The Sign of the Sinister Sorcerer Read online

  “Someone else!” yelled Uncle Jonathan over the din. “Let’s keep it going!”

  “A Catherine Wheel!” someone called.

  With a tap of the wand, a spinning spiral of sparks rose majestically from the bowl, spraying the audience with silvery fragments and making some of the kids yelp in alarm—but the sparks were not hot at all and evaporated an instant before they touched anything. The whirling wheel of sparks rose higher and higher and finally blew itself apart with a gratifying, stomach-tightening blast.

  “Another!” yelled Uncle Jonathan. “Hurry!”

  “Roman candles!” yelled Lewis. He liked them because they didn’t make much noise at all, and loud noises made him flinch.

  Whoosh! Graceful balls of colored fire shot out of the bowl, one right after the other, and then curved back toward the earth, producing red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet smoke trails and leaving a figure in the air that looked like a multicolored symmetrical sketch of a gigantic willow tree. “Now mine!” said Uncle Jonathan. “I want to make Mrs. Zimmermann happy, so—lots and lots of purple smoke!”

  Rose Rita shrieked half in alarm, half in glee. A boiling cloud of thick, and yes, very, very purple smoke, erupted from the bowl, spilled out, covered the stage, and poured into the audience. Everyone jumped up, but they had no chance to run, and in an instant the smoke had covered them all completely.

  For just a moment, Lewis was lost in purple murk. He held his breath, but when he had to breathe, he found that he couldn’t smell the smoke at all, and it didn’t choke him the way real smoke would have done. It was just as if he were breathing the fresh air of a summer’s afternoon. And a moment later—he was.

  Everyone blinked. The smoke had just faded away. And the stage had vanished, along with all the magic props: Uncle Jonathan now stood wearing his familiar old blue shirt, red vest, and tan pants, and he stood not on a stage, but on the somewhat shaggy green grass of the backyard. Next to him, Rose Rita stood uncertainly, her hands still raised over her head to balance a goldfish bowl that was no longer there.

  “Thank you!” said Uncle Jonathan, taking one of Rose Rita’s hands and leading her in a stage bow, and the kids clapped wildly. A moment later, they were all clustered around him, firing questions and demands at him: “How did you—?” “Was that really a—?” “Will you show us how to—” and over and over, “Do it again!”

  Politely but firmly, Uncle Jonathan declined to repeat any of his tricks, and as for explaining them—“Why,” he said, “a magician swears an oath of secrecy! If a magician reveals his tricks, his toe-nails turn blue and play rock and roll music all night long. And I love to sleep too much for that! Come on—let’s eat!”

  At last! Lewis hurried over to the picnic table and filled up a plate. Soon he, Rose Rita, and David were gobbling their goodies while sitting together on a big beach towel spread on the grass. “That was a g-great show,” David sighed happily, his face smudged with chocolate beneath his cardboard top hat.

  “And this is great cake,” returned Lewis. He wasn’t surprised. Mrs. Zimmermann’s double-fudge chocolate-frosted cake was one of her specialties, and she made it only once or twice a year.

  “Hal’s not eating,” pointed out Rose Rita.

  Lewis glanced over. Hal Everit stood off by himself, his hands in his pockets. He was watching Uncle Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann intently, but he didn’t move toward the table himself.

  “We ought to make him feel more at home,” said Rose Rita.

  Lewis looked at her in surprise. “I thought you hated his guts!” he said. “He kept you from getting the history medal.”

  “I don’t hate him,” sniffed Rose Rita. “I just don’t think the school was very fair about it, that’s all. He seems to be a nice enough guy. He took your uncle’s ribbing well. Anyway, Hal’s new in town, just like you were once, Lewis.”

  “And m-me too,” put in David. His folks had moved into town not too long before, and they didn’t know that the place they had bought, a local landmark called the Hawaii House, was haunted by an army of Hawaiian warrior ghosts. The family came close to being taken away by the night marchers, but luckily Lewis and Rose Rita had come to the rescue, along with their two grown-up magician friends.

  “So we should make friends with him,” finished Rose Rita. “We can show him around this summer.”

  “I can’t,” David said. “My mom’s taking me to visit my grandparents in Massachusetts all summer l-long. I w-won’t be back until August.”

