The House with a Clock In Its Walls (4 page)

Lewis had discovered that the strange incident on his first night in New Zebedee was part of a regular pattern. Every night after twelve, Jonathan was out there searching. What he was searching for, Lewis couldn’t say.

Again and again, as on that first night, he had heard the floor boards creak outside his door. Again and again he had heard Jonathan tiptoeing stealthily down the hall, entering rooms, closing doors. He heard him overhead on
the third floor, where Jonathan hardly ever went during the day. Then he would be back downstairs, poking around, stumbling into furniture. Maybe he was scared of burglars. Maybe so, but then why did he pound on the wall? Burglars seldom got into walls.

Lewis had to find out what was going on. And so, one night a little after twelve, Lewis lowered himself silently from his bed to the cold floor boards. As stealthily as he could, he tiptoed across the room, but the warped boards complained under his feet. By the time he got to the door, he was thoroughly shaken. He wiped his hands on his robe several times and turned the knob. He took a deep breath, let it out, and stepped out into the dark hallway.

Lewis clamped his hand over his mouth. He had stepped on the protruding head of a nail. It didn’t really hurt much, but Lewis was scared of tetanus. When his panic had died down, he took another step. He began to edge his way down the hall.

But Lewis was no better at stealthy creeping than you might think and, by the time he had bumped his head against a heavy, gilt picture frame for about the third time, Jonathan called to him from one of the distant rooms.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Lewis! Stop playing Sherlock Holmes! You make a better Dr. Watson. Come on and join me. I’m in the bedroom with the green fireplace.”

Lewis was glad that his red face didn’t shine in the dark. Well, at least Jonathan wasn’t mad.

Lewis picked his way down the hall until he found an open door. There was Jonathan, standing in the dark with a flashlight in his hand. He was playing the light over the mantel clock, a boxy black affair with gold handles on the sides, like a coffin.

“Evening, Lewis. Or morning, as the case may be. Would you care to join me on my rounds?”

Jonathan’s voice sounded tight and nervous. Lewis hesitated a moment and then he plunged in. “Uncle Jonathan, what are you doing?”

“Stopping the clocks. During the day it’s nice to have clocks ticking all over the house, but at night it keeps me awake. You know how it is, Lewis, with faucets and . . . and the like.”

Still chattering nervously, Jonathan turned the clock around, reached into the back of it, and halted the stubby pendulum. Then he motioned for Lewis to follow him and, waving the flashlight a little too cheerfully, walked on to the next room. Lewis followed, but he was puzzled. “Uncle Jonathan, why don’t you turn the room lights on?”

His uncle was silent for a minute. Then he said, in that same nervous voice, “Oh, well, you know how it is, Lewis. If I were to go from one room to another snapping lights on and off, what would the neighbors think? And what about the electric bill? Do you know that you get billed for an hour’s worth of electricity every time you snap the lights on and off?”

This explanation did not sound convincing to Lewis. In the first place, Uncle Jonathan had never before given any sign that he cared what the neighbors thought about anything he did. If he wanted to sit in the glider under the chestnut tree and play a saxophone at 3
A.M.
he was likely to do just that. In the second place, Jonathan had more than once left the floor lamp in his study burning all night. He was a careless man, and not the sort who worried about big electric bills. It was true that Lewis had only known his uncle for three weeks, but he felt that he already had a pretty good idea of what Jonathan was like.

On the other hand, he couldn’t very well say, “Uncle Jonathan, you’re lying through your teeth!” so he silently followed his uncle to the next room, the second-best upstairs bathroom. It had a fireplace too—a white tile one—and there was a small, white plastic clock buzzing on the mantel. Jonathan unplugged it without saying anything and went on to the next room, where he stopped a cherrywood clock with a pendulum that used three columns of mercury as a weight. And then on to the next room.

The last clock to be silenced was the grandfather clock in the study. Jonathan’s study had a very high ceiling, and all the walls were lined with books. There was a fat, slouchy, brown-leather easy chair that hissed when you sat down in it and, of course, there was a fireplace, and
there was still a fire burning in it. Over in a corner by the sliding doors that opened into the dining room stood the tall gloomy clock. The brass disk on the pendulum flashed dimly in the light of the dying fire. Jonathan reached inside and grabbed the long black rod. The clock stopped.

