The Bell, the Book, and the Spellbinder Read online

  "Huh," snorted Fergie. "Okay, Mr. Whosis, I'll play along. I wish my dad had a job that paid him so good he didn't have to travel. What about that?"

  He turned the page. And blinked. He felt his heart trying to climb up his throat and jump out his mouth. There was his own father's name—and his. Swallowing hard, Fergie frantically began to read:

  Mr. Ferguson hardly suspected that when he had trouble with his automobile on his way back to Duston Heights he would ask help from a passerby who owned a thriving business. When he began to speak to the stranger, he had no way of knowing that the prosperous fellow would offer him a good job before their talk was through. And when he accepted the job offer, Mr. Ferguson could only look ahead with eager anticipation to the pleasure his announcement would give to his wife, Alice, and to their son, Byron. They would be so happy, and he would not have to travel ever again!

  And Fergie would be secretly proud that he had given his father the opportunity. He would not even mind the small price that he had to pay.

  Bo-o-o-n-nng!

  The thunderous peal of the bell made Fergie jump and yelp. The book fell closed, and he leaped out of bed, shoved the chair over to the closet, and stuck the mysterious volume back in his hiding place. He slammed the closet door shut and went running downstairs. He reached the kitchen doorway and froze, holding onto the door frame. His mother stood at the sink, washing the breakfast dishes, and she looked around in alarm. "What's wrong?" she asked with a gasp.

  "Uh—did you hear somethin' just now?" panted Fergie.

  "I heard you running downstairs like a herd of rhinos," his mother replied, drying her hands on a white dish towel.

  "When—when's Dad comin' home?" asked Fergie.

  Mrs. Ferguson frowned at her son. "Why? You know he won't be back until next Friday afternoon," she said. "He still has all of his New Hampshire territory to visit."

  Fergie tried to keep his voice steady. "Have—have you heard from him? I mean, in the last coupla days?"

  "He called me last night from Burlington," said Mrs. Ferguson.

  "An'—an' he was all right and everything? Did he, uh, say anything about his job or—or anything?" finished Fergie lamely.

  Looking worried, Mrs. Ferguson shook her head. "No, dear. He just said he was looking forward to coming home again."

  Fergie closed his eyes and pictured the family's car, an old blue Ford. Then he asked one more question: "Did he say anything about the car actin' up?"

  "No, son," said his mother. "Are you sure you're all right? You look a little feverish."

  "Mom, I'm fine, okay?" Fergie took a long, shaky breath. The Book of True Wishes, huh? Well, it sure didn't seem to be doing its job! So much for magic and sorcery and all that baby stuff! Fergie turned in the doorway and stalked toward the front door. "I'm goin' out," he said.

  "Where are you going?" his mom asked.

  "Out," Fergie yelled over his shoulder. He got his leather jacket from the hall closet and shrugged into it.

  Mrs. Ferguson followed him into the hall. "But Byron, when will you—"

  "I'll be back when I get back!" snapped Fergie. He banged out the door. Something made him look over his shoulder. His mom stood in the doorway, her hands clasped in front of her apron, an expression of distress on her face. Fergie almost waved at her in a reassuring way. But then he heard, or imagined he heard, a voice: "Don't bother with her. You've got big things ahead of you."

  And so he hunched into his jacket, lowered his head, and went trotting off into a warm spring morning, heading for the athletic field. He was glad to get away from home, he told himself. He was really looking forward to playing flies and grounders with Johnny and Sarah. That would get his mind off that loopy book, off the strange man in the library, and off his mother, who lately had developed a real knack for getting on his nerves. Still, when Fergie thought about how worried his mother had looked, his stomach seemed to fall.

  And so he decided not to think about her anymore. Maybe never again, in fact.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The rest of the weekend passed quietly. The next week began with warm, sunny skies, and the people of Duston Heights began to think that spring had arrived at last, but the balmy weather did not improve Johnny's spirits. He and Sarah had played a few rounds of flies and grounders with Fergie on Saturday. Fergie wasn't his usual cheerful self, but glum and gruff. He had left their game early, and they hadn't seen him again. Then the weekend was over, and school was back in session and Johnny got busy studying for a big Latin test.

