Amanda Lester and the Black Shadow Terror Read online

  AMANDA LESTER

  AND THE BLACK SHADOW TERROR

  (AMANDA LESTER, DETECTIVE #8)

  Also by Paula Berinstein

  Amanda Lester and the Pink Sugar Conspiracy (Amanda Lester, Detective #1)

  Amanda Lester and the Orange Crystal Crisis (Amanda Lester, Detective #2)

  Amanda Lester and the Purple Rainbow Puzzle (Amanda Lester, Detective #3)

  Amanda Lester and the Blue Peacocks’ Secret (Amanda Lester, Detective #4)

  Amanda Lester and the Red Spider’ Rumpus (Amanda Lester, Detective #5)

  Amanda Lester and the Gold Spectacles Surprise (Amanda Lester, Detective #6)

  Amanda Lester and the Green Monkey Gotcha (Amanda Lester, Detective #7)

  Amanda Lester

  and the

  Black Shadow Terror

  PAULA BERINSTEIN

  The Writing Show

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s twisted imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Paula Berinstein.

  All rights reserved. Thank you for not scanning, uploading, or sharing any part of this book electronically without permission. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact the author at [email protected].

  The Writing Show

  P.O. Box 2970

  Agoura Hills, CA 91376-2970

  www.amandalester.net

  ISBN: 978-1-942361-24-4 (softcover)

  ISBN-10: 1-942361-24-6 (softcover)

  ISBN: 978-1-942361-25-1 (ebook)

  ISBN-10: 1-942361-25-4 (ebook)

  Cover design: Anna Mogileva

  Text set in Garamond Premier Pro

  Printed in the United States of America

  To my wonderful readers

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 Monsters

  Chapter 2 Blixus and Hugh Ride Again

  Chapter 3 Nick’s Vow

  Chapter 4 Hugh Hatches a Plan

  Chapter 5 A Blast from the Past

  Chapter 6 They Look Alive and Well to Me

  Chapter 7 Kidnapped

  Chapter 8 The Seance

  Chapter 9 Despina Lester, Detective

  Chapter 10 But I Don’t Have a Thing to Wear

  Chapter 11 Eustachia Parrot’s Party

  Chapter 12 Meanwhile, Back at Legatum

  Chapter 13 A Devil’s Bargain

  Chapter 14 Well That Answers That Question

  Chapter 15 Cellmates

  Chapter 16 Simon Gets Emotional

  Chapter 17 Holmes and Nick Investigate

  Chapter 18 He Only Looks Like Blixus

  Chapter 19 Wimbly Coatrack My Foot

  Chapter 20 Me and My Shadow

  Chapter 21 The Bailiwick Wiffle Personal Papers Collection

  Chapter 22 Now for My Next Trick . . .

  Chapter 23 Consequences

  Chapter 24 Introducing Cousin Kevin

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Monsters

  The shadow materialized out of nowhere and loomed over her. Ten times her size, black as onyx, with jaws like those of a T-Rex and breath like death, it reached out toward her with a horrible claw.

  Her heart raced so fast it felt like it would burst through her chest. She whirled around looking for a place to run, a weapon, a rescuer—anything—but it was too late. Sharp as knives, its rotting teeth began to tear at her flesh and she screamed before sinking into its unbreakable grip. She could feel herself fighting, flailing, lashing out with her fists, her feet, her head, but the thing was too strong. Then everything went black.

  “It’s okay,” someone said as they stroked her hair. “It’s just a dream.” The voice seemed to be coming from all around her. She thought she knew it but it seemed so far away, like a distant radio.

  “Amanda, honey, you’re all right. Come on, hold me. I’m here. Nothing is going to happen to you.”

  Instinctively she reached out and embraced the warm body. It was covered with some kind of soft cloth but underneath she could feel that it was hard and muscular.

  “That’s right,” said Herb Lester, holding his daughter tight. “You’re going to be fine. Look, here’s Tealeaf.”

