The Whistle, the Grave, and the Ghost

by Brad Strickland

  Rose Rita’s eyes were serious behind her round spectacles. “Well, my job’s not any easier. Mrs. Zimmermann classifies amulets every way you can think of. Stone amulets and silver ones, large amulets and small, plain ones and fancy ones with the Ivy League design and the belt in the back! I think I’m going to read all about the silver ones first. Get back to your book.”

  Lewis nodded, but the more he read, the more the old house seemed to creak around him. Some of the descriptions made the flesh of his arms crinkle up. Sometimes he hastily turned a page when a particularly fearsome drawing appeared. Finally, though, he spotted the word lamiae and bent close to the desk to read it. “Listen to this,” he said. “ ‘The Greek lamiae, or vampiric witches, may be related to one of the very oldest legends of vampires, that of Lilith. In Hebrew tradition, Lilith was the first wife of Adam. Because she refused to obey Adam as his wife, she was cast out of the Garden of Eden and Eve was created. Lilith became a vengeful monster, capable of changing her form. Sometimes she took the shape of an owl in order to fly through the night. By reputation, she is a drinker of blood.’ ”

  “Okay,” said Rose Rita. “So how do you kill her?”

  Lewis read on silently for a few minutes. “It doesn’t tell. But get this: ‘The Greek lamia, a vengeful, blood-drinking magical spirit, may be a development of the Lilith story. However, according to tradition, lamiae may occasionally be tamed, or rather enslaved. In the year 1587, the French mystic and priest Pere d’Anjou was supposed to have captured a lamia by means of a magic spell, and to have held it through a mystical item of some kind. D’Anjou used the spirit as a weapon, sending it forth against his enemies. In 1611, d’Anjou, whose physical appearance was still that of a young man despite his being well into his seventies, embarked on a voyage of discovery to the New World, where he was lost somewhere in North America.’ ”

  Rose Rita wrinkled her nose. “So? Did he come to Michigan?”

  “Doesn’t say.” Lewis read on. “And there’s not much more to the story of the lamia. Some stories of the Chippewa tell about an owl spirit that lures children away from home and drinks their blood. The writer seems to think that might be tied in to d’Anjou and his magic. Nothing here tells how to kill a lamia. No magic spells or anything.”

  “Well, from what your uncle told us, we’re not dealing with a magic spell here. I wonder if this critter could be what he meant by deep magic.”

  But that was a question neither could answer. Rose Rita found a passage in Mrs. Zimmermann’s dissertation that dealt with amulets of summoning. These were magical objects that could call up ghosts or spirits, but none seemed to be whistles. The typed book mentioned Aladdin’s lamp and genies and rings that gave the wearer power over spirits, but there was nothing remotely like Lewis’s discovery. Finally a yawning Rose Rita shut the dissertation with a clap. The big clock on the upstairs landing bonged dolefully ten times. It was getting late.

  “Uncle Jonathan will be back any minute now,” said Lewis. “We’d better put the books up.”

  Rose Rita stretched. “All right. I think I can keep track of how Stan and Billy are doing in the hospital. Your job is to get rid of that whistle if it shows up again. Give it to Mrs. Zimmermann. If anybody can deal with it, she can.”

  Lewis nodded. It wasn’t that easy, but he could think of nothing to say that would convince Rose Rita of the fact. And so he kept quiet.

  That night Lewis took Mrs. Zimmermann’s dissertation up to his room. He told himself that it was possible Rose Rita had missed something. He lay propped up in bed and turned the pages, reading all about the Philosopher’s Stone and the Ring of Solomon and the Seal of the Pharaohs. Nothing. Then as he looked through the footnotes, he noticed one that rang a faint bell: “For further information on amulets of summoning, see Girardus Abucejo, From the Vasty Deep.” Lewis closed the bound typescript and frowned in thought. Abucejo was an unusual name, and he thought he had seen it before. Maybe Uncle Jonathan had that very book in his study.

  Quietly, Lewis slipped out of bed. He opened his bedroom door and heard the faint, muffled sounds of Jonathan Barnavelt’s snores. Still barefoot, Lewis tiptoed down the back stairway. He glanced up at the magic window, a stained-glass oval that Uncle Jonathan kept enchanted so that it was always changing. Tonight it showed a tall wizard standing in front of a strange arched bridge, with stone sculptures like giant chess pieces at its corners. The magician was flinging a handful of playing cards through the air toward the bridge.

