The Doom of the Haunted Opera Page 5

  “Well, you didn’t want to hear the rest of the story,” said Rose Rita. “If you’d let me read it, you would know that the school board has cancelled classes for next week so that Mr. Vanderhelm can use the school for auditions.”

  “What?” Lewis grabbed the paper from Rose Rita and read the story. It was true. Mr. Vanderhelm had announced his intention to begin tryouts on Monday, and the school board had suspended classes not only in the junior high but in the high school as well. Parents had volunteered to clean and spruce up the old theater, the article said. Lewis dropped the paper and stared at Rose Rita. Normally he would welcome such news; like any kid, he was always happy when a blizzard forced school to close for a day or two. This, however, struck him as all wrong.

  Rose Rita looked troubled too, now that her little bout of teasing him was over. “People are acting crazy,” she said. “School boards just don’t do stuff like this. I’m worried.”

  Lewis’s mouth was dry. “I had another bad dream last night,” he mumbled.

  “Me too.”

  They looked at each other for a long time. Timidly, Lewis said, “Friends again?”

  “Sure,” said Rose Rita, smiling. Then she shuddered a little. “I wish Mrs. Zimmermann was back. She’d know what to do about all this.”

  Lewis made up his mind. “Let’s call Uncle Jonathan,” he said. “He left me the number of Mr. Mickleberry’s house, where he and Mrs. Zimmermann are staying. I think they ought to know what’s been happening.”

  Lewis got the number from his room, and they went into the study. Lewis slipped into his uncle’s chair and lifted the receiver. The operator said, “Number, please?” in a pleasant, cheerful voice.

  “Uh, this is a long-distance call,” Lewis said. He then gave the operator the information. The line clicked and crackled with a little static for a few moments. Then the operator came back on to say, “I am sorry. I cannot get a clear line to Florida at the moment. Will you try your call again later?”

  “Yes, thank you,” said Lewis. He hung up glumly. “Can’t get through,” he explained to Rose Rita.

  “That’s funny,” Rose Rita said, frowning. “I mean, your Uncle Jonathan got through to you a couple of times. I wonder what’s wrong?”

  “Who knows?” Lewis said. He drummed his fingers on the desk. “Well, we can wait an hour or so and then try again. I guess we don’t have to worry about homework. Want to play some chess?”

  They got the chessboard out and set it up on the dining-room table. The board was one of Jonathan’s little indulgences. It was made of leather, and the squares were ivory and brown instead of red and black. The chessmen matched the board, with one set carved from ordinary white marble and one from a deep chocolate-colored marble that could be found in only one obscure quarry in Lombardy, a region in northern Italy. Jonathan had cast a spell on the chessmen, so that they were able to comment on the action. When a knight was moved to a position where it threatened another piece, it would say, “Have at thee for a foul faytour, varlet!” And whenever a pawn was captured, it would shriek, “Aggh! Ya got me, pal!” in a tiny, high-pitched voice. Rose Rita finally won when she managed to move her queen to a checkmate position. “That’s all for you, Big Boy,” said the queen in Mae West’s voice. Lewis’s defeated brown king muttered, “Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Little Caesar?” and tipped itself over.

  They tried to telephone Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann once more, but again the operator could not get a long-distance line. By that time Mrs. Holtz was preparing dinner, so Rose Rita left. Lewis wandered around the house for awhile, feeling adrift and vaguely apprehensive. He went to the back stairs in the south wing and stared at the oval stained-glass window, the one that changed every time he looked at it. Today it showed a milk-white angel playing a golden harp as she flew through a sky the exact color of a Vicks VapoRub jar. That reminded Lewis of the magic hat stand in the hallway, and he went to take a look at it.

  The hat stand had a small round mirror in it, and sometimes this mirror showed strange, faraway scenes. In the glass Lewis had seen Mayan pyramids, a part of the Battle of New Orleans, and even the horrid landscape of the dread planet Yuggoth as it rolled through the midnight gulfs between the stars. He stared at the mirror for awhile. At first he could see only his face, a little pudgy and exhausted looking. Then suddenly he was looking at a blue sea rippling with foamy waves. A white-sand beach lay in the warm sunshine, and fronds of date palms swayed gently back and forth in a gentle breeze. A big beach umbrella stood in the sand, and under it were two beach towels, one purple and one white. Lewis squinted. Two tiny figures were on the towels. One had white hair and wore an old-fashioned purple bathing suit. She was reading a book that was propped on her knees. The other was lying on his stomach, apparently asleep. He wore an orange tank top and navy-blue trunks. Lewis grinned. It was Mrs. Zimmermann and Uncle Jonathan.

