When Lewis returned to 100 High Street, he found that Uncle Jonathan was back home too. His uncle said nothing about finding the wooden box with its mysterious journal. Rose Rita came over for dinner, and she kept a sharp eye on Mrs. Zimmermann. Neither of the two adults gave the least clue that they had found the journal.
Later, Rose Rita and Lewis had a hasty, whispered conversation before Rose Rita left for home. “Keep an eye on them,” urged Rose Rita. “I want to be sure they got the book.”
“It didn’t walk off,” responded Lewis. “Uncle Jonathan must’ve picked it up with the rest of the mail.”
“Watch anyway,” said Rose Rita, and she left.
Though he felt like a spy in his own home, Lewis did settle in to watch his uncle and Mrs. Zimmermann.
Nothing happened until the following Wednesday. At lunchtime, Uncle Jonathan said, “Lewis, why don’t you and Rose Rita go to the movies this evening? There’s a dandy new Gene Autry western on.”
“I don’t like singing cowboys too much,” hedged Lewis.
His uncle smiled. “Well, I’m having some people over, and I’m afraid you’d be bored out of your mind here. At least it will be cool in the theater.” When Lewis still looked doubtful, his uncle added, “Tell you what. You go to the movies, and one day soon we’ll have Rose Rita over and I’ll put on a private show about the Battle of the Nile, or maybe Trafalgar.” Lewis knew that Jonathan meant he would cast one of his wonderful illusion spells. They were just like Technicolor movies, except they were three-dimensional and you could actually take part in them.
Reluctantly, Lewis agreed to go to the movies. But when he called Rose Rita, she said, “This is it. I’d bet a dollar to a moldy doughnut that the Capharnaum County Magicians Society is meeting at your house this evening. We have to find out for sure if your uncle found the book. Think of a way.”
Immediately, Lewis thought of one possibility. The house at 100 High Street had an extra-special feature: a secret passageway. It wasn’t very long, and it wasn’t even very practical. The secret passage led from behind a cupboard in the kitchen to a space behind a bookcase in the study. No one knew why it had been built in the first place, but it was an ideal spot for two snooping kids to hide. The trick would be getting into the passage without being caught.
That afternoon Jonathan gave Lewis five dollars. “You can get a hamburger and soda and still have enough left for the movie,” he said. “Since you’ll be coming back after dark, wear something light colored and be sure to walk facing the traffic.”
It seemed to Lewis that his uncle was being especially fussy. Usually he trusted Lewis to remember things like that, for Jonathan knew his nephew had a lot of common sense. Rose Rita came over at five o’clock. Mrs. Zimmermann and Uncle Jonathan were puttering around in the kitchen, making hors d’oeuvres for the guests. Lewis called, “We’re going now!”
“Be careful, you two!” his uncle shouted back. “Have a good time.”
But instead of leaving the house, Lewis and Rose Rita ducked into the study. The one tricky thing about the secret passage was that, on the study end, the latch was on the outside, not the inside. Lewis released the catch and swung a large section of the built-in bookcase open. It moved silently on unseen hinges, and Lewis and Rose Rita walked into the passageway.
It was cramped and dark inside. As Lewis pulled the bookcase section back into place, he heard Rose Rita begin to gasp for air. He remembered how she was afraid of closed-in spaces. “Are you okay?” he asked.
Rose Rita took several deep breaths. “I will be. This isn’t so bad. It’s more like a little room than—than anything else. And I can see light around the edges of the door.”
For a few minutes they stood shoulder to shoulder. Gradually Rose Rita’s breathing calmed down. Now and then she looked through a small peephole into the study. “Tell me when they show up,” said Lewis.
“Are you sure they’ll meet in there?” asked Rose Rita.
“That’s where the Magicians Society always meets when they come over,” said Lewis. “Are you all right now?”
Rose Rita shivered beside him. “I guess so. I still have the crazy feeling the walls are closing in, but it’s okay as long as I’m not alone. It’s not like being in a cave or a hole in the ground. Let’s just settle down and not talk about it, okay?”
With nothing to do but wait, Lewis and Rose Rita sat on the floor, their backs against opposite walls of the passageway. “I wish we’d eaten first,” whispered Lewis. “I’m going to be starving by the time everyone gets here.”
Rose Rita moved in the darkness. “Hold out your hand.”
Lewis did, and felt her put something into his open palm. “What’s this?”
“It’s a Welch’s Fudge Bar,” replied Rose Rita. “I figured we’d get hungry.”
