The Whistle, the Grave, and the Ghost

Luckily, that week the meeting of the Capharnaum County Magicians Society was at the home of one of the other members, not Jonathan’s or Mrs. Zimmermann’s. Lewis, Uncle Jonathan, and Mrs. Zimmermann had an early dinner, and then the two adults left for their meeting. Lewis immediately telephoned Rose Rita, and she was at the house on High Street within ten minutes.

“Okay,” said Lewis as they began to look through the books. “We’ll see if we can dig up any information on lamias or lamiae or whatever you call them. Did Sally say anything about Billy and Stan today?”

Lewis recognized it at once, even before Rose Rita opened the cover. It was a bound copy of Mrs. Zimmermann’s doctoral dissertation, the research paper she had written when she was studying magic in Germany. Mrs. Zimmermann had several, and she had given one to Jonathan. “That won’t help,” said Lewis. “You know Mrs. Zimmermann said she’d never heard of a magical whistle.”

Amulets

by F. H. Zimmermann D. Mag. A.
A FREE INQUIRY INTO
THE PROPERTIES OF MAGIC AMULETS

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Magic Arts
of the University of Göttingen,
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the Degree of
DOCTOR MAGICORUM ARTIUM
(DOCTOR OF MAGIC ARTS)
by Florence Helene Zimmermann
June 13, 1922

English Language Copy.

For several minutes, the two read silently. Lewis sat in his uncle’s chair, with the green-shaded lamp shining on the page in front of him. Rose Rita had settled in the big wing armchair, and she held the dissertation close to her nose as she leafed through it. Usually Lewis enjoyed the dusty, faintly spicy smell of old books, but tonight it seemed to overpower him, making him feel nauseous.

The book he was consulting had no entry under lamia. However, under vampire it had an enormously long article, detailing vampires from different countries and different cultures. There was the nosferatu, although the text said that was a mistranslation of a word that meant “unclean spirit.” This kind of vampire was a sort of ghost on the borderline between life and death. It was a bloodthirsty phantom still animating a dead body.

Others were even stranger and more disturbing. In Malaysia, some people believed in a creature called the penang-galen. Although this kind of vampire looked human, it could detach its head from its body. The head, trailing the monster’s stomach and intestines behind it, flew through the air and sought out victims to feed upon. An illustration almost turned Lewis’s own stomach. He could just picture this slimy creature sailing through the night air . . . ugh!

He quickly turned the page. A vampiric spirit native to the Caribbean, he discovered, was the lou-garou, which could take the form of a “hot steam,” a tall, pale blue flame burning in the middle of a path or road. An unlucky person who blundered into the flame would collapse, all the blood drained from his body. The lou-garou would then return to a tomb, where the body that held its spirit rested. Lewis looked up from the page. “This is hard. I think every country in the world has its own kind of vampire!” He looked back down at the page. “Wurdalaks and strigoi and m’rani and . . .”

Rose Rita’s eyes were serious behind her round spectacles. “Well, my job’s not any easier. Mrs. Zimmermann classifies amulets every way you can think of. Stone amulets and silver ones, large amulets and small, plain ones and fancy ones with the Ivy League design and the belt in the back! I think I’m going to read all about the silver ones first. Get back to your book.”

Lewis nodded, but the more he read, the more the old house seemed to creak around him. Some of the descriptions made the flesh of his arms crinkle up. Sometimes he hastily turned a page when a particularly fearsome drawing appeared. Finally, though, he spotted the word lamiae and bent close to the desk to read it. “Listen to this,” he said. “ ‘The Greek lamiae, or vampiric witches, may be related to one of the very oldest legends of vampires, that of Lilith. In Hebrew tradition, Lilith was the first wife of Adam. Because she refused to obey Adam as his wife, she was cast out of the Garden of Eden and Eve was created. Lilith became a vengeful monster, capable of changing her form. Sometimes she took the shape of an owl in order to fly through the night. By reputation, she is a drinker of blood.’ ”

Lewis read on silently for a few minutes. “It doesn’t tell. But get this: ‘The Greek lamia, a vengeful, blood-drinking magical spirit, may be a development of the Lilith story. However, according to tradition, lamiae may occasionally be tamed, or rather enslaved. In the year 1587, the French mystic and priest Pere d’Anjou was supposed to have captured a lamia by means of a magic spell, and to have held it through a mystical item of some kind. D’Anjou used the spirit as a weapon, sending it forth against his enemies. In 1611, d’Anjou, whose physical appearance was still that of a young man despite his being well into his seventies, embarked on a voyage of discovery to the New World, where he was lost somewhere in North America.’ ”

“Doesn’t say.” Lewis read on. “And there’s not much more to the story of the lamia. Some stories of the Chippewa tell about an owl spirit that lures children away from home and drinks their blood. The writer seems to think that might be tied in to d’Anjou and his magic. Nothing here tells how to kill a lamia. No magic spells or anything.”

