The House With a Clock in Its Walls

by John Bellairs

  He was about to close the curtain and go to bed when the porch light of the Hanchett house came on. The two frosted panes of the front door glowed yellow. Then one of the panels of the door moved inward. Someone stepped out onto the front stoop. Lewis watched as who-ever-it-was stood there, just stood there, taking in the frosty air of the December night. He thought he caught the faint glitter of spectacles, but he couldn't be sure at this distance.

  After a little while, the dark figure went inside and pushed the door shut. The hall light went out. Lewis sat there for a while thinking, then he lowered the curtain and went to bed.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The next day Jonathan was helping Lewis rummage in the front hall closet for his ice skates. Lewis had weak ankles, and he was terrified of falling down on the ice, but he had decided to try to learn to skate. If he got good enough he might be able to worm his way back into Tarby's favor. He had never seen Tarby ice skate, but he was sure that the team's greatest home-run hitter was also the champion ice skater of New Zebedee. He probably could sign his name across the ice of Durgy's Pond.

  So Lewis and Jonathan threw warped badminton rackets, raccoon coats, galoshes, and picnic baskets into the hall. Finally Jonathan came up with what looked like a short aluminum ski for a midget. It was a beginner's skate, with two little ridges for runners. "This it?"

  "That's one of them. Thanks a lot, Uncle Jonathan. Now all we need is the other."

  As they went on searching. Lewis said, in what he thought was a casual way, "Who's living in the old Hanchett house?"

  Jonathan stood up suddenly in the closet and banged his head on a shelf. When he had stopped rubbing his head and wincing, he looked down at Lewis and said, rather sharply, "Why do you want to know?"

  "I just wanted to know," said Lewis shyly. Once again, he wondered what his uncle was angry about.

  Jonathan stepped out of the closet with the other skate. He dropped it into a pile of clothes.

  "So you just wanted to know, eh? Well, Lewis, there are some things it would be better for you not to know. So if you'll take my advice, you'll just stop poking around where you're not wanted. There's your other skate and... and good day. I have work to do in the study, and I've already wasted enough time answering your foolish questions."

  Jonathan got up abruptly and stalked off to the study. He had slid back the doors with a loud clatter when he paused and went back to the closet, where Lewis was still kneeling with tears in his eyes.

  "Please forgive me, Lewis," said Jonathan in a tired voice. "I've been feeling really rotten lately. Too many cigars, I guess. As for the house across the street, I hear that it's been rented to an old lady named Mrs. O'Meagher. She acts kind of crabby—or so I'm told. I really haven't met her, and... and I just didn't want anything bad to happen to you." Jonathan smiled nervously and patted Lewis on the shoulder. Then he got up and walked to the door of the study. Again he stopped.

  "Don't go over there," he said quickly, and then he stepped inside and slammed the double doors, hard.

  Lewis felt crisscrossing lines of mystery and fear and tension hemming him in on all sides. He had never seen his uncle acting like this. And he wondered, more than ever, about the new neighbor across the street.

  One night during the week before Christmas, after a heavy snow had fallen, Lewis was awakened by the sound of the doorbell ringing. Brr-rr-rring! Brr-rr-rring! It was not an electric bell, but an old, tired mechanical bell set in the middle of the front door. Someone was turning the flat metal key, grinding the stiff old chimes around. Brr-rr-rring!

  Lewis sat up and looked at his bedside clock. The two luminous hands were straight up. Midnight! Who could it be at this hour? Maybe Uncle Jonathan would go down and answer it. Lewis felt cold just thinking of the drafty front hall. He bundled his quilt about him and shivered.

  The bell rang again. It sounded like a whiny person insisting on some stupid point in an argument. No sound from Jonathan's room. No waking-up sounds, that is. Lewis could hear his uncle's loud, steady snoring even though there was a thick wall between their rooms. Jonathan could sleep through an artillery bombardment.

  Lewis got up. He threw back the covers, slipped on his bathrobe, and found his slippers. Quietly, he padded down the hall and then down the dark staircase. At the entrance to the front hall he stopped. There was a streetlight burning just outside the front gate, and it threw a bent black shadow against the pleated curtain on the front door. Lewis stood still and watched the shadow. It didn't move. Slowly he began to walk forward. When he reached the door, he closed his fingers around the cold knob and turned it. The door rattled open, and a freezing wind blew in over his bare ankles. There stood his Aunt Mattie, who was dead.

  Lewis stepped back as the old woman, her head cocked to one side as it always had been, tottered across the floor toward him. A shaking blue light filled the air around her, and Lewis, his eyes wide open in this nightmare, saw Aunt Mattie as she had been the last time he had seen her alive. Her dress was black and wrinkled, she wore heavy shoes with thick heels, and she tapped her bunchy, black umbrella as she went. Lewis even thought he smelled kerosene—her house, her furniture, and her clothing had always reeked of it. The white fungus blotch that was her face shook and glowed as she said, in a horribly familiar voice, "Well, Lewis? Aren't you glad to see me?"

