The House with a Clock In Its Walls (10 page)

The next morning, when Lewis came down to breakfast, Uncle Jonathan was reading an article on the front page of the New Zebedee
Chronicle
. Curious, Lewis leaned over his shoulder and this is what he read:

“Morning, Lewis,” said Jonathan, without looking up. “Did you sleep well?”

Lewis turned pale. Did Jonathan know?

Mrs. Zimmermann was sitting across the table, munching her Cheerios. “Does it say whether they disturbed the coffins?” she asked.

“No, it doesn’t,” said Jonathan. “The caretaker probably just shoved the doors shut and fastened them with a new padlock. I don’t blame him. I wouldn’t want to look inside old Isaac Izard’s tomb.”

Lewis sat down. There were too many things whirling around in his head, and he was trying to get them straightened out.

“I . . . I was up in the cemetery with Tarby a couple of times, Uncle Jonathan,” he said cautiously, “but I didn’t see any tomb with ‘Izard’ on it.”

“Oh, well, he didn’t want his name on the tomb. When he had it fixed up for his wife’s body, he brought in a stonecutter who chiseled off the family name and carved an omega.”

“An omega?” said Lewis. “What’s that?”

“It’s the last letter of the Greek alphabet, and it’s used a lot by wizards. It looks like an
O
, except that it’s open
at the bottom. It is the sign of the Last Judgment—the End of the World.”

Lewis sat there staring at the little
O
’s floating in his bowl. He forced himself to eat a few of them.

“How come he wanted something like that on his tomb?” asked Lewis. He was trying to conceal the tremble in his voice.

“Lord knows, Lewis,” said Jonathan. “Say, you’re not scared about this tomb-breaking business, are you? Old Isaac Izard’s dead and gone. He’s not going to bother us.”

Lewis looked at Jonathan. Then he looked at Mrs. Zimmermann. He knew, as well as he knew anything, that they couldn’t wait for him to go off to school so they could discuss the matter alone. So he finished his breakfast, mumbled goodby to them both, grabbed up his books, and left.

Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann did indeed want to discuss the break-in alone. Any tampering with the tomb of two powerful wizards like Isaac and Selenna Izard was a matter for serious discussion, and they didn’t want to frighten Lewis with their talk. But they had no idea of what Lewis had done. Jonathan was not in the habit of peering in at the sleeping form of his nephew during the night, so he had no idea that Lewis had been out of the house. Of course, he and Mrs. Zimmermann had been concerned for some time about Lewis’s strange behavior. But they did not connect it with what had happened on Halloween night.

After their discussion—which came to no conclusions at all, except that there was dirty work afoot—Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann decided that it would be nice to take Lewis on an evening ride around Capharnaum County. They knew he loved to ride, and since they hadn’t taken him out in some time, they thought that maybe an excursion would shake some of the gloom out of his system.

But when Lewis came home from school that day, he was depressed and worried. He had been thinking about the tomb business all day long. So, when Jonathan pushed back his chair after dinner and asked Lewis if he’d like to go for a nice long ride, Lewis merely shrugged his shoulders and said, “Yeah, I guess I’d like to go” in a dying-cat sort of voice.

Jonathan stared at Lewis for a minute, but he said nothing. He merely got up and went to get his car keys. Soon all three of them—Jonathan, Mrs. Zimmermann, and Lewis—were crammed into the front seat of Jonathan’s 1935 Muggins Simoon, a big black car with running boards and a windshield that could be cranked open. The car, spewing clouds of bluish smoke, backed down the rutted driveway and into the street.

They drove for hours, as the afterglow of sunset stayed and stayed, and the hollows filled with purple mist. They drove past barns with big blue signs on their sides that said:
CHEW MAIL POUCH
. They drove past green John Deere tractors parked in deep muddy ruts. Up
hill and down hill they drove, over bumpy railroad crossings with X-shaped signs that said:
RAIL-SING CROS-ROAD
if you read them the wrong way, through little towns that were no more than a church, a food store with a gas pump outside, and a flagpole on a triangle of green grass where the roads met. By the time it got dark, they were miles from New Zebedee.

They were on their way home when—for no reason that Lewis could see—Jonathan stopped the car. He turned off the motor and sat there staring at the row of green dashboard lights.

“What’s wrong, Uncle Jonathan?” asked Lewis.

“I keep imagining that I hear a car somewhere,” said Jonathan. “Do you hear it, Florence?”

“Yes, I do,” said Mrs. Zimmermann, giving him a puzzled look. “But what’s so odd about that? They do let people drive these roads at night, you know.”

“Do they?” said Jonathan in a strange voice. He opened the car door and stepped out onto the gravel. “Stay here,” he said to them. He walked up the road a little ways and stood there, listening. Even with the car door open, Lewis could hear nothing but the wind in the roadside trees and the clattering of a tin sign on a barbed-wire fence. The car was parked near the top of a high hill, and now Lewis could see headlights rising out of a gully and then dipping into the next one.

