The Bell, the Book, and the Spellbinder Page 11

  "Fergie!"

  "The book!" croaked Fergie in an awful old-man's voice. "I must save the book!" He pushed Johnny aside.

  Johnny turned to scream for help, but what he saw froze him. Thanatos had spread his arms, holding his cloak out to the sides. Leaping from the tower, he seemed to glide like a bat. He soared through the air, over the unconscious Professor Childermass, over the reeling Father Higgins. He landed twenty feet away, his thin face writhing, his hands clenched like twisted, bony claws. "Boy, I will torment you worse than your worst nightmares!"

  Johnny looked around fearfully. Fergie had retrieved the book. He stood there clutching it to his chest. His eyes were blank and mindless. No help there.

  Or was there? With a sudden crazy inspiration, Johnny tore off his windbreaker and kicked off his shoes. He ran past Fergie. "Last one in's a rotten egg!" he shouted, and he did a passable cannonball. Splash! He came up gasping—the water was icy! Fergie had turned and stared down at him.

  "Hey, chicken!" shouted Johnny. "C'mon in. It's freezing, man! Betcha won't come!"

  Fergie took an uncertain step onto the swaying pier.

  Behind him, Thanatos stopped, his arm stretched out. "Here!" he shrieked. "Here, I command you!"

  Fergie stopped.

  Desperately, Johnny shouted, "C'mon, you big fat chicken. I dare you. I double dare you! Let's see that famous Ferguson swan dive! Or are you chicken? Buck-buck-buck!"

  Something snapped in Fergie. With an inarticulate cry, he took three running steps and went off the pier, headfirst. Thanatos leaped forward—

  Fergie went into the water as smoothly as if he were in his swim trunks, not his motorcycle outfit. He came up like a porpoise, his eyes wide in shock and astonishment. In his hands, the book melted. It ran in a black, chunky rivulet through his fingers, looking like dirty, clotted motor oil.

  And on the shore, the running figure of Thanatos melted too. His features flowed and ran. An ear slipped down the side of his neck. His nose dripped across his chin. The flesh on his outstretched arm drooled away, leaving a bare bone, and then that flowed like white wax. In two steps he was a dissolving lump, and in another second he was a greasy, gray puddle.

  "Man!" said Fergie in a stunned voice. "What happened?"

  Johnny looked at his friend and shouted in joy. Fergie's hair was growing darker. It was pale gray, then iron-gray, and finally black and curly. The two boys floundered up to the shore. Father Higgins was there already, holding Johnny's glasses in his left hand, reaching out his right to help them, and close behind him was the professor, still carrying the shovel. As soon as the shivering boys were out of the water, Professor Childermass stared in disgust at the messy puddle that had been Jarmyn Thanatos. He scooped up shovel after shovel of it and flung it into the lake. When the earth was clean again, he said, "Johnny, you've got extra clothes in the car. What we're going to do about you, Byron, I don't know, but we'll find some way to keep you from freezing to death. And, Byron, I don't want to make you feel self-conscious, but it's great to have you back!" And he threw his arms around the embarrassed Fergie, gave him a hug, and then said, "Father Higgins, lead the way! Men, forward march, on the double!" He turned to the lake, and in a harsh voice he added, "Jarmyn Thanatos, may you rot there forever."

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  "Are you sure you feel all right again, Byron?"

  Fergie made a face. "Aw, Prof that's only the seven hundredth time you've asked me that in the last month. I'm fine!"

  It was a warm day in June. School had just ended, and Father Higgins and the professor had taken Fergie, Johnny, and Sarah on a little outing up to Dr. Coote's vacation cottage on Lake Winnepesaukee in New Hampshire. They had been swimming, they had gorged on charcoal-grilled hot dogs and hamburgers and the professor's homemade potato salad, and now they were sitting lazily in lawn chairs, listening to the distant drone of motorboats. The sky was a rich blue, with lots of fluffy white cumulus clouds. The hickory scent of charcoal hung in the warm summer air. From a tall blue-green fir nearby, an enthusiastic mockingbird sang his whole repertoire of bird imitations. It was a perfect afternoon.

  "So opposites were the key to Jarmyn Cudbright's magic," Dr. Coote was saying. "He wished to work in secret—and so he had to announce his nefarious doings by the ringing of a bell, real or illusory. He wished to become young—so someone else had to grow old. All opposites, you see."

  "Fortunately, Byron liquidated him before he could complete his work," said Professor Childermass.

  Dr. Coote nodded. "Opposites again. I should have guessed it would be water. Cudbright believed in astrology, and as he told Nostradamus in his letter, he was an Aries. That is a fire sign. Its opposite, water, would be malevolent toward Cudbright in all aspects."