  Just then Mrs. Holtz called him to dinner, and Lewis looked away to answer. When he returned his gaze to the mirror, he could see only himself. He felt a little better, though, and he went to the dining room in a more cheerful frame of mind.

  The next morning Lewis woke up and blinked at the Westclox alarm clock on his bedside table. Seven-thirty! He jumped out of bed in a panic and had started to scramble into his clothes when he suddenly remembered that he had turned off the alarm the night before. There was no school today. With a sigh of relief, Lewis showered and dressed more slowly. When he came downstairs, Mrs. Holtz had breakfast ready: home fries, scrambled eggs, and raisin-bran muffins. The housekeeper was almost as good a cook as Mrs. Zimmermann, and the food smelled delicious.

  Mrs. Holtz was standing at the counter, fiddling with the knobs on her Motorola radio. She liked to listen to the news and weather on the Chicago station WLS at breakfast time, but now she was frowning and muttering to herself. “Hi, Mrs. Holtz,” said Lewis as he slipped into his chair and began to help himself to the eggs and potatoes. “What’s wrong?”

  “Oh, this blamed thing is on the fritz,” said Mrs. Holtz as she gave the radio a sharp slap. “I couldn’t pick up Chicago, so I was trying to get the Grand Rapids station, but all the set’s picking up today is WNZB.” WNZB was the New Zebedee radio station. Until about nine o’clock all you could get on it were farm reports and the Swap Club, a call-in show for people with items for sale such as old toasters, newborn piglets, or pick-up trucks that needed new engines and a little bodywork. It was pretty boring stuff. Mrs. Holtz finally gave up and sat at the table. She had already eaten, but she had another cup of coffee and looked uncharacteristically grumpy at missing her favorite morning programs.

  After breakfast Lewis went into the study and tried his uncle’s radio. It was a large floor model, with a round dial the size of a dinner plate on which there were nine separate radio bands. You could listen to regular broadcasts, or tune to shortwave bands and hear strange, distant stations with announcers who spoke in many different langauges. You could hear the weather, police calls, and airplane bands, where pilots talked to their control towers. There were even amateur bands, for ham-radio operators to chat with their pals in far-flung corners of the globe.

  This morning, all Lewis could pick up on the radio was boring old WNZB. He frowned. Mrs. Holtz had thought something was wrong with her radio, but apparently that was not where the trouble lay. He sat at the desk and tried again to telephone his uncle, but as soon as he asked the operator for the number, she said, “I’m sorry, but we have no long-distance lines at the moment. Will you try your call again later?”

  Lewis began to get a creepy feeling. He asked Mrs. Holtz for permission to go visit Rose Rita, and she told him to go ahead and to be polite. Lewis got into his coat and rode his bike over to Mansion Street, where Rose Rita lived. Mrs. Pottinger called Rose Rita, and the two went into the living room. The Pottingers had a TV set, but when Lewis and Rose Rita tried it, they got only snow. “Something weird is going on,” Lewis said anxiously.

  Rose Rita bit her lip. “
Dad was furious this morning because the Detroit paper didn’t come. What do you suppose all this means?”

  “How should I know?” asked Lewis.

  “You’re the one who likes to pretend to be Sherlock Holmes,” Rose Rita shot back. Then she looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to fight. It’s just that all this is making me nervous.”

  Lewis thought for a moment. “Tell you what,” he said. “We can’t get an outside phone line from New Zebedee, but I’ll bet we could if we rode our bikes out to Eldridge Corners. There’s a pay phone at the gas station, and it’s on the Homer exchange, not the New Zebedee one.”

  “That’s a pretty long way to ride,” said Rose Rita doubtfully. It was about five miles out to Eldridge Corners, on the winding Homer Road.

  “What else do we have to do?” responded Lewis. “There’s no school today.”

  “Okay,” said Rose Rita. “Let me tell my mom that we’re going out.”

