The House with a Clock In Its Walls (7 page)

After a long while, Lewis sat up and looked around. Tarby was kneeling near him, his ear to the ground and his eyes wide with wonder. But where was Uncle Jonathan? Where, for that matter, was Mrs. Zimmermann? At the far end of the yard, in the shadow of the four elm trees, Lewis thought he saw them moving around. He tapped Tarby on the shoulder, pointed, and the two boys silently got up and went to join the magicians.

When they found them, Jonathan was arguing with Mrs. Zimmermann, who argued right back, though her ear was pressed flat to the ground.

“I say it’s the old storm sewer system,” she muttered. “It was lost track of in 1868 because the charts got thrown out with the wastepaper.”

“Well, you can think what you like, Frizzy Wig,” said Jonathan as he knelt down for another listen. “
I
say it’s an underground stream. Capharnaum County is full of them, and it would account for the fact that Sin-and-Flesh Creek is much bigger when it leaves New Zebedee than it is when it enters it.”

“You’re full of beans, Fatso,” said Mrs. Zimmermann, whose ear was still pressed to the ground. “I think I know the sound of water rushing through a brick tunnel. It’s all vaulty and hollow.”

“Like your head?”

Lewis and Tarby pressed their ears to the ground, but
all they could hear was a sound like the one you hear when you press your ear against an inner tube that you are floating on in a lake. Lewis felt very excited. He wanted to be all over the garden at once, touching things and smelling them and listening. The magic in the back yard lasted for over an hour. Then the phosphorescence changed to plain old ordinary moonlight, and the moon floated high overhead, free from enchantments.

As they walked back into the house, Lewis asked his uncle if the police department didn’t get mad when he eclipsed the moon. Jonathan chuckled and put his arm around Lewis.

“No,” he said, “strangely enough they don’t. I’ve never been quite sure why, but maybe it’s because the eclipse is only visible in this yard.”

“You mean it’s not real?”

“Of course, it’s real. You saw it, didn’t you? But one of the troubles with human beings is that they can only see out of their own eyes. If I could be two people, I’d station the other me across town to see if the eclipse was operating over there.”

“Why don’t you ask Mrs. Zimmermann to go watch?”

“Because she’d be crabby. She always wants to be in on things. Don’t you, Pruny?”

“Yes, I do. And right now I’d like to be in on some chocolate-chip cookies. Why don’t you all come over to my place?”

And that is what they did. Lewis was happy to have a chance to show off Mrs. Zimmermann’s house to Tarby. It was not a mansion, by any means. Just a little two-story bungalow with a screened-in front porch. But it was full of strange things, most of them purple. Mrs. Zimmermann had a thing about the color purple. Her rugs, her wallpaper, her staircase runner, her toilet paper, and her bath soap were all purple. So was the large surrealistic painting of a dragon that hung in her living room. It had been done for her specially by the French painter Odilon Redon.

As they munched their cookies and drank their milk and walked around looking at the purple things in Mrs. Zimmermann’s house, Lewis noticed that Tarby wasn’t saying much. When it came time for him to go, Tarby shook Jonathan’s hand while staring at the carpet, and he mumbled, “Thanks for the cookies” to Mrs. Zimmermann in such a low voice that he couldn’t be understood. Lewis saw Tarby to the front gate. He knew this was odd behavior for Tarby, who was usually loud and sassy-acting, even in front of grownups.

“Thanks for the magic show,” said Tarby, shaking Lewis’s hand and looking very serious. “It was kind of scary, but it was fun. I take back all the things I said about your uncle, I guess. Well, see you around.” And with that, Tarby went trudging down the hill.

Lewis stared after him with a worried frown on his
face. He hoped that Tarby had had a good time. Most people do not like to be proven wrong, even when they enjoy themselves in the process. Tarby was a popular boy, and he was used to being right about everything. He had turned out to be wrong about Jonathan’s magic powers. Now what would he do? Lewis didn’t want to lose his only friend.

It was the last week of October, and Tarby’s arm had almost healed. Lewis saw less and less of him now. He still waited for him on the baseball diamond out behind the school, and sometimes Tarby showed up, and sometimes he didn’t.

Of course, Tarby couldn’t be expected to be very interested in flies and grounders at this time of year. The football season was getting underway. Lewis had seen Tarby playing football with the other boys after school. Needless to say, Tarby was always the quarterback. He threw long passes and made end runs and pulled off tricky plays, like the “Statue of Liberty.”

Lewis had thought of trying to join the football game,
but he remembered what had happened back in Wisconsin. Whenever anyone charged over the line at him, he fell to the ground and covered his head with his hands. He couldn’t catch passes and, if he tried to kick the ball, he usually wound up bunting it with his knee. Maybe if he got really good at baseball, he could get Tarby to teach him football next year.

But he wasn’t going to learn much about baseball without Tarby. Of course, these days he wasn’t learning much even with Tarby’s help. On those rare occasions when Tarby showed up to play ball with Lewis, he seemed to want to get the game over with in a hurry. Lewis knew that he was losing Tarby, but so far he hadn’t figured out how in the world he was going to hang on to him.

One Saturday afternoon when the two of them were poking around in the cemetery, Lewis had an idea. New Zebedee’s beautiful old cemetery was on a high hill just outside of town. It was full of elaborate gravestones that showed weeping women leaning on urns and cupids extinguishing torches. There were pillars made to look as if they had been broken, and there were pillars with hands on top, pointing up. There were little tombstones made in the shape of lambs, and these were over the graves of children. Some of the lambs had been there so long that they were worn into grimy white blobs that reminded Lewis of soap.

