The Witchmaster's Key (2 page)

“Maybe old books.” Joe tried to smile. “Professor Rowbotham lectures at Cambridge. Perhaps somebody walked off with his Shakespeare collection.”

“Could be. Anyhow, we'll know when we get to Griffinmoor in East Anglia.”

Joe rubbed his jaw gingerly. “Lucky we don't have to see the professor for two days. That'll give me a chance to get this tooth pulled.”

The gentle thud of unlimbering wheels signaled the approach to London airport, and the
jet came in for a smooth landing. Passengers yawned and stretched, then filed off the plane.

Joe wrestled their baggage through customs while Frank hired a car at the booth in the terminal.

“We'd better get used to driving on the left side of the road,” Frank remarked as he slid behind the wheel.

“That's for sure,” Joe answered. “We don't want to bump heads with some guy coming the other way.”

Following the signs, Frank eased the car through roaring London traffic. Near the center of the city they passed a number of vintage automobiles, which bore colorful flags and triangular insignia of shields with crossed arrows and star clusters.

“Who are they?” Frank wondered.

Joe peered back. “London Motor Club. Must be headed for a car show.”

Reaching the outskirts of London, Frank stepped on the gas. They sped through the countryside of East Anglia beyond the town of Chelmsford. At Colchester they turned left along the road leading to Ipswich and on north. Just before Norwich, Frank veered east while Joe picked out their route on a map spread across his knees.

“We're in Norfolk County,” he said. “Griffinmoor can't be far now.”

The car rolled over broad level plains as small
hamlets and big farms slipped by. The boys crossed rickety wooden bridges over slowly meandering streams where windmills stood on the banks, their sails revolving lazily in the breeze. Chickens fluttered away from the car wheels, clucking in fright.

Joe broke the silence. “This is the lowest part of England. Any lower and we'd be under water.”

Outside Griffinmoor, Frank eased to a stop to let a funeral procession cross the narrow road.

The mourners were strange-looking people, wearing bedraggled clothes. Six men carried a rough-hewn black coffin on their shoulders, while an unkempt woman followed behind it with a black cat in her arms.

The leader of the procession was a man with a heavy shock of gray hair and a bushy beard. He carried a sword upright in both hands.

The mourners crossed the road in silence. Then they entered the woods on the opposite side and started to chant.

“Abracadabra! Abracadabra! Cast a spell! Cast a spell!”

Frank glanced at his brother. “This is worth a look-see.”

“I'll say so,” Joe agreed.

Frank ran the car behind a clump of trees and they got out. Creeping through the woods, they followed the funeral procession into an ancient
churchyard cemetery high on a hill overlooking Griffinmoor.

The mourners crossed the road in silence
.

Weeds covered the graves, and the headstones were chipped. The nearby church was weather-beaten and deserted.

The Hardys watched from behind a moss-covered tomb while the mourners placed the coffin in an open grave. The leader walked around it three times, pointing at the coffin with his sword. He then struck it three blows with the blade.

The group began to sway from side to side, chanting eerily:

All fell silent as two men lifted the lid off the coffin for the mourners to get a last look at the deceased. Frank and Joe pressed forward for a peek.

They shuddered. The dead man might have been a hundred years old! His wrinkled, wizened face was contorted in a savage scowl!

A low groan broke the silence. The mourners swung around and gazed fiercely at Joe Hardy, whose toothache had caused him to make the sound. Joe tried to look nonchalant, and Frank
got ready for action in case the man with the sword decided to use it on them.

The boys were relieved when the mourners went back to burying the dead man. The six pallbearers quickly shoveled earth on top of the coffin, where it landed with a dull muffled thud.

The people drifted back to the road, and the Hardys returned to their car and resumed their trip.

“I wonder what that get-together meant?” Frank speculated.

“If you ask me,” Joe said, “they're making a horror movie.”

A few minutes later they were in Griffinmoor, driving down the main street between rows of quaint cottages to the town square. Frank stopped in front of an inn with a signboard showing a soldier in a scarlet coat and steel helmet. They went in.

“Welcome to the Marquis of Granby Inn,” the desk clerk greeted them. “What can I do for you?”

“First you can let us have a room,” Frank said.

“Righto.”

“Second,” Joe added as Frank signed the register, “can you tell us about the funeral we passed outside of town?”

The clerk stopped smiling. Nervously he reached for the key to their room and handed it to Frank.

“Number sixteen on the second floor,” he said.

“Do enjoy your stay at the Marquis of Granby.”

“The funeral,” Joe prodded him. “The Boris Karloff characters, who were they?”

The clerk leaned over the desk and said in a low voice, “If you want my advice, you'll forget you ever saw the funeral, because the next one could be yours!”

Thunderstruck by the mysterious warning, the Hardys questioned the clerk further, but he insisted he could tell them nothing more.

“That guy's holding out on us!” Joe said as he and Frank unpacked. “I'd say he's afraid of something.”

Frank nodded. “And I'd like to find out what it is.”

After washing, they went to the town square and tried to start a conversation with some bowlers on the Griffinmoor green. The men became sullen at the mention of the funeral.

One bowler drew the boys aside. “You're new around here, aren't you?”

“Just over from the U.S.A.,” Joe said.

“Then you don't know about old John Pickenbaugh. That was his funeral.”

“So?”

“John Pickenbaugh was a witchmaster!”

“Come off it,” Joe scoffed. “There aren't any witches.”

“You'll know better before you leave East
Anglia,” the man retorted, and returned to his game.

The boys inquired in a few Griffinmoor shops. Nobody would talk to them about John Pickenbaugh and his funeral.