  Rose Rita made them a picnic lunch of ham sandwiches, an apple apiece, and some Oreo cookies, and she got a couple of bottles of pop from the refrigerator. She stowed the provisions in the saddlebags of her bike, and they were off.

  It was almost spring, and the weather had become much warmer over the past week. Some ice and snow lingered where there was deep shade, but the air, though still nippy, wasn’t nearly as frigid as it had been. The sky was clear and blue with bright sunshine. Rose Rita and Lewis rode their bikes downtown, and on Main Street they passed to look at the Feed & Seed. A couple of tall ladders leaned against the brick wall, and some high-school boys were attaching a sign to some iron hooks set into the bricks. THE NEW ZEBEDEE OPERA HOUSE read the freshly painted green-and-yellow sign. A banner had been attached to the bottom of it. In neat red capital letters it proclaimed GRAND REOPENING SOON!

  Rose Rita and Lewis looked at one another. Then they rode toward the railway tracks, where the Homer Road joined Main Street. They had clattered across the tracks and past the athletic field, when suddenly they ran into a fog bank. The whole world became gray as they plunged into it, and Lewis could barely see Rose Rita ahead to the left of him. He couldn’t see anything else at all, not even the ground. “This is a strange kind of fog,” Rose Rita said as she slowed her bike. “It’s so clear everywhere else—it’s thinning out again, though.”

  For a few seconds they had been riding through a blinding, heavy mist as thick as soup. Then it brightened and became less dense. All of a sudden, their bikes jolted over railroad tracks.

  Lewis braked, feeling panic rising in his chest. They were heading back into town. Somehow they had turned completely around, although he knew he had not swerved. “How’d we do this?” asked Rose Rita.

  Lewis did not reply. He turned his bike and started out of town again, and Rose Rita followed. She almost banged into him moments later. Their bikes rattled over the tracks, and they found themselves right back where they started, again heading into town.

  “We’re trapped,” Lewis said, fighting the urge to scream. “We can’t get out of town—and I’ll bet nobody else can get into New Zebedee either. That’s why your dad’s paper didn’t come this morning.”

  Rose Rita stared at him with wide, frightened eyes. “And we can’t get any out-of-town radio or TV stations,” she said. In a shaky voice she asked, “Lewis, do you suppose something has happened to the outside world? Is New Zebedee all there is left?”

  Lewis had not considered that, but now he did. And he became so frightened, he thought he might lose his mind.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The disturbing fog hung in a circle all around New Zebedee. As Lewis and Rose Rita tested the boundaries, they found they could not get beyond the city limits on the Homer Road or on routes 9 or 12. They got a little farther going cross-country through Wilder Creek Park. In fact, they left the park behind and started up Cemetery Hill, where they had to get off and walk their bikes. Oakridge Cemetery was south of town on a high, flat ridge that was cut across by two dirt roads. Rose Rita and Lewis paused to park their bikes under the gate of the cemetery. This was a heavy stone arch covered with elaborate carving. On the lintel over their heads were inscribed these words:

  The trumpet shall sound

  and

  the dead shall be raised

  Lewis felt his knees trembling. He had avoided the cemetery for years. Years ago, he and a boy named Tarby Corrigan had come here on Halloween at midnight. Lewis had been trying to show off, and he cast a necromancy spell—a spell meant to raise the dead—outside the Izard tomb. He still had nightmares about what had come out of that sinister mausoleum.

  “Look at that,” said Rose Rita in a voice filled with awe. They gazed down, over the bare black trees in the park and back at the town of New Zebedee. To their left and right, long arms of gray fog swept in on either side of the town, right along the city limits. They could not see beyond the town, but Lewis was willing to bet that the fog was there too. They could see nothing but fog everywhere, heavy, sluggish, and gray, like the underside of a stormcloud. That wasn’t right. The sun had been shining, so the fog should have been brighter and lighter. Rose Rita sighed and climbed onto her bike. “Let’s see if we can get out through the cemetery.”

  With his heart thumping hard, Lewis plodded after her down the dirt road. They passed a section of the cemetery where all the monuments were carved to look like logs, and they went through the area with statues of weeping women leaning on urns and cupids extinguishing torches. Ahead was the back fence of the cemetery, black wrought-iron curlicues with decorative spearheads every ten feet or so. And beyond that, the mysterious gray fog bank leaking wisps here and there. They retreated to the highest part of the cemetery, where Rose Rita climbed up the barred iron door of a mausoleum to stand on the roof. “It’s no use,” she called down. “We’re surrounded.”

