Then the shadowy form spoke: “L-L-Lewis? Muh-my m-mom and duh-d-dad w-won’t w-wake up!”
“David! Stick with me!”
Lewis turned on the lights in the parlor. It didn’t matter if he turned on every light and lamp in the house, if he screeched and screamed or sang “My Darling Clementine” at the top of his lungs, if the Kellers were under some kind of spell, and he thought they were. Lewis grabbed something from the shelf and then ordered, “Come on! Don’t be afraid!”
The two boys pounded back up the stairs. Lewis didn’t know what he was doing. All he could hold on to was a crazy, wild hope.
Pele challenged: “It can swim, it lies on the sand, you can hold it in your hand, it is round, it is small, but it stands more than a man’s house tall!” She suddenly stood in the middle of swirling scarlet flames, and they rolled upward.
Mrs. Zimmermann felt the scorching heat on her face, but she did not give ground. “That is an easy one. A coconut! For a coconut is a seed that floats, that finds its way to land, and then grows into a tall tree. And now answer me this, if you can: This canoe holds a lowly traveler. Across a dry sea he rows with four short paddles. What is it?”
The contest of wits was as old as the oldest wizardry. No blinding flashes, no explosions or stabs of lightning. Just the quick thrust and parry of riddle and answer. Mrs. Zimmermann had thought of something as far from the islands of the Pacific as she could, hoping that the question would stump Pele. But the fiery spirit shook her head. “Ah, you try to be clever. But what rows itself across a desert but a tortoise?” She threw back her head and laughed. Billows of steam rose in the night air, tinted by the flames that burned around her.
Mrs. Zimmermann nodded, tilting her head. Was she crazy, or was Pele enjoying this? Mrs. Zimmermann tried to concentrate as the next challenge came: “I sail in a sea of deepest blue; when you sleep, I watch you; I sail to reach a golden shore, and when I reach it, I am no more!”
Mrs. Zimmermann bit her lip. She knew hundreds of old puzzles, but none were from Hawaii. As if sensing her indecision, Pele lifted the war club in a menacing way, and the flames around her flared so hot that Mrs. Zimmermann had to force herself to hold her ground. The rules were clear: If she failed to answer or she stepped back from her foe, she would lose her life. “You cannot answer, old woman?”
“A star sails the night sky,” said Mrs. Zimmermann in a firm voice. “And when it reaches the shores of dawn, it fades.”
Pele lowered her weapon. In a grudging tone, she said, “It is long since I met one like you, woman of the dry land.”
Mrs. Zimmermann bowed. “And I have never met your like, spirit of the volcano.”
“But only one of us can win.”
Mrs. Zimmermann did not answer. She was desperately trying to think up a riddle that would stump Pele. The spirit’s fury was barely contained. If she won the contest, Pele’s anger would strike the house and everything around it in a burst of real fire, fire that would burn, fire that would kill.
And Lewis was still in that house.
“Captain!” Lewis stumbled out onto the platform. “Here!”
Carefully, as if he held a baby animal, Lewis set down the thing he had carried up from the parlor: a ship in a bottle, a trim, two-masted schooner named Sword. Behind Lewis, David gasped. As Lewis backed away, as he sat and hastily tied his shoes, a glowing form took shape above the ship in the bottle. “Such a sweet craft!” The captain’s words rang in Lewis’s mind. He didn’t know whether David could hear it or not, but he didn’t have time to find out.
Lewis held up the broken shark’s tooth. “Can we use this?”
The captain’s sea-blue eyes flashed. “Aye! That is a point from the war club given me by a mighty warrior on Maui. The spirit warriors cannot face it. Beware, though, that it does not fall into the hands of Pele! If you had the whole of it, you might be able to banish even her—”
“Stay here,” gasped Lewis, so busy in his thoughts that he couldn’t even be afraid. “David! You come with me!”
Down the steps, and Lewis threw the front door open. To their left, Mrs. Zimmermann and Pele circled each other, their voices alternating, rising, falling, challenging. Both of them were surrounded by flames, crimson ones rising around Pele, purple ones flickering from Mrs. Zimmermann’s wand. Past the two women, the Marching Dead stood shoulder to shoulder like a ghostly fence surrounding the house. “Come on,” Lewis said. He led the way across the lawn, and then he could see Uncle Jonathan and Rose Rita standing yards distant, helplessly watching. He heard his uncle call his name.
