The Sign of the Sinister Sorcerer

by Brad Strickland

  Feeling a little shudder at that thought again—bad things happening in threes—Lewis nodded and murmured, “He’s great.”

  “Mrs. Zimmermann had a little to do with it too,” put in Rose Rita loyally. “The refreshments were scrumptious.”

  “But the magic was the best,” returned Hal, almost in a whisper.

  A nervous Lewis darted a warning glance toward Rose Rita. Gossip about fireworks aside, people in town didn’t much bother wondering about Jonathan, who had inherited a pile of money from his grandfather. As Jonathan had cheerfully explained more than once, when an ordinary person acts funny, people think he’s crazy. But when someone with money acts funny, people smile and call him eccentric.

  As for Mrs. Zimmermann, people did gossip a bit about her. She was a retired schoolteacher who always wore purple and drove a purple car, and she had a way of showing up almost exactly when people needed help. Some people called her an oddball, but almost everyone in town liked her. Still, very few of them knew that she was an accomplished sorceress and an expert on magical talismans and amulets, and she liked to keep those facts secret.

  Hal had produced a yellow pencil from his pocket. He waved it like a baton. “Presto! Alakazam! I’d like to learn how to do magic,” he said. “Maybe your uncle could teach us—all three of us.”

  Lewis realized that Hal was imagining the pencil as a magic wand. He began to feel uncomfortable. “Well, you can get books and special card decks and stuff,” he said, trying to sound casual and unconcerned.

  “They sell different magic kits at the Magician’s Museum in town,” added Rose Rita.

  “No, not just tricks from a kit,” whispered Hal impatiently. He leaned sideways, and his voice sank to a soft, insistent level. “Haven’t you ever read about people like Count Cagliostro, or the Order of the Golden Circle, or Prospero and Roger Bacon? I mean real magic. Spells. Sorcery.”

  Lewis laughed, hoping that it sounded disbelieving and just the smallest bit scornful. “But that’s not real. Magic like that is stuff you find in storybooks, that’s all.”

  Hal gave him a long sideways look and a little knowing smile. “I saw what your uncle was doing with his cane. You can’t tell me that was all just smoke and mirrors and a bunch of tricks you can buy in the store!” He swept his yellow pencil around and around and then pointed it at Lewis.

  Crack!

  “Look out!” shouted Rose Rita.

  Too late. Lewis had been staring at Hal. He jerked his head around exactly at the moment when the high foul ball came hurtling down. He caught just a glimpse of the ball, and time seemed to slow down, and then the baseball struck him hard on the forehead and right between the eyes. The world flashed in a sickening flare of brilliant yellow, and then everything faded to black.

  When Lewis opened his eyes again, he found himself lying on the grass, with everyone crowded around him. “What happened?” he asked, and his voice sounded funny even to him. His ears were ringing and he had a terrific headache.

  “Lie still, son,” said Mr. Detmeyer, pushing down on Lewis’s left shoulder. “You got clocked a good ’un by a foul ball. Don’t stir around, now, and it’ll be okay. Somebody’s gone to get the doctor to come check you out.”

  Lewis groaned. His head throbbed horribly. His nose felt funny too, as if it were swollen and all clogged up. He struggled not to cry, and he didn’t sob out loud, but he still felt tears leaking out of the corners of his eyes and creeping down to his temples, first warm, then cold.

  After what felt like hours, Dr. Humphries pushed through the crowd, swinging his rattling black leather doctor’s bag and calling, “Let me through, let me through here!” His deep, musical voice sounded like a bass viol. Even though he was wearing a good black suit, he knelt in the grass beside Lewis and clucked his tongue. “Great day in the morning, Lewis! You’ve been pounding in fence posts with your forehead again! You are going to have two beautiful shiners, my boy. Too bad the town mascot isn’t a raccoon—you’d be in line for the job! Look here and tell me how many fingers I’m holding up.”

  “Three,” said Lewis, and the doctor nodded. His nose tingled. “Id by nothe broken?” he asked.

