The Tower at the End of the World (Action Packs) Read online

  “Oh, my Lord,” said Mrs. Zimmermann. “You’re right! Stand back, everyone!”

  She pointed her wand at the top of the tower. She quickly recited a spell in ancient Gothic, and from the tip of her wand, a purple lightning bolt shot out. It arced through the air and slammed into the roof of the tower. With a furious explosion, the stones flew apart and the spire toppled. “Get back!” shouted Jonathan. He hooked one arm around Lewis’s waist and one around Rose Rita and dragged them away.

  Lewis winced. The whole top of the tower roof had been blasted off. It whistled to earth and struck not three feet away from Mrs. Zimmermann. The spire impaled itself in the ground. The clouds, which had been whirling faster and faster, suddenly boiled. From all around them rose a shriek louder than anything Lewis had ever heard. He clapped his hands over his ears.

  The crystal skulls exploded, one after the other, with reports as loud as a shotgun being fired! The steel spears melted like licorice over a hot stove! The metal bats caught fire and blazed with a blinding white light! And the tower began to heave and rumble. Stones fell from the flying buttress that supported the steps!

  “Run, Florence!” yelled Jonathan. “Kids, get to the boat!”

  “I won’t leave Mrs. Zimmermann!” insisted Rose Rita. She wormed out of Jonathan’s grasp and ran to her friend. Mrs. Zimmermann turned, her eyes wide and dazed. She stumbled, and then Rose Rita was beside her. She threw Mrs. Zimmermann’s arm around her shoulder and began to walk her toward the pathway.

  The marble tombstones had become something cobwebby. They wavered, then blew away in sickly gray streamers. Lewis staggered as the ground under his feet heaved. It was like trying to walk across a gigantic squishy mattress. The whole island was gurgling. Trees were sinking into the earth as if they stood on quicksand.

  And there, shaking and swelling, stood the shadow-creature! It blocked the path. Jonathan looked at Mrs. Zimmermann. Then he said, “I suppose this has to be up to me. Here’s hoping I’ve got what it takes!”

  Lewis felt sick. Jonathan strode out of the circle and the shadow surged forward, stretching toward him. With his feet wide apart Jonathan held his cane straight before him. In a voice like thunder he cried out, “Lux et veritas!”

  Blinding light blossomed from the crystal globe on his cane! Lewis saw it strike the shadow-monster and lift it into the air. Streamers of light pierced and shredded it, pieces of shadow whirling away into nothingness!

  And it was gone!

  Turning, Jonathan grabbed Mrs. Zimmermann’s free arm. Only then did Lewis notice that her staff had become an umbrella again, a plain black umbrella with a crystal globe for the handle. “I’m all right,” whispered Mrs. Zimmermann. “Just wasn’t prepared for the whammy! ‘Light and Truth,’ Jonathan? Pretty nifty spell for a parlor magician! Let’s go!”

  They stumbled down the heaving path and passed the cottage, which was glistening sickly like the slime from slugs and seeping into the ground. Lewis looked over his shoulder. So many trees had been sucked into the earth that he could see the tower. It was moving, reeling, and shedding black stones. Then with a terribly loud snap! that sounded like the crack of doom, it broke and fell.

  Lewis screamed in alarm. The path had become liquid, like horrible, thick mud. He felt himself sinking in it up to his knees. Everyone around him was floundering and falling. But just ahead was the pier, and Izard’s boat and their own.

  With a superhuman effort, Jonathan, who had sunk into the mud up to his waist, picked Lewis up. “Here you go!” he exclaimed, and Lewis felt himself being tossed through the air. He shouted in alarm, and then plunged into cold water! Fighting his way to the surface, he grabbed something solid—the gunwale of Jonathan’s boat! He flopped over the rail and into the boat. Ahead of him, the waters of Lake Superior were reclaiming Gnomon Island. Uncle Jonathan was holding Rose Rita up, and beside him, Mrs. Zimmermann reeled with one hand on his shoulder. Both of them had sunk into the soft earth, but now the water was washing around their waists.

  “Hang on!” screamed Lewis. He snatched the mooring lines and yanked, and they tore the cleats right out of the nearly liquid wood of the pier. Lewis grabbed one of the pier supports and pushed hard. It was nasty, like plunging his hand into something so rotten, it had turned greasy and soft, but the effort made the boat drift. Jonathan surged ahead one step, two steps, and then he was at the edge of the boat. He lifted Rose Rita in and tossed his cane after her. Then, even as he sank in up to his chest, he boosted Mrs. Zimmermann in. “Go!” he bellowed. “I’ll be all right! Take her out, Lewis!”

  Mrs. Zimmermann, panting for breath, threw herself flat and grabbed one of Jonathan’s arms. “I’ve got him!” she said. “Start the engine!”

  Lewis yanked the cord. The outboard coughed once, then fired up. “Hold on tight!” he roared. He turned the nose of the boat as slowly as he dared, and they began to pull away from the island, with Uncle Jonathan desperately clinging to the boat and to Mrs. Zimmermann.

  “Look at that,” said Rose Rita in a voice filled with awe.

  Lewis chanced a look back. The whole island was dissolving. It ran down into the water of the lake like a putrid mass. And overhead, the clouds were thinning and breaking up.

  “Let me get in!” yelled Uncle Jonathan. Rose Rita and Lewis leaned way back as he came slopping and slipping over the side, bringing about half of Lake Superior in with him. He was shaking. “So much for the Doomsday Clock,” he growled. “There it goes! The whole island’s going to drip away.”

