The Vengeance of the Witch-Finder Page 4

  “No,” said Bertie slowly. “Mr. Barnavelt has talked about the maze from time to time. He’s always meaning to have Jenkins trim it into shape, but he never gets around to it. I’m sure that Mr. Barnavelt doesn’t know about any secret inside the maze, and if he doesn’t know, then no one does.” His voice became excited and eager: “I say, I think you really have discovered something! Let’s go together.” When Lewis did not answer at once, Bertie added, “Come on, please let me explore with you. I could be your Dr. Watson, and you could be Sherlock Holmes.”

  That decided Lewis. “Very well,” he said, trying to make his voice sound deep and brave. “I have my, uh, dark lantern with me. The game’s afoot! Come along, Watson, and we shall unravel this mystery!” Despite his misgivings, Lewis grinned. It felt great to be playing the role of the brave detective.

  Bertie led the way out of the grove of trees. Since he could hardly see anyway, it made no difference to him whether it was day or night. In a few minutes the two friends stood at the entrance to the maze. They went inside. The leafy walls loomed all around them, green and impenetrable in the glow from the flashlight. Lewis studied the copy of the map as they made all the twists and turns. “What do you think it is?” asked Bertie after a minute or two. “The secret in the center, I mean?”

  “I don’t know,” said Lewis. “It looks like a kind of hidden compartment. It’s almost square, and it looks hollow. If the map is right, it should be about the size of a small room. It might be anything.”

  “Treasure, perhaps?” asked Bertie in an excited tone.

  “Sure!” said Lewis. “Why not? Maybe the Barnavelts hid their family valuables there when the Civil War broke out. We might find jewels and gold and silver. We could be rich!”

  “I wish—” began Bertie. He broke off and then said, “No, never mind.”

  “What?” asked Lewis. They had stopped at an intersection, and he was studying the map in the flashlight beam. “Come on. Holmes and Watson don’t keep secrets from each other.”

  “Well, I wish we might find enough money so that I could travel to America,” whispered Bertie. “My mum is saving so that we can go there someday. The doctors here think I might—that an operation could—” He broke off and sniffled. “Oh, what’s the use?”

  Lewis’s conscience gave him a twinge of regret. He had lain in the dark for hours trying to work up the courage to come out here. Bertie had been in the dark for years, and he had jumped at the chance to come out into the spooky maze at midnight. There was real bravery. Lewis cleared his throat. “An operation might let you see again?”

  “Yes,” said Bertie. “It’s chancy, though.”

  “But you have to go to America for the operation, huh?”

  “Yes,” said Bertie. “You see, there are only a few surgeons in the world who would even try it. The best of them is a specialist in New York City. But it will take years and years to save up the money for the trip. And every year that I stay blind means the operation has a smaller chance of success.”

  Lewis took a deep breath. Oh, well, he thought, the maze isn’t all that scary, even at night. Not if there’s a friend along. He clapped Bertie on the shoulder. “Come along, Watson,” he said. “Perhaps we may find the answer to our problems at the center of the maze!”

  The two friends plunged ahead, following the twisty course of the labyrinth. Before long they stood in the narrow part of the maze before the mossy stone bench. “All right,” said Lewis. “According to the map, the secret space is just behind this hedge. Now we have to find our way through!”

  That proved easier said than done. The hedges grew very thick. Lewis could find no way to penetrate them. He and Bertie ranged all around the central square without success. Finally they sat on the chilly stone bench and pondered. The flashlight batteries were beginning to weaken, and the beam of light was now a little yellowish. “I guess the only way in is to cut through the hedges,” said Lewis with a sigh. “And we’d better not do that.”

  “No,” said Bertie, sounding disappointed. “I don’t believe Mr. Barnavelt would like that. You’d think that the map would show a way in.”

  Lewis studied the map again. This time he noticed something he hadn’t before. The little rectangle that represented the stone bench looked funny, somehow. Lewis realized that the line showing the hedge passed right through it. Had the original been split that way, or had he made a mistake in copying? Lewis thought back. He was almost sure that his copy of the map was accurate. Still, what did it mean? The back of the bench was right against the hedge. It was impossible for the shrubbery to grow right through the middle of the bench.

