The Doom of the Haunted Opera Read online

  “Well,” said Vanderhelm as the two came close to him. “Are you going on a little nocturnal expedition, my boy?”

  “Lewis!” exclaimed Mrs. Holtz. “What are you thinking of? You get right back into the house this instant. You’ll catch your death of cold out on a night like this, and then what will I tell your uncle Jonathan?”

  Henry Vanderhelm laughed smoothly. “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about Uncle Jonathan,” he said. Lewis realized that Vanderhelm was talking to him, though the man seemed to be addressing Mrs. Holtz. “No, I shouldn’t think Uncle Jonathan would be much to worry about. But you’re right, Hannah. Lewis should go in. It seems to be a clear night, but these cold evenings can get foggy so very quickly. And he’ll freeze like a stone statue.”

  “Goodness,” said Mrs. Holtz. “I had no idea we’d been rehearsing so long. Good-bye, Mr. Vanderhelm, and thank you for putting me in the chorus. I know it’s just a small part, but—”

  “Tut, tut,” said Vanderhelm. “In a work like my illustrious ancestor’s, no part is small. Good evening, Hannah.” He bowed and said to Lewis, “Goodnight, young man. Sleep like a stone, and remember what a very great service you have done for me and my art. In a way, the whole opera is your fault.”

  “What an odd way of putting it,” said Mrs. Holtz.

  His heart was pounding so hard, Lewis was afraid it would burst. He didn’t think Vanderhelm’s words were an odd way of putting it at all.

  Something awful was going to happen in New Zebedee because of the opera that he had found.

  Vanderhelm was right.

  It was all his fault.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The next few days were strange and unsettling. The eerie fog that cut off New Zebedee from the rest of the world never lifted or thinned. The grocery stores ran out of things like fresh bread and milk. No out-of-town mail or newspapers or magazines showed up in New Zebedee. The television sets transmitted only static and snow, and the radios only picked up the New Zebedee station.

  Yet to Lewis the scariest part was that no adult seemed to notice or care. Almost every family in town had someone involved in the opera, and all those families had become distracted and enchanted by the rehearsals. The opera would run about an hour and a half when it was all put together, Mrs. Pottinger told Rose Rita, but until the opening night the cast was rehearsing only half-hour segments at a time. New Zebedee was holding its breath, and even the people who were not involved with the opera were expecting it to mean great things for the town.

  That included Rose Rita’s father. He grumbled a little about how everything had come to a stop in town while the opera was being rehearsed. Still, he wound up saying, “Well, it’ll be good for the place to have a little life in it, I suppose.” Rose Rita didn’t have the heart to argue with him.

  She and Lewis saw a lot of each other, because the schools were not in session. Many of the teachers were in the opera, and Vanderhelm insisted that everyone in the cast rehearse for hours each day, from late morning into the night. Most of the kids took advantage of their unexpected break, but Lewis and Rose Rita moped around, trying to think of something new that might stop Vanderhelm’s scheme. “We should be able to come up with something,” groaned Rose Rita one afternoon. She and Lewis were in Jonathan’s study again. “I mean, this isn’t the first time you had to fight an evil spell.”

  Lewis shuddered at the memory that Rose Rita’s words awakened. Years ago, when he first came to live with Uncle Jonathan, this very house had a dangerous magical item hidden inside it: a Doomsday Clock. The wicked sorcerer Isaac Izard had placed it there, and the ghost of Izard’s wife had almost succeeded in activating it. Rose Rita had heard Lewis tell about the adventure, and about how Uncle Jonathan, Mrs. Zimmermann, and he had narrowedly averted the end of the world.

  Things had changed since then. He was older and more cautious about meddling with forces he did not understand. The house itself had been altered: Uncle Jonathan had ripped out all the old wallpaper, which had Isaac Izard’s initials in it, and had replaced it with a more cheerful pattern. He had even exorcised the house of all evil influences. However, Henry Vanderhelm seemed to be at least as great a threat as the Izards had been. And most important, this time Lewis and Rose Rita were alone, without the help of good magicians. Lewis said so, and Rose Rita sighed.

  “Maybe he overlooked one,” she said.

  Lewis scowled at her. “We tried every telephone number,” he reminded her. “None of them is working. And every address we tried is a vacant lot, remember?”

