The Sign of the Sinister Sorcerer

by Brad Strickland

  And so at about a quarter to eleven that morning, Uncle Jonathan put his small suitcase in the trunk, climbed into his boxy old Muggins Simoon, waved at Lewis, Rose Rita, and Mrs. Zimmermann, and then blatted off down the street in a cloud of bluish white exhaust smoke.

  After a good lunch, Lewis and Rose Rita sat in Mrs. Zimmermann’s dining room and played cards with her, odd poker games like “Wild Widow,” “Spit-in-the-Ocean,” and “Pineapple.” They kept score with toothpicks instead of the bag of old foreign coins that Uncle Jonathan always used. Unfortunately, Lewis’s mind really wasn’t on the games, and he couldn’t always get the hang of the complicated rules, so Rose Rita cleaned him out pretty fast.

  While Rose Rita and Mrs. Zimmermann fought a determined battle for the remaining pile of toothpicks, he went out to sit on the front steps and read—not the superstition book, because he thought he was already nervous enough, but instead a murder mystery novel by Agatha Christie. The story told about one of the adventures of a crafty Belgian detective named Hercule Poirot who lived in England and who followed a tangled line of clues to solve a puzzling murder. Unfortunately the tale didn’t distract Lewis from his worries and concerns at all, because the very first time that Agatha Christie wrote about Poirot’s “egg-shaped head,” he thought of the State Capitol dome, and that reminded him of Lansing, and that reminded him of his uncle. Lewis found it hard to concentrate. He had been out for about an hour when he heard the phone ringing in the Barnavelt house.

  Thinking it might be his uncle, Lewis hurried across the lawn, unlocked the door, and picked up the phone just as it rang for about the sixth time. “Hello?”

  A man’s voice said, “Hello? Is this Lewis?”

  “Yes.”

  The voice harrumphed in a self-important way. “Well, this is Mayor Parker, Lewis. I need to speak to Jonathan, please.”

  Lewis’s stomach fluttered. Mayor Parker! “Um, he’s not available,” Lewis said.

  “Oh? Well, please tell him to call me as soon as he can on a confidential matter. I have to talk with him about some things I’ve heard,” the voice said. “Thank you.” And the line clicked.

  Lewis dragged back over to Mrs. Zimmermann’s house, his suspicions confirmed that the party was going to get Uncle Jonathan into big municipal trouble. Could legal problems with the city be part of the Curse of Three? Lewis thought about telling Mrs. Zimmermann—but the mayor had warned him it was confidential, which in Lewis’s book was right up there with top secret. He sat on Mrs. Zimmermann’s steps and steeped himself in worry.

  Time dragged by that afternoon. After finally losing the last card game to Mrs. Zimmermann, Rose Rita came outside, and she and Lewis played a half-hearted game of catch until late afternoon, when Mrs. Zimmermann appeared in the back doorway to tell them that Rose Rita’s mom needed her to come home. Rose Rita took her ball and fielder’s glove, climbed onto her bike, and shoved off for home.

  That was at four. For a couple of hours Lewis listened to the radio, paced the floor, and tried playing “Napoleon’s March to Moscow,” a fiendishly complicated type of solitaire that his uncle had taught to him, but he still could not concentrate. And though Mrs. Zimmermann cooked her famous savory pot roast, one of his very favorite dishes, Lewis had little appetite for dinner. To tell the truth, he felt relieved at nine o’clock when he could just go to bed.

  The guest bedroom, tastefully decorated with creamy white wallpaper with a purple stripe design, had one tall window that looked out over the lawn toward the Barnavelt house next door. Through it, Lewis could not see the garage, which was on the far side of the house and behind it from his point of view, but he had a clear view of the front of the house and the driveway. If Uncle Jonathan drove in, or if he switched on the porch light or any other lights in the front of the house, Lewis would know he had safely returned.

  Lewis lay on his right side, his right hand nestled beneath his cheek, and gazed out the window. The night was overcast and dark, and toward ten o’clock a thundershower rolled in from the west, bringing dashes of rain clattering against the windowpanes and flickers of lightning followed by light rumbles of thunder. New Zebedee could have some fearsome thunderstorms and even a tornado now and again, but this was mild by comparison.

  The rain ended after about half an hour, and the last reluctant grumbles of thunder faded off to the east. Lewis’s eyes began to feel heavy and raw, as if fine, salty sand had blown in them, but still he watched, unable and unwilling to fall asleep.

