The Whistle, the Grave, and the Ghost

Over the next few days, Lewis felt stranger and stranger. It still wasn’t that he was sick, exactly, but he was not himself. Rose Rita noticed it on Friday, when she came over to tell him that she had heard both Billy and Stan were being moved to a bigger hospital in Detroit, miles and miles away. “The doctors think they have some kind of unusual anemia,” she told Lewis. “They pump them full of blood about every other day, and then it just seems to disappear somehow.”

“Umm,” said Lewis, preoccupied. They were sitting in the backyard of Lewis’s house again. The sun was bright and hot, but Lewis hardly felt it. To him it seemed as if the world were in a hazy fog, and as if he were somehow not part of it.

Lewis made a face. “You’ve only told me about a hundred times!” It was odd, but he had never much noticed how bossy Rose Rita always was. He began to think he might be better off without her as a friend. Always sticking her nose into his business, always thinking she knew what was best for everyone. He was getting fed up with her pushy nature.

“Always picking on me,” grumbled Lewis. “Always calling me names and planning to beat me up. I think it serves them right to land in the hospital! And I’ll bet there are a lot of others who think the same thing too!”

Now Rose Rita was blushing, but with anger, not embarrassment. “Be careful what you say, Lewis. You don’t mean that. It’s a hateful thing to say, and anyway, you’ll have to confess all that to Father Foley!”

“He’s another one who should be in the hospital,” growled Lewis. “Thinks he’s so great just because he’s a priest! But he’s mean, and he loves pushing people around. He needs a taste of his own medicine—”

When she had gone, he just sat there for a while, breathing hard. He felt strange. Sad, but sad as if he were remembering how it felt. Mostly he just felt exhausted, tired of everything. He closed his eyes and imagined he heard a song, a wordless humming sort of song, rising and falling as softly as the summer wind. He opened his eyes a moment later to find that shadows had stretched out long across the lawn. Lewis jumped up, alarmed. Hours had gone past as if they had been seconds. He shook his head in confusion. Then he hurried inside.

Mrs. Zimmermann came over that evening for dinner. They had a lot of Lewis’s favorites: grilled trout and fresh corn on the cob, dripping with butter, sweet green peas that popped when you bit into them, and fresh-baked bread. Lewis ate mechanically, and to him it all tasted like cardboard.

“Well,” boomed Uncle Jonathan as they got to the end of their meal, “Helen called this afternoon and wanted to know why I haven’t seen her in so long. So I suppose I’ll have to pack up the old buggy and drive out to Ossee Five Hills tomorrow. Want to come, Lewis?”

Lewis didn’t. He didn’t much like visiting his uncle Jimmy and his aunt Helen, and usually he wormed out of going more than a few times every year. But just the thought of staying behind, all alone in the big empty house, suddenly made him feel shaky and afraid. “Sure,” he said.

It seemed to Lewis that Mrs. Zimmermann’s expression was suspicious. He sighed and said, “Maybe if I go now, I won’t have to go again until Christmas.” Then, trying to make his voice sound normal, he stood up and said, “I’ll wash if you’ll dry.”

They stood at the sink, with Lewis scrubbing the dishes and Mrs. Zimmermann drying and putting them away. She had cooked for Lewis and Jonathan so often that she knew very well where everything went. At first they were silent, but then Mrs. Zimmermann asked, “Is there anything you need to get off your chest, Lewis?”

With a sigh, Mrs. Zimmermann said, “I hope this isn’t about the grave in the woods, if grave it was. I’m still trying to learn something about that. In fact, I’ve asked for a rare book to be sent to me so I can read up on it. It should be here before very long, so maybe then—”

Mrs. Zimmermann grinned at him. “Not a chance, kemosabe! You got my curiosity up, and it’s like an itch I can’t reach, let alone scratch. Just for my own nosiness, I have to see if I can find out about the lamia that jacets hic. Lord, my old Latin teacher would be scandalized to hear me say that!” She chattered on.

