Charlie Hitchcock had never slept in a magician’s house before.

It was disappointing. No unearthly moans. No rattling chains. No phantoms flitting through walls. Charlie would have welcomed them, and would have spent the rest of the night trying to solve the mystery of what they really were. He loved solving puzzles.

Charlie yawned and pulled the blanket to his chin. Counting ghosts would have been a lot more fun than lying there counting sheep. Instead, he listened to the rumbling of the thunderstorm outside and to the ticking of a grandfather clock. The clock faced the sofa on which he was trying to fall asleep. A flash of lightning lit up the dial.

Almost three o’clock? he thought. Only four more hours! He groaned and rolled over, gazing around Brack’s sitting room.

Brack — also known as Abracadabra, the legendary magician — was the founder and owner of the world-famous Abracadabra Hotel, the only hotel made by and for retired magicians, and Brack’s home was a special penthouse on the windy roof of the building. But Brack was not there. The old magician was missing.

Groans came from the closet.

For a nanosecond, Charlie hoped it was a ghost, but he knew the sound was just old floorboards settling in the storm.

The boy glanced over at the magician’s big, wooden desk. The pile of books and papers covering the desk was the reason he was staying overnight. They had also led Charlie into his latest adventure, along with Tyler Yu.

The hotheaded Tyler was known at Blackstone Middle School for having enemies. But he and Charlie made a good team. They had solved a number of weird puzzles in the old hotel. This newest mystery was the weirdest. Brack was missing, and Tyler had also vanished.

On the magician’s desk lay a clue that Charlie hoped would lead him to his friends. It was a sheet of paper that held an unusual list of words:

Charlie was convinced that “lily,” written in Brack’s spidery handwriting, referred to a flower in the hallway of the hotel’s fourteenth floor. A flower that stood out strangely from the rest of the old-fashioned wallpaper.

But it was the last entry in the list that bothered him the most. THE 12. Did that mean the twelfth floor?

Then why hadn’t Brack written it the way he wrote 13th floor just above it?

Dnnng! Dnnng! Dnnng!

Three o’clock. Charlie shifted on the sofa and pulled the blanket around himself more tightly.

What — or who — are the Twelve? he wondered.

There were twelve months in the year. Twelve numbers on a clock. Twelve days of Christmas.

Twelve signs of the Zzzzz…

Brack’s sitting room soon echoed with the thunder-like rumbling of Charlie’s snores.

And while the boy slept, a dark figure — waiting patiently in the shadows — slipped from the closet, made its way to the front door, and darted away from the magician’s house.

* * *

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Four hours later, Charlie yawned and stepped off the elevator, shuffling through the vast lobby of the Abracadabra, which was also known as the Hocus Pocus Hotel to the staff and its guests.

“Charlie! Over here!” came a voice.

Charlie rubbed his eyes and saw Annie Solo waving furiously near the front desk. Another girl stood next to her.

“Charlie,” said Annie, smiling widely. “This is Cozette. She’s new here. Just started a couple weeks ago.”

The other girl held up a hand and said, “Hey.” She had thick dark hair and bright eyes, and wore pink shoes that matched her fingernail polish.

“Cozette’s going to help us,” said Annie. “I figured two heads are better than one, and, well, three heads are better than two.”

Before Charlie could ask a question, Annie grabbed his hand and pulled him, along with Cozette, toward the hotel restaurant. “Come on, I’m starving,” she said.

Tyler’s dad, Walter Yu, was the head chef of the Top Hat restaurant. He showed them to a table. “Breakfast is on the house,” he said. “Thanks to you, Annie, and your friend here, we can all keep our jobs. And the hotel is safe!”

Cozette looked puzzled, so Annie said, “I’ll explain it all later.”

And she did, with help from Charlie, while the three of them dug into eggs, toast, bacon, and fruit.

Annie explained how the two of them, but mostly Charlie, had saved the hotel from falling into the hands of a magician known as Theopolis.

“That snake threatened to take away the Hocus Pocus if Mr. Brack didn’t pay the rent,” said Annie.

