The Figure In the Shadows (3 page)

“What is it?” asked Lewis. He had never seen a coin like it in his life.

“It’s a United States three-cent piece,” said Mrs. Zimmermann. “Anyone ought to be able to see that.”

Rose Rita laughed. “Oh, come on, Mrs. Zimmermann!
You’re always kidding. You mean this coin was worth three cents way back then?”

“It certainly was. It’s worth a little bit more now, because it’s old, but it’s not very rare as coins go.”

“Why did they have three-cent coins?” asked Lewis. “Wouldn’t it have been easier to just use three pennies?”

“You’ll have to ask the United States Mint why they had three-cent pieces,” said Jonathan. “At one time they had half cents and two-cent pieces and half dimes and all sorts of weird denominations. So, as Mrs. Zimmermann says, this coin is not so strange—except for the fact that it’s part of the story I just told you.”

Lewis looked at the coin and imagined it lying on a heap of money and swords and pistols in the red light of a campfire. He imagined Walter Finzer pulling a gun and shooting Grampa Barnavelt. Blood had been shed because of that coin. Lewis had read a lot, and he knew stories about kings who had fought and killed each other over small objects. Small objects like crowns and jewels and pieces of gold. The coin seemed to Lewis like something straight out of those old tales.

Lewis looked up at his Uncle Jonathan. “Uncle Jonathan, are you
sure
this coin isn’t magic?”

“Sure as sure can be, Lewis. But just to set your mind at ease, why don’t you give to to Mrs. Zimmermann for a minute? She knows all about magic amulets and talismans and things of that kind, and I think she could
probably tell just by the feel of the thing. Couldn’t you, Florence?”

“Yes, I could. At my final exam at the University of Göttingen, when I was getting my doctor’s degree in Magic, I had to tell if certain objects were enchanted or not just by feeling them with my fingers. Here, let me see it.”

Lewis handed the coin to Mrs. Zimmermann. She rubbed it back and forth between her fingers and stared at it thoughtfully for a few minutes. Then she handed it back to Lewis.

“Sorry, Lewis,” she said, shaking her head. “It just feels like a hunk of metal. If it was magic, it would . . . well, it would kind of
tingle
in my hand. But there’s nothing there. It’s just an old coin.”

Lewis held the coin up and looked at it sadly. Then he turned to Jonathan and said, “Can I keep it?”

Jonathan blinked absent-mindedly. “Hm?”

“I said, can I keep it?”

“Can you . . . ? Oh. Oh, sure. Go ahead. It’s yours. Keep it as a souvenir of the Civil War.” Jonathan patted Lewis on the shoulder and smiled.

Late that night, when Rose Rita and Mrs. Zimmermann had gone home and Jonathan had gone to bed, Lewis sat on the edge of his bed looking at the coin. It was too bad it wasn’t magic. If it had been, it might’ve turned out
to be one of those amulets that made you brave and strong and protected you from your enemies. Like the pin that an ancient king of Ireland wore in his shirt when he went into battle. As long as he kept the pin on, he couldn’t be wounded. Lewis liked that story. He had never gone into battle with sword and shield, but he had gotten into a few fist fights, and he had always lost them. Maybe if he had had an amulet, he would have won those fights. Maybe if he had had an amulet, Woody Mingo would not have been able to steal his hat.

Oh well, thought Lewis, that’s the way it goes. He put the coin in the drawer of his bedside table, turned out the light, and went to bed.

Lewis went to bed, but he didn’t go to sleep. He lay there tossing and turning and thinking about Woody and the Sherlock Holmes hat and Grampa Barnavelt and Walter Finzer and the three-cent piece. After that he just lay there and listened to the sounds of the house: the clock ticking, the bathtub faucet dripping, the various cracks and creaks and snaps that a big old house makes when it is settling itself for the night.

Flip-flop.
Lewis sat up straight in his bed. He knew that sound. He knew it very well—but it was not a nighttime sound. It was the sound of the mail slot.

The front door of Lewis’s house had a slot in it for mail. The slot had a hinged metal cover over it, and when
the mailman lifted the cover to slide letters in, the cover went flip-flop. Lewis and his uncle both loved to get mail, and no matter where they were in the house, when they heard the flip-flop sound, they came running. The mailman on their route was very talkative, and so he seldom got to their house before two-thirty in the afternoon. But as far as Lewis knew, the mail had never arrived at midnight.