That was one of Lewis’s favorite candy bars. He ate it. He and Rose Rita sat in the dark for what felt like hours. They heard scrapes and thuds as Uncle Jonathan dragged chairs into the study. At last they heard the sound of people talking. Rose Rita got up and surveyed the study through the peephole. “About two dozen people,” she reported. “I see Mrs. Jaeger, and there’s Mr. Plum. Looks like the meeting’s about to start.”
Lewis stood beside her, his ear close to the secret door. He heard his uncle say, “Thanks for coming, everybody. Before we start, Howard’s asked me to remind you to pay your dues if you haven’t already. Well, you know why we’re all here. I wonder if any of you know who delivered this package last Saturday.”
Voices murmured various versions of “No” and “What is it?”
“It seems to be a kind of sorcerous diary kept by Jebediah Clabbernong,” said Uncle Jonathan. “Someone dropped it off here while I was out. There was a note, but it was signed only ‘A Friend.’”
“What’s in the book, Jonathan?” asked someone.
Jonathan said, “Florence and I have read through it a couple of times. We agreed you all should hear some of it. After the meeting, we’ll ask a few of you to study this volume further. Florence, will you do the honors?”
Lewis heard Mrs. Zimmermann clear her throat and then begin to read sections from the journal. When she finished, she said, “That’s it. Does anyone know anything about this red star that he keeps mentioning?”
A man said, “It’s a comet, Florence. It only visits the Earth once every thirteen or fourteen thousand years. It’s supposed to be a source of energy for evil magicians. There’s a passage in Flavius about it, and some hints in the Kabbala. I read in a magazine that astronomers recently spotted it deep in space.”
“What about this business of the Great Old Ones?” asked Jonathan. “The only source of knowledge about them that I’ve ever heard of is the Necronomicon, and you all know how rare that dreadful book is. We’d never get our hands on a copy. Anything else?”
“The Comte D’Erlette has some writings about them,” returned a woman’s deep voice. “And there’s that German book called Unnameable Cults or some such. They’re supposed to be demonic creatures from another dimension, as far as I can tell.”
“Of course,” agreed Jonathan. “But what did old Jebediah have to do with them? And how does the meteorite figure in? Come to that, Walter, what have you found out about Jebediah’s death back in 1885?”
A man answered, “Not very much. In 1885, Jebediah was a fairly elderly man. No one seems to know just how old he was, but he was at least seventy-five. He’d been in poor health for six months or so. He died on December twenty-first, the night the meteor hit. Coroner said he died of ‘catalepsy,’ which means some kind of paralysis. Stroke, I guess. His only heir was Elihu, who had the body cremated—which was hard to do back then, because it wasn’t the custom. No one knows what happened to the old man’s ashes.”
“I can make a guess,” said Mrs. Zimmermann, “that Elihu scattered those ashes in the creek and later built the bridge over them. Either that, or he put them in a jar with some lead sinkers and tossed them into the creek. It’s strangely deep at that point, you know—that’s why it was odd that Elihu chose that place to build the bridge.”
“What came to Earth in the meteorite?” someone else asked.
Lewis heard his uncle sigh. “That we don’t know,” he confessed. “Though it seems clear that Jebediah did call the meteorite down, somehow, and that something came to Earth along with it. But whether that something was an alien creature or a spirit or a Cracker Jack prize, we haven’t been able to learn. Florence and I tried to track down anything that Elihu left when he passed away in 1947, but we’ve had very little luck. He bequeathed all his money to various charities. The law firm in Kalamazoo that handled his estate refuses to comment on what happened to his personal papers.”
“What law firm?” asked Mrs. Jaeger, a pleasant, rather vague sorceress whose spells usually backfired.
“Moote, Mull, and Boyd,” said Jonathan. “Unfortunately, Mr. Moote is retired now, Mr. Mull is dead, and I must say that Mr. Boyd is about as talkative as the Sphinx.”
“However,” said Mrs. Zimmermann, “I did drive over to Kalamazoo to have a look at the will—that’s public record, you know. It’s a perfectly ordinary legal document, stuffed with whereases and therefores and parties of the umpty parts. Except, that is, for one very strange paragraph.” Lewis heard the rustle of paper. Mrs. Zimmermann coughed and said, “I copied this down. See if you can make sense out of it. The paragraph says: ‘Meanings may have other meanings. One thing I have learned is that the heart is the seat of the soul. The soul is the life. And the key to finding the life is, at the very bottom, a healthy heart.’” The paper rattled again, and Mrs. Zimmermann said, “Well?”