  “Nope, your schnozz is bloody but unbowed.” The doctor leaned in close and peered first in Lewis’s right eye, then in his left. Then he turned on a little penlight and moved it around, telling Lewis to follow it with his eyes. Grunting in satisfaction at last, the doctor put the penlight back in his pocket and said, “Looks like you caught it just high enough to protect your eyes and nose, but too low to protect your noggin. You have a lumpus on the bumpus, but your pupils look normal. I think you’ll be all right after a few days. Miserable in the meantime, but all right in the end!” He turned away and said, “Rose Rita, please run back to the drugstore and call Jonathan. I think Lewis needs to get home and put some ice on this goose egg he’s wearing, and he most definitely will not feel like walking just at the moment.”

  The doctor wiped Lewis’s lips and chin with some gauze dampened in something that smelled like witch hazel, then helped him sit up. Sharp red pain flashed through his head, and a groaning Lewis slumped with his head down, feeling sick. Soon Rose Rita came running back, out of breath, and not long afterward, Uncle Jonathan’s big old antique car, a long black 1935 Muggins Simoon, turned off the street and into the gravel parking area so fast that it sent up a cloud of dust and a spray of loose pebbles. The car slid to a dusty stop, and Uncle Jonathan, pale in the sunlight, came running over, his red hair and beard flying in the breeze.

  “Don’t bust a blood vessel, Jonathan. Lewis is all right,” said Dr. Humphries. “Fortunately, Rose Rita had the presence of mind to come and get me. I know it looks terrible, but this kind of thing happens all the time, and pretty nearly a hundred percent of the victims recover with no complications. Take this boy home, put an ice pack on his head, and make sure he doesn’t start having hullabaloosions or talking in Esperanto. Keep him awake until tonight. Call me right away if he has any suspicious symptoms. You have aspirin?”

  “Sure,” said Uncle Jonathan.

  “Follow the dosage. Lewis will be all right in a few days. Meanwhile, I recommend rest and relaxation.” He patted Lewis on the shoulder in a friendly way. “Go lie in a lawn chair and read a good book!”

  Lewis gave Rose Rita a meaningful glance. “That’d judt whad I plan to do,” he said in a voice that sounded as if he had a terrible head cold.

  Uncle Jonathan and Rose Rita helped him to the car, and they all climbed in. Then for the first time, Lewis noticed that his shirtfront showed streaks of bright red blood. From his nose, he guessed.

  He wished he hadn’t looked down. The sight of blood made him feel sick. Especially when the blood was his own.

  CHAPTER 3

  AS DR. HUMPHRIES PREDICTED, by the next morning Lewis felt a lot better, but he had two spectacular black eyes, and his eyelids had turned a strange purply-pink and had puffed up so that he gazed at the world through two narrow slits. His nose still felt stuffy, and when he blew it, crusted blood came out. It was disgusting, but fascinating enough so that he blew his nose three or four times just to see how much he could produce. Uncle Jonathan brought up the ice pack, filled with ice that he had crushed by wrapping cubes in a cloth and beating them with a hammer, and he insisted that Lewis hold it to his eyes for several minutes.

  At nine Mrs. Zimmermann came over and prepared breakfast, and she and Uncle Jonathan served it to Lewis in bed. Despite his discomfort and his still-aching head, Lewis grinned at the sight of a neat stack of waffles, dripping with butter and half-hidden under a mound of glazed strawberries and a generous dollop of whipped cream. And Mrs. Zimmermann had made tasty sausage links too, and the tray held orange juice and a big glass of milk. “Thanks,” said Lewis, and he sat up in bed, his back propped against two pillows, and wolfed down the breakfast.

  Mrs. Zimmermann settled in a chair near his bed and her wrinkly, friendly face split into a satisfied smile. “You are most welc
ome. And judging from the fact that you’re eating like a starving lumberjack, I suppose you really aren’t as badly injured as Weird Beard here led me to believe. From the story he told of your accident, I really expected to find you bandaged from head to toe, wrapped up like the mummies in the Museum of Natural History!”

  Behind her stood Uncle Jonathan, wearing his red vest. He hooked his thumbs in the pockets, spread his other fingers on either side of his pot belly, and grumbled, “Oh my stars and garters, it was bad enough, Florence! You just try stopping a high fly ball with your forehead sometime and see how you feel the next day! But Lewis will stay in bed and rest for as long as he wants today, and maybe this afternoon or tomorrow he’ll feel like getting up and about. Want me to bring the radio in for you, Lewis?”

  Lewis patted his lips with his napkin and stifled a very satisfied burp. “No, but you could bring me a book I was reading. I left it on a shelf down in the study. It’s a big old one, bound in reddish-purple leather, and it’s about superstitions. It’s on the shelf to the left of the door, not shelved but just lying on its side.”

