The Figure In the Shadows (4 page)

“Yeah. Kinda. Doesn’t it show?” Lewis flexed his arm again. He was getting embarrassed with all those kids
standing around watching. Normally he wouldn’t have done anything like this in front of them, but he really had to know. Mr. Hartwig was an expert. He could tell if Lewis’s muscles were getting bigger.

Mr. Hartwig put his arm around Lewis and took him aside. “Listen, Lewis,” he said quietly, “it takes more than five minutes with a punching bag to build up your muscles. You have to work at it for weeks and months and even years. So don’t be discouraged if nothing happens right away. Okay? Now go back and hit that bag!” Mr. Hartwig smiled kindly and gave Lewis a light playful jab in the stomach, which was what he did when he liked you. Lewis winced. He thanked Mr. Hartwig and went back to the punching bag.

But his heart really wasn’t in it now. If it was going to take years for him to build up a manly physique, he might as well knock it off and have lunch. It was almost one o’clock, and he was getting hungry.

Later, Lewis was sitting at the counter in Heemsoth’s Drug Store. He had just had two hot dogs and two large cherry Cokes for lunch. Now he was leafing through a Captain Marvel comic book. Captain Marvel was slugging it out with the usual collection of crooks and villains. His uppercuts landed with sounds like ZOK! and POW! Lewis had tried a few uppercuts, but they had never landed on anybody’s chin. The kids he had tried to use them on had just stepped away and laughed.

Lewis read all the stories in the comic book and then
flipped to the back. There were ads there for things like a Vacutex, an evil-looking gadget that resembled a hypodermic. It was supposed to suck out unsightly blackheads. That was more of a teenager’s problem. Lewis had other things to worry about.

He turned to the last page, and there was the Charles Atlas ad. It was always there, and it was always the same. There was a little cartoon story about a 97-pound weakling who got strong so he could get even with the guy who kicked sand in his face at the beach. And there at the bottom of the ad was Charles Atlas himself, in a white bathing suit that always made Lewis think of a baby’s diaper. Mr. Atlas looked as if he were covered with grease, and he was bulging and rippling all over with muscles. He was shaking his fist at Lewis and daring him to try his Dynamic Tension Exercises. Under the picture of Mr. Atlas was the little coupon that you were supposed to cut out. Lewis had been on the point of cutting it out many times, but he had always stopped for some reason or other. Now, he ripped out the page, folded it neatly, and slipped it into his pocket. That afternoon when he got home, he put the coupon in an envelope with a quarter and mailed it off to Charles Atlas.

Lewis kept at his diet and his pushups for three or four days, but by the end of that time it was getting pretty boring. He kept feeling his arms, but it didn’t seem to him that any new muscles were arriving. And dieting
meant that he felt crabby a good deal of the time. He began to realize that Mr. Hartwig was right. Getting thin and tough like Woody took work. You had to deny yourself things that you really wanted, and you had to slave away at things that were really very dull, like exercises. And even then, you couldn’t be absolutely positively sure that you would get what you wanted after all your hard work.

Lewis began to weaken, and then he gave in completely. He decided that he would take a break and go back to his plan when he felt better. Before long he was munching Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and taking second helpings of strawberry shortcake with whipped cream. He stopped doing pushups and he never went near the punching bag again. Now and then he would check the mail to see if the Charles Atlas booklet had arrived, but it was never there.

If only there was an easy way of getting to be strong! Lewis thought about Grampa Barnavelt’s lucky piece. Wouldn’t it be great if it really was magic? Magic in a way that would let him mow down his enemies and protect Rose Rita from harm? That would sure be something! Then he could forget about dieting and pushups. Then . . .

But every time Lewis had this daydream, he remembered that Mrs. Zimmermann had examined the coin, and she had flatly stated that it was not magic. Mrs. Zimmermann was an expert on magic. She ought to know.
On the other hand, experts had been wrong before, like those people who claimed that men would never be able to fly. Lewis would argue with himself this way, back and forth, pro and con, until he was sick of the whole business. Then he would go up to his room and take the coin out of his drawer and press it between his thumb and index finger. Wasn’t there a tingle there? No, there wasn’t. Then he would get angry and shove the coin back in the drawer and slam the drawer shut. He did this over and over again, but nothing ever happened. Lewis fiddled with the coin so much, wishing over it and pressing it, that he began to think of it as his “magic coin.” The phrase “magic coin” kept running through his mind like a broken record. He tried to think of other things, but the phrase kept coming back. Magic coin. Magic coin. Was it just wishful thinking, or was there something else at work?

On a bright sunny Saturday afternoon in late October, Lewis and Rose Rita were poking around in Jonathan’s library. Some people put a bookcase in a room and call the room a library, but that was not Jonathan’s way. His library was crammed, floor to ceiling, with books. Lewis often went to this room to browse or just to sit and think. Today he was there with Rose Rita, looking for a Latin motto to put on the sail of the Roman galley they were building. The galley had turned into quite a project. Lewis and Rose Rita had sat up late many nights with strips of balsa wood and rubber cement and model airplane glue. They had the ship about half finished, but, as often happens, they had gotten hung up on an unimportant
detail. Lewis had drawn a picture of Duilius, the great Roman admiral, on the sail, and he had found a motto to go with the picture:
IN HOC SIGNO VINCES
. The motto came from a carton of Pall Mall cigarettes; it wasn’t appropriate, but it was the only one Lewis could find. Rose Rita had informed him that she thought the motto was stupid and senseless. Now the two of them were digging through the Latin books in Jonathan’s collection, looking for a reasonable, appropriate, and suitably dignified motto. In other words, they were looking for a motto that Rose Rita liked.

