The Whistle, the Grave, and the Ghost

by Brad Strickland

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  BY BRAD STRICKLAND (based on John Bellairs’s characters)

  The Whistle, the Grave, and the Ghost

  The Tower at the End of the World

  The Beast under the Wizard’s Bridge

  The Wrath of the Grinning Ghost

  The Specter from the Magician’s Museum

  The Bell, the Book, and the Spellbinder

  The Hand of the Necromancer

  BOOKS BY JOHN BELLAIRS

  COMPLETED BY BRAD STRICKLAND

  The Doom of the Haunted Opera

  The Drum, the Doll, and the Zombie

  The Vengeance of the Witch-Finder

  The Ghost in the Mirror

  BOOKS BY JOHN BELLAIRS

  The Mansion in the Mist

  The Secret of the Underground Room

  The Chessmen of Doom

  The Trolley to Yesterday

  The Lamp from the Warlock’s Tomb

  The Eyes of the Killer Robot

  The Revenge of the Wizard’s Ghost

  The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull

  The Dark Secret of Weatherend

  The Mummy, the Will, and the Crypt

  The Curse of the Blue Figurine

  The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn

  The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring

  The Figure in the Shadows

  The House with a Clock in Its Walls

  Published by Dial Books for Young Readers

  A division of Penguin Young Readers Group

  345 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2003 by The Estate of John Bellairs

  eISBN : 978-0-803-72622-2

  [1. Supernatural—Fiction. 2. Magic—Fiction.]

  I. Title: Whistle, the grave, and the ghost.

  II. Strickland, Brad. III. Title.

  PZ7.B413 Lg 2003 [Fic]—dc21

  2002010817

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  This one is for the fans I’ve met

  at compleatbellairs. Keep the faith, all!

  CHAPTER ONE

  On an overcast summer afternoon in the 1950s, a dozen boys and one man, all wearing Boy Scout uniforms, hiked through a meadow in southern Michigan. The man had a grim expression, probably because all twelve boys were bellowing out a song:

  “We are the true Scouts, true blue are we,

  We are the Scouts of Troop One-thirty-three!

  We are the best of all of the rest,

  And as we march, we all sing mer-ri-lee:

  We are the true Scouts . . .”

  Like “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” it was a song calculated to drive adults crazy in about thirty seconds. At the end of the line of boys, struggling to keep up and huffing and puffing rather than singing, Lewis Barnavelt clumped along. He was about thirteen, overweight, and nearly as unathletic as a boy could be. At that particular moment, he was exhausted and hot. Sweat trickled in tickling beads down his neck and stained his khaki uniform. The straps of his knapsack dug uncomfortably into his shoulders. The dry summer grass swished and crackled as he trudged through it.

  At least, he thought, this was better than the woods, where the other boys liked to push branches aside and then let go of them so they’d spring back and slap him in the face. They laughed at him when the twigs stung his eyes and made tears roll down his cheeks.

  Still, trudging through the meadow under the weight of his bedroll, tent, and supplies was hard, hot work. Lewis knew better than to complain, though. Others could gripe all they wanted, but one word from Lewis would mark him as a crybaby, and he’d never hear the end of it.

  After what seemed like hours, Scoutmaster Halvers blew a shrill, rattling blast on his whistle. Lewis halted and looked up. The troop had reached the crest of a low, rounded hill. “We’ll set up camp here,” the scoutmaster said. “It will be a good location if we get rain tonight. First pitch the tents, and then I want some volunteers to fetch some rocks and some firewood. Peters, Fox, and . . . let’s see, Barnavelt, you’ll do.”

  “Fox an’ me’ll get the wood,” said Stan Peters promptly. He was a tall, lanky red-haired kid with big ears, a big nose, and about a thousand pale orange freckles on his cheeks. “Let Barnavelt get the rocks.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Billy Fox. Billy was shorter than Stan, and chunkier. He had a round face, brownish-blond hair cropped into a flattop haircut, and the solid build of a football player. In a voice soft enough for only Lewis and Stan to hear, he added, “Lard Guts needs the exercise!”

