The House Where Nobody Lived

by Brad Strickland

Uncle Jonathan shook his head. “I’m not sure. This doesn’t have the feel of something from the past or future, and I don’t think it’s just an imaginary scene. If I had to guess, I’d say we are seeing the eruption of a shield volcano, like the ones that blew their stacks in Iceland not long ago. They’re the ones that produce fountains of lava instead of the huge black clouds of ash that a conical volcano produces. But the news broadcast didn’t say a word about a volcanic eruption anywhere on earth.”

  Lewis asked apprehensively, “Could that be a warning that one is going to erupt around here?”

  “Hardly,” replied Uncle Jonathan. “The geology of Michigan doesn’t support any kind of volcano that I know of. That kind of volcano is more common in—” Jonathan broke off suddenly, his expression troubled. But then he shrugged. “Oh, well, this doojigger doesn’t always show just what’s really happening. Every once in a while it decides to give us a scene of green and red macaws in top hats dancing in a chorus line or a football game where one side wears pink ballet tutus and the other is dressed in tuxedos and skin-diving masks.”

  Uncle Jonathan didn’t appear to be perturbed, and Lewis didn’t think anything more about the mirror. Lewis telephoned Rose Rita, and she agreed at once to join them. Then he and his uncle walked toward town though a cool, pleasant twilight. As they strolled down Mansion Street, Rose Rita popped out of her house and hurried to join them. “Hello!” Uncle Jonathan said cheerfully. “Greetings, salutations, and welcome aboard. Now, before I get myself in trouble with your folks for spoiling your appetite, have you had dinner?”

  “Just finished it,” said Rose Rita. “Pork chops and sauerkraut, which I don’t particularly like.”

  “No dessert? Good,” returned Uncle Jonathan. “Then if you still have room, you can sneak off with us and savor some frozen delights. I seem to remember you have a fondness for strawberry sundaes, and the calories are on me tonight.”

  “Where’s Mrs. Zimmermann?” asked Rose Rita as she fell into step beside them.

  “She is busy with a research project,” Uncle Jonathan said shortly. Lewis wondered about that, because as far as he knew, they hadn’t heard anything from Mrs. Zimmermann that afternoon. As if he wanted to change the subject, Uncle Jonathan asked, “How is school, Rose Rita?”

  Beside Lewis, Rose Rita made a grunt of dissatisfaction. “Not great,” she said. “I keep telling everyone that I don’t like home economics, and they keep telling me that someday I’ll get married and want to be a homemaker.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with being either of those things,” observed Uncle Jonathan.

  Lewis sensed rather than saw Rose Rita’s shrug. “Maybe not, but I want to be a famous writer. I want to be so rich that I can hire someone else to do all the cooking and cleaning for me while I travel the world and write stories and have autograph parties.”

  Uncle Jonathan laughed. “Good for you! Be exactly what you want, and don’t mind what anyone else says, that’s my motto.”

  The streetlights had just flickered on when the three of them reached Main Street. Everything was still and peaceful as could be, with almost no traffic and only a few people out on the sidewalks. They turned toward the soda fountain and at that instant, Lewis heard a screech of brakes and spun to take a panicky look at what was barreling down the street behind him.

  CHAPTER 8

  CLATTERING AND LURCHING TOWARD them with two screeching wheels on the sidewalk and blue smoke spitting from under its tortured tires was the town garbage truck. It was speeding right for them, mowing down parking meters as if they were stalks of wheat, approaching too fast, already too close to avoid—

  Umph! Something hit Lewis right in the stomach, and he tumbled down, heels over head. In the next heartbeat the runaway truck screamed past, so close that a blast of wind from it whipped Lewis’s hair and the dust it kicked up stung the skin on his neck and the back of his hands. The top of a decapitated parking meter crashed through a window behind him, and a shower of glass fell close to him, making him throw his arms around his head.

  For a moment, Lewis thought the truck had run over him, and he waited frantically to feel the pain of broken bones and gashed flesh. Gradually he realized that, aside from scratched knees, he was safe and whole. Everything seemed to go in slow motion, though mere seconds had passed.

  From somewhere came the shattering sound of a crash and a crunch, then the clatter of flying metal and the tinkle of glass. Someone was screaming like a maniac. Lewis felt hands helping him up, and he heard Uncle Jonathan’s shaky, anxious voice: “Are you both all right?”

