The Vengeance of the Witch-Finder

by John Bellairs

  “You know about Martin Barnavelt and his magic?” asked Lewis, amazed.

  “He was my ancestor, and yours too, Lewis. Sure, I know all about Martin Barnavelt. Maybe Pelly thought all the old family stories were just fairy tales, but I knew better. Martin Barnavelt studied magic, all right, but he never used it for evil. And the worst day that he ever lived, he was twice as good a man as the wicked witch-finder ever was!” The words sounded contemptuous and brave, but Lewis could see a worried light in his uncle’s eyes.

  “That will change, thou miscreant,” said the ghost. “Thy foolish nephew released the phantom that served me. It summoned my own spirit from its slumber, and allowed me to walk again upon the earth. I spelled the inhabitants of the Manor to be my slaves and follow my will, and they released to me the trunk containing my magical supplies. The sacrifice of a few chickens strengthened me to use those supplies. And when thou and thy sorcerous kin are dead, then I shall walk the earth as flesh and blood again, free to find all wickedness and to punish it!”

  “What do you mean?” demanded Jonathan. “You don’t have any jurisdiction over me or my relatives!”

  The apparition laughed in a nasty way. “I have the jurisdiction of the righteous!” it howled. “Behold! Through the mystical knowledge I gained in my long studies, I know a most secret and cunning spell. One by one, ye miscreants will roast at the stake for thy sins! And as the life burns from each of ye, I shall gain new life! This ghostly form shall gain flesh and blood, and I shall be man alive again, fit to cleanse this sinful world. And this time I shall succeed, and claim rulership of England—of the whole world!”

  “You’re crazy, Pruitt,” growled Jonathan.

  “Which shall be first?” murmured the ghost. “The eldest? The youngest? Shall I give thee a taste of thy doom, thou bearded warlock?” The wavering spirit began to chant weird words.

  In the dock beside Lewis, Jonathan stiffened. “What’s wrong, Uncle Jonathan?” asked Lewis.

  His uncle did not reply. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and his eyes squeezed shut in pain. His teeth clenched, and a groan forced its way out. Then the ghost’s chanting stopped, and Jonathan staggered. “Whew!” he breathed.

  “What’s wrong?” squeaked Bertie.

  Jonathan shook his head. “An illusion spell. That flickering phantom had me believing I was lying on a rack, with my arms and my legs being stretched out of their sockets. And I fell for it!”

  Lewis looked at the ghost. Was it a little more solid? Did its features change more slowly from middle age to decrepitude? He thought they did.

  “Thou starest at me?” grinned the spook. “Then sample thy fate, young warlock!” Again the ghost chanted.

  Lewis gasped. The underground dungeon faded away. He was standing in a walled courtyard. His arms had been tied behind him, around a post almost as thick as a telephone pole. And he stood on a jumbled mound of split logs, reeking of pine resin and oak sap. The spirit of the witch-finder planned to burn him at the stake!

  The moment the thought came to him, Lewis heard the dreadful crackle of fire. He screamed for help, and his shout echoed back at him from the stone walls. Wisps of smoke floated up. Then the smoke grew thicker, ragged and gray. Waves of heat swept up from the wood, choking Lewis. Tears streamed from his eyes. He felt a searing lick of flame blistering his legs—

  And then the chanting stopped, and he was standing back in the dock. He swayed and gasped. Even the hot, stagnant air seemed cool by comparison with his vivid hallucination. And this time he was sure of it: Old Witch-finder Pruitt was more solid, less transparent, than he had been. He lives on other people’s pain and fear, Lewis thought confusedly. They make him stronger and more real. And death makes him strongest of all! He vaguely heard his uncle asking, “Lewis? Are you all right?”

  An idea came to Lewis then. He was crying, but he forced himself to speak boldly: “Yeah, you may burn us all to crisps and become real again. But if you plan to rule the world, you’re gonna need a crown. And you don’t have one, because my ancestor took it away from you. And you know what? I hid it where you’ll never find it, not in a million years!”

  “What!” thundered the ghost. “Thou hast my crown? I demand it of thee, insolent whelp!”

  “Go soak your head,” said Lewis.

  The ghost’s expression became cagey. “Boy, tell me where thou hast concealed my crown. Do it, and perhaps I shall let thee live. Perhaps I shall even adopt thee as my son—teach thee the words of command over spirits, that thou shalt be a mighty man of power.”

