The House with a Clock In Its Walls (11 page)

“Oh, good heavens!” cried Jonathan, covering his ears.
“Are you going to go through the whole history of Capharnaum County at four
A.M
.?”

“Is it
that
late?” asked Lewis.

“That late or later,” said Jonathan wearily. “It’s been quite a ride.”

They drove on toward New Zebedee. On the way they stopped at an all-night diner and had a large breakfast of waffles, eggs, American fries, sausage, coffee, and milk. Then they sat around for a long time talking about the narrow escape they had just had. Lewis asked a lot of questions, but he didn’t get many answers.

When they got back to New Zebedee, it was dawn. Dawn of an overcast November day. The town and its hills appeared to be swimming in a gray grainy murk. When Jonathan pulled up in front of his house he said, “There’s something wrong, Florence. Stay in the car with Lewis.”

“Oh, dear!” she cried, wrinkling up her mouth. “What more can happen?”

Jonathan swung back the iron gate and marched up the walk. From where he was sitting, Lewis could see that the front door was open. This could easily be explained, since people in New Zebedee never locked their doors, and sometimes the latches didn’t hold when they closed them. Jonathan disappeared into the house, and he didn’t come back for ten full minutes. When he did reappear, he looked worried.

“Come on, Florence,” he said, opening the door on her side. “It’s safe to go in, I think. But the house has been broken into.”

Lewis burst into tears. “They didn’t steal your waterpipe, did they? Or the Bon-Sour coins?”

Jonathan smiled weakly. “No, Lewis, I’m afraid it’s not as simple as all that. Someone was looking for something, and I think they found it. Come on in.”

Lewis expected to find the house in wild disorder, with chairs and lamps smashed and things all scattered around. But when he got to the front hall, he found everything in order. At least, that’s the way it looked. Jonathan tapped him on the shoulder and pointed toward the ceiling. “Look up there,” he said.

Lewis gasped. The brass cup that covered the place where the ceiling fixture met the ceiling had been pried loose. It dangled halfway down the chain.

“It’s like that all over the house,” said Jonathan. “Every wall sconce and ceiling light has had its cup jimmied loose. A few chairs were overturned and a couple of vases were broken, just to make it look like this was an ordinary break-in. But we ought not to be fooled. Whoever it was had a general idea of where to look. Come here.”

Jonathan led Lewis and Mrs. Zimmermann into the front parlor, a more or less unused room full of fussy little red-velvet chairs and settees. On the wall over the parlor organ was a brass light fixture like all the others
in the house: a tarnished cup-shaped thing fitted to the wall, and a crooked little brass tube sticking out of it. On the end of the tube was a socket and a bulb with a frilly pink shade.

“I thought you said the cup was loose,” said Lewis.

“It was. It is,” said Jonathan. “In this case Whosis tried to fit it back just the way it was, which was kind of stupid, seeing as how all the other cups in the house are at half mast. Some of them are slid all the way down to the socket. But I think Whosis was trying, in a clumsy way, to keep me from looking too closely at this one.”

Jonathan pulled over a chair and stood up on it. He slid the cup out and peered inside. Then he got down and went to the cellarway for a flashlight. When he got back, Mrs. Zimmermann and Lewis had taken turns looking into the cup. They both were puzzled. What they saw inside the dusty bowl was a greenish rust blot. It reminded Lewis of the stuff in the cracks and crevices of the copper Roman coins they played poker with. It was the mark of something that had lain concealed inside the old brass cup for a long, long time. The mark looked like this:

“It looks like a clock key,” said Lewis in a weak, throaty voice.

“Yes, it does,” said Jonathan. He played the light around inside the cup and squinted hard.

“Uncle Jonathan, what does all this mean?” Lewis sounded as if he were about to burst into tears.

“I wish I knew,” said Jonathan. “I really wish I knew.”

It rained a lot in New Zebedee that November. Cold rain fell steadily through each night and left the sidewalk a glaze of ice in the morning. Lewis sat in his window seat and watched the rain peck at the chipped slates of the front porch roof. He felt sick inside. It was an empty, black feeling in the pit of his stomach. He was eaten up with guilt and remorse because he knew what he had done—or thought he knew, at any rate. He had let Mrs. Izard out of her tomb, and now she had stolen the key. The key that wound up the magic clock ticking in the walls of Jonathan’s house, ticking away morning, noon, and night; sometimes loud, sometimes soft, but always there.

What was going to happen? How could anyone stop her? Had she used the key? What would happen if she did? Lewis had no answers for any of these questions.

It might have helped if he had been able to talk the whole matter over with Jonathan, but then he would have had to admit what he had done. And Lewis was afraid to do that. It was not that Uncle Jonathan was such a hard man to talk to. He was easier to talk to than most people Lewis knew, easier by far than Lewis’s own father had ever been. Then, why was Lewis afraid?

Well, he was afraid because he was afraid. Maybe it was because his mother had once threatened to send him to the Detention Home when he was bad. The Detention Home was a big white house on the outskirts of the town that Lewis and his parents had lived in. It stood on a high hill and had bars and chicken wire over the windows. Bad boys and girls were sent there—at least, that’s what everyone said. Lewis had never known anyone who had actually gotten sent there. Of course, Lewis’s mother would never have sent him there for being bad. Not really. But Lewis didn’t know that, and now when Lewis thought of telling his uncle about Halloween night, he thought of the Detention Home, and he was afraid. It wasn’t a reasonable fear, considering the kind of man Jonathan was. But Lewis had not known him for very long, and anyway, people are not always so reasonable.

