Professor Childermass falls under a deadly family curse brought upon by a skull in an heirloom clock in their third outing, The Spell of the Sorcerer's Skull (1984). The malevolent Windrow clan responsible for the Childermass curse returns to seek vengeance on those who defied them - mainly Johnny Dixon - in the only true sequel, The Revenge of the Wizard's Ghost (1985). This unlikely trio of Dixon, Childermass and Ferguson was teamed up for most of the 1980s, battling supernatural events throughout the northeast. Bellairs was at his best and most productive during this period, describing Spell in a 1990 interview as "one of the best if you consider the best to be a book that turns out as good as you want it to be."
Perhaps, however, as a way to avoid getting stuck in a rut with the Dixon series or being typecast as only a “children’s author,” Bellairs played around with other projects during this time. There were, of course, the further tales of Prospero and Roger Bacon that remained to be written, though what attempts there were, if any, are now assumed lost. In a 1990 interview, Bellairs revealed that, because “you make a lot more money” writing for adults, he had tried his hand at adult detective novels. The author described his efforts as “lousy.” Al Myers remembers visiting his old college friend around 1987 and remembers John writing and “living a life of genteel but comfortable literary poverty, with boxes of books and manuscripts all over the place and the same typewriter he had used in college occupying the place of honor on his desk.”
During this time he also returned to the seldom-used Anthony Monday series with the chilling The Dark Secret of Weatherend (1984) and The Lamp from the Warlock's Tomb (1988). The adventures of Anthony and Miss Eells, along with her brother Emerson, are almost identical to that of Johnny and Professor Childermass in sharing supernatural plots and gothic overtones. His subsequent books, each taking roughly half a year to complete, became slightly formulaic, though each unique: The Trolley to Yesterday (1989) is a time-traveling jaunt to the infamous Turkish battle at Constantinople in 1453, and The Secret of the Underground Room (1990) moves the Dixon-Childermass story to Bristol and the English countryside. While an interesting departure, Secret proved to be something of a low point. Due to health problems, Bellairs was unable to dedicate his allotted time to the book, which ended up his shortest ever and with a distinct “rushed” feeling throughout the text.
If the 1980s were the Johnny Dixon decade, perhaps the 1990s would have switched gears and focused on another set of characters. A fourth Anthony Monday title, The Mansion in the Mist, was completed that took Monday and Miss Eells to, if not Dimension X, another dimension whose inhabitants are keen to rule both their world and Anthony’s, thereby taking the series in a step toward the science-fiction realm. If Bellairs truly found himself needing to break away, he found comfort in revisiting characters that hadn’t been heard from since 1976, Lewis Barnavelt and Rose Rita Pottinger. The new novel, The Ghost in the Mirror, picks up where we last heard from Lewis and Rose Rita and sets out to rectify the problem of a powerless Mrs. Zimmermann.
There were changes in John’s personal life, too, mainly his moving from the house he had lived in since moving to Haverhill in the 1970s to an apartment complex a few blocks away. It was there that John died on Friday, March 8, 1991. John was buried in Haverhill’s Greenwood Cemetery; his marker contains two inscriptions: that “he loved to write stories that children loved to read,” and a line from Virgil, “sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangent.”
The Mansion in the Mist was published posthumously in 1992.
A year following his death, the Michigan State Register of Historic Sites installed a Historical Marker in Marshall that dually honored the house of the Jeremiah Cronin Jr. family and John Bellairs. On hand for the celebration were Virginia Cronin; Frank and Suzanne Bellairs, John’s brother and sister; and a handful of people dressed up as figured from John’s books. An article in the Marshall Chronicle noted that Phyllis Fogelman, former president and publisher for Dial Books, saluted Bellairs by saying, in part, “We know that John would have been very moved by the affection and admiration of his hometown friends, and we join you in celebrating this memorial.”