Lewis held the shark’s tooth out ahead of him. Closing his eyes, he touched one of the warriors. A jolt, like electricity, throbbed through Lewis’s arm, nearly knocking him backward. He heard David’s cry of amazement and opened his eyes. The ghostly form had dissolved into mist. With his free hand,
Lewis shoved David forward. David stumbled, went sprawling, but burst through the ghostly barrier an eye-blink before the guards on either side of the gap stepped to seal it. Pele shrieked in anger. Uncle Jonathan and Rose Rita were in the distance, yelling to David.
Lewis had no time. He shouted, “David! My room, the top desk drawer, in an old aspirin bottle! Looks like an arrowhead! Bring it back, and hurry!”
He retreated, holding the broken tooth before him. Mrs. Zimmermann’s angry voice lashed out: “Pele! If you turn away from me, I claim victory!”
Pele stood enveloped in flames. “I am immortal! What is time to me? I shall finish you, old woman, and then take all your spirits!”
The warriors were closing in. Lewis backed up the front steps, ran into the parlor, fought a terrible stitch in his side as he climbed those steps again.
On the platform, Abediah Chadwick looked almost solid. “Captain! Can we hold out?”
“Aye, Mr. Barnavelt!” Lewis shivered. The man’s fierce expression was that of an eagle, or that of a lion, unbeaten and unbeatable. Pele could not have defeated this man. She could only kill him.
The Muggins Simoon screeched to a stop in front of the Barnavelt house, and three figures spilled out of it and rushed inside. “Hurry,” urged Uncle Jonathan. “I can’t stand the thought of leaving Florence and Lewis to hold off those horrors alone!”
Rose Rita trembled. She hated to feel helpless. They all hurried to Lewis’s bedroom, and David yanked the desk drawer open. He rummaged, throwing odds and ends onto the floor: a Boy Scout knife, a British shilling piece, pencils, old keys, and all the other junk that Lewis had tossed in over the years. With a cry of “H-here it is!” David held up a St. Joseph’s aspirin bottle. Something in it rattled.
Uncle Jonathan took it from him, unscrewed the top, and shook a white pointed something into his palm. “This is it?”
“I remember that!” exclaimed Rose Rita. “It’s an arrowhead that I found at the Hawaii House a long time ago!”
“Not an arrowhead,” said Uncle Jonathan. “This is a tooth.”
“Kuh-quick,” begged David. “Wuh-we’ve g-got to g-get b-back.”
“Right you are. Come on, everyone!”
Rose Rita held on as the car lurched and roared its way through the night. It seemed to her that only a few moments had passed, but when Uncle Jonathan stomped on the brakes and the big old car slid to a stop, things looked different. Mrs. Zimmermann and Pele still faced each other. Now, though, Mrs. Zimmermann leaned on her staff as if she were growing weary. And the Marching Dead had gone.
A thin voice cried out from the platform in the tower: “Uncle Jonathan! Don’t come in the house! The ghosts are inside!”
“They can’t take David’s family!” shouted Mrs. Zimmermann. “Not as long as I hold off Pele!”
“But how long can you do that, old woman?” The voice of the spirit was haughty and proud.
“I’ve got it, Lewis!” called Uncle Jonathan.
Rose Rita couldn’t understand what Lewis was doing. He appeared to be conversing with someone she couldn’t see. Then he yelle
d down, “I have to have it, Uncle Jonathan! But I can’t get down, and you can’t come up the stairs!”
“Oh, I can’t, can’t I?” snarled Uncle Jonathan. He held out his cane. “Grab on to this, David and Rose Rita! Hold tight and close your eyes if you want to. Just don’t let go!”
Rose Rita seized the cane, her hand just below David’s. In the next moment, Uncle Jonathan bellowed, “Volans!”
Rose Rita felt the breath catch in her chest. The cane had responded. It yanked them upward.
The three of them rose from the earth and flew through the air.
CHAPTER 18
LEWIS HAD NEVER SEEN anything as wonderful as Uncle Jonathan, Rose Rita, and David sailing from the earth up, up to the tower. They arched over the rail, and, one, two, three, they touched down. “Lewis!” gasped Uncle Jonathan. “What’s happened? What does that tooth mean?”
“It has some kind of power,” replied Lewis. “Did you find it?”
