The House with a Clock In Its Walls (9 page)

“Ooh-
waah!
” he screamed. “Greenwich Mean Time! Very mean time! I want to go home
now!
”

Whereupon the scene changed, and Lewis and Uncle Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann were back in the dark shadowy dining room by the warm fire. The purple china clock on the mantel whanged tinnily eleven times. The whole show had taken only an hour.

Jonathan got up, stretched, yawned, and suggested that they all go to bed. Lewis thanked Mrs. Zimmermann for the wonderful party and went home with Jonathan. He went upstairs to bed, but he did not sleep.

As the luminous hands of his new Westclox bedside clock crept around toward midnight, Lewis lay, fully dressed, under his covers. The room was dark. His heart was pounding, and he kept saying over and over to himself, “I wish I didn’t have to do it. I wish I didn’t have to do it.”

He felt in his pants’ pocket for the piece of paper with the magic circle copied on it. There was a fat piece of yellow chalk in his other pocket. What if Uncle Jonathan came to his room to see if he were all right? He’d just have to pull the covers up to his chin and pretend that he was asleep.
Tick-tick-tick-tick
. Lewis wished that it was next week, and that he had never made his stupid promise
to Tarby. He closed his eyes and stared at the patterns that formed on the insides of his eyelids.

Minutes passed. Suddenly Lewis sat up. He threw back the covers and stared at the clock. It was five minutes after twelve! He had promised to meet Tarby in the cemetery at midnight, and now he was going to be late! What could he do? Tarby wouldn’t wait for him. He would go home, and tomorrow he would tell all his friends how Lewis had chickened out.

Lewis rubbed his face and tried to think. The cemetery stood atop a long ridge that rose just on the other side of Wilder Creek Park. You had to walk half a mile beyond the city limits to get to the road that ran up the ridge. There was a short cut, of course, but Lewis hadn’t intended to take it. Now he had no choice.

Slowly, carefully, Lewis eased himself down onto the floor. He knelt down and groped under the bed for his flashlight. It was a long, old-fashioned flashlight with a fluted handle and a big round lamp on the end. The metal felt cold and slimy in his hand. He went to the closet and put on his heavy jacket. It would be cold up on Cemetery Hill.

Lewis opened the bedroom door. The hall was dark, as usual, and from the next room he could hear Uncle Jonathan snoring. Lewis felt awful. It was like being sick to your stomach. He wished with all his heart that he could run into Jonathan’s room, wake him up, and tell
him all about the adventure he was going on, and why he had to go through with it. But he didn’t do any of these things. Instead, he tiptoed across the hall and opened the door that led to the back stairs.

It didn’t take long for Lewis to get to the other side of town. When he had reached the
CITY LIMITS
sign, he poked around by the side of the road until he found a little wooden staircase that ran down the gravel bank to Wilder Creek Park. The creek was fairly shallow at this point, so Lewis waded across. The water was freezing on his ankles. When he got to the other side he looked up. His hands felt sweaty, and he almost turned around and went home.

He was looking at Cemetery Hill. It was a high, flat-topped ridge cut across in two places by a narrow dirt road. It wasn’t a hard hill to climb: New Zebedee children went up and down it every day during the summer. But to Lewis, who was scared of heights, it might as well have been Mount Everest.

Lewis looked up at the dark hill, and he swallowed a couple of times. Maybe if he took the long way around . . . no, he was already late, and Tarby might get bored and go home. The last thing Lewis wanted was to be in the cemetery alone at this time of night. He got a tight grip on his flashlight and started to climb.

At the first landing, Lewis stopped. He was breathing hard, and the front of his jacket was soaked through.
There were black smudges on the knees of his trousers, and there was a twig in his shoe. Two more stages. Lewis gritted his teeth and went on.

At the top of the hill, he dropped to his knees and crossed himself several times. The sweat was running down his face, and he could feel his heart thumping. Well, he had done it. It was no great triumph because Tarby had probably scaled the ridge in a tenth of the time it had taken him. But at least he had done it.

Lewis looked around. He was standing at the edge of a long avenue lined with willow trees. The bare strings of the willows swayed in the wind, and Lewis shivered. He felt very cold and very alone. At the far end of the avenue, the gray gate of the cemetery glimmered. Lewis started to walk toward it.

The cemetery gate was a heavy arch of stone covered with elaborate carving. On the lintel were inscribed these words:

Lewis pushed open the squeaky iron gate and walked quickly past the rows of white headstones. The mausoleum was on the other side of Cemetery Hill, the side that looked out across the deep valley beyond the town. A little narrow path led down to the stone platform in front of the tomb door. Where was Tarby?

As Lewis looked around, someone said, “Boo!” Lewis almost fainted. It was Tarby, of course, hiding in the shadow of the stone arch on the front of the mausoleum.

“Hi! You sure took long enough,” said Tarby. “Where were you?”