  That was when Lewis realized that Uncle Jonathan had reacted with the reflexes of a football guard. He had shoved Rose Rita and Lewis down, rolling them over onto the narrow strip of grass in front of Corrigan’s hardware store a moment before leaping back, barely avoiding the runaway truck the way a matador would spin away from an enraged bull. The garbage truck must have whizzed right between them, missing them all by a matter of a few inches.

  “I’m not hurt,” gasped Rose Rita. “Lewis?”

  “Okay,” was all Lewis could say, as he wondered if whoever was yelling might be pinned under the tires of the truck. “Uncle Jonathan, did it hit you?”

  Grimly, Uncle Jonathan said, “It missed me by about one-tenth the thickness of a baby gnat’s eyebrow. That Potsworth Stevenson must have been drinking on the job. Look what he’s done!”

  Down the street, not far past the drugstore, the garbage truck had plowed into the rear of a parked Ford, forcing the car forward right into a telephone pole, which had splintered and now stood partly bent over the two wrecked vehicles. The truck had snapped off about ten parking meters, and they lay scattered like jackstraws on the sidewalk. Broken fragments of glass gleamed in the streetlights, and from under the crumpled hood of the garbage truck thick white steam jetted out with a hiss that sounded like a giant snake. The odd sweet smell of antifreeze filled the air. People were gathering around the truck, and from inside the cab the driver was trying to force the door open, but the metal had bent and buckled. The screams were pouring from the garbage truck’s partially opened window, high and shrill.

  A man had climbed up onto the running board of the truck and was bellowing through the gap at the top of the window: “Hold on! We called the police. They’ll be here in a minute. Just—”

  Crash! Smash! The garbage truck driver was swinging something at the windshield from the inside. The man jumped off the running board and ducked away from the danger. More glass flew, and then a frenzied Skunky Stevenson came wriggling and crawling out of the broken windshield like a maggot writhing out of a rotten apple. Lewis saw that in his scratched and bloody hands he held a short crowbar, and he brandished it at the three or four people who had run out to help him. “Stay back!” he wailed. “Get away! Keep them off me!”

  “Potsworth!” yelled Uncle Jonathan. “Calm down!” He said quickly to Rose Rita and Lewis, “You two stay here. I think something’s wrong with him.” He strode forward.

  “Help me!” bawled Stevenson. “Here they come! They want to drag me away!” He took a desperate roundhouse swing with the crowbar, like the ball-player Joe DiMaggio taking a hard cut at a fastball, and people jumped away from him, shouting in anger and confusion. Stevenson pointed with the crowbar, past Rose Rita and Lewis. “Oh, saints help me, here they come!” Lewis fearfully looked back, but saw only the deserted, quiet street. Nothing moved there, not even a cat or a dog.

  “Potsworth!” Uncle Jonathan had stopped a few steps away from the wreck. He stood right in the center of the street, leaning on his cane, and the other people sort of spread out in a semicircle to either side of him, as if they hoped he could talk some sense into this wild man. “Calm down, old friend. Are you hurt?”

  Stevenson collapsed to his knees. The crowbar dropped from his bloody hands and clanged clattering onto the pavement. “Jonny?” he asked in a voice racked by deep, shuddering sobs. “Jonny Barnavelt? Is that you?”

>   Lewis felt his flesh crawl. Skunky Stevenson’s voice had become that of a six-year-old, high and bleating, full of terror. From beside him, Lewis heard Rose Rita gasp at the sound.

  Uncle Jonathan took a few steps forward. “It’s all right, Pots,” he said in a gentle voice. “I can see that you’ve scratched yourself up pretty badly, but we’ll send for Doc Humphries and—”

  “Keep them away!” shouted Stevenson, suddenly leaping up and throwing his hands in front of him, as if he were fending off some invisible attacker. “Oh, Mother of Mercy, don’t let them get me!”

