The Whistle, the Grave, and the Ghost

Snakelike, eyeless creatures haunted Lewis’s dreams. Uncle Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann conferred about him, and he was sure that the two of them cast protective spells on the Barnavelt house. Nothing seemed to help. He spent his nights half in terrified sleep and half awake, sweating and shaking, afraid to try to drift off again. He had the strangest sensation of fading. Color slowly drained from the world. Sounds came from far distances. When he lay in bed, he could not really feel the mattress beneath him or the sheets on top of him. It was as if he were floating in outer space.

He began to feel a dull anger toward his uncle, Mrs. Zimmermann, and Rose Rita. If they liked him so much, why didn’t they help him? And if the whistle was so bad, why was it the only thing that could help him when the chips were down and he faced being beaten to a pulp? More and more Lewis just wanted to be alone.

One Sunday he felt too ill to go to Mass. His uncle stayed home with him, and all that day Lewis remained in bed, complaining of a headache. “If that doesn’t clear up by morning, you are going to be checked out by Dr. Humphries,” pronounced Jonathan firmly. “This is the first time since you fell off your bike and clonked your noggin that you’ve had that kind of a headache, and I don’t like it.”

His uncle hesitated, then patted Lewis’s shoulder. “I know you’re not. I’m sorry, Lewis. I wasn’t hinting that you’re pretending. Here, open up.” He took the thermometer, squinted at it, and turned it this way and that, peering hard. “Ninety-eight point six,” he reported. “You’re a normal Norman, as far as your temperature goes.” He shook the thermometer. “Feel like any dinner?”

The voice spoke no more. But Lewis had the terrible sensation that it was singing, wordlessly, so softly, he could not even be sure he heard the sound. It became stronger when he tried to fall asleep, a hypnotic rise and fall of music at the very edge of his hearing. That made his heart jerk with alarm and woke him up again, over and over.

Daylight faded away from the window. At last, from sheer exhaustion, Lewis did manage to fall into a kind of sleep, or at least unconsciousness. How long he was in that state he could never tell, but at some point something woke him. He had felt a wave of darkness pass over him. It was a flash of black lightning. It was as though he had been touched by the hand of Death.

Lewis rolled out of bed. He could barely feel the floor beneath his feet. He had trouble grasping the doorknob. When he closed his hand on it, he felt almost no pressure to tell him he was holding it. He turned it with great difficulty.

Something told him to tiptoe down the back stairs. The oval, changing window was oddly blank and black. It always showed a picture of some sort, but not tonight. Tonight it was like a window into outer space, out beyond the farthest star.

Before he reached the foot of the stairs, Lewis heard the murmur of voices: his uncle’s and Mrs. Zimmermann’s. He understood that something wanted him to listen. Something was using his ears to learn what the two of them were talking about. Carefully, he tiptoed to the kitchen door, which stood barely ajar. A thin wedge of light spilled from it. Avoiding this, Lewis put his ear close to the opening. He heard his uncle’s voice clearly first: “. . . no fever, but he’s complaining about a headache, and he just doesn’t look right.”

“The volume I’ve been waiting for will be here tomorrow,” replied Mrs. Zimmermann. “At long last! Until then, I suppose we can try all the old folk preventions. Garlic and hawthorn, crucifixes and holy water.”

“I have all those,” said Uncle Jonathan. “And don’t think it was easy to get up the nerve to ask Father Foley for a bottle of holy water, and then for a special blessing on top of it! The man must think I’ve lost what few marbles I possess. But what was the news you had to run over to tell me, Florence? Nothing else terrible, I hope.”

Mrs. Zimmermann was so quiet for so long that Lewis leaned closer to the kitchen door, thinking that she might be whispering. But at last she spoke, in a low but understandable voice: “Billy Fox was released from the hospital yesterday, but his parents are not bringing him back to New Zebedee. They’re taking him somewhere out east to live. They blame the town for what happened to him, as if it were some kind of plague spot. But that isn’t the worst. The other boy, Stanley Peters . . .”

When she did not go on, Uncle Jonathan said peevishly, “Confound it, Pruny Face, don’t leave me hanging! Come on and spill it. I’m a great big man, and I can take it, whatever it is. Did he die?”

