The House With a Clock in Its Walls

by John Bellairs

  Lewis stood there with a puzzled frown on his face. There was something going on in this house that he couldn't quite get hold of. He thought of Jonathan standing paralyzed while the clock in the church steeple tolled; he thought of Mrs. Zimmermann listening at the wall. It was strange.

  Oh, well, he thought, shrugging his shoulders, people are funny sometimes. Lewis climbed into bed and turned off the light. A few minutes later he turned it back on. He realized that he was still tense, excited, and wide awake.

  He climbed out of bed and walked over to the shaky-looking bamboo bookcase that stood by the closet door. What a lot of old dusty books! He pulled one out and wiped the dust off with his sleeve. The faded gilt letters on the black buckram spine said:

  John L.

  Stoddard's

  Lectures

  vol. IX

  Scotland

  England

  London

  Lewis opened the book and flipped through the slick glossy pages. He held the book up to his nose. It smelled like Old Spice talcum powder. Books that smelled that way were usually fun to read. He threw the book onto his bed and went to his suitcase. After rummaging about for a while, he came up with a long, narrow box of chocolate-covered mints. He loved to eat candy while he read, and lots of his favorite books at home had brown smudges on the corners of the pages.

  A few minutes later Lewis was sitting up in bed with his pillows propped behind him. He was reading about how the Scotch nobles had murdered poor Rizzio right in front of Mary, Queen of Scots. Stoddard compared Rizzio to a purple-velvet plum spurting plum juice in all directions. The nobles dragged the poor man, kicking and screaming, into the hallway, where they stabbed him some more. Fifty-six times, said Stoddard, though he didn't say who counted the stabs. Lewis flipped the page and bit into a peppermint patty. Now Stoddard was talking about the permanence of bloodstains and wondering whether or not the stain on the hall floor in Holyrood really was Rizzio's blood or not. Lewis began to yawn. He turned off the light and went to sleep.

  But he was awakened—quite suddenly—a little while later. He had been dreaming that he was being chased by the Queen of Spades. Now he sat up, wide awake. He was scared, and he didn't know why.

  Creak, creak. Someone was tiptoeing down the hall.

  Lewis sat still and listened. Now the sound was outside his door. Now it was going away down the hall. Creak, creak, creak.

  Lewis slid out of bed. As slowly and carefully as he could, he tiptoed to the door. He opened it, just as slowly and carefully. He didn't open it far. Just a crack. He looked out.

  The hall was dark, except for a glimmering gray window down at the far end. But Lewis could hear someone moving. And now he saw the faint, pale circle of a flashlight beam moving over the wallpaper. Frightened, Lewis pulled the door shut and then opened it just a crack. The flashlight beam had stopped. Now the figure with the flashlight brought his fist down on the wall—hard. Lewis heard little clots of plaster falling down into the space between the walls. The figure pounded again, and again. Lewis stared and opened the door wider.

  Now the shadowy intruder stepped back, and Lewis saw a bulky shadow against the hall window. A bulky, bearded shadow with a pipe in its mouth. Jonathan!

  Lewis closed the door as softly as he could and leaned against it, shaking. He hoped Jonathan hadn't seen him. A horrible thought came into his mind. Was Jonathan crazy?

  Lewis went to the wing chair by the fire and sat down. He watched the black honeycombs as they crumbled into deep red wells. What if Jonathan were crazy? His parents had always warned him against crazy people, the type that lured you into their cars and offered you candy with glue in it. Or was it glue? He couldn't remember. But Jonathan didn't really seem like that kind of person. Or the kind that sneaked into your room at night and stabbed you to death. Lewis sighed. He would just have to wait and see what happened.

  He went back to bed and had a dream in which he and Jonathan were running round and round the block that had the church on it: the church with the monster-faced steeple. All the houses on the block were lit up, but they couldn't go into any of them to hide. Something tall and dark and shapeless was following them. Finally they stopped in front of the church, and the tower began to sway as if it were made of rubber. The howling face got closer and closer... and then the dream changed. Lewis was sitting in a room full of glittering coins. He let them run clinking through his fingers until morning came.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Lewis woke up the next day with confused memories of the previous night running around in his head. In general, his impression was a happy one, despite the dark things that lurked in the corners of the picture.

  He got dressed, went downstairs, and found Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann at breakfast. It seemed that Mrs. Zimmermann always came over to cook Jonathan's breakfast because Jonathan was such a terrible cook. Well, that was fine with Lewis. He sat down to pancakes and sausages, and before long he was figuring out how best to use the three weeks of freedom that were left before school began.

