The Tower at the End of the World (Action Packs)

by Brad Strickland

  Maybe, she thought, she could even find out about this Clusko and about the mysterious Gnomon Island. It would be great if she could crack the case and tell Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann exactly what they had to deal with.

  First, though, she’d have to persuade her grandfather that it would be worth a boat trip to run over to Porcupine Bay on a Sunday afternoon. And what if the store wasn’t even open?

  “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it,” Rose Rita told herself. And she set off to do some detecting.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Late that same afternoon a splintered old red motorboat chugged up to the wooden pier on Gnomon Island. Only one person was in it: a very short man with bushy black hair. He moved in strange jerks. As he tied the boat and climbed out, he darted his head this way and that, as if expecting some enemy would leap at him. He gathered together two brown paper bags and hurried up the winding path, running awkwardly on his bandy legs.

  He spoke a word at the door of a little cottage, and the door unlocked itself, swinging open on silent hinges. The short man hurried inside. The room he entered was very plain. Two beds stood against the left and right walls. Each was covered by a green Army blanket, and each was made up neatly, with hospital corners. Against the front wall to the man’s left, near the door, was a table. On the other side of the door stood a bookcase jammed with ancient-looking tomes. At the back of the room was a wood-burning stove. Pots, pans, and plates were stored on shelves above it. A squat, old-fashioned icebox was against the opposite wall. The only other room was the bathroom.

  He stored some bacon and eggs in the icebox and put a loaf of bread and several cans of food on one of the shelves. Then he carefully folded the paper bags and put them in a wooden crate near the stove. He gave the room a last look around and hurried out, pausing outside the door to speak a word that made the door close and lock itself.

  For a few minutes he stood in front of the cottage, rubbing his hands together as if he were washing them. He shook his head several times in a dissatisfied, apprehensive way. “I don’t like them snooping and spying, I don’t,” he grumbled to himself. Then he hurried up the hillside, through the trees, following the pathway to the tower.

  He stood up there, of course. He stood on the far eastern shoulder of the hill. It was afternoon, and shadows were long. The shadow of the dark tower fell almost at the tall man’s feet. But he wasn’t looking at his feet. His face was turned toward the east, where piles of clouds reached high into the sky.

  “Yes, Mr. Clusko?” the tall man said without even looking at him.

  The short man followed one of the curving gravel paths. He wore heavy black brogans, and with each step the gravel crunched under their soles. He stopped a few feet away from the other man. “Sir, the Barnavelt man is back.”

  The tall man nodded. His hair was iron-gray and he wore it unusually long. It hung down his neck, gleaming in the late sun. “Barnavelt is back. Of course he is. Of course he is.”

  Clusko licked his lips. “He’s asking questions, snooping and spying. You—you’re not worried?”

  The tall man did not bother to reply. A light breeze ruffled his long hair. His face was craggy in the afternoon light, like a mask roughly chiseled from sandstone. “There,” he said, lifting an arm to point upward. “There. You see?”

  Clusko looked to the east. The towering clouds had assumed the shape of a monstrous human face. Deep shadows marked the eye sockets. The nose was long and curving, like the beak of a hawk. The mouth was a frowning grimace. Clusko could not help trembling. “It is very like him. Like the pictures I have seen of him, I mean.”

  “My late lamented father,” said the other man. “Isaac Izard. It’s fading already.”

  The clouds were always in movement. The left half of the face crumpled. The right eye socket folded itself outward, like a flower blooming. In five minutes no face could be seen.

  Ishmael Izard sighed. “He dreamed of so much power, and yet he ended with nothing. Do you know where he failed?”

  Clusko bowed his head. No matter what he answered, it would be wrong. “No,” he murmured.

  “Of course not,” said Izard in a voice of scorn. “How could you? You are nothing but a failed wizard yourself, after all. If you understood the reasons for failure, you would not have lost so badly. To think such a thing as you challenged me to a duel of magic! You are lucky I even allowed you to live, much less accepted you as my servant so you might witness my greatest work.”

