Now that Bertie had said it, Lewis found the idea very tempting. The invisible servant had chased them twice toward the house. Like a collie herding sheep, Lewis thought. Maybe its power ended at the road, and if he could get that far, he could escape. But what about Bertie? Lewis could dream up all sorts of disasters, but this time he imagined things happening to his friend. He made up his mind. “No,” he said gruffly. “We go together. Even Professor Moriarty couldn’t split up Holmes and Watson—and he was lots tougher than any old spook and his invisible whatsis!” He hoped that he sounded much braver than he felt.
“All right,” said Bertie, his tone showing his vast relief. “Toward the Manor, then. I’ll take the lead out of the maze, and then up the hill as fast as we can go.”
“And once we get there . . .” Lewis floundered for an idea. Once they got to the Manor, then what? Climb back up his improvised rope? What good would that do? They needed a base of operations, someplace safe. Not the toolroom in the garage—they could be trapped there if anyone came to the door, because the toolroom had only one entrance. But there was one room where Lewis had felt a sense of peace. “Okay,” he said. “Once we get to the Manor, we go to Master Martin’s study to plan how to use the Amulet. Maybe we can find a book on magic there that could help us. Or maybe—this is crazy, but maybe Martin’s spirit will watch out for us and keep us safe.”
“Whatever you say,” agreed Bertie. “As long as we don’t desert my mum.”
Lewis’s mouth felt dry. “I guess we’d better start. I’m rested up from the dash down here, and there’s no sense putting it off any longer.”
Bertie led the way beneath the stone bench again. The two friends trotted quickly through the hedge maze, with Bertie’s extended hand brushing the wall and providing guidance. With the Amulet hanging on its chain around his neck and the coronet clutched in his hands, Lewis thought of the nightmares that had plagued him. What if these hedges came alive suddenly? What if they wrapped their shoots around Bertie’s hand and dragged him into their brushy maw? Stop it! he told himself. That’s your trouble. You dream up calamities before they ever happen.
“Here we are,” Bertie said. He halted in the entrance to the maze. “All clear?”
Lewis peered over his shoulder up the long hill toward the Manor. “Looks okay. Let’s go!”
They made a run for it. At once Lewis heard a deep-throated roar, somehow realer than the earlier sounds had been. Bertie screamed thinly. Lewis yelled, “Run, Bertie, run!” The circular drive and safety were only ten yards away. Only five—
“Hrr-umpf!” Bertie had snagged his foot on something! He went sprawling, both hands thrust out to catch himself! He hit the ground with a whump, and his green glasses flew off his nose and dangled by one earpiece. From behind him something came dashing through the tall grass, growling and snarling!
“Get up!” screeched Lewis. His momentum had carried him a few steps past his friend. Now he stood almost on the circular drive. “Oh, gosh, Bertie, get up!”
He could see the course the thing took in coming up the hillside. It was already past the maze. The tall grass bent aside as the invisible pursuer bounded toward them. Clods of earth and matted grass roots flew where unseen claws ripped the ground. Bertie crouched on his hands and knees, disoriented. “Help me, Lewis!” he wailed.
Lewis ran back and grabbed Bertie’s elbow. He tugged hard, but the thing had almost reached them. One more jump—
Lewis dropped Bertie’s arm and grabbed the Amulet. He thrust it before him, like Professor van Helsing brandishing his crucifix at Count Dracula. The snarls became a bubbling growl of rage and frustration, and the invisible servant stopped not ten feet away. Lewis felt its hot breath and smelled its sickening stench of decay. “You stay back,” he ordered the creature. “Bertie, we’re going up the hill. You got the direction?”
“Yes. Wh-what’s it doing?”
“It’s okay. Come on now. One step at a time.”
Lewis was walking backward. Bertie had risen to his feet. Lewis nudged him in the right direction. They took a few steps, and then he felt the asphalt of the drive underfoot. Safe! A giant depression promptly appeared in the grass just beyond the drive. The invisible servant had lain down on its belly in the grass, like a monstrous lion or tiger. Except the bent grass showed that its body was much larger than either, at least the size of a horse. Low, rumbling growls followed the boys to the Manor. Lewis did not dare pause until they had backed in the front door. Would the commotion bring Jenkins or Mrs. Goodring? Lewis knew they had to get out of the entrance hall fast.