On this particular day, Lewis and Tarby had been
inspecting a lot where all the gravestones were carved to look like wood. Each grave was marked by a little granite log, complete with bark and rings and knotholes. The curb around the lot matched the tombstones, and in the center of everything rose a broken tree of stone. The top was jagged, as if lightning had struck it, and a stone woodpecker was whetting his beak on the realistically carved bark. Lewis and Tarby had been playing in this petrified forest for a while, but now they were getting tired. The sun, red as the tomato sun in Jonathan’s stained-glass window, was setting between two crooked pine trees. Lewis shivered and zipped up his jacket.

“Let’s go back to my house,” he said. “Mrs. Zimmermann can make us some cocoa, and I’ll show you some
real
petrified wood. My uncle got it in a forest out west that was actually turned to stone.”

Tarby looked bored, and he also looked mean. “Who wants to go back to your old uncle’s house? It’s a pretty crazy place, if you ask me. And how come old Mrs. Zimmermann is over there all the time? Is she in
luuvv
with him?” Tarby threw his arms around the stone tree and started kissing it with loud smacks. Lewis felt like crying, but somehow he managed to keep down the tears.

“I . . . I bet you think all my uncle can do is eclipse the moon,” said Lewis. It sounded silly, but he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Tarby looked interested, in a bored sort of way. “Well,” he said, “what else can he do?”

Lewis did not know why he said what he said next. It just came to him.

“My uncle can raise the dead.”

Tarby did a somersault over one of the log-shaped markers. “Oh, sure he can,” he snorted. “Look, your uncle is a fake. That night when he made it look like the moon had gone out and all that other stuff was happening, he just had us
hypnotized
. My dad told me that was prob’ly what happened.”

Lewis stared at him. “You said you’d never tell anyone about what we did that night. Remember? I made you promise.”

Tarby looked away. “Oh, yeah, I guess I did promise. Sorry.”

Both of them sat quietly for a long while. There was nothing left of the sun but a faint red afterglow. A night wind had sprung up, and it stirred the long grass on the graves. Finally Lewis got up and spoke. His voice came from way down in his throat.

“What if I were to raise a dead person by myself?”

Tarby looked at him. He giggled. “Boy, that would be some fun. I can see you runnin’ down Main Street in the middle of the night with a ghost after you.” Tarby got up and waved his arms. “
Woo-oooo!
” he wailed. “I am the ghost of miss-terr-reee!
Woo-oooo!
”

Lewis’s face was getting red. “Wanta see me do it?”

“Yeah,” said Tarby. “I do. When are you gonna do it?”

“I’ll let you know,” said Lewis, although he didn’t have the faintest idea of what he was going to do, or when he was going to do it, or how he was going to do it. All he knew was that he had to try, if he was going to hang on to his only friend in New Zebedee.

During that week before Halloween, Lewis spent a lot of time in his uncle’s study. Normally it was okay for Lewis to browse in the library, but if Jonathan had known what books Lewis was looking at now, he would have stopped him. Lewis knew this, so he always waited till Jonathan was out visiting, or raking leaves, or tying up corn shocks in the garden. When he was sure he would not be disturbed, Lewis would slide back the paneled walnut doors, tiptoe into the study, and roll the stepladder down to the section of the library wall that contained Jonathan’s magic books. Jonathan had forbidden Lewis to look through these books without his permission, so Lewis felt very bad about what he was doing. He felt bad about the whole business. But he went ahead anyway.

He looked through all the strange old volumes, with their pentacles and pentagrams, their anagrams and talismans and abracadabras and long incantations printed in Old English lettering. But he spent most of his time with a big black leather volume entitled
Necromancy
. Necromancy is the branch of magic that deals with the raising of the dead. The frontispiece of the book was an engraving that showed Dr. John Dee, personal astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I of England, as he and his assistant,
Michael Kelly, raised the spirit of a dead woman in an English churchyard at midnight. The two men were standing inside a chalk circle drawn on the ground. The border of the circle was covered with strange symbols and words. Just outside the charmed circle hovered a figure in a long nightgown. On her head she wore an odd ruffly bonnet, the kind they once buried women in. Lewis kept turning back to the illustration because it frightened him. But he read the rest of the book. He read it all, and he memorized some of the charms. He even copied one of the pentagrams and the spell that went with it onto a piece of notepaper and put it in his pocket.

Halloween was a windy dark day. Lewis sat in the window of his bedroom and watched the wind strip the trees of the few ragged brown leaves that remained. He felt sad and scared. He was sad because he had disobeyed his uncle, who was always kind to him. And he felt scared because he had promised Tarby that he would meet him in the graveyard at twelve o’clock on Halloween night, so that the two of them could raise up the spirit of a dead person. Or try to. Lewis didn’t think it would work, and he was kind of hoping that it wouldn’t.

They had the grave all picked out. It was a mausoleum stuck into the side of the hill the graveyard was built on. Lewis didn’t know anything about who was buried in the tomb. Neither did Tarby. There wasn’t even a name on the door. But whatever the name was, it probably
started with
O
, because there was an
O
in the triangle over the heavy old stone arch. It was a funny kind of
O
, and it looked like this:

At dinner that night, Lewis did not say much. This was odd because he usually talked his head off about everything under the sun, especially those things he didn’t know anything about. Jonathan asked him if he was all right, and Lewis said that of course he was all right, anybody could see that. Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann exchanged worried glances and stared at him again, but Lewis went on eating with his head down. At the end of the meal, he pushed his chair back and announced that he was not going trick-or-treating, because he was too old for it.