Lewis’s nerve broke. He turned and ran back to the Manor as fast as he could go. He had heard that mocking, hollow voice before. It sounded just like the tone he had heard in his head when he had imagined the skull-faced moon was talking to him. Or had he imagined it?
Lewis felt like bursting into tears. He sensed that invisible eyes watched him secretly, with gloating triumph. He was afraid to try to run away, and he was afraid to go back into the Manor. When he got to the point where the drive curved to run around the house, Lewis paused and chanced a look back toward the gate. Jenkins stood there, as stiff as a statue, his pointing arm still extended. And something flickered momentarily at the window of the gatekeeper’s cottage. Could it be the same repulsive face that had looked in his window during the storm? Lewis feared that it was.
At a loss, he decided to go back inside and up to his room after all. He had to think this through. Everything pointed to an appalling conclusion: Mrs. Goodring and Jenkins were hypnotized or brainwashed. His uncle had been taken from his room in the night. His cousin Pelly was also missing.
And Lewis was a prisoner in Barnavelt Manor.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Inside Barnavelt Manor, Lewis found Mrs. Goodring waiting for him with that same empty, mindless gaze. “Don’t you think you had better go to your room?” she asked. After a moment’s pause, she repeated, “Don’t you think you had better go to your room?” in exactly the same way. Lewis did not speak to her, but he did climb the stair. He heard a sound behind and looked back. Mrs. Goodring was coming up after him, with the monotonous slow tread of a zombie. “Don’t you think you had better go to your room?” she asked again.
Lewis thought he would come down with the screaming meemies if he heard that question again. He hurried to his bedroom and closed the door. He paced the floor for several minutes. Then he tiptoed to the door and pulled it open slowly and quietly, until he could just peek out the crack. Mrs. Goodring stood motionless in the hall, her unblinking eyes staring in his direction. Lewis closed the door again and locked it. After a moment he hauled the chair over to the door and tilted it back, bracing it under the handle. He felt safer with the door barred as well as locked. He latched the door that led into his uncle’s room too, and pulled the desk over to hold that one closed.
He looked at his watch. It was just past nine o’clock. How could he get a message through to the outside world? He wondered if whatever had happened to Mrs. Goodring and Jenkins had also happened to everyone else. Was Uncle Jonathan shambling about somewhere in the Manor like Frankenstein’s monster? Was Cousin Pelly one of those glassy-eyed automatons? Lewis might be the only one in the whole house still in his right mind! The thought terrified him. He wasn’t just scared now. He felt a deep, gnawing horror, and a sense of hopelessness. Who was he kidding when he played Sherlock Holmes? Just himself, that was all. He wasn’t a brave, brilliant detective. He was just a lonely boy with an overactive imagination and a deep desire to be bigger and stronger and smarter than he was.
But he couldn’t give up. Not now. Not when he could be the only one capable of bringing help. And yet he knew Mrs. Goodring still stood guard outside his room. How to elude her?
Lewis went to the window again. It still stood open. He put his head out and looked straight down. It was twenty feet to the ground—and the ground looked hard, even after the soaking rains. If he only had a ladder—
“Sherlock Holmes would make a ladder,” said Lewis aloud. He turned to the bed. He was still frightened, but now he was feeling another emotion. He had become angry. Angry at the horrible old witch-finder who somehow had brought this terror on him and Pelly and Uncle Jonathan and the other victims over all those centuries. Angry at the feeling that some invisible spirit was watching him and gloating because it thought he was so dumb and it was so darned smart. Well, two can play at that game!
Lewis threw off the coverlet and then stripped the blanket and both sheets from his bed. He knotted these all together, and then he pushed and grunted and groaned until he had shoved the bed up against the wall next to the open window. He quickly tied a corner of the blanket to the bedpost, and then he tossed the improvised rope of blanket and sheets out the opening. He leaned out and peered down. Not too bad. The bottom sheet dangled about eight feet above the ground, but that was lots better than twenty.