Lewis felt grumpier and grumpier. He could tell that she was trying to humor him, and he resented it. After they had finished with the dishes, all three of them sat in the study. Jonathan broke out the blue-and-gold Capharnaum County Magicians Society playing cards and the one-franc pieces he used as poker chips and suggested a few hands of Siberian Tiger, a fiendishly complicated game that Lewis usually enjoyed. That night, though, Lewis couldn’t keep his mind on the cards, and soon he threw his last hand in and announced he was going to bed. He left Uncle Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann still playing as he trudged upstairs. “I wish everybody would leave me alone,” he grumbled to himself as he turned in. “Treat me like . . . like . . .” But he had already fallen asleep, almost the moment his head touched the pillow.

The next day Uncle Jonathan woke Lewis up bright and early, and they went out and piled into the 1935 Muggins Simoon. It had a starter on the floor that you had to press with your foot as you turned the key in the ignition. For a long time the motor ground on with an R-r-rrR-rrr sound until finally the engine coughed, turned over, and then chugged along steadily. “I think the battery’s going,” said Uncle Jonathan. “I’ll have to buy a new one next week.”

Lewis didn’t say anything, but he thought it was just like Uncle Jonathan to put off things like that. Jonathan Barnavelt was lazy, that’s what he was. He never wanted to do chores until he had to, and then if he could postpone them a little longer, he’d do it. Lewis rested his chin on his hand as they drove along toward the little town of Ossee Five Hills, watching the cornfields and small farms roll past. People out working in their fields or their yards pointed and laughed and waved as the boxy old car went past.

That was another thing. Why didn’t Uncle Jonathan get rid of this clunky old antique car and get a new one? Even Mrs. Zimmermann drove a better car than this, a purple Plymouth that she had named Bessie. It was a few years old, but it wasn’t as ancient as this decaying heap.

Lost in his gloomy thoughts, Lewis rode silently beside his uncle until they reached Ossee Five Hills and then drove a little past it to the white frame house where Jonathan’s sister Helen and her husband, Jimmy, lived. With a sigh, Lewis climbed out of the car and followed his uncle to the house.

Aunt Helen had the personality of a leaky inner tube. Unlike her older brother, she was thin and nervous-looking. Instead of Uncle Jonathan’s coppery red thatch, she had mousy brown hair. She greeted them sniffily at the door and had them sit in the parlor. Lewis knew he had to sit absolutely still and not swing his feet or say anything unless he was spoken to. Aunt Helen didn’t much approve of boys anyway, and especially not of Lewis. Uncle Jimmy was a Baptist, and she had become a Baptist too, when she married him, and more than once she’d hinted to Uncle Jonathan that she would have been happier if he were not trying to raise Lewis as a Catholic. She had been to a Catholic school herself as a girl, but she had hated it.

Aunt Helen dramatically placed a hand on her thin chest. “You would not believe, Jonathan, how I suffer from asthma. I say it’s all these atomic tests the government is doing out in Nevada. I’m sure that horrible fallout drifts right up here to Michigan, and it’s making everyone sick. I was reading in the paper just the other day about those mysterious cases of anemia you have down in New Zebedee. It’s atomic sickness, you mark my words!”

Lewis sighed. His aunt was a little nutty on the subject of atomic bombs. And she went on and on. She detailed all her symptoms and kept insisting that Jonathan and Lewis could have no idea of how much she suffered. Lewis thought he was suffering a good deal himself, but he didn’t dare say anything. After an hour or so, the front door banged and Uncle Jimmy came in. He was a skinny, balding man whose expression was usually weary and long-suffering. Lewis could understand that. Anyone married to Aunt Helen would become tired before long, and he would have to suffer a lot!

Lewis didn’t care much for the thin soup or the sandwiches, and after lunch, when Uncle Jonathan stretched and said how nice the visit had been, he was relieved. They went out and climbed into the car, and Jonathan turned to Helen and Jimmy, who had followed them out. “Nice to see you both,” said Uncle Jonathan. “You’ll have to come to New Zebedee and visit us one of these times.”

“Dead as a doornail,” said Uncle Jimmy. “No doubt about it. Well, I can run you into town and we’ll see if we can scare up a battery. Though this one’s not standard, you know.”

“I know,” said Uncle Jonathan, climbing out of the car. “I have the people down at the Bass Garage in New Zebedee keep one in stock for me, but they’re hard to find.”