  Amanda felt a little push against her skin and then something warm and wet touched her face. It didn’t feel like a monster at all. It felt like—

  Tealeaf! Her pet puli was licking her face, trying to comfort her. She let go of her father and wrapped her arms around the shaggy dog, who licked even harder. As the animal covered her face with kisses she felt something wonderful well up inside her and she broke into tears of joy and release.

  Her father circled his arms around the both of them and pulled them close. The dog struggled to get free and tickled her skin. “Feel better now?”

  Amanda lifted her tear-stained face to him. The light from her bedside lamp bounced off his head and made him look like an angel. “Another nightmare. I’m sorry for waking you again, Dad. You must be exhausted.”

  He stroked her face. “I’m fine, baby. You know I don’t need to sleep. But you do. Do you think you can relax a little now?”

  “I think so,” she said. She could feel that her hair was sticking out every which way. Not that that was anything new. She was used to having the wildest hair of anyone in England. She pushed it out of her face. “It wasn’t so bad. Way better than usual. It was just a monster this time.”

  Monsters she could handle. The other horrors the Moriarty brothers had implanted in her brain not so much, although she would never admit it. She was a detective. She had been trained to handle anything. She just wished her father weren’t collateral damage in her ongoing struggle against the criminals. It wasn’t fair to inflict her baggage on him.

  “Good,” he said. “Now you just snuggle in with Tealeaf and I’ll stay here as long as you want. Would you like me to read to you? How about a good screenplay? Black Panther?”

  She took his hand. It was large, warm, and dry, and always made her feel safe. “You don’t need to. I’m fine. Go get some sleep.”

  Herb looked doubtful but kissed her and left the room. The dog turned around three times and burrowed into the bed, falling asleep instantly. Amanda pulled the covers over her—not that she needed them in the warm Edinburgh autumn they were having—and closed her eyes. But she didn’t sleep.

  She was anxious to get back to the secret detective school. After the Legatum campus in Windermere was destroyed by unknown assailants, Headmaster Thrillkill had hurriedly relocated the school to a castle in the village of Auchencairn on Solway Firth. The building was rumored to be haunted, but most detectives don’t believe in ghosts and Thrillkill had snapped up the lease at a good price. If he hadn’t, the term might have been delayed for months. But the move hadn’t gone well, and Amanda and her friends had been having a number of problems adjusting.

  For a start, the setting was problematic. The new castle featured an awkward floor plan that required almost everyone to walk through others’ rooms to get to their own. Some of the students—especially the boys—didn’t care so much, not being particularly modest, but others, such as Amphora Kapoor, a highly sensitive second-year student, made such a big deal about being “invaded” that the matron, Mrs. Scarper, had to move her. When she mistakenly put her in with Delara Watson, a new arrival originally from Afghanistan, sparks flew. The two prickly girls were so much alike that they could barely stand to speak to each other, and although Mrs. Scarper demanded that they learn to live wi
th the situation, she finally caved and separated them, sending them to opposite corners of the girls’ residential area.

  Then there was the fact that most of the staff had quit and it had been nearly impossible to find replacements. Seashell Feeney, the fierce criminals and their methods teacher, had finally had enough of what she called “all this fluff” and had bolted back to the Isle of Skye in Scotland, where some of the teachers had previously established a rival institution, taking half the faculty and students with her, not to mention a healthy portion of the school’s tuition. The rest of the original staff except for Dean Drusilla Canoodle, a tough old bird; Mrs. Bipthrottle, the popular librarian; Noel Updown, one of the school’s two décor gremlins; Dr. Wing and her nurse; and dumpy but steadfast Mrs. Scarper, were too freaked out to follow a “group of crazies” to the north, where “God knows anything could happen,” so Thrillkill had no maids, gardeners, cooks, or any of the indispensable staff that kept the school running. What he did have, thank goodness, was a new décor gremlin, Tantalus Grapestem, a huge black American from New Orleans who was afraid of nothing. Amanda thought the newcomer’s outsider style might be even more challenging for the school and therefore more effective than that of the man he had replaced, the redoubtable Alexei Dropoff, who had followed his idol Professor Pargeter to Skye. If his first designs were anything to go by—back alleys, juke joints, and auto body shops—his residence would be a rousing success.