  But he didn't stop thinking about his friend, and he and Sarah talked the matter over. On Wednesday after they left school, Sarah suggested that they head over to Haggstrum College, where both Professor Childermass and Sarah's dad taught. She thought they might be able to find something about Mr. Jarmyn Thanatos in the college library. As the dependent of a faculty member, she had a library card, and the college library staff seemed to know her well.

  She and Johnny went through the card catalogue without finding any books by or about Mr. Thanatos. Then Sarah had a bright idea. The Duston Heights newspaper, the Gazette, dated all the way back to before the Civil War, and the college library had shelves of huge oversized volumes of the bound newspaper. Fortunately, the Duston Heights Historical Society had created a set of indexes for the newspapers, and Sarah suggested that she and Johnny tackle these.

  They had to go down into the basement. It was creepy there, with long pine tables scuffed and scarred by generations of students, tall gloomy shelves, and scattered lightbulbs in white metal shades throwing little yellow islands of illumination. The Gazette indexes alone filled most of one shelf, and they hauled a batch of these over to one of the tables, beginning with the index for 1884. They looked for the name Thanatos in each one, and they also checked for the name Childermass, although the professor's father had been on the faculty of Princeton University.

  For a long time they had no luck at all. Finally, Sarah grunted in satisfaction and said, "Here's something, Dixon. Says here that the 1886 papers have three stories about someone named Thanatos. May 10, October 27, and November 14. Let's get them."

  The old newspapers were bound in crinkly maroon covers held together by silvery rivets. Their spines bore a library call number and the months and year of the newspapers each oversized book contained. Two heavy volumes covered 1886, and Johnny pulled both out, releasing a cloud of dust that smelled old and dry and stale. He sniffled and carried the heavy volumes over to the table, where he plumped them down under a light.

  Sarah opened the first one. The newspapers inside were fragile, brown and brittle with age, and she had to turn each page carefully to keep it from flaking away. The Gazette had been published on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays in 1886, and most of the issues had eight pages. These were densely packed with type, and there were no photos or drawings at all—just column after column of old newsprint, with the stories separated by thick black lines. They found the issue for May 10 that the index had listed, and skimmed through all the columns. The story was a small one, on page four. Its headline read, "Mystery in Ellisboro."

  Johnny read through the article. It said that an eleven- year-old boy named Tommy McCorkle, the shy and bookish son of a wealthy banker in the town of Ellisboro, Vermont, had disappeared on Monday, May 3. The town constables had searched everywhere for the boy, and they had questioned one J. Thanatos, who lived in an old house on the edge of town. Someone thought that he had seen Mr. Thanatos talking to Tommy on the afternoon of the third, but Mr. Thanatos had proved that he was elsewhere at the time.

  "This doesn't tell us much," Johnny complained. "We don't even know if it's the same person."

  Sarah rolled her eyes. "C'mon, Dixon. How many J. Thanatoses can there be? It's not a name like John Smith, you know!"

  "Okay, okay," said Johnny. "What's the next story?"

  The next one was from October 27. Its headline read, "Mystery of Missing Boy Deepens." Johnny frowned. A frightened boy
had told an Ellisboro constable that he had seen the face of his friend Tommy McCorkle looking out of a second-floor window of Jarmyn Thanatos's house. When officials investigated, they found the place completely locked up and apparently deserted. After getting a warrant, the constables broke into the old house and searched it thoroughly, but they could find no trace of the missing boy—or of the mysterious Mr. Thanatos.

  "Okay," grunted Johnny. "I have to admit, this is the right guy. Next?"

  The next article was the last one, and it was the most puzzling of all. It was on the front page of the November 14 issue, under the headline "Search for Missing Tommy McCorkle Yields Mysterious Orphan." The article was a long one. Johnny read it, and then he took a deep breath. "What's it say?" demanded Sarah, reaching to tug the bound volume around.

  "Don't bother," said Johnny. "I'll tell you. The police started looking for Mr. Thanatos, but they couldn't find any trace of him. And then they got a letter from the Hannah Duston Orphanage, right here in town."

  "I never heard of an orphanage here," objected Sarah.