  “Then the two of us will have to do it,” said Rose Rita decidedly. “Maybe he likes baseball. We could play flies and grounders with him, or—”

  Lewis sighed. It did no good to argue when Rose Rita took that tone. When she made up her mind to do something, she did it. She was more athletic than he was, and in the summer she was always trying to talk him into grabbing a bat or putting on a baseball glove. And if she wanted him to help make Hal feel welcome—well, he would help, that’s all.

  “Fine,” he said. “But not before I finish this cake!” And he took another bite of the wonderful cake, and the sweet frosting melted in his mouth. By that time he had forgotten all about the phantom-like hooded figure he had glimpsed a few minutes earlier.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE PARTY TOOK PLACE on a Saturday afternoon. By the following Monday, Lewis had begun to feel as if he were out of school for a good, long stretch. He welcomed the break. Not that he was a bad student, or that he hated school—far from it. Lewis was a sharp kid, very interested in science and math. In fact, he was something of a whiz at astronomy. He and his uncle even had their own telescope, a nifty ten-inch reflector, which meant that instead of using a big lens to peer at the stars and planets, it used a big concave mirror. It let him see the craters on the moon, the white polar caps on orange-red Mars, and the moons of Jupiter, which looked like a row of bright little stars that were usually very close to the planet.

  However, after a long school year, Lewis loved nothing better than just to relax for a while, and to him relaxation meant one thing: stretching out in a comfortable place with a tasty snack and a good book to read.

  And that was why on that sunny Monday morning Lewis lay comfortably stretched out on a lawn chair, the kind made of aluminum tubing and nylon webbing with a foot part that propped up so he sat with his legs straight out and his back supported. He had placed the chair carefully in the shade of one of the maple trees in the backyard. On a little wrought-iron table beside the chair he had some of his favorite snacks: crisp, buttery crackers spread with pink pimento cheese, a big box of chocolate-covered raisins, and a tall glass of milk. And spread open on his stomach he held an oversized book from his uncle’s library.

  Lewis really liked poking through the shelves of books in the mansion his uncle owned. The house was ridiculously large for just the two of them, and they mostly lived on the first and second floors. The whole third floor was unused, crammed with furniture hidden under dustcovers. Some rooms practically overflowed with strange odds and ends of various junk that Jonathan Barnavelt had inherited or collected. Lewis had found a stereopticon, a viewer into which you put long sepia-toned double photos that became three-dimensional views when you looked through the eyepieces. One box held thousands of pictures: the Alps with a summer storm coming up behind them, Niagara Falls cascading in summer and frozen like a river of whipped vanilla frosting in the winter, smoky Civil War battlefields with cannon and mules and sometimes dead or wounded soldiers, and many others.

  In another room Lewis had found a wheezy pump organ that would still play, though it sounded croupy. And in one of the upstairs rooms he discovered a wall of floor-to-ceiling shelves jam-packed with hundreds of odd old books. They were just the kind he loved, with dusty covers and liver-spotted pages and the heady, spicy aroma that only antique volumes seemed to have.

  Just that morning he had pulled down one of these, a tall, thick volume with a blotchy, cracked maroon leather cover and brown, brit
tle pages dotted with tiny bookworm holes and splotched with brown age spots. The title attracted him at once:

  A COMPENDIUM OF CURIOUS BELIEFS

  AND SUPERSTITIONS

  OF THE BRITONS, SCOTS, AND IRISH

  By Theodosius M.Fraser,

  B.A., M.A., D.Div. (Oxford), F.R.S.

  LONDON

  1851

  The thought that he was holding a tome more than a hundred years old gave Lewis a pleasant little tingle of anticipation. This was the first book he wanted to read for the summer.

  And so, happily stretched out in his lawn chair, Lewis popped a cheese cracker into his mouth and munched it as he began to read about odd beliefs and practices in old England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. The first chapter was all about curious weather omens. Lewis sipped his milk and ate his crackers as he learned about how hares with heavy coats promised a cold winter to come, about how low-flying birds predicted rain and stormy winds, about how sailors should fear a red sky at morning but rejoice at one in the evening, and other superstitions. To tell the truth, it wasn’t very exciting, but Lewis fell into the old-fashioned language and drifted along with it in an agreeable kind of daze.