  Unless, he thought, there was another bench just like this one inside the secret opening.

  Lewis jumped off the bench. “Aha!” he shouted. “Now I have it!”

  Bertie rose. “What is it, Lewis?” he asked.

  Lewis got on his hands and knees. Tall grass and weeds grew thickly in front of the bench. He pushed these away and shone his flashlight beam under the bench. He saw a dark opening. “Here,” he said. “This is the way in. We have to crawl under the bench!”

  Bertie groped, felt the edge of the seat, and dropped to his knees. “I’ll go first,” he said. He crept out of sight.

  Lewis, left alone on his side of the bench, felt his heart racing. All his borrowed bravery had evaporated. The dark, narrow opening was like the jaws of death. Still, his stalwart friend had gone through—

  “I say!” Bertie called. “There’s a building or something in here!”

  Lewis took a deep breath and drew on all his resolve. “I’m coming, Watson,” he said. Then he crawled beneath the bench and into the strange clearing at the heart of the maze.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Wow!” Lewis stood in a graveled clearing. It was not like the paths through the maze. Not a blade of grass or a spear of weed grew here. However, it was obvious that no groundskeeper took care of the weeding and mowing. The place looked as if no one had been inside it in years. The hedges were even more untidy on this side, although their branches twisted away from the central open space. Oddly, no dead leaves had collected on this side, although the gravel underfoot lay old and black from years of weathering. Behind Lewis was a stone bench, just like the one on the other side of the hedge. Except this one was clear of moss. It was as if plant life refused to flourish in this secret enclosure. The whole place was weird and spooky. And the spookiest thing in the clearing stood right in front of Lewis.

  The “building” that Bertie had mentioned was a small brick structure. It came up to Lewis’s chest—about three and a half feet, he estimated. The brick was pale red and crumbling. The top of the structure was concrete, with rounded edges so that rain would run off. In the very center of the top was a dome. It was about the size of Mrs. Zimmermann’s largest mixing bowl, if the bowl were inverted to rest on its rim. This dome was made of concrete too, like the rest of the lid. “What do you think it is?” asked Bertie, running his hand over the brick.

  “I don’t know,” admitted Lewis. It might be anything. It could be some kind of storage building, though it was very low for that purpose. It might be a doghouse—it might even be a dog apartment, with spaces for half a dozen hounds to sleep. Or it might be a tomb. Lewis shuddered, feeling goose bumps rise on his arms and legs. “Do you have a strange feeling?” he asked Bertie, his voice a squeak.

  “Yes,” Bertie whispered. “It’s like, oh, like the whole world is holding its breath. But I think you should take a good look at this thing. It’s what we came for, isn’t it?”

  “You’re right.” Lewis clenched his teeth. What good would it do to come this far and then go back without really exploring? None at all. He hoped the batteries in his flashlight would hold out for a while longer. “Come on. Let’s find the entrance.”

  They walked slowly around the brick structure. It was about three feet wide by five feet long. It really was too small to be a tomb, Lewis told himself. At least, too small for an adu
lt tomb. Bertie might fit inside—or Lewis. Stop that! Lewis told himself silently. Whatever the thing was, it looked solid. And as their trip around it proved, it had no entrance at all. The four walls were all unbroken by any opening, as was the concrete lid.

  “Nothing,” said Lewis. “No doors, no grates, no way in.” He had to admit that he felt relieved. His courage had been stretched very far already tonight. He did not know if it could stand much more tension without snapping altogether.

  “Perhaps there’s a secret door,” suggested Bertie. “Let’s look again.”

  Lewis sighed. He had no better suggestion, so the two went slowly around the brick construction once again, this time feeling for concealed levers or buttons that might release a hidden door and cause it to pivot open, the way fireplaces and bookcases were always doing in the movies. They found nothing at all. Finally, Lewis said, “Well, we can tell Cousin Pelly that this thingamajig is here, anyway. Maybe he can find a way to open it up. Or maybe he won’t even mind smashing into the thing. I guess it could be a vault concealing the Barnavelt family treasure.”

