Summoned (2 page)

Would Eddy explode at Horrock’s use of her real name? Though, duh, if Horrocke knew her real name, she must’ve given it to him. Sean stopped holding his breath and said, “That’s great, Mr. Horrocke. There’s this other book, though. I found it behind
Infinity
. It kind of fell on me.”

“Indeed? I hope it didn’t hurt you.”

“Ah, no,” Sean managed. “I caught it all right. I don’t think it got hurt, either.” He put
The Witch Panic
down next to
Infinity
.

Horrocke drew the old book toward himself, using a pencil hooked over its top. Before he opened it, he put on white cotton gloves. Oh man, and here Sean and Eddy had been pawing it with their grubby hands. Delicately, Horrocke turned pages. “The Greene Phillips, 1895, first edition,” he murmured.

First edition. Bad. Read:
expensive
.

“In good condition. Minimal foxing, sound text block.”

Better. At least Horrocke couldn’t accuse them of having
foxed
the crap out of the book, whatever that meant.

Horrocke had come upon the newspaper clipping and balanced it on his gloved fingertips. While he read, Sean caught himself holding his breath. If anybody could explain the circled ad and how the clipping had been faked, it had to be Horrocke. You didn’t throw around words like
foxing
and
text block
if you didn’t know all about books and documents and forgeries.

Horrocke studied the clipping even longer than Eddy had. A couple times his Popsicle-red tongue touched his lower lip. A couple times he glanced toward the cases and the stacks, as if he expected to see someone there. Once he stared straight up at the ceiling, as if he followed the progress of something across it. Sean looked for a fly or spider. He saw nothing. Maybe the old guy had overdosed on espresso after all.

At last Horrocke gave up on the invisible bug. He tucked the clipping back into the book, closed it, and pushed it toward Sean. “Indeed,” he said.

Indeed what? Sean and Eddy waited, but Horrocke seemed lost in contemplation of his gloved hands.

“So is that newspaper ad a crazy joke or what?” Eddy asked.

Horrocke started taking off the gloves, finger by finger. “I have no opinion of the advertisement, miss. However, I can tell you that I don’t have a first edition of
The Witch Panic in Arkham
in stock at the moment, only modern reprints. I don’t know how the book came to be on the shelf.” He looked at Sean. “Since I don’t own it, I believe the book is yours.”

His? That easy? “That doesn’t seem right, Mr. Horrocke.”

“On the contrary, it’s exactly right. The book came to you of its own accord.” Horrocke’s laugh sounded like somebody playing a botched scale on a flute. “I imagine it’s your destiny.”

The Witch Panic in Arkham
? As destinies went, that didn’t sound too hot. But who could argue with free? “Well, thanks, Mr. Horrocke, if you’re sure.”

“I’m quite sure.” Horrocke had folded his gloves. He put them back in his desk and took out a notepad and pen. On the top sheet, he wrote: “NO CHARGE FOR THE GREENE PHILLIPS, N. Horrocke.” He handed the sheet to Sean. “Give that to Miss Anglesea at the cash register, when you pay for the other.”

Sean grabbed both books off the desk. “Okay, thanks. I guess we better go now. We’re supposed to meet somebody.”

Horrocke’s lips stretched in what he probably meant as a smile. “I imagine you are, Sean. Indeed. I hope you enjoy your books.”

Sean couldn’t get out of the bookstore fast enough. As soon as he and Eddy were through the door, he started laughing. It was part victory laughter—he’d scored a free first edition! Uncle Gus would flip when he heard about that.

It was also part freaked laughter. “That was insane,” Sean said.

“What: Mr. Horrocke?”

“Him and getting this book for nothing. Got the fake ad for nothing, too!”

Eddy’s cell phone rang. “Text from your dad. We’re late.”

She took off up High Lane, toward the old railroad station that had been converted into a boutiquey mall. The college-girl cashier had tucked Sean’s books into a navy-blue plastic bag, and he shot a quick look inside to make sure
The Witch Panic
hadn’t bailed now that it had seen him in the light of day.

Dad
was parked outside the station Starbucks when Sean and Eddy ran up. “I was about to call you again, Sean,” he said. “No, wait. I was about to call Eddy, since you forgot your phone.”

Dad had griped about the AWOL phone the whole ride from Providence to Arkham. “We were at the bookstore,” Sean said. He showed the bag.

