By donating a box full of strange objects, Professor Childermass gets his young friend Johnny Dixon a summer job at the Gudge Museum. Everything seems okay as Johnny mops the floors and dusts the artifacts. That is, until a sinister man named Mattheus Mergal shows up looking for the one item the professor held back to keep safe--a wooden hand carved by the evil wizard Esdrias Blackleash. If Mergal gets the hand, he'll be able to bring back his long-dead relative and their sinister powers will be unstoppable. It's up to Johnny and the professor to keep Mergal from taking over the world, but they'll have to face nightmares, snakes, and imprisonment inside a tiny snow globe. Can they stop Mattheus Mergal in time? In this tenth book in the Johnny Dixon series, author Brad Strickland continues the fast-paced adventures and eerie atmosphere first created by master of chills John Bellairs.