The Bell, the Book, and the Spellbinder Page 5

  Dr. Coote looked down on the remains. "It's just as well," he said slowly. "Someone should have destroyed the wretched creature years ago. Gentlemen, that is, or was, the Thanatos mouse. I don't know anything about its origins—"

  "D-Dr. Coote!" Johnny stammered. "Look at it—it's still alive!"

  The pieces of the shattered mouse were still moving feebly. The mouth opened and shut. The front legs tried to drag themselves across the floor. The back legs twitched. With a grunt of disgust, Professor Childermass stamped on the thing, and when he lifted his foot, the three pieces had been ground to powder and loose strands of white hair. Horribly, they kept stirring even then. The professor strode to the fireplace, got the ash shovel and a whisk broom, and swept up the powder. "Charley," he said, "do we bury this or keep it for observation?"

  "Oh, dear," said Dr. Coote. "Bury it. By all means, bury it." The three went into the backyard, where they dug a hole much deeper than seemed to be necessary, and they covered the dust over and packed down the dirt. When they had finished, Dr. Coote said, "Roderick, could this be connected to your Jarmyn Thanatos?"

  "I think it is," growled the professor. "But I'd rather not go into that right now, if you don't mind. Ugh! That creature is going to show up in my nightmares!"

  "Very well, I won't press you," said Dr. Coote. "But do me a favor, please. If you find there's really some diabolical magic going on here, if Thanatos or his nephew is some kind of wicked sorcerer, I would greatly appreciate it if you would make your plans without me. I've had enough excitement already to last me a lifetime, my nerves aren't really very good, and you know I have weak legs—"

  "Charley," said the professor grimly, "you just find out what you can, and leave all the rest to me."

  "To us," said Johnny in a small voice. After all, Fergie was his friend. And if Fergie was in trouble, Johnny knew he had to help him get out of it.

  If, that is, there were any way of helping him—any way at all.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Weeks went by. March turned into a drizzly, cool April, and April wore on toward May. Johnny and Sarah, who were in the same grade at St. Michael's School, studied together, played softball or flies and grounders when the weather was good enough, and every now and then saw a movie. But they did all of these things without Fergie. Sarah, who had known Fergie less than a year, was not as worried about him as Johnny was. "Maybe he's got a girlfriend or something," she told Johnny one day as they walked around the edge of Round Pond. "Or maybe he's just got other friends of his own."

  Johnny shook his head. "He's got other friends, but none of them are really close to him. He plays ball with them and all, but they don't talk about the crazy kind of stuff that we used to." He picked up a pebble and skimmed it across the surface of Round Pond. It skipped four times, leaving expanding circles in its path.

  "Anyhow, Mr. Ferguson's new job is turning out great," said Sarah. "He's selling used cars like nobody's business."

  "I saw the story in the paper," Johnny said. A few days before, Mr. Ferguson's picture had been in the Duston Heights Gazette over a story that said he was the salesman of the month at Baxter Motors. "I even tried to call Fergie and ask him if he wanted an extra copy of the story."

  "What happened?"

  "He said 'No, thanks,' and hung up on me," said Johnny miserably.

  Sarah stopped in her tracks. "Hung up on you?" she asked, her eyes blazing.

  Johnny nodded. "I guess he didn't want to talk."

  "Well, I guess he was just being a rude pest," returned Sarah tartly. "Dixon, friends like that you don't need."

  Later, while he was home alone munching Ritz crackers spread with pimiento cream cheese, listening to music on the radio, and trying to read a book on ancient Mesopotamia, Johnny pondered Sarah's words. He thought back to the time when he and Fergie had first met, at a Boy Scout camp up at Lake Chocorua in the White Mountains. Fergie had been different from any friend that Johnny had ever had. Outgoing, happy-go-lucky, and devil-may-care, Fergie was willing to take any chance if he thought he would have a good time doing it. He and Johnny had gotten themselves into some pretty dangerous situations a time or two, but together they had always scraped through.

