The Whistle, the Grave, and the Ghost

by Brad Strickland

  She blushed a little. “I wish he’d let me help more,” she muttered.

  Jonathan nodded, and then smiled. It looked to Rose Rita as if he were trying to force himself to be cheerful again. “Well, I’m off to the barber shop, Rose Rita. I’d suggest you pay a call on old grouchy-cranky-snappy, but he’s probably still not in the mood for company. Don’t worry. These things blow over, you know.”

  “I hope so,” said Rose Rita.

  In the mansion at 100 High Street, Lewis Barnavelt had seen all of this. He had been standing at a front window when Rose Rita ran past the house, and from another window, he saw her catch up to his uncle and walk off talking to him. He felt a dull anger. Here she was again, poking her nose into business that didn’t concern her! He clenched and unclenched his fists. Why, if he had the whistle—

  With a groan, Lewis pressed his hand over his eyes. “I didn’t mean that,” he said, not knowing if anyone or anything could hear him. “I don’t want anything to happen to Rose Rita.”

  But she is not important.

  Lewis almost yelped, and he actually jumped in his surprise and fright. He heard the voice very often now, a woman’s voice, but somehow it always came from inside his head. “She’s my friend.”

  I am your friend. I am hungry.

  Lewis did not say anything. What was the voice suggesting? That he should somehow give Rose Rita to—to the thing that had attacked Billy and Stan?

  The stone is very heavy. The stone holds me down. I cannot go far unless I am called. The others are too far, too far away.

  “B-Billy and Stan?” asked Lewis.

  The voice, or whatever it was, did not bother to reply. Lewis had heard about people losing their minds and hearing voices that no one else could hear. Was that happening to him? What if he wound up sitting in a padded cell, wrapped in a straitjacket, drooling and gibbering and talking to someone who wasn’t even real?

  “Where’s the whistle?” he asked. He had asked that same question dozens of times now.

  No answer came.

  Lewis wandered through the house restlessly. In the front hall, he looked into the magic mirror on the hat stand. Instead of reflecting his face, it showed some strange stone coffins, with hollows scooped out in them for the bodies. They lay scattered about a pebbly yard. It had appeared before, and Uncle Jonathan had told him the coffins were in Holyrood Abbey in Scotland, where Mary, Queen of Scots, had once lived. After England had broken away from the Roman Catholic church, King Henry VIII had closed all the abbeys in 1537, and looters had emptied the tombs, seeking jewelry.

  Lewis stared at one of the stone coffins. It had been chiseled out so that the interior had a hollow shaped somewhat like a mummy: The legs broadened toward the hips, and then there was a rounded niche for the chest and shoulders, and a smaller oval one for the head. Lewis could just imagine what it might feel like to be pushed into one of those, to see the heavy stone lid slide into place, shutting out the light—

  He felt as if he were going to have a nervous breakdown. He could not read, he could not concentrate on television or radio, he didn’t feel like talking to anyone. It was a bit like being shut up in a coffin at that, he thought bitterly.

  “I want—I want—” he murmured. He wanted what?

  “I want my life back,” he said in a hopeless whisper.

  I want life.

  Lewis clapped his hands over his ears, although he knew he could not keep that voice out. He climbed the stairs to the bathroom. He stood in front of the medicine chest and unbuttoned his shirt. Fearfully, he pulled it open.

  For days he had had two red marks on his chest. They looked like wounds, but they never seemed to heal. He could not remember hurting himself. Or had he? The marks didn’t hurt, exactly. They ached, with a low, dull sensation that was not quite pain and not quite an itch. He had swabbed them with Mercurochrome and with hydrogen peroxide, and he had covered them with Band-Aids, but they did not close up or scab over.

  What had happened the night he saw the ghostly figure outside the French doors? He could remember nothing after stepping through the door and looking into her terrible empty eyes. Had she lured him outside, or even worse, had she come into the house? Had she—he shuddered—drunk his blood?

  He went to his bedroom and pulled open the drawer in his night table. Rummaging in the clutter, he found his mother’s rosary and pulled it out. It wasn’t fancy. It was just a small silver crucifix hanging from a short length of five white beads. This was attached to a necklace made of five sets of one large coral bead and ten smaller white ones. You were supposed to use the rosary to keep count of your prayers. You could also “pray the rosary,” saying prayers like the Apostles’ Creed, the Our Father, and the Hail Mary as you counted off the beads.