  Lewis blinked. He had not thought of that possibility. Although Jonathan fooled around with white magic, Lewis had always been frightened to try anything like that. He had been frightened of people and things all his life, he realized. For a moment he imagined himself wielding sorcerous power. He could turn all the bullies at school into frogs and mice. He could be so powerful that nothing could ever hurt him, and never again would he have to be afraid or dream up disasters that might happen to him.

  But then hot anger flooded over him. What would be the price of such power? The life of eccentric, likeable old Cousin Pelly? Of his loyal friend Bertie? Of kind and gentle Uncle Jonathan?

  “No deal,” he said. “But here’s what I will do: If you’ll let us go, I’ll get the crown for you. How’s that?”

  Greed and wrath warred in the ghostly face. A sly look replaced them. “Give us the coronet first,” the spirit purred. “And then we shall consider what leniency we shall offer thee.”

  “Lewis, no,” Bertie cried. “He’s trying to trick you.”

  Lewis ignored his friend. “Okay, I’ll do it,” he said. “You’ll have to let me go get it, though.”

  “My slave shall go with thee.”

  Lewis looked up at Jonathan and gave him a wink. Jonathan looked startled for a moment. But he raised no objection when Lewis stepped out of the dock. Lewis walked to the door. It swung open at his approach. All the way back to the study, Cousin Pelly plodded right along behind him. He had no chance to make a break for it.

  But Lewis had no plans to run away. In the study he reached down to the drawer where he had hidden the crown. He busied himself doing something to it for a moment, and then he straightened. He walked past Pelly and downstairs again, with his hypnotized old relative trudging along right behind him. Down he went again, down that spiral staircase to the horribly gruesome underground chamber.

  The scene had not changed. Jonathan and Bertie still cowered in the dock. The wavering form of Witch-finder Pruitt still shimmered behind the table. Its eyes glowed a hungry red the second Lewis entered with the coronet. “Mine!” screeched the spectral creature. “Mine! The just rewards of my diligence and cleverness, stolen from me by your ancestor! Approach, boy! Crown me King of England—of the world!”

  Lewis licked his lips. He hated to draw near the eerie creature, but he had to do it. He edged around the table. He stood beside the high-backed chair. “Crown me!” the spirit ordered again.

  He can’t pick it up, Lewis realized. The ghost might have the power to materialize, and it might even be solid enough for the crown to sit on its head and not sink through like a spoon sliding into Jell-O. But it wasn’t real enough to grasp material objects. That was why it had entranced Jenkins and Mrs. Goodring and Cousin Pelly. The most it could do was float trunks downstairs or make doors open and close by themselves. Lewis raised the coronet and held it over the ghost’s head. The judge’s wig faded and vanished, leaving the patchy, bald head of Witch-finder Pruitt exposed. Slowly, Lewis lowered the crown into place. It settled onto the ghost’s head. Both of Lewis’s hands felt cold, as if he had stuck them into the icebox.

  “Ha!” exclaimed the ghost. “What is rightfully mine has been returned. Now, foolish boy, thou shalt die—thou and all thine accursed kin!”

  “Yeah?” shouted Lewis. “You sure you can pull that off? What if you’re wearing the Amulet of Constantine around your stupid head?”

  “What!”
the ghost shrieked. Lewis had wound the chain of the Amulet around the crown again, just as he had found it, and he had tucked the Amulet into the network of gold filigree among the emeralds and rubies. Now the glass tube suddenly dropped free and dangled on its chain right between Witch-finder Pruitt’s hollow eyes.

  “Attaboy, Lewis!” yelled Jonathan, and immediately he began to chant something.

  The glass tube lit up with a supernatural glow. The ghost of the witch-finder leaped out of its seat, clawing at the crown. But the coronet had frozen itself to his skull. The ghost rose into the air, whirled, screamed, and screeched, and all the time the Amulet shone brighter and brighter. In its green glow an alarming change flowed over Pruitt’s features: He grew older by the second. He looked a hundred years old. Then he was like a living mummy, with his skin stretched horribly over his bones, so tight that it split and peeled away. His teeth showed in a grimace. The lips and gums shrank away from them until they were bare, yellow, and dry. The witch-finder became a rattling skeleton, his black judge’s robe flanking away to nothing. And then Jonathan’s chanting voice rose in a mighty crescendo. The Amulet gave a final, brilliant flash. In its unearthly light, Lewis saw the writhing skeleton silently explode into a cloud of gray dust—

  And the coronet fell from empty air to clatter on the table. Lewis snatched it up in the sudden darkness. He heard the clink and clank of chains. “What happened? What happened?” bawled Bertie.

