The shouting stopped abruptly, and a moment later, Jonathan opened the door. He was wearing baggy red pajamas, the ones that he said made him look like a ripe tomato, and his hair and beard were all mussed up, with spikes sticking every which way. He gave Lewis a weak, embarrassed smile. “Sorry! Just a nightmare, that’s all. I had the silly notion that a great big ivory-colored snake was slithering around beside my bed. I think it must have been a king cobra! Anyway, I dreamed that I woke up and actually saw the creature right beside my pillow, all reared up and ready to sink its fangs into me. Then you knocked and I woke up for real!”
Lewis stared. Beads of sweat stood on his uncle’s face. “A snake?” Lewis asked in a small voice.
Jonathan patted him on the shoulder. “I simply had a bad dream. I have them now and then, usually after I eat the wrong food before going to bed. I guess the rhubarb pie was a mistake!”
When he got back to his room, Lewis lay in bed wondering if his uncle’s experience had really been just a dream. Was the snaky creature that had materialized from the newspapers still around? Could it have followed him home? Did it know where he lived? Lewis closed his eyes and imagined he heard a low, slithery hissing. He held his breath, but still couldn’t tell whether the sound was all in his head or really came from somewhere in the room. With his breath coming in short gasps, he turned on his bedside lamp.
Nothing.
With a sigh, Lewis realized he probably was going to have a hard time getting back to sleep. From his bedside table he picked up a book he had started to read, A Guide to the Planets by Patrick Moore. Uncle Jonathan had been talking about trying to take some photos of the moon and planets with their backyard telescope, and the book was all about observing Mars, Venus, and the other heavenly bodies and taking pictures of them. Usually Lewis found it an interesting subject, but he could not keep his mind on the planets and stars at all. At least, though, reading the same paragraph over and over again made him feel drowsy. He finally fell asleep with the book open across his chest.
And in his dreams the slithery sounds became hissing words. Words that he could not understand, but that seemed to threaten his life.
That seemed to threaten his very soul.
“There’s something bad going on,” insisted Rose Rita the next day as the two of them sat on the porch of her house. “I know it and you know it. It may not be any kind of magic that Mrs. Zimmermann can make sense of, but it’s bad. You’ve got to get rid of that stupid whistle, Lewis.”
Lewis had told her about his latest encounter with Billy and Stan. He had left out a few things, though, like the creepy way the newspapers had formed themselves into a figure. He had made it seem as if the whistle had just called up a storm and had scared them away. Now, with his head achy and his eyes swollen from lack of sleep, he mumbled, “How can I? It’s not here anymore. It shows up when it wants to, and then it goes away.”
“When it wants to?” Rose Rita pushed her glasses up on her nose. Her expression was furious. “That’s crazy! How can a whistle want to do something?”
Lewis just shook his head. It felt wobbly, as if his brain were sloshing around loose inside his skull. “I don’t know.”
Rose Rita jumped up from the porch swing. She waved her arms in the air. “The next time the dumb thing shows up, throw it away!”
Lewis closed his eyes. The headache pounded in his temples. How could he explain? The only times he had the whistle were times when he was facing a threat of some sort. Asking him to throw it away then was like asking a starving man to throw away a juicy hamburger! Like asking a drowning man to throw away a life preserver! It was something he could not do.
“Let’s talk to Mrs. Zimmermann again,” suggested Rose Rita. “I’m really starting to worry about you. You look like something the cat dragged in, then dragged right back out again. Are you sick or something?”
Lewis opened his eyes. The day was sunny and fresh after the rain of the evening before. But the light almost hurt Lewis’s eyes, and the air somehow didn’t feel right. It was as if he felt a chill, even though the sun was warm and bright. “I don’t feel sick exactly. I just feel . . .” Lewis groped for the words. “Weird. Like I’m only half here. I’m tired and everything seems to take so much effort. I don’t know what it is.”
“Could be flu,” said Rose Rita confidently. “There was something on the radio this morning about some kind of summer flu. There’s already a couple of cases in the hospital. Do you have a fever?”