“Say no more. I know how Eddy is around books. You guys want anything here, or do we go to the pizza place in Kingsport?”

“I vote pizza,” Eddy said. She and Sean piled into the backseat of the Civic. “How’d your consultation go, Mr. Wyndham? What was Ms. Arkwright like? Scary?”

The consultation must have gone well, because Dad only snorted at Eddy. “Why should Ms. Arkwright be scary?”

“Because her house is. We walked by it when we were doing the witch tour. How about that big old plaque? The Arkwright House. Anything that’s the Blankety-Blank House has to be haunted.”

“I didn’t see any ghosts,” Dad said. He had pulled out of the parking lot and turned onto Garrison Street. As they rattled over the bridge, Sean saw the tops of the ailanthus trees that choked Witch Island. “No ghosts, just plaster dust and ripped-out wiring. As for Helen Arkwright, she looks like she’s about twenty years old and too nervous to say ‘boo.’”

“Maybe she’s nervous because of the ghosts,” Sean said.

“More likely because she’s trying to renovate that whole monster at once. She said the uncle who left her the house lived in the library and let the rest go.” Dad shook his head. He didn’t believe in letting stuff go. “That’s where the stained-glass windows are, in the library. They’re in rough shape, but they’re spectacular. You’d like them, Sean. One of the panels has the Devil in it.”

“What, like Satan?”

“Ms. Arkwright called him the Black Man. I guess that’s what the Puritans called him. He didn’t look like a devil to me, though. He was in this Egyptian getup, no horns, no hooves, no tail.”

Sean leaned between the front seats. “So, are you going to restore the windows?”

“I think so. Big job. I’ll have to take them out and do a full refabrication, new support system, the works.”

“So you’ll have to come back to Arkham?”

Dad grinned; Sean saw it in the rearview mirror. “Which would mean
you
can come back to Arkham. You have that good a time?”

“It was awesome. This place owns Salem for witches. We went to the Witch Museum, and the Witch House, and the courthouse where they had the witch trials, and Witch Island—”

“We only saw the Island off the bridge,” Eddy cut in. “Sean wanted to swim out to it, but I wouldn’t let him.”

“No, I didn’t. I wanted to rent a kayak and
row
out to it.”

“Only there’s like three waterfalls between the Island and the kayak rentals. Then we hung out on the University Green for a while. I so want to apply to Miskatonic now.”

“I’m applying for sure,” Sean said. “Then we went to the bookstore.”

“I see you bought something.”

“This book about mythology, that’s all.” And it
was
all that he’d bought. No need to mention the
Witch Panic
book and the newspaper clipping. It was too complicated, and Dad had just inched into the jam of cars on Main Street. Dad hated traffic. The only way he could deal with it was by turning on the classic rock station from Boston, which he did now. “Jumping Jack Flash” blared. Dad joined in without missing a snarl.

End of the interrogation, excellent. Eddy had already snagged
Infinity Unimaginable
and was slumped comfortably, reading. Sean pulled out
The Witch Panic
and let it fall open to the clipping. “Wanted, an apprentice in magic and in the service of its Masters.” If it only said “an apprentice in magic,” that could mean it was hocus-pocus, saw-the-lady-in-half magic. Stage stuff. But it also said “and in the service of its Masters.” With a capital
M
. That made the whole business sound more serious. Who were the Masters of magic, anyhow? And why did the guy who’d faked the ad call himself Reverend Orne? Sean checked the index. He found a listing for “ORNE, Redemption, husband of Patience, minister at the Third Congregational Church.” The Reverend was a big enough deal to appear on a dozen pages.

“Hey, Eddy.”

She kept reading. “This book is wicked. Can I borrow it?”

“Sure. But listen. Maybe I’ll write to this Reverend dude.”

That made Eddy look at him over the top of
Infinity
. “Why?”

“I don’t know. He must be pretty cool, coming up with this ad and getting it to look so real. And I can ask him what the hell he’s talking about, apprentices and Masters of magic and all.”

“Yeah,” Eddy said. She bugged her eyes out and got sarcastic-breathless. “You better do that right away. You know what Mr. Horrocke said. He said, ‘It’s your destiny, Luke.’”

Of course she did the Darth Vader imitation just as the Stones segued into a discount furniture ad and Dad dumped the radio volume. “What’s whose destiny?” he asked.