  “Lewis just saved our hides!” yelled Jonathan. “The chains have dropped away from my wrists and ankles. You did it, Lewis! The Amulet sent old Witch-finder Pruitt back to the grave! We’re free!”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “You bring the crown and the Amulet, Lewis,” Jonathan said. “Cousin Pelly has fainted. I’ll have to carry him upstairs.”

  They hurried up the winding staircase. Lewis and Bertie heaved the heavy lid of the trapdoor over, and it closed with a bang. They found Jenkins slumped in the downstairs hallway, unconscious, and Mrs. Goodring in a dead faint outside Lewis’s door, where she must have been standing all day. Lewis put the crown and Amulet down as he and Jonathan rubbed her hands. She did not respond, and Bertie, who stood a little apart from them, began to sob.

  Just then someone knocked at the door downstairs. The hollow thuds of the knocker echoed through the big old house. “Get that, Lewis,” Jonathan said as he picked up Mrs. Goodring. He began to carry her downstairs as Lewis ran ahead. The knocking continued.

  Lewis threw the door open. A middle-aged man stood in the light flowing out from the open door. He wore a baggy brown jacket and a rumpled tie, and he carried a brown bowler hat in his hands. He was the image of Inspector Lestrade, the bumbling policeman in the Sherlock Holmes stories. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I’m Sergeant Norman Spiney, from the village. A few minutes ago we received a rather odd call from one of my colleagues in London, a Constable Dwiggins. He seemed to believe that something might be wrong here.”

  Lewis didn’t know what to say, but Jonathan came up behind him. “You’re a policeman? Did you come in a police car?”

  The sergeant blinked in confusion. “I did, but it’s at the foot of the drive. A chain—”

  Jonathan ignored his explanation and said, “Good! You can help me get these people to a doctor. They’re all unconscious.”

  “What?” asked Spiney, staring unbelievingly at this big, red-bearded man in the loud orange pajamas.

  “Help me!” barked Jonathan. “Bring your car up and carry these people out to it while I get dressed!”

  Lewis went down the drive to help Sergeant Spiney loosen the chain. He heard no grunts, no growls, no sound at all from the invisible servant. From the fresh, clean feel of the air, Lewis guessed the evil spirit had vanished along with its wicked master. After some moments of fumbling in the dark, the two of them managed to lower the chain. The sergeant drove his police car up to the front door of the Manor.

  They got Mrs. Goodring and Jenkins into the front seat, beside Spiney, and Cousin Pelly into the back. Spiney looked a little unhappy at the overcrowding. “Perhaps you and this young gentlemen might remain here—” he started.

  “Not on you life!” Jonathan snapped. “Pile in, boys!”

  They crowded into the backseat. Cousin Pelly lolled like a rag doll against one door. Bertie squeezed in against the other. Uncle Jonathan sat in the middle, and Lewis sat on his lap. Ordinarily he would have been embarrassed by this, but now he felt comfortable and safe.

  Sergeant Spiney sped toward the village of Dinsdale with the odd British siren yelping away: HOO-hah, HOO-hah, HOO-hah! it seemed to cry. Dinsdale had no real hospital, but it did have a clinic, and the doctor there put all three patients to bed. The sergeant spoke with Jonathan at some length, and he came away with the impression that a gas leak or something of that sort had knocked out the victims. As no crime seemed to have been committed, he satisfied himself with that.

  Bertie collapsed from nervous exhaustion, and the doctor put him to bed too. Jonathan and Lewis waited in the small room as the doctor treated his patients. “That was good thinking, Lewis,” Jonathan said, putting his hand on Lewis’s shoulder. “You saved us all.”

  “But I got us all into trouble first,” admitted Lewis. He told Jonathan the whole story then, from start to finish. His uncle listened patiently and sympathetically. By the time Lewis finished the tale, he was crying. “So if I hadn’t been fooling around like that, the evil spirit would never have been released,” he sobbed.

  In a gentle voice, Jonathan said, “Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?”