  Lewis felt his face flaming. He shot Billy a murderous glance, but he clamped his mouth shut. Lewis had learned long ago that if he argued with these guys, they’d just be rougher on him later on. So he turned away from them, unshouldered his knapsack, and turned his attention to pitching his pup tent.

  At least that was something he could do well. Lewis and his uncle Jonathan had practiced this part over and over in the backyard of the Barnavelt house at 100 High Street in New Zebedee, Michigan. Lewis had lived there with his uncle for several years, since his mother and father had died in a terrible auto crash. Now Uncle Jonathan was his legal guardian, and for the most part, Lewis enjoyed their life together.

  For one thing, Jonathan Barnavelt was a magician. And he was not just a conjuror who hid handkerchiefs up his sleeves and pretended to make coins vanish, but a real sorcerer. He could create wonderful, lifelike illusions, complete with sounds and smells. Their next-door neighbor Mrs. Florence Zimmermann was a friendly, wrinkly-faced good witch whose magic was even stronger than Jonathan’s. Life was never dull with them around.

  Even so, at times Lewis thought he could use a little boredom. He was by nature a timid boy, though in the past he had found himself having to face strange and magical threats. In an odd way, he could deal with them better than he could with the everyday problems of life, like bullies and demanding teachers—and weekend hikes.

  Lewis hammered the last stake into place and stood back. His tent was a work of art, taut and tight, its angles sharp and crisp. “Mr. Halvers,” he said, “I’m finished.”

  Mr. Halvers was a tall, athletic man with a bulbous nose, close-clipped gray hair that was almost white, and black-rimmed glasses. He came over and inspected Lewis’s work. “Good job,” he said, clapping Lewis on the shoulder. “And you’ve showed these slowpokes how to do it! Okay, Barnavelt, we need some good flat rocks to make a fire pit. You know what to look for.”

  “Yeah,” said Stan with a sneer. His own tent was sagging in the middle, like a carpet thrown over a clothes-line. “And thanks just so much for showin’ us slowpokes how to do it!”

  Lewis didn’t say anything. He just walked down to the bottom of the hill and into the woods. Now he was in for it. Somehow Stan and Billy would get back at him, as if by doing his best, he had shown them up on purpose. When he was out of sight of the other Scouts, instead of searching for stones, Lewis sat down on a fallen log with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands. For a few minutes he rested and fretted about his life, which was unusually hard lately.

  One problem was that the Catholic church that he and his uncle attended had another new priest, the thir
d one in a year. The new one was Father Foley. He had come all the way from Ireland, and he was an elderly, scowling man who seemed to think that all boys were evil. Lewis was beginning to dread going to confession. The other priests he had known had all been friendly and kind, and he had liked them a lot. When they handed out penance, it wasn’t too hard: a dozen Hail Marys, maybe, but not much more than that. Father Foley scolded him harshly for every little thing, and his penances were more on the scale of mowing the church lawn, cleaning out the basement, and washing the windows of the parish house.

  Stan Peters went to the same church, but somehow he never seemed to get into as much trouble. Two or three times Stan had happened by while Lewis was working outside the church, and he had sneered and gloated and made fun of Lewis. Sometimes Lewis felt as if Father Foley were joining in with the boys who liked to bully him. Even when Lewis did a good job, the priest frowned at him as if he were Public Enemy Number One instead of a junior high school kid who really didn’t mean to cause anybody harm.

  Lewis’s uncle Jonathan told him that you had to learn to deal with all kinds of people, and he wouldn’t let Lewis out of going to confession. Lewis didn’t know how much longer he could take it. He used to enjoy Mass, with its comforting ancient Latin ritual and the sweet smell of Ad Altare Dei incense. By the end of the service, he always felt close to his father and mother. Before leaving the church, he would light candles and say prayers for them. But now he felt that all the saints in heaven were lined up behind Father Foley, all of them staring at him with disapproval the same way the priest did.

