The Sign of the Sinister Sorcerer

by Brad Strickland

  But, a treacherous little voice inside him insinuated, it had been a sign, hadn’t it? According to the book, the captain had been sure that the first accident would be followed by two others, and that each would be worse than the one before. His apprehensions had turned out to be true: A broken arm was certainly worse than a bump on the head. And the third misfortune had killed him.

  Lewis had dropped his book facedown on the bedcover. Now he picked it up again and skimmed several pages. Then he turned to the index, looking for “antidotes” and “counter-spells” and “good luck” and such terms, but nothing that he found under these headings reassured him much. Oh, the author mentioned a ton of good-luck charms, from four-leafed clovers to rabbits’ feet, and quite a few cheerful omens of good fortune to come, but he didn’t seem to say a single word about how to avoid a series of catastrophes once they had begun to occur.

  A concerned Rose Rita came over to visit at about three that afternoon and Lewis came downstairs in his pajamas and baggy brown robe. After Rose Rita had tutted over his black eyes, the two of them sat in the study and played chess with the set of men that Uncle Jonathan had enchanted. Lewis liked it because Uncle Jonathan claimed the pieces had been carved by a blind German artist in the sixteenth century, and indeed the chessmen looked really old. They were carved from two different kinds of wood, with the white men being a creamy, buttery color and the black side a ruddy, deep mahogany. Their contours had been worn smooth from years and years of play.

  The magic spell that Uncle Jonathan had cast on them gave the chess pieces crabby, fluty little voices, and they complained constantly about how they were being moved. A pawn would grumble, “Oh, sure, move me out where I can be captured! What about the bishop’s pawn, huh? He’s just standing there, not doing anything, the lazy bum! Use him instead!” When a knight captured another piece, it just about went crazy in a high-pitched voice of excited, frenzied triumph: “Ho, down with thee, thou blaggardly varlet! Thou hast met thy master, I trow! Victory is mine! O frabjous day! Calloo! Callay!” And all through a game, both queens kept droning in displeased, flat, vinegary voices, “We are not amused.”

  As a rule, Lewis played a cunning game of chess. He had a knack of figuring out moves well in advance and he loved to build a strategy that his opponent wouldn’t recognize until it was too late to avoid a slowly constructed trap. Rose Rita was pretty good herself, but she often got distracted talking about other things, so sometimes she made careless little mistakes that Lewis was sure to pounce on.

  As Lewis set up the board for their game, Rose Rita kept darting glances at his face. “You look awful,” she told Lewis cheerfully. “Like you’ve been in a fistfight with Rocky Marciano.” Lewis just grunted. Rocky Marciano was a world-champion heavyweight boxer. Rose Rita tilted her head and asked, “Does it still hurt?”

  Lewis shrugged. “Kind of a dull headache, that’s all. But I’ve taken some aspirin for that. Dr. Humphries came by again right after lunch, and he says that since I don’t have any ringing in my ears and no blurred or double vision, I probably don’t have a concussion, so I’ll be okay. Here, choose one.” He held out his fists, and Rose Rita picked his right one. He opened his hand to reveal a white pawn. Rose Rita would play the white side in the game, meaning she got to move first, and he would play black.

  “You know, in the movies when someone gets hit on the head he always develops amnesia,” said Rose Rita as she shoved her queen’s pawn forward two squares, to its grouchy mutters of protest. She ignored the pawn’s mosquito-like whining about being sent forward to battle and asked Lewis, “You don’t have amnesia, do you? How are you at remembering stuff?”

  Lewis moved a squabbling pawn forward. “I remember stuff fine,” he said, watching as Rose Rita moved another man. “I remember you yelled for me to look out, just after the nick of time.”

  “I’m really sorry,” said Rose Rita, looking miserable.

  With a shrug, Lewis said, “I’m not blaming you. If I hadn’t looked up, I probably would have been conked on the top of the head, and that might have been worse. Anyway, when you yelled, I looked up and saw the ball about a foot from my face right before it smacked me. Everything turned yellow and then black. Thanks for going to get the doctor, by the way.” Lewis made his move, and then Rose Rita had moved again, giving Lewis a chance to maneuver his queen out to a safe position, where it threatened one of Rose Rita’s bishops.