  Johnny shrugged impatiently. "It's probably not here anymore. I mean, this was about seventy years ago. Anyhow, the director of the orphanage read in the paper about the search for Tommy McCorkle and about Mr. Thanatos, and when a strange kid showed up on the doorstep of the place, she seemed to think it might be the McCorkle boy. So she telegraphed the Ellisboro police, and Banker McCorkle and Constable Padgett rode down on the train. But they were disappointed, because the kid wasn't Tommy at all. He was the same age as Tommy, but he said he was Adam Nemo, the nephew of Jarmyn Thanatos. And the funny thing was that a letter came the next day from a bank in Duston Heights. It said that Jarmyn Thanatos had opened a substantial savings account for his nephew, and that the boy was not to be adopted out. When he turned eighteen, he was to get all the money in the account. Meanwhile, a check went to the orphanage to pay for his room and board until he could claim the money. But the strangest thing was that when he did turn eighteen—his birthday happened to be October 31—Adam Nemo had to change his name before he could claim the money."

  "Change his name to what?" asked Sarah.

  Johnny stared at her. "To Jarmyn Thanatos," he said in a whisper.

  Sarah shivered. "That's weird," she said.

  They read through more indexes, but they could find no further mention of any Jarmyn Thanatos. Sarah checked for stories about the Hannah Duston Orphanage, though, and she found a very odd one in the 1890s. They looked it up. It was the story of how the Hannah Duston Orphanage had burned to the ground on the night of October 31, 1893. No lives were lost, but the whole structure went up in flames, and all the records that had been stored in the basement were completely burned.

  Sarah counted under her breath: "Eighty-six, eighty-seven, eighty-eight—"

  "What are you doing?" asked Johnny.

  She shook her head and continued counting until she reached ninety-three. Then she stared at Johnny. "Adam Nemo would have had his eighteenth birthday on October 31, 1893," she said. "And then if he wanted to inherit his money, he became Jarmyn Thanatos."

  The name hung in the air between them. Johnny had an attack of goose pimples. He felt as if he were suffocating down there in the dark, stuffy basement. He and Sarah hurried upstairs and out into the warm afternoon sunlight. "What do we do now?" asked Sarah.

  Johnny shook his head. "I don't know. But I think we'd better tell the professor. This is all getting too mysterious, if you ask me."

  "I think you're right," agreed Sarah.

  They hurried away. Neither of them noticed that someone watched them go. It was a short, thin, elderly man with long white hair spreading over his shoulders. He smiled grimly to himself and then went into the library. He stayed for only a few minutes before coming out again. This time when he walked, something rustled in his coat pockets. The sound was whispery and soft, like crumpled sheets of old newspaper.

  * * *

  That night Fergie had a hard time getting to sleep. He tossed and turned for a long time. He tried counting sheep, but that didn't work. He had an old, beat-up Motorola radio beside his bed and he turned it on with the sound very low. He twiddled the dial until he found a station playing some boring music, and he lay and listened to that for a while. None of it seemed to help. He wanted to get out of bed, climb up in the chair, and pull The Book of True Wishes from its hiding place. But with another part of his mind, a stubborn one, he refused to do it. He would wait and see. If his dad came back home on Friday and nothing unusual had happened, then he would toss the book away. And if the crazy things the book said turned out to be true . . . well, he would think about that later.

  It was past midnight when Fergie finally dozed off. Soon he was sleeping deeply, and then he started to have a strange dream. It was the kind of dream he had experienced only a couple of times before, one in which he knew he was dreaming. Yet at the same time everything seemed so real. . . .

  Fergie was walking along a sidewalk in a little town somewhere. The street he was on was full of small white cottages, each with a neat green front yard and a white picket fence. The sidewalk was made of wood, not cement, and the street was unpaved. For some reason things that were a few feet away from Fergie looked blurred and unclear, while objects in the distance were sharp and crisp. He could see humped green mountains far off beyond the vague shapes of buildings. It was silent. No voices called out. No leaf rustled in the wind. All was as still as death.

  Then from behind him came an odd, raspy, metallic noise. Fergie looked around and blinked. A young kid was running down the street toward him. In front of the boy rolled an iron hoop, the kind that used to go around the huge barrels called hogsheads. The running figure held a short T-shaped stick, and with this he kept the hoop rolling.