“I don’t think so,” said Lewis. His heart had thumped strangely, and a thought, almost like someone else’s soft voice speaking inside his head, had come to him: This is revenge. It was like the voice he had imagined when the ghost was attacking Stan.
Rose Rita sat beside him on the swing again and put her hand against his forehead. “You don’t feel warm. Just the opposite. Kind of cold and clammy.”
“Maybe I’m just tired.” A disturbing thought suddenly came to Lewis. “What did you say about the radio?”
“Huh?” Rose Rita blinked. “Oh, the local news report this morning. It just said that there were a couple of people in the hospital with some kind of flu bug, that’s all.”
Revenge, came the imagined voice, fainter but sounding triumphant. Lewis felt dizzy. “Who?” he demanded.
Rose Rita frowned and shrugged. “I don’t think it said.”
Lewis got up. “Could I use your phone?”
“Sure,” said Rose Rita. “Come on.”
The Pottinger telephone was on a little table beside the stairway up to the second floor. Lewis got the New Zebedee phone book, a slim volume, and leafed through until he found the page with “Fox” on it. “What’s Billy Fox’s dad’s name?” he asked.
“Phil, I think,” replied Rose Rita. “He works over at—”
“Here it is,” said Lewis. “It’s 2-3432.” He dialed the number and then listened as the phone rang twice, three times—
“Hello?” answered an old lady’s voice.
“Uh, hello,” said Lewis. “Uh, is Billy there, please?”
There was a pause. Then the woman said, “Billy is very sick. He’s in the hospital, and his mother and father are there with him. This is his grandmother.”
“Thank you,” whispered Lewis, and he hung up the phone.
“What’s the matter?” demanded Rose Rita. “You’ve gone as pale as a gho—pretty pale.”
Lewis confided, “I think I know who the two flu patients are. I think it’s Stan and Billy.” Lewis’s chest tightened. “Oh, my gosh. Rose Rita, I can’t just get rid of the whistle. What if it’s turned some magic creature loose? If there’s a spell to get rid of the creature, the spell might have to have the whistle to work!”
“It could be a coincidence,” said Rose Rita in an uncertain tone. “You said that it was raining hard. Maybe Billy got sick from being soaked—”
“You don’t believe that.”
“No,” admitted Rose Rita. “I guess I don’t.”
They walked back out onto the porch. Lewis said, “I’m scared, Rose Rita. Uncle Jonathan had a terrible nightmare last night. What if this thing is starting to affect other people? Uncle Jonathan said something about deep magic, about how hard it is to control. If deep magic attacks magicians, then Uncle Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann could be victims.”
“What are you going to do?” asked Rose Rita.
“I’m going to try to find out what’s wrong with Billy,” replied Lewis. “And I’m going to try to find out what can be done with the whistle the next time it shows up. When I know more, then maybe I’ll know whether it’s safe to involve Uncle Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann.”
“I’ll help,” said Rose Rita promptly.
Lewis gave her a look of pure gratitude. But then he frowned. “It might be dangerous. I’m scared out of my wits!”
“I’m not happy about it myself. But I’d be a pretty poor kind of friend if I ditched you because of some heebie-jeebie ghost snake! Okay, let’s make our p
lans.”
Their plans, Lewis could not help thinking, were hardly brilliant. As Rose Rita quickly pointed out, the public library offered very little help. Lewis’s uncle had a collection of books on magical subjects, but he didn’t like Lewis to read them. Years before, trying to show off for a boy named Tarby Corrigan, Lewis had read a potent spell from one of the more dangerous books. As a result, a long-dead woman had come back from the grave and had very nearly taken the life of Lewis and Jonathan. Since that time, Jonathan had moved some of the collection to a locked bookcase.
Still, the study in the Barnavelt house held shelf after shelf of books that told about magic without telling you how to do magic. They would start there, Rose Rita decided. If they turned up nothing, maybe the Museum of Magic, run by their friend Mr. Robert Hardwick, might have something. Mr. Hardwick had an extensive library of books on magic, though almost all of them were just about conjuring tricks and sleight of hand. Lewis had his doubts about finding anything useful there, but it might be a last resort.
