And with that, his face got kind of red . . . and so did my dad’s. They both sat back down at the table.
So Tom made his way to that open door . . . which happened to be my dad’s office back door. It had been left open to let out all the puffs of smoke that were coming out of my dad’s ears, because he had just discovered (he thought) a cure for Witch Flu. And my dad had seen this adorable trembling little black kitten and had brought Tom home that night as a surprise for me. And what a surprise he had turned out to be.
But listen to how creepy this is. All the time my dad was asking Dr. March Hall for help with Tom, poor Tom knew that the doctor was doing things to make things go wrong but he had no way of telling us. With the enchantment on him, he wasn’t able to point out what a bad guy Dr. March Hall was, so instead he just took to hiding whenever the doctor came over. And that night, when Dr. March Hall pretended to have stamped on a spider . . . he had actually been trying to stomp the life out of Tom!! Just the thought of it made the cake and soda and ice cream in my belly start to churn and I felt really queasy.
So while we were away in Hawaii, Tom had been having a perfectly nice time, coming up with alchemical formulas on the computer, when black clouds started rolling in through the closed doors and windows again. This time though, Tom knew what was happening and he hightailed it out of Mom’s office, raced upstairs, and found a place to hide that he hoped Dr. March Hall wouldn’t think to look into.
He’d made a really smart choice (big surprise—I mean, he is a genius), because Dr. March Hall, who’s too mean and nasty to have ever bothered to play with any children, thought the bulging hand puppet was just another stuffed toy. And that’s what saved Tom as a raging, storming, violent Dr. March Hall tore our house apart looking for him.
This time, Dr. March Hall kept reciting the spell he planned to use on Tom when he found him, as if he was still trying to memorize it, and Tom happened to recognize it, from reading Dad’s witchy medical textbooks. That horrible man was planning to turn Tom into a rock and he was going to toss him out into some field. Nobody would ever suspect that the rock was anything but an inanimate object and Tom’s great mind would have been lost to the ages. Instead, at school, we would have gotten stuck with Miss Linegar assigning us to study about the many brilliant inventions of one great, big, phony blowhard, Dr. March Hall.
CHAPTER 24
March Hare Skedaddles
We were all absolutely exhausted but with a mad, evil witch on the loose, there was no question of getting any sleep. So, although Mom doesn’t like to do this very often because it might stunt Munch’s and my growth if we don’t get enough real sleep, she cast another, stronger, refresher spell on everybody. It felt like jumping into a cool pool on a very hot day, a bit of a jolt at first and then that pleasant feeling of being completely wide-awake and full of energy.
Mom and Dad got right to work sending out an emergency summons to the witchy authorities, including the most famous witch there is, Mrs. Dorothy Drake, who is really, really old, and really, really powerful. Unlike Dr. March Hall though, she’s also nice and full of fun. She usually makes chocolates come out of Munch’s and my ears whenever she sees us, which I’m actually a little old for, though I can’t say I mind the candy.
Aunt Sophie popped in too. She had been at some sort of movie premiere or something, because when she got there, she was wearing a shimmery gown that showed kind of a lot of skin. Tom’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. As soon as she realized how serious the circumstances were though, she zapped into something more conservative. It was still pretty fancy, but that’s just Aunt Sophie.
“Kids,” said Mom to Munch and me, “we’re going to need to you stay out of the way tonight, but I think there’s a lot you can learn from what goes on here, so you can listen in if you like.”
“Okay, lovie-doos,” said Aunt Sophie. “I’m more of a light comedienne anyway, and I think I’d be miscast in this sort of drama, so why don’t all three of us just snuggle up on the couch and we’ll watch everything from there.”
Then she zapped us into our robes and slippers so we could be comfortable and cozy while we watched.