  “I know, I know,” said Rose Rita. She pushed her black-rimmed glasses up on her nose and frowned. “There must be something old Vanderhelm forgot. He can’t be everywhere at once. Hmm. Maybe the fog doesn’t go up very high in the air. I wonder if you could fly out of New Zebedee?”

  “Oh, sure,” replied Lewis in a mocking voice. “I’ll just tie on my cape and flap my arms and leap over the fog in a single bound, like Superman.”

  Rose Rita gave him a nasty look. “I didn’t mean that you personally could fly out,” she said. “But what about a—a balloon, maybe? Or a carrier pigeon?”

  “Where do we get one?” asked Lewis. “I guess we might make a kite or something, but there’s nowhere in town to buy a helium balloon or a carrier pigeon. Or do you want to try to catch one of the pigeons that roosts on the Civil War Monument?”

  “No,” said Rose Rita, “because where would he go? Just back to the monument, probably. Carrier pigeons have to be trained. Hmm. We could make a kite, but so what? Even if we got it out past the fog, it would probably just crash into a tree or something, and no one would pay any attention to it. I wish there was a magician left in town.”

  “There’s no use wishing for that,” grumped Lewis. “Vanderhelm took care of every one of them.”

  Suddenly Rose Rita sat up straighter in the chair. “Hold on! What about that Mildred Whosis?”

  “Huh?” asked Lewis. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Mildred Somebody-or-other!” insisted Rose Rita. “Mrs. Zimmermann was talking about her, remember? The one who couldn’t get her spells to work out right? What was her name?”

  Lewis had been sitting at Uncle Jonathan’s desk, slumped forward. He straightened up too. “Right,” he said. “It was a funny name. Not Johnson or Jackson. It started with a J, though. Uh—Jaeger, that was it! Mildred Jaeger!”

  Rose Rita jumped up and grabbed the address book on the desk. She flipped through it hurriedly. “She isn’t here!” Rose Rita announced. “So she isn’t a member of the Magicians Society.”

  Lewis dug out the skinny New Zebedee telephone book and turned to the J’s. “Here she is,” he said. “Mildred Sherman Jaeger. She lives over on Marshall Street.” He reached for the phone and when the operator came on the line, he asked for Mildred Jaeger’s number. Lewis held his breath. The phone rang once . . . twice . . . three times—

  “Hello?” It was a friendly voice, an elderly voice.

  “Uh, hello, Mrs. Jaeger?” Lewis stammered.

  “Yes. Who is calling, please?”

  Lewis clamped his hand over the receiver and looked at Rose Rita for help. “What do I tell her?” he whispered.

  “Tell her who you are,” Rose Rita shot back. “Ask her if we can come and see her.”

  Lewis swallowed. “Uh, Mrs. Jaeger, you don’t know me, but my name is Lewis Barnavelt. My uncle is Jonathan Barnavelt.”

  “Oh, dear me, yes,” said the cheerful voice. “Dear Jonathan, such a thoughtful man. How is he?”

  “He’s not in town right now,” replied Lewis. “Do you remember Lucius Mickleberry?”

  “Oh, of course. I knew him quite well when he lived in New Zebedee.”

  Hurriedly, Lewis told Mrs. Jaeger about the mission his uncle had undertaken. Then he said, “Mrs. Jaeger, have you noticed something odd about the town lately?”

  “It has been very quiet,” admitted Mrs. Jaeger.

  “Well, we think that
something terrible is going on, and we need to talk to someone who knows about—” Lewis dropped his voice almost to a whisper—“magic.”

  There was such a long pause that Lewis was afraid the woman had hung up. Finally, though, she said, “Dear, I wish I could help, but perhaps you should get in touch with some other people. There is a Magicians Society in town.”

  “We can’t talk to them,” said Lewis, and in a rush he explained why.

  After another long silence Mrs. Jaeger said, “I think perhaps you had better come over, dear. I don’t know what I can do, but I’ll help in any way I can. Do you know how to get to my house?” She gave him directions.

  Lewis said good-bye to her, and he and Rose Rita ran out to their bikes. It was a day of pale, watery sunlight, with everything looking cold and dead, and the air seemed stagnant and lifeless as they pedaled toward Marshall Street.

