CHAPTER ELEVEN

 

 

Days went by. Johnny moped around the house, did chores for his grandparents, spent hours in his room, and daydreamed that he was Sergeant John M. Dixon of Gangbusters, and that he and a carload of tough cops would come roaring up with sirens blasting to arrest Mr. Mattheus Mergal. They would catch him in the act of robbing a bank. He would snarl, "You'll never take me alive, coppers!"

Then, in a hail of tommy-gun fire, Johnny would dash into the building, yelling, "Cover me, boys!" After crashing through the door, he would get into a wild fistfight with Mergal, thrashing him until the coward broke down and confessed that he was to blame for everything. The bank would be full of hostages, and Miss Ferrington would be one of them. She would weep and beg Johnny to forgive her. He wasn't quite sure if he would or not.

But when the daydream was over, Johnny had to admit that it was a fantasy. He began to be afraid that maybe Sarah was right. Maybe he had lost his marbles. He wished he could come up with some way to prove that his worries were about real things and not just in his mind.

One morning Johnny came downstairs and heard voices in the parlor. He recognized the professor's querulous voice and Grampa Dixon's mild tones. Johnny knew eavesdropping was wrong, but something made him stop and listen.

"Rod, if it was just that he was feelin' a little down, I could understand," Grampa Dixon was saying. "I guess everybody feels that way now an' again. But he's been draggin' around for days. Kate wants me to take him to Doc Schermerhorn for a checkup, because she's afraid he might be comin' down with infantile paralysis or somethin'. What do you think?"

The professor replied, "Henry, John is just growing up, that's all. When you were his age, didn't you have bleak days when the whole world seemed against you? Didn't you ever get into silly quarrels with your friends?"

"I s'pose I did," replied Johnny's grandfather slowly. "Only Johnny's always been such a loner. Y' know, I think he really misses Fergie. For a while we thought that maybe he an' that nice Sarah Channing girl were gonna become good friends, but he hasn't talked about her much lately."

"Give him a little time," the professor said.

"Then y' don't think we should take him to Doc Schermerhorn?"

Johnny heard Professor Childermass snort. "Henry, I wouldn't take a sick cat to that quack. I haven't trusted him since he told my cousin Bea she was having headaches because her teeth were bad, and then a couple of months later she died of a brain tumor. Besides, his jokes are so terrible they give patients nervous stomachs, hives, and the blind staggers. I'm busy now, but in a week or two, certainly by August, I'll take Johnny down to Boston for a few Red Sox games. That will take his mind off his miseries, and before long Fergie will be back, and everything will return to normal."

"Y' think so, Rod?"

"I'm positive, Henry."

Johnny coughed, and the two men fell silent as he walked into the parlor. Grampa Dixon looked a little embarrassed, the way he sometimes looked if he and the professor were sitting at the kitchen table sipping whiskey and Gramma walked in. Gramma did not approve of alcohol. "Hi, Johnny," mumbled Grampa Dixon. "Say, Rod here was just wonderin' if you'd wanta go to see the Red Sox play sometime."

"That'd be swell," said Johnny, but he could not put much enthusiasm into his reply.

"How are you feeling, John?" asked Professor Childermass.

Johnny shrugged. "Okay, I guess. I thought I'd cut the grass today, before it gets hot."

"Good idea," said the professor. "In fact, if you want, you can mow my lawn. I'll pay you two dollars. And if you uncover any chests of Spanish gold, you may keep them." The professor grinned.

Johnny smiled too, but his heart wasn't in it. He kept busy that day and the next morning with the yard work. The professor was being very mysterious, hopping in his car, driving away, and coming back at odd hours. He would not discuss what he was up to, and this made Johnny feel more left out than ever.

One afternoon Johnny walked downtown toward Peter's Sweet Shop. He saw Eddie Tompke and a bunch of his friends go into the shop, though, and he turned around to go back home. He didn't want to mix it up with them, not after the disturbing nightmares he had been having about Eddie.

But Sarah had just come around the corner, and she stopped, staring at him. "Hi," she said, and then she bit her lip.

"Hi," muttered Johnny. He walked past her, but she fell in beside him.

"Look, I've got something to tell you," she said. "I don't know if it's important or not, but I think you ought to know."

Johnny didn't reply or look at her. He felt a dull burning inside. Why couldn't she just leave him alone? "What?" he asked in a cranky voice.

"Your Mr. Mergal has moved to Duston Heights," she said.

Stopping dead in his tracks, Johnny stared at her. "Are you sure?"

Sarah nodded. "I know Mikey Bonner. He delivers the Gazette, and he said Mr. Mergal moved into an old empty house on Saltonstall Street last Friday or Saturday. On Monday Mike tried to get him to subscribe to the newspaper, and Mergal chased him away. Mikey was still complaining about it when we played flies an' grounders."