  With his heart going like a hammer, Lewis began with the crucifix: “In nomine Patris, et Fili, et Spiritus Sancta . . .”

  Red pain rose in his head, blinding him. He fell to his knees and dropped the rosary. For a little while, everything went dark. When he could see again, he found himself lying crumpled on the floor and clutching his head, as if to keep it from exploding. Tears were running from both of his eyes.

  Put that . . . thing away. You will not need it.

  Shaking and fearful, Lewis dropped the rosary back into the drawer. He fell facedown on the bed. What was happening to him? What had that figure at the window done to him?

  Was he simply going insane?

  CHAPTER TEN

  Snakelike, eyeless creatures haunted Lewis’s dreams. Uncle Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann conferred about him, and he was sure that the two of them cast protective spells on the Barnavelt house. Nothing seemed to help. He spent his nights half in terrified sleep and half awake, sweating and shaking, afraid to try to drift off again. He had the strangest sensation of fading. Color slowly drained from the world. Sounds came from far distances. When he lay in bed, he could not really feel the mattress beneath him or the sheets on top of him. It was as if he were floating in outer space.

  He began to feel a dull anger toward his uncle, Mrs. Zimmermann, and Rose Rita. If they liked him so much, why didn’t they help him? And if the whistle was so bad, why was it the only thing that could help him when the chips were down and he faced being beaten to a pulp? More and more Lewis just wanted to be alone.

  One Sunday he felt too ill to go to Mass. His uncle stayed home with him, and all that day Lewis remained in bed, complaining of a headache. “If that doesn’t clear up by morning, you are going to be checked out by Dr. Humphries,” pronounced Jonathan firmly. “This is the first time since you fell off your bike and clonked your noggin that you’ve had that kind of a headache, and I don’t like it.”

  “I’m not crazy about it myself,” growled Lewis, his teeth clamped to hold a thermometer in place.

  His uncle hesitated, then patted Lewis’s shoulder. “I know you’re not. I’m sorry, Lewis. I wasn’t hinting that you’re pretending. Here, open up.” He took the thermometer, squinted at it, and turned it this way and that, peering hard. “Ninety-eight point six,” he reported. “You’re a normal Norman, as far as your temperature goes.” He shook the thermometer. “Feel like any dinner?”

  Lewis shook his head.

  “Ice cream? Cake? Sauerkraut with chocolate-covered peanuts? A mustard-filled doughnut?”

  Lewis groaned. “I just want to rest, that’s all.”

  “Right you are. I’ll check in on you a little later,” replied Jonathan cheerfully. He went out, closing Lewis’s bedroom door behind him.

  Lewis twisted in bed and pounded his pillow. Why did his uncle have to tell all those corny jokes, anyway? And what was the big deal in having a touch of headache? All he wanted was to be left alone.

  Alone.

  But you are never alone, came the soft voice in his head.

  “Go away,” said Lewis harshly.

  The voice spoke no more. But Lewis had the terrible sensation that it was singing, wordlessly, so softly, he could not even
be sure he heard the sound. It became stronger when he tried to fall asleep, a hypnotic rise and fall of music at the very edge of his hearing. That made his heart jerk with alarm and woke him up again, over and over.

  Daylight faded away from the window. At last, from sheer exhaustion, Lewis did manage to fall into a kind of sleep, or at least unconsciousness. How long he was in that state he could never tell, but at some point something woke him. He had felt a wave of darkness pass over him. It was a flash of black lightning. It was as though he had been touched by the hand of Death.

  Lewis sat up in bed. It was the middle of the night, and no light showed in his room, yet he could see. Everything stood out clearly, in shades of dull gray. You have to go downstairs. Quietly.

  Lewis rolled out of bed. He could barely feel the floor beneath his feet. He had trouble grasping the doorknob. When he closed his hand on it, he felt almost no pressure to tell him he was holding it. He turned it with great difficulty.