Lewis got his flashlight and jammed it into the waistband of his corduroy pants. He grabbed his Sherlock Holmes hat and crammed it beneath his belt. Then he climbed onto the windowsill and tugged at the blanket. What if it gave way? If the knots slipped, he could be killed or lamed for life. It was a stupid thing to attempt, he knew, but he felt desperate. “Don’t think about it,” muttered Lewis to himself. He took a deep breath and let himself slip through the window. He clutched his makeshift rope so tightly that his fingers ached. For a dizzy second he was so scared that he could not even make his hands loosen their desperate clench. Then he forced his muscles to relax. He slipped down the blanket, inch by inch, until he got to the first knot. The sheet was easier to hold on to than the thick blanket. He let himself slide down a little faster. At last he dangled from the end of the last sheet. His arms ached fiercely, but his swinging feet could not touch the ground. Lewis was afraid to look down, but he forced himself.
He had been holding his breath. He let it out in a gust of relief. His toes swayed only two feet above the ground. Lewis let go and dropped to earth. The wet sod squished under the impact and threw him off balance, but he managed not to fall down. He was free, at least for the moment.
What now? Lewis considered. He would give anything for some help and encouragement. He needed Bertie, but he had no idea what had happened to his friend. Maybe the evil spirit had put him under its spell, but what if Bertie was all right? All right, but a captive, as he had been? He made up his mind and stole around to the back of the Manor, keeping close to the wall and ducking down low to creep under the windows he passed. At the corner he saw something that explained why his telephone call had been interrupted. The telephone wire came out of the house there, and someone had cut it. Whoever had snipped the connection had made sure that the wires could not be easily connected, because a section at least six inches long had been cut away.
At the corner Lewis looked around nervously, but no one was in sight. He remembered that Bertie’s bedroom window looked out at the vegetable garden. He decided that to have that particular angle of view, Bertie’s window had to be the second one from the corner. He sneaked to that window and, raising his head, cautiously peered inside.
He had chosen the right window. Bertie lay face-down on his bed, with his arms folded under his head. He looked as if he had been crying. Lewis tapped quietly on the window, making no more noise than a fly might make if it flew head-on into the glass.
Bertie’s head came up. He groped for his green spectacles, put them on, and came over to the window. He opened it a crack. “Who’s there?” he whispered.
“The game’s afoot,” breathed Lewis. If old Growly had taken over Bertie’s mind, then that phrase would be meaningless. But if Bertie was himself—
“I shall be with you in a moment, Holmes,” said Bertie. “Lewis? This window sticks rather badly, but if we both try, we might manage it.”
They shoved and tugged at the window sash until they had it open just far enough for Bertie to worm out. Lewis helped him. “Where can we go that’s private?” whispered Lewis.
“The toolshed next to the garage,” answered Bertie promptly. “No one’s ever there unless Jenkins has to work on the auto.”
“Come on, then.”
The toolshed was a little addition on one side of the huge garage. As they approached it, Lewis saw that Cousin Pelly’s boxy old automobile still rested in its place. The Austin had not budged an inch since he had noticed it there the day before. Uncle Jonathan and Cousin Pelly have gone on a short trip, he thought. Like fun, they have. The two boys crept into the shed and closed the door. A row of small, square windows very hi
gh up in one wall let daylight into the narrow little room. The wall beneath the windows had rows and rows of pegs, and all sorts of things hung on them: red rubber inner tubes plastered all over with patches, coils of copper wire, and broken fan belts unraveling into long hanks of black fibers. A narrow shelf ran along the other wall, with open cabinets underneath holding shallow wooden boxes filled with tools. “What’s going on, Lewis?” asked Bertie.
Lewis hopped up to sit on the shelf. “I don’t really know,” he admitted. “But I have a few ideas, only they’re kind of horrible.” He quickly told Bertie about the diary and what it had revealed about old Malachiah Pruitt. He hesitated for a few seconds, but then reflected that he owed the whole truth to Bertie. He breathed deeply and rushed on to add, “And there’s something else too. Malachiah Pruitt was the evil sorcerer, but Martin Barnavelt was also a wizard. A good one. I know that sounds crazy, but—but—Bertie, there are such things. I know. Uncle Jonathan is a good wizard too.” There. He’d said it.