Johnny frowned. Saltonstall Street was closer to the Merrimack River than Fillmore Street, but it was in the same section of town. He tried to remember any empty houses. "Is that the one close to the old church?"

"Which church?"

Johnny rolled his eyes. "The old Congregational Church. It caught fire and the roof burned back in 1943, Grampa says. They never fixed it 'cause they built the new church on the other side of town."

"I don't know anything about the church," Sarah reminded him. "I'm new in town, remember?"

"Yeah." Johnny thought hard. "There's the old Bradstreet house. All the kids call it the haunted house, because it's big and creepy, all weathered gray, and it has this strange tower in the front—"

"That's it," said Sarah. "Mike said Mergal moved into a haunted house."

Johnny shivered. He and Fergie had often strolled past the old Victorian house. It was about a quarter mile past the ruined church, behind a forbidding fence of black wrought-iron. The overgrown yard sprouted chest-high weeds, and the bleak, dirty windows gazed out blearily, like evil eyes. A wooden sign hung drunkenly from the wrought-iron gate:

 

No Trespassing

Violators Will Be Prosecuted

 

Fergie had often dared Johnny to spend a night in the place. Kids around town told all sorts of stories about it. In the 1890s a crazy killer had hacked a man to pieces there, and they said that every night at midnight a puddle of blood formed in the front hall where the victim had fallen. People said that a spiral staircase led up into the tower, and if you walked up when the full moon was shining, you would see a shadowy form leap from the top and plummet down, only to be jerked short by a rope around its neck. That was the ghost of a woman who had committed suicide by hanging herself in the tower. Sometimes through the windows you could glimpse a ghostly coffin, drifting eerily from room to room. It would chase you, people said, and if it caught you, it snapped you up and sank into the earth, burying you alive.

Johnny had never been tempted to take Fergie's dare. He swallowed hard and said, "I know the house."

"Wanna go there?"

"No!" Johnny yelped the word out so loudly that it made Sarah jump.

"Take it easy, Dixon! If you're still mad at me—"

"I'm not," said Johnny miserably. "It's just that—well, I've seen Mr. Mergal. He's weird, Sarah. Something about him isn't right. I don't think we should go rushing over to his house. Maybe we could talk to the professor, and he might have some idea of what we should do."

"Hey, it's a free country," returned Sarah. "I mean, Mr. Mergal can move to Duston Heights if he wants to, right? And we can walk down Saltonstall Street if we want to. I'm not saying we should try to run Mr. Mergal down with our bikes or bop him on the bean with slingshots or anything. All I wanted to do was take a look at that house. It's supposed to be pretty weird itself, from what I hear. And maybe we could get a glimpse of Mr. Mergal. After all, we just have Mikey's word for it. We don't really know that it's the same guy who spooked you in the museum."

"It would just about have to be," muttered Johnny. Mergal was an odd name. Two Mergals showing up in a small town like Duston Heights was too big a coincidence to swallow.

Sarah sniffed. "Dixon, I'll make you a deal. Go along with me and take a look at the house, and we can be friends again. But don't try to tell me this Mergal guy is gonna start howling at the moon or anything, okay?"

Taking a deep breath, Johnny nodded. He hadn't wanted to talk about magic and witchcraft anyway, but it would do no good to remind Sarah of that. The two of them walked across town, then turned onto Saltonstall Street.

The houses here were big and run-down. Many had been built back in the 1880s, when lots of people in Duston Heights were getting rich in the leather and shoe businesses. These were Victorian houses, with complex gables, porches, and gingerbread decorations, but most needed paint and repairs. A porch rail was broken here, a loose shutter hung crookedly there, and the yards were seedy and overgrown.

Bradstreet Hill was at the end of the street. The hill was a good place for sledding in a winter snowfall. At its crown was the silhouette of the old burned-out church. Johnny and Sarah plodded up the hill and paused to look at the ruin.

All the brick walls of the church still stood. The roof over the sanctuary had burned and collapsed onto the pews, and through the gaping hole where the front doors had been they could see charred timbers and piles of ashes with weeds sprouting from them. The church had been T-shaped, and the sanctuary was the vertical stroke of the T. The crossbar, containing the choir and the Sunday-school rooms, still looked intact. Of course, everything was far gone with decay and neglect, because the building had stood open to all kinds of weather for about ten years.

A long way past the church on the right was the last house on Saltonstall Street before it turned into a county highway and wound past cornfields and scattered farms. It was the Bradstreet house, and it huddled behind its black wrought-iron fence, looking forbidding and evil.

All around the brooding house grew a heavy thatch of unmowed grass. A thick layer of grime blinded all the windows. The place looked as if no one had lived there for fifty years.