“Can we get up to the study without going through the east wing?” he asked Bertie.
“Sure,” said Bertie. “We could take the center stair. That way we won’t have to go anywhere close to our rooms.”
Bertie led the way through the dim, darkened hallways and stairways, and they came out not far from the study. As soon as they got inside the room, they closed the door behind them. They had no way of locking it, so they sat on the floor with their backs against it. “Here we are,” said Bertie. “Now what?”
Lewis hated to admit it, but he was fresh out of ideas. He had been taking everything one step at a time, and just getting to the study had been his entire goal. Now that they actually were here, he had to think of what to do. Bertie was relying on him, and maybe Cousin Pelly’s and Uncle Jonathan’s lives hung in the balance as well.
When he did not reply to Bertie’s question right away, Bertie said, “Lewis, something is bothering me.”
“What?”
“Well, old Growly can’t cross the drive. At least he never has. But something got inside the Manor to hypnotize my mum and Jenkins. What is it, and how did it get across the magic barrier?”
Lewis could answer that, because he had thought about the same question. “I’m guessing,” he said, “but I think that somehow when we opened the vault, we brought old Witch-finder Pruitt’s spirit back to the Manor. I’d bet you anything that Mr. Matthew Prester of London is really a ghost—the ghost of Witch-finder Pruitt. The other thing, what we call old Growly, is Pruitt’s invisible servant, the evil spirit that he controlled. I think it’s more like an animal than a human being. Right now the ghost of the witch-finder is using it as a kind of guard dog, probably to make sure we don’t get out of the Manor and no one gets in to help us. I’ll bet Martin Barnavelt made some kind of magical circle around the Manor the minute he moved back in, and that’s what keeps old Growly out.”
“But something got in.”
“Yeah,” agreed Lewis. “Remember what Jenkins told us about Mr. Prester asking if he could come inside the Manor? That’s gotta be it. In the vampire stories, a vampire is a kind of evil ghost. And vampires can’t come into a house until someone living inside invites them. Jenkins didn’t mean to do it, but when he told Mr. Prester to go into the Manor, he broke the protective spell that Martin put around the house. The ghost got inside, and that’s how he got a chance to hypnotize your mom and Jenkins, and to kidnap my uncle and Cousin Pelly.”
“D-do you think we can fight something like that?” faltered Bertie.
“I don’t know, Bertie. Maybe this thing will help. I wonder what it is.” He held up the bubbly, cracked, green glass tube, but he could not clearly make out what it held inside. He dropped the Amulet down inside the front of his shirt. Somehow its presence near his heart comforted him. He had put the coronet down beside him. Now he rose to his feet and picked it up. “Let’s hide this crown and see if we can find anything in any of these books that might help.”
One of the dustcovers concealed an enormous old desk of some heavy, dark wood. Lewis opened the drawers and found a deep one that was empty. He slipped the coronet down into that, closed the drawer, and rearranged the cover. Then as Bertie kept guard at the door, Lewis began to look at the rows and rows of books. He found lots of things that ordinarily might have made him pause: A Second Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, a French translation of the Necronomi
con by someone named Abdul Alhazred, and a slim volume called The Lore of Model Railroading. He found cookbooks and poetry collections, mystery novels and arithmetic books, accounts of piracy and collections of stories about dragons. But he found nothing that promised to help him understand the magic of the Amulet or to give him any ideas about how to combat a sorcerer’s ghost. He did not give up, but went on to the next set of shelves.
Most of the day passed in this way. Bertie complained once that he was hungry. Lewis felt ravenous too, but he did not dare try to sneak down to the kitchen for something to eat. “We just have to live with it,” he said, sighing. Bertie must have agreed, because he did not bring up the subject of food again.
The problem was that the library held so many books. Worse, they were in no order at all—unless you counted the order of size. The folios, which are larger books, were on the taller shelves, the middle-sized quartos and octavos on the shorter shelves, and the even smaller sixteenmos and thirtytwomos were crammed into shelves only a few inches apart. However, since size does not determine content, books jostled each other with no sense or order. Lewis found a biography of Izaak Walton, the world’s most famous fisherman, wedged between a tome of wedding etiquette and a fat travel guide to scenic Luxembourg. Searching for one particular book in all this confusion was worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. It was more like looking for one particular needle in a needle factory.