Now that their strange tour was over, Jonathan lapsed into silence. He seemed to be thinking. He walked over to the fireplace, stirred up the fire, and put on another log. He threw himself down into the leather chair and waved his arm at the green easy chair on the other side of the fireplace.

“Have a seat, Lewis. I’d like to have a talk with you.”

Lewis wondered if he was going to get bawled out for sneaking up on his uncle. It didn’t seem likely. Jonathan looked and sounded friendly, though his voice was still a little edgy. Lewis sat down and watched as Jonathan lit up his hookah. Lewis always liked to watch him do this. The hookah was shaped like a Spanish galleon, and the crow’s nest on the mainmast was the bowl. The body of the ship was full of water for cooling the smoke, and up on the bow stood the tiny ceramic figure of a boatswain with his pipe to his lips. A long hose was plugged into the ship’s stern, and there was a black rubber mouthpiece on the end. When you blew into the hose, the burning tobacco in the crow’s nest sent up a long column of smoke, and the boatswain went
fweee!
on his little pipe. Sometimes, when Jonathan made a mistake and filled the boat too full of water, the boatswain went
blp!
and blew bubbles.

When Jonathan had the pipe going good, he drew in a big mouthful of smoke, let it out slowly, and said, “Lewis, I think it would be better for you to be scared than it would be for you to think of your uncle as a crabby old lunatic.”

“I don’t think you’re crabby,” said Lewis.

Jonathan laughed. “But you
do
think I’m off my rocker. Well, after tonight I wouldn’t blame you.”

Lewis blushed. “No, Uncle Jonathan! I never meant that! You know I don’t think . . . ”

Jonathan smiled. “Yes, of course, I know. But all the same, I think it would be better if you knew something about this clock business. I can’t tell you all about it because I don’t know all about it. In fact, there are times when I think I don’t know much about it at all. But I’ll tell you what I know.”

He crossed his legs, sat back, and puffed some more at his pipe. Lewis sat forward in the big green chair. He kept clasping and unclasping his hands and he stared hard at Jonathan. After a brief dramatic pause and a particularly long drag at the galleon-hookah, Jonathan began.

“I haven’t lived in this house always, Lewis. In fact, I only moved here five years ago. I used to live down on Spruce Street, near the waterworks. But when the old
owner died, and the place was put up for sale cheap, and it meant a chance to live next door to my best friend, Mrs. Zimmermann—”

“Who was the old owner?” asked Lewis, interrupting.

“I was going to get around to that. His name was Isaac Izard. Initials I.I., like a Roman numeral II. You’ll find his double
I
carved or painted or stamped on all sorts of things all over this house: the wainscoting, the floorboards, the insides of cupboards, the fuse box, the mantelpieces—everywhere. You’ll even find a Roman numeral II worked into the tracery on the wallpaper in the upstairs front hallway.” Jonathan paused for a second and looked thoughtful. “Have to get that paper replaced some day . . . oh, well, back to what I was saying. Old Isaac Izard—his name is odd, isn’t it? Mrs. Zimmermann thinks that it comes from
izzard
, which in some parts of England is the word for
zed
, which is the word the English use to identify the letter Z. I go along with Mrs. Zimmermann’s theory because I can’t think of a better one. And besides, she is a Z-lady, so she should know. But, as I was saying, and I will get around to saying something
sometime
, Lewis . . . ” He puffed on his pipe some more and wriggled around in the chair to get comfortable. “As I was saying, old Isaac was a warlock.”

“What’s that?”

Uncle Jonathan looked very serious. “It’s the word for a male witch.”

Lewis shuddered. Then, out of nowhere, a strange
thought came to him. “Are you one too?” he asked in a tiny, frightened voice.

Jonathan looked at him with a strange smile. “Would it scare you if I said I was?”

“No. I like you an awful lot and you can be a warlock if you want to be one, I guess. You wouldn’t be a bad one, I know.”

“That depends on how you mean ‘bad,’ ” said Jonathan, chuckling. “If you mean that I wouldn’t be an evil one, you’re right. If you mean that I wouldn’t be too bad at wizarding . . . well, I don’t know. I’m pretty much of a parlor magician, though I have a few tricks that go beyond rabbits and playing cards.”

“Like stained-glass windows and coat racks?” said Lewis, grinning.

