The Sign of the Sinister Sorcerer by Brad Strickland

Author:Brad Strickland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2010-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

ROSE RITA ANSWERED THE door and to her great surprise saw Lewis standing there on the Pottinger porch, his face pale and his lip trembling. “What’s wrong?” she asked, letting him into the house. “Come on into the living room, we can talk in there. Dad’s at work and Mom’s out back with her roses.” She led Lewis to the sitting room and noticed for the first time that he was carrying a thick reddish book. “What’s that?”

“Something I wanted you to see,” croaked Lewis in a voice very much unlike his own. He had marked a place in the book with a playing card, a three of diamonds from one of the many packs of cards Uncle Jonathan had lying around the house. “Read this.”

Frowning, Rose Rita took the volume from him. It was the same collection of odd beliefs and superstitions she had seen back on that first Monday of vacation, when Lewis had been sprawled in his lawn chair, munching crackers and reading. She saw that the chapter Lewis had marked was headed “Of the accouterments and paraphernalia of those supposed to be sorcerers.”

Following Lewis’s pointing finger, Rose Rita read:

A wizard’s staff or a magician’s wand (the two are often but not always interchangeable) is intimately bound up with its owner’s life force. Although stage-conjurors typically wield white-tipped black wands some one foot to eighteen inches long, I have seen a variety of so-called “wands” in the possession of both men and women who fancy themselves workers of magic. These have ranged from a stout walking staff, more than six feet tall, belonging to an old man in County Cork, Ireland, to a curiously twisted twig not even three inches long that was always in the possession of an old crone of Glasgow.

But regardless of form or substance, all of the self-proclaimed wizards and witches told me the same thing: Whenever a worker of magic expires during a magical effort, his or her wand inexplicably snaps itself, breaking into two pieces. By this token, they say, they know the magician has actually passed away from the circles of this world and into the Great Beyond; for it is fully within the powers of many wizards and witches, they say, to feign death so perfectly that no one could say the wonder-worker had even a spark of life remaining. And so no witch or wizard is ever buried until his or her wand has been found to be broken in twain.

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