Outside, the sun sank low and shadows stretched out long and black across the lawn. Lewis had to drag a heavy chair around with him to be able to look at the books on the higher shelves, and that made the going even slower. He felt more and more frustrated as he prowled through all the useless books. He wondered why Cousin Pelly didn’t simply sell some of these volumes if he needed money. Lewis was no expert, but he knew that some of the books were very old and probably very valuable. He was almost sure, for example, that the big black Gutenberg Bible would bring a high price. But maybe the books had sentimental value, like the big cardboard suitcase that he and Jonathan had decided not to take on their vacation because it was in such bad shape. Still, Lewis would never have thrown it away. The suitcase had belonged to his father, and it was special to him.
The light faded to dusk, and finally Lewis finished the last set of shelves. “Nothing,” he reported in a gloomy voice. He felt grimy and exhausted. A fine film of book dust covered his face and hands and made his eyes feel scratchy. “I guess if Martin Barnavelt had any volumes of magic, he must have hidden them. And no, I don’t want to search for secret bookshelves. Bertie, I hate to say it, but I think we’d better try to get away from the Manor. The sun is setting, and I don’t wanna be here after dark.”
“I shall stay,” said Bertie at once.
Lewis grimaced. “Okay, okay,” he muttered. “But we gotta get some food. You stay here, and I’ll sneak down and grab us something. If I’m not back in ten minutes, you’ll know that you should try to escape.”
“No,” said Bertie. “We go together, or not at all.”
“Oh, all right.” Lewis tried to sound cross, but what he felt was immense relief. He did not look forward to creeping through those dark hallways.
They opened the study door, and Lewis looked out. Nothing. Together he and Bertie stepped into the hall and headed for the stairway.
Slam! The door crashed shut behind them with a sound like a gunshot. Both boys yelled in fright. Lewis spun in the sudden darkness and saw an eerie glow behind him. It hovered, shapeless and uncertain at first, a greenish-blue vapory-looking mist about the size of a man. Then almost immediately it took on shape and form. Lewis recognized the black-clothed man he had glimpsed down by the gatekeeper’s cottage! The face was long and lean, with a high forehead and deep-set, glaring eyes. The lips split apart, and the apparition gave Lewis a horrifying snaggle-toothed grin, just like the evil leer he had seen on the face of the moon.
“At last!” Did Lewis hear the words, or did they sound only in his mind? He couldn’t tell. The sound, or the feeling, made him dizzy and breathless. He felt the way he had in the awful nightmares, when he tried to run but could hardly move a muscle. “The last of the accursed Barnavelts, in my hands after all this great while! I tell thee, I have waited three hundred years for my vengeance. And now ‘tis mine at last! I hold thee my prisoner, thou accursed whelp!”
“Run!” screamed Bertie, and that broke the dreadful spell. Lewis screamed too, and he spun on his heel. He and Bertie pelted down the dark hallway—
They ran right into a tall figure. Bony hands clamped onto the boys’ shoulders. Lewis thought his heart would burst from fear. He heard mocking laughter.
Then the electric lights flickered on, dim and orange and ghastly. Lewis could see his captor now. Cousin Pelly stood gripping Lewis and Bertie, his face turned down toward them.
But his expression, like Mrs. Goodring’s and Jenkins’s, was empty and mindless. The ghost of the witch-finder had somehow enslaved poor old Pelly. And now Bertie and Lewis were in the evil ghost’s power.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Down, down, down. Unspeaking, moving like a robot, Cousin Pelly forced the boys to climb down a winding circular stair. “Where are we going?” Lewis asked, but his relative did not reply.
“I don’t know,” said Bertie. He had thought the question was for him. “Was that a trapdoor we went through?”
“Yeah,” replied Lewis. “It’s under a rug in the middle of the front-hall floor.”
“I didn’t even know it was there,” said Bertie.