  Mrs. Jaeger’s house was a one-story cottage on a block of modest little homes. Rose Rita and Lewis climbed off their bikes and rang the doorbell, and Lewis nervously scraped his shoes on the welcome mat as they waited for someone to answer the door. After a moment the door swung open and they found themselves facing a short, plump gray-haired woman. Her hair was in a bun, and she was wearing a blue dress and a frilly white apron. Her blue eyes looked huge behind gold-rimmed spectacles. “Come in, come in,” she said, waving the two friends inside. “I was just making some lunch. Do you care for chicken soup? It’s homemade, and I have some lovely fresh bread I just baked this morning.”

  Lewis was ravenous, and Rose Rita said she was hungry too. Mrs. Jaeger refused to hear a word of their story until they each had a generous bowl of hot delicious soup, with toasted homemade bread and steaming cups of cocoa. The meal warmed Lewis and made him feel more like his normal self than he had in awhile. Mrs. Holtz had almost stopped cooking anything except canned goods, and Lewis missed her hearty meals.

  “Now,” said Mrs. Jaeger, “tell me about this trouble.”

  She listened while Lewis told her about Vanderhelm and the opera, with Rose Rita adding facts here and there when Lewis forgot something important. Mrs. Jaeger’s magnified eyes grew rounder and more solemn, and she shook her head dolefully. “My, my,” she said when Lewis and Rose Rita had finished. “This is very bad. Much worse than I thought. I should have noticed all this myself, but I never listen to the radio, and I don’t subscribe to any out-of-town newspapers. Still, the air has been full of bad feelings. I just put it down to growing old and arthritic.”

  “Can you help us?” asked Rose Rita.

  Mrs. Jaeger bit her lip. “I don’t know, dear. Of course I do remember old Vanderhelm. I was just a young woman then, but I was still trying to become a member of the Magicians Society. I’m afraid I wasn’t much good as a sorceress. Since then I’ve learned that I am very good at making cherry preserves and stitching quilts and cooking. I believe you should always do what you are best at, and so I’ve given up magic.”

  “Tell us about old Vanderhelm,” said Lewis. “We don’t know anything about what he was up to, or how the Magicians Society defeated him.”

  “Well, I’m not sure I know much about that myself, dear.” Mrs. Jaeger sipped her cocoa. “I remember this much: Mr. Vanderhelm’s spell was a terribly hard and complex one. It was so powerful that one person could not speak it alone. That is why he wrote the opera. If all the actors sang the lyrics in the right order, then the opera itself became his spell. With that many voices, it would work.”

  “What would it do?” asked Rose Rita.

  Mrs. Jaeger sighed. “I don’t want to frighten you children.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Lewis assured her. “We’re plenty scared already!”

  “Well—” The woman’s face looked troubled. At last, though, she said, “As I understood it, the spell would awaken all the dead sorcerers from the past. Their spirits would come in answer to the summons, and Vanderhelm would enable them to possess the bodies of the living. Then they would be his slaves. He would be the King of the Dead, with an army of incredibly potent magicians to do his bidding. With that kind of power, it would be a simple thing for him to take over the whole world. He would be the dictator of the entire human race.”

  Lewis shook, remembering Henry Vanderhelm’s cunning voice and oily manner. A world ruled by such a person would not be a pleasant place.

  Rose Rita said, “Is that all?”

  “I am afraid not,” said Mrs. Jaeger. “With the power the spell would give him, Vanderhelm could also command the ordinary, unmagical dead. Their bodies would rise from their tombs and march to his orders. He would have a whole army of the dead to do his bidding—and the dead greatly outnumber the living. If anyone dared to oppose him, Vanderhelm would simply have that person killed, and in death the person would become just another one of Vanderhelm’s servants.”

  “That’s awful,” said Rose Rita, her voice trembling. “Isn’t there anything anyone can do?”

  “Well, there are some safeguards,” said Mrs. Jaeger. “The spell will not work if anyone has shed blood, for example, so Vanderhelm could not just kill anyone who tried to oppose him. Of course, after the spell is complete he can kill whomever he wants. But bad magic can always be counteracted with good. That is how the Magicians Society defeated him. They put together a spell of their own that protected them and prevented him from enchanting all the people in town. Then Lucius Mickleberry confronted him in a duel and defeated him. You see, a bad magician seldom has many friends to help with his or her evil spells, and there is strength in numbers.”

  “That might have worked back in 1919, but what can we do?” asked Lewis. “Somehow or other Henry Vanderhelm has put a spell on all the magicians in New Zebedee except you. We can’t act together with all of them, because they’re all missing. Can you fight him?”