  Up until now, anyway. Johnny sighed and closed his heavy book. Just then the music on the radio ended and a commercial began. An organ played a few bars of "Merrily We Roll Along," and then a fast-talking man said: "Friends, are you in the market for a great used car? We've got them by the dozen at Baxter Motors! Come and see our sweet deals, and then roll merrily along in your own set of wheels! Ask for me, George Ferguson, and get the best deal on wheels at Baxter Motors!" Johnny blinked. The voice was that of Fergie's father, but it sounded strange and different. Unlike his son, George Ferguson was a mild-mannered and soft- spoken fellow, but the high-pressure sales pitch made him sound insincere and conniving. Johnny sighed. Maybe Fergie and his whole family were changing somehow.

  That evening after dinner he crossed Fillmore Street to visit Professor Childermass. The two of them broke out the trusty chess set, but neither played very well. After a few minutes Professor Childermass sighed, "My mind isn't on the game tonight. Call it a draw?"

  "Okay," Johnny said.

  They were sitting in the professor's living room, with the chessboard laid out on a card table between them. Professor Childermass drummed his fingers on the table and muttered, "I wish I hadn't already had my cigarette." He was trying to quit smoking, and had finally managed to cut back to only one of his foul-smelling Balkan Sobranies every day. He started to replace the chessmen in their wooden box, and then stopped, with a rook in each hand. "John, I suppose you deserve to hear the news, so I'll spill it. Dr. Coote has managed to dig up a little dirt on our friend Mr. Thanatos—not much, but what there is of it is wormy, slimy, and smelly."

  Johnny swallowed. "What did he find?"

  The professor finished packing away the chess pieces and stood up. "Let's go have some German chocolate cake first, and then I'll tell you." He led the way to the kitchen, where he and Johnny dug into two delicious slices of cake. Professor Childermass refused to say a word until his plate was clean. Then he pushed away from the table and said, "To begin with, old Thanatos had a much longer career than I'd imagined. Charley found references to his traveling medicine wagon as early as the 1840s, when he was operating primarily in western Connecticut and upstate New York. He was a snake-oil huckster, if you know what that means."

  "I think I do," said Johnny. "That's a man who sells phony medicines, isn't it?"

  "Bull's-eye, my friend. Thanatos peddled lotions and tonics, pulled teeth, and did a lot of unlicensed doctoring. He went from town to town in a gaudy wagon painted like a circus car and pulled by four white horses. He'd pitch his camp on the outskirts of some little town and spend a week or two there swindling every nincompoop in sight before pulling up stakes and rolling off to find his next victims. Funny thing, though—he never seemed to be in trouble with the law. Charley found reproductions of some of his posters in a crumbling old book about nineteenth-century advertising art, and that was all."

  "Professor, how did he trick your father?" asked Johnny.

  Professor Childermass scowled. "I heard the story a hundred times when I was a child. As I've told you, my father was an unusual man. He held not one, but three PhD degrees—in philosophy, history, and literature. I am told he is still a legend at Princeton University, where he taught literature for most of his career." The professor peered over the tops of his gold-rimmed spectacles at Johnny. "Please understand, I am telling you this so you will realize that Marcus Childermass was nobody's fool."

  Johnny nodded. "I know he wasn't," he said. "He was a great teacher, and he was good with his hands too. I've seen the ship models he built from scratch."

  The professor nodded and sighed. "Well, to make a long story short, my father was entering middle age around 1876. That's a time of life when many people begin to worry about growing old. It seems that he was at the family
home in Vermont one summer when the celebrated Mr. Thanatos—or 'Doctor' Thanatos as the liar called himself—trundled into town. He gave a few men in town some most unusual presents. Mice."

  "Mice?" Johnny asked. "L-like the one in—in that box that Dr. Coote showed us?"

  Professor Childermass grunted. "Precisely like that one—but fresher. They seemed to be ordinary white mice. Thanatos claimed that he had stumbled upon an ancient recipe for the elixir of life—a marvelous magical mixture that would let a person stay young and healthy for hundreds of years. But there was a major hitch: The ingredients were terribly rare, extremely expensive, and frustratingly hard to come by. He had made just enough of the elixir, he told my father and the others, to test it on these mice. He gave one mouse apiece to half a dozen men in town and then vanished with his horses and wagon for ten long years."

