The Wishing Game(2)

Hugo turned his back on the water. He found his shoes and dusted the sand from them.

When he came to Clock Island, he’d sworn to himself he’d stay one or two months. Then he said he’d stay until Jack was back on his feet. Five years later and here he still was.

No. No more. Time’s up. Time to go. By this time next spring, he’d be gone. He couldn’t sit and watch his old friend fade like ink on old paper until no one could read the writing anymore.

His decision made, Hugo started for the path. Just then, he saw a light come on in a window.

The window of Jack’s writing factory.

The writing factory that only the housekeeper had set foot inside for years…and today was her day off.

The light in that window was low and golden. Jack’s desk lamp. Jack was sitting at his desk for the first time in years. Was the Mastermind putting pen to paper again?

Hugo waited for the light to go out, proof it was a mistake, a whim, Jack looking for a lost letter or misplaced book.

The light stayed on.

It was too much to hope for, and yet Hugo hoped for it with all his heart and wished for it on every star in the night sky. He wished and hoped and prayed for it.

Prayed for the oldest miracle in the book—a dead man coming back to life.

“All right, old man,” Hugo said to the light in the window of the house on Clock Island. “It’s about bloody time.”





Make a Wish





    Astrid woke from a deep and dreamless sleep. What had woken her? Her cat jumping on the bed? No, Vince Purraldi was sound asleep curled up in his basket on the rug. Sometimes the wind woke Astrid up when it rattled the roof of their old house, but the tree branches were quiet outside her window. No wind tonight. Although she was scared, she got out of bed and went to the window. Maybe a bird had tapped on the glass?

Astrid gasped as the room was flooded with white light, like a car’s headlights but a thousand times stronger and brighter.

Then it was gone. Is that what had woken her? That blast of light in her room?

Where had it come from? she wondered.

Astrid grabbed her binoculars hanging off her bedpost. She knelt at the window, binoculars pressed to her eyes, and gazed across the water to where a lonesome island lay like a sleeping turtle in the cold ocean.

The light flashed again.

It had come from the lighthouse. The lighthouse on the island.

“But,” Astrid whispered to the window, “that lighthouse has been dark forever.”

What did it mean?

The answer came as suddenly to her as the light in her window.

Quietly as she could, she left her bedroom and slipped into the room across the hall. Max, her nine-year-old brother, was sleeping so hard he was drooling on his pillow. Ugh. Gross. Boys. Astrid poked Max in the shoulder, then did it again. It took twelve shoulder pokes to get him to wake up.

“What. What? Whaaat?” He opened his eyes, wiping away the drool with his pajama sleeve.

“Max, it’s the Mastermind.”

That got his attention. He sat straight up in bed. “What about him?”

She smiled in the dark.

“He’s come back to Clock Island.”

—From The House on Clock Island, Clock Island Book One, by Jack Masterson, 1990





Chapter One





One Year Later

The school bell rang at two-thirty, and the usual stampede of little feet followed. Lucy took backpack duty and lunch box duty while Ms. Theresa, the class’s teacher, called out her usual warnings.

“Backpacks and lunch boxes and papers! If you forget anything, I’m not bringing it home to you and neither is Miss Lucy!” Some of the children listened. Some ignored her. Thankfully, this was kindergarten, so the stakes were pretty low.

Several of the kids hugged her on their way out the door. Lucy always relished these quick squishes, as they called them. They made the long draining days of being a teacher’s aide—refereeing playground fights, cleaning up after potty accidents, tying and retying a thousand shoelaces, and drying a thousand tears—worth the endless work.

When the classroom finally emptied, Lucy slumped in her chair. Luckily, she was off bus duty today, so she had a few minutes to recover.

Theresa surveyed the damage with a garbage bag in hand. All the round tables were covered in bits of construction paper, glue bottles left open and leaking. Fat pencils and fuzzy pipe cleaners were littered all over the floor.

“It’s like the Rapture,” Theresa said with a wave of her hands. “Poof. They’re gone.”

“And we’re left behind again,” Lucy said. “What did we do wrong?”

Something, obviously, because she was, at that very moment, prying a wad of gum off the bottom of the table for the second time that week. “Here, give me the garbage bag. That’s my job.” Lucy took the bag and dropped the gum into it.

“You sure you don’t mind cleaning up alone?” Theresa asked.

Lucy waved her hand to shoo her away. Theresa looked as exhausted as Lucy felt, and the poor woman still had a school committee meeting today. Anyone who thought teaching was easy had obviously never tried it.

“Don’t worry about it,” Lucy said. “Christopher likes to help.”

“I love when the kids are still young enough that you can trick them into doing chores because they think they’re playing.” Theresa dug her purse out of the bottom desk drawer. “I told Rosa she couldn’t mop the kitchen because that was for grown-ups, and she literally pouted until I let her do it.”