Rose Rita gave Lewis a reassuring look. “Then there’s nothing to worry about.”
Uncle Jonathan grinned broadly. “I agree with Rose Rita,” he said. “If Witch Hazel here can’t sense it, it simply isn’t there. Lewis, I think you can safely write this one off as a false alarm.”
Lewis gave him a wan smile. “I hope so. Just coming back here makes my stomach feel sort of queasy.”
“That could be hunger,” observed Mrs. Zimmermann. She rolled up her sweater sleeves. “All right, everyone, stand back. I’m going to cast a little spell here just to make sure.”
The others backed out of the clearing. Jonathan stood between Rose Rita and Lewis, with a hand on the shoulder of each. Lewis fought to keep his breathing regular.
In the clearing, Mrs. Zimmermann waved her umbrella in the air and chanted something softly. Instead of a normal handle, the umbrella had a bronze griffin’s talon clutching a small crystal ball. The crystal began to glow, a pulsating purple light. From it a billow of pale purple mist spread, growing to fill the entire clearing like a dome. In the midst of this Mrs. Zimmermann stood, with the umbrella held straight out before her. She turned slowly in a complete circle.
Lewis blinked. Shapes were becoming visible in the pale mist, shapes like shadows. A shadow-deer leaped from the ground, began to fall, and faded. A shadow-rabbit hopped across the stone, then was jerked into the air by a diving shadow-hawk. Lewis felt the hair at the back of his neck prickle. He suddenly understood what he was seeing: the deaths of creatures within the clearing! Everything that had died there had left some kind of imprint. Mrs. Zimmermann was calling them all up.
But no human shapes appeared. After ten minutes Mrs. Zimmermann lowered her umbrella. The mist thinned and suddenly was gone. Mrs. Zimmermann walked toward them, shrugging. “No monsters, Lewis. Just ordinary woodland creatures, rabbits and deer and lots and lots of birds and insects. As far as I can tell, nothing terrible died here.”
Lewis released the breath he had been holding. “I feel better,” he admitted.
Mrs. Zimmermann grinned. “I hope you feel well enough to eat some sandwiches and cake. Because now that that business is over, we can get down to our picnic!”
They did, but as if they had made a silent agreement, they walked away from the clearing, up to the top of the hill where the Scouts had camped. There they spread out their picnic, and ate and talked and laughed.
But Lewis kept glancing down at the woods. Somehow he had a sick feeling that whatever had begun had not yet truly ended.
Tuesday came. That evening was the Scout meeting. Troop 133 usually met in the lunchroom of New Zebedee High School. The high school was next to the junior high, with an alley between the two buildings. Lewis showed up at seven o’clock, and Mr. Halvers greeted him at the door. They were the first two to arrive. Before long, the others came in too. That evening they talked about the camping trip, and the reasons why no one in the troop except Lewis would receive a merit badge for it. Then they talked about some ways the troop might raise money for next year’s Scout Jamboree. Finally, as they usually did, they wound up with some games. Lewis was painfully aware, though, that no one was having much fun. Least of all him.
When eight-thirty came and it was time to go, he was more relieved than anything else. He and Barney helped clean up the lunchroom, and then Mr. Halvers let them out and locked the door. Barney turned into the alley between the two school buildings, and Lewis started to walk toward Main Street. He had not gone far before he heard Barney yell, “Hey, Lewis! Come look at this!” from behind him.
Lewis paused. It wasn’t really dark, but the sun was down. He looked back into the alley but could not see Barney. “What is it?” Lewis shouted.
No answer. After a few seconds Lewis called out, “Barney? What’s up?”
Still there was no answer. Lewis felt uneasy. What was going on? Had Barney hurt himself somehow? He was a clumsy enough kid to do that. With a sigh, Lewis decided he had to go check it out.
He had walked through that alley thousands of times, but usually during the day. Lewis felt his chest tighten as he stepped into the shadows of the alley. Everything was very quiet. “Barney?” he yelled, his voice shaking a little. “What’s the matter?”
At the far end of the alley, you could turn left and head toward the high school gym, or right and head for the middle school ball field. When Lewis got to that point, someone tackled him. He flopped forward, throwing out his hands. The air huffed out of his lungs as he fell facedown onto the grassy edge of the pavement. He heard someone running away.
