The House with a Clock In Its Walls (17 page)

Suddenly the ball hiccuped. Jonathan glanced quickly down at it, and saw that the little window was filled with bubbles.

“Oh, good grief! Look at this, Florence. Now it thinks it’s a Bendix washer. Shall we get out the ouija board?”

“Wait a minute,” said Mrs. Zimmermann. “It looks like the bubbles are starting to break up.”

Lewis, Jonathan, and Mrs. Zimmermann watched breathlessly as the little bubbles popped, one by one. Pop, pop, pop. It seemed to take forever. Meanwhile, the clock ticked.

At last the window was clear. Now the sign said:
COAL BIN
.

“Oh, great!” said Jonathan. “Just great! Now it says coal
bin!
That’s a big improvement.”

“Don’t you have a coal bin?” asked Mrs. Zimmermann.

Jonathan gave her an irritated look. “Of course not, Florence! You ought to know that. Remember, I switched to oil when I bought this . . . oh!
Oh!
” Jonathan clapped his hands over his mouth. “Oh! I think I see! Come on, everybody. We’re going to the basement.”

Lewis and Mrs. Zimmermann followed Jonathan to the kitchen. He opened the cellar door, and jumped back as if he had been hit in the face. The ticking down there was thunderous.

Jonathan looked at Mrs. Zimmermann. His face was haggard, and his eyes were wide with fear. “Got your umbrella, Florence? Good. Then down we go.”

Over in a black sooty corner of the basement was the old coal bin. Two of its walls were formed by gray slats nailed to worm-eaten wooden pillars. The other two
walls were whitewashed stone, and up against one of these lay a high rampart of coal. It had been there when Jonathan moved in, and he had always meant to have it hauled away.

“I certainly get the idiot prize,” he said quietly. Jonathan took a long backswing and started shoveling. Lewis and Mrs. Zimmermann helped with their hands. Before long they had cleared all the coal away from the wall.

“Doesn’t
look
like there’s any secret panel,” said Jonathan, feeling around for springs and hidden levers. “But then, if it looked that way, it wouldn’t be secret, would it? Hmm . . . no . . . nothing. I’m afraid we’ll have to use the pick. Stand back, everybody.”

Lewis and Mrs. Zimmermann got well away from the wall, and Jonathan started swinging. By now the ticking was hurried and staccato, and the blows of the pick were like heavy beats in the rhythm. Every stroke sent whitish-gray chips flying in all directions. But it was an easier job than anyone would have thought. The wall began to shake and crumble at Jonathan’s first stroke, and the whole solid-looking mass was soon lying in pieces on the hard dirt floor of the cellar. For it had not been a real wall, but merely a plaster mock-up. What lay behind was a weathered, old wooden door with a black china knob. There was a lock plate, but there was no keyhole.

Jonathan leaned his pick up against a pillar and stepped back.

“Don’t dawdle!” said Mrs. Zimmermann nervously. “Get that door open! I have a feeling that we are on the very edge of disaster.”

Jonathan stood there rubbing his chin. Exasperated, Mrs. Zimmermann grabbed his arm and started to shake it. “Hurry, Jonathan! What on earth are you waiting for?”

“I’m trying to think of door-opening spells. Know any?”

“Why not pull at it?” said Lewis. “It may not be locked.”

Jonathan was about to say that he had never heard of anything so stupid in all his life. But he never got a chance to say this. The door opened all by itself.

Jonathan, Mrs. Zimmermann, and Lewis stared. They were looking down a long corridor—more like a mine shaft it was, really, with square wooden arches diminishing into the dark distance. Something vague and gray was moving at the far end of the tunnel. It seemed to be getting closer.

“Look!” cried Lewis.

He was not pointing at the gray shape. He was pointing at something that was sitting on the floor of the tunnel, right there at their feet.

A clock. A plain, old, Waterbury eight-day clock.

Its pendulum oscillated madly behind a little glass door, and it was making a sound like a Geiger counter gone crazy.

“I’m so glad you’ve done my work for me,” said a voice behind them. Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann spun around and froze. Really froze. They could not move their hands or feet or heads. They couldn’t even wiggle their ears. They were completely paralyzed, though they could still see and hear.

There stood Mrs. Izard. Or Mrs. O’Meagher, or whatever name you choose. She was wearing a black-velvet cloak with an ivory brooch at her neck. The brooch bore a raised Greek omega. In her right hand was a plain black rod, and in her left she carried what looked like a severed hand with a lighted candle growing out of its back. Concentric rings of yellow light spread outward from the hand, and through them Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann could see Mrs. Izard’s glasses, which looked like tablets of gray slate.

“I do hope you haven’t tired yourselves, my dears,” said the old woman in a nasty, sneering voice. “I do hope you haven’t. But if you have, it’s all been in a good cause. I couldn’t have done anything without you. Not a thing. Because, you see, since I was set free, I’ve been able to pass through walls and doors, but these poor old hands of mine just haven’t been able to wield tools. I even had to get Mr. Hammerhandle to find this for me.”