  Lewis fainted. When he awoke, he was lying on his back in the cold hallway. The shaking blue light was gone. So was Aunt Mattie, though the front door was open. Skitters of snow blew in over the worn threshold, and the street lamp burned quiet and cold across the street. Had it all been a sleepwalker's dream?

  Lewis didn't think so. He had never been a sleepwalker before. He stood there thinking for a minute, and then, for some reason, he shuffled out onto the front porch and started to pick his way down the snow-covered steps. His feet were so cold that they stung, but he kept going until he was halfway down the walk. Then he turned and looked at the house. He gasped. There were strange lights playing over the blank windows and the rough sandstone walls. They wouldn't have been strange lights at midday in the summer, but on a December night they were eerie. For they were leaf-lights, the shifting circles and crescents cast by sunlight falling through leaves.

  Lewis stood and stared for several minutes. Then the lights faded, and he was alone in the dark, snow-covered yard. The chestnut tree dropped a light dusting of snow on his head, shaking him out of his trance. His feet were numb and tingling, and he felt, for the first time, the cold wind whipping through his thin pajamas and his half-open cotton bathrobe. Shuddering, Lewis stumbled back up the walk.

  When he got to his room, he sat down on the edge of his bed. He knew he wasn't going back to sleep. There were the makings of a fire in his fireplace, and he knew where the cocoa was kept. A few minutes later Lewis was sitting by a warm, cheerful fire that cast cozy shadows over the black marble of his own personal fireplace. He sipped steaming cocoa from a heavy earthenware mug and tried to think pleasant thoughts. None came to him. After an hour of sitting and sipping and brooding, he plugged in the floor lamp, got John L. Stoddard's second lecture on China out of the bookcase, and sat reading by the fire until dawn.

  The next morning at breakfast, Lewis saw that Jonathan was red-eyed and nervous acting. Had his sleep been disturbed too? Jonathan had not discussed the break-in or the car chase or the Izard tomb with Lewis, and Lewis was not about to bring up any of these subjects. But he knew that something was bothering Jonathan, and he also knew that, ever since the night of the break-in, Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann had been holding midnight conferences. He had heard their voices coming up through the hot-air register, although he had never been able to make out what was being said. He had thought a couple of times of hiding in the secret passageway, but he was afraid of getting caught. A passage that is entered through a china cupboard full of rattling dishes is not as secret as one might wish. And if some secret spring lock snapped shut on him, he would need to scream his way out, and then there woul
d have to be explanations.

  Lewis almost wished that something like that would happen, because he was sick of his secret. He was sick of it because it kept him away from Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann. He always felt that they were watching him, waiting for him to break down and tell them everything. How much did they know?

  Christmas at 100 High Street was both good and bad that year. There was a big tree in the study and the glass balls on it were magic. Sometimes they reflected the room, and sometimes they showed you ancient ruins on unknown planets. Jonathan gave Lewis several magic toys, including a large pink Easter egg—or Christmas egg, if you wish—that was covered with sparkly stuff and what looked like icing, although it couldn't be eaten. When Lewis looked into the egg, he could see any battle in history. Not the battle as it really was, but as he wanted it to be. Though he didn't know it, the egg, like the balls on the tree, was capable of showing him scenes on other planets. But it was not until he was a grown-up man, working as an astronomer at Mount Palomar, that he was able to discover that property of the magic egg.

  Jonathan did a lot of other things that Christmas. He put candles in all the windows of the house—electric candles, not real ones, since he liked the electric kind better—and he put strong lamps behind the stained-glass windows, so that they threw marvelous patterns of red and blue and gold and purple on the dark, sparkling snow outside. He invented the Fuse Box Dwarf, a little man who popped out at you from behind the paint cans in the cellarway and screamed, "Dreeb! Dreeb! I am the Fuse Box Dwarf!" Lewis was not scared by the little man, and he felt that those who scream, "Dreeb!" are more to be pitied than censured.

  Needless to say, Jonathan put on a very good show with the coat rack mirror, though it had the habit of showing the ruins at Chichen-Itza over and over again. Somehow the mirror managed to pick up radio station WGN on its bevelled edges, so that when Lewis went out the door in the morning, he heard the Dow-Jones averages and livestock reports.