  “I ran pretty fast,” said Rose Rita, seeing the trap that Lewis was working on and moving her bishop out of danger. It squeaked, “Praise be! For this fair rescue we give humble thanks.”

  “I guess Hal Everit just ran, period,” said Lewis, bending forward to study the board. “Anyhow, I didn’t see him when I came to.”

  “Well, the whole thing probably scared him,” said Rose Rita. “It happened so suddenly, it shocked everybody. I mean, one second Hal was sitting there talking to you and then the next, blam! The ball smacked into your head, and you fell right off the bleachers and flat on your back in the grass. I jumped down to see if you were all right, and you were out cold. You looked pretty bad, you know, with blood dribbling out of your nose, down your chin and onto your shirt. I guess Hal took off about the same time I did. Anyway, he was long gone by the time Dr. Humphries drove us over. Don’t blame Hal, Lewis. Some people are very squeamish about blood.”

  “About the last thing I remember before getting hit was him waving that stupid yellow pencil in my face,” muttered Lewis. “And asking us about Uncle Jonathan’s magic. I know Mrs. Zimmermann’s been worried that people are talking about those magic fireworks all over town.”

  “They’ll forget soon enough,” Rose Rita assured him. “Just wait until something new comes along—some young couple will elope, or a deacon of a church will get arrested for drunk driving, and they’ll have something else to gossip about.”

  “But Hal’s interested in magic, so we’re going to have to be careful around him. It was bad enough when David found out what Uncle Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann could do.”

  “David sort of had to find out about them,” she told Lewis in a reasonable tone. “Otherwise, the evil spirits haunting his house would have killed him and his whole family. Oh, no!” She had just noticed that in relocating her bishop, she had made a very bad move.

  Lewis swept his rook forward, capturing a pawn. The rook cawed in triumph, like an exulting crow, and the captured pawn moaned, “Man, sometimes life just stinks!” The move left the rook poised with Rose Rita’s king threatened. All she could do was to move her king one square, and that was just prolonging the agony, because in the next move Lewis could trap it in checkmate. “I resign,” she said, sounding irritated with her own bad judgment.

  Her king moaned, “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown! Look out, everyone, I’m falling down!” and tipped itself over.

  The two friends had a snack, and then Lewis walked Rose Rita to the front door. They glanced in the hall mirror, the one that was set in a coatrack that had pegs for hats and coats and a little bench in front. Like many things in the Barnavelt house, the mirror carried an enchantment. The glass sometimes reflected your face, but often it showed strange, far-away, and even other-worldly scenes. And sometimes Chicago radio station WGN faintly came in on it, but Lewis’s uncle had told him that wasn’t magic. The beveled edges of the glass, he claimed, created a kind of primitive crystal radio receiver.

  Rose Rita said, “That’s kind of spooky-looking.” The mirror today showed a moonlit clearing in a dark wood. It seemed to be a winter scene—at least, the grass looked stiff and white with frost in an irregular rounded clearing in a gloomy and foreboding forest. In the background, dozens of tall, thick evergreen trees brooded, their trunks dim gray streaks, their tops deep dark green cones. An eerie kind of pale fog wove in and out of the trees in thin, glutinous-looking streamers. And as Lewis stared, a strange figure melted out of the darkness. It seemed to be a tall man wearing a maroon robe with a head covering like a monk
’s hood concealing his face.

  “Hey,” said Lewis, “that guy looks familiar. I think I saw him once before!”

  “What guy?” asked Rose Rita, peering through her round glasses.

  Lewis swallowed hard, remembering that he had seen the same person, or one dressed just like this, at the corner of the garage during the party. The robed person in the mirror paced around in the circular clearing, then faced them, spreading his arms dramatically.

  “I can’t see anything but—” began Rose Rita, but a worried Lewis shushed her and leaned close, peering into the mirror with a rising feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach.

  Lewis squinted, trying to decide whether the shrouded creature was holding a wand. It looked as though he had one in his right hand, but the image was dim and dark, and the figure was really very tiny. Then the right arm moved, and with a quick slash the hooded form began to leave a trail of fire in the dark air.