Then Stan Peters’s voice yelled, “You better not say anything about this, Barney!”
Lewis gulped for air. “What—what’s the idea?” he demanded.
Whoever had tackled him pulled him up to his feet, with his arms held in a tight grip behind him. “We don’t like smart guys,” said the voice of Billy Fox. He was so close that Lewis could smell his sour breath. “We’re gonna teach you a little lesson.”
It was so dark there in the corner of the building that Lewis could see Stan only as a vague, lanky shape. “Let me go!” said Lewis furiously.
Stan stepped close and punched Lewis in the stomach, hard enough to make Lewis grunt in shock and pain. “That’s one,” he said. “Wanna help us count, fat boy? Wanna see how high we can go before you start crying?”
Lewis struggled to break free of Billy’s grasp. “Nuhuh!” chided Billy, pulling Lewis’s arms up painfully. “It’s just gonna be worse on you if you don’t take it like a man!”
Desperately, Lewis kicked backward. He felt his heel connect hard with Billy’s shin. Billy howled in anger and surprise, and Lewis threw all his weight back against him. He felt Billy stumble. A moment later Billy fell to the ground, and Lewis, off balance, tumbled on top of him. Stan was dancing around waving his fists like a boxer.
“Get offa me!” bawled Billy. “I think you broke my ribs!”
Lewis rolled away from Stan. He tried to scramble to his feet, and felt something cold under his hand. Without thinking, he grabbed it and lunged up to a stumbling run. He pounded down the alley toward the street, hearing Stan’s feet slapping on the pavement behind him. Lewis burst out of the alley just as the streetlight overhead flickered on. He felt Stan swipe his hand down the back of Lewis’s shirt.
Lewis twisted away and saw what he had picked up. It was the whistle, the chain dangling from it. He turned on Stan and yelled, “You better stop!”
Behind Stan, Billy came limping out of the alley. “Pound the tub of guts!” Billy yelled. “Hold him an’ I’ll pound him!”
Lewis knew there was no way he could outrun the two. He did the only thing that he could think of. He thrust the whistle between his lips and blew as hard as he could.
The whistle shrieked, a loud, piercing note. The sound of it was somehow icy cold, making Lewis wince even as he blew with all his might. The evening sky seemed to flash, as if a silent bolt of lightning had burst out right above his head. He saw Stan and Billy for just an instant, as though they had been frozen in a high-speed photograph.
Both of them had stopped dead in their tracks. Both of them had their eyes and mouths open wide in an expression of horrified surprise. For what seemed like a long, long time they stood like that.
Then Stan yelled, “Run!”
He and Billy did run, in opposite directions. Lewis was shaking all over. He took the whistle from his lips, but even though he was not blowing it, he seemed to hear a long, lingering echo of the terrible sound. He turned too, and ran in a third direction. He did not stop until he rushed through the door of his house.
Uncle Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann were sitting in the study, engrossed in a game of chess. Lewis waved at them and then hurried up to his room. He opened the drawer of his night table and threw the whistle inside. Then he sat on the edge of his bed, trying to make himself breathe normally. He wondered what had just happened.
Slowly, his jittery feeling began to settle
down. Lewis told himself that Stan and Billy ran away because they didn’t know where Mr. Halvers was. They might have thought the whistle would summon the scoutmaster, or even a policeman.
“They’re chickens,” Lewis told himself. “Bullies are all chickens.”
Still—just the memory of that weird high-pitched sound, the wail of the silver whistle in the dusk, made Lewis’s teeth chatter. Did the sound affect Billy and Stan the same way it did him? Was it simple fear that had chased them away?
For the rest of that evening, Lewis felt jumpy. But as time went on, nothing happened. Lewis took a hot bath. He lay in bed and read. Gradually he grew sleepy, and when at last he put his book aside and turned off his lamp, he went to sleep at once.
The bad dreams he had expected did not come.
Wednesday morning was clear and warm. Lewis ate breakfast, then called Rose Rita. She agreed to meet him in the park at the west end of Main Street, and they both showed up at nine o’clock. The park was a round one, in the center of a traffic circle. The main feature of the park was a circle of white marble columns that enclosed a fountain that sent up a plume of water like a liquid willow tree. In another circle around this were marble benches, and Rose Rita and Lewis sat on one of these. In the sunshine, with busy traffic around the park and pedestrians cutting through it, Lewis felt a little braver than he might have anywhere else. He quickly told Rose Rita about the strange experience he had had.