  “Yes, sir,” whispered Clusko through clenched teeth.

  Izard sniffed. “My father thought to end the world because he was dissatisfied with his share in it. Foolish, foolish! The world holds many pleasant things in it. Unfortunately, it holds many possessive people as well. But that will change. The signs are in the sky even now. When the time is right, when the Clock brings a day of darkness, then how all things will alter! What will you be in the new world? Still nothing more than my servant, of course. But your master will then be the emperor of all. This crowded globe will be swept clear of all inferior beings. Only my followers will survive. And I, I will be their master.”

  “But Barnavelt has come—”

  “Barnavelt is nothing!” The words came like the lash of a whip. “A parlor magician! He is weak in power, weaker in knowledge and understanding. He shall suffer when the time comes. No quick death for him! What you do not understand, my poor Clusko, is that I want him here. Yes, and the more powerful witch Zimmermann as well, and that cursed boy who thwarted my mother’s plan—”

  “But if he had not, the world would have ended,” whined Clusko. “Ended before your own scheme had come to anything.”

  “Oh, so you believe I should thank this Lewis Barnavelt?” snarled Izard. “Be grateful to the little devil who called my mother back from the tomb, then banished her forever? No, no, he must suffer too. And he will suffer most horribly. The runes will take care of that.”

  For some time the two said nothing. The swollen red sun sank in the west, touched the horizon, and then slowly vanished. When only a broad crimson glow was left, Izard scanned the sky once more. “No more clouds. No more signs.” But then he chuckled. “One more day gone. Soon, Clusko, soon. My trap is baited. The clock is running. And this time the fools cannot even see it!”

  In the gathering darkness the failed wizard Clusko shivered again.

  After a week of rainy weather, the sky finally cleared over Ivarhaven Island. On a hot Monday afternoon near the end of July Rose Rita finally found someone she could really talk to. Her name was Marta Krebsmeyer, and she was twelve and a half years old. Marta’s dad was a fishing guide in Porcupine Bay, and her mom was a teacher. Marta herself was bored. “Sure, there’s lots for tourists to do here,” she told Rose Rita scornfully as they tossed a baseball back and forth on the playground of Porcupine Bay Combined School. Marta was a chunky girl with short dark blond hair and a good muscular arm for baseball. “But summers are dead. And the rest of the year isn’t so great either. There’s only about a hundred kids in the combined school, and most of them think I’m weird.”

  Rose Rita took a fastball from Marta. Marta wasn’t half bad, she thought. She had lots of speed, but she needed to work on her accuracy. “So what were you saying about funny weather?” asked Rose Rita innocently, trying to get Marta back to the subject that really interested her.

  Marta’s mitt smacked as Rose Rita’s pitch slammed into it. “Good one. Oh, not weather, I guess, just funny clouds. Funny strange, not funny ha-ha. They look like faces sometimes, or like mythological animals. Know what a chimera is?” She wound up and threw a pretty good curveball, though it broke late and would have been a ball, not a strike.

  Rose Rita had borrowed Marta’s brother’s glove. The ball whapped into it. “Sure,” Rose Rita said. “A chimera’s one of those mixed-up jigsaw puzzle-type animals. It’s part snake and part lion, isn’t it?” She wished she knew as much about mythology as Lewis did. She wasn’t really sure that she had desc
ribed a chimera very well.

  Marta gave her a superior smile. She had very short bangs, but she kept brushing them back as if they bothered her. “That’s kinda the idea of a chimera, but it has three heads. One’s a goat’s head, one a lion’s head, and one a serpent’s head. We learned about them in English class last year. Anyhow, one day last week there was a big cloud in the west at sunset. The sun made it all red and purple, and it looked just like the picture of a chimera in my English book. I made Davy look at it. I told him it meant monsters were coming to the Earth, and it scared the bewheekis out of him!” She laughed at the memory. “He can’t stand to watch spooky movies or stuff like that.”