  In the corner of Lewis’s eye something moved, across the street, some fleeting and stealthy gray shape, or many gray shapes hurrying past in a single line. He whirled to look—and nothing was there except for the five-and-dime and the feed and seed company. He remembered the very first time he and Rose Rita had seen the Hawaii House, how he’d had the eerie sensation that a row of ghostly marchers scurried beside them as they retreated back toward the highway. This was just like that—

  “Here!” Stevenson had taken something from his pocket. “It was in their garbage, they didn’t want it! Oh, take it, take it, it’s yours and you can have it, but leave me my soul!” With a convulsive jerk of his arm, he threw something small, something invisible at that distance. Except that when it arched high in the dusk, it caught fire, first as a little red glowing ember about the size of a marble. Then it flared to white-hot life, streaked down toward the earth trailing flames behind it, and landed with a splat in the street off to Lewis’s left. Where it hit, it burst into a sparkling spatter of liquid, fiery drops, just like—

  Just like the molten lava pictured in the enchanted mirror.

  Lewis felt chilled. Uncle Jonathan had been about to say that volcanoes like the one in the mirror were more common in places like—Hawaii!

  “What just happened?” asked Rose Rita in an unsteady voice. “Lewis, did you feel that?”

  “Yeah.” Something had gone away. Lewis could feel it pass, the way a sudden breeze could spring up and then die away. The whole world seemed to let out a long-held breath.

  Ahead of them, Skunky Stevenson slowly collapsed to the dark asphalt beside his wrecked truck, whimpering like a little baby, then making a horrible keening sound, rising and rising in pitch until Lewis wanted to clap his hands over his ears to shut it out.

  More and more people showed up, coming out of the few stores that were still open, but nobody ventured close to the fallen man. From down toward the fountain a siren howled, and Lewis could see the flashing red light of a police car tear through the roundabout. It screeched to a halt, and two policemen climbed out, staring at the wreck and at the crowd. Maybe a dozen people stood around Stevenson in a silent circle, but not a single one moved to help him until Uncle Jonathan stepped forward. One of the policemen cautioned, “Better watch out, Mr. Barnavelt. He may be dangerous.”

  “He isn’t,” replied Uncle Jonathan firmly. He knelt beside the weeping man, one knee in the puddle of water that had leaked from the truck radiator, and patted the huddled, weeping figure on the shoulder. “It’s all right,” Uncle Jonathan said over and over. “Nobody’s going to hurt you now. They’ve gone away, Potsworth. It’s all right.”

  But it wasn’t. Lewis felt sick and dizzy from the close call and from the way the fallen man could not stop crying. The sobbing, gibbering noises were horrible. They were the sounds of someone who had completely lost his mind.

  CHAPTER 9

  IT WAS NINE O’CLOCK. Rose Rita, Uncle Jonathan, and Lewis had not enjoyed any ice-cream treats, but had instead gone to Mrs. Zimmermann’s house, where they had a council of war in her living room. She had turned on every lamp and light, and the purple furnishings nearly glowed. Over the mantel a purple dragon writhed in a framed painting. Lewis found it hard even to look at the creature, so he kept his eyes on the toes of his sneakers.

  Mrs. Zimmermann was pacing the floor while the other three sat on her overstuffed purple sofa. “It was a pearl?” she asked Uncle Jonathan. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m not sure about anything,” confessed Uncle Jonathan. “And especially not about what Potsworth Stevenson thought he was taking from the Kellers’ trash. He told me he found a wooden box in the Kellers’ garbage can, about yay by yay”—here Uncle Jonathan indicated a square about four inches on a side—“and he thought he might be able to sell it. He found a secret compartment in the blasted thing, and inside that was what he thought to be a pearl the size of a robin’s egg.”

  “A pearl?” Rose Rita asked.

  “Hawaii was once famous for its pearls,” returned Uncle Jonathan. “That’s how Pearl Harbor got its name. I have no doubt that old Captain Chadwick brought back a few.”

  Mrs. Zimmermann stopped pacing, folded her arms across her chest, and shook her head. “Pearls. This is nothing I’ve heard of. I know of earth magic and water magic and sky magic—even of weather magic, like the kind the late, unlamented Isaac Izard used to practice. But pearl magic? Never. What happened to it?”

  “He threw it away,” said Rose Rita. “And it burned up in the air.”

  Mrs. Zimmermann gave her an astonished look. “Wha-a-at?”

  “I saw it too. It looked like molten lava,” added Lewis in a small voice. “It hit the street and then just boiled away to nothing.”

  “Just a sooty mark like a black asterisk,” agreed Uncle Jonathan. “Remember when we were kids and we used to set off fireworks and sometimes they’d leave a burned patch? It was like that.”