She frowned. “Billy Fox and Stan Peters are a couple of jerks,” she pronounced decisively. “They’re nothing but juvenile delinquents. If I were you, I’d report them to the cops. What they did was—was assault and battery!”
Lewis shook his head impatiently. “Haven’t you been listening? What chased them off was the whistle! I fell down and there it was, right under my hand!”
Rose Rita gave him a suspicious look. “Are you sure it was the same whistle?”
Lewis nodded. “I looked at it after I got back to my room. It has the inscription and everything.”
“So how did it get between the schools? Could you have dropped it there?”
Lewis shook his head. “I didn’t go there when I had it in my pocket. It’s like it just vanished until I needed it, and then it materialized again.”
“Oh, sure,” said Rose Rita with a touch of sarcasm. “I don’t suppose you could’ve dropped it in the church, and one of the other boys couldn’t have found it, and then lost it again behind the schools? Doesn’t that seem just a tad more logical to you than a super-duper disappearing act?”
“I don’t know what seems logical,” confessed Lewis. “All I know is that it was scary. Finding that thing, and then blowing it. I think that’s what chased those two off, just the sound. It was like—like—I don’t know. Like something that was alive and was angry.”
“Okay,” said Rose Rita. “Maybe the doohunkus really is magic. Did you bring it with you?”
“I don’t want to carry it around,” Lewis told her. “It’s in the drawer of my night table.”
Rose Rita got up. “Then let’s go get it. It’s high time that Mrs. Zimmermann took a look at it.”
Lewis didn’t argue. They walked to his house, and he went up to his bedroom. He opened the drawer. No whistle. Feeling a strange fluttering in his stomach, Lewis pulled the drawer all the way out of the night table and dumped its contents onto the bed. There was a St. Anthony’s medal, a souvenir of his first Communion. He found a rosary that had belonged to his mother. There were five Indian-head pennies from the 1880’s, and a deck of cards with pictures of authors on them. There were two rubber bands and a small flat gadget he’d bought that was supposed to help him become a ventriloquist but didn’t really work. He sorted through some smaller junk: little lenses from old binoculars, a stone arrowhead that he had found in a creek bed near the Waterworks, and a red pencil with a tiny picture of a ferryboat and the name of it, City of Escanaba, stamped on it in black. No whistle.
Lewis scooped everything back into the drawer and plodded slowly downstairs. He and Rose Rita went out into the backyard, where they sat in a couple of lawn chairs. “It’s missing again,” he said.
Rose Rita shook her head. “Something is screwy,” she announced. “Are you sure you found the whistle last night?”
Lewis gave her an annoyed glance. “I’m not crazy,” he said. “I didn’t just imagine all that! My stomach still hurts from where Stan hit me. Look at my hands.” He held them up, palms out. When he had fallen, he had scraped the heels of both hands, and the scratches, scabbed over now, showed plainly. “They would have beaten the daylights out of me if I hadn’t found that whistle.”
Rose Rita gave a theatrical sigh. “I don’t know what to do. We could tell Mrs. Zimmermann and your uncle, but so far they’ve drawn a blank. What do you think?”
Chewing on his lower lip, Lewis thought that over. “Well, I hate to go running to Uncle Jonathan. I think he thinks I shouldn’t be afraid of bullies like Billy and Stan. He’s always telling me to stand up for myself more. I mean, if I could find the stupid whistle, that would be one thing. But without it, I don’t see what Uncle Jonathan or Mrs. Zimmermann could do.”
Reluctantly, Rose Rita nodded her agreement. “I suppose you’re right. I don’t like it, though. Look, let’s snoop around and find out some more details about last night. Who was the kid who yelled for you?”
“Barney Bajorski,” answered Lewis. “You know him.”
“Red hair, lives across the tracks?”
“That’s him.”
Rose Rita sprang up. “Okay, we start with him. Maybe he’s a witness. Come on!”