Uncle Jonathan fumbled in his vest pocket and took out the rattling aspirin bottle. He handed it to Lewis, and Lewis shook the broken tip of the tooth into his palm. He fitted the base to it, and it made a perfect match. “Can you—glue this together? Can you make it whole?”
“No sooner said than done,” growled Uncle Jonathan. He raised his cane and intoned a Latin phrase that Lewis mentally translated as “Let the broken be healed!” A thin blue ray, as fine as a spiderweb, shot from the crystal orb on his cane and touched the two jagged pieces of tooth. Lewis felt them pulsate on his palm. A flash of blue light, and he held a complete tooth, with not even a hairline fracture.
“W-w-wow,” said David, who still looked shaky after his flight through the air.
“Now the ship,” said Lewis, pointing toward the ship model in the bottle. “Uncle Jonathan, Captain Chadwick here—”
“They can’t see me,” intoned the ghost.
“What?” asked Uncle Jonathan and Rose Rita in unison. David backed away, his eyes wide.
“He’s here, his ghost is here.” The words tumbled out of Lewis. He felt there wasn’t much time. “Listen, he needs for this ship to be a real ship, or at least a real ghostly ship. Uncle Jonathan, can you—”
“Tall order,” said Uncle Jonathan. “Stand back, everyone!” He stood over the model, waving his wand and murmuring something, his eyes closed. From below them, Lewis heard Pele’s angry voice rising, speaking raging words in a language he did not know.
Then the model ship began to grow. Lewis stepped back in alarm, expecting the bottle to shatter. But the little model was still there. What was swelling up in the night air was a transparent illusion, like the ghost of a ship. Chadwick shouted out, “That’s my craft! Aye, there be fine magic here!”
As the ghost ship grew, the breeze caught the insubstantial sails, puffing them out, and by the time the model schooner was the size of a rowboat, it had begun to float out into the night, passing through the rail as if it were no more than a wisp of mist. Captain Chadwick leaped aboard, and then the schooner was the size of a truck. In another instant it had become life-sized. “I see him now!” shouted Rose Rita. David whimpered.
“No!” The cry from below lashed like a whip. “You cannot escape me!”
David clapped his hands over his ears. “H-help!”
Captain Chadwick’s ghost laughed, a defiant sound. He spun the ship’s wheel, and the schooner banked in a curve as graceful as the elegant flight of a gull. The craft’s bow dipped, and the vessel plunged right through the roof of the house. An instant later, it emerged from the wall below. And now a second figure stood beside Abediah Chadwick at the wheel. Princess Makalani embraced her husband.
“I will call the Marching Dead!” shrieked Pele, swelling in her rage.
“No,” said Mrs. Zimmermann firmly. “You have not defeated me.”
Red flame rolled off the angry spirit. “Nor have you defeated me!”
“It’s a tie!” bellowed Uncle Jonathan.
Mrs. Zimmermann gestured with an imperious arm. Lewis felt a wave of silence. He didn’t dare try to speak. He hardly dared to breathe. Everything in the world had come to some sort of perilous balance. One hair out of place now, and it would all crash down.
“Look at the princess,” said Mrs. Zimmermann softly. “You could not claim her. Death itself could not break the bond of love she felt with her husband. She is not yours, Pele. She belongs only to herself. Admit that.”
Pele rumbled, and dark smoke boiled up. It was going wrong.
“Ahoy!” shouted Captain Chadwick. “If it pleases you, I will sail this craft to the islands. There my love and I will find our final reward. What do I care if I am here or there? Where she stands beside me, there heaven is! You have your pearl, and you have the enchanted war club. Your treasures are safe. Let us keep our own!”
“No!” Pele brandished the club. “It is no longer as it was! Even for the loss of a single tooth, you must pay!”
Lewis handed Rose Rita the shark tooth. For a moment she just looked at him. His mouth felt dry as a stone. “Remember how Skunky threw the pearl. I’d suggest a fastball,” he managed.
With a look of determination, Rose Rita gripped the tooth as if it were a stone she wanted to skim across a pond. She whipped a lightning sidearm pitch. Like the pearl that Skunky had thrown, the whirling tooth kindled. It trailed out a yellow streak of fire. Rose Rita had thrown the most perfect pitch of her life.