  As for the rest of the staff, Thrillkill had hired some temporary help, but when the day laborers got wind of what was going on at the castle they fled, and their talk tarred the school with such a poor reputation that he couldn’t hire anyone from then on. That required the teachers and students to cook their own meals, “clean” their quarters, and scrape by as well as they could, but except for Professor Hoxby, the pathologist, who possessed surprising culinary talents, they were all hopeless at housekeeping and everyone was out of sorts.

  But what was really getting everyone were the reports of mysterious occurrences at the castle that no one could explain. No one except Amphora and her boyfriend, Ramon Splunk, believed these were supernatural events. What people were really concerned about was enemy infiltration, and for good reason. After all, the Legatum campus at Windermere had been bombed by mysterious ninjas no one knew anything about. Further, arch-criminal Blixus Moriarty and his hacker son, Hugh, were at large, as was Eamon Moran, the reclusive and sick-minded sniper. Any one of them could have been responsible for the odd goings on.

  In addition no one knew whether the lawyer-turned-crime kingpin Banting Waltz was dead or alive, so the anomalies might have been down to him. The last time the kids had seen him, he and Amanda’s mother, Lila Lester, had been spirited off in a flying turret that had risen from the top of Durham Castle during a battle between the detectives and their enemies. Amanda had seen Stencil Moriarty—or was it Blixus—shoot Waltz there, but whether he had survived no one knew. What they did know was that security was more difficult to effect at the new digs, and that the aforementioned enemies had acquired new technologies and skills over the past couple of years, while the detectives had been weakened by internal and external strife and were seriously under-resourced. So when people started hearing strange noises and seeing flashes and odd shapes and feeling things touching them, they were understandably concerned.

  “I’ve been hearing a grinding noise,” Ivy Halpin said the night before Amanda left for a weekend in Edinburgh with her father. Because she was blind her hearing was especially acute, and everyone took her reports seriously. Amanda, who had been and still was her roommate and best friend, had risen, turned on the light, and checked everywhere, even out in the hall and next door, but had found nothing.

  “There was something in my room,” said Simon Binkle, the most logical and least perturbable student at the school. “It was dark and looked like the phantom of the opera, with a great black cape.” But upon investigating further, he had found nothing either.

  Owla Snizzle, widely considered the smartest girl in school, complained of a “coconut smell” in the hall outside her room.

  “What’s wrong with that?” said Amphora. “I love the smell of coconuts.”

  “Ych,” said Owla, who was from Jamaica. “Back home they put coconut in everything. I can’t stand it. Give me a full English breakfast any day. I’d rather eat stewed tomatoes than coconut, and that’s saying something.”

  Even Scapulus Holmes, great-great-grandson of Sherlock, who was afraid of nothing, had felt uneasy.

  “It was creepy,” he told the others. “I couldn’t see anything but I felt it touch me, like knobby fingers closing around my throat.”

  “Ghosts,” pronounced Ramon Splunk, the resident ghost hunter, with a smirk. “My instruments are off the charts.”

  “There are no ghosts,” said David Wiffle, who in the past would have been among the whiniest but had found new courage since he’d left the Moriartys, with whom he’d lived for a few months during a particularly bad period in his life.

  “Oh yeah?” said Ramon. “Then how do you explain my readings?”

  “It’s easy,” said David. “You faked them.”

  “I am a scientist,” said Ramon. “I would never do such a thing.”

  David let out a guffaw. “Don’t make me laugh, Splunk. You’re as much a scientist as I am a fashion designer.”