Lewis grabbed his bike. They stopped at Rose Rita’s house so she could climb onto her own bike, and then they pedaled down Main Street, rattled across the railroad tracks, and found Barney’s house, a tiny cottage with two little kids playing in the yard. One of them ran inside, and in a minute Barney came out, pale and frightened-looking.
As soon as he got close enough, he said, “Gosh, Lewis, I’m sorry! Stan an’ Billy were gonna beat me up if I didn’t call you.”
“That’s okay,” Lewis assured him. “It wasn’t too bad.”
“Did you see what happened to Lewis?” asked Rose Rita.
Barney shook his head. “Not me. I got out of there as soon as Billy let go of me! I looked for Mr. Halvers out in front of the school, but he was already long gone.”
Though Rose Rita asked some crafty questions, Billy couldn’t tell them anything else. After a while they rode back to High Street. They climbed off their bikes in front of Lewis’s house. Rose Rita said, “Well, we don’t have much to go on. I guess we just have to keep an eye on things and—” She broke off and yipped in alarm.
Lewis looked quickly at her. She was staring up at his bedroom window, her eyes wide. He jerked his gaze there too.
He saw—or did he?—it was over in a flash—what looked like a pale, pale face, a face literally as white as snow, pressed close up against the windowpanes. It was there for an instant, and then it was gone.
But in that instant, Lewis saw with a surge of dread that it had no eyes, no eyes at all.
Just two blank, empty pits that nevertheless seemed to stare straight into his terrified soul.
CHAPTER FIVE
Lewis and Rose Rita went inside. They climbed the stair and crept down the hall to Lewis’s bedroom door.
Lewis swallowed a lump in his throat. His heart thudded so hard that he was surprised Rose Rita couldn’t hear it. He put his hand on the doorknob and felt it round and cold beneath his palm. Slowly he turned the knob. It gave a faint click.
He jerked the door open!
And released the breath he had been holding. Nothing was inside his room. Nothing but the ordinary things.
“Maybe it was a reflection or something,” said Rose Rita, but her voice was a little shaky. “Or maybe we just sort of imagined it.”
Lewis frowned. “My bed,” he said. It was unmade, the pillows tumbled, the coverlet and t
op sheet strewn across the floor.
Rose Rita peered past him. “What about it?”
“I didn’t leave it in a mess,” responded Lewis. “I always make it up. Somebody’s been in here. Somebody broke into my room!” He did not add his other thought: Whoever it was must have been looking for the whistle.
But Rose Rita seemed to read his mind. “I think you should check and see if anything is missing.”
Lewis spent half an hour looking over everything, from the closet to the mantel over the fireplace. Not a single item seemed to have been disturbed. The sheet and coverlet were the only things that were out of place.
Rose Rita tossed them back onto the bed. “Still no whistle.”
Lewis shook his head. “No. And I don’t think anyone went through the drawer where I left it. All the stuff I put back looks like it hasn’t been touched.”
“This is nutty,” declared Rose Rita. “I never heard of a burglar that broke in and short-sheeted a bed! Or one that had it in for hospital corners and smooth sheets.”
Lewis had no explanation either. “Help me and we’ll make the bed up again,” he said.
Together they made up the bed, then they went downstairs, just in time to meet Uncle Jonathan coming into the house with his arms full of paper bags loaded with groceries. Lewis and Rose Rita helped him put things away. Rose Rita, after she had stacked some cans of soup in the kitchen cabinet, suddenly asked, “Mr. Barnavelt, could you use magic to tell if somebody ever broke into your house?”
Jonathan raised his red eyebrows. “What a strange question! Do you mean, do I have some kind of magical mystical burglar alarm?”
“Do you?” asked Rose Rita.
With a comfortable chuckle, Jonathan said, “In a way, I suppose I do. For years and years, I never worried about burglars. Not in New Zebedee. But then there was the time that the late unlamented Ishmael Izard or his henchman snuck into the place, so I had second thoughts about protecting the house. As you know, I’m pretty good at casting illusion spells. Well, not long ago, I placed some on all the doors and all the windows of the house. If a burglar tried to creep in, he’d find himself waylaid by a wolf, or chased by a cobra, or bedeviled with bees. They wouldn’t be real, but the burglar wouldn’t know that!”
The Whistle, the Grave, and the Ghost Page 4