“You mean from whom,” said Mrs. Zimmermann, who had been a teacher and who hated to hear faulty grammar. “But I don’t mean escaped, exactly. He slipped out of the hospital two nights ago, taking the clothes he had been wearing when he was admitted. No one has seen him since, and no one knows where he may be headed.”

Upstairs. Quickly. The command in Lewis’s head seemed louder than the voices he had been eavesdropping on, though he knew that no one else could possibly hear them. Quietly but quickly, he climbed the stairs and returned to his own room. It is too soon, but we have to go now.

Lewis did not understand. Something ordered him to dress hurriedly, ordered him without even the silent words that he heard only in his head. He didn’t have to turn on the light to do so. He could still see in the dark, although everything was lifeless and colorless. He sat in the chair at his desk to tie his shoes, and when he had finished and straightened up, he was not surprised to see the shape of a body beneath the sheet on his bed.

It moved. The sheet clung to the form. What lay beneath the sheet Lewis could not say. Somehow the sheet itself became the body of a woman, the face made of crumpled, wrinkled linen. The mouth was wide and cruel, the nose broad, and the eyes only empty hollows under a projecting brow. The form sat up and rose from the bed. The blind head swiveled and finally faced Lewis. With despair, he saw color again. The empty eye sockets held a deep crimson light that pulsated with the beat of Lewis’s heart.

A little after nine the next morning, the phone rang in the Barnavelt house. Jonathan, who had been sitting at the kitchen table sipping coffee and reading the morning paper, jumped at the sound. He hurried to answer the phone, and as soon as he did, Mrs. Zimmermann’s voice buzzed on the line: “Jonathan! Can you come over?”

“He hasn’t gotten up yet. I looked in on him this morning, and he’s lying there under the covers, all huddled up. I didn’t have the heart to wake him, because he’s been sleeping so badly. Say, why don’t you come over here?”

“Be there in two shakes. Pour an extra cup of coffee, because I think I’ll need it.” After a pause, she added, “And I’m going to phone Rose Rita and ask her to come over too. I know she’s young, but she’s been in on this from the start, and I think she deserves to be in on it now.” Mrs. Zimmermann hung up with a click, and Jonathan replaced the receiver. He hurried up the stairs and quietly opened Lewis’s door. Lewis didn’t seem to have moved much. He still lay under the coverlet, huddled up as if he were cold. Carefully, Jonathan closed the door and went back downstairs again.

Mrs. Zimmermann was just opening the kitchen door. She held a book almost twice as tall as an encyclopedia volume against her chest. Behind her glasses, her eyes were sparkling. “Now maybe we’ll find out a few things!” She thumped the book down on the table as Jonathan poured her a cup of coffee. He served it to her, and the cream pitcher, which was in the shape of a black-and-white cow, came to life and ambled over to her with a friendly moo. Mrs. Zimmermann made a face as she picked it up and poured a dollop of cream into her coffee from the cow’s open mouth. “Please don’t hex the sugar bowl,” she said to Jonathan. “It makes me feel queasy, having a cow spit cream into my coffee.”

Jonathan paid her very little attention because he was studying the mysterious tome. It had a leather cover, pebbly and deep brown, with semiprecious stones set into it in a curly design: black onyxes and purple garnets, blue-green turquoises and yellow citrines, red bloodstones and green jade. He traced these with his index finger. “Someone believes in mineral spells, I see. Whoever made this cover put all the protective stones in just the right order. At least the bookbinder knew his magic!”

Mrs. Zimmermann greeted Rose Rita. “The more I thought about the word lamia, the more certain I was that I had read about it someplace,” she explained. “Finally I had the sense to read my own doctoral dissertation again, and that sent me to a book by a man named Abucejo, and that directed me to a three-hundred-year-old book that is so rare, I had to pull about a million strings to find a copy. But I have a friend or two in certain European universities, and one of them finally came through. This should tell us about the lamia and how it came to Michigan, if anything can!”