  Uncle Jonathan gave him a salute. “Mission accepted. I’ll be right back.”

  Mrs. Zimmermann smiled sadly at Lewis and shook her head, dislodging a tendril of her untidy gray hair so that it fell from the bun on the back of her head and dangled down by her cheek. “Your poor swollen face! Those two black eyes make you look very different. Can you see all right? Will you be able to read?”

  “I can see fine,” said Lewis. “Nothing is blurry or anything. It’s like I’m peeking between my fingers or something, though. How long will it take for the purple to go away?”

  With a grin, Mrs. Zimmermann said, “Well, as a rule I like purple, but I understand why you want to get rid of that particular coloration as fast as possible. A bruise is caused by blood that leaks out of the capillaries when you get an injury. It fades as your body reabsorbs the blood. I’d guess you have at least two weeks before you’re back to normal again.”

  Lewis made a face. “Great.”

  Mrs. Zimmermann gathered up the tray with its dirty dishes. “Well, you can speed the healing along if you use the ice pack regularly and don’t overtire yourself, Lewis. Drink plenty of fluids and rest as much as you can for the next day or two.”

  Lewis promised that he would, and soon after that Uncle Jonathan returned with the big volume of superstitions. “Here you are,” he said, handing it over. He reached to switch on Lewis’s bedside reading lamp and continued, “Now, I’ve put a little bell on the table beside your bed, next to the ice pack there. And I’ve put a little spell on the little bell. If you need me to bring you anything or do anything for you, just give it a good jangle. Want to try it out?”

  “Sure,” said Lewis. He picked up the bell. It was like a miniature version of an old-fashioned teacher’s desk bell, with a black wooden handle and a small shiny metal body about the size of a golf ball. Lewis held the handle tight and shook it. Instead of the tiny tinkle he expected, he got a resounding gonnnnng! He tried it again and heard an antique car horn’s ah-OO-gah! and then the gruff warning bark of a big dog. Lewis chuckled in appreciative surprise. “It’s swell.”

  “And though it doesn’t seem particularly loud in here, because I didn’t want the noise to bother your poor aching head, the spell means that I will hear it no matter where I am,” promised Uncle Jonathan. “So if you need anything, just ring for Jeeves. Of course Jeeves won’t come, but I’ll be up here in a flash!”

  “Umm,” Lewis said hesitantly. “I did sort of want to ask you something.”

  “Shoot!” said his uncle.

  Lewis didn’t meet his eyes. He didn’t want his uncle to know that he had been eavesdropping. “Well,” he said, “I wonder if maybe you made too big a deal out of those—those fireworks and all at the party. People in town are talking about them.”

  Uncle Jonathan sighed. “I’ve heard about that already,” he said with a glance at Mrs. Zimmermann, who stood silently holding the tray. “If the FBI shows up at our door to investigate, Lewis, I will have a few plain old conjuring tricks to show them. Don’t worry. This will blow over.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t do real magic for the kids, though,” said Lewis. “I mean magic like, uh, Count Cagliostro or the, uh, Golden Circle—”

  Mrs. Zimmermann’s eyebrows rose. “Heavens, Lewis! Where did you hear those names?”

  “I think I read them or something,” replied Lewis. “I don’t know much about them, though.”

  “Cagliostro was a scoundrel,” said his uncle firmly. “He was a fellow who roamed around Europe in the eighteenth century, swindling people out of money and claiming to be a magician. The Order of the Golden Circle was a brotherhood—”

  Mrs. Zimmermann cleared her throat loudly.

  “—and sisterhood,” added Uncle Jonathan, “of magicians who started out devoting themselves just to the study of magic but ended up bickering, brawling, and falling to pieces. It was pretty much gone by the time I started to study magic, though my teacher had at one time been a member of it.”

  “You’ve never told me about your magic teacher,” said Lewis.

  “Haven’t I?” said Uncle Jonathan, seeming surprised. “Well, it’s no deep dark secret. One of the teachers at my college dabbled in magic as a kind of hobby, and he took two of us students in and gave us lessons now and then, that’s all.”

  “The Rule of Three,” murmured Mrs. Zimmermann.

  Three. Again. “What’s that?” asked Lewis, not sure he wanted to know.