She let go of her wand—it stood up by itself—and reached deep into the folds of her cloak. What she brought out was a greenish copper key. She held it up and turned it around. “Pretty, isn’t it? I told him where
to look, but he had to do the work. He’s really been very good at following directions, and he made it quite easy for me to set up light housekeeping across the street. But, alas, that is all over and done with. You played right into my hands as I thought you would. Did you
really
think you had defeated me, you foolish old biddy? You merely hastened the Day of Judgment. And it is at hand. My Lord and master is coming to meet us. And when he arrives it will be a very different world.
Very
different, I assure you. Let me see . . . you two will change first, I think.” She pointed at Jonathan and then at Mrs. Zimmermann. “Yes, that’s the way it will be. You two first, so Sonny here can watch. You’ll want to watch, won’t you, Lewis?”

Lewis stood with his back to Mrs. Izard. He was as still as a clothes-store dummy.

“Turn around, Lewis,” said Mrs. Izard, in that nasty-sweet voice she had used from the beginning. “Don’t you want to kiss your old Auntie Izard?”

He didn’t move.

“Come now, Lewis. I command you. Don’t be foolish. It’ll just make things worse for you in the end. Turn around, I say!”

Lewis’s body grew tense, and then he rushed forward into the tunnel. He picked up the clock, which had just begun to make that whirring sound clocks make when they are going to strike the hour.

“Stop, boy!” shouted Mrs. Izard. “Stop, you filthy fat
pig! I’ll turn you into something that your own mother wouldn’t—don’t you dare! Don’t. . . .”

Lewis threw the clock down. There was a sproinging of uncoiled springs and a clatter of cogs and a splintering of wood and a tinkle of broken glass. He reached down into the wreckage and ripped the pendulum free of the works, which were still buzzing furiously. At that moment, a figure which stood only a few yards from Lewis, the figure of an elderly man in a rotting black Sunday suit, vanished. Then there was an awful shriek, a loud, inhuman sound like a siren at the top of its wail. It filled the air and seemed to turn it red. Lewis covered his ears, but the sound was inside his head and in the marrow of his bones. And then it was gone.

He turned around. There stood Jonathan, smiling and trying to blink away the tears in his eyes. There stood Mrs. Zimmermann, smiling even more broadly. And behind them, on the cellar floor, under a swaying bare bulb, lay a crumpled pile of black cloth. A yellow skull was staring up out of it, staring up in gap-jawed amazement. A few wisps of gray hair clung to the crevices in the smooth dome, and over the empty eyeholes a pair of rimless glasses was perched. The glasses were shattered.

Three days after the destruction of Mrs. Izard and her magic clock, Jonathan, Mrs. Zimmermann, and Lewis were sitting around a bonfire in the driveway of the house at 100 High Street. It was a chilly night, and the stars were cold overhead, but the fire burned a warm, bright orange. Mrs. Zimmermann had a steaming earthenware pot of cocoa by her side. She kept it close to the fire so it would stay warm. Jonathan and Lewis stared at the fire and sipped cocoa from their mugs. It tasted very good.

There was a pile of Isaac Izard’s dusty papers in Jonathan’s lap. Every now and then he would pick one up and throw it into the fire. Lewis watched each sheet as
the fire licked at its corners, then blackened it, then wadded it into a fluffy ball of ashes.

After a while Lewis said, “Uncle Jonathan?”

“Yes, Lewis?”

“Was Mrs. Izard really trying to make the world end?”

“As far as I can tell, she was,” said Jonathan. “And she would have done it, too, if you hadn’t fixed her clock for her. But tell me, Lewis. Why didn’t you turn around when we did?”

Lewis smiled broadly. “I looked at the glass door on the clock and I saw the reflection of what Mrs. Izard was holding, and I knew it was a Hand of Glory. John L. Stoddard tells you all about Hands of Glory.”

“I’m glad he does,” said Mrs. Zimmermann. “One look at that hand and you’d have been as numb as we were. But still, it took a great deal of courage for you to rush in and smash the clock. After all, you didn’t know what would happen to you when you did that.”

Lewis was silent. He had always thought that courage had something to do with riding your bicycle through bonfires and hanging by your knees from the limbs of trees.

Mrs. Zimmermann picked up a plate of chocolate-chip cookies and passed them around. Jonathan took two and Lewis took several. There was another silence while everyone munched and sipped for a while. Jonathan threw more papers into the fire.

Lewis squirmed around and stared at the dark house across the street.

“Do you think Mrs. Izard could ever . . . come back?” he said in a faltering voice.

“No,” said Jonathan, shaking his head gravely. “No, Lewis, I think that when you smashed the clock in the walls, you destroyed any power she might have in this world. Just to be on the safe side, though, I put what was left of her back in the mausoleum and locked the doors with a nice shiny new lock. A lock that has had spells said over it. That ought to hold her for a while.”

“What about the Hanchetts?” said Lewis. “I mean, are they going to come back to live in their house?”

Jonathan paused for a minute before speaking. He clicked the paper clips on his watch chain. “I think they are,” he said at last. “But certain rites will have to be performed before they return. When an unclean spirit inhabits a house, it leaves behind a bad aura.”

“Speaking of bad auras and unclean spirits,” said Mrs. Zimmermann, “do you have any idea of what happened to Hammerhandle?”

Jonathan’s face grew grim for an instant. He had made a few guesses about Hammerhandle’s fate, but he had kept them to himself. For one thing, he knew that the blood of a hanged man went into the making of a Hand of Glory.