“It was hard work climbing,” said Lewis, staring sadly down at his wet and dirty trousers.

“It’s always hard climbing for fatsoes,” said Tarby. “Whyncha lose some weight?”

“Come on, let’s do what we’re supposed to be doing,” said Lewis. He felt depressed.

The cracked and mossy stone slab that lay at the doorstep of the tomb was in the shadow of the hillside now. Everything around it lay in bright moonlight. Lewis turned on the flashlight and played the pale beam over the ugly iron doors. A heavy chain held the doors together, and it was fastened by a large, heart-shaped padlock. Lewis flashed the beam up. There was the strange-looking
O
on the cornice. The wind had died down. Everything was quiet. Lewis handed the flashlight to Tarby and knelt down. Out came the scrap of paper and the chalk. He drew a big circle and then a smaller one within it, like this:

As Tarby held the flashlight steady, Lewis filled in the border of the magic circle with symbols from the piece of paper. When he had chalked in the last strange sign, there was still a blank space in the border. Lewis had read in Jonathan’s book that you were supposed to fill in the space with the name of the dead person. But he didn’t know the name.

“Well,” said Tarby, “I don’t see any dead people.”

“It’s not finished,” said Lewis. “We’ve got to put in the name.”

Tarby looked disgusted. “You mean you don’t know it?”

“No, I don’t,” sighed Lewis. “Maybe if we sit here for a minute or two it will come to us.”

They knelt silently at the door of the tomb. A sudden gust of wind rattled the dead leaves on an oak tree that grew nearby. Minutes passed. Lewis’s mind was completely blank. Then, for some reason, he picked up the chalk.

“Hold the flashlight down here,” he said.

Slowly, carefully, he spelled out a name. The funny thing was that he was not thinking of a name at all. It was as if someone else was guiding his hand. With one last down-stroke of the chalk he completed the word:
Selenna
. It was a strange name. Lewis had never known anyone called Selenna. He didn’t even know how to pronounce the name. But there it was.

He stood up with the creased paper in his hand. Now
he started to chant in a high-pitched nervous voice:
Aba bēbē bachabē
 . . . 

He stopped. Tarby, who was crouched beside him, grabbed his arm and squeezed it hard. From deep within the tomb came a sound.
Boom!
A deep hollow sound. The iron doors jolted, as if they had been struck a blow from inside. The chain rattled, and there was a
clunk
on the pavement. The padlock had fallen off. And now, as the boys knelt, terrified, two small spots of freezing gray light appeared. They hovered and danced before the doors of the tomb, which now stood ajar. And something black—blacker than the night, blacker than ink spilled into water—was oozing from the space between the doors.

Tarby shook Lewis and squeezed his arm harder. “Run!” he shouted.

They tumbled over the bank and started to scramble down the hillside. Part of the way Lewis slid on his belly, with roots scratching at his face. He clawed at the wet slippery grass, but he could not get a handhold. Then he was tumbling over and over, and then he was sliding on his back. Rocks scraped his shoulder blades and bumped the back of his head. And then he was sitting on the dirt road, thoroughly shaken and sick and scared.

The moon drifted out from behind a thin veil of clouds and stared down at Lewis as if it were scared too. Tarby was sprawled near him in a weedy ditch. He got up quickly and stared back up the hillside. Now he was tugging at Lewis’s arm. “Come on! We’ve got to get out of here! It might come after us! Oh, come on! Please come on!”

Lewis was dazed and shaken, but he got up and followed Tarby over the next stage of the hillside, and the next one. They waded across the stream and were soon on the gravel road that led back to New Zebedee.

As they walked along, Lewis kept stopping and shuddering. Tarby told him to quit it.

“I can’t help it,” said Lewis in a sick voice. “Did you see it? It was awful!”

“I don’t know what I saw,” said Tarby sullenly. “Maybe it was the moonlight or something.”

Lewis stared at him. Was Tarby kidding, or was he trying to deny to himself that he had seen what he really had seen? Lewis didn’t know, and he didn’t care. All he knew was that he was terribly frightened.

Lewis sneaked back into the house a little before three
A.M.
He tiptoed up the back stairs, checked to make sure that his uncle was asleep—he was—and quietly opened the door of his own room. Just as quietly, he shut it behind him. Then he slowly began to strip off his wet and dirty clothes, which he wadded up and threw into a dark corner of his closet. Where was his flashlight? Tarby must have taken it. He would get it back from him later. As for the clothes, he could get them cleaned without Jonathan knowing about it.

Lewis went to bed. He tried to sleep, but all he could see when he closed his eyes were those two burning
circles of light. Finally he did drift off, but he had a strange dream. Clock hands and skeleton bones were chasing him around and around a high stone tomb. Lewis awoke with a start and, for a moment, it seemed that his room, and the whole house, was filled with a loud ticking noise.