“What can he do?” asked Bertie, sounding interested.
“Well, he can eclipse the moon, and create illusions,” said Lewis. “And he can make the neighbor’s cat whistle ‘Dixie,’ only it flats out on the twelfth note. But none of that can help us now. And I thought you didn’t believe in witches and stuff, anyway.”
Bertie’s expression was grave. “I didn’t, but you say that Jonathan is a wizard, so he must be one. I guess I was wrong, that’s all.”
“Don’t tell anyone about this,” cautioned Lewis. “Uncle Jonathan wouldn’t like anyone to know. It’s kind of a family secret, and I’ve gotta trust you now that I’ve spilled it.”
“I won’t tell, honor bright,” said Bertie. Somehow Lewis knew he could believe him. The blind boy was silent for a minute, and then he asked, “What can we do, Lewis? Something awful has come over Mum. She acted quite cross with me this morning for no reason at all, and she told me I had to stay in my room all day. I think something is wrong with her.”
“Boy, is it ever. Bertie, I believe that whatever we let out of that vault has some sort of spell over your mom, and over Jenkins too,” said Lewis in a grim voice. “Worst of all, I don’t know what we can do to help. The only thing I know to try is to make a run for it. But I have a rotten feeling that once we get outside the circular drive, the spirit or demon or whatever it is will be right on our heels.”
“What about the amulet you read about in the book?” asked Bertie. “If it has power to bind evil spirits, maybe it has power to chase them away too.”
Lewis sat up straighter. “Yeah,” he said. “I hadn’t even thought about that, but you’re right. If this Amulet of Constantine could hold that nasty critter down for three hundred years, I’ll bet it could snap Jenkins and your mom right out of their trance. It might even help us send the invisible servant back to wherever it came from in the first place.”
“We’ve got to try for it, then.”
“But it’s buried in the vault,” objected Lewis. “How are we supposed to get it out?”
“We are in a toolshed,” Bertie pointed out in a reasonable voice.
“So we are,” said Lewis. He saw the plan right away, but after a moment he had to confess, “Bertie, I don’t know if I can go through with this. I’m scared.”
After a moment Bertie mumbled softly, “I am too.”
“I know you are. But I guess you’re right—we gotta try. We’ll have to make a run for it once we get into the maze. You think you can get us to the stone bench fast?”
“I ought to be able to do that,” replied Bertie. “I’ve been through the maze a hundred times, at least.”
“Okay.” Lewis frowned in concentration. “Let’s see if we can find some hammers and chisels and crowbars. Somehow I don’t think old Growly will be back in that center clearing where the vault is.”
“Why not?”
“Well, if you had been locked up in a dark little room for three hundred years, and then got out, would you wait there to get shoved inside again?”
“That makes sense,” admitted Bertie.
“So I think if we can get there fast, it’ll be okay. According to that diary, Martin Barnavelt sealed the amulet in the lid. I’d bet you anything that it’s under that dome right in the middle. And if we can break open the dome, and the amulet is inside, then—then we’ll decide what to do next,” Lewis finished lamely.
Bertie could offer no better plan. Lewis soon found a sturdy ball-peen hammer, a tarnished but heavy metal chisel, and a short crowbar. He gave the latter to Bertie, and he carried the other tools himself. For luck he pulled his Sherlock Holmes hat out of his belt and tugged it on. “Let’s go,” he said. “We’re as ready as we’ll ever be.”
The boys saw no sign of Jenkins. They crept around front until they stood at the top of the slope—about twenty yards from the hedge maze. But to get to it, they would have to step off the circular drive. Both Bertie and Lewis were quite convinced by now that some magic beneath the drive warded off the invisible servant. Getting up the nerve to move past that boundary was like building up the courage to jump off a high diving board. At first you thought you could never do it, and then you imagined how awful it would be, and then suddenly you stepped off into thin air and were on your way. Both Bertie and Lewis leaped forward at the same moment.