As we snuggled up with the sweet-smelling Aunt Sophie on the couch, we looked in through the dining room arch at the big meeting that was going on. Everyone was at the table, with Tom at one end and Mrs. Drake at the other. My mom and dad were sitting on one side and there were four really serious-looking witches sitting on the other side. One of them was Dean Wilkins, the head of Witch University, where Dr. March Hall taught from before Dad even went there. Dean Wilkins was tall and thin and wearing a dark business suit. He looked as if he hadn’t ever been out in the sun much.
The other three men were younger and were dressed almost alike in jeans and leather jackets. They were identical triplets, Mr. Terence, Mr. Thaddeus, and Mr. Theodore Mather, who, due to the fact that they were on exactly the same magical wavelength, were able to triple the intensity of a spell when they cast it together. They were a trio of grim, muscular witchy policemen, called up whenever there was evidence of crimes against magic, and when they were on your case, watch out. Even a witch with the strongest skills possible, like Mrs. Drake, could be overpowered when the Mathers joined their magic together.
Tom was the center of attention for hours as he got questioned about every single detail of everything that had happened to him.
“What time of day was this?”
“In what direction was he looking as he cast the spell?”
“Can you recall if he clapped as he chanted?”
Tom seemed to have a pretty good memory for all the details they were asking about. Though when it came to exactly what March Hall had said as he enchanted Tom, Tom wasn’t as helpful as everyone hoped because of course his hearing wasn’t too great.
Expressions on the faces around the dining room table got very dark as the story got told and retold. Even sweet old Mrs. Drake looked angry as she heard the part about Dr. March Hall trying to stomp on Tom.
“In all my years . . .” she muttered and then stopped.
By the time Tom got to the part of the story about having to hide in the puppet, Mrs. Drake looked positively furious. Then she closed her eyes and a red heat started to glow out of her. Munch got scared and snuggled closer to Aunt Sophie as the six other adults at the table and Tom moved their chairs back from the intensity of the heat radiating out from Mrs. Drake.
Aunt Sophie cuddled Munch to her and explained that Mrs. Drake was about to launch an all-points summoning spell, something she’s the only one alive skilled enough to do perfectly. With it, she’d be able to find and haul Dr. March Hall out of anyplace he’d found to hide.
It got hotter and hotter in the room and the walls all around us started to glow, but then Mrs. Drake gave a great sigh and opened her eyes. Immediately, everything turned cool and comfortable again.
“He’s somehow removed his imprint from the continuum, I’m afraid,” she said.
As she spoke, I was struck by how frail and quavery and old her voice sounded, especially after having just felt the heat from the immense power of her magic.
There was a collective groan around the table and Aunt Sophie explained to us that everybody’s job had just gotten a lot harder, since it would now take a lot of magical detective work to discover exactly where and when Dr. March Hall had gone.
“Oh no, no,” muttered Dean Wilkins, straightening the tie he’d loosened when things got so hot. “I blame myself, Dottie. He’d told me he was making advances in cloaking necromancy, but of course I was so used to that blasted self-aggrandizement of his, I didn’t give it much heed. I figured he’d be retiring soon anyway, so there was no need to look into it much. I see now it was a terrible mistake to do that. He’s clearly found a way to cloak himself from us.”
Just in case you’re wondering, self-aggrandizement is like tooting your own horn . . . It goes pretty good with being a blowhard, if you think about it. Blow . . . hard . . . Toot
. . . horn. See what I mean?
Too bad it wasn’t the right time to crack a joke just then.
Mrs. Drake patted Dean Wilkins’s hand. “Oh my dear, how could any of us possibly have anticipated something like this? You mustn’t feel responsible.”
CHAPTER 25
A Posse
Mrs. Drake took charge and started organizing everyone, assigning time periods for them to search. She figured Dr. March Hall had probably given up on finding Tom, since as far as he knew, Tom was still just a little kitten who couldn’t communicate with anyone.
“I don’t doubt that the doctor wishes to waste no time in establishing himself as the most important inventor of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. So perhaps we should start our search by dividing those particular periods between us,” she said.
