Jonathan, if worse comes to worst, we simply have to work the spell. God help us, I don’t know what it might do, but we’ll have to try.”
Lewis said, “Why don’t we ask Mr. Hardwick if he has pictures?”
Both Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann looked at him. “Pictures?” asked Uncle Jonathan. “You mean pictures of the monument?”
Mrs. Zimmermann asked, “Why do you think he’d take pictures?”
With a shrug, Lewis answered, “I know it’s a long shot. Still, Mr. and Mrs. Hardwick visit the cemetery a lot, and they have friends buried there. And Mr. Hardwick does make a point of collecting everything he can about magic—everything from wands and books to posters and Houdini’s old milk can.”
Jonathan got to his feet. “It’s worth a try. Let me call him.” He went to the study and made the call, and a minute later he was back. “Let’s go!” he hastened them. “Lewis may have saved the day.”
Mrs. Zimmermann did not even object when Jonathan opened the garage. They drove the few blocks to the National Museum of Magic in Jonathan’s boxy old car, and they hurried inside. Mr. Hardwick was waiting there for them. He opened the door and ushered them in. “Welcome, welcome,” he said, shaking hands with all of them. “Jonathan, it’s good to see you again. My, I did admire that trick you did at the Chamber of Commerce meeting last summer—the floating handkerchief. I think I’ve about figured out how you did it, but it was a great stunt. I—”
With a tight smile Jonathan said, “Thank you very much, Bob, but we’d really like to see—what we talked about on the phone, if it isn’t too much trouble.”
The Specter from the Magician's Museum Page 10