  Overhead the green maple leaves fluttered in the morning breezes. Faintly from the street Lewis could hear the occasional sounds of a passing car. A red airplane droned along through a sky dotted with white clouds.

  Chapter two made Lewis sit up a little straighter. It was titled rather grimly “Of Harbingers of Death and Disaster.”

  The chapter began with a discussion of comets as signs of tragedy. It told of the fiery comet seen in England in 1066, the year the Normans invaded and conquered the island. A comet had blazed in the Roman sky the night before Julius Caesar was assassinated in the Forum. Lewis sniffed impatiently. He knew all about comets, and they were nothing to be afraid of. They were icy balls of stone and frozen water whizzing in long, warped orbits about the sun. When they came hurtling in from the depths of space, the sun heated the ice on them and the vapor trailed out behind the comet in what looked like a glowing tail. But he was sure comets didn’t really foretell death or disaster. Well, pretty sure.

  For Lewis was what Rose Rita called a worrywart. His problem was that he had a very active imagination. That was usually good, but too often Lewis used it to picture threats or calamities that had little or no chance of actually happening. Now as he read farther into the book, he hit something that he had often heard people talk about: the Curse of Three.

  “Many in this kingdom,” Dr. Fraser had written, “firmly hold that deaths and other catastrophes invariably come in threes. If a great personage should die, many an old woman will then solemnly proclaim the death is a sign that within a few days a second will follow, and not until a third celebrated lord or lady dies will the curse be lifted.” The chapter went on to mention other types of bad things that happen in threes: earthquakes, storms, losses in war, and many instances of bad luck.

  “Hey, Lewis!”

  He jumped about a foot, even though he was sitting down, and he choked on the cracker he had been chewing. Lewis scrambled up out of the lawn chair, turning it over, and coughed and sputtered, spraying crumbs.

  A contrite-looking Rose Rita stood nearby. “Hey,” she said again in a small voice, “I didn’t mean to scare you half to death! You okay?” She thumped him on the back.

  Lewis gasped for air and took a long drink of milk. “You didn’t scare me,” he rasped at last. “Crumb just went down the wrong way, that’s all.”

  “You okay now?”

  Lewis nodded, but his face felt hot and red. “What are you up to?” he wheezed, trying to make his voice sound normal and not succeeding.

  “A bunch of the kids are organizing a baseball game down at the athletic field,” said Rose Rita. “It sounds like a lot of good players are going to be there, so I thought you might want to go and join in.”

  Lewis made a face. Though he was no longer the tubby kid he had been years ago when he first came to New Zebedee, following the tragic death of both of his parents in a car crash, no one would call him athletic. Clumsy, self-conscious, and hesitant, Lewis wasn’t much good at sports. Whenever he played, the team leaders always picked him last of all, and at that they would stick him in right field.

  “I’m not in the mood,” Lewis complained to Rose Rita. “I had my day all planned. I was going to lie here and read my book and enjoy the sunshine.”

  “But you’re in the shade,” protested Rose Rita with a laugh. “Oh, come on. At least walk over there with me. If you don’t feel like playing, you don’t have to. Somebody told me that Mr. Detmeyer will be umpiring.”

  Lewis gave a resigned shrug. He knew better than to argue with Rose Rita when she fell into a determined mood. And he did like Mr. Detmeyer, a lanky, bald old retired man who hung out at the firehouse and who in his youth had played second base for a minor-league team called the Spiders, out east somewhere. Mr. Detmeyer spun great yarns, and he claimed that he didn’t become a major leaguer because during an exhibition game he caught barehanded a sizzling line drive hit by the great Babe Ruth. It had broken every single bone in his right hand, he said, and that ended his hopes for a professional career—“But I put Babe Ruth out!” he always finished with pride.

  Even though his playing days were long behind him, Mr. Detmeyer was nuts about baseball and always coached Little League, and if you asked him to come along and umpire at a pickup game, he would gladly go. The kids all liked him, and nobody ever questioned one of his calls.

