The Sign of the Sinister Sorcerer

“YOUR UNCLE SURE HAS a lot of stuff,” grumbled Hal. He and Lewis had climbed up to the unused third floor of the Barnavelt house. They were poking around in one of the old bedrooms, which now held a million bits of junk jammed in willy-nilly. Lewis had just thought that if his uncle had been puttering around up there to look for anything, it would have been easy for him to lose his cane among all the clutter. “Does he have anything, you know, special? I mean besides his cane?”

Lewis shrugged that off. “I guess lots of this stuff must seem pretty special to him, or he would have dumped it. He inherited most of it from my great-grandfather, who used to have a great big mansion somewhere.”

“I guess,” said Lewis. “My great-grandfather Barnavelt made a lot of money with railroads and livestock sales and things like that. My uncle says he was a hard man to get along with, though. He and my grandfather, Uncle Jonathan’s and my dad’s father, I mean, had some kind of real falling-out. But then he liked the fact that Uncle Jonathan was studying in an agricultural school, because the old man had started out as a homesteader and a farmer himself, so when he died, to everyone’s surprise, he left all of his money and possessions to Uncle Jonathan.”

Lewis was rummaging about in a closet, but the only things in it were stacks of shoe boxes that contained faded old photographs, the blacks and grays now sickly tones of brown. He felt odd, twitchy and nervous, and he thought Hal was sounding inexplicably sour. “Look, maybe this isn’t such a hot idea,” he said to Hal. “Maybe we should just go. Rose Rita should have been back by now.”

“Let’s look around at least.” Hal rubbed his hands together. He took a yellow pencil from his pocket—Lewis remembered he’d had one that day when the baseball had knocked him silly—and began to twirl it in his fingers. “Does your uncle have any interesting mirrors?” he asked suddenly.

Lewis frowned at him. “Interesting mirrors?” he asked, his voice suddenly squeaky. “You mean like a shaving glass?”

“Because you see, my boy, I’ve been reading about magic mirrors,” Hal said smoothly. “It would be about ten inches square, with beveled edges on the glass. And it might not always show you your face.”

Lewis shook his head, now feeling something was definitely wrong. “That’s sort of crazy talk,” he said. “Come on, if we’re going to look—”

“Where are the mirrors?” asked Hal. And all at once he—jerked. He shivered all over, his head rolling horribly back, his limbs loose. “Curse these spells!” he snarled. “And the puppet must hold the wand too!” His voice sounded completely different, strange, raspy, like an old man’s voice, and oddly accented. A second later, Hal straightened up and smiled. “I really think we ought to look at mirrors,” he said in his normal tone.

Lewis agreed—anything to get out of this cluttered, claustrophobic room!—hoping that once they were downstairs he could bolt for the front door. Something was wrong with Hal, badly wrong. They trooped from room to room as the evening outside grew darker. Hal snarled in frustration as he looked at round mirrors, big rectangular bathroom mirrors, hand mirrors, every kind of mirror but the right one. “It should be in a rich gold frame because it is precious and valuable!” he growled. “Perhaps it is hidden away! He’d never risk its being broken. Too much of his power is in it! Come!”

They made their way through the second floor, with Hal rifling through everything. Hal pulled pictures off the wall, peering behind them—a photo of Uncle Jonathan shoulder to shoulder with Lewis’s late father, Charlie Barnavelt, a rather good painting of the Eiffel Tower at sunset and a horrible one of a knock-kneed brown and white spotted horse, and others. Hal tossed them aside, and at least one framed picture broke with a clink of glass. “Hey!” Lewis objected, but Hal ignored him.

Lewis cried out again when Hal began to pull open the drawers in his uncle’s wardrobe, flinging things left and right, and the boy whirled on him, his face a mask of anger. “Be still!” he yelled, flicking the yellow pencil as if it were a wand.

And all at once Lewis couldn’t move a muscle. He felt himself fall sideways, toppling like a felled tree. He collapsed against the bed, then slid from the bed down to the carpet. His arms and legs had lost all their feeling, and he lay there helpless, with the scary sensation of total paralysis. He could see under the bed. Hal was pacing around the room, muttering, “Where is it, where is it?”

Finally, Hal stood over him and waved the wand again. The old man’s voice came out of the boy’s mouth: “I shall have to inspect in person! Come! You must invite me in!”

Lewis rose to his feet. If he could have produced even a squeak, he would have roared in fright. But he couldn’t. He felt as if he were a puppet. His arms and legs would not respond to his will, but somehow his legs marched him down the stair and to the back door. “Open it,” said Hal.

In the rectangle of night outside stood a fierce-faced man, skinny and tall. His beaked nose was the same as in the photo Lewis had seen of him, but his bushy mustache and triangular goatee had turned gray. He was clad in a faded monk’s robe, with the hood down. He glared at Lewis from deep-set, angry-looking eyes. The man’s lips moved, but the voice came from behind Lewis: “Invite me in!”

“Thank you,” said the man sarcastically, stepping through the door. It slammed by itself, and he spoke a harsh, unintelligible word. Instantly vivid green sparks crept over the door. “We are sealed in,” the man said. He grinned very unpleasantly. “You foolish children! You agreed to the spell that I performed through my puppet. You reversed the magic the witch cast on the house—reversed it so it now protects me, not you! Fools, so easily led. My wand!” He held his hand out, and Hal gave him the pencil.

The second that happened, something snapped, and Lewis felt that he was back in his body again, with proper control. “What did you do to him?” Lewis asked.

The man stared at him in evident amusement. “Do you think your little friend I have somehow enchanted?” he asked in his accented English. “That I perhaps have him in some way hypnotized? No!” He laughed, an ugly sound like a rusty hinge. “What did I do to him? Why, you stupid fool, I made him!” He twitched the wand, and Hal staggered to his side in a dreadful loose-limbed shuffle, his head lolling loose on his neck.

“He is merely a puppet,” the man explained. “Nothing more than a hollow shell filled with a little magic, to allow me to roam and spy, listening with his ears, looking through his eyes. And now I need him no longer, so—”

He pointed the wand at Hal, and zigzag streaks of green-white power struck out of Hal’s body like miniature lightning bolts being attracted by the pencil eraser. Hal jittered and twitched and jerked.

Lewis yelped in terror. Hal’s left ear crumbled and flaked away, and his hair puffed into dust. His eyes shriveled, leaving two dark holes in his head. Cracks appeared all over his skin, and his flesh turned the sick gray-brown color of brittle oak leaves in autumn.

With a crackling sigh, the boy fell apart in a poof of dust that pattered down onto the hardwood floor. Hal was gone. Nothing was left of him but a settling pile of horribly crisp flakes.

“Now,” said the man, “allow me to introduce myself. I am Adolfus Schlectesherz, and if you do not help me find what I must have, my fine young man, I will make you what Hal Everit now is! Dust!”