  Lewis padded to the bottom of the stairs and switched on the light. He went to the study and replaced Mrs. Zimmermann’s dissertation on its shelf, then began to run his finger across the names on the spines of the other volumes. Aansen, Abbott, Abson, ah, yes: Abucejo. Lewis pulled the volume from the shelf. It was old, with brown pages and a crumbling cloth binding. The title and author’s name had been stamped on in gilt, but most of the gold color had flaked away, leaving just the outline of the letters. Lewis sat at the desk and turned on the green-shaded light again. He opened the book and read the title page:

  FROM THE VASTY DEEP By Girardus Abucejo, MMRS

  “I can call spirits from the vasty deep.”

  —Wm. Shakespeare

  London: Malleficus Press, 1888

  Hurriedly, Lewis turned to the table of contents. It had not only the chapter titles, but a summary of the chapter contents too:

  Chapter 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 On the summoning of spirits. Ghosts. Spirits of the departed. Nature spirits. Elementals. Djinni and the like. Spirit communication.

  Lewis scanned through these until he came to Chapter 8, which was about “Dangers of attempting to control spirits. Spirit possession. Entrapment of the will.” His heart felt as if it had climbed up into his throat and were pounding away behind his Adam’s apple. Lewis gulped a couple of times and turned to page 133, where the chapter began. His eyes were watering. He blinked and started to read. He came to a chilling passage:

  . . . but the chief worry of the magician bold enough to conjure up such a spirit is the simple principle of quid pro quo. Ancient authorities all agree that such magic must be paid for. Payment may take many forms, some of the most common being the gift of blood (for spirits are always desirous of having a physical body, and the blood of the living is one way of forming such a body), or of obedience, or even an exchange of life for life.

  This last is the most terrible. The hapless magician discovers himself locked outside his own body, whilst some loathsome spirit enters it and takes control. In such cases, payment is indeed complete, for the servant spirit has now become, to the world’s sight, the magician, and the magician has become what the spirit was, bodiless and lost upon the wind, lost for all of time and all of eternity.

  Lewis’s head spun. He jumped up from the desk and hurriedly replaced the book on its shelf. Payment? For blowing a whistle? Could it be true?

  He turned out the light and was just going into the hall when something made him look back. Behind the desk was a set of French doors that led into the side yard. These were always closed, and gauzy white curtains hung over them. The curtains stirred as if in a breeze, though Lewis could feel no wind.

  He wanted to slam the door closed, to dash upstairs and throw himself in bed. He wanted to hide under the covers, to feel safe in his room.

  But his muscles refused to move. The curtains billowed, rising in the air. He could glimpse the darkness of the yard beyond them, with patches of drifting night mist curling and writhing against the glass. The curtains moved again. They rose, fell, hid the closed French doors, then revealed them.

  Someone was standing in the yard.

  Come to me.

  Lewis gasped. Was that a voice? Or was it only words he heard in his head? It was the same sensation he had felt when the ghost had declared that Stan was Mine, the same whispery sense that he had experienced when the thought of Revenge had come into his head. An imaginary voice, he had told himse
lf over and over. Now he desperately wanted to believe he was imagining things.

  The curtains lifted on the unfelt breeze. A woman stood just outside the house. She was white, as pale as moonlight, tall and slender. Come to me. Was she speaking to Lewis? Was it her voice he heard in his head? He couldn’t be sure. He felt odd, as if he were asleep and awake at the same time.

  The woman wore robes that billowed around her just as the curtains billowed in the room. Her face was beautiful and cold, her hair indistinct and dark.

  But her eyes—

  Her eyes were empty pits.

  She stretched out her hands.

  Lewis saw her lips form his name. And she smiled. And a moment later the voice said, Lewis. You must open the doors.

  Her smile pierced Lewis as if it had been a dagger.

  He saw his hands rise. Saw them fumble at the latch and push against the doors.

  Without a sound, the French doors opened.

  She looked wrong. She looked as if her body were formed of the night mists, almost transparent, wavering on the night air. She spread her arms, reaching for him. We will belong to each other. Together we will be strong. Come to me.

  Lewis tried to say “No,” but he could not open his mouth. He was freezing and burning all at the same time. He felt himself take one unwilling step toward the woman . . .