  Mrs. Jaeger sighed deeply. “I wasn’t any good as a magician,” she said in a small voice. “I tried and tried, but every spell I cast went wrong or backfired. Oh, Lewis, I’m sure that your uncle or maybe Florence Zimmermann could fight this new Vanderhelm, but I am rusty and out of practice and not very talented besides.”

  “Then it’s hopeless?” asked Rose Rita.

  “Of course not!” returned Mrs. Jaeger in a brisk voice. “That’s nonsense. Nothing is ever hopeless. We will simply have to put our heads together and come up with something that might help us. I only wish,” she added regretfully, “that I had some idea of what that might be.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  They stayed at Mrs. Jaeger’s house for hours. She had Lewis climb up a rickety ladder into the attic and bring down a small suitcase, which she opened in her living room. Rose Rita and Lewis sat side by side on a soft sofa embroidered with pink roses and green leaves, and Mrs. Jaeger knelt in front of her coffee table. She took a half-finished jigsaw puzzle off the table and put it away in its box. The cover showed that the puzzle was a colorful scene of picnickers in a field full of daisies, tiger lilies, and primroses, with a red barn and silo and a herd of black-and-white Holstein cows in the background.

  “I’m afraid I haven’t had these things out in twenty years or more,” apologized Mrs. Jaeger. “I hope the moths haven’t gotten at them.” The sharp odor of naphtha rose from inside the suitcase. Lewis and Rose Rita leaned forward as Mrs. Jaeger pulled out a long wooden spoon, an ancient book bound in crumbling black leather, a white satin robe, and small jars wrapped in old newspaper. “My wand,” said Mrs. Jaeger, waving the spoon about.

  Rose Rita and Lewis looked at each other.

  Mrs. Jaeger sighed. “Oh, I know that magicians are supposed to have hazelwood wands or ebony staves or silver scepters, but none of those things ever appealed to me. I’ve always loved to cook, so when the time came for me to enchant a wand, I chose the object that seemed best for me.”

  “That’s all right,” said Rose Rita. “After all, Mrs. Zimmermann’s wand is a plain black umbrella.”

  “That’s true!” agreed Mrs. Jaeger with a happy smi
le. “And Lewis, your uncle chose a walking stick, if I remember correctly. Well, this is what I chose, and it always worked. Uh, sort of.” She tapped her chin with the spoon. “Hmm. Let me see. What do you think we should try? I’m afraid that I simply don’t have enough power to fight this new Vanderhelm successfully.”

  “Could you get in touch with another magician?” asked Lewis. “One who might be, well—”

  “Better at this than I am?” asked Mrs. Jaeger with a smile. “Don’t worry, dear, you won’t embarrass me. Yes, that is a good idea. In fact, let’s see if we can conjure up some way to speak to your uncle, Lewis.”

  Following Mrs. Jaeger’s instructions, Lewis brought a glass of water from the kitchen. “Put that on the coffee table,” Mrs. Jaeger told him. “We’ll try to use it like a scrying glass or crystal ball. If we’re lucky, we’ll at least get your uncle’s image—and maybe his attention.”

  Then Mrs. Jaeger wriggled into her satin gown, which was cut like a choir robe and had become rather tight, and began to wave her spoon over the glass. She chanted something in ancient Chaldean, then in Coptic, and finally in Old High German. At last she waved the spoon commandingly and said in English, “One, two, three, wherever they may be, let Florence Zimmermann or Jonathan Barnavelt see and speak with me!”

  A goldfish appeared in the glass. It looked somewhat startled, and then it settled down to swimming round and round in tight little circles.

  “Oh, dear,” said Mrs. Jaeger. “I still don’t seem to have the knack.”

  Lewis had been holding his breath, and now let it whoosh out. Mrs. Jaeger had half scared him into thinking that maybe the fish was Uncle Jonathan, but it looked like an ordinary Woolworth’s pet-department goldfish, not magical at all.

  “It’s getting dark,” Rose Rita said.

  Mrs. Jaeger shook her head. “Well, perhaps you children had better go home. I will think about this and try to figure out what went wrong. Maybe I left some words out, or maybe my pronunciation isn’t quite right. I’ll call you tomorrow if I can come up with anything. Do either of you have goldfish?”