  Lewis gasped.

  The phantom shape had quickly stepped back into the shadows and had vanished.

  But floating in midair was the fiery figure his hand had traced.

  It was a glowing, shimmering golden orange numeral:

  CHAPTER 4

  “IT WAS A THREE!” insisted Lewis hotly.

  “It was just an orange squiggly line,” returned Rose Rita. “And I didn’t see a little man at all. I saw a drifting, maroony-grayish sort of blob, and then it jerked, and there was an orange squiggle in the air for a second, and then the mirror went back to normal.”

  The mirror was undeniably back to normal now. Lewis could see his face with its purple raccoon-eyes staring back at him. He swallowed hard and insisted, “I saw a man in a robe! Well, a person in a robe, anyway—I suppose it could have been a tall woman. It looked like a medieval monk, with the hood up and everything.”

  Rose Rita looked at him strangely. “A monk?”

  Lewis went on, “And I’m pretty sure the person was holding a—a wand, or anyway, a thin kind of stick or something. That’s what he or she used to draw the number three in the air!”

  Rose Rita shook her head, her expression thoughtful but unconvinced. “I don’t know. I couldn’t see anything at all very clearly, to tell you the truth. It was dark and blurred.”

  “Besides,” muttered Lewis, almost as if Rose Rita hadn’t even spoken, “I saw someone in a robe just like that one last Saturday at the party. It was while Uncle Jonathan was doing his magic. Whoever it was must’ve ducked right back around the corner of the garage at the same time I noticed him standing there, because one moment he was there and the next—what’s the matter?”

  Rose Rita was biting her bottom lip and looking uncomfortable. “Long maroon robe?” she asked. “Tied at the waist with a belt that looked like a rope? Sort of a skinny person, maybe about as tall as Mr. Morgan, the basketball coach at school? Hood up so you couldn’t see the person’s face?”

  Lewis blinked. “I don’t remember about any kind of belt, but yes, the hood had been pulled up over the person’s head. Why?”

  Frowning in concentration, Rose Rita said, “I thought I saw someone like that yesterday, right after you got conked by the foul ball.”

  “Wh-what?”

  Rose Rita shrugged. “I’m not even sure. It was just a glimpse. It happened when I was running to get Dr. Humphries, and up at the street I looked back over my shoulder at the field. Under the trees down at the far end, close to the railroad tracks, I sort of thought I saw someone in a monk’s robe, just standing there quietly. But gosh, that’s about a hundred yards past the baseball diamond! At that distance it might have been a tree stump, for all I know. I haven’t had my glasses changed this year, and—”

  “Three times.” Lewis’s throat was dry. “The party, the mirror, the athletic field—he’s been seen three times! Come on, I think we’d better tell Uncle Jonathan.”

  His uncle was in the dining room, paying the Barnavelt household bills. He had his checkbook out, his prized gold fountain pen in his hand, a stack of envelopes and a sheet of purple three-cent stamps at the ready, and nearby stood a Chinese abacus that he used to add and subtract faster than Lewis could with paper and pencil. As the two came in, he looked up and smiled. “How did the great chess tournament end?” he asked. “Did Rose Rita take you to the cleaners, Lewis? You look down in the dumps!”

  “No, I won,” replied Lewis. “But listen to this.” He and Rose Rita pulled chairs out for themselves, and they quickly told him about the reflection in the mirror and about the hooded figure—or figures, perhaps—that they thought they had seen.

  To Lewis’s relief, Uncle Jonathan listened gravely to them, never once interrupting and never making noises of disbelief. Though Uncle Jonathan sometimes confessed that he worried about raising Lewis—

  “An old bachelor like me simply doesn’t know much about kids,” he had said once—Lewis really appreciated the way his uncle never talked down to him or treated him like a child.

  When Rose Rita and Lewis finished their story, Uncle Jonathan thoughtfully dug a curved pipe from his shirt pocket. He no longer smoked, but sometimes when he was in a thoughtful mood, he liked to hold the pipe between his teeth. It helped him ponder, he said, and the old briar British Bulldog pipe was his favorite thinking aid because it looked like Sherlock Holmes’s pipe.