  And then all was darkness.

  When he woke the next morning, Lewis lay in his own bed. He leaped up as if something had stung him. For a moment he stood beside the bed swaying.

  He remembered—what?

  “It was a dream,” he told himself. “It was just a dream.”

  But was it?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Over the next few days, Lewis felt stranger and stranger. It still wasn’t that he was sick, exactly, but he was not himself. Rose Rita noticed it on Friday, when she came over to tell him that she had heard both Billy and Stan were being moved to a bigger hospital in Detroit, miles and miles away. “The doctors think they have some kind of unusual anemia,” she told Lewis. “They pump them full of blood about every other day, and then it just seems to disappear somehow.”

  “Umm,” said Lewis, preoccupied. They were sitting in the backyard of Lewis’s house again. The sun was bright and hot, but Lewis hardly felt it. To him it seemed as if the world were in a hazy fog, and as if he were somehow not part of it.

  Rose Rita squinted at him. “Are you okay? You’re not getting sick too, are you?”

  “No,” replied Lewis. “Just tired, I think. I keep having these crazy dreams, and it’s hard to sleep at night.”

  “You need some vitamins or something,” pronounced Rose Rita. “My mom would say you look peaked. Has that whistle showed up again?”

  “Haven’t seen it.”

  “If it does, remember—grab it, hold on to it, and give it to Mrs. Zimmermann or your uncle.”

  Lewis made a face. “You’ve only told me about a hundred times!” It was odd, but he had never much noticed how bossy Rose Rita always was. He began to think he might be better off without her as a friend. Always sticking her nose into his business, always thinking she knew what was best for everyone. He was getting fed up with her pushy nature.

  Now she gave him an anxious, searching look. “Really, Lewis, maybe you should tell your uncle you’re feeling sick. He could let Doc Humphries check you out.”

  “I’m not sick!” snapped Lewis. “I’m just tired, that’s all.”

  “Well, excuse me all to pieces,” said Rose Rita coldly. “I’m sorry, Your Majesty. I just thought you might want to know about Billy and Stan—”

  “I hope Billy and Stan die,” said Lewis spitefully.

  Rose Rita’s eyes opened wide in shock. “Lewis!”

  “Always picking on me,” grumbled Lewis. “Always calling me names and planning to beat me up. I think it serves them right to land in the hospital! And I’ll bet there are a lot of others who think the same thing too!”

  Now Rose Rita was blushing, but with anger, not embarrassment. “Be careful what you say, Lewis. You don’t mean that. It’s a hateful thing to say, and anyway, you’ll have to confess all that to Father Foley!”

  “He’s another one who should be in the hospital,” growled Lewis. “Thinks he’s so great just because he’s a priest! But he’s mean, and he loves pushing people around. He needs a taste of his own medicine—”

  Rose Rita leaped up from the lawn chair where she’d been sitting. “I’m going home!”

  Lewis glared at her. “Good!”

  Rose Rita took a few steps, then turned, with her hands on her hips. “And maybe I won’t come back until you get in a better mood!”

  “Stay away, then!” yelled Lewis after her.

  When she had gone, he just sat there for a while, breathing hard. He felt strange. Sad, but sad as if he were remembering how it felt. Mostly he just felt exhausted, tired of everything. He closed his eyes and imagined he heard a song, a wordless humming sort of song, rising and falling as softly as the summer wind. He opened his eyes a moment later to find that shadows had stretched out long across the lawn. Lewis jumped up, alarmed. Hours had gone past as if they had been seconds. He shook his head in confusion. Then he hurried inside.

  Mrs. Zimmermann came over that evening for dinner. They had a lot of Lewis’s favorites: grilled trout and fresh corn on the cob, dripping with butter, sweet green peas that popped when you bit into them, and fresh-baked bread. Lewis ate mechanically, and to him it all tasted like cardboard.

  “Well,” boomed Uncle Jonathan as they got to the end of their meal, “Helen called this afternoon and wanted to know why I haven’t seen her in so long. So I suppose I’ll have to pack up the old buggy and drive out to Ossee Five Hills tomorrow. Want to come, Lewis?”

  Lewis didn’t. He didn’t much like visiting his uncle Jimmy and his aunt Helen, and usually he wormed out of going more than a few times every year. But just the thought of staying behind, all alone in the big empty house, suddenly made him feel shaky and afraid. “Sure,” he said.