  Finally, just before midnight, he sat up in bed, exhaling in relief. The big, boxy antique car had just rolled majestically up High Street and had turned into the driveway at his house. With a satisfied sigh, Lewis settled back on his pillow. He felt tension flowing out of him, and at last he could relax.

  Part of him wanted to get up and run home, but he hated for his uncle to know how anxious he had been. Telling himself that Uncle Jonathan was back safe and sound from Lansing, Lewis relaxed at last, and he was so tired that he drifted into a deep sleep within minutes.

  The next morning Lewis thanked Mrs. Zimmermann for having hosted him. “I’m all ready to go back home,” he finished, hefting the gym bag in which he had packed his extra clothes and his toothbrush.

  “Is Jonathan back this morning?” asked Mrs. Zimmermann, peering at him over the tops of her spectacles.

  “I saw him come back last night,” said Lewis before he thought. He could have bitten his tongue, because Mrs. Zimmermann gave him a sharp, questioning glance.

  Mrs. Zimmermann tilted her head, her expression reproachful. “And exactly how late was that, young man?”

  “Uh, I don’t really know,” replied Lewis evasively. “You know, we had a thunderstorm, and the thunder sort of woke me up.” Or at least it had helped keep him awake. Lewis told himself it wasn’t really a lie, or at least not much of one.

  “All right,” said Mrs. Zimmermann, letting him off the hook. She glanced at her gold watch. “Hmm. It’s nearly eight. I’ll go over with you and let you wake up Brush Mush, and then I’ll prepare a good breakfast for the three of us. We can eat it while Jonathan fills us in about what he has learned.”

  The two walked over, crossing the silvery wet lawn and leaving dark trails behind them. After the rain the air smelled clean and fresh, and the morning breezes felt cool for the first day of July. Lewis found the front door locked—people in New Zebedee hardly ever locked their doors except when they were going to be away overnight—and he fished his key from his jeans pocket. He and Mrs. Zimmermann went in, and immediately Lewis pounded up the stairs. He tossed his gym bag into his room and then knocked on his uncle’s bedroom door. “Hey, Uncle Jonathan! Wake up! Mrs. Zimmermann is downstairs!”

  No answer came, and feeling a little sick, Lewis opened the door. His uncle’s bed had not been slept in—scattered over it were pages from the newspaper, and when Lewis looked at one of the pages, it turned out to be the morning paper from the day before.

  From downstairs, he heard Mrs. Zimmermann’s urgent call: “Lewis! Please come here at once!”

  He ran down to her. “Mrs. Zimmermann, Uncle Jonathan hasn’t—”

  “I know. Come on, let’s see if the car is here.” Mrs. Zimmermann walked fast down the hall to the back door.

  They went outside and across the backyard to the garage. With a feeling of despair, Lewis saw that the garage door stood wide open—Uncle Jonathan never left it that way, because he was fussy about keeping the antique car protected from the weather. At least the black Muggins Simoon was parked inside. The car was empty, and Uncle Jonathan’s keys still dangled from the ignition. Mrs. Zimmermann took them out and unlocked the trunk. Uncle Jonathan’s small suitcase was still there.

  “What happened?” asked Lewis, feeling panicky.

  “I don’t know yet,” answered Mrs. Zimmermann grimly. “Close the garage door, please. And lock it.”

  Lewis reached up and pulled the garage door down with a clacking rattle. He found the right key
on his uncle’s key ring and locked the door. Then he followed Mrs. Zimmermann back inside the house. “Do you have a piece of chalk handy?” she asked.

  “I think so.” Lewis went to the kitchen and rummaged in the odds-and-ends drawer, sifting through bolts and nuts, can openers and coupons for canned soup that had expired in 1945, until at last he found a flat piece of gray tailor’s chalk that Uncle Jonathan had used once or twice when he was making model sailing vessels and needed to mark some fabric for cutting out the sails.

  “Thank you, Lewis,” said Mrs. Zimmermann. She looked thoughtful for a long moment and then added, “Let’s go into the study. I think that would be the best place.”

  In the study, they rolled up the carpet from the hardwood floor. “Now,” said Mrs. Zimmermann, “stand in the doorway, Lewis, and do not come into the room, no matter what. I’m going to try something magical. It may look odd or even a little disturbing, but it is not dangerous. Trust me about this and promise me that you won’t come in until everything is over.”

