The Sign of the Sinister Sorcerer Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  BY BRAD STRICKLAND

  (based on John Bellairs’s characters)

  The House Where Nobody Lived

  The Whistle, the Grave, and the Ghost

  The Tower at the End of the World

  The Beast under the Wizard’s Bridge

  The Wrath of the Grinning Ghost

  The Specter from the Magician’s Museum

  The Bell, the Book, and the Spellbinder

  The Hand of the Necromancer

  BOOKS BY JOHN BELLAIRS

  COMPLETED BY BRAD STRICKLAND

  The Doom of the Haunted Opera

  The Drum, the Doll, and the Zombie

  The Vengeance of the Witch-Finder

  The Ghost in the Mirror

  BOOKS BY JOHN BELLAIRS

  The Mansion in the Mist

  The Secret of the Underground Room

  The Chessmen of Doom

  The Trolley to Yesterday

  The Lamp from the Warlock’s Tomb

  The Eyes of the Killer Robot

  The Revenge of the Wizard’s Ghost

  The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull

  The Dark Secret of Weatherend

  The Mummy, the Will, and the Crypt

  The Curse of the Blue Figurine

  The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn

  The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring

  The Figure in the Shadows

  The House with a Clock in Its Walls

  DIAL BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  A division of Penguin Young Readers Group

  Published by The Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario,

  Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand,

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  Copyright © 2008 by The Estate of John Bellairs

  eISBN : 978-1-440-64137-4

  [1. Magic—Fiction. 2. Supernatural—Fiction. 3. Uncles—Fiction.

  4. Wizards—Fiction. 5. Witches—Fiction. 6. Orphans—Fiction.

  7. Michigan—History—20th century—Fiction. 8. Mystery and detective stories.]

  I. Bellairs, John. II. Title.

  PZ7.S9166Sig 2008

  [Fic]—dc22

  2008007698

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To Jonathan, my juggling son

  —B. S.

  CHAPTER 1

  “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!” ANNOUNCED Jonathan Barnavelt in a cheerful boom, “for my next trick, I shall require the assistance of a volunteer from the audience! Who wants to be my victim—I mean, my helper?”

  Sitting in the backyard of 100 High Street with a bunch of his classmates, Lewis Barnavelt couldn’t help grinning. It was a June day in the mid-1950s, and in the town of New Zebedee, Michigan, school had just ended. To celebrate, Lewis’s uncle Jonathan was throwing a party for Lewis and some of his classmates, and the cheerful, red-haired, bearded, pot-bellied Uncle Jonathan was performing one of his slightly unusual magic acts. Meanwhile, their next-door neighbor, the thin, gray-haired Mrs. Florence Zimmermann, was filling a long picnic table with delicious snacks and refreshments.

  In a way, that was funny, because while Lewis’s uncle was a real, honest-to-goodness wizard who could create realistic illusions, the friendly, wrinkly-faced Mrs. Zimmermann was a powerful good witch whose magic was far greater than Jonathan Barnavelt’s. However, while Lewis’s uncle could easily entertain a dozen or so schoolkids, he couldn’t cook a decent dish to save his life. Fortunately, Mrs. Zimmermann was not only a sorceress, but also a fabulous cook.

  Sitting next to his friend Rose Rita Pottinger, Lewis squirmed around to look hungrily over his shoulder as Mrs. Zimmermann set down a tall, four-layer chocolate-frosted cake, its glossy brown icing making Lewis’s mouth water. Then Mrs. Zimmermann, who was wearing one of her light summer dresses (purple, of course, because she loved that color), began to decorate the cake with sweet red maraschino cherries.

  Suddenly Rose Rita poked Lewis in the side with her elbow. “Pay attention!” She was a skinny, rather plain girl with long, stringy black hair and big round horn-rimmed glasses, and when she hit you with her sharp elbow, it hurt!