  Mrs. Zimmermann sniffed. “Some of us never fooled around with dangerous things like firecrackers. Well, this beats everything I’ve ever run across. Is Potsworth all right?”

  Uncle Jonathan coughed. “Well, no. I don’t think he’ll ever be all right again. The doctors don’t think he’s physically injured—at least they couldn’t find any broken bones, though he’s got some bad lacerations on his hands from breaking out the windshield of his truck—but he’s having terrible hallucinations. He told me that an army was after him, an army of ghosts made of night and darkness.”

  “I felt them,” said Lewis. He told about his two experiences, first at the Hawaii House and then on Main Street. “I couldn’t see anything when I looked straight at them,” he finished. “But when I was looking away, they sort of flickered off to one side. It was like a whole bunch of people darting along, in single file.”

  Mrs. Zimmermann frowned. “Did you get any impression of them? How big were they? Human-sized? Bigger? Smaller?”

  Lewis felt helpless. “I don’t really know. Human-sized, I think. Taller than me.”

  Turning to Rose Rita, Mrs. Zimmermann asked, “And did you see or sense anything?”

  “No!” Rose Rita said, sounding bewildered. “And Lewis never mentioned seeing anything before either.”

  Lewis hung his head. “I didn’t want to sound like a scaredy-cat,” he mumbled. “And I don’t want to lose my mind like Sku—Mr. Stevenson.”

  Mrs. Zimmermann’s mouth set itself into a grim, straight line. “I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all. Lewis, since you’ve seen these figures, they may have their eyes on you too. You’re going to have to be brave. Something bad is going on, something ancient and deep and beyond my knowledge. I was worried about David and his family.” She looked into Lewis’s eyes. “But now,” she added sorrowfully, “now I’m most worried about you.”

  CHAPTER 10

  SKUNKY STEVENSON’S ACCIDENT WAS less than a nine days’ wonder. At the first of the week, he was sent away to a special hospital in Westland, a town some distance east of New Zebedee. A couple of hulking, beeping wreckers had long since towed the dented old garbage truck and the ruined Ford away. The telephone company had even replaced the splintered pole. People talked about what had happened, to be sure, but by Tuesday, almost everything was back to normal, although if you knew just where to look in the center of Main Street, you could still see the inky splat where the flaming pearl, if it was a
pearl, had landed. That spot seemed to be seared right down into the surface, like a brand burned into cowhide.

  Lewis couldn’t stand not knowing whether David had seen the same ghostly figures as he had. So at lunch on the last Wednesday in September, Lewis made a determined effort to talk to David. He finally glimpsed the boy actually sitting outside the lunchroom. David had slipped out a side door—you weren’t supposed to do that, of course—and sat crouched in a hard-to-see spot at the corner of the school, huddled miserably with his back against the brick wall, his lunch tray balanced across his knees. Lewis took a look around to make sure no one was noticing him, and then he ducked outside too. “Hi,” he said.

  David didn’t say a word, but stared down at his ketchup-coated meat loaf, shriveled green peas, congealed carrots, and hard-as-a-rock peanut butter cookie. Lewis hunkered down beside him and with a shock noticed that David had a split lip with a short wound that looked ugly and reddish brown, and a swollen purplish bruise beside his left eye. “What happened?” asked Lewis, so concerned that he decided against asking David about the ghostly figures.

  Raising a hand to hide his face, David mumbled, “N-nothin’. R-ruh-ran into a duh-door.”

  “Nuts,” said Lewis, anger rising in him against whoever had done this. “Somebody beat you up, didn’t they?”

  “I duh-don’t w-want t-to t-talk ab-buh-about it,” insisted David, his face flushing. His voice sounded as if it were about to break into sobs.

  Lewis crossed his arms. The weather had turned cooler, and he wasn’t wearing a jacket. He could see goose pimples on David’s neck. David picked at the meal with no real sign of an appetite. With a sigh, Lewis said, “Listen, who hit you?” A sick thought suddenly rose in his mind, and he lowered his voice: “It wasn’t your dad, was it?”

  “No!” David’s sharp answer came right away. His lips tightened, and his eyes filled with tears. “My dad hasn’t ever hit me,” he said with no trace of a stutter. Then he bit his swollen lip and dropped his gaze down to the ground. Quietly, he admitted, “It was th-that Muh-M-Mike D-Dugan, a-after suh-school y-yesterday.”