  “And ‘leave not a wrack behind,’ ” said Mrs. Zimmermann, quoting from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. “But did we destroy the Doomsday Clock in time? Did we kill the spell, or did—”

  She didn’t finish. But Lewis knew what she couldn’t bear to say: “Or did the spell kill everyone else?”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Lewis soon found, to his relief, that they had been in time. Although Grampa Galway said there had been some “mighty strange weather,” nothing terrible had happened. But more than a week passed before he found out the rest of the story.

  That came on a warm summer night back in New Zebedee. They were all back, even Grampa Galway, whose friend had returned from Australia with a gold cup for having won his yacht race. But he wasn’t in the backyard of 100 High Street when Mrs. Zimmermann told Jonathan, Rose Rita, and Lewis what she had learned.

  “Professor Athanasius and the others think that we really hurled a monkey wrench into the world of evil magic,” she said with a smile. “We probably will never know how many magicians had signed on with Ishmael Izard in his mad plan for world domination. There were certainly hundreds. Maybe a thousand or more. But from what my friends from all over the world tell me, their magic has been completely drained. They couldn’t turn cream into butter with what they have left! Some of them are awfully angry with old Droopy Drawers. If they could find him—well, maybe the creatures of shadow were easier on him than his friends would have been!”

  Jonathan nodded. “I thought something like that would happen. Ishmael was calling on a lot of power to keep that island together and solid. When Florence snapped off the pointer to the sundial, everything sort of backfired. When the island dissolved, it took their power right along with it!”

  Rose Rita breathed out a sigh of relief. “Then the world is safe.”

  Mrs. Zimmermann’s eyes twinkled. “Well—safe from the last of the Izards, anyway! And with all of those evil sorcerers defanged, it will be safer and more comfortable in lots of other ways. Still, you have to remember that not every bad magician in the world joined forces with Ishmael. We still have to keep our guard up.” She turned to Jonathan and said, “By the way, Frazzle Face, I didn’t break the tip off any ‘pointer.’ I have found out that the official name for the doojigger that casts a shadow on the face of a sundial is gnomon.”

  Jonathan slapped his forehead. “Gnomon Island! Oh, my gosh! Now I wish I’d paid attention to all those vocabulary quizzes in English class!”


  With a sheepish smile Mrs. Zimmermann said, “The clock was so big, we couldn’t see it. Just counting those spooky sculptures should have tipped us off. They were the hours of the day, from six in the morning to six in the evening!”

  Jonathan shook his head. Then he fished in his vest pocket. “Oh, by the way, Florence, I took care of this.” He handed her a slip of paper.

  She took it suspiciously and read it. Then she laughed. “You paid for my rental boat!” she said. “Seven hundred dollars! I’ll pay you back.”

  “No need,” said Jonathan with a smile. “I think we got off cheap at the price! And I can well afford it. I just told the owner that you’d cracked the boat up and it sank like a stone.”

  “I’m a better driver than that!” scolded Mrs. Zimmermann, but she was grinning.

  For a few moments no one spoke. Then Lewis hesitantly asked, “Are you going to be all right, Mrs. Zimmermann? I mean, you didn’t drain all of your power or anything, did you? You looked pretty—”

  “Pretty much like something the cat dragged in?” Mrs. Zimmermann finished. “I don’t wonder! No, my magic is perfectly fine, thank you very much. But, my heavens! Snapping that spell gave me a nasty moment or two. I felt as if I’d grabbed hold of a live wire. I’m just lucky that Rose Rita and Jonathan are so stubborn. I don’t think I could have found my way down to the dock without them tugging and shoving me along!”

  “You’re very welcome, Haggy,” Jonathan replied. “And anyway, you more than paid me back by hanging on to my arm while the island was trying to drag me down with it!” He cracked his knuckles. “Now then, speaking of magic . . . I know that Lewis always likes historical battles, but tonight I thought I’d try a spell that’s just a bit different. Since we saved the human race and gave it a future, I thought I might conjure up a nice little illusion for us to play in. Ready?”

  It took some doing, but when at last his preparations were over, Jonathan waved his walking stick and intoned a spell. A pink mist swirled in, and when it settled, they were standing on a rusty-red hillside that was covered with snow. The sun seemed faint and shrunken, and the sky was pink. Farther away in the distance, Lewis could see some domes and the green smudge of growing things. “Where are we?” he asked.

  His uncle laughed. “On Mars, of course! But not Mars as it is today—Mars as it will be hundreds of years in the future, when humans have made it more Earthlike and have colonized it. And here’s the best part: Mars has very low gravity!”

  With a sudden bound, Jonathan jumped straight into the sky. He soared up for ten or fifteen feet, then came gracefully back to—well, not Earth, but to the ground. “Try it!” he said. “It’s loads of fun!”

  Soon Rose Rita and Lewis were bounding and leaping this way and that, laughing their heads off. It was like being on the greatest trampoline in the universe. Uncle Jonathan stood with his hands on his hips, beaming. “What could be more fun than this?” he asked.

  Whap! He yelped as a soft snowball burst against his head. He spun around and saw Mrs. Zimmermann balling up another one.

  “What could be more fun?” she asked mischievously. “A good old-fashioned futuristic snowball fight, of course!”

  Rose Rita and Lewis settled back down to watch Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann whooping and tossing Martian snowballs back and forth. Lewis started to giggle. So did Rose Rita. Then they were both roaring. The peals of their laughter rose high into the strange sky of Mars. It was a good sound.