  “Okay, okay,” mumbled Lewis, and though his stomach was growling, he turned his gaze back toward the temporary stage his uncle had built in the backyard from two-by-fours and plywood. Though he was no expert at carpentry either, Uncle Jonathan had done a pretty good job this time. The platform looked sturdy enough, and Mrs. Zimmermann had draped it with festive red, white, and blue crepe-paper streamers.

  “Now, David,” said Uncle Jonathan to his shy volunteer, David Keller, one of Lewis’s few real friends at school, “I don’t know you at all, do I?”

  “Huh?” David asked in surprise, and the other dozen or so kids hooted with laughter.

  “All right, maybe I know you,” said Uncle Jonathan with a wink. “But I’ll bet you if you name any object, I can find it in your pockets, or as a last-ditch effort, in mine!” He made a swirling bow. Since Uncle Jonathan, for a change, was not wearing his familiar blue work shirt and khaki wash pants, but a tuxedo (rather tight around his round belly), a black top hat, and a black silk cloak lined with white satin, his bow looked elegant and sweeping.

  “Name anything at all,” encouraged Uncle Jonathan, holding up his battered old cane dramatically. “Doesn’t matter, anything, however outrageous. Think up something you don’t believe I’ll be able to find in a million years, two months, and eleven days!”

  David shifted from foot to foot, his face red with embarrassment at being up in front of everyone. “Uh—an, an e-elephant!” he said finally, stuttering a little.

  “An elephant!” shouted Uncle Jonathan. “A tall order! Or at least a great big one! But prestidigitatio pachydermatitis, and behold!” He flourished his crystal-headed cane and waved it like a magic wand. “Now I say the magic words ‘Peanut in a Trunk’! And what is this I find in your shirt pocket?”

  David’s eyes flew wide as Uncle Jonathan reached into his pocket and pulled out a balled-up gray silk handkerchief. His eyes got wider when Uncle Jonathan dropped the handkerchief softly onto the stage with a grand gesture and waved his cane over it. Something moved around under the silk, looking like a tennis ball. Then it grew larger, as though someone were blowing up a balloon. When Uncle Jonathan bent over and whisked the handkerchief away, everyone
yelped in surprise.

  A tiny elephant about the size of a white rat was marching around in a circle on the stage. It wore miniature circus trappings: pink ostrich plumes and a red leather harness. As everyone watched, it raised its little trunk and trumpeted, sounding like a kitten playing a kazoo.

  “It’s not real!” someone exclaimed in derision. “It must be a toy!”

  “David, are you trying to pull a fast one on us? Tell us, did you have a toy elephant in your pocket?” demanded Uncle Jonathan, sounding very serious.

  “N-no!” replied David. “I didn’t even have a r-real one!”

  Everyone laughed again at that, but Uncle Jonathan held up his hand for silence. “Who said it wasn’t real?”

  Lewis and Rose Rita turned around, looking at the kids behind them. One of them stood instead of sitting among the other kids in folding chairs, and he had his arms crossed and a smart-aleck kind of look on his face. “It’s Hal,” murmured Rose Rita with a rueful grin.

  “Yeah,” said Lewis. Hal Everit was a new kid in town, and he had been attending their school for only the last few weeks of class. In that short time, Rose Rita had developed something of a grievance against him because he had edged her out in their history class as the one with the highest average. She had wound up the year with an incredible 98.5 score, but when Hal Everit had transferred in, he had made perfect grades on every quiz and even on the final exam, so his average wound up being 100. As Rose Rita had complained to Lewis, that didn’t seem fair. She had been on board for the whole school year, and if she hadn’t come down with a bad case of flu back in the winter and missed a whole week of class, she might have had a hundred average too! It was unlike Rose Rita to hold a grudge, but Lewis almost regretted that he had invited Hal.