  Rose Rita nodded. Marta had already told her that her little brother’s name was Davy, and that he was sort of a scaredy-cat. She glanced down the hill. She could see the general store, and beyond it the dock where her grampa had tied their motorboat. Grampa Galway was spinning yarns with some of the old men who hung out at the store. Rose Rita guessed she had lots of time to find out what Marta knew. “We saw something real odd out on the lake,” she said after a couple more pitches. “It was an island that was, like, hidden by this mysterious mist—” Rose Rita broke off. She had an active imagination, and when she started to tell about something, she always had to fight the temptation to turn it into an elaborate story. She shrugged and said, “It was almost like the island just appeared out of nowhere.”

  “Hey,” said Marta, “I’ve heard about that. It’s a few miles to the east of Ivarhaven. Somebody told me that a crazy rich guy from overseas bought a little bitty island after the war and named it Gnomon Island. He had a funny foreign name. Isham? Izman? Something like that.”

  “Izard?” asked Rose Rita. She was so excited that she flubbed her next throw badly. It hit the ground five feet in front of Marta and took a screwy bounce, but Marta snagged it with some good footwork.

  “Izard,” she said, straightening up. “That’s it! You getting tired? ’Cause we can stop if you want to. It’s too hot to play catch anyways.”

  “Maybe I am a little tired,” said Rose Rita. They walked to the swings. The set was like the one Rose Rita remembered from elementary school: a tall A-shaped steel frame. From it dangled eight swings on chains that had rusted almost black. Some were low to the ground for little kids, but two on the end were a comfortable height for Rose Rita and Marta. They chose these two and sat side-by-side. Rose Rita grasped the chains and leaned back. “So why do you think this Izard guy is crazy?”

  The grass under the swings had been worn away. Marta looked down as she drew small circles in the dust with the toe of her sneaker. “I dunno. He won’t talk much. And he’s got this—this servant, I guess you’d call him. Helper. Izard bosses him around like a dog. Anyway, the servant is a little guy, sort of hunchbacked. He’s always yellin’ at kids, tellin’ them the end of the world is comin’. Crazy stuff.”

  “Huh. Sounds like it’s just as well that the two of them don’t live in town. I wonder why we had such a hard time seeing Izard’s old island,” Rose Rita mentioned casually.

  Marta’s swing creaked as she made it drift back and forth. She wasn’t really swinging, just moving around a little. “Who knows? People in town are tellin’ lotsa crazy stories about that island too. Like, when the Izard guy bought it after the war, it wasn’t much more than a rock. Now there’s trees and stuff all over it. People swear that somehow he made it grow. And he built some kinda strange lighthouse. But nobody goes around the place much. The water’s not deep enough for the big freighters, and the fish’ve all gone away from that part of the lake. Besides, like I say, Izard and his helper are mean and nobody wants to hang around them.”

  “Making the island grow. Making a lighthouse all by himself. Maybe this Izard guy does some kind of magic,” suggested Rose Rita carefully.

  Marta snorted. “Oh, sure. He just calls on the magic power of pixie dust, an’ he can fly to the moon! Anybody who’d think that must have a screw loose or somethin’. He’s no magician. They’re just in storybooks. Naw, Izard’s just a nutty old guy, that’s all.” Marta began to swing, then stopped with her sneakers skidding on the worn patch. “Talkin’ about weird-lookin’ clouds, take a gander at that one!”

  Rose Rita looked at the patch of sky toward which Marta was pointing. Her stomach felt funny, fluttery and hollow. For a second she didn’t think that what she saw could be a cloud at all, but maybe a big helium balloon, like the ones she had seen on TV that were hauled along in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.

  But no, it was a wandering white cloud. The edges were puffy, and even as she watched, it began to lose its unusual shape. In the instant that she saw it, the cloud formation had looked just like a circular dial with two hands, one long and one short. A clock face, though of course without numbers. The short hand was almost at twelve, and the long one a little more than fifteen minutes away.

