CHAPTER FOURTEEN

 

 

Johnny slipped across Fillmore Street. It was early—5:20 a.m., according to his watch—and the street was deserted. The light fog lingered on, making everything gray and hazy. So much the better, Johnny thought. If anyone passed, the chances of his being spotted were that much less.

He slipped inside the professor's house, but now that he was actually about to find his "birthday present," he was frightened. Frightened of where he had to go and of what he might find.

But he knew he had to go through with it. The professor had risked his life for Johnny more than once. And so Johnny climbed the stairs to the second floor, then opened a door at the end of the hallway. It was almost never used, and its hinges groaned with a high-pitched squeal. The door opened onto a dim stairway that led from the cellar to the unused third floor of the house. Up there, below the roof, were two small servants' rooms and a large, gloomy attic. Johnny climbed up, his breath coming in shallow gasps, the dry dust tickling his nose and making his eyes water.

Both the servants' rooms were empty. A droning fly circled in the warm air and followed Johnny into the large, dark attic. The room was cluttered with boxes, trunks, and old furniture, but there in the center was what Johnny was searching for. It was a cord dangling from the dim ceiling. Johnny found a fairly sturdy chair, pushed it under the cord, and climbed up. He could just reach the wooden bead that hung at the cord's end. Grasping it firmly, Johnny tugged downward.

With a rusty creak, a trapdoor opened overhead and a folding ladder extended itself. Johnny had to move the chair until the ladder was braced, and then he climbed up. Cobwebs swept into his face, making him shiver with revulsion. He climbed up into the dark, yawning rectangle.

At the top he had to crouch, because the trapdoor opened right under the peak of the roof. He felt around on the dry wood, once touching a cold, little many-legged body—a spider! Johnny yanked his hand away. He had heard stories of deadly black widow spiders that could kill a human being with one shot of their lethal venom. Johnny wished that he had thought to bring a flashlight with him, but he had been too excited at the time.

Grimacing, Johnny put his fingertips on the wood again. This time, as if by instinct, he found a rough, rusty metal handle. He gave this a turn, and it ground slowly through half a circle. Then he pushed. A crack of pale, milky daylight showed, and then light flooded in. Johnny had opened a second trapdoor, this one leading out onto the roof of the professor's house. It was set in a little flat-roofed dormer that faced down the roof slope exactly behind the Italian cupola. The professor had squeezed in and out of this opening many times when he was putting up his homemade radio aerial, because the old man hated heights and ladders. Now Johnny crept cautiously through.

The roof swept dizzily down, and from here Johnny could see the backyard with its incinerator, barbecue grill, and weedy flower beds. Over to his right was the roof of the garage, and through the trees at the back of the yard Johnny glimpsed the alley that ran behind the houses on this side of the street. Everything beyond that was lost in the morning mist. Johnny flattened himself until he was almost lying on the roof and then crawled up to the peak, carefully. Very, very carefully, because he could imagine rolling helplessly down and plummeting to the earth, possibly breaking his neck.

He sat astride the roof like a cowboy on a horse, leaning against the cupola. The ramshackle radio aerial towered over him. Despite his fear, Johnny smiled. This was the ear in the sky. Professor Childermass had built the aerial so he could hear the Red Sox games on his radio. Leading from the aerial, tacked down to the roof and disappearing over the edge, was the antenna wire. And running along beside it, white and almost brand-new, was a length of cotton cord, like clothesline. It ran to the edge of the roof, but then instead of vanishing downward, it led up the chimney side.

The present would be where billows rose—billows of smoke.

Johnny found the end of the cord and tugged. The professor had stapled it down only lightly, and it came loose with a pop. Johnny pulled harder until finally the cord was free of the roof and made a straight line between his hand and the chimney top. Something scraped inside the chimney, and then an oblong package wrapped in soot-blackened cloth came out. It thudded to the roof and rolled a little way before the cord stopped it. Johnny hauled in his catch. It had to be the wooden hand. He wrapped the free part of the cord around and around it, carefully eased down the roof, and scuttled back into the attic. He started to pull the door closed and froze.

A dark shadow zoomed past, disappearing into the fog.

Was it a crow?

Johnny couldn't be sure, but he slammed the trapdoor, clambered down the ladder, and sent the folding ladder clashing back up into the ceiling. Then he hurried downstairs. The moment he opened the front door, he saw Sarah pedaling her bike up the street. Johnny dashed out and waved at her. She swerved, and they met at the edge of the professor's driveway.

"Hi," she said. "Whatcha got?"

"My birthday present," Johnny returned, making a face. "Come on and we'll open it."

It was not yet six o'clock, and Gramma and Grampa were still asleep. While Sarah waited in the parlor, Johnny went quietly up to the bathroom, scrubbed his sooty hands and dusty face, and changed clothes. He hurried downstairs and led Sarah into the cellar. "Nobody will come down here," he whispered. "And I don't think any birds can spy on us here either." He hastily told Sarah about how he had solved the professor's puzzle and retrieved the package.

He used his Boy Scout knife to cut the cord that bound the sooty package and then unrolled the old sheet. Inside was the carved wooden hand. Sarah picked it up. "So this is the big deal? What's it supposed to do?"

Johnny shrugged helplessly. "I don't know. It was the last thing that Esdrias Blackleach made before he died. When I first touched it, it—I thought it moved. But Professor Childermass didn't know about any magical powers that it might have, unless Dr. Coote found something."

Sarah grinned. "We can find out. His door's not even locked."