“But Mr. Brack is missing,” said Cozette.

Annie and Charlie nodded. Charlie had kept Theopolis from stealing the hotel, by threatening to reveal one of his most amazing magic tricks. But who knew how long that would keep the evil magician quiet? Charlie was afraid the man would come up with another awful plan. And soon.

“That’s why we have to find Brack,” said Charlie.

“And Tyler, too,” added Annie. “They’re both in trouble.”

“We told Ty’s parents that he’s been helping us look for Brack,” said Charlie. “But if we don’t find him soon, Mrs. Yu’s going to get suspicious.

“You should call the police,” said Cozette.

“We will,” said Annie. “Tomorrow. If we still can’t find them by the end of the day. But we know they’re somewhere in the hotel.”

“On the thirteenth floor,” said Charlie.

“Thirteen?” said Cozette. Her eyes grew wide. “That seems unlucky.”

“But we’ll go to the fourteenth floor first,” said Charlie.

“Right,” said Annie. “The lily.”

Cozette put down a forkful of eggs. “Lily who?”

“No, it’s lily what,” said Annie. “A flower.”

“But not really a flower,” said Charlie.

Cozette sighed. “I don’t know why you talked me into this, Annie.”

“Because we have to help Tyler,” said her friend.

Cozette and Charlie shared a glance. They knew Annie liked Tyler. Really liked him.

Cozette patted her lips with her napkin and then dropped it on the table. “Okay then,” she said. “Let’s go rescue Tyler.”

When they got off the elevator at the fourteenth floor, Charlie led them to the hallway he and Annie had investigated the day before. Annie waved toward two doors, side by side. “That’s where the magicians are staying this week. Theopolis there, and Mr. Dragonstone there.”

“David Dragonstone?” said Cozette. “He is so cute! Do you think he’ll come out if we knock on the door? Will he be wearing his cute white suit?”

“We’re here to look for Tyler, remember?” said Annie.

“Besides, David Dragonstone might be involved in this,” added Charlie.

“Charlie figured out how Mr. Dragonstone did his magic tricks,” said Annie. “Figured it all out by himself. Except for one thing.”

“What’s that?” asked Cozette.

“The trick where he walks through a glass door down on the twelfth floor,” Annie said. “Charlie knows how he got through the glass. But he doesn’t know how he got to the twelfth floor in the first place.”

Charlie walked down the hall. “Tyler stood at one end of that hallway. The solid glass door was at the other end. But somehow Dragonstone appeared in the middle,” he said.

“How?” asked Cozette.

Charlie was staring carefully at the wall. “I think it has something to do with this.”

The two girls rushed over to him.

“That’s the lily!” said Annie. The dark wallpaper was covered with patterns of lilies. The flower Charlie was staring at, however, was not printed on the wallpaper. It was made of plaster and sat on top of the paper, in three dimensions, but blended in with the flowers around it. If a person hadn’t been looking for it, they would have overlooked it in the flowing pattern.

“Brack’s writing,” said Charlie, referring to the paper he had found the day before, “had the words ‘turn lily there.’”

“I figured out that part,” said Annie.

“So, how do we turn it?” asked Cozette.

“I’m not exactly sure,” said Charlie. He took a few steps back for a better view. On the floor beneath his shoes was a rectangle. It was the only shape in the otherwise plain, red carpet. A rectangle made of twisting lines of gold and emerald and cream. Charlie was sure that the two items that didn’t fit in, the rectangle and the flower, were parts of the same puzzle.

Cozette shrugged. “Why don’t you just try turning it?”

She reached out and grabbed the plaster lily. With a small crunch, it turned in her grip like a doorknob.

Something thudded in the hallway and shook the floor. Annie gasped. The rectangle in the carpet tilted downward, like a waterslide, into a dark rectangular space. The last things Charlie saw were Cozette’s pink shoes.

He fell through the floor, then rolled into something hard. With another thump, the carpet above him tilted back up and the light disappeared.

Charlie heard a wrenching sound, a scream, and then nothing. He was in darkness.