  She scrambled down and drew a diagram in the dirt with a stick to explain what she had seen. The fog was everywhere except in the cemetery and in New Zebedee itself. The clear places formed a lopsided figure 8, with the smaller loop of the 8 as the cemetery and the larger one the town. Lewis looked around fearfully. A gray stone statue down the hill, a woman in a cloak with a hood over her forehead, seemed to stare back at him. “What are we going to do?”

  Rose Rita shook her head. “Don’t ask me. We could climb the fence, but I have a feeling we wouldn’t get anywhere through that fog. We’d probably just take a couple of steps away and then bang into the fence again.”

  Lewis groaned and turned away. He felt a chill creeping up his spine. The hooded statue was closer, wasn’t it? He tried to remember where it had been before. Now it seemed to be striding forward, a grim look on its pitted stone face. Lewis stared at it, but it was not moving. He swallowed hard and turned back to Rose Rita. “It’s the music, isn’t it? When that Mr. Vanderhelm sang the song, he did something awful.”

  “It was called ‘The Sealing,’” said Rose Rita in a thoughtful voice. “Maybe it did some kind of magic. Like sealing the town off from the outside world, and vicy-versa, as your uncle would say.”

  Lewis blinked. “And the song that Miss White played first was called ‘The Summoning.’ That might have been what drew Henry Vanderhelm here in the first place.”

  “I wonder who he really is?” mused Rose Rita.

  Lewis thought he knew. “It’s him. It’s old Immanuel Vanderhelm himself, come back to finish whatever it was he started back in 1919.” He got the shakes and looked over his shoulder. His mouth dropped open.

  Rose Rita considered this and shook her head. “I don’t see how that’s possible. Henry Vanderhelm can’t be more than about thirty years old. I think he must be who he says he is—old Immanuel’s grandson.”

  “R-Rose Rita,” stammered Lewis, “L-look down the hill.”

  She frowned at him and then followed his trembling, pointing finger. “It’s a momument. So what?”

  “It’s r-reaching out its arms toward us.”

  “It’s beseeching
the mercy of heaven or something,” said Rose Rita firmly.

  “I know it wasn’t stretching its arms out before,” insisted Lewis. “And it’s closer now than it was.”

  “Maybe we’d better go,” Rose Rita said. They started downhill. They passed the stone woman, and she was soon hidden from view behind mausoleums and other markers. Then Rose Rita squeaked in surprise and stopped suddenly.

  Lewis groaned. There she was again, ahead of them now, leaning on a tombstone, her shoulders hunched. The stone mouth had opened, and inside were two rows of sharp stone teeth. A forked tongue lolled out, and the hands clenching the tombstone ended in wicked, hooked claws. She was just beside the path.

  “I think we’d better go the long way,” Rose Rita said, her voice shaking. “Nobody would put up a memorial like that!”

  They nearly ran for the main road, leaving the grotesque statue behind. The dirt road led down steeply to the stone arch where they had left their bikes. “Oh, no!” said Lewis. “Look up there!”

  A huddled shape crouched on the arch, like a lion hunched waiting for the kill. They could see it only in silhouette, and it no longer looked very human, but Lewis knew in his heart that it was the moving statue, waiting for them.

  “We can’t stay here forever,” whispered Rose Rita. “Look, we never see it move, right?”

  “B-but it does move!”

  “Let’s try something. C’mon!” Rose Rita plunged into the stone forest of carved logs, with Lewis trotting desperately behind her. They came to a small clearing and stood back-to-back, peering around. “I see her,” Rose Rita said grimly.

  Lewis turned, feeling cold and weak. He saw the woman too, only she was no longer a woman but a—a thing perched on top of a tombstone carved like an upright log. Her toothy face had grown sharp-snouted and snakelike, her knotted arms impossibly long. The hood had become a cobra’s hood, and she had no legs at all, just a long, coiling serpent’s tail wrapped around and around the log she perched on. Her eyes looked alive now, glaring at them with hatred and hunger.