Jonathan Barnavelt and Mrs. Zimmermann always went to the weekly meetings of the Capharnaum County Magicians Society, and one was coming up. That would give them a chance to dig into some works about magic, ghosts, and spells that summoned magical beings or creatures.
Meanwhile, Lewis and Rose Rita climbed onto their bikes and pedaled over to the New Zebedee Hospital, a renovated old mansion not far from the library. Inside, they approached a woman wearing a crisp white nurse’s uniform. Swirly red letters embroidered on the front of it identified her as Doris Engels. Lewis was feeling nervous, and he didn’t like the smell of the hospital. It was like alcohol and iodine, and it reminded him of illness and suffering.
But at least Nurse Engels looked friendly. She was young, with dark hair tucked neatly up beneath her nurse’s cap, and she wore round spectacles that looked a lot like Rose Rita’s. The nurse was sitting at a desk marked “Information,” and she was making notes in a huge book like a ledger. She glanced up at Lewis and Rose Rita and asked politely, “May I help you?”
“Hi,” said Rose Rita. “We’re here to see our friend Billy Fox. We heard he was sick.”
“Fox,” echoed Nurse Engels. She looked at her book, then shook her head. “Billy is here, but he can’t have any visitors right now. You see, the doctors aren’t sure what he has or how contagious it might be.”
“Is he okay?” asked Lewis anxiously.
“He’s stable,” replied Nurse Engels. Then, as if responding more to Lewis’s worried expression than to his question, she added, “I mean he’s not getting any worse. He’s just not getting better yet.”
“How about Stan Peters?” asked Rose Rita. “I heard he was sick too. Is he here?”
Again the nurse consulted her ledger. “Yes, he is. His symptoms are about the same as Billy’s. They’re friends, so they probably caught some germ while they were together.”
“They’re going to be all right, aren’t they?” asked Lewis.
Nurse Engels smiled reassuringly. “I’m positive they will be. They’ll get the best of care here.”
Rose Rita jerked her head in a way that meant “follow me.” She led the way to the waiting room. There she sat on a banged-up maroon leather chair with splits in its upholstery mended with plastic tape. “I think we ought to find out what’s wrong with them,” she said.
“How?”
Rose Rita scratched her nose thoughtfully. “Well, if this was the movies, we’d find a closet with doctors’ gowns and stuff in it, and we’d dress up like doctors and nobody would think twice about it.”
“That’s crazy,” objected Lewis. “We might as well put on those furry caps with the tails and tell everyone we’re Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone.”
Rose Rita nodded. “You’re right. This is real life, and people know there aren’t any doctors as young as we are. Hmm.” For a few moments Rose Rita was silent. Then she grinned. “But you know something? There are girls who help the nurses, and they aren’t much older than we are! And I think Sally Merryweather’s older sister Phyllis is one. Let’s go. I’ll bet you anything I can find out about this. Sally loves to talk! I’ll just have to wait for the chance to get her started.”
Lewis spent most of that afternoon worrying and trying to stay out of his uncle’s way. Jonathan was involved in some kind of legal transaction. It had to do, he had explained, with reviewing the stocks and bonds and other investments that brought him his income. “I only have to do this once every other year or so,” he had observed, “but it’s a pain!”
So while Jonathan scribbled and clicked off numbers on a battered old adding machine as he consulted folders and brochures in his study, Lewis tried to watch TV or read. He could not concentrate on either. Late that afternoon, Rose Rita rode over on her bike, and the two of them went to the backyard. “Well?” Lewis asked.
Rose Rita rolled her eyes. “Sally is a real motormouth! But I was right about her sister. She’s a volunteer at the hospital, and when she got home this afternoon, she told her family all about Billy and Stan. They’re suffering from anemia.”
Lewis frowned. “Anemia?”