Eddy knew better, but she was on a roll. “It’s Sean’s destiny to be an e-mail wizard’s apprentice. See, he found this ad at the bookstore—”

She’d propped her feet up on the back of the passenger seat, so Sean couldn’t kick her.
Shut up shut up shut up,
he willed in her direction.

Either his telepathy worked or Eddy came back to her senses. She knew how paranoid Dad was, especially about Internet freaks. Like they were after geek-boys, not the girls hanging their boobs out on Facebook.

“What ad?” Dad prompted. The traffic was so tight, the Civic might as well have been parked; Dad was able to turn around and look at them. Sean hustled the clipping into the book, the book into the map pocket on his door.

“This dumb joke ad,” Eddy said. She’d switched voices from breathless to bored. “Apply to be a magic apprentice. Nothing much.”

Dad’s eyebrows vanished into the shock of hair that fell over his forehead. “You didn’t really think about answering an ad like that, Sean.”

“God, Dad. I was just kidding Eddy. I can’t believe she took it seriously.”

Eddy put her feet down and gave Sean a kick to the ankle, as if
he
were the one who deserved kicking. He stifled a yell.

“Because that would be stupid,” Dad said. “You know how many scammers and predators there are on the Internet. I don’t have to tell you.”

Not more than ten times a day. “I know, Dad.”

The cars ahead started moving. The cars behind started honking. Even so, Dad gazed at Sean for what felt like a whole minute before he faced forward and drove. “I would hope you know by now.”

Sean had signed up for the online ghost-hunting course (with Dad’s Visa) four years back, when he was twelve, a kid. Dad might forgive, but he never forgot. “I do know,” Sean said. “Besides, I don’t even have the ad. It’s back at the bookstore.”

He got his feet up before Eddy could kick him again. He kept them up until she glared, shrugged, and went back to reading her book.

Once off Main, the Civic cruised unimpeded toward Orange Point. Tour buses at the Hanging Ground Memorial slowed them down again. They’d checked out the Memorial that morning, or Sean would have asked to stop. The sun had dropped low enough to spill pale gold over the ocean and the cliff-top grasses and the tombstones of hanged witches. It looked like a movie scene the special-effects crew had colorized to make everything pop. Sean craned around to see the path that led to Patience Orne’s grave. She’d been such a bad-ass witch that they’d planted her away from everyone else, in a little clearing surrounded by scrub blueberries and dune roses. The edge of the cliff was a few steps from her splintered stone. Sean pictured the stone new, and Redemption standing over it. Maybe he’d gotten so worked up mourning, he’d thrown himself over that convenient edge. Except he couldn’t have. He’d lived long enough to put an ad in the 1895
Advertiser
.

Sean laughed.

“What’s up?” Dad asked.

“Nothing. Except I was thinking we should get double anchovies on the pizza. And pineapple.”

Dad and Eddy went into bouts of bogus retching. As they began the descent into Kingsport, Sean slipped
The Witch Panic
from the map pocket and hid it under Dad’s seat, where it and the newspaper clipping could stay safe until he got a chance to do something about them.

2

Stupefied
by his pizza binge, Sean slept through the trip from Arkham to Providence. He woke up when they stopped at Eddy’s house, but he was too late to keep her from jumping out with his Mythos book. It was after nine, and traffic was light; Dad made it home in five minutes and went straight over to his studio. His eagerness to get to work on the new commission was good luck for Sean—he recovered
The Witch Panic in Arkham
unseen and, after checking his recharged phone for messages, flopped on the back-porch glider. The scent of cloves and ginger and myrrh wafted off the pages as he flipped through them. Nice but weird. Most old books were sneezy with dust and mold. Maybe the last owner of this one had burned incense all the time, some kind of special preservative, the Crypt Freshener of the Pharaohs.

The newspaper clipping fell out on Sean’s chest. He set it on the wicker table by the glider, well away from his sweating Coke can, and looked at the page it had marked. In ghost stories, people were always reading the future by picking a Bible passage at random. The passage in front of him was in an appendix of short biographies, and it was titled “The Unfortunate History of the Reverend Redemption Orne.” Damn. Eddy would never believe it. She’d say Sean had marked that page on purpose, but he hadn’t. The last time he’d shoved the clipping into the book had been in the car, when Dad was getting nosy and Sean was trying to get it out of sight quick. In an emergency like that, how could he have picked any particular page? Random, baby.