  Lewis heaved a sigh. He’d better start looking for rocks, and he’d better do it before Stan and Billy came looking for him. He poked around and dug up half a dozen flat stones that would do, piling them up at the edge of the woods. Then he went a little farther into the gloom, searching for more. He didn’t blaze a trail, but he kept nervously checking landmarks so he wouldn’t get lost.

  That was sort of silly, he knew. The Scout troop was only a dozen or so miles from New Zebedee. The little patch of woods and meadows was surrounded by farm-land, and even if he got separated from the troop, all Lewis had to do was keep walking, and before long he’d come out in sight of a farmhouse or a road. Still, he felt nervous about getting too far away from Mr. Halvers and the others.

  Still thinking of his troubles, Lewis pushed through some brush and found himself standing at the edge of a rocky clearing. In the center was a stone far too big for his purposes. In fact, it was nearly ten feet long and perhaps five feet wide, a long, flat boulder nearly oval in outline. Scattered around it were thousands of smaller stones, from palm-sized to pumpkin-sized. Maybe back at the end of the Ice Age a glacier had dropped them all here—but to Lewis it looked as if the rocks had been left by people.

  But rocks were rocks. He hefted a medium-sized one and carried it back to his pile. A few more like this, and he’d have as many as he needed. Lewis pushed back through the brush for another stone, and another. Then, on his fifth or sixth trip, Lewis sat on the large stone to catch his breath. Only then did he notice that it had something carved on its moss-covered surface. The engraving seemed ancient and weathered, and parts of some of the letters were missing, as if eroded. But Lewis puzzled out a strange inscription:

  HIC IACET LAMIA

  It was Latin. Lewis had been an altar boy and had also studied Latin in school for more than a year, and he could easily translate the first two words: “Here lies—”

  With a yelp of alarm, Lewis jumped off the rock. It covered a grave! Someone named “Lamia” must have been buried beneath it. Lewis didn’t think of himself as superstitious, but he never messed with graves. At least not since an awful thing that had happened not long after he had come to live with his uncle, when he had tried out a magic spell and the spirit of a woman named Selenna Izard had been summoned from its tomb!

  Hastily, Lewis stooped to grab one last rock. That would have to do—

  He paused. Something glinted in the black dirt where the rock had lain, something silvery. Lewis dropped the rock and scraped the dry earth away. He revealed a tube of silver about three inches long and as thick as a fountain pen. Lewis picked it up, turning it this way and that. It was a whistle, packed with soil but untarnished.

  Just then he heard a crashing in the woods. Probably Billy and Stan, he thought wildly, and he thrust his find into his pocket. They’d only take it away from him, and maybe beat him up if they thought they could get away with it. Lewis snatched his rock up again, staggering a little under its weight. He heard Billy and Stan off to the left somewhere. Ignoring them, he hauled his rock to the campsite, and Mr. Halvers sent a couple of other boys who had finished pitching their tents to help him carry the rest.

  By sunset they had lit a campfire and had cooked hot dogs and a pot of baked beans. The threat of rain had passed. Overhead, the sky slowly cleared as the clouds drifted away, leaving a vivid pink patch in the west where the sun had gone down. Lewis finished two hot dogs and felt tired but full. As dusk came on, the Scouts began to tell campfire stories. Lewis heard the one about the escaped lunatic killer with a hook for a hand, and the one about the woman whose husband told her she could look into every room in the house except one, and more.

  Lewis didn’t tell any. He didn’t much like these stories. They reminded him of things that had really happened, things that he could not even mention unless he wanted Mr. Halvers and the others to think he had a few screws loose. The stories didn’t really scare him. Well, not very much, anyway. Lewis noticed that as the tales went on, the other Scouts huddled closer and closer to the fire, until he realized he was sitting all alone.