Bertie had one hand on Lewis’s elbow. Lewis had to watch out for both of them, choosing a path that wouldn’t let Bertie trip over a root or a stone. They were at the entrance to the maze before he knew it, and they plunged right in. Lewis gritted his teeth. The air had a strange feeling again, like the tension building up in the atmosphere before a bolt of lightning. If they could just reach that bench—
They twisted and turned and twisted again, with Bertie taking the lead now. Something rattled in the hedges far behind them, maybe just a bird. It made them both move faster all the same. “Around this corner,” panted Bertie, and sure enough, there was the mossy bench.
Bertie threw himself on the ground and crawled under the stone bench, and half a second later Lewis wriggled through the opening too. They collapsed, breathing hard and listening for sounds of pursuit. A bird twittered somewhere. The wind rustled in the hedges. They heard nothing else.
“I think this is a safety zone,” said Lewis when he had caught his breath. “It may be the one blind spot that old Growly has.”
“Let’s get to work,” replied Bertie. “I don’t want to leave my mum in the power of that thing.”
Lewis hoisted himself up to the concrete lid of the brick vault. He noticed that things had changed. Little twigs lay here and there on the lid, and a black beetle trundled along on some beetly mission. Before, the vault clearing had shown no signs of life, and no fallen leaves at all had lain in it. Since the evil spirit had escaped and gone outside, everything seemed to be returning to normal in the heart of the maze. Lewis braced the chisel against the side of the dome and pounded it with the hammer. The blows made a kind of metallic music: clang! clang! clang! The sound reminded Lewis of “The Anvil Chorus,” a tune he had heard played in a hundred cartoons. Chips of concrete flaked off and flew away. Lewis wondered what would happen if one of those things hit his eye. It would blind him, probably. He squinted and half averted his face.
Another blow, and another, and suddenly the chisel sank a couple of inches through the dome’s surface. “Got it!” Lewis said. “Gimme the crowbar.”
He worked the curved end of the bar into the little slot he had chiseled. Then he and Bertie tugged hard on the straight end of the bar, applying all the leverage they could. Sproin-n-ng! A big chunk of the dome peeled back. Lewis could see now that the dome had a lining of greenish metal. Probably old Martin had put a copper bowl upside down and plastered a thin layer of concrete over that. The copper had corroded and weakened over the centuries, and now it offered no resistance. Seeing a hole as broad as the palm of his hand now open in the dome, Lewis took the hammer and smacked away. He split off large fragments, and in a
moment he was able to reach inside. He pulled out a wooden box a little bigger and deeper than a cigar box, with hinges and a lock made of badly tarnished brass.
“We don’t have time to worry about finding a key,” Lewis said with a grunt. He stuck the chisel under the edge of the lid and pried. The old hinges gave way with a screech of metal, and the box practically fell to pieces in his hand.
“What is it, Lewis?” asked Bertie anxiously. “Is the Amulet there?”
“It sure is,” said Lewis. “And something else too.”
He held a surprisingly heavy object in his hand. Wrapped around it was a gold chain, and from the chain dangled a sealed green glass tube as long as his index finger. The green glass was bubbly and spiderwebbed with tiny cracks, but inside the tube Lewis could glimpse something dark and metallic and pointed. Lewis unwrapped the chain and let the glass tube dangle. “This must be the Amulet of Constantine,” he said. “But Bertie, there’s something else.”
“What?” asked Bertie, impatience making his voice rise.
Lewis looked down at what he held. It was a delicate network of gold filigree arching over an inch-wide band of solid gold. Woven into the golden strands were glittering gems that had to be emeralds, rubies, and pearls. “I don’t know for sure,” said Lewis, his tone hushed, “but Bertie, I think it might be the crown of King Charles the First.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
They did not spend much time admiring the coronet. “Which way do you think we oughta go?” asked Lewis. “Out the back of the maze, toward the house, or out the front, toward the road?”
Bertie fell silent for several moments. At last he said, “I’m sorry, Lewis. I know you’d really like to get to the road and run for help. But my mum’s back in the Manor. I can’t leave her. I’ll go back that way.” His lower lip trembled and he sniffed a couple of times. “Per-perhaps it might be better if we split up. That way old Growly could pursue only one of us.”
The Vengeance of the Witch-Finder Page 9