And there was another thing that added to Lewis’s despair. He had lost Tarby. He had lost him in spite of
all his sneaking and planning—or maybe he had lost him because of it. It was one thing to say that you could raise the dead, but when you did it—well, ordinary people have never cared much for the company of wizards. Tarby was afraid of Lewis now, or else he was enjoying himself with the other boys, the boys who could hit home runs and catch fly balls. Whichever way it was, Lewis had not seen Tarby since Halloween night.

The month wore on, the rain kept falling, and nothing mysterious or evil happened. Until one day—the third of December it was—when the Hanchetts moved out.

The Hanchetts lived across the street from Uncle Jonathan in a boxy, dark-brown house with tiny windows, the kind of windows that have little diamond-shaped panes and swing out instead of sliding up and down. The Hanchetts were a friendly, middle-aged couple, and they liked Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann a lot, but one morning they were gone. A couple of days after their disappearance a truck came and a couple of movers in gray uniforms packed all the Hanchetts’ furniture into it, and drove off. A real-estate man came around and hung a big red and white sign on their front door. The sign said:

Bishop Barlow was not a real bishop. Bishop was just his first name. Lewis knew the man: he was a fat loudmouth who wore sunglasses all the time, even on rainy days. He smoked cheap smelly cigars and wore sports coats that looked like awnings.

Jonathan seemed really upset at the departure of the Hanchetts. He phoned their son, who was a lawyer in Osee Five Hills, and he found out that the Hanchetts were living with him. The frightened couple would not talk to Jonathan over the phone, and they seemed to blame him for whatever had made them leave. The son did not seem to know much about the matter. He muttered something about ghosts and “messing around with magic” and hung up.

One day Lewis was walking home from school when he saw a small moving van pull up in front of the empty Hanchett house. The big black letters on the side of the van said:
TERMINUS MOVERS INC
. Lewis was about to cross the street to watch the men unload the truck when he realized, with a shock, that he knew the driver. It was Hammerhandle.

All the children in New Zebedee knew Hammerhandle and, if they were smart, they were afraid of him. He was a mean old hobo who lived in a tar-paper shack down by the railroad tracks, and he had a reputation for being able to foretell the future. Lewis had stood once on the outskirts of a crowd of kids gathered about the door of Hammerhandle’s shack on a hot summer
day. He remembered seeing Hammerhandle seated in the doorway on a broken kitchen chair. He was telling stories about the World’s Last Night, which, if you believed him, was not far off. Behind Hammerhandle, in the disorder and darkness of the old shack, stood ranks of smooth yellow poles: ax handles, hoe handles, hammer handles. He made them and sold them. That was how he got his name.

Lewis stood there wondering what he was doing driving a moving van. Hammerhandle slammed the door on the driver’s side and walked across the street. He looked around him quickly and then grabbed Lewis by the collar. His bristly face was close to Lewis’s now, and his breath smelled of whiskey and tobacco.

“What the hell you starin’ at, kid?”

“N-nothing. I-I just like to watch people moving in.” It was getting dark, and Lewis wondered if anyone could see him. If he yelled, would Jonathan or Mrs. Zimmermann come?

Hammerhandle let go of Lewis’s collar. “Look, kid,” he said in his harsh scraping voice, “you just keep yer nose on your side of the fence, okay? An’ that goes f’ya fat uncle too. Just don’t bother me, okay?” He glared at Lewis, turned, and went back to the truck.

Lewis stood there trembling for a few moments. He was sweating all over. Then he turned and ran in through the open gate, up the walk, and into the house.

“Uncle Jonathan! Uncle Jonathan!” he shouted. He
yanked open the doors of the study and looked. No Jonathan. He shouted into the front parlor and into the kitchen and up the stairwell. At last Uncle Jonathan appeared at the top of the stairs. He was wearing his bathrobe, which was made in the shape of the robes professors wear at graduation ceremonies, black with red stripes on the sleeves. In one hand he held a dripping, long-handled scrub brush. In the other, he held the book he had been reading in the tub.

“Yes, Lewis? What is it?” He sounded cross at first, but when he saw the state that Lewis was in, he dropped the book and the brush and clumped down the stairs to throw his arms around the boy. It was a damp embrace, but it felt good to Lewis.

“Lewis, my boy!” said Jonathan, kneeling in front of him. “What in the name of heaven is wrong? You look awful!”

Lewis, stuttering and breaking down several times, told Jonathan what had happened. When he was through, he watched Jonathan’s expression change. There was a hard, angry look on his face now, but his anger was not directed at Lewis. He stood up, knotted his bathrobe tighter about him, and stalked to the front door. For a minute Lewis thought that Jonathan was going out to challenge Hammerhandle right then and there. But he merely opened the front door and stared across at the Hanchett house. The workmen were just hitching up the
tail gate and getting ready to drive off. Apparently there hadn’t been much to unload.

With folded arms Jonathan watched the truck drive away. “I might have known he’d be in on it,” he said bitterly. Lewis stared up at his uncle. He didn’t have the faintest idea of what was going on, and for some reason he was afraid to ask what Jonathan meant.

That evening at supper, Lewis asked Jonathan why Hammerhandle had acted so mean. Jonathan threw down his fork and said angrily, “Because he’s mean, that’s why! Do you have to have explanations? Just stay away from him and you’ll be all right. And stay away . . . stay away . . . oh, I don’t know what I mean!” He got up and stomped out of the room. Lewis heard the study doors slam.