  Bertie nodded in a disappointed way. “All right,” he said. “But it would be ever so much more fun to find out what’s inside ourselves.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Lewis. “But my flashlight won’t last too much longer, and I don’t wanna be around here when it’s pitch dark.”

  “Your flashlight? Oh—you mean your electric torch.”

  “Yeah,” said Lewis. He had forgotten for the moment that the English had lots of different names for things. The “hood” of a car was the car’s roof to an Englishman. What an American called the hood was the “bonnet” to the English. A flashlight was an electric torch here. Jonathan had told Lewis that someone had described the Americans and the English as “two cultures divided by a common language.” Now Lewis said to Bertie, “Well, my, uh, torch is starting to burn kind of low, so maybe we’d better start back.”

  “I can find our way back even in the dark,” Bertie said. “I don’t need a light—”

  “Bertie,” said Lewis, in an exasperated voice. “It’s late and it’s cold and my feet are wet. It’s time to give up and go back home.”

  “All right,” sighed Bertie. Lewis could tell that his friend was downcast by this turn of events. The two crunched around the edge of the brick vault—for Lewis now thought of the structure as a vault of some kind—and headed for the stone bench. The pathway between the hedge and the vault was only a couple of feet wide. It was even narrower at the bench, because the bench took up part of the room.

  “I’ll go first this time,” Lewis said. He bent over and dropped to all fours. The sharp gravel was uncomfortable beneath his hands and knees. He had to squirm to make an abrupt turn here in order to get his head and shoulders beneath the bench. He braced one foot against the brick vault and pushed himself forward. Something gave with a hollow, grating sound.

  “What was that?” asked Bertie. “Did you hear that?”

  Lewis backed out and stood up again. “I heard it,” he said. “I think there’s a loose brick here somewhere.” He directed his flashlight beam against the bricks. They all looked crumbly and weathered. He crouched and began to run his hands over them. “It was right in here somewhere.”

  Bertie hunched down beside him and began to feel the bricks too. They shoved and tugged, but all seemed solid. Then Bertie cried out, “Here’s something!” He pushed again, and a brick wriggled in place, sending a little shower of red dust down. “This one is loose.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Lewis. He pushed the brick too. The mortar around the edges had disintegrated over the years. Friction alone held the brick in its place. “You work that end of it,” directed Lewis, “and I’ll see what I can do with this one.”

  The two rocked the brick back and forth in a sort of seesaw motion. At first it would barely move. Then it loosened and began to slip back. A little patter of brick dust and particles showered down onto the gravel. Now when Bertie pushed his end, Lewis’s swung out about a quarter of an inch. Lewis tried to grasp the brick between his thumb and fingers, but the edges were rounded and worn smooth, and he could not get a good grip. “Rock it some more,” he said to Bertie.

  They must have spent five or six minutes at the task. Gradually Lewis became aware that the moon was up, bright enough to give them some light. He switched off the flashlight to save the batteries. They ground away at the brick some more. The brick slipped back in its place. When they paused, it was definitely sunken, its face an inch or more farther into the wall than those of the surrounding bricks. “A little more,” said Bertie, exploring with his fingers the edge of the opening they were making. “If it won’t come out this way, maybe we can push it through.”

  Scrape. Grind. By fractions of inches, the brick moved. Lewis’s fingers began to ache from the pressure. He was sweating and getting grumpy. After all, he thought, what will this get us? We sure can’t squeeze through this hole, and we might not even be able to look through it to see what’s inside—

  Plop! The brick dropped through. Lewis caught his breath. He reached for his flashlight. It rolled away on the gravel, and he fumbled to pick it up. He began, “Let’s have a look—”

  Whoosh! Hot air blasted into his face from the hole the brick had left. Lewis gagged. The air stank of rot and decay. Bertie cried out.