"That seems wrong," said Johnny. "It's like stealing or something."

Sarah began to wrap the hand up again. "What are you talking about? You've already been in his house once today!"

"That was different. Professor Childermass left the card for me, so he wanted me to find this hand if he couldn't get to it. He didn't tell me just to come into his house and make myself at home."

"How else are we gonna find out what he dug up on old Blackleach?"

Johnny had no answer. They slipped into the professor's house. Johnny led the way up to the cluttered study. A few books were piled on the desk, and some of them obviously had to do with magic. There was the two-volume set of Charles W. Upham's Salem Witchcraft, John Hale's A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft, Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World, and W. Elliot Woodward's Records of Salem Witchcraft. The two friends looked through the indexes, but only two of the books mentioned Blackleach.

Sarah restacked the books, making a face. "Well, that tells us nothing," she grumbled. "Where else would he keep books and stuff ?"

They searched through the brick-and-board bookshelves with no luck. Irritated, Sarah scuffed her toe through the ankle-deep pile of old graded exams—and turned up a heavy, crumbling volume that had been thrust underneath them. "Hey," she said. "Here's something." She picked it up. It was a thin, tall book, a folio volume, bound in ancient, flaking leather. The cover no longer bore any tide that could be read.

They plopped the book on the desk and Johnny carefully opened it, releasing a cloud of spicy-smelling dust. "It's a holograph," he said.

"A what?" demanded Sarah, craning to see.

"A holograph," repeated Johnny. "A book that wasn't printed, but written in longhand." He pointed to the title page, where a spidery title had been written in ink faded to a rusty brown:

 

A True Relation

of the

Witchcraft Tryals

in New-England

 

Sarah wrinkled her nose. "The penmanship's awful."

"It's just old-fashioned," returned Johnny. "Hey, here's a bookmark." He opened the book to the place marked by a three-by five-inch note card, and they saw writing on the card. Johnny immediately recognized Dr. Coote's fussy, neat handwriting: "Dear Roderick—I borrowed this monograph from a good friend of mine, so please take care of it. It is the only one in existence, and it may tell you more about your wizard than you want to know." It was signed, "Charles."

Johnny read the faded words on the brittle, ancient page:

 

Mr. E. B. of Squampatanong Village, a prosperous Farmer, but withal a learned Man, did advise the Magistrates of the divers Means of discovering Witches. Mr. Hathorne did say, that without the Aid of Mr. E. B., the Tryals would not have been Half so successful, nor the Convictions for this Horrid Art or Science of Witch-Craft half so Many.

I watch'd and long wonder'd at this Prodigy, and began to fear that he was not, as he seem'd, a modest helpful Man, but perhaps himself an Instrument of Evil, for to be sure he oft succeeded to the Property of those accused or condemn'd. Mr. E. B. suffer'd a Stroke of Apoplexy in July, and linger'd on most grievously Ill until August, when, on the first Day of the Month, he deliver'd up his Soul. The Skies were rent with Lightning and Thunder, and some Relations of those accus'd, were so Bold as to say that the Devil had come for his Own. Yet the Magistrates held that Practicers of the Wicked Arts rais'd the Storm, to trouble the Last Moments On Earth of a good and godly Soul.

The old man's mutilated Body the Family buried, but in dying, Mr. E. B. left behind him many curious and strange Works, that I acquir'd from his only Son. Among these were a Mirror for sending of Spirits, and a tablet for finding Treasures hid under ground, and a tube of spying from a Distance or at Night, and a Hand marvelously carven of Wood like unto his own, which he lost, and a curious bottle, wherein it snowed, and many Phials of Medicines and Powders besides. All these I have put by, for I am persuaded that E. B. was of the Evil One's Party himself, for he kept the Trappings of the Necromancer's Art.

 

Sarah pointed to the name. "Mr. E. B. could be Esdrias Blackleach. What does 'mutilated Body' mean?"

Johnny shrugged. "I don't know. But it also says the wooden hand was like the one that E. B. lost. Maybe he had his hand cut off in a farm accident. Anyway, it has to be the same guy." He read more, but the rest of the book talked about the executions in Salem Village, about the oratory of Cotton Mather, and about the villagers' apologies to the surviving accused witches some ten years after the trials had ended. He closed the book and puffed out his breath. "So that's how the hand and the other things came to be preserved," he said. "I suppose whoever wrote this book kept them, and then his heirs got them, and little by little they were scattered until the professor's brother began buying them as antiques."

"But what does Spooky-Face Mergal want with the junk?"

"I told you," said Johnny impatiently. "He thinks he can be a wizard like Blackleach."

Sarah had opened the book back to the marked page. "What in the world is a n-necromancer?" she asked.

"A magician of some kind," Johnny said. "I saw a dictionary of magic over on one of the bookshelves. Let's look it up."

They thumbed through the heavy dictionary until they found the entry. A hideous woodcut illustrated it, showing two men in Elizabethan clothes standing in a magic circle drawn on the soil of a cemetery. A grave yawned open nearby, and standing stiff as a board was a ghastly figure, a dead woman with a skeletal face and a gaping mouth. The caption read, "Dr. Dee and his assistant Kelley performing an act of necromancy."

Johnny's throat felt dry as he read the definition opposite the illustration. "It says here that a necromancer is a magician who has the power to make people rise from the dead."

For a moment the two friends stared wide-eyed at each other. Then the telephone rang, its bell terribly loud in the silent house.

Johnny and Sarah both screamed in alarm.