Weathered to a dull gray, the house had been built in two big blocks. Facing the street was a long porch supported by thin Corinthian columns, with scalloped decorations running between them. The porch rail had rotted away, and now only a few broken banisters jutted this way and that, like decayed, snaggly teeth. Above the porch were two more stories, with narrow, tall windows framed by moldering shutters. At the steep roof peak, ornate lightning rods, iron spears with purple and red glass globes along their lengths, thrust up to the sky.

A second porch was over on the right side, where another three-storied section of the house projected into the yard. Between the two big blocks nestled a tower. Up to the roof line it was square, but then its top story became an octagonal cupola. An unusual lightning rod was on the steepled crown of the tower, with three red glass balls at the base and a large blue one at the top, supporting the spire. It looked like this:

"Are you sure he's there?" asked Johnny.

"Mikey said he was." But Sarah sounded uncertain, as if she couldn't believe anyone would live in a terrible place like that.

A crow swooped over their heads and sailed up to perch on a windowsill. It was a narrow ledge, and the big bird had to flap and scrabble with its claws to hold on. It pecked at the window hard, three times—tap! tap! tap!—then screeched a raucous caw! and flew away.

"Let's go knock on the door," said Sarah.

"Are you nuts?" returned Johnny.

"What harm can it do? Look, if he gets mad and blows his top, we can always say we're selling candy or something. Come on!" She pushed at the gate, and the metal hinges groaned as it swung inward.

"Sarah," pleaded Johnny. Too late. She was already halfway to the porch. Johnny hurried after her, staring anxiously at the weathered old house. It waited with a patient, sinister air, like a tiger watching its prey approach. The wooden porch steps creaked as Sarah stepped on them. "I don't like this," Johnny muttered, joining her on the porch. The rotten old boards underfoot sagged as if they were about to break, and a choking, nasty-smelling dust rose from them.

"Okay, we're selling candy for St. Michael's," muttered Sarah. "We'll knock and see if he's home and ask to take his order. Ready?"

Whether Johnny was ready or not, Sarah pounded on the door. Her fist made a dismal, echoing boom! boom! boom! The sound almost made Johnny jump out of his skin.

Then he felt the hairs on his neck bristle. The door opened. Slowly, with a protest of ancient, rusty hinges, it swung inward, into darkness. But no one was there.

"Want to explore?" asked Sarah. She put her foot on the threshold.

Johnny grabbed her arm. "No! There is something wrong about this—"

Sarah screamed. Johnny's jaw fell open as he stared into the darkness. From the deep gloom someone was coming toward them—someone or something. It was as tall as a man, but it moved with a shambling, loose step, as if it were about to fall apart.

And then it stumbled close enough for the light from the open door to fall on it.

It was a walking skeleton, dressed in the flaking scraps of a Pilgrim suit, with a tall, conical hat atop its pale, grinning skull. Ancient, dried shreds of moldy green flesh stuck to its cheeks, and cobwebs busy with spiders filled its eye sockets. The long, tattered coat that it wore hung open, and inside the skeleton's rib cage gray shapes moved, huge, red-eyed rats that gnawed the bones with their yellow teeth. The skeleton thrust its arms out as if it were blind in the light, and Johnny saw that its left hand was missing. The shape lurched forward, its jaws gaping, a hollow groan coming from its bony mouth—

Johnny pulled Sarah away, and they leaped off the porch. Behind them they heard an angry snarl, and as they ran through the tall grass, things writhed at their feet.

Snakes! Hundreds of snakes reared, hissed, coiled, and struck at them. Sarah shrieked at the top of her lungs, and Johnny thought he was going to faint. He stepped on a muscular body that bulged and twisted underfoot, and with a yelp he rushed forward. He and Sarah reached the iron gate, but a huge, scaly green serpent coiled itself in and out of the bars, its evil triangular head raised, its slitted blood-red eyes glaring at them. It struck as Johnny pushed Sarah through the open gate, its fangs barely missing them. An instant later they were outside.

When Johnny looked behind him, all the snakes had vanished. "They weren't real!" he gasped. "It was some kinda trick—look!"

Sarah was breathing hard and shaking so badly, she could hardly stand. The two of them were shoulder to shoulder, staring back through the iron gate at the gray old house, its door peacefully closed. "That—that thing in the house. Do you think that was real?"

"I don't know," Johnny confessed. "But I'm never going back in there as long as I live!"

From behind them a grating voice said, "Oh, you didn't enjoy your visit, hmm? Come back any time—I never lock my gate!"

Johnny and Sarah wheeled around. Not three steps away stood the tall, gaunt, black-suited figure of Mattheus Mergal. His stained, uneven teeth showed in a fierce grin. From overhead, the crow screamed again, an evil, nails-on-a-blackboard sound.

"Well, if you really must go, there is the way," Mergal said, stepping aside and gesturing down the hill.

Sarah and Johnny began to run at the same instant. They ran as if the devil himself were at their heels.