  He had only done it because when he finished handing out the invitations, he suddenly realized that, counting himself and Rose Rita, there would be thirteen kids at the party—thirteen! Sitting in study hall, he had hastily scribbled out another invitation. He was on his way to lunch, trying to think of someone to invite, when Hal caught up with him and said, “Everyone tells me you’re having a party.”

  “Kind of an end-of-school celebration,” Lewis had explained.

  Hal had sighed deeply. “I wish I could do things like that.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  Looking miserable, Hal had shrugged. “New in town,” he said in a choked-up kind of voice. “Don’t know anybody.” He looked away as if embarrassed. “I don’t suppose you—you’ve got room for me?”

  And just like that, Lewis had given him the invitation. He felt sorry for Hal, even if Rose Rita wasn’t terribly fond of him. Now Lewis hoped that Hal wouldn’t be too much of a smart aleck as Uncle Jonathan called him to the stage.

  “Step up, step up,” Uncle Jonathan was saying to Hal, and he moved through the crowd: a tall, skinny, pale kid with a grave, serious face.

  “Right up onto the stage,” said Uncle Jonathan in an encouraging tone. “All right, Mr. Doubting Thomas, if that is your real name—”

  “It’s Hal Everit,” said Hal, sounding a little irritable.

  “I apologize, Mr. Everit. All righty then, I lift the small elephant like this.” Uncle Jonathan bent over and retrieved the tiny animal. He held it in one hand as it waved its trunk. “And I hand you the silk handkerchief that concealed it. Now I will ask you to hold all four corners of the silk together, making a kind of pouch. Two corners in your left hand, two in your right. Yes, that’s good. Now, I’m going to place Jumbo Junior here very carefully into the handkerchief. Very well, now bring all the corners together and hold your elephant in a bag, all right?”

  Hal did as he was instructed, with David looking on curiously. The dangling silk pouch certainly looked as if it contained something alive. It moved restlessly, bulging and swinging gently.

  Uncle Jonathan raised his wand and intoned, “Transformatio columbia livia!” He nodded and then said, “Now, Hal, do you agree that you are holding the miniature elephant in that handkerchief?”

  Hal shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “And you think it may not be alive?”

  Hal gave him a suspicious look. “It has to be a toy!”

  “Very well. Here, I will hold the corners of the handkerchief, and you just reach carefully inside and take out the toy elephant.”

  “Okay.”

  Lewis stretched his neck, wondering what his uncle was up to. His magic shows were never the same twice—and he rarely performed them for Lewis’s friends, because the kids had a way of talking about the shows that made their unsuspecting parents think that maybe Jonathan Barnavelt was a little more tricky than he seemed. Not very many people in town knew that he was a real sorcerer, and the ones who did were all members of the Capharnaum County Magicians Society.

  Carefully, Uncle Jonathan took the corners of the handkerchief and held the pouch slightly open while Hal reached in and felt around. A puzzled look came into the boy’s eyes. He reached farther in—and farther—and even farther. The boys and girls watching the show started to giggle and point. Somehow, Hal was leaning way over, his whole arm inside the small pouch of the handkerchief all the way up to the shoulder. It looked impossible, and really it probably was, reflected Lewis. That was his uncle’s real magic at work.

  It was a warm day, but he shivered a little, remembering an evening some years before when Uncle Jonathan had performed one of his best tricks for Lewis and a boy named Tarby Corrigan. Uncle Jonathan had eclipsed the moon, creating a weird magical darkness that no one outside of the backyard of 100 High Street even noticed. All sorts of strange things had happened in that uncanny darkness—and one of them was that Lewis got the idea to imitate his uncle and try a magic spell that ended disastrously. Ever since, Lewis had felt very timid about trying to do magic himself.

  Up on the stage, Uncle Jonathan said encouragingly, “It’s in there somewhere. Reach a little deeper. Be gentle, though!”