The group muttered its puzzlement, and someone said, “Sounds like a health tip to me. Did Elihu die of a heart attack?”
“Pneumonia,” Jonathan answered. “We’re just as much in the dark as you are. Florence has made copies of that part of the will, and we’ll hand them out. If anyone can think of a way to solve the riddle, or just prove that there’s nothing to it, get in touch at once. Otherwise, let’s all get busy.”
“What do you want us to do?” asked someone.
“For one thing,” said Mrs. Zimmermann, “we need a subcommittee to study this journal. Howard, you and Walter know more about this kind of magic than anyone else here. If you two and Mildred could see what you can make of the book, we’d all appreciate a full report.”
“For another,” added Jonathan, “we need to have more information on this comet. When’s it coming? What will its coming mean? What kind of influence will it have? I’ll tackle that question. And finally, we have to keep up our watch on Wilder Creek. Florence and I are firmly convinced that something is stirring there, but we can’t yet tell whether it’s ghost or wizard or galloping woo-hoo. Florence can’t detect any magic at work—”
“Then none is there,” someone said. “I’d trust Florence with my life, where magic is concerned.”
“So would I,” responded Jonathan. “But let’s be safe instead of sorry. Now, I’d suggest all of you with clairvoyance work out a rotation so we can keep tabs on the place twenty-four hours a day. Keep your crystal balls ready. I happen to know that on Friday the last piling of the old bridge comes out. Something may occur then. If it does, we need to know about it pronto.”
Very little else happened. The meeting broke up into groups of people chatting and munching on snacks. With everyone still in the study, Lewis and Rose Rita slipped down the secret passage to the other end, came out in the kitchen, and took the back door outside. Dusk was falling already. They walked toward Rose Rita’s house on Mansion Street.
“I guess our job is pretty clear too,” said Rose Rita. “We have to help without getting caught.”
“Haven’t we done our part?” asked Lewis. “We turned the journal over to Uncle Jonathan.”
“We still have things to do,” insisted Rose Rita. “For one thing, I want to write down that puzzle from old Elihu’s will while I can still remember it. Maybe we can figure that out. And we’re going to be on watch just as much as the magicians are.”
Lewis grunted. You couldn’t argue with Rose Rita when she was in the mood to take charge. They reached her house. After Rose Rita had jotted down the words from Elihu Clabbernong’s will, they went to the backyard, where they sat on patio furniture. From inside the Pottinger house came the sounds of a boxing match on TV or the radio. Crickets chirped all around. The night grew darker and darker. Lewis lay back in his lawn chair and stared up at the sky. He could see a handful of stars strewn across the heavens. Somewhere among them might lurk the comet known as the Red Star. With every moment that passed, it was streaking closer to the Earth.
And who knew what disaster it might bring?
* * *
Not very far away, on a hill just outside New Zebedee, two other people were studying the stars. They were the old couple Mephistopheles and Ermine Moote, and they took turns bending over their telescope.
“It’s coming faster than we thought, Mephisto,” said the woman. “It will be visible to the naked eye any day now.”
“No matter, no matter,” the gnarled old man said in his raspy voice. “The cursed bridge is almost down. We will be free to act soon. Even if those busybodies in town find out about the comet, it will be too late! Once he is free, none will dare to oppose us!”
The woman backed away from the telescope, and the old man bent over the eyepiece with a gloating chuckle. The telescope mechanism ticked like a loud alarm clock. After a few moments the woman said, “Mephisto, while you were napping, Ernest Boyd telephoned from Kalamazoo. He said the Zimmermann woman had been trying to find if any of Jebediah’s papers survived.”
“Hah!” the old man cried out. “Much luck to her! What isn’t burned is safely hidden away—hidden where no one, burglar, witch, or wizard, can find them!”
“One thing isn’t,” said the woman. “The will.”
Mephistopheles Moote slowly straightened up from the eyepiece. “And what would she learn from the will, you fool? Just that Elihu frittered his hard-earned money on orphans and widows! There’s nothing in the will that can possibly hurt us!”
“Except the paragraph you never could understand,” the woman said. “That part about the soul and the life and the heart.”
With an annoyed grunt, Moote turned back to his telescope. “If she is smart enough to figure that rigmarole out, she is smarter than Mephistopheles P. Moote! I doubt that, but if she seems to be about to solve it—if she seems even close—we will take care of her, my dear.” He chuckled nastily. “Witches aren’t immortal, you know. A witch can die.”
The woman laughed too, a low, throaty sound in the dark. “Yes,” she said. “A witch can certainly die.”