“You know, Lewis, it would kind of help if your uncle would keep his books in better order,” Rose Rita complained.

“It would, huh? Okay, what’s wrong with the way my uncle keeps his books?” Lewis was getting tired of Rose Rita’s crabbing, and he was beginning to fight back.

“What’s wrong? Oh, not much. Just look at them! This section here is supposed to be Latin books, and there’s adventure novels, and old phone books, and even a book by Mrs. Zimmermann.”

Lewis was startled. He didn’t know that Mrs. Zimmermann had written a book. “Gee, that’s weird. What kind of a book is it?”

“I dunno. Let’s see.” Rose Rita took down from the bookshelf a dusty book in a black leather pebble-grained cover. A title was stamped on the spine in gold letters. It said:

Rose Rita and Lewis knelt down on the floor to examine the book. The first page was the title page. It said:

Lewis was amazed. Amazed, and fascinated. He knew that Mrs. Zimmermann had gone to college to learn how to be a witch, but he didn’t know about this book.

“I bet your uncle would be mad if he knew we were looking at this,” said Rose Rita, giggling.

Lewis glanced nervously toward the door. At one time Jonathan had kept his magic books out on the shelves with all the other books in his collection. But he had gotten concerned about Lewis’s interest in magic, and so one day he had scooped up all the magic books he could find and carried them off to his bedroom closet. That was where they were now, locked up. All but this one, which Jonathan had forgotten about.

“Yeah, I’ll bet he doesn’t even know it’s here,” said Lewis.

“Well, serves him right for keeping such a messy library,” said Rose Rita. “Come on, let’s see what’s in it.”

Lewis and Rose Rita sat down on the floor and began leafing through Mrs. Zimmermann’s book. They found out quite a bit about magic amulets. They read about the strange parchment found on the body of Bishop Anselm of Würzburg, and the lost amulet of Queen Catherine de Medici of France. Finally, at the end of the book, they came to a chapter with this title:

Lewis thought about the coin in his drawer upstairs, and he began to get very interested. But what he read at first was disappointing. The book just said what Mrs. Zimmermann had said the night they found the coin: only a real wizard could test an amulet. Mrs. Zimmermann had tested the three-cent piece, using the method
recommended by her own book. And the coin had turned out to be just a coin.

Rose Rita was getting pretty bored with amulets. “Come on, Lewis,” she said impatiently. “We’re wasting a lot of time. Let’s go see if we can find something nice to put on our ship.” She closed the book and started to get up.

“Wait a minute,” said Lewis, opening the book again. “There’s one more page. Let’s see what’s on it.” Rose Rita heaved a deep sigh and sat down again.

They turned to the last page, and this is what they read:

Lewis looked up from the book. There was a strange light in his eyes.

“Hey!” he said. “Why don’t we go up and get Grampa Barnavelt’s coin and see if it’s one of these?”

Rose Rita gave him an exasperated look. “Oh, come on, Lewis! She tested it for you the night we found it. Remember?”

“Yeah, but she didn’t use this test. It says right here that the really strong amulets don’t respond to the test she used.”

“Unh-huh. And it also says that these strong amulets are very rare.”

“Well, Grampa’s coin
might
be one of them. You can never tell.”

Rose Rita slammed the book shut and stood up. “Oh, all
right
! Go get your dumb coin and bring it down here and say dumb magic words over it and we’ll see what happens. I’m so sick of this whole business that I’d like to drop your stupid coin down the sewer. Now, if you say all this junk here and nothing happens, will you shut up?”

“Yeah,” said Lewis, grinning.

Lewis ran upstairs and yanked open the drawer of his bedside table. After a bit of fumbling and poking around, he found the coin. He could hear his heart beating and his face felt flushed. When he got back to the library, Rose Rita was sitting there in the leather armchair. She was leafing through a big book full of pictures of sailing ships.

“Well?” she said, without looking up. “Did you find it?”

Lewis gave her a dirty look. He wanted her to be interested in what he was doing. “Yeah, I found it. Now, come on and help me.”

“Why do you need my help? You can read, can’t you?”

“Yeah, I can read, but I don’t have three hands. You have to hold the book for me so I can read it while I make the sign of the Cross with one hand and hold the coin with the other hand.”

“Oh, all right.”

There was a set of double doors in the middle of one wall of the library. They were glass doors, and they opened right out onto the side yard of the house. Lewis and Rose Rita took up their positions in front of these doors. Lewis stood with his back to the doors. The light fell over his shoulder onto the pages of the book that Rose Rita held up before him. In his left hand, Lewis
held the coin. With his right hand, he slowly made the sign of the Cross on himself. He did it three times. Then he began to chant, the way he had heard Father Cahalen do during Mass:

“Immo haud daemonorum, umquam et numquam . . .”

As Lewis chanted, the room began to get darker. The light faded from the bright orange leaves of the maple tree outside, and now a strong wind was rattling the glass doors. Suddenly the doors flew open, and the wind got into the room. It riffled madly through the dictionary on the library table, scattered papers across the floor, and knocked all the lampshades galley-west. Lewis turned. He stood there silent, staring out into the strange twilight. His hand was still clenched tight around the coin.

Rose Rita closed the book and glanced nervously at Lewis. From where she stood she could not see his face. “Gee, that was weird,” she said. “I mean, it was just like . . . like as if you had made it get dark outside.”

“Yeah,” said Lewis. “It was funny how it happened.” He did not move an inch, but just stood there, looking out at the night.

“Did . . . did anything happen to the coin?” Rose Rita’s voice was tense and frightened-sounding.

“Nope.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. It’s just a dud. C’mon, let’s get back to work.”