  “Hey!” Hal pulled his arm out. He was holding something gray. But it wasn’t an elephant. Looking surprised, Hal opened his hand and a pigeon flew away, cooing in its gurgly birdy voice. Uncle Jonathan shook the handkerchief one, two, three times, and it disappeared with a flash of light.

  “Now, what you pulled out of the handkerchief was alive, wasn’t it?” asked Uncle Jonathan, stroking his gray-streaked red beard.

  Despite his apparent determination to hold on to his skepticism, Hal grinned shyly. “Umm, it was alive—but it wasn’t an elephant!”

  “Very well. Test me. What do you think I couldn’t possibly have inside my pockets?”

  Hal squinted in thought. “Helium balloons!”

  “Let’s see!” Uncle Jonathan swirled his cloak dramatically. Everyone oohed as inflated balloons rose from his flapping cape and floated up on the ends of long strings. Each balloon had a word printed on it in squiggly letters: A yellow one said “Umm”; a red one, “but”; a blue one, “it”; a green one, “wasn’t”; a purple one, “an”; and an orange one, “elephant.”

  “Let ’em fly!” shouted Uncle Jonathan, handing the balloons to David.

  A laughing David Keller let go of them one at a time. Each balloon flew up about fifty feet and then popped spectacularly. When the “but” balloon burst, it sent up a shower of red sparks; the others produced a cloud of fluffy royal-blue feathers, a puff of lavender smoke, a glittering burst of golden particles, and a noise like a whoopee cushion that made everyone double up in laughter.

  Hal chuckled weakly too, but he looked sheepish. Watching the spectacle, Lewis felt a wave of sympathy for the new kid, the outsider. Feeling that people were laughing at you was never any fun.

  “It’s all right,” said Uncle Jonathan, patting his pockets. “I think we got ’em all! Try saying something else to check. Say, uh, ‘That was the most fantastic magic trick I ever saw.’”

  Making a face that might have been a reluctant smile, Hal murmured, “That was the most fantastic magic trick I ever sa
w.” No balloons.

  “Why, thank you!” responded Uncle Jonathan, giving another impressive bow. He held his hand out, and pop! a shiny red top hat appeared in it. He handed this to David, then produced another one, this one bright blue. That one he gave to Hal. “I present you with genuine honorary magician’s hats,” he said. “Thanks for helping, and if any rabbits come out of those, don’t let ’em loose in the house! A big round of applause for my assistants, please!”

  Lewis clapped along with everyone else, but just then he noticed something. Or, rather, someone, peeking around the corner of the garage, someone dressed very strangely in a maroon-colored hooded robe with the hood pulled up so that Lewis could not see the person’s face. He leaned toward Rose Rita. “Who’s that?”

  “Where?” asked Rose Rita.

  Lewis pointed, but found he was aiming his finger at empty air. The robed person had vanished. He blinked, wondering if this was part of Uncle Jonathan’s act. It gave him a momentary creepy feeling, though.

  Uncle Jonathan said, “Now, I see that Mrs. Zimmermann has just about finished loading up the table with a great feast of goodies that you are going to love, so maybe just one last quick trick. Hmm. Rose Rita, come up here!”

  With a grin, Rose Rita popped up from her seat and bounded onto the stage. She knew about Uncle Jonathan’s real magic, and she trusted him not to hurt her.

  “What’s a celebration,” asked Uncle Jonathan, “without a few fireworks? Rose Rita, you are going to help me give a magical fireworks show. Please, kids, don’t try this at home! You might blow yourselves to kingdom come!”

  First Uncle Jonathan produced an empty goldfish bowl. Then he had Rose Rita hold it on top of her head. “Now,” he said, “what kind of fireworks do you like best, Rose Rita?”

  “Rockets!” she answered at once.

  And immediately, to gasps of awe, a dozen rockets shot up out of the empty goldfish bowl. Trailing streamers of colored smoke, they rose higher and higher until finally, with booms and bangs and kerpows, they went off one after the other, bursting into brilliant red, blue, and green stars.