  Uncle Jonathan looked at him in some surprise. “All right. We’ll try not to stay too long.”

  It seemed to Lewis that Mrs. Zimmermann’s expression was suspicious. He sighed and said, “Maybe if I go now, I won’t have to go again until Christmas.” Then, trying to make his voice sound normal, he stood up and said, “I’ll wash if you’ll dry.”

  “I’ll dry,” said Mrs. Zimmermann.

  They stood at the sink, with Lewis scrubbing the dishes and Mrs. Zimmermann drying and putting them away. She had cooked for Lewis and Jonathan so often that she knew very well where everything went. At first they were silent, but then Mrs. Zimmermann asked, “Is there anything you need to get off your chest, Lewis?”

  He shook his head and handed her a clean pot.

  With a sigh, Mrs. Zimmermann said, “I hope this isn’t about the grave in the woods, if grave it was. I’m still trying to learn something about that. In fact, I’ve asked for a rare book to be sent to me so I can read up on it. It should be here before very long, so maybe then—”

  “I wish you wouldn’t bother,” said Lewis.

  Mrs. Zimmermann grinned at him. “Not a chance, kemosabe! You got my curiosity up, and it’s like an itch I can’t reach, let alone scratch. Just for my own nosiness, I have to see if I can find out about the lamia that jacets hic. Lord, my old Latin teacher would be scandalized to hear me say that!” She chattered on.

  Lewis felt grumpier and grumpier. He could tell that she was trying to humor him, and he resented it. After they had finished with the dishes, all three of them sat in the study. Jonathan broke out the blue-and-gold Capharnaum County Magicians Society playing cards and the one-franc pieces he used as poker chips and suggested a few hands of Siberian Tiger, a fiendishly complicated game that Lewis usually enjoyed. That night, though, Lewis couldn’t keep his mind on the cards, and soon he threw his last hand in and announced he was going to bed. He left Uncle Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann st
ill playing as he trudged upstairs. “I wish everybody would leave me alone,” he grumbled to himself as he turned in. “Treat me like . . . like . . .” But he had already fallen asleep, almost the moment his head touched the pillow.

  The next day Uncle Jonathan woke Lewis up bright and early, and they went out and piled into the 1935 Muggins Simoon. It had a starter on the floor that you had to press with your foot as you turned the key in the ignition. For a long time the motor ground on with an R-r-rrR-rrr sound until finally the engine coughed, turned over, and then chugged along steadily. “I think the battery’s going,” said Uncle Jonathan. “I’ll have to buy a new one next week.”

  Lewis didn’t say anything, but he thought it was just like Uncle Jonathan to put off things like that. Jonathan Barnavelt was lazy, that’s what he was. He never wanted to do chores until he had to, and then if he could postpone them a little longer, he’d do it. Lewis rested his chin on his hand as they drove along toward the little town of Ossee Five Hills, watching the cornfields and small farms roll past. People out working in their fields or their yards pointed and laughed and waved as the boxy old car went past.

  That was another thing. Why didn’t Uncle Jonathan get rid of this clunky old antique car and get a new one? Even Mrs. Zimmermann drove a better car than this, a purple Plymouth that she had named Bessie. It was a few years old, but it wasn’t as ancient as this decaying heap.

  Lost in his gloomy thoughts, Lewis rode silently beside his uncle until they reached Ossee Five Hills and then drove a little past it to the white frame house where Jonathan’s sister Helen and her husband, Jimmy, lived. With a sigh, Lewis climbed out of the car and followed his uncle to the house.

  Aunt Helen had the personality of a leaky inner tube. Unlike her older brother, she was thin and nervous-looking. Instead of Uncle Jonathan’s coppery red thatch, she had mousy brown hair. She greeted them sniffily at the door and had them sit in the parlor. Lewis knew he had to sit absolutely still and not swing his feet or say anything unless he was spoken to. Aunt Helen didn’t much approve of boys anyway, and especially not of Lewis. Uncle Jimmy was a Baptist, and she had become a Baptist too, when she married him, and more than once she’d hinted to Uncle Jonathan that she would have been happier if he were not trying to raise Lewis as a Catholic. She had been to a Catholic school herself as a girl, but she had hated it.