  “O-okay,” said Lewis.

  He stood there, holding on to the door frame with both hands, as he watched Mrs. Zimmermann lean way over, her left arm doubled to hold her baggy purple dress tight across her middle, and draw a circle on the floor of the study. She drew a concentric circle inside this, and then she began to mark the space in between the two circle rims with a dozen arcane figures, looking something like Egyptian hieroglyphs.

  Standing up, she tossed the chalk onto Jonathan’s desk and slapped her hands together as though dusting them. Then, absentmindedly tucking in a stray strand of gray hair, she turned slowly in place, intently studying the magic figure she had drawn. “Very well,” she said. “Now, remember your promise. Stay just where you are, Lewis, and nothing bad will happen.”

  Then, walking slowly around the edge of the inner circle in a counterclockwise direction, Mrs. Zimmermann began to chant in a low voice. The language was strange to Lewis, but it held a great many growls, trills, and low guttural sounds. After making three circuits, Mrs. Zimmermann stood in the exact center of the two circles and held her hands out to either side of her, elbows bent and palms up.

  The hairs on Lewis’s neck began to prickle. A milky, shimmering light, like some kind of drifting vapor, filled the circle, and slightly denser, though wispy, white forms swirled all around Mrs. Zimmermann, things that almost but not quite looked like human shapes floating as though in water. They formed, dissolved, and re-formed. The perspective seemed disturbingly off: When the drifting figures were on the side toward Lewis, they were fully human-sized, but as they whirled slowly around to the far side, they diminished as if they were fifty feet away instead of only about twelve. The gray strands of Mrs. Zimmermann’s hair began to stir and lift, as if a lazy whirlwind were blowing all around her. Every once in a while her head would jerk, as if she had felt a sudden electric shock. Though her lips moved and Lewis heard a vague, low humming sound, he could not make out her words. She seemed to be talking to the drifting wisps of fog.

  Then, in something like a silent explosion, bright purple light erupted from the circle, so intense that Lewis squinched up his eyes. Mrs. Zimmermann vanished entirely in the glare. A moment later it had faded, leaving blobby dark patches wavering and dancing in Lewis’s vision, and gasping, Mrs. Zimmermann staggered out of the circle and made her way to the armchair, where she collapsed. “My stars! I haven’t done the evocation spell in nearly thirty years. I’d forgotten how much it takes out of a body. Lewis, be a dear and bring me a glass of water, please. And bring back a damp cloth to get rid of these circles. We don’t need them any longer.”

  Lewis hurried to do as she had asked, feeling a weird sense of abandonment. The house felt empty, as if it had stood vacant for twenty years. Unremembered echoes lurked in the hall, unfamiliar shadows reigned in corners. His hands trembled as he filled the glass, then found a cleaning cloth and wet it.

  “Thank you,” said Mrs. Zimmermann, taking the glass from him and drinking deeply. “Ahh! That’s better. Lewis, just erase those circles. Don’t worry— they’re perfectly harmless now. Later, after the floor is good and dry, we’ll unroll the rug again.”

  Lewis got on his hands and knees and rubbed out the chalk marks. “What did you do?” he asked, standing up again.

  Mrs. Zimmermann finished her glass of water. “Something that should not be done often or lightly. I consulted the spirits regarding this house.”

  “The s-spirits?” squeaked Lewis.

  “Not the wicked Izards,” said Mrs. Zimmermann with a reassuring smile. “And your house is not haunted, Lewis, so don’t worry about that! No, I sought out the spirits of good people who over the years have had to do with this house and then have passed on—there was a friendly carpenter who helped build it, a kindly doctor who had treated even the Izards, unpleasant though they were, and one or two others. I had to ask them, you see, because they were the only ones who might know.”

  Lewis dreaded the question he had to ask: “Did you ask them what happened to Uncle Jonathan?”

  “Not exactly. They probably could not or would not have told me that, for the living can learn only a few specific things from the dead. There are extremely strict and clear rules about what I did, and while some evil magicians may attempt to break them, I am not about to risk that. No, I have a strange feeling here this morning, and I wanted to make sure I was correct.”

  “I feel it too,” said Lewis impulsively. “It’s like no one has lived here for years!”

