The House with a Clock In Its Walls (12 page)

Mrs. Zimmermann reached across the table and laid her hand gently on Lewis’s. “Don’t worry, Lewis,” she said. “He’s not angry at you. But he does have a lot on his mind these days, and he hasn’t been getting much sleep. Come on over to my house and we’ll have a game of chess.”

“Okay.” Lewis was grateful for the suggestion.

They played chess till ten o’clock at night and, since Lewis won most of the games, he was in a happy mood when he went home. Upstairs he saw a line of light under the door of Jonathan’s bedroom. He decided not to disturb him. When he had gotten ready for bed, Lewis went to his window seat, sat down, and pulled back the heavy curtain.

It was a bright, cold, starry night. The water tower at the top of the hill glimmered in the moonlight, and the roofs of the houses were dark pointed shadows. There were lights on in the houses that stood on either side of the Hanchett house and, in one window, Lewis saw the gray aquarium-glow of one of those new television sets. Jonathan hadn’t gotten one yet. The Hanchett house seemed to lie in deep shadow, except for faint patches of moonlight on the roof. By the light of a street lamp, Lewis could see that there was a car parked in the driveway.

He was about to close the curtain and go to bed when the porch light of the Hanchett house came on. The two frosted panes of the front door glowed yellow. Then one of the panels of the door moved inward. Someone stepped out onto the front stoop. Lewis watched as whoever-it-was stood there, just stood there, taking in the frosty air of the December night. He thought he caught the faint glitter of spectacles, but he couldn’t be sure at this distance.

After a little while, the dark figure went inside and pushed the door shut. The hall light went out. Lewis sat there for a while thinking, then he lowered the curtain and went to bed.

The next day Jonathan was helping Lewis rummage in the front hall closet for his ice skates. Lewis had weak ankles, and he was terrified of falling down on the ice, but he had decided to try to learn to skate. If he got good enough he might be able to worm his way back into Tarby’s favor. He had never seen Tarby ice skate, but he was sure that the team’s greatest home-run hitter was also the champion ice skater of New Zebedee. He probably could sign his name across the ice of Durgy’s Pond.

So Lewis and Jonathan threw warped badminton rackets, raccoon coats, galoshes, and picnic baskets into the hall. Finally Jonathan came up with what looked like
a short aluminum ski for a midget. It was a beginner’s skate, with two little ridges for runners.

“This it?”

“That’s one of them. Thanks a lot, Uncle Jonathan. Now all we need is the other.”

As they went on searching Lewis said, in what he thought was a casual way, “Who’s living in the old Hanchett house?”

Jonathan stood up suddenly in the closet and banged his head on a shelf. When he had stopped rubbing his head and wincing, he looked down at Lewis and said, rather sharply, “Why do you want to know?”

“I just wanted to know,” said Lewis shyly. Once again, he wondered what his uncle was angry about.

Jonathan stepped out of the closet with the other skate. He dropped it into a pile of clothes.

“So you just wanted to know, eh? Well, Lewis, there are some things it would be better for you
not
to know. So if you’ll take my advice, you’ll just stop poking around where you’re not wanted. There’s your other skate and . . . and good day. I have work to do in the study, and I’ve already wasted enough time answering your foolish questions.”

Jonathan got up abruptly and stalked off to the study. He had slid back the doors with a loud clatter when he paused and went back to the closet, where Lewis was still kneeling with tears in his eyes.

“Please forgive me, Lewis,” said Jonathan in a tired
voice. “I’ve been feeling really rotten lately. Too many cigars, I guess. As for the house across the street, I hear that it’s been rented to an old lady named Mrs. O’Meagher. She acts kind of crabby—or so I’m told. I really haven’t met her, and . . . and I just didn’t want anything bad to happen to you.” Jonathan smiled nervously and patted Lewis on the shoulder. Then he got up and walked to the door of the study. Again he stopped.

“Don’t go over there,” he said quickly, and then he stepped inside and slammed the double doors, hard.

Lewis felt crisscrossing lines of mystery and fear and tension hemming him in on all sides. He had never seen his uncle acting like this. And he wondered, more than ever, about the new neighbor across the street.

*   *   *

One night during the week before Christmas, after a heavy snow had fallen, Lewis was awakened by the sound of the doorbell ringing.
Brr-rr-rring! Brr-rr-rring!
It was not an electric bell, but an old, tired mechanical bell set in the middle of the front door. Someone was turning the flat metal key, grinding the stiff old chimes around.
Brr-rr-rring!

Lewis sat up and looked at his bedside clock. The two luminous hands were straight up. Midnight! Who could it be at this hour? Maybe Uncle Jonathan would go down and answer it. Lewis felt cold just thinking of the drafty front hall. He bundled his quilt about him and shivered.

The bell rang again. It sounded like a whiny person
insisting on some stupid point in an argument. No sound from Jonathan’s room. No waking-up sounds, that is. Lewis could hear his uncle’s loud, steady snoring even though there was a thick wall between their rooms. Jonathan could sleep through an artillery bombardment.

Lewis got up. He threw back the covers, slipped on his bathrobe, and found his slippers. Quietly, he padded down the hall and then down the dark staircase. At the entrance to the front hall he stopped. There was a streetlight burning just outside the front gate, and it threw a bent black shadow against the pleated curtain on the front door. Lewis stood still and watched the shadow. It didn’t move. Slowly he began to walk forward. When he reached the door, he closed his fingers around the cold knob and turned it. The door rattled open, and a freezing wind blew in over his bare ankles. There stood his Aunt Mattie, who was dead.