  "No one could have guessed that water would send the old devil to his just reward," said Professor Childermass in a low voice. "It took the poor dying Tommy McCorkle to scratch his warning for us—and even then we didn't understand it and were almost lost. Fortunately, John Michael had a sudden—ahem!—flash of inspiration and saved our bacon. And speaking of loss, has your father adjusted to losing his job at Baxter Motors, Byron?"

  Fergie grinned. "I wish I'd been there when he told old man Baxter off. That must have been somethin'! 'I won't work,' Dad said, 'for a liar, a cheat, and a fraud.' An' he walked out, an' some other guys who were fed up with old Baxter clapped their hands! When I heard about it, I felt kinda proud of my old man, y'know? But, yeah, it worked out just fine. Mom an' Dad thought I'd run off because they were fightin' about money, see, an' Dad decided I was worth more to him than the job. I guess it's better for them to think I'd run away than to let 'em know what really happened, so I kinda clammed up about that crazy book and Old Creepy Crawly."

  Johnny said, "But Fergie's got more news. His dad has another job already—and a better one."

  "Yeah," agreed Fergie. "Turns out that the company Dad traveled for wanted him back. Only not as a salesman. He's gonna be the new district manager. He'll have an office in the First National Bank Building, with a good salary, an' he only has to travel a little now an' then. Mom is lots happier now that he's happy again."

  "All's well that ends well," said Father Higgins with a smile. "But it's fortunate for all of us that Jarmyn Thanatos made a crucial mistake. He chose a stubborn, bullheaded, semi-delinquent for his victim instead of some good Catholic boy."

  "Hey, no fair," objected Fergie. "Betcha Dixon there could've foxed him just as good as me. Maybe even better, right, John baby?"

  "I'd hate to try," said Johnny. "Better you than me, Fergie." He smiled at his friend.

  But Sarah was frowning. "I still don't understand how Thanatos kept those mice alive," she said.

  Dr. Coote shivered. "Ugh! I hate to think about them. Well, it's only a guess, but I think that the mice were dead all along. Thanatos preserved their bodies and put a spell on them so they would move and squeak and eat just as if they were alive. But the spell was designed to last for only ten years or so, not eighty. The horrible creature that I had stored away was one of those dead mice. The trouble was that over the years the body had dried out and had become little more than a mouse mummy." He looked pale. "Anyway, I'd rather not talk about it. Mice upset me, and moving, mummified mice upset me even more."

  "Well," said Sarah, "I was pretty upset that I missed all the excitement. You guys tore off to Maine and left me behind. I don't think that's fair at all."

  "We didn't exactly have a lot of time to spare," pointed out the professor. "And you more than did your part when you discovered the tricky magician was heading for Maine. Without you, Fergie would be a gone goose."

  "I just hate missing out," complained Sarah.

  "You didn't miss anything," Fergie assured her. "I can't remember very much toward the end, except bein' in the dark. But man, was I terrified. He made me read th' whole book, page after page. An' all the time he was complainin' that we had to do it too quick, that I'd only be good for ten or fif
teen years, not the sixty or seventy he'd counted on."

  "Did you know what he was up to?" asked Sarah.

  Fergie hung his head. "Yeah. It was all in the book. But the more I read, the less I could do about it." He shivered. "How old was Thanatos, anyhow?"

  Dr. Coote shrugged his thin shoulders. "Who knows? More than three hundred years, at any rate. His motto was Quis acognoscit mortem, acognoscit artem mortem super antis. Or, in English, 'He who knows death knows the art of overcoming it.' But you know, I don't believe he had found a true secret of earthly immortality. He renewed himself and was young again time after time, but he lost something of himself each time he did it. Once, say two hundred years ago, he might have been a great and powerful magician, capable of dominating the world. But by the time you met him, he had worn away to little more than an insane desire to prolong his life indefinitely. I think he was quite mad."

  "Well, he is now just some rather unsightly sediment at the bottom of a rather polluted pond," retorted Professor Childermass. "And good riddance to him! Attention, all! I have just realized that we still have two perfectly good burgers on the tray next to the grill. Sarah, would you care for one?"

  With a smile, she said, "Sorry, Professor. I'd pop if I tried to scarf down one more."

  "Fergie? John?"

  Johnny shook his head, but with a mischievous grin, Fergie said, "C'mon, Dixon. I dare ya."

  "Oh, yeah, Ferguson? Bet I can eat one faster than you can," declared Johnny, returning his grin. "I double dare ya!"

  Each boy grabbed a burger and began to wolf it down, drops of mustard and ketchup squirting wildly. The sloppy race wasn't very pretty, but it was funny enough to make Professor Childermass double over with laughter. Sarah made a disgusted face, but she had to laugh too. Everyone joined in, and the joyful sound floated out over the placid mountain lake.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1997 by The Estate of John Bellairs

  Cover design by Open Road Integrated Media

  ISBN 978-1-4976-1462-8

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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