Lewis sat there wondering for a few minutes. Then he got out of bed, put on his slippers and bathrobe, and padded downstairs to the front hall. There on the floor, just below the mail slot, lay a postcard.

Lewis picked the card up and carried it over to the hall window. The gray light of a full moon was streaming in. It was bright enough to read by—but there was nothing to read. The card was blank.

Lewis began to feel creepy. What kind of a message was this? He turned the card over, and was relieved to find that the card was stamped and addressed. But the stamp looked very old-fashioned, and the postmark was so blurred that Lewis couldn’t tell where the card had been mailed from. The card was addressed in a neat, curlicued hand.

There was no return address.

Lewis stood there in the moonlight with the card in his hand. Maybe Rose Rita had gotten up in the middle of the night to play him a practical joke. Maybe—but it didn’t seem likely. Lewis turned the card over and looked at the blank side again. His eyes opened wide. Now there was writing on the card.

Lewis’s hand began to tremble. He had read about writing in invisible ink, but he had always heard that you had to dust the message with special powders or hold it over the fire to make the letters appear. This message had appeared all by itself.

And Lewis knew what the message said. He could read a little Latin, because he had been an altar boy once, and he knew what
Venio
meant: I come. Suddenly Lewis felt very afraid. He was afraid of being alone in the dark hallway. But as he stepped quickly across the hall to snap on the light, the card slipped out of his hand. It actually felt as if someone had grabbed it and pulled it away. Lewis panicked and flung himself at the wall switch. Warm yellow light flooded the hallway of the old house. There was no one there. But the card was gone.

The next morning, as soon as he got up, Lewis went downstairs to look for the mysterious postcard. He looked under the hall rug, and into the cracks between the floorboards. He looked into the blue Willoware vase where Jonathan kept his canes. He looked everywhere. The card had vanished. None of the cracks in the floor was wide enough for it to have slipped through, and the card couldn’t very well have floated back out through the covered mail slot.
Where did it go?

Lewis didn’t feel like talking to Uncle Jonathan about the card, but as he ate his Cheerios that morning, a comfortable explanation occurred to him. The card was probably just part of Uncle Jonathan’s magic.

Lewis had lived in the home of a practicing wizard for over a year now, and during that time he had come to expect strange sights and sounds. The mirror on the coat rack showed you your face when you looked in it—sometimes. But more often than not, it would show you Roman ruins in the desert or Mayan pyramids or Melrose Abbey in Scotland. There was an organ in the front parlor that sang radio commercials. And the stained-glass windows in the enormous old house changed their pictures from time to time, all by themselves. Maybe the ghostly card was one of Jonathan’s little jokes. Lewis could have found out if his answer was right by asking Jonathan, since Jonathan controlled all the magic in the house. But he was afraid to ask. If his answer was wrong, he didn’t want to know about it.

One afternoon in the middle of October, Lewis decided to go back to school early. Most of the time he waited out the noon hour at home, because he was afraid of getting beat up. But today he was going back early because Rose Rita had talked him into it.

Lewis and Rose Rita had had a long talk about his fears. She had tried to persuade him that the only way to conquer his fears was to meet them head-on. He had to force himself to go back to the playground right after lunch. After the first time, the second time would be easier, and so on. This was the way Rose Rita argued. Lewis had been stubborn at first, but he had finally agreed to try it her way. To make things easier for him,
Rose Rita had agreed to meet him in the alley next to the school. He wouldn’t have to get into a football game or anything. The two of them would just stand around and talk. They could talk about the model Roman galley they were building out of balsa wood. It would be a lot of fun.

When Lewis got to the school, he peered down the long narrow alley. No Rose Rita. At the far end he could hear kids shouting and playing. Cautiously, he began to edge his way down the alley toward the playground. He always expected to get jumped, and sometimes it really happened.

Lewis had gotten about halfway down the alley when he heard something off to his left. It sounded like grunting and scuffling. Lewis turned and saw two kids fighting in the dark shadowy space between the buttresses of the Episcopal church. The kids were Rose Rita and Woody Mingo.

Lewis stood watching, paralyzed with fear. Woody had one hand around Rose Rita’s waist, and with his other hand he was pulling her hair. Hard, so that it must really have hurt. But Rose Rita said nothing. Her eyes were closed, and her teeth were set in a rigid grimace.