  Something told him to tiptoe down the back stairs. The oval, changing window was oddly blank and black. It always showed a picture of some sort, but not tonight. Tonight it was like a window into outer space, out beyond the farthest star.

  Before he reached the foot of the stairs, Lewis heard the murmur of voices: his uncle’s and Mrs. Zimmermann’s. He understood that something wanted him to listen. Something was using his ears to learn what the two of them were talking about. Carefully, he tiptoed to the kitchen door, which stood barely ajar. A thin wedge of light spilled from it. Avoiding this, Lewis put his ear close to the opening. He heard his uncle’s voice clearly first: “. . . no fever, but he’s complaining about a headache, and he just doesn’t look right.”

  “The volume I’ve been waiting for will be here tomorrow,” replied Mrs. Zimmermann. “At long last! Until then, I suppose we can try all the old folk preventions. Garlic and hawthorn, crucifixes and holy water.”

  “I have all those,” said Uncle Jonathan. “And don’t think it was easy to get up the nerve to ask Father Foley for a bottle of holy water, and then for a special blessing on top of it! The man must think I’ve lost what few marbles I possess. But what was the news you had to run over to tell me, Florence? Nothing else terrible, I hope.”

  Mrs. Zimmermann was so quiet for so long that Lewis leaned closer to the kitchen door, thinking that she might be whispering. But at last she spoke, in a low but understandable voice: “Billy Fox was released from the hospital yesterday, but his parents are not bringing him back to New Zebedee. They’re taking him somewhere out east to live. They blame the town for what happened to him, as if it were some kind of plague spot. But that isn’t the worst. The other boy, Stanley Peters . . .”

  When she did not go on, Uncle Jonathan said peevishly, “Confound it, Pruny Face, don’t leave me hanging! Come on and spill it. I’m a great big man, and I can take it, whatever it is. Did he die?”

  “N-nooo,” said Mrs. Zimmermann slowly. “He . . . escaped.”

  “Escaped? Escaped from what? Escaped from who? Did that hospital have bars on the doors and men in uniform patrolling the halls?”

  “You mean from whom,” said Mrs. Zimmermann, who had been a teacher and who hated to hear faulty grammar. “But I don’t mean escaped, exactly. He slipped out of the hospital two nights ago, taking the clothes he had been wearing when he was admitted. No one has seen him since, and no one knows where he may be headed.”

  “I can guess,” muttered Jonathan. “He’s heading back to little old New Zebedee. He’s coming home.”

  Upstairs. Quickly. The command in Lewis’s head seemed louder than the voices he had been eavesdropping on, though he knew that no one else could possibly hear them. Quietly but quickly, he climbed the stairs and returned to his own room. It is too soon, but we have to go now.

  Lewis did not understand. Something ordered him to dress hurriedly, ordered him without even the silent words that he heard only in his head. He didn’t have to turn on the light to do so. He could still see in the dark, although everything was lifeless and colorless. He sat in the chair at his desk to tie his shoes, and when he had finished and straightened up, he was not surprised to see the shape of a body beneath the sheet on his bed.

  It moved. The sheet clung to the form. What lay beneath the sheet Lewis could not say. Somehow the sheet itself became the body of a woman, the face made of crumpled, wrinkled linen. The mouth was wide and cruel, the nose broad, and the eyes only empty hollows under a projecting brow. The form sat up and rose from the bed. The blind head swiveled and finally faced Lewis. With despair, he saw color again. The empty eye sockets held a deep crimson light that pulsated with the beat of Lewis’s heart.

  The thing could see.

  It reached out a draped arm for him.

  Come with me.

  And, although some part of his mind was shrieking in terror, Lewis followed the shape.

  A little after nine the next morning, the phone rang in the Barnavelt house. Jonathan, who had been sitting at the kitchen table sipping coffee and reading the morning paper, jumped at the sound. He hurried to answer the phone, and as soon as he did, Mrs. Zimmermann’s voice buzzed on the line: “Jonathan! Can you come over?”

  “What’s up?”

  Mrs. Zimmermann sounded exasperated: “The book arrived this morning, special delivery. Hurry over and let’s see if we can learn what’s what. How is Lewis?”