  "What happened?" asked Johnny.

  "Absolutely nothing," said Professor Childermass. "The mice went on unchanged, day after day. One fellow in town, a banker, tried making his go without food and water. Six months later the mouse was still frisky, though it had become bad tempered. When he finally fed it again, it ate a whole pound of cheese in less than two weeks. Do you know what the life expectancy of a white mouse is, John?"

  "No," said Johnny.

  "About two or three years," replied the professor. "And yet here were these blasted rodents going along quite happily year after year. Well, the rest is obvious. In the early summer of 1886, when these creatures should have been dead, they were still alive and kicking. And that was when Doc Thanatos reappeared and reclaimed his infernal little pets. You can guess the rest. Everyone in town who knew about the miraculous mice was ready to put up hard-earned money to help Thanatos make enough of the elixir for them to have a swig.

  My father invested five thousand dollars, quite a sum in those days. And within a few weeks, Thanatos utterly disappeared, leaving six very embarrassed middle-aged men in my hometown—and eight dozen more scattered all over New England." Professor Childermass shuddered. "And evidently one of his mice was never returned to him. That's the one we saw up at Charley's house."

  "It must have been eighty years old," said Johnny.

  "About that. Of course, I don't think the creature was actually alive anymore—not in a real sense. Thanatos found some kind of diabolical spell to make the mice seem normal, but they were no longer 'alive' as you and I would recognize living." The professor gestured. "They were like—oh, I don't know—like toys, almost, with movement and sound but no real spirit."

  "Professor, you said that Thanatos tricked your father and those other men in 1886," said Johnny after a thoughtful pause. "Did you realize that was the very same year the McCorkle boy disappeared in Ellisboro?"

  "Yes, and that's what made me think—"

  The phone rang, interrupting the professor. With an irritated grimace, he went to answer it. A few minutes later he came back into the kitchen, a frown on his face. "I don't like this," he said. "I don't like it at all."

  "What?" asked Johnny.

  The professor poured himself another cup of coffee. "That was Charley Coote," he said. "He's been busy all day, poring over a dusty collection of old records. And he found something very unsettling."

  Johnny felt a chill. "What was it?" Slipping back into his chair, the professor took a long gulp of steaming coffee. "The passenger record of a sailing ship called the Acheron," he said. "It seems that it carried one Jarmyn Thanatos over from London. Except for one minor detail, that man seems to be our old friend."

  "What detail?"

  With a strained smile, Professor Childermass said, "Thanatos landed in Charleston in the year 1794. And he was described then in the passenger list as 'a gentleman about sixty years old.' " Johnny blinked. "But that means—" The professor's voice was dry: "Precisely. If that Thanatos was the same one as the rapscallion who swindled my father, then in 1886 he must have been about one hundred fifty years old."

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  That Friday, Professor Childermass and Johnny developed a plan. A plan that seemed to have little going for it, but the two were feeling somewhat desperate. The next day, the professor suggested, they would drive up to Ellisboro. "It's the one place where we suspect the rascal was operating for some time," the professor explained, "and it's just barely possible we may come across some trace of him. At this point, I'd say that anything would help."

  "Can Sarah come along?" asked Johnny. "She's the one who found the newspaper stories."

  "Hum," said the professor. "Yes-s, I agree with you. Sarah deserves to come along, so I'll call Dr. Channing and ask him. He's a pretty good fellow for an English teacher. I'll point out that it will be just a long day trip, and that Sarah really ought to learn more about our picturesque surroundings. But if her parents say no, then that ends the matter."

  As it turned out, Dr. and Mrs. Channing said yes, and so very early the next morning, before the sun was even up, the professor stopped his maroon Pontiac in front of the Channings' modest home. Sarah came running out, wearing jeans, sneakers, and one of her colorful sweatshirts, this one white with crimson letters spelling out "Boston Red Sox" on it. The professor beamed. "You are adapting quite well to civilization, considering you came from the forsaken Midwest. Congratulations on your attire," he said cheerfully as she clambered into the front seat next to Johnny. "And let's hope our team doesn't leave us in the lurch this year, as they normally do. All set?" Everyone was, and they were off in a cloud of exhaust smoke.