  Lewis grunted, and Rose Rita grinned as if she knew she had persuaded him. “Let me put my stuff away,” he said, reaching for his plate, glass, and book. Rose Rita followed him inside. Lewis rinsed the plate and glass in the sink and left them there. He and his uncle were not exactly slobs, but they took their time about doing housework. Later that evening, one of them would wash and the other would dry. Lewis left the book on a shelf in the study, where Uncle Jonathan was chatting with Mrs. Zimmermann. Lewis told him where they were going, and he nodded. “Have fun, you two,” he said.

  Lewis really didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but as he went back into the hall, he heard Mrs. Zimmermann tell his uncle, “I’m only suggesting that you showed off a little too much at the party. You should hear some of the stories that are going around. Even the unimaginative grown-ups are starting to wonder about those fancy fireworks of yours.”

  Uncle Jonathan chuckled. “Frizzy Wig, parents know their kids exaggerate! Just because you’re a real magician with a fancy foreign degree, don’t begrudge me a little conjuring show now and again. My old magic teacher once told me, ‘You may never be able to do much more than create illusions, but at least you should enjoy that!’”

  “Come on, Lewis,” said Rose Rita from the front door, and Lewis followed her, hoping that his uncle hadn’t made trouble for himself with the party.

  Lewis and Rose Rita walked down High Street to where it intersected with Mansion Street, and then down the hill past Rose Rita’s house and past the Masonic Temple, and on through town. New Zebedee’s buildings were old and varied, with many ornate Victorian houses. The four-block business district was, basically, Main Street, lined with brick stores, most of them boasting high false fronts. At the west end of Main Street the town fountain sprayed a shimmering willow-tree-shaped plume of water from within a circle of white marble columns. Lewis and Rose Rita walked past it, enjoying the cool drift of mist that trailed over them, and then down toward the athletic field, near the Bowl-Mor bowling alley. Long before they got there, Lewis could hear the crack of a baseball bat and the excited yells of kids.

  They were a little late. Two teams were already on the field. “Sorry,” Lewis said. “It looks like both teams are full. You won’t be able to play.”

  “There’ll be other games,” Rose Rita said philosophically. “I enjoy watching too. Let’s get a good seat.” About a dozen kids and even a few older people sat on the bleachers watching the game. Just as Lewis and Rose
Rita got to the stands, the pitcher, a kid named Bobby Bielski, whipped a blazing fast one high, hard, and inside, right past the batter, Buzzy Logan. Smack! The ball slapped into the catcher’s mitt, and from behind the plate Mr. Detmeyer screeched, “Stee-rike thu-ree! You’re out o’ there!”

  The teams changed places, and Rose Rita said, “Hey, look, there’s Hal Everit. C’mon, we can sit with him.”

  Hal sat about three benches up on the far side of the bleachers, all by himself. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees and his cupped hands supporting his chin. Rose Rita clambered up to sit beside him and said cheerfully, “Hi, Hal. What’s the score?”

  “Oh, hi, Rose Rita. I thought you’d be here! Nobody has made a score,” replied Hal. “Hi, Lewis.”

  “Hi,” said Lewis, sitting down on the other side of Rose Rita. “Why aren’t you playing?”

  Hal scrunched up his face. “Aw, I’m no good. I can’t hit for beans, and I’m too slow to play the field.”

  “I know how that is,” said Lewis. The two exchanged sympathetic smiles.

  Buzz Logan’s team threw the ball around, warming up, and then Punchy Fain took the mound. Punchy was a tall, skinny kid a year older than Lewis. Punchy had a good curveball and a fair slider. With the crowd chanting, “Batter, batter, batter,” he got two strikes and one ball on the first batter, and then the batter looped a long lazy fly to center field, where Buzz trotted backward and easily caught it. “Uh, Lewis, thanks for the invite to your house. Uh, that was a good party,” Hal said in a quiet voice, as if he felt embarrassed.

  “Thanks,” replied Lewis. “I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

  “Your uncle’s pretty neat,” added Hal. “You’re lucky. My dad ran off an’ left Mom and me a couple of years ago, and then she lost her job, and we had to move from a nice house to a crummy one—bad things happen in threes, they say. Anyhow, I wish I had an uncle.”