  For a minute or so he just sat there clenching the pipe in his teeth, and then he murmured, “Hum. And also ah, and other assorted expressions of mild puzzlement.” He tore a sheet of paper from the pad where he kept track of the monthly budget and passed it together with a pencil to Lewis. “Draw this mysterious character for me. Don’t worry if you can’t make it look like a van Gogh or a Picasso! It doesn’t have to be a perfect sketch. Just show me the general shape.”

  Lewis took the pencil and drew a fairly formless figure, with the heavy robe billowing down on both sides, and then he added the hood and shaded in the place where the face should have been. “Is this like what you saw?” Lewis asked Rose Rita.

  She shook her head. “I can’t tell! What I glimpsed was really far away. I mean, it was tiny in the distance! But it might be. Except I think the robe was sort of cinched in by a belt. I don’t know why, but I think the belt might have been made out of a piece of dark rope.”

  Uncle Jonathan studied the sketch and stroked his beard thoughtfully. He absently picked up the pencil and sketched in a belt around the drawing’s middle. Then he took the pipe out of his mouth and shook his head. “This does look reminiscent of something, but—well, no, it couldn’t be. That was years and years ago. Hmm.”

  He put the paper down and drummed his fingers on it. “Well, Lewis, I can tell you this much: I don’t think you saw a ghost! It might have been some joker who looked at the calendar wrong and thought Halloween was coming five months early. Or it could be a deranged TV weatherman wearing a maroon raincoat because he’s sure we’re due for a frog-drowning downpour. But for what it’s worth, I don’t think any ghoulies, ghosties, or long-leggity beasties have been creeping around Castle Barnavelt.”

  “What did you mean about something years and years ago?” insisted Lewis.

  His uncle chuckled. “It’s just that when I was a much younger fellow than I am now, some magicians thought you had to dress up in robes like that to perform magic properly. I’ve worn a robe in my time too, but take it from me, it isn’t absolutely necessary. Not much is—though I’ll cheerfully admit that a magician is about a dozen times more powerful when equipped with a wand he or she can rely on, attuned to that magician’s special powers. Still, an accomplished magician can scrape by without a wand in an emergency. Florence is good enough to be able to cast a magical whammy just using her fingertips! So as far as being worrisome, the robe is more curious than threatening; that’s all I’m saying.”

  “What about the figure Lewis saw in the mirror?” asked Rose Rita.

  Uncle Jonathan seemed a little uncomfortable, Lewis thought, but he said, “That fool looking glass shows strange
things all the time. There’s a good chance that the blobby maroon thing you saw was something entirely different from a hooded human. I’d chalk it up to coincidence, if I were you, and try to forget about it.”

  “That’s what I think too,” added Rose Rita with a nervous sort of sideways glance at Lewis.

  But Lewis wasn’t so sure. He knew what Rose Rita must be thinking: There goes his crazy imagination again. Still, he couldn’t help fearing that the glowing orange figure, that fiery number three floating and shimmering in midair, was a dire warning.

  Late that night, Lewis woke up suddenly. He had heard something, a creak or a groan. He turned on his side and looked at the luminous green hands of his Westclox alarm clock: 11:32. Then he heard something else: the front door downstairs closing with a clack. It wasn’t a loud sound, because whoever had closed the door had done so carefully, but in the stillness of night it was about as noticeable as a firecracker going off beneath Lewis’s bed.

  Curious, Lewis threw back the sheets, got up, and walked barefoot down the hall past the bathroom. He knocked on his uncle’s bedroom door, but he got no response. Lewis opened the door and peered into the darkness. “Uncle Jonathan?”

  When no answer came, he turned on the light. His uncle’s bed had not yet been slept in, though it looked as if someone had been lying on the red and green plaid covers. A book lay open next to the pillow. Lewis went over and glanced at it. He felt his blood turn cold.

  He picked up the thin but oversized volume and saw that each page had either one big black-and-white photograph or several smaller ones on it, something like a magazine. The page that Lewis stared at had one photo that showed three men, each of them wearing a monk-like hooded robe. The picture had the blurry quality that some old-fashioned photos have, though the men’s features were pretty clear. They all stared solemnly at the camera. Somehow, the shot looked like a very old one.