Lewis stepped back as the old woman, her head cocked to one side as it always had been, tottered across the floor toward him. A shaking blue light filled the air around her, and Lewis, his eyes wide open in this nightmare, saw Aunt Mattie as she had been the last time he had seen her alive. Her dress was black and wrinkled, she wore heavy shoes with thick heels, and she tapped her bunchy, black umbrella as she went. Lewis even thought he smelled kerosene—her house, her furniture, and her clothing had always reeked of it. The white fungus blotch that was her face shook and glowed as she said, in a
horribly familiar voice, “Well, Lewis? Aren’t you glad to see me?”

Lewis fainted. When he awoke, he was lying on his back in the cold hallway. The shaking blue light was gone. So was Aunt Mattie, though the front door was open. Skitters of snow blew in over the worn threshold, and the street lamp burned quiet and cold across the street. Had it all been a sleepwalker’s dream?

Lewis didn’t think so. He had never been a sleepwalker before. He stood there thinking for a minute, and then, for some reason, he shuffled out onto the front porch and started to pick his way down the snow-covered steps. His feet were so cold that they stung, but he kept going until he was halfway down the walk. Then he turned and looked at the house. He gasped. There were strange lights playing over the blank windows and the rough sandstone walls. They wouldn’t have been strange lights at midday in the summer, but on a December night they were eerie. For they were leaf-lights, the shifting circles and crescents cast by sunlight falling through leaves.

Lewis stood and stared for several minutes. Then the lights faded, and he was alone in the dark, snow-covered yard. The chestnut tree dropped a light dusting of snow on his head, shaking him out of his trance. His feet were numb and tingling, and he felt, for the first time, the cold wind whipping through his thin pajamas and his half-open cotton bathrobe. Shuddering, Lewis stumbled back up the walk.

When he got to his room, he sat down on the edge of his bed. He knew he wasn’t going back to sleep. There were the makings of a fire in his fireplace, and he knew where the cocoa was kept. A few minutes later Lewis was sitting by a warm, cheerful fire that cast cozy shadows over the black marble of his own personal fireplace. He sipped steaming cocoa from a heavy earthenware mug and tried to think pleasant thoughts. None came to him. After an hour of sitting and sipping and brooding, he plugged in the floor lamp, got John L. Stoddard’s second lecture on China out of the bookcase, and sat reading by the fire until dawn.

The next morning at breakfast, Lewis saw that Jonathan was red-eyed and nervous acting. Had his sleep been disturbed too? Jonathan had not discussed the break-in or the car chase or the Izard tomb with Lewis, and Lewis was not about to bring up any of these subjects. But he knew that something was bothering Jonathan, and he also knew that, ever since the night of the break-in, Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann had been holding midnight conferences. He had heard their voices coming up through the hot-air register, although he had never been able to make out what was being said. He had thought a couple of times of hiding in the secret passageway, but he was afraid of getting caught. A passage that is entered through a china cupboard full of rattling dishes is not as secret as one might wish. And if some secret spring lock snapped shut on him, he would need to scream his
way out, and then there would have to be explanations.

Lewis almost wished that something like that would happen, because he was sick of his secret. He was sick of it because it kept him away from Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann. He always felt that they were watching him, waiting for him to break down and tell them everything. How much did they know?

*   *   *

Christmas at
100
High Street was both good and bad that year. There was a big tree in the study and the glass balls on it were magic. Sometimes they reflected the room, and sometimes they showed you ancient ruins on unknown planets. Jonathan gave Lewis several magic toys, including a large pink Easter egg—or Christmas egg, if you wish—that was covered with sparkly stuff and what looked like icing, although it couldn’t be eaten. When Lewis looked into the egg, he could see any battle in history. Not the battle as it really was, but as he wanted it to be. Though he didn’t know it, the egg, like the balls on the tree, was capable of showing him scenes on other planets. But it was not until he was a grown-up man, working as an astronomer at Mount Palomar, that he was able to discover that property of the magic egg.

Jonathan did a lot of other things that Christmas. He put candles in all the windows of the house—electric candles, not real ones, since he liked the electric kind better—and he put strong lamps behind the stained-glass windows, so that they threw marvelous patterns of red
and blue and gold and purple on the dark, sparkling snow outside. He invented the Fuse Box Dwarf, a little man who popped out at you from behind the paint cans in the cellarway and screamed, “Dreeb! Dreeb! I am the Fuse Box Dwarf!” Lewis was not scared by the little man, and he felt that those who scream, “Dreeb!” are more to be pitied than censured.

Needless to say, Jonathan put on a very good show with the coat rack mirror, though it had the habit of showing the ruins at Chichen-Itza over and over again. Somehow the mirror managed to pick up radio station WGN on its bevelled edges, so that when Lewis went out the door in the morning, he heard the Dow-Jones averages and livestock reports.

Lewis tried to enjoy himself that Christmas, but it was hard. He kept thinking that Jonathan’s magic show was meant to cover up what was happening to the house. What was happening was hard to figure out, but it was strange and terrifying. After the night when Lewis saw—or dreamt he saw—Aunt Mattie, the house seemed stranger than it ever had. Sometimes the air in certain rooms seemed to shimmer as if the house was going to disappear in the next second. Sometimes the stained-glass windows showed dark and terrifying scenes, and sometimes Lewis saw in the corners of rooms those awful sights that nervous people always imagine are lurking just outside the borders of their eyesight. Walking from room to room, even in broad daylight, Lewis forgot
what day it was, what he was after, and at times almost forgot who he was. At night he had dreams of wandering through the house back in the 1890’s, when everything was varnished and new. Once or twice Lewis woke from such dreams to see lights flickering on his bedroom wall. They were not leaf-lights this time, but rags and patches of orange light, the kind that you see in the corners of an old house at sunset.