Mrs. Zimmermann carefully opened the book. Jonathan craned over her shoulder, squinting at the yellowed parchment. The printing was very old-fashioned, and the language was medieval Latin, but he mentally translated the title:

“Oh, quiet, Brush Mush,” snapped Mrs. Zimmermann, but in a playful tone, with a wink at Rose Rita. She turned the pages, and then settled down to read. “Hum. All right. Herr Doktor Kemp, it seems, knew Father d’Anjou personally. In fact, when Kemp was a very young man, he was apprenticed to the elderly d’Anjou. D’Anjou was, let’s see . . . let’s see, not only a priest but also a physician, an explorer, a lawyer, and a magician.”

Mrs. Zimmermann didn’t even look up from the book. “I know you’re just trying to be funny because you’re afraid, but that’s really quite distracting, so please be quiet for a moment. Let’s see . . . yes, in 1611, d’Anjou went along on a voyage of exploration with a party of French adventurers, and the young Kemp was d’Anjou’s servant. Voyage over, blah, blah, blah, let’s get to the good stuff.” Mrs. Zimmermann turned over several pages, her eyes just scanning them. “Aha! Also, Oho! and other expressions of wonderment. Here we are. The group was traveling overland, trading with the native people they encountered. The spelling is outlandish, but I think Kemp is talking about the Ojibway and the Potawatomi. Anyway, listen to this: ‘My master kept us all safe, for he had in his possession a silver tube that called a spirit the people of the forest much feared.’ ”

“Don’t worry your beard white,” returned Mrs. Zimmermann. “Uh-oh. According to Kemp, after a time d’Anjou refused to use the whistle, because ‘he had twice used it, and to call upon the spirit a third time would cause it to take his life, or the lives of his nearest friends.’ ”

Mrs. Zimmermann was turning pages again. Her face was pale. “Father d’Anjou proposed setting up a mission in what surely must be Michigan today. The French traders with him tricked some of the Potawatomi, and then attacked them. They killed several, but some got away. They returned with a war party and soon eleven of the thirty-two Frenchmen were dead, and the others were about to be overwhelmed. Father d’Anjou blew the whistle, and something dreadful happened.”

Mrs. Zimmermann looked up, her eyes sick. “Kemp isn’t willing to say. But the attacking Potawatomi warriors were all killed, to the last man. And over the next days, every one of the French explorers died, one after the other. Listen: ‘Now it had shape and substance. Now it prowled the forest, beyond my master’s control. When but the two of us were left, my master took me to a place where a stone lay in the manner of a tomb. Here we would end it, if anywhere.’ Kemp says they drew a magic circle, and ‘with holy water, with the holy crucifix, and with other amulets of power, we prepared. And then it came from the forest, in the guise of a creature half serpent, half beautiful woman.’ Hmm. Some kind of magical battle. Kemp was almost lost, ‘but my master pulled me back within the circle at the last moment.’ He took away the creature’s body, somehow, and ‘like a living shadow, the monster was forced into the holy circle and beneath the stone, where may it lie forever.’ ”

“Kemp says only that d’Anjou hid it.” Mrs. Zimmermann read on. “D’Anjou had made some unholy pact with the servant of the whistle. When its influence was no longer in his life, he began to age unnaturally fast. ‘At least a year for every week that passed,’ Kemp says. The two of them struggled back to Quebec, which was a new colony at the time. D’Anjou died the day before they arrived there. Kemp says he buried the body on the shore of a river, and then goes on to talk about how he returned to France. He finally finished his education in Wittenberg, and ‘never again do I wish to see the deadly shores of New France.’ ”

“I can make a good guess at what he did,” replied Mrs. Zimmermann thoughtfully. “The trick will be to make the lamia come out of hiding. For that we need Lewis. I think what must have happened was that the spirit gained control of the blasted whistle somehow or other. D’Anjou was too smart to let that happen while he was alive, but by hook or crook, the lamia arranged to have the whistle found, and used some dire magic to make it appear and disappear just when Lewis was most likely to blow the thing. What we have to do at all costs is to keep him from using it three times.”

“Let’s get him up,” said Jonathan. “Wait for us here, Rose Rita.” He held Mrs. Zimmermann’s chair as she got up, and the two of them climbed the back stairs of the Barnavelt house. Jonathan tapped lightly on Lewis’s door. “Lewis? Time to get up!” He opened the door.