  And something laughed, something big and horrible. Lewis screamed. He found the flashlight, but now he had no interest in peering into the vault. “Run!” he yelled to Bertie.

  Bertie was already worming his way through the opening beneath the stone bench. As soon as his legs disappeared, Lewis followed. The horrible laugh sounded again. It was deep, sinister, and angry. It bubbled in an awful way, as if it were coming from a huge, decaying chest. Something with claws closed on Lewis’s ankle, and he yanked his foot away. He heard a terrifying growl as he popped through the opening and into the maze. Then he began to run. His Sherlock Holmes hat nearly fell off. He clapped one hand on top to hold it on, and with the other he tried to find the switch for his flashlight. He ran into a hedge, all prickly twigs and branches.

  And it grabbed him.

  Lewis felt the thin branches curling down to hold his arms and legs. He screamed and flailed away. The branches snapped and tore. He finally got the flashlight on, and the first thing he saw was bright-red blood oozing from the broken twigs.

  At first Lewis had the panicky thought that he had been wounded—then he saw that the blood was coming from the broken branches! The bleeding hedge writhed away from the light. With a shriek, Lewis beat at the pieces of twig that had curled around his arms. They were creeping over his windbreaker, humping and lifting their blunt ends like horrible worms. He flicked them off and staggered away. Something snuffled behind him, sounding like a gigantic hound hot on his trail. He ran desperately down the dark alley of one of the hedge paths.

  “I see thee!” Lewis heard the voice inside his head. It was a soft voice, mocking and ancient and evil. He did not dare look back. He took another turn, and then another. He was completely lost in the maze now. “Aye, run!” purred the voice. “It makes the chase so much more interesting.” Somehow Lewis could tell that the voice came from overhead.

  He looked up, dreading what he would see. At first there was nothing: just the starry sky and the moon beaming down through the narrow space at the top of the hedges. Then Lewis realized that the moon was wrong. He had seen the Man in the Moon before, the illusory face caused by the seas and the craters on the full moon. This was different. The pale, waning moon had an odd shape, and the markings on it were growing darker—

  “Now I have thee!” The moon had become a leering skull. The eye sockets were dark and endless, and two hateful red sparks glowed deep in them, staring down at Lewis. The skull was missing teeth both top and bottom, and the gap-toothed mouth swung open in an awful, soundless laugh. “Now I have thee!” the voice said again, and this time the skull’s mouth moved in rhythm with the words.

/>   Lewis screamed, but all that came out was a high-pitched, thin screech. He closed his eyes and blundered on. Again he heard growls, and then a snuffling sound behind him, and the hedges began to rustle. It was as if a monstrous animal, a lion or a tiger, were squeezing its way through the hedge walls, running him down. It was a trick, some part of Lewis’s mind shouted at him. The hideous skull-moon was a trick, making him freeze and hesitate until the—the thing behind him could catch up.

  He desperately turned a corner.

  And found himself trapped.

  He had run into a dead end.

  Lewis whirled. He shone his flashlight down the maze path. The leaves and twigs moved at the very edge of the beam. He heard a coughing roar. Twin spots of green suddenly glowed at him, like the eyes of a beast. But the growling, stalking creature itself was invisible. Lewis thought he would faint. He tried to scream again and could only hiss—

  “This way!” Something grabbed his arm! He felt himself being tugged into the hedge wall! Lewis struggled to escape. “It’s me!” the voice cried. “It’s Bertie!”

  The invisible creature roared again. Lewis scrambled through the scratching hedges. “You’re almost free,” Bertie panted. “Come on!”

  With a final effort Lewis jerked his leg loose. They were on the grass outside the hedge maze, not far from the side entrance of the house. “Run for the Manor!” shouted Bertie.

  Lewis realized that they had not escaped yet. Something was clawing at the hedges and soon would be through. He heard hoarse rasps of breath, low growls. Following Bertie, Lewis turned and ran as fast as he could up the hillside. He dashed across the asphalt driveway—

  And tripped.

  Lewis went sprawling in the wet grass. He lost his grip on the flashlight. It hit the ground, flared brightly, and went out.