  Billy Fox was telling a story about a hermit named Crazy Jake who had lived “maybe in these very woods” a hundred years ago. “So this hunter gets lost, see?” he said, making his voice sound hollow and spooky. “An’ he comes to this shack in the woods. And this guy opens the door when the hunter knocks, okay? An’ he’s about seven feet tall with wild hair and a tangled beard so ratty that it’s got grass an’ stuff growing in it . . .”

  The other boys listened, but Lewis idly took the whistle he had found from his pocket. He picked up a twig and started cleaning the packed dirt from inside the silver tube. Who could have lost it there? How old was it? Maybe a Potawatomi hunter had dropped it centuries before Columbus came to the New World. Maybe a French explorer had worn it around his neck in the days when the United States did not even exist as a country. Lewis liked imagining all the possibilities.

  Billy was coming to the end of his story: “An’ the hunter had never slept on a bed that soft. So he wondered what the mattress was stuffed with. So he takes his hunting knife and cuts a tiny slit in th’ cover. An’ inside is human hair! He jumps up an’ goes to run out of the room, but he opens the wrong door. It’s a closet. An’ inside are piles and piles of human heads, an’ they’ve all been scalped! An’ just then he felt somebody grab his hair!”

  Stan had slipped around the edge of the campfire. He seized Barney Bajorski’s red hair and tugged it, and Barney, who was almost as timid as Lewis, shrieked in alarm.

  Lewis grunted, glad that he had stayed put when all the other Scouts had closed in around the fire. Otherwise he would have been Stan’s victim.

  He had picked most of the dirt out of the whistle, but it was still gritty and dirty. He decided that when the camp-out was over, he would ask his friend Rose Rita Pottinger to help him research his find. She was almost a year older than he was, but Rose Rita and he were in the same class at school. She was a brainy girl who liked history, especially if it had anything to do with cannons or adventures or exploration. In the meantime, he would clean the whistle up and—

  He started. The Scouts were already dousing the fire, and Donnie Malone was playing “Taps” on his bugle, hitting about one good note out of every six. It was time to turn in.

  Each of the boys crawled into the sleeping bag in his own tent. Lewis lay on his back, with his head just outs
ide the pup tent. He had his hands clasped behind his head, and he stared up into the dark night sky. He could name many of the constellations, and he could see that two planets were out: brilliant Jupiter and red Mars. A half-moon rode up there with them. Around him, crickets were chirping, and from far away came the mournful hoots of an owl. A breeze rustled the dry grass. Lewis closed his eyes and soon fell asleep.

  He woke suddenly some time later. He had the suffocating feeling that he was buried! His chest heaved, but he could not breathe! Lewis struggled, only to find his arms pinned down. He couldn’t even move! Something was pushing against his face—

  With strength he did not even know he had, Lewis bucked and shoved. He managed to drag some air into his lungs and screeched out a terrified, high-pitched yell.

  “What’s wrong?” It was the voice of Mr. Halvers, sounding sleepy and angry.

  Lewis felt someone tugging at him. Then, suddenly, he could breathe again. Cool air rushed into his lungs, and he found himself blinking up at Mr. Halvers, who held a flashlight.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” demanded Mr. Halvers sternly.

  “I—I—” gasped Lewis.

  “Here.” Mr. Halvers unzipped the sleeping bag, freeing Lewis.

  Lewis crept out, still panting for air. He finally realized what had happened. Somehow, he had gotten completely zipped up in his sleeping bag, head and all. He stood trembling and, in the light of Mr. Halvers’s flashlight, he saw that his tent was ruined. It sagged and swayed, and three huge rips gashed the canvas.

  Beyond the little yellow circle of light, the other boys were grinning at him. Lewis saw Billy nudge Stan, and they both snickered.

  “Who did this?” asked Mr. Halvers, shining his light over the vandalized tent. “Lewis, do you know?”

  Lewis shook his head. “I didn’t see anybody.”