Jonathan came running back to the car. He slammed the door and started the motor. With a squealing of tires,
he turned the car around and headed back the way they had come.

Lewis was frightened. “What’s wrong, Uncle Jonathan?” he asked.

“Ask me later, Lewis. Florence, what’s the best way—other way—back to New Zebedee?”

“Take the next side road to your right. That’s Twelve Mile Road, and it runs into the Wilder Creek Road. And step on it. They’re gaining.”

Many times, when he had been out riding with his father and mother, Lewis had pretended that they were being followed by some car or other. It was a good game to pass the time on long dull evening rides, and he remembered how he had always felt disappointed when the mystery car turned away into a side street or a driveway. But tonight the game was for real.

Around sharp curves they went, lurching dangerously far over and squealing the tires. Up hills, down hills, then seventy or eighty miles an hour on the straightaway, which was never straight for long on these winding country roads. Lewis had never seen Jonathan drive so fast, or so recklessly. But no matter how fast he drove, the two cold circles of light still burned in his rear-view mirror.

Both Mrs. Zimmermann and Uncle Jonathan seemed to know who or what was in the car behind them—or at least they seemed to know that it was someone that had the power to do them harm. But they said as little as
possible, except to confer now and then about directions. So Lewis just sat there, trying to feel comforted by the green dashboard lights and the warm breath of the heater on his knees. Of course, he also felt comforted by the two wizards, whose warm friendly bodies pressed against his in the furry darkness. But he knew that they were scared, and this made him twice as scared.

What was after them? Why didn’t Uncle Jonathan or Mrs. Zimmermann just wave an arm and turn the evil car into a wad of smoldering tinfoil? Lewis stared up at the reflected headlights, and he thought of what he had seen in the cemetery, and of what Uncle Jonathan had told him about Mrs. Izard’s eyeglasses. He was beginning to have a theory about how all these things fitted together.

The car raced on, spitting stones from under its tires. Down into hollows bordered by dark skeletal trees, up over high hills, on and on while the setting moon seemed to race to keep up with them. They covered a large part of Capharnaum County that night, because the way around was a long way. After what seemed like hours of driving, they came to a place where three roads met. As the car screeched around the turn, Lewis saw—for a few seconds—a Civil War cannon white with frost, a wooden church with smeary stained-glass windows, and a general store with a dark glimmering window that said:
SALADA
.

“We’re on the Wilder Creek Road now, Lewis,” said Mrs. Zimmermann as she put her arm around him. “It won’t be long now. Don’t be afraid.”

The car raced on. Dead roadside stalks bent in its hot wind, and overhanging branches whipped along the metal roof. The burning white holes danced in the mirror as before, and it looked like they were getting closer. They had never, since the start of the chase, been more than two or three car lengths away.

Jonathan shoved the accelerator to the floor. The needle moved up to eighty, which was dangerous, to say the least, on these roads. But the greater danger was behind, so Jonathan took the big roundhouse curves as well as he could, and the tires screeched, and the fenders almost touched the crumbling asphalt at the side of the road. This was blacktop, and you could go faster on it than you could on loose gravel.

At last they came to the top of a high hill and, there below them, glimmering peacefully in the starlight—the moon had gone down some time ago—was Wilder Creek. There was the bridge, a maze of crisscrossing black girders. Down the hill they barrelled, faster and faster. The car behind followed, just as fast. They were almost to the bridge when the lights in the rear-view mirror did something headlights had never done before. They grew and brightened till the reflection was a blinding bar of white light. Lewis clapped his hands to his eyes. Had he been struck blind? Had Jonathan been blinded too? Would the car crash, or . . . 

Suddenly Lewis heard the rolling clatter of the bridge boards under the car. He took his hands away from his face. He could see. Jonathan was smiling and putting on the brakes. Mrs. Zimmermann heaved a deep sigh of relief. They were across the bridge.

As Jonathan opened the door to get out, Lewis twisted around in his seat and saw that the other car had stopped just before it got to the bridge. Its headlights were dark now, except for two smoldering yellow pinpoints. Lewis could not tell if there was anyone in the car, because the windshield was covered by a blank silvery sheen.

Jonathan stood there, his hands on his hips, watching. He did not seem to be afraid of the other car now. Slowly the mysterious car turned around and drove away. When Jonathan got back to the Muggins Simoon he was chuckling.

“It’s all over, Lewis. Relax. Witches and other evil things can’t cross running water. It’s an old rule, but it still applies.”

“You might throw in the fact,” said Mrs. Zimmermann in her most pedantic tone, “that Elihu Clabbernong built that iron bridge in 1892. He was supposed to be doing it for the county, but he was really trying to make sure that the ghost of his dead uncle, Jedediah, didn’t cross the stream to get him. Now Elihu was a part-time warlock, and what he put into the iron of the bridge . . . ”