“Come on,” Woody snarled. “Take it back!”

“No.”

“Take it
back
!”

“I said no, and—ow!—I meant—
no
!”

Woody grinned his nastiest grin. “Okay then—” He gave Rose Rita’s hair a short vicious yank. Her grimace got tighter, and her teeth ground together. But she still refused to scream.

Lewis didn’t know what to do. Should he run and get the principal, or go for the police? Or should he try to take on Woody all by himself? He thought about Woody’s knife, and he was afraid.

Now Woody saw Lewis. He laughed, just the way he had when he stole Lewis’s hat.

“Hey, fat guts! Arncha gonna rescue yer girl friend?” Woody gave Rose Rita’s hair another yank, and she winced.

Rose Rita opened her eyes and glanced at Lewis. “Go away, Lewis!” she hissed. “Just go away!”

Lewis stood there, clenching and unclenching his fists. He looked toward the street, where cars were slowly rolling past. He looked toward the playground, where he could hear kids laughing and shouting and playing.

“C’mon, lard ass! You wanna try’n take me? Let’s see ya try!”

Lewis turned and ran. Down the alley, out onto the sidewalk, across the intersection, up Green Street toward home. His feet slapped the pavement under him, and he could hear himself crying as he ran. He stopped halfway down Green Street because he couldn’t run any more. His side hurt and his head ached and he wished that he
were dead. When he had finally gotten his breath back, he wiped his eyes, blew his nose, and trotted the rest of the way home.

Uncle Jonathan was raking leaves in the front yard when Lewis came stomping moodily up the sidewalk.

“Hi, Lewis!” he called, waving cheerfully with his pipe. “Did they let school out early, or . . .”

Clang went the front gate. Slam went the front door a few seconds after. Jonathan dropped his rake and went in to see what was wrong.

He found Lewis crying with his head on the dining room table.

“God-dam dirty rotten no-good god-dam dirty . . .” was all Lewis would say, over and over.

Jonathan sat down in the chair next to him and put his arm around him. “Come on, Lewis,” he said gently. “It’s okay. What’s wrong? Do you want to tell me what happened?”

Lewis wiped his eyes and blew his nose several times. Then, slowly and brokenly, he told his uncle the whole story. “ . . . and I ran away and she’ll never want to have anything to do with me ever again,” he sobbed. “I wish I was
dead
!”

“Oh, I doubt if Rosie is going to scratch you off her social list,” said Jonathan, smiling and patting him on the shoulder. “She just wanted to take care of herself, that’s all. She’s a real tomboy, and if she got into a fight with Woody, I guess she figured she could handle herself.”

Lewis turned and looked at Jonathan through his tears. “You mean she won’t hate me on account of I’m a coward and a weakling?”

“You’re not either one of those,” said Jonathan. “And anyway, if Rosie had wanted a lug for a best friend, she’d have found a lug. She’s a very stubborn girl, and she does what she wants to do. And I think she likes you a lot.”

“You do?”

“Mm-hmm. Now, I’m going to go finish raking the leaves, so we can have a bonfire in the driveway tonight. I’ll write you a note Monday so you won’t be in trouble with Miss Haggerty, and—well, why don’t you go work on that ship model?”

Lewis smiled gratefully at his uncle. He hiccupped a few times, as he often did after he had been crying. “Okay, Uncle Jonathan. Thanks a lot.”

Lewis went up to his room, and for the rest of the afternoon he was all wrapped up in the world of Greek and Roman triremes, and the great sea battles of Salamis and Actium. Just before dinner the phone rang. Lewis took the stairs two at a time, and almost fell on his face.

“Hi!” he panted as he picked up the receiver. “Is that you, Rose Rita?”

He heard a giggle at the other end. “If it hadn’t of been, what would you have done?”

Lewis felt relieved. “Are you mad at me?” he asked.

“Unh-uh. I just called to find out what happened to you.”

Lewis felt his face getting red. “I felt kinda sick so I went home. Did Woody beat you up?”

“Nope. A couple of the teachers came by and made us stop fighting. I would’ve fixed him if it hadn’t’ve been for my darned hair. I think I’ll get a crew cut.”

“How come you were fighting?”

“Oh, I told him he was a dirty little sneak thief for stealing your hat, and he wanted me to take it back and I wouldn’t.”