  The sun came up, shining behind them as they drove west on Route 2, and they stopped at a place called the Friendly Inn for breakfast shortly after turning north on Route 112. It was a homey little place, full of delightful smells of baking. They gobbled delicious stacks of pancakes drenched in butter and maple syrup, and then, full and happy, they traveled north into Vermont. As he drove, the professor talked about the history of the state, which he maintained was superior in every way to its neighbor to the east, New Hampshire. He gave a stirring account of the capture of Fort Ticonderoga in May 1775. The Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen, together with Benedict Arnold (who was not yet a traitor) and eighty Green Mountain Boys had taken the fort from the British. The Americans held it for two years, and when a superior force of British soldiers had driven them out, a man named Seth Warner fought a brave rearguard action against the British that saved the Continental army, even though his small force went down in defeat.

  As the professor went on and on about battles and armies, the Pontiac rolled through a green and increasingly hilly countryside. Soon they were skirting the beautiful Green Mountains. Now and again a sparkling blue lake appeared through the trees on either side of the highway, and the little white towns they passed gleamed in the morning light. The car's tires hummed along over the roadway as the sun climbed higher into a clear blue sky. Not long before noon they turned off the main highway and onto a winding, narrow road through the mountains. They came over a long rise, and before them they saw a lovely green valley. A small river twinkled in the sunlight, winding through the scattering of buildings and houses, and the road followed along the edge of the river. They passed farmhouses, then a small rural school, and then they clattered over an old arched stone bridge and were in Ellisboro itself.

  They stopped in front of the town hall, a white clapboard building that looked almost like a church. Climbing out, the professor took a deep breath and stretched his arms luxuriously. "Smell that pure mountain air!" he said with enthusiasm.

  Johnny took a sniff. It smelled like any other air to him, though pleasantly cool and scented with the fresh aroma of growing things. Sarah just rolled her eyes.

  They spent over an hour in the basement of the town hall, looking through musty old records. They found a few meager clues. Ellisboro, as it turned out, had sent quite a few of its young men to fight in the Union army during the Civil War. One was a certain "Jarmyn Nemo."

  "Obviously a pseudonym," the professor announced. "Unless this is the
father of that mysterious nephew who appeared in Duston Heights in 1886. I doubt that, though. It would be unlikely that brothers-in-law had the same unusual first name, and anyway it just sounds suspicious. You do know what 'nemo' means, don't you?"

  "Sure," said Sarah. "It's the name of that submarine captain in the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea movie." The professor scowled at her, and she grinned mischievously and continued, "I read the book too. 'Nemo' also happens to mean 'nobody' in Latin."

  "I am glad your father hasn't neglected your education," muttered the professor, a suspicion of a smile on his lips. "And you may not know it, but the Hebrew word 'adam' can just mean 'man.' So our fine-feathered friend Adam Nemo was literally the 'nobody man.' I suspect there was no such person as Jarmyn Nemo either."

  "What does it say about him?" asked Sarah.

  The professor adjusted his spectacles and peered at the yellowed pages of the old ledger. "Not very much. In 1862 he paid a substitute to fight in the Union army in his place. That was legal back then—though most patriotic people thought it was cowardly. That's about all."

  They asked the city clerk about anyone named Thanatos, and the clerk, a big, bluff, hearty woman with curly white hair, blinked at the question. "Well, now, that's strange," she said in a deep voice. "I haven't thought about that old place in a dog's age, but yes, a man named Thanatos does own property in the valley. Although he hasn't lived here for thirty or forty years." She got out a huge book of maps and found one. "Here's the place," she said, putting her finger on the map. "It's just north of town. You go past the old mill and then turn left on the gravel road. It's about two miles down the road, on the right. Probably not much left of the place now, though. It's been empty for ages."

  The professor had taken out a pocket notebook and was writing the directions down with his green Estabrook fountain pen. ". . . two miles, on the right," he muttered. "Thank you. You have been most helpful."