  “Stop arguing,” said Clive Ng, a quiet, nerdy boy who liked to invent whizzy gizmos. “There’s room for all viewpoints here.” Ever since he had been paired with Ramon on a project having to do with brainwaves, Clive had moderated his rigid anti-paranormal stance. While he was still very pro-science, he had become convinced through some weird personal experiences that there were unexplained forces at work out there. Simon, his best friend, hadn’t been thrilled with his transformation but hadn’t been able to talk sense into him.

  So far, no one had been able to come up with any other explanations for the weird phenomena. Not Headmaster Thrillkill, not the teachers, and not Amanda. But emotion was running high, and she wanted to get back to her friends and solve the mystery. Which was why, when her father told her they were going to visit a friend of his, she was even more irritable than usual after a night of interrupted sleep.

  “Can’t I just go back to Legatum?” she said.

  “No,” said Herb, adjusting his glasses. “We’re going to get to the bottom of your spells. You can’t live like this.”

  “But Legatum needs me,” she complained.

  “Legatum will live without you for a day,” he said. And so despite her protests he took her to see a monk named Mandir Rinpoche, who lived in a small flat on a busy street in Newington.

  As they trudged up the endless, rather smelly stairs to the fourth floor of his building Amanda said, “Please don’t make me do this, Dad.”

  “Look, honey,” he said. “You clearly don’t enjoy being terrorized night after night. Even you’ll admit that.”

  “I do but—”

  “Then why won’t you let Rinpoche take a look at you?”

  “Because there’s nothing that can be done,” she said. “The Moriartys’ formulas are unbreakable.”

  Herb took her by the shoulders. “Why do you think that?”

  “Because there were three of them,” she said, falling into his arms. “Blixus, Stencil, and Amboy put their heads together and gave me a triple whammy. Two of them are dead now. There’s no way to undo what they did.”

  “I don’t believe that,” said Herb, holding her tight. “And either should you. You know better. The power of the mind is infinite.”

  “But I have other things to do,” she said into his blue cotton shirt. “Weird things are happening at Legatum. They need me. Anyway, I’m adjusting. What are a few nightmares now and then? Everyone has them.”

  “I’m not the only one who doesn’t like seeing you this way,” he said, letting go of her. He stared deep into her brown eyes. “Nick and your other friends want you healed too.�
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  That was below the belt. She would do anything for the boy she loved and her father knew it. “Please don’t guilt me with Nick,” she said, shaking her head. “He’ll learn to live with it, as I have.”

  “You are one stubborn—”

  At that moment the door opened and another bald man, this one tall and lanky and wearing a yellow robe that was even longer than he was, stood before them.

  “Herb,” he said warmly.

  “Rinpoche,” said Herb. “May I present my daughter, Amanda.”

  Amanda looked way up at the tall man’s face, which was narrow and spare. He reminded her of what she thought Sherlock Holmes was supposed to have looked like except that he seemed laid back. There was something about him that instantly made her feel calm. She was a little worried that he’d trip over his robe, though. She couldn’t even see his feet.

  Rinpoche reached out and shook her hand. She was surprised. Weren’t monks supposed to do something a little less pedestrian, like bow or something? Apparently not.

  “Come in,” said Rinpoche, motioning for them to enter his simple abode.

  And simple it was, bare and functional but scarily clean, with a pristine cream-colored couch that looked too short to hold a supine Rinpoche, a couple of Danish-looking chairs with royal blue seats, and a small yellow kitchen off to the side. An opening led to the back, where presumably the flat contained a bedroom and bath.

  Amanda and Herb sat down on the hard couch. The monk took a chair opposite them and crossed his long legs. Now she could see that he was barefoot. No wonder his footsteps had made no noise.

  “Tell me about these nightmares,” he said without preamble.

  “They’re nothing,” said Amanda. He was nice but she still didn’t want to talk about them. “I don’t know why I’m even here.”