“We're getting brush-offs instead of answers,” Frank observed.

Finally they came to a run-down tearoom, where a caged parakeet, jars of herbs, and a zodiac chart stood in the window. The name
Mary Ellerbee
was painted on the window ledge. They went in.

Mary Ellerbee was an old woman with a polka-dot bandanna around her head. She offered to read tea leaves for her customers and tell them their fortune. Frank said they'd have tea and cakes but no fortunetelling. They took a corner table.

“Know anything about John Pickenbaugh?” Joe asked before taking a bite of a chocolate cupcake.

“What about old John?” Mary asked suspiciously.

“Was he really a witchmaster?” Frank put in.

“Of course he was! And the mourners at his funeral today were witches from the Griffinmoor coven!”

Frank and Joe exchanged startled glances. Frank lowered his cup of tea. “How do you know that?”

Mary Ellerbee gave a high-pitched cackle. “That's my secret! I'll tell you this, though. You shouldn't be asking about John Pickenbaugh. You should be asking about his successor!”

Joe looked puzzled. “His successor?”

The old woman grinned like a harpy. “Of course. The title is handed down from one witchmaster to another. We've always had a witchmaster in East Anglia.”

A black cat leaped into her lap. She stroked its silky fur and whispered something in its ear. The cat yawned, showing long fangs, and peered at the Hardys with green eyes.

Suddenly Mary Ellerbee cackled again, and Joe felt a cold shiver run up his back.

“So!” she cried. “Who do you think is the new witchmaster of East Anglia?”

“Do you know?” Frank asked.

“Maybe I do, and maybe I don't!”

Realizing they would learn nothing more from her, the boys got up. Frank dropped a few British coins on the table.

As they left the tearoom, Mary Ellerbee called out, “Remember East Anglia is witch country of Old England! Strange things happen here!”

As her strident voice died away, they turned down the street toward the Marquis of Granby Inn.

“What an odd character!” Frank said. “But at least
she talked to us. It's lucky we went into her tearoom.”

“Not so lucky for me,” Joe said. “That chocolate cupcake was a mistake. My jaw feels as though it's blowing up like a basketball!”

“We'd better get you to a dentist, pronto,” his brother suggested.

At the inn, Frank found the name of Doctor Vincent Burelli and put through a call. The dentist said it was after hours, but he'd take anybody with a toothache.

The Hardys walked across Griffinmoor just as night was falling. Raindrops pattered down out of a black sky, and the boys sloshed through mud puddles on a side street, looking for the office.

Finally they spotted it and made their way to a door that stood ajar. It bore a nameplate reading: D
OCTOR
V
INCENT
B
URELLI
, D
ENTAL
S
URGEON
.

Frank rang the bell. No answer. He rang several times. Silence. “Maybe he's treating a patient, Joe. Let's go in.”

They found themselves in a tiny waiting room. Through a half-open door on the opposite side they saw the office and the dental chair.

“I don't see any patient or the doctor,” Frank said. “We'll have to wait.”

They sat down and Frank began to leaf through a magazine on oceanography when footsteps sounded from the direction of the office.

After exchanging perplexed glances, the boys tiptoed across the waiting room and pushed through the door.

Inside they saw an opening trap door beyond the dental chair. A man emerged with his back toward them. He lowered the door and turned around.

The boys gaped. The face was horribly deformed. The eyes bulged. The nose was squashed. A puffy tongue hung limply from a frothing mouth!

T
HE
horrid-looking creature placed a thumb under his chin and gave a jerk upward. His face came off!

“It's a mask!” Frank cried.

“Only plastic and paint!” Joe marveled.

“Doctor Burelli at your service.” The man introduced himself with a low bow.

He was of medium height with short, uncombed brown hair, blue eyes, horn-rimmed glasses, a prominent nose, and an expanding waistline. He smiled easily.

“Quite a start for our visit to Griffinmoor!” Frank mumbled.

“I didn't mean to frighten you,” the dentist said seriously. “I'm an amateur actor, and secretary of the Gravesend Players in town. I make masks for our company in my basement workshop. The trap door allows me to work on them between
patients. I believe one of you has a toothache. Let me look.”

Joe sat down in the dental chair, opened his mouth, and pointed to the sore spot.

“Well,” the dentist said after an examination, “You haven't shown much wisdom about that wisdom tooth. The wisest thing would have been to have had it extracted long ago.”

He chuckled at his own witticism. Amid a barrage of comic comments, he gave Joe a local anesthetic and waited for it to take effect.

“Who are you fellows?” he inquired. “I notice an American accent.”

Frank explained that he and Joe were two Americans who did detective work at home in Bayport. He concealed the fact that they were in Griffinmoor to deal with Professor Rowbotham's mystery. “No sense in gabbing too much,” he thought.

Frank was the cautious Hardy. Joe was more likely to leak a secret, but just now Joe couldn't talk.

“So you're detectives,” Burelli said. “You must know about masks.”

“We use disguises from time to time,” Frank admitted.

The dentist clamped his forceps around Joe's tooth, applied leverage, and extracted it.

“No mystery here,” he declared. “You see the offender before you. Now you can rinse.”

A few minutes later Joe got out of the dental chair, rubbing his jaw.

“Since you're detectives,” Burelli went on, “perhaps you'd like to see my collection of masks in the basement.”

The boys said they would, and Dr. Burelli lifted the trap door, wedged it open, and descended the ladder. Frank and Joe climbed down after him.

They found themselves in a gloomy room lighted by a single overhead bulb. A long bench held a series of masks of well-known people. They recognized Winston Churchill, General Douglas MacArthur, and Marilyn Monroe.