Though I was dying to get involved, I knew better than to offer to help, because there was no way Mom and Dad were going to let me search for someone who’d almost murdered someone.
Actually, if you think about it, this search party was sort of the witchy version of a posse like they used to have back in the Wild West to catch bad guys. I whispered that to Munch and he liked the idea so much that he zapped a cowboy hat right onto his head. He conjured up a rope and would have done some lassoing with it, but Aunt Sophie quickly made it disappear and zapped up some cowboy action figures for him to play with instead.
As the search began, people kept popping in and out of the room as if they were lights turning on and off. Tom, who’d never seen anything like it, came and sat with us on the couch and just marveled at everything.
“But Miss Sophie, how can they search if they’re only gone a moment?” Tom asked.
Aunt Sophie explained that the searchers might have spent hours or even weeks in another time but could calibrate their return to the twenty-first century at almost the very moment they left it.
“It’s hard to get it exactly right, sweetie, and it takes a lot of energy, so it’s a technique that’s only used if it’s really important,” she explained. “Which it certainly is in this case,” she added, giving his hand a little pat.
“I’m not that great at calibration, for instance,” I threw in. “Though I could probably get better with practice.”
“I’ll bet anything your mother would tell you the same thing,” observed Tom with a grin.
As you can see, Tom managed to notice a lot of stuff even while he was still a kitten. I gave him a poke for that one and he snickered.
As people kept appearing and disappearing and stopping to discuss what they’d found, or actually not found, all of the adults got more serious than they had been. My dad stopped pulling little pranks like suddenly materializing while standing on his head. Apparently, on their visits back into the past, they were starting to notice some small changes in the development of technology.
I knew I was supposed to stay on the couch, but a girl has to go to the bathroom sometime, doesn’t she? On my way upstairs, I managed to detour around the coffee table so I could get close enough to the dining room to overhear Mrs. Drake as she popped in and started whispering really urgently to Dean Wilkins.
“Charles, I’m beginning to spot massive disruptions in the time continuum, aren’t you?” she said very quietly, but with an extremely worried look on her face.
The dean’s back was to me, so I couldn’t actually hear what he said, but it was pretty clear from the way Mrs. Drake’s forehead wrinkled up at his response that he was noticing the same thing.
“Then we really haven’t got much time before the damage begins,” she answered with a heavy sigh.
Okay, maybe I didn’t have to go to the bathroom that badly, so I hurried back to the couch. Munch was set up with his toys behind the couch now, but Tom and Aunt Sophie had spotted my eavesdropping.
Probably Aunt Sophie didn’t approve of eavesdropping, but she’d have to be made of stone not to be curious. I started whispering the second I got back to the couch so that she wouldn’t have a chance to reprimand me.
“Mrs. Drake is beginning to worry that if we don’t capture March Hall and return Tom to his time quickly, there’ll soon be damage to the time continuum,” I hissed.
Tom looked confused by that and so Aunt Sophie explained.
“Simply put, sweetie, the whole present world could be changed because the past is different,” she said. And it was easy to see from her expression that she didn’t think it was going to be changed for the better either.
Everybody in the dining room was starting to look absolutely exhausted. The Mather brothers, who weren’t big talkers at the best of times, kept popping back in together. Then they’d just look tiredly at each other, as if it was too much trouble to say a word. They seemed to understand each other without actually having to talk though, because they’d just look into each other’s eyes for a second, shake their heads, and then zap right back out.
Though it had to have felt like a long time for the posse, it was only an hour or so for Munch, Tom, Aunt Sophie, and me before Mrs. Drake called another meeting. Aunt Sophie conjured up coffee and sandwiches and all of the adults sat down very heavily in their seats at the table. By now, poor old Mrs. Drake’s voice was so tired and weak-sounding that everybody had to lean in to hear her.
“My, my,” she said as she smiled sweetly at everyone sitting around the table.
She had a lot of wrinkles in her face and they all seemed to crinkle upward when she smiled, as if her smile just needed to take over her whole face.