  Lewis shook his head. “I was afraid to. I acted so dumb. And I kept thinking what would happen if you got mad and kicked me out.”

  “Kicked you out?” Jonathan sounded truly astonished.

  “Uh-huh. I was a-afraid that y-you would be so mad that you wouldn’t want me to live with you anymore.”

  Jonathan shook his head. Then he sighed. “This is my fault.”

  Lewis blinked at him through his tears. “What?”

  Jonathan shrugged. “Well, I’m just an old bachelor. A girl I was in love with jilted me and broke my heart thirty years ago, so I never married. And so I never had children of my own and never learned how to talk to kids. If I’d behaved the way I should, I would have listened to you more—”

  “But I caused all the trouble,” Lewis insisted. “Gosh, Uncle Jonathan, you didn’t do anything wrong. You’ve been swell to me, and I lo—I mean, I—I—”

  Jonathan held his arms open, and Lewis hugged him. Softly, Jonathan said, “Tell me whenever you’re ready, Lewis. And I love you too.” He fished a handkerchief out of his pocket, and Lewis blew his nose.

  After a moment Lewis said, “Do you think we got rid of the ghost? For good, I mean?”

  “I sure do,” said Jonathan. “But we’ll ask Mrs. Z. about it when we get back to America. She’ll know all about this lucky charm.” He pulled the Amulet of Constantine from his vest pocket. “We’ll give the crown to Cousin Pelly, but I think we’d better hold on to this little item for safekeeping.”

  A few minutes later the doctor came and said that everyone was awake again. Awake but confused. Jonathan and Lewis went to see Cousin Pelly, who appeared dazed. “Oh, there you are,” he murmured. “Dashed odd, but I seem to have lost my memory. Last thing I can recall is a terrible storm and a big flash of lightning. Was I struck, or what?”

  The others had had a similar lapse of memory. In the morning they were all ready to go home again, but before they did, Lewis and Jonathan had a talk with Bertie. They all agreed not to mention the story of the evil spirit and the ghost. If Jenkins, Mrs. Goodring, and Cousin Pelly did not recall the horrible ordeal, so much the better.

  Uncle Jonathan hired a car, and he drove them to Barnavelt Manor, although he had some trouble adjusting to the right-hand drive. The first thing he did upon arriving was to inspect the gatehouse. He emerged after some minutes. “Mr. Prester left a note,” he told Pelly
. “He says he feels much better and is returning to London. I took the liberty of burning some, ah, trash that he left behind in an old trunk.” Lewis noticed smoke coming from the chimney. He guessed that Jonathan had destroyed whatever magical papers and implements the ghost of Pruitt had used in his dire spells.

  At the Manor itself Jonathan, Bertie, and Lewis made the other three comfortable around the dining-room table. Then Jonathan went upstairs for a moment. When he came back down, he brought the jeweled crown with him. “Cousin Pelly,” he said, “Lewis and Bertie have been playing detective, and they uncovered this fancy hat. Since they found it on your property, I’d say it belongs to you.”

  Pelly’s gray eyes nearly bulged out of his head. “I say! That looks—rather expensive!”

  That afternoon he and Jonathan went into the village, where Pelly knew an antiques and valuables dealer. When they returned, Pelly was exultant. “This could be the answer to all my problems!” he said. “It’s worth heaps of money, simply heaps! I could open up the rest of the Manor, and repair the west wing, and—” He broke off. “But of course it isn’t really mine,” he said. “Bertie found it, and finders keepers.”

  “No, sir,” objected Mrs. Goodring, her voice indignant. They argued back and forth for one whole day, each trying to give the crown to the other. Finally Jonathan proposed a truce.

  “If this dazzling derby is really the crown of Charles the first, it may not belong to either one of you,” he pointed out. “But if you get to keep it, why not simply split the proceeds fifty-fifty? If the fellow who appraised it is right, even half of its value should be a big enough fortune for anybody!”

  And so they left it at that. Pelly hired a lawyer—only he called it a solicitor—to determine whether he could actually claim the crown or would have to settle for only a reward. The lawyer, a shrewd-looking little fellow, thought Pelly stood a good chance of keeping the coronet for himself. “Possession is nine-tenths of the law, you know,” he advised. “And since your family have had possession for three hundred years, that should account for the other tenth. However, we shall see what we shall see.”