  Rose Rita found it hard to get her breath. Lewis had told her that old Isaac Izard did sky magic. He had spent years studying cloud formations and trying to use them to bring about the end of the world. And he had been completely gaga about his magical Doomsday Clock. Had Izard’s son, Ishmael, somehow put the clock together? Was the cloud-clock a sign that time was running out? One thing was for sure, Rose Rita knew. She couldn’t talk to Marta about such things. Normal people didn’t believe in magic!

  “I better go,” she said, getting up from the swing. “It’s getting late, and Grampa’ll probably be worrying about me. See ya later.”

  “Next time you’re in town, I’ll borrow Davy’s bat. We can play some flies an’ grounders,” Marta called. “I live in the green house over there, the first one on the left past the school. Maybe Davy’ll play with us too, if he’s not too scared of the clouds!”

  “Sure.” Rose Rita forced a smile for Marta, then hurried on down the grassy hill. Though the day had been hot and dry, yesterday’s rain made the sod squelch under her feet. She trotted toward the general store, feeling a dread she could not quite identify.

  Before she had walked all the way across the parking lot, Rose Rita heard an old man’s screechy voice coming from inside the store: “Signs and wonders, I tell ye! Look to the sky! Skulls in the clouds, an’ devil’s heads. The end of days is at hand! And that’s not all, neither! Just last week Lem Crawley caught a fish that talked—”

  “Oh, come on, Samuel,” said the voice of the store owner, Jake Brannigan, just as Rose Rita stepped on the porch. “Would you believe anything Lem told you? After a couple belts of the rotgut he takes out with him when he goes fishing, Lem Crawley starts talking to his bait!”

  It was dark inside the store. Peering through the closed screen door, Rose Rita could make out shadowy shapes of men sitting at the checker tables, and two men, the talkers, standing at the counter, one on each side. “The fish spoke to Lem, I tell ye!” insisted the skinny old man who had been warning about signs and wonders. “It said, ‘The world will end with the dark of the sun on the fifteenth of August.’ Them was its very words! I tell ye, this old world’s got a little over two weeks left, and then that’s all she wrote!”

  Standing with her hand on the screen door, Rose Rita could see a corner of the counter. Jake stood behind it, with a dim lightbulb in a hanging conical metal shade right over his head. He turned around and picked up a paper-covered book from the shelf behind him. “Dark of the sun, huh? Like an eclipse?” He licked his thumb and turned the pages of the book. Finding what he wanted, he peered through his glasses, his lips moving as he read silently. He tossed the book back to the shelf. “Well, the almanac sure don’t predict an eclipse for the fifteenth! I guess that trout might have been mistaken. Or maybe it was drinking from the same bottle as Lem!” Everyone laughed, and Rose Rita stepped inside the store to the sound of hoots and guffaws.

  “Well,” said Grampa Galway, his voice unusually serious. “Here she is, just like I was telling you.”

  As her eyes adjusted to the dimness of the store, Rose Rita g
ulped. Turning around and looking at her with a kind of resigned sadness was Jonathan Barnavelt. He shook his head, his red beard wagging.

  She had been found out.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “Can you run this thing?” asked Mrs. Zimmermann, looking doubtfully at the weathered boat.

  “There’s not much to it,” answered Lewis, hoping he was right. “You just fire up the outboard, and use this handle to turn it. If you pull it to the left, the boat goes to the right.”

  “I hope we can find Ivarhaven Island,” said Mrs. Zimmermann. “If we get lost on the lake, we’ll be in a real pickle! However, since you can actually see Ivarhaven from the shore, I don’t suppose we can go too wrong. All right. Let’s go see what Rose Rita has been up to!”

  It was the first Tuesday in August. The day before, an exasperated Jonathan Barnavelt had called Mrs. Zimmermann to tell her that Rose Rita was on the scene. Mrs. Zimmermann had fretted all night about that, and so she and Lewis had set out before sunrise to make the long drive to the Upper Peninsula. It was late afternoon by the time they had parked Bessie and rented the little motorboat. But even as she stepped into it, Mrs. Zimmermann looked worried.