  Mrs. Zimmermann looked at him, her eyes thoughtful as she adjusted her spectacles. “It’s even worse than that, I’m afraid. Lewis, you are going to have to be brave.”

  Lewis’s heart quailed. He was bad at being brave, oddly not when he was in actual danger—he had stood up to terrifying threats before—but whenever he had to anticipate something happening, he quickly became a quivering bowl of Jell-O. Now it felt as if he could not catch his breath to reply. He only stared at Mrs. Zimmermann with wide, pleading eyes.

  Turning her empty glass slowly in her hands, Mrs. Zimmermann said softly, “The puzzling truth is, Lewis, that all of your uncle’s magic has absolutely vanished from this house. Nothing remains! It’s gone like a candle flame blown out by the wind, leaving not a rack behind, as Shakespeare says in The Tempest.”

  “No!” Lewis said. He ran out into the front hall. The mirror in the coat stand looked dull and a little tarnished, and in it he saw only a hazy reflection of his own face. The mirror had never looked so woefully ordinary. Lewis tore to the back stair of the south wing. Here and there in the house were stained-glass windows, and that one was the easiest one to see from inside. It was the most vividly colorful of them all, and it always changed scenes from day to day.

  But today it was just an ordinary leaded oval of clear pebbled glass showing no picture at all. Lewis swallowed hard, feeling a painful lump rising in his throat. He knew that his uncle’s enchantments always tended to wear out if he didn’t bother to renew them now and again. The strange, tiny figure of the Fuse Box Dwarf that had once lived in the cellar, coming out to shout “Dreeb! Dreeb!” when anyone went down the stair, had just dwindled away to nothing, and Jailbird, a neighbor’s cat that Jonathan Barnavelt had once caused to become a whistling cat, had over time lost his musical ability.

  But Jonathan had kept up a lot of the little everyday magic spells around the house, like the one on the stained-glass windows. If the enchantments were all truly gone—

  Lewis rushed back to the study. “Is he dead?” he demanded in a shaky voice. “Tell me, Mrs. Zimmermann, I have to know—is my uncle Jonathan dead?”

  With a look of pity and understanding, Mrs. Zimmermann replied, “I could simply lie to you, Lewis, but you are old enough to deserve the absolute truth, no matter how bad it is. And I’m very much afraid that the absolute truth is that I simply do not know.”

  Lewis felt numb. In a way, that was the worst answer she could have given him.

&nbs
p; CHAPTER 9

  The first disaster could have been Uncle Jonathan’s losing his cane. The second had been his disappearance. So—what was the third one to be? Death?

  All day Friday Lewis fretted and agonized. Now he was sure his uncle was under the Curse of Three. He didn’t want to think that his uncle had vanished for good—but what if he had? What would happen to Lewis?

  He remembered all too well the terrible night when a policeman had come to his house in Wisconsin and had spoken with his babysitter. That was back when he was much younger. His babysitter, a high school girl named Gloria, had screamed, “No!” and had fainted. And then the policeman had told Lewis that a car had crossed the center line and had run head-on into the automobile that his father was driving. Everyone, his father and mother and the other driver, who had fallen asleep at the wheel, had been instantly killed.

  Lewis had felt as though his heart had been ripped out. He had only a hazy recollection of the funeral and the next few days, which he spent in a foster home. His aunt Mattie and aunt Helen came to visit him, arguing about his coming to live with them. Neither of them wanted him, and he had not wanted to go with either one, because he didn’t like them. Especially his mean aunt Mattie, who made fun of him for being fat. She had once told him that he looked like a balloon ascension.

  And then his uncle down in New Zebedee, Michigan, had agreed to take him in. Lewis had been only a toddler the last time he had seen his uncle Jonathan and didn’t remember him at all, but he had rather go live with him than either of his aunts. Lewis remembered the long bus ride into Michigan and how desolate he had felt.

  Now he felt the same exact way again. Aunt Mattie had since passed away herself, but he hated the very thought of going to live with Aunt Helen and Uncle Jimmy. Aunt Helen had all the personality of a leaky inner tube, and since she had become a staunch Baptist after marrying Uncle Jimmy, she moaned and groaned over her brother Jonathan and nephew Lewis because they were still Catholics. Short visits to their home in the town of Ossee Five Hills were bad enough. Lewis didn’t think he could stand living with them, not every single day.