But that was a question neither could answer. Rose Rita found a passage in Mrs. Zimmermann’s dissertation that dealt with amulets of summoning. These were magical objects that could call up ghosts or spirits, but none seemed to be whistles. The typed book mentioned Aladdin’s lamp and genies and rings that gave the wearer power over spirits, but there was nothing remotely like Lewis’s discovery. Finally a yawning Rose Rita shut the dissertation with a clap. The big clock on the upstairs landing bonged dolefully ten times. It was getting late.

Rose Rita stretched. “All right. I think I can keep track of how Stan and Billy are doing in the hospital. Your job is to get rid of that whistle if it shows up again. Give it to Mrs. Zimmermann. If anybody can deal with it, she can.”

That night Lewis took Mrs. Zimmermann’s dissertation up to his room. He told himself that it was possible Rose Rita had missed something. He lay propped up in bed and turned the pages, reading all about the Philosopher’s Stone and the Ring of Solomon and the Seal of the Pharaohs. Nothing. Then as he looked through the footnotes, he noticed one that rang a faint bell: “For further information on amulets of summoning, see Girardus Abucejo, From the Vasty Deep.” Lewis closed the bound typescript and frowned in thought. Abucejo was an unusual name, and he thought he had seen it before. Maybe Uncle Jonathan had that very book in his study.

Quietly, Lewis slipped out of bed. He opened his bedroom door and heard the faint, muffled sounds of Jonathan Barnavelt’s snores. Still barefoot, Lewis tiptoed down the back stairway. He glanced up at the magic window, a stained-glass oval that Uncle Jonathan kept enchanted so that it was always changing. Tonight it showed a tall wizard standing in front of a strange arched bridge, with stone sculptures like giant chess pieces at its corners. The magician was flinging a handful of playing cards through the air toward the bridge.

Lewis padded to the bottom of the stairs and switched on the light. He went to the study and replaced Mrs. Zimmermann’s dissertation on its shelf, then began to run his finger across the names on the spines of the other volumes. Aansen, Abbott, Abson, ah, yes: Abucejo. Lewis pulled the volume from the shelf. It was old, with brown pages and a crumbling cloth binding. The title and author’s name had been stamped on in gilt, but most of the gold color had flaked away, leaving just the outline of the letters. Lewis sat at the desk and turned on the green-shaded light again. He opened the book and read the title page:

Chapter 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 On the summoning of spirits. Ghosts. Spirits of the departed. Nature spirits. Elementals. Djinni and the like. Spirit communication.

Lewis scanned through these until he came to Chapter 8, which was about “Dangers of attempting to control spirits. Spirit possession. Entrapment of the will.” His heart felt as if it had climbed up into his throat and were pounding away behind his Adam’s apple. Lewis gulped a couple of times and turned to page 133, where the chapter began. His eyes were watering. He blinked and started to read. He came to a chilling passage:

. . . but the chief worry of the magician bold enough to conjure up such a spirit is the simple principle of quid pro quo. Ancient authorities all agree that such magic must be paid for. Payment may take many forms, some of the most common being the gift of blood (for spirits are always desirous of having a physical body, and the blood of the living is one way of forming such a body), or of obedience, or even an exchange of life for life.

This last is the most terrible. The hapless magician discovers himself locked outside his own body, whilst some loathsome spirit enters it and takes control. In such cases, payment is indeed complete, for the servant spirit has now become, to the world’s sight, the magician, and the magician has become what the spirit was, bodiless and lost upon the wind, lost for all of time and all of eternity.

He turned out the light and was just going into the hall when something made him look back. Behind the desk was a set of French doors that led into the side yard. These were always closed, and gauzy white curtains hung over them. The curtains stirred as if in a breeze, though Lewis could feel no wind.

But his muscles refused to move. The curtains billowed, rising in the air. He could glimpse the darkness of the yard beyond them, with patches of drifting night mist curling and writhing against the glass. The curtains moved again. They rose, fell, hid the closed French doors, then revealed them.

Lewis gasped. Was that a voice? Or was it only words he heard in his head? It was the same sensation he had felt when the ghost had declared that Stan was Mine, the same whispery sense that he had experienced when the thought of Revenge had come into his head. An imaginary voice, he had told himself over and over. Now he desperately wanted to believe he was imagining things.

The curtains lifted on the unfelt breeze. A woman stood just outside the house. She was white, as pale as moonlight, tall and slender. Come to me. Was she speaking to Lewis? Was it her voice he heard in his head? He couldn’t be sure. He felt odd, as if he were asleep and awake at the same time.

She looked wrong. She looked as if her body were formed of the night mists, almost transparent, wavering on the night air. She spread her arms, reaching for him. We will belong to each other. Together we will be strong. Come to me.

Lewis tried to say “No,” but he could not open his mouth. He was freezing and burning all at the same time. He felt himself take one unwilling step toward the woman . . .