The white-hot spark struck the war club that Pele had raised above her head. With a flash of fire, the whole club exploded, leaving black dots dancing before Lewis’s eyes.
He heard a clap of thunder that shook the entire house, though the night had been clear.
Pele . . . laughed.
Then the sound faded into the twittering of birds, hundreds of them. Lewis felt as though an enormous weight had lifted from his shoulders.
And in the east, like a tide swelling in an immense ocean, dawn rose and flooded the night sky, turning it a brilliant, clear, deep blue. Night fled before it, and the sun came up on a bright, crisp new day.
A week later, Uncle Jonathan, Lewis, Mrs. Zimmermann, and Rose Rita jounced along a concrete road in Bessie, Mrs. Zimmermann’s purple car. “I understand that Pele went away and took the Dead Warrior Marching Society and Saturday Night Pinochle Club with her,” grumbled Uncle Jonathan. “We’ve been over that. What I really want to know is did we win or lose?”
Mrs. Zimmermann turned the wheel as they passed a slowpoke old Studebaker. “I think everyone won, Brush Mush. I believe Pele released the souls of those poor servants who perished in the Hawaii House back in 1876, and that they have found their place in eternity. I’m sure that Captain Abediah Chadwick kept his word, and that he and Princess Makalani sailed away to Hawaii on the ship you conjured up. Nice bit of magic, by the way.”
“Thank you, Haggy,” returned Uncle Jonathan. “Just one of my basic illusion spells, but I suppose an illusion is solid enough for your average run-of-the-mill ghost. Tell me about the pearl and that whack-’em-on-the-head doojigger, though. What were they?”
“Sacred relics. Oh, don’t ask me the details. I don’t know, and Pele certainly didn’t tell me. The pearl was the eye of an idol, maybe. The war club might have been consecrated to Pele after some great chief won a victory in battle with it. But they were hers, and that’s the point. Returning them was the whole key. Poor Potsworth had exactly the right idea when he told the phantom army they could have the pearl and threw it to them. He surrendered the trophy of his own free will, you see, just as Rose Rita did when she made that excellent side-arm toss with the shark’s tooth. When the two items turned into mystical fire, Pele got them back in some way and in some form. Without them, without actual solid relics that had been dedicated to her, and her alone, Pele held no real claim to remain here. In the end, she accepted that the princess was not hers to command. I think that after all was said and done, even Pele had to admire the strength and the depth of human love.”
“
Mr. Chadwick had his own relic,” put in Jonathan. “A sailor always thinks his ship has magic in its very canvas and wood.”
“And Mr. Chadwick could reunite with the princess because he had the Sword,” said Rose Rita with a sigh.
Lewis rolled his eyes. Sometimes Rose Rita could sound positively mushy.
They had reached the outskirts of Ann Arbor, a university town. Mrs. Zimmermann turned up one street and down another, and at last they parked in front of a long red brick building.
“There he is!” shouted Rose Rita. “Hey, David!”
David and his parents had just emerged from the building. They waved and hurried over as everyone spilled out of Bessie. “Hello, hello,” Mrs. Zimmermann said to the Kellers, who were all smiling and looking flustered. “What’s the news?”
“G-g-great,” David said. “The th-therapist s-says sh-she can help me learn not—” he swallowed. “Not to s-stutter. If I try hard. And I’m g-going to!”
Ernest Keller had his arm around his wife’s waist. “Thank you so much,” he said to Uncle Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann. “We could never have afforded treatment for David. But the university is willing do it for free. David will have sessions twice a week from the visiting therapist. I know this means a lot to him. To us all.”
“How can we ever repay you for finding someone who could help David?” asked Mrs. Keller.
“Simple,” boomed Uncle Jonathan. “Just let David ride back to New Zebedee with us, and we’ll treat him to a banana split the likes of which few have ever seen!”
The Kellers agreed, and David scrambled into the backseat of Mrs. Zimmermann’s car. “You didn’t tell them anything about that night?” asked Lewis with some anxiety as soon as they had started toward home.
“N-no,” David said. “Th-they w-wouldn’t believe me anyway. All th-they know is th-that th-they g-got a really g-good night’s s-sleep that n-night, and every other one s-since. B-but L-Lewis, your uncle’s a m-magician! And Mrs. Z-Zimmermann is the b-bravest person I know!”
The House Where Nobody Lived Page 11