Lewis was silent. He felt the way he had when Rose Rita had said that she wished she had been there to keep Woody from stealing the hat. It was a confusing feeling. He was grateful to her for sticking up for him, but it felt awful not to be able to fight and win your own battles. Boys were supposed to be able to do that.

“Are you okay?” Rose Rita asked. Lewis had been silent for a whole minute.

“Uh . . . yeah, sure. I was . . . I was just thinking,” Lewis stammered. “Woody didn’t hurt you, did he?”

Rose Rita snorted disdainfully. “Oh, he wouldn’t do anything to me but pull my hair because I’m a
gurr-rul.
Hey, Lewis?”

“Yeah?”

“Let’s get to work on that ship again. You want to bring it over to my house tonight?”

“Okay.”

“See you after dinner. Bye.”

“Bye.”

Lewis was relieved to know that Rose Rita didn’t hate him for running away. But he kept thinking about the fight between her and Woody, and that night he had a dream about it. In the dream, Woody had knocked Rose Rita down, and her head was bleeding. Lewis grabbed him and socked him and then Woody pulled his knife and held it up in front of Lewis’s nose. Then Woody said, “I’m gonna cut your tongue out!” and Lewis awoke suddenly. He was sitting up in bed and his pajamas were drenched with sweat. It was a long time before he could get back to sleep again.

The next morning when Lewis got up, he decided that he was going to get thin and tough like Woody. He got down on the floor and tried to do ten pushups, but he could only do three before he collapsed. Then he tried sit-ups, but when he lay down flat on his back, he couldn’t struggle up to a sitting position unless he thrashed around and used his elbows. He stood up and tried to touch his toes without bending his knees, but he couldn’t do it. Trying made his head ache. Finally he tried jumping jacks. They were fun because you could clap your hands over your head when you did them. But the flab on Lewis’s thighs clapped too, when his legs came together, and this sound depressed him. Also, he
was afraid of bringing down the plaster in the room below. So he gave up and went downstairs to have breakfast.

It was Saturday morning, and Mrs. Zimmermann had come over to make breakfast. Although she lived next door, she usually cooked for the Barnavelts, and on Saturdays she always made something very special for breakfast. It might be doughnuts or pancakes and sausages or strawberry shortcake, or french toast with comb honey and peach preserves. This morning, Mrs. Zimmermann was making waffles. Lewis watched her as she poured some of the rich yellow batter onto the black iron grid. Then he remembered his resolution.

“Uh . . . Mrs. Zimmermann?” he said.

“Yes, Lewis?”

“I, uh, don’t think I’ll have any waffles this morning. Could I just have a bowl of corn flakes?”

Mrs. Zimmermann turned and looked at him strangely. She was about to go over and feel his forehead when she remembered what Jonathan had told her about the fight between Woody and Rose Rita. Mrs. Zimmermann was a very shrewd woman, and it didn’t take her long to guess what Lewis had up his sleeve. So she shrugged her shoulders and said, “Okay. That’ll just be a little more for me and your uncle.”

Lewis managed to hold to his resolve all the way through breakfast. It was pure torture to see all those nice golden waffles and that thick maple syrup being
passed back and forth in front of his nose. But he swallowed hard and ate his soggy, tasteless cornflakes.

After breakfast, Lewis went down to the junior high gym to work out. He punched the punching bag until his fists were sore. Then he rolled up his sleeve and flexed the muscle in his right arm. He couldn’t tell if anything was happening, so he walked across the basketball court to find Mr. Hartwig. Mr. Hartwig was the gym instructor. He was a big cheerful man who was always throwing medicine balls at you and telling you to hit that line and suck in your gut and hup-two-three-four and stuff like that. When Lewis found him, Mr. Hartwig was organizing some informal boxing matches among boys who just seemed to be standing around doing nothing.

“Hi, Mr. Hartwig!” Lewis yelled. “Hey, can I see you for a minute?”

Mr. Hartwig smiled. “Sure thing, Lewis. What can I do for you?”

Lewis rolled up his sleeve again and held out his arm. He flexed the muscle, or what was supposed to be the muscle. “Do you see anything, Mr. Hartwig?” asked Lewis, hopefully.

Mr. Hartwig tried hard to keep from smiling. He knew Lewis, and he knew something about his problems. “Well, I see your arm,” he said slowly. “Have you been working out today?”