  “He hasn’t gotten up yet. I looked in on him this morning, and he’s lying there under the covers, all huddled up. I didn’t have the heart to wake him, because he’s been sleeping so badly. Say, why don’t you come over here?”

  “Be there in two shakes. Pour an extra cup of coffee, because I think I’ll need it.” After a pause, she added, “And I’m going to phone Rose Rita and ask her to come over too. I know she’s young, but she’s been in on this from the start, and I think she deserves to be in on it now.” Mrs. Zimmermann hung up with a click, and Jonathan replaced the receiver. He hurried up the stairs and quietly opened Lewis’s door. Lewis didn’t seem to have moved much. He still lay under the coverlet, huddled up as if he were cold. Carefully, Jonathan closed the door and went back downstairs again.

  Mrs. Zimmermann was just opening the kitchen door. She held a book almost twice as tall as an encyclopedia volume against her chest. Behind her glasses, her eyes were sparkling. “Now maybe we’ll find out a few things!” She thumped the book down on the table as Jonathan poured her a cup of coffee. He served it to her, and the cream pitcher, which was in the shape of a black-and-white cow, came to life and ambled over to her with a friendly moo. Mrs. Zimmermann made a face as she picked it up and poured a dollop of cream into her coffee from the cow’s open mouth. “Please don’t hex the sugar bowl,” she said to Jonathan. “It makes me feel queasy, having a cow spit cream into my coffee.”

  Jonathan paid her very little attention because he was studying the mysterious tome. It had a leather cover, pebbly and deep brown, with semiprecious stones set into it in a curly design: black onyxes and purple garnets, blue-green turquoises and yellow citrines, red bloodstones and green jade. He traced these with his index finger. “Someone believes in mineral spells, I see. Whoever made this cover put all the protective stones in just the right order. At least the bookbinder knew his magic!”

  “Or hers,” returned Mrs. Zimmermann tartly.

  Someone knocked on the front door, making them both jump. Jonathan laughed uneasily. “That will be Rose Rita,” he said. “She made good time!” He hurried to the foyer and opened the door.

  Sure enough, Rose Rita stood on the threshold, looking pale with worry. “What’s up?”

  “Come with me and you’ll see,” replied Jonathan. He hastily filled Rose Rita in about the magical book as they walked to the kitchen.

  Mrs. Zimmermann greeted Rose Rita. “The more I thought about the word lamia, the more certain I was that I had read about it someplace,” she explained. “Finally I had the sense to read my own doctoral dissertation again, and that se
nt me to a book by a man named Abucejo, and that directed me to a three-hundred-year-old book that is so rare, I had to pull about a million strings to find a copy. But I have a friend or two in certain European universities, and one of them finally came through. This should tell us about the lamia and how it came to Michigan, if anything can!”

  “And how it ties in with Lewis’s troubles,” agreed Jonathan. “Let’s have a look.”

  Mrs. Zimmermann carefully opened the book. Jonathan craned over her shoulder, squinting at the yellowed parchment. The printing was very old-fashioned, and the language was medieval Latin, but he mentally translated the title:

  Of the Lamia

  Together with Memoirs of

  Fr. Pierre Michel d’Anjou

  Rome, 1656

  By Fr. Augustus St. Francis Xavier Kemp

  Doctor of Philosophy

  Mrs. Zimmermann waited impatiently. “You know you’re slow as molasses when you’re trying to translate in your head! Let me read it to you, translating as I go. That will speed everything up!”

  “Go ahead, go ahead,” grumbled Jonathan, rolling his eyes. “Just because I got my degree in animal husbandry instead of a fancy-pants doctorate of magic—”

  “Oh, quiet, Brush Mush,” snapped Mrs. Zimmermann, but in a playful tone, with a wink at Rose Rita. She turned the pages, and then settled down to read. “Hum. All right. Herr Doktor Kemp, it seems, knew Father d’Anjou personally. In fact, when Kemp was a very young man, he was apprenticed to the elderly d’Anjou. D’Anjou was, let’s see . . . let’s see, not only a priest but also a physician, an explorer, a lawyer, and a magician.”

  Jonathan snorted. “Oh, peachy. A doctor and a lawyer. After he killed his patients, he could sue himself for malpractice!”