The Figure In the Shadows by John Bellairs, Mercer Mayer Read Free Book Online

him shook to cannonade after cannonade. He felt grim and strong and brave and heartless and cruel. It was a good feeling, and it usually lasted about half of the way home. Then he was just plain old Lewis again.
    The feeling that the magic coin gave Lewis was a bit like the pirate-movie feeling, except that the coin feeling lasted longer. The coin did other things for him too: forone thing, he found that his head was full of schemes and plots. He would walk along dreaming up ways to get even with Woody Mingo and the other kids who bothered him. Of course, he had dreamed of revenge before the magic coin came into his life, but his planning had never been so good. Sometimes Lewis had to shake his head to get rid of a plan that was too awful to think about.
    And it seemed to Lewis that he was dreaming a lot more at night now. The dreams seemed to be in color, with music playing in the background—stirring military music. Lewis would dream that he was riding at the head of an army or leading his knights up over the walls of a castle. There were other dreams too, really frightening ones, but he could never remember them. He just woke up with the feeling that he had had them.
    So Lewis wore the coin and waited for it to do something for him. And around about this time Woody Mingo began to make life really miserable for Lewis.
    It was as if Woody sat up nights thinking of mean things to do: he managed to get a seat near Lewis in school, and when Miss Haggerty’s back was turned, he would dart across the aisle and pinch Lewis in the neck. Hard, so that it hurt for a long time afterwards. Or he would goose Lewis when they were in the bathroom together, or he would put dead mice in Lewis’s briefcase because he knew that Lewis was very much afraid of dead animals. Probably the most maddening thing that Woody did was to march Lewis down the stairs of the school during fire drills. Lewis’s school was a tall old brick building with shaky wooden staircases. The sixth-grade room was on the second floor, and when the fire bell rang and everyone lined up at the top of the staircase, Woody would slip in behind Lewis. Then he would put one hand in each of Lewis’s hip pockets and march him down the stairs, saying, “Right butt, left butt, hup-two-three-four,
march
!” until Lewis got to the bottom, shaken and sick and almost in tears.

    Lewis didn’t understand why Woody had decided to pick on him. It was like those kids who jumped out at you when you were walking down the street, and wouldn’t let you by till you had told them your name, and they had pounded you a couple of times on the arm. They were bullies, and so was Woody. Kids like that always seemed to be attracted to Lewis. He had hoped that his magic coin would help him to stand up to Woody but so far it hadn’t. Lewis might be walking down the street with the coin around his neck, imagining that he was Blackbeard the pirate or Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. Then he would run into Woody and all his courage would evaporate, and he would find himself thinking about the red-handled jacknife that Woody carried in his pocket. But maybe the coin would help him yet. He hoped that it would.
    One night Lewis went to bed thinking about how to get even with Woody Mingo. He fell asleep amid daydreams of exploding baseballs and poisoned peanut buttersandwiches, and trap doors that dropped people into cauldrons of boiling oil. So perhaps it is not very surprising that he had a wild and exciting dream that night.
    In the dream Lewis had become a tall, big-boned Viking chieftain. He and his companions were fighting off an attack by some Indians. Lewis recognized the place where they were fighting. It was Wilder Creek Park, which was just outside the city limits. Lewis had been there on picnics a number of times. In the dream the wooden tables and the brick cook-stoves had vanished, and the park was weedy and overgrown. He and his men were drawn into a ring in the middle of the park, and Indians