  But the oddest thing was the way the boy was dressed. He was wearing a blue middy blouse, short pants, and black leather shoes. And his hair was long, curling down over his ears. He reminded Fergie of the picture of Buster Brown that he had seen in shoe stores. "Hey," Fergie yelled.

  The boy paid no attention and rolled his hoop right past. A horse-drawn wagon came clopping along in the other direction. The old gray spotted horse seemed to be doing all the work, because the driver slumped in his seat, chin on chest, asleep.

  "This is a crazy dream," muttered Fergie. Usually his dreams were far more exciting, filled with adventures and chases and pirate fights. He walked along for a while and found himself in the center of a small town. A green park was before him. On the four streets facing the park stood businesses, some with horses tied to hitching posts in front of them. A few people were walking on the wooden sidewalks, all of them dressed in old-fashioned clothing. Fergie spoke to many of them, but none gave the least sign of having heard him.

  The dream dragged on and on. Fergie began to feel nervous. He was like a ghost in this strange world of living shadows. People couldn't see or hear him, and when he tried to touch them, he couldn't. He was always farther away than he thought, or the person made a sudden movement that just eluded him. Inside a dry-goods store, where spools of thread, thimbles, and needles lay on a counter, he tried to pick up something, but everything was impossible to move. It was as if the things had been cemented to the counter. But then a woman in an old-fashioned dress came over and picked up a packet of needles that Fergie had been unable to budge. He got red in the face and yelled at the woman. She turned away. Obviously, she had not even heard him.

  Fergie rushed back into the street. He screamed and leaped. He capered and howled. No one paid him the least attention. By that time Fergie was sweating. This dream had gone on far too long. What if he never woke up? Or what if he were dead, and Catholics were right? This might be purgatory, where he would have to spend thousands of years alone, invisible, an outcast. He might never see Johnny or the professor again, or his mother and father—

  Fergie ran through the streets like a crazy person. He did not watch where he was going, and he did not care. More
than he had ever wanted anything in his whole life, he wanted to wake up. He ran until he could hardly lift his feet, until his breath burned his lungs. Finally, fatigued, he slowed. He plodded along, not wanting to halt. He had the creepy feeling that something was stalking him. Some lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's spooky poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" ran through his mind:

  Like one that on a lonesome road

  Doth walk in fear and dread,

  And having once turned round walks on,

  And turns no more his head;

  Because he knows a frightful fiend

  Doth close behind him tread.

  But at last, exhausted, Fergie stumbled to a stop. And then he saw that he had fled right out of the town. He stood on a hill overlooking the village, a little clump of white houses and buildings gleaming in the sun. He was on a dirt road. And as he stared down into the valley, suddenly, from everywhere at once, came the terrible loud pealing of a great bell, so close that it hurt his ears.

  "I gotta wake up," groaned Fergie. He turned this way and that, looking for any way to escape this deadly dream.

  And then he saw the house. It was behind a grove of trees, some distance away from the road. He could see the upper stories only, and he could see that attached to the house was a bell tower. Somehow he knew that was where the terrible sound was coming from. He had to stop it.

  He turned off the road, down a weedy, overgrown driveway. The ground was rutted and treacherous, and round, smooth stones stuck up to trip him. He pushed through brush and finally came out in front of the old house. The bell tower was on the right, attached to the side of the house, but it had its own door. As Fergie came close, the door slowly opened, as if its hinges were rusty. Another peal of the bell made Fergie's ears ache, but he staggered forward and into the yawning black doorway.

  A stairway ran up the sides of the tower. Fergie began to climb it, grasping the rail, which felt spongy and slimy beneath his hand. When he was halfway up, the bell tolled again, and the whole structure vibrated as if it were about to cave in. Fergie ground his teeth. His eyes were watering. He climbed up, up, up, until he stood on a platform with the bell only a yard away. To his despair, he saw that the bell had no rope or clapper—and yet something had produced that horrible sound. "I gotta climb down," Fergie muttered. "It'd kill me if that thing rang with me right beside it."