  Lewis soon found out that three weeks was not nearly enough time for exploring the town of New Zebedee and the house at 100 High Street. In three weeks he barely got started.

  To begin with, the town was marvelous. It was the sort of place he had always wanted to live in. Lewis's old hometown in Wisconsin looked as if it had been built yesterday; all the houses were the same size, and the main street was just a row of bars and gas stations. New Zebedee was different. It was full of tall, elaborately decorated old houses. Even the ordinary white-frame houses had things that made them seem different—a stained-glass window or a bouquet of iron flowers on top of a cupola. And so many of the houses seemed to be hiding secrets.

  Jonathan took Lewis for some walks around the town, but more often he just let Lewis find out things for himself. Sometimes Lewis just walked up and down Main Street and stared at the high, elaborate, false fronts of the stores. One of the stores had an abandoned opera house in its upper stories. Jonathan said that the old scenery was still up there, leaning against cases of Mounds bars and five-cent writing tablets. At one end of Main Street was the Civil War Monument, a fantastic stone object shaped like an artist's easel. Each of the joints and corners of the easel had a soldier or sailor standing on it, threatening the rebel army with a musket or a sword or a cannon swabber or a harpoon. The flat part of the easel was covered with the names of Capharnaum County residents who had died in the Civil War. There was a small stone arch near the monument, and it was called the Civil War Monument Annex, because it contained the names that the carvers hadn't been able to get on the big monument. Jonathan's grandfather had fought in the war with the Fifth Michigan Fire Zouave Lancers, and Jonathan was full of stories about the old man's exploits.

  As for the house at 100 High Street, it was every bit as wonderful as the town, besides being strange and more than a little bit scary. There were lots of rooms to explore: third-best upstairs front parlors and second-best back bedrooms; linen closets and playrooms and just plain rooms. Some of these were empty and full of dust, but there were others that were crammed with antique furniture. There were marble-topped tables galore, and upholstered chairs on squeaky casters, and doilies pinned to the backs of the chairs, and stuffed partridges under glass bell jars. Each room had its own fireplace made of marble that looked—depending on the room—like blue cheese or fudge-ripple ice cream or green hand soap or milk chocolate.

  One afternoon Lewis was walking down the back staircase in the south wing of the mansion, when he came to a stained-glass window on a landing. There were quite a few stained-glass windows in the house. Lewis found them on back staircases like this one, or in unused bathrooms or at the ends of hallways. Sometimes he even found them set in the ceiling. He had seen this one before, or rather, he had seen another window where this one was now. That was why he stopped and stared.

  He remembered the other window very well. It had been a big oval window that showed a red tomato sun setting i
nto a blue sea the color of old medicine bottles. The oval frame was still there, but in it Lewis found a window that showed a man fleeing from a forest. The forest was plum colored, and the grass under the man's feet was bright green. The sky in the picture was a squirming, oily, brownish-red. It reminded Lewis of furniture polish.

  What had happened to the other window? Did Jonathan go around changing them during the night? It was pretty strange.

  Another thing that was strange was the coat rack in the front hall. At first Lewis had thought that it was just an ordinary coat rack. It stood about six feet high, and it had a little round mirror on the front. There were pegs for coats and hats, and there was a little wooden compartment in the front for rubbers. It looked very ordinary. But one day when Lewis was hanging up his raincoat, he looked at the mirror and saw a Mayan step pyramid in a steaming green jungle. He knew that the pyramid was Mayan because he had a picture of it among his Viewmaster slides. Only this scene was not fake three dimensional, the way the slides were. It looked as if you could reach through the mirror and touch the vines. As Lewis watched, a brilliant red bird with a long tail flew from one tree to another. Waves of heat made the pyramid ripple. Lewis blinked and stared again. He was looking at the reflection of the rainy gray window behind him.

  Lewis thought a lot about the stained-glass windows and the coat rack. Were they magic? He believed in magic, even though he had been taught not to. His father had spent one whole afternoon explaining to Lewis that ghosts were caused by X rays bouncing off distant planets. But Lewis was a stubborn boy, and besides, hadn't he seen the Aladdin's lamp on the back of Jonathan's playing cards, and the words Capharnaum County Magicians Society? He was convinced that magic was at the bottom of this mystery.

  Lewis was also convinced that he would have to solve another mystery before he could tackle the problem of the coat rack and the stained-glass windows. He would have to find out why Jonathan prowled the house every night with a flashlight in his hand.

  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 o
ld 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—every where. 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."