“That’s kind of like loss of blood,” explained Rose Rita. “Their red corpuscles aren’t corpuscling, or whatever you call it. So they’re pretty weak. Both of them had to have a blood transfusion. The funny thing is, when those two got home yesterday, soaking wet, they didn’t have any memory of what happened to them. They were confused and acted so strange that their parents were worried. And Billy was pale and shaky, so his folks took him straight to the emergency room, and the doctors stuck him right into the hospital. Billy’s folks knew that he’d been hanging out with Stan, so they called Stan’s mom, and by that time Stan was so sick that they brought him in too.”
“Rose Rita,” said Lewis miserably, “what did that book say about the lamia? That it was a female vampire? Was that it?”
Rose Rita’s expression became serious. She folded her arms as if she were hugging herself, or trying to keep warm. “That was it.”
They stared at each other. Lewis couldn’t even bring himself to ask the question that had come into his mind.
What if Billy and Stan were not suffering from anemia at all?
What if some ghostly creature was drinking their blood?
CHAPTER SEVEN
Luckily, that week the meeting of the Capharnaum County Magicians Society was at the home of one of the other members, not Jonathan’s or Mrs. Zimmermann’s. Lewis, Uncle Jonathan, and Mrs. Zimmermann had an early dinner, and then the two adults left for their meeting. Lewis immediately telephoned Rose Rita, and she was at the house on High Street within ten minutes.
“Okay,” said Lewis as they began to look through the books. “We’ll see if we can dig up any information on lamias or lamiae or whatever you call them. Did Sally say anything about Billy and Stan today?”
“They’re about the same,” answered Rose Rita. She had pulled down a big black-bound volume.
Lewis recognized it at once, even before Rose Rita opened the cover. It was a bound copy of Mrs. Zimmermann’s doctoral dissertation, the research paper she had written when she was studying magic in Germany. Mrs. Zimmermann had several, and she had given one to Jonathan. “That won’t help,” said Lewis. “You know Mrs. Zimmermann said she’d never heard of a magical whistle.”
“Maybe she forgot,” argued Rose Rita. “It’s been a long time since she wrote this, you know.”
The book was really a bound typescript. Rose Rita opened to the title page:
Amulets
by F. H. Zimmermann D. Mag. A.
A FREE INQUIRY INTO
THE PROPERTIES OF MAGIC AMULETS
A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Magic Arts
of the University of Göttingen,
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the Degree of
DOCTOR MAGICORUM ARTIUM
(DOCTOR OF MAGIC ARTS)
by Florence Helene Zimmer
mann
June 13, 1922
English Language Copy.
“Okay,” said Lewis. “Maybe you’re right. She wrote that more than thirty years ago. But I’m going to look in the Directory of Magical Creatures.”
For several minutes, the two read silently. Lewis sat in his uncle’s chair, with the green-shaded lamp shining on the page in front of him. Rose Rita had settled in the big wing armchair, and she held the dissertation close to her nose as she leafed through it. Usually Lewis enjoyed the dusty, faintly spicy smell of old books, but tonight it seemed to overpower him, making him feel nauseous.
The book he was consulting had no entry under lamia. However, under vampire it had an enormously long article, detailing vampires from different countries and different cultures. There was the nosferatu, although the text said that was a mistranslation of a word that meant “unclean spirit.” This kind of vampire was a sort of ghost on the borderline between life and death. It was a bloodthirsty phantom still animating a dead body.
Others were even stranger and more disturbing. In Malaysia, some people believed in a creature called the penang-galen. Although this kind of vampire looked human, it could detach its head from its body. The head, trailing the monster’s stomach and intestines behind it, flew through the air and sought out victims to feed upon. An illustration almost turned Lewis’s own stomach. He could just picture this slimy creature sailing through the night air . . . ugh!
He quickly turned the page. A vampiric spirit native to the Caribbean, he discovered, was the lou-garou, which could take the form of a “hot steam,” a tall, pale blue flame burning in the middle of a path or road. An unlucky person who blundered into the flame would collapse, all the blood drained from his body. The lou-garou would then return to a tomb, where the body that held its spirit rested. Lewis looked up from the page. “This is hard. I think every country in the world has its own kind of vampire!” He looked back down at the page. “Wurdalaks and strigoi and m’rani and . . .”
The Whistle, the Grave, and the Ghost Page 6