They parked Lewis back in the parlor, where he sat and leafed through some of his aunt’s boring magazines, all about how to grow flowers and how to arrange furniture. Hours passed. By the time Uncle Jimmy’s Chevrolet rolled back into the yard, it was dark outside. For another half hour the two men tinkered with the Muggins Simoon, until at last it started. Then they came inside, oily and dirty, to the horror of Aunt Helen.

“You will do no such thing,” scolded Aunt Helen. “Why, it would be long past midnight before you could get back to New Zebedee! You and Lewis will stay here for the night, and you can get an early start first thing in the morning.”

Lewis gave his uncle a despairing look, but it was no use. They had a dismal dinner of fried salmon croquettes, lumpy mashed potatoes, and stringy green beans. Then Uncle Jonathan and Uncle Jimmy listened to a Detroit Tigers baseball game on the radio. Aunt Helen made up the guest bedroom for Jonathan. She brought an armload of sheets and a flat pillow into the living room. “Lewis, you will have to manage on the sofa,” she said with a sigh. “Try not to toss and turn all night! I’m sure it’s bad for the springs.”

Lewis was seething. When the ball game ended with a Tiger victory, everyone went off to bed. He stripped down to his underclothes and tried to get comfortable on the sofa. That was impossible. The sofa cushions bulged in the wrong places and sagged in the wrong places. Each cushion had a cloth-covered button in its very center, and even through a folded blanket and two sheets, they prodded Lewis in maddening ways. The pillow was almost useless. Even worse, both Aunt Helen and Uncle Jimmy snored, even louder than Uncle Jonathan, and before long the house sounded like a sawmill.

Finally, somehow, Lewis drifted off to sleep. Perhaps because he was sleeping on the lumpy sofa, he dreamed that he was back at the Boy Scout camp near the woods and the flat stone, sleeping on the ground. He did not seem to have a tent or a sleeping bag, though.

In his dream, an owl hooted over and over, each hoot becoming longer and shriller, until they all blended in the sound of a whistle. It pulled him to his feet and made him walk, stiffly, over the meadow. A pale moon was high in the midnight sky, and in its faint light he saw what first looked like a group of boulders. But as he came closer, he realized that one of the shapes was really Stan Peters, lying on his back, and the other was a woman bending over the form of Billy Fox. She rose as Lewis came closer.

He stared dully down. Stan Peters was dead. His face was as pale as the moonlight, his flesh shrunken like a mummy’s. And as Lewis stared, Billy Fox took one gasping breath and then stopped breathing. He was dead too.

In the dream Lewis did not protest that he was not strong enough. He tugged at Stan’s leg and found that he was as light as a bundle of rags. He grabbed Billy’s foot and pulled. Dragging both of them, he walked down the hill.

The stone lay in the clearing, the same three-foot-thick flat boulder he had seen in real life. Lewis dropped Billy’s and Stan’s feet and tugged at the stone. It swung up as if on hinges, silently. Beneath it yawned a hole. Lewis shoved first Stan’s body and then Billy’s into the opening. He heard a clatter.

Looking down, Lewis felt a surge of nausea. The hole was perhaps six feet long and four feet wide, like a grave, but it was much deeper. Fifteen or twenty feet down, Billy and Stan had landed on a jumbled pile of bones. Thousands of people must have been buried here!

Something tugged at Lewis’s feet. He looked down. From beneath the stone a tentacle of darkness had crept. It had wrapped itself around both of Lewis’s legs. It was pulling, pulling with a terrible force. He knew he could not break away. He knew the shadow would drag him under the rock—

Uncle Jonathan came from the guest room and knocked on Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Helen’s door. Uncle Jimmy opened it. What little hair he had was frizzed out around his ears. He looked like a daisy that had begun to wilt. “Bad dream,” he grunted.

Aunt Helen appeared behind him, rollers in her hair and her face terrified. “The curtains!” she shrieked. “The curtains came to life! They stared at me! Only they didn’t have any eyes!”

Past his aunt, Lewis saw the white curtains swaying in a breeze from the half-opened window. Just for an instant, they billowed into the shape of a face, a horrible pitiless face with no eyes, but blank holes where eyes should be. Then it was gone.