  Uncle Jonathan shrugged. “Something that a lot of magicians believe in. If you’re learning magic, you can try to do it all by yourself, or you can be an apprentice to a sorcerer. But if it’s a real old-fashioned magic teacher you’re dealing with, he or she will almost always want two apprentices at once—the Rule of Three. Magic is better when it’s balanced, and three people, a teacher and two students, balance each other like a tripod.”

  “My first magic teacher believed in it,” said Mrs. Zimmermann. “Granny Weatherby taught one of her nieces and me the basics of magic at the same time.”

  “Now,” said Uncle Jonathan, “are you all settled in? Need anything else? All right, then, Florence and I will leave you alone now. I remember that time when I conked my noggin, all I wanted was to be left in peace, and Frizzy Wig here was determined to be at my side every minute. I couldn’t get rid of her!”

  “I don’t remember you complaining about that at the time! Anyway, you ate my cooking and didn’t complain,” teased Mrs. Zimmermann tartly. They went out, still squabbling good-naturedly, and Lewis picked up his book. With a frown, he turned to the index, and sure enough, there was an entry for the Rule of Three.

  And only a second later, he sat up in bed, his heart pounding hard. The first few paragraphs he read sounded truly alarming:

  Among those who fancied themselves practitioners of witchcraft, the Rule of Three dictated that every magician in training had to join with a teacher and another student; for all too often, one of the students became a thoroughly evil wizard, and then the other two had to join forces to destroy the third. Three in witchcraft and wizardry is a number of balance and protection, and in any group of three, each member is linked to the other two, so that if an evil wizard should sorcerously attack his teacher or his fellow student, the third will instantly feel the attack and rush to the rescue.

  Similarly, often evil and malign sorcerers are said to work in groups of three, for the number adds more force to their wicked enchantments.

  Lewis turned a page and found himself staring at a horrible illustration, not a photograph but an engraving. It showed a woman tied at a stake, with a crowd pressing in around her. She stood on a jumbled pile of wood, and it was afire. Flames were licking at her body, and her eyes had rolled up in agony.

  “The first witch burned in the first persecution of magicians of the fifteenth century,” the caption read. “By the end of the summer, three in all had been
so dealt with, and after the death of the third, the magical disturbances ended.”

  Lewis grimaced. He didn’t really want to look at the poor woman’s face, locked in an expression of intense suffering, but he couldn’t help himself. He swallowed hard, imagining her terror as she struggled against her bonds, with the flames crackling, the smoke rising, and the people mocking her and making fun of—

  Not able to stand it, Lewis turned back to the index, but there was no mention of any Golden Circle, nor of Cagliostro. He had forgotten the names of the other two people Hal had mentioned. Lewis put the book on his bedside table and lay back puzzling over the significance of the number three.

  It seemed weird and strange to Lewis. Why was three a number of balance? Why not four, or five? He reached for the book again, but in it he found only a couple of very short passages about magicians, and these explained very little. Lewis went back to superstitions about death—three again!—and read an unsettling tale about a Captain Lewis Nevins, a member of the British Army during the Peninsular Campaign against Napoleon back in the early 1800s. Nevins had been cursed by an old man who had “an evil eye.” The next day, during a game of cricket, Nevins had been struck by a ball and had told his friends he would die because of the curse, and within one day he did suffer three accidents: first being struck by the ball, then being wounded in the elbow when a musket discharged while a man was cleaning it, and finally dying horribly in a fall down a flight of stairs.

  Lewis felt his stomach flutter with sick apprehension. This British Army officer, whose first name was the same as his, had predicted his own death! Well, maybe not exactly, but something close to it. And even worse, Captain Nevins’s first injury was almost precisely what had happened to Lewis! A cricket ball wasn’t that much different from a baseball. For a panicky moment, he wondered what troubles would lie in store for him in the next hours: a broken arm, a fever, a fatal accident—“Oh, get a grip!” he told himself angrily and aloud.

  For he really hated being such a worrywart, but worrying and fretting were as much a part of Lewis as his sandy blond hair or the funny crook in his little toes. He knew very well that Captain Nevins’s first name being the same as his own was nothing more than a coincidence. Lewis tried to reassure himself that accidents like the ones in the book were flukes. They could have happened at any old time. Just because the superstitious officer took the cricket ball as a sign—