The bony hands gave them a shake, and the boys fell silent. The circular stair twisted downward through a stone-walled shaft, with dim and flickering light coming from candles stuck into sconces every few steps. The air felt damp and smelled musty, as if the place had been closed off for ages. Finally they reached the bottom of the stair. Ahead of them loomed a tall, arched door of oak. Pelly shoved them roughly toward this, and it swung slowly open as they approached, although no hand touched it.
Lewis gasped. Now he knew where they were. The room beyond the door rose to a barrel-arched ceiling. The floor was glistening stone, blackened with age and slippery with moisture. A long table had been set up at the far end. It held a brass candelabrum with four tapers burning in it, giving the dismal room the dimmest possible illumination. And thanks to the uncertain light, Lewis could see a miserable figure standing in a kind of waist-high wooden cage to the left of the table. It was his uncle Jonathan, still in his carrot-colored pajamas and nightcap, with his hands chained in front of him.
Lewis glared wildly around. Shapes stood in the dark shadowy corners of the room, shapes that could be tables or chests or other odds and ends of furniture. Only they weren’t. Without even being able to see them clearly, Lewis knew that they were instruments of torture. This was the abandoned wine cellar that Witch-finder Pruitt had made his headquarters. This was where he tormented and wrung confessions from his hapless victims. This was the courtroom where he had held his trials for witchcraft.
“The prisoners will be placed in the dock.”
Lewis jerked his gaze back to the table. No one had sat behind it before, but now he saw a tall chair, and in it a spectral form. Old Witch-finder Pruitt, or his ghost, sat there, his bald dome hidden under an elaborate wig. He wore the long black robes of a British judge. Pelly pushed the boys forward, forcing them into the waist-high cage where Uncle Jonathan stood. “Hello, boys,” he said, his voice sad and weary. “Lewis, I’m sorry I got you into this mess.”
Despite all his fear and dread, Lewis felt like hugging Jonathan. “Gosh, Uncle Jonathan, it’s all my fault—”
“Silence!”
Bertie gasped in fear. Lewis flinched and looked back at the apparition behind the table. It looked different, somehow. Then he realized that the features of the witch-finder were changing from moment to moment. They wavered and swam, like a face seen through a windowpane with rain wriggling down over it. One instant the face was the stern and cunning countenan
ce of a man in hearty middle age. The next the cheeks and eyes had sunken, the hair had withered away from the temples, and the mouth had gone gap-toothed and slack. It was as if Pruitt were aging from forty-five to a hundred and then going back again, over and over.
“The other prisoner will enter the dock.”
Pelly walked stiffly into the now-crowded cage.
“Mr. Barnavelt,” whispered Bertie. “Please, sir, snap out of it!”
Pelly did not respond. He stood staring blindly ahead, his arms slack at his sides. Lewis thought desperately of running away, but the moment the thought entered his mind, the door swung closed with a boom, making him start violently. No escape that way.
The ghost at the table spoke again: “Prisoners at the bar, three of ye stand accused of the most horrible and vile crime of sorcery. Ye are descended from that accursed warlock Martin Barnavelt, who did foully enchant me in my days of life and cut short my good work. How do ye plead?”
Pelly said nothing, and Lewis was too frightened to speak. But Jonathan raised his voice and boomed, “Not guilty, your dishonor!”
The ghost continued as if it had not heard: “The fourth prisoner is a willing accomplice to the crimes of the others. He shall be judged as harshly, and delivered to the same punishment as they. The trial will proceed.”
“You’re no judge,” said Jonathan in an angry voice. “And this is no trial. You were the evil sorcerer, and you know it. Martin Barnavelt never hurt anyone in his life except you, and you asked for it!”
“We who do the work of good must sometimes employ the methods of the doers of evil,” the ghost said. “True, I did learn the ways and wiles of sorcery. But that was to entrap the witches that did bedevil our land, and to prolong my days upon the earth, that they might be caught and punished!”
Jonathan snorted. To Lewis and Bertie, he said, “Don’t believe the old liar. Malachiah Pruitt traded his soul for control of an evil spirit. It prolonged his days, all right—he didn’t age at all for fifty years. But when Martin Barnavelt banished the spirit, all of old Pruitt’s evil fell on his shoulders, and the shock turned him into a doddering old man before it killed him!”
The Vengeance of the Witch-Finder Page 10