“Yes. Exactly like those. And just to make you
perfectly
secure, let me inform you that Mrs. Zimmermann is also a wizard, though in her case the term should be witch.”

“Couldn’t you find a better name?” asked Lewis timidly.

“Well, she prefers ‘maga’ or ‘enchantrix,’ but I can’t use such words without breaking up, so she’s old witch Florence to me. She’s really a much more serious wizard than I am. Got her D.Mag.A.—that’s
Doctor Magicorum Artium
—from the University of Gottingen in Germany in 1922. I just have an A.B. from Michigan Agricultural College.”

“What in?” asked Lewis, as if he were interviewing Jonathan for a job. Actually he was interested in Jonathan’s college work. Both of Lewis’s parents had gone to college, and they always talked a lot about their college work.

“What in?” said Jonathan, blushing. “What in? Why, Agricultural Science. Animal Husbandry and all that. I was going to be a farmer till my grandpa died and left me a pile of money. But back to Isaac Izard. You’re still interested, aren’t you?”

“Oh, yes! Of course! Please tell me. I want to know.”

“Isaac, as I say, was a wizard. He fooled around with black magic, the worst kind of thing a wizard can do. I can’t tell you about anything bad that I absolutely know he did—for sure—but if one wizard can judge another, I’d say he was an evil one. A very evil one. Mrs. Zimmermann thinks so too. She lived next door to him for years, remember. You’ll have to ask her about him yourself, of course, but there were many evenings when she and I would stand in her back yard and look up and see old Isaac’s evil face in the window of the cupola on top of the house. He’d be holding an oil lamp and just staring out at the night. Mrs. Zimmermann claims that he would sit for hours in the cupola during the day. He seemed to be taking notes.”

“Gee, that
is
weird. What was he taking notes for?”

“Lord only knows, Lewis. But I’m sure it wasn’t anything good. At any rate, to get on with my story. . . . It
must be getting pretty late by now, but without the clocks I have no idea what time it is. Where was I? Oh, yes. Old Isaac died during a wild thunderstorm, one of the worst in the history of Capharnaum County. You can look it up in the New Zebedee
Chronicle
if you want to: roofs blown off barns, trees uprooted, and a bolt of lightning melted the iron doors on the tomb Isaac is buried in now. I’ll have to show you that tomb some day. Ugly old dump—one of those little stone houses for the respectable dead. There are several of them up in our cemetery, some of them really fancy. This one was built by Isaac’s family in the 1850’s, but it was never used till they put his wife in there. She died before he did.”

“What was she like?”

“Pretty strange, as you’d have to be to choose Isaac Izard for a husband. I don’t remember anything about her but her eyeglasses.”

Lewis stared. “Her eyeglasses?”

“Yes. I passed her once on the street and she turned and looked at me. It might have been the way the sun caught her spectacles, but I remember two freezing circles of gray light burning into me. I turned away and closed my eyes, but those two cold spots stayed there. I had nightmares for a week after that.”

“How did she die?” Lewis imagined Mrs. Izard falling from a cliff during a hurricane, or flinging herself from the cupola of the house.

“How? Quietly and mysteriously. No funeral. Some
strange-looking people from out of town came and helped Isaac bury her. After that, he went into seclusion. Further seclusion, that is. He and she had always been hermits, but after her death he really shut himself up. Built a big high board fence between this house and Mrs. Zimmermann’s. I had it torn down as soon as I moved in.” He smiled contentedly. Lewis felt that his Uncle Jonathan was happy living at 100 High Street, despite the fact that old Isaac Izard had made the place his castle.

“Is that all there is to the story?” asked Lewis cautiously.

“Oh, my, no. We’re just getting to the good part. Look, here I am selfishly puffing away at this boat, and you have nothing. Let’s go out to the kitchen and get a couple of glasses of milk and some chocolate-chip cookies. Okay?”

“Sure!” said Lewis, who liked chocolate-chip cookies even more than he liked Welch’s Fudge Bars.

In a few minutes they were back in the study, sitting by the quietly crackling fire and munching cookies. Suddenly a book fell out of the bookcase.
Flop.
Two more fell out.
Flop. Flop.
Lewis stared at the black gap in the row of books. A long, withered, bony hand appeared. It seemed to be groping for something.

Lewis sat rigid with terror, but Jonathan merely smiled. “A little to your left, my dear. That’s it. Now you’ve got it.”