“When I look at all the decency and integrity gathered together in this room, it gives me such comfort and assurance that this evil cannot possibly triumph. Why, just the fact that Tom sensed the goodness emanating from Marley’s office, and understood that help was at hand, is proof enough that we can’t possibly fail,” she said. “Now Matilda . . .” (That’s my mom, did I ever tell you her full name is Matilda?) “If you would be so good as to apply one more of those invigorating little refresher spells of yours on everyone, I think we’d be better equipped to hash out this thing.”
My mom, who really does have a special talent for that sort of spell, quickly zapped one up. Everyone gasped and looked startled for just a second, and then they all got a lot more rested-looking.
Each person did a rundown on the summoning and searching spells they had cast all through the decades and Dean Wilkins did a fast calculation. (And the calculating was all in his head. I guess that’s why he runs a whole university.) From what he figured out mathematically and statistically and all that, it was decided that Dr. March Hare had to have been in one of the places and time periods they’d visited but had somehow managed to cloak his presence.
“Oh dear,” sighed Mrs. Drake. “It appears that we’re going to have to devise a whole new plan of attack.”
It was agreed that everybody would go back to their homes and offices and whatnot and that there would have to be conference calls and visits with other experts in the field and computer searches and all that sort of stuff.
Once all the jobs were assigned, Dean Wilkins crankily got up from the table.
“I’ll be on my way. And let’s hope that someone can come up with a way to counteract this filthy cloaking spell,” he said. Then he nodded good-bye to the others and popped out for the last time.
Mrs. Drake was worried that maybe Dr. March Hall had gone back into a period of time before Tom had done any of his important work, so he could get the big jump on inventing stuff.
In that quavery little voice of hers she said to my dad, “You know, Marley, I had hoped that at the very least, the doctor would have the ethics not to unbalance the progress of science by advancing technology too quickly.”
Of course, I was thinking the kind of guy who would try to stomp on a tiny furry little genius wasn’t going to have a lot of principles about scientific progress, but I knew this meeting was for adults only and I’d better not say anything. Anyway, I liked that Mrs. Drake was so good and honorable hersel
f that she tended to think the best of people, even if they gave her plenty of reason not to. Miss Linegar could certainly learn a thing or two from her about giving people (such as, oh say . . . yours truly) the benefit of the doubt now and then.
So everybody said their good-byes for now and before they left, the Mathers put Tom between them and held hands to make a little circle around him. Then they chanted a complicated spell to put an extra-powerful protective conjuration on him to keep him safe in case old March Hare happened to come back looking for him.
My mom sadly told Tom that she was terribly sorry that he couldn’t go home until Dr. March Hall got caught.
“Aw, don’t get all vexed on my account, Mrs. Adams,” he said. “The truth is, I’d hate to leave anyway, without having seen Abbie’s play first.”
Now it was my turn to get a red face. It made me feel pretty good, you know . . . that in the middle of all this creepy stuff that was going on, Tom was thinking about my play. The truth is, I hadn’t given the play a thought for days, but now that I was thinking about it, I was really glad Tom was going to see it.
CHAPTER 26
Tom Discovers a Time-Warp
Well, with Mrs. Drake, Dean Wilkins, and the Mathers working the case, Mom and Dad figured they’d try to get us back to some sort of normal life for a while. That meant Munch and me going to school as usual on Monday, Mom organizing the PTA fund-raising dinner and studying her real estate stuff, and Dad getting back to trying to figure out what was the problem with his Witch Flu serum.
We’d been seeing quite a lot of the Schnitzler brothers lately, and Mr. Heatherhayes was making plenty of unscheduled visits as well. Dad was getting very worried about them, especially Mr. Heatherhayes, because of his age. While Mom made calls to people about bringing food for a PTA dinner, she flipped her way through her real estate books. Dad kept stepping into a time warp so that he could get a lot of work done without taking too much time away from his patients.
The Witchy Worries of Abbie Adams Page 10