  Lewis tried to enjoy himself that Christmas, but it was hard. He kept thinking that Jonathan's magic show was meant to cover up what was happening to the house. What was happening was hard to figure out, but it was strange and terrifying. After the night when Lewis saw— or dreamt he saw—Aunt Mattie, the house seemed stranger than it ever had. Sometimes the air in certain rooms seemed to shimmer as if the house was going to disappear in the next second. Sometimes the stained-glass windows showed dark and terrifying scenes, and sometimes Lewis saw in the corners of rooms those awful sights that nervous people always imagine are lurking just outside the borders of their eyesight. Walking from room to room, even in broad daylight, Lewis forgot what day it was, what he was after, and at times almost forgot who he was. At night he had dreams of wandering through the house back in the 1890's, when everything was varnished and new. Once or twice Lewis woke from such dreams to see lights flickering on his bedroom wall. They were not leaf-lights this time, but rags and patches of orange light, the kind that you see in the corners of an old house at sunset.

  These strange things didn't go on all the time, of course; just now and then over the long cold winter of '48-'49. When spring came, Lewis was surprised to see that the hedge in front of the Hanchett house was wildly overgrown. It was a spiraea hedge, and had always had bristly little pink-and-white blossoms. This spring there were no blossoms on the hedge; it had turned into a dark, thorny thicket that completely hid the first floor windows and sent long waving tendrils up to scrape at the zinc gutter troughs. Burdocks and ailanthus trees had grown up overnight near the house; their branches screened the second-story windows.

  Lewis still had not seen much of the new neighbor. Once, from a distance, he had caught a glimpse of a dark, huddled figure rattling a key in the front door. And from his window seat, he had seen her passing to and fro on the second floor. But, aside from that, the old woman had kept out of sight. Lewis had figured it would be like that.

  She did have visitors though: one visitor. That was Hammerhandle. Lewis had seen him coming away from Mrs. O'Meagher's back door late one night. And twice, on his way to the movies in the evening, Lewis had literally bumped into Hammerhandle, who was huddling along High Street toward the Hanchett house, his shabby overcoat buttoned up to the neck. Both times Hammerhandle had been carrying packages, odd little bundles wrapped in brown paper and twine. And both times they had collided because Hammerhandle kept looking behind him.

  The second time they met this way, Hammerhandle grabbed Lewis by the collar, the way he had before. He pressed his unshaven muzzle to Lewis's ear and growled, "You little snip! You're lookin' to have your throat cut, aren't you?"

  Lewis pulled away from him, but he didn't run. He faced Hammerhandle down.

  "Get out of here, you rotten old bum. If you ever try to do anything to me, my uncle will fix you."

  Hammerhandle laughed, though it sounded more like he was having a choking fit. "Your uncle!" he said, sneering. "Your uncle will get his sooner than he thinks! The End of the World is at hand. Don't you read your Bible like a good boy? There have been signs, and there will be more. Prepare!" And with that, he stumbled on up the hill, clutching his parcel tightly.

  The day after this strange meeting was cold and rainy, and Lewis stayed indoors. Jonathan was over at Mrs. Zimmermann's helping her bottle some prune brandy, so Lewis was alone. He decided to go poke around in the back rooms up on the third floor. The third-floor rooms were generally unused, and Jonathan had shut the heat off in them to save money. But Lewis had found interesting things up there, like boxes full of chessmen and china doorknobs and wall cupboards that you could actually climb up inside of.

  Lewis wandered down the drafty hall, opening and closing doors. None of the rooms seemed worth exploring today. But wait. Sure! The room with the parlor organ. He could go play it; that would be fun.

  One of the disused parlors on the third floor had a dusty old parlor organ in it. It was one of the few pieces of furniture that was left from the time Isaac Izard had lived in the house. Of course, there was the parlor organ downstairs—the good one—but it was a player organ, and often refused to let Lewis play what he wanted to play. This one up here was wheezy, and in the winter its voice was only a whisper. But you could sometimes get good tunes out of it if you pumped hard.

  Lewis opened the door.

  The parlor organ was a bulky shadow against one wall. Lewis found the light switch, and the light came on: He wiped some dust off the seat and sat down. What would he play? "Chopsticks," probably, or "From a Wigwam." His repertoire wasn't very large. Lewis pumped the worn treadles, and he heard a hissing and puffing that came from deep inside the machine. He touched the keys, but all he got was a gaspy tubercular sound. Darn.

  He sat back and thought. Over the keys was a row of black organ stops with labels that said things like Vox Humana, Salicet, and Flute. Lewis knew that these stops were supposed to change the sound of the organ in various ways, but he had never pulled any of them out. Well, now was the time. He grabbed one of the black tubes and tugged gently. It wouldn't budge. He wiggled the stop and pulled harder. The whole thing came out in his hand.

  Lewis sat there staring stupidly at the piece of wood. At first he felt bad about breaking the organ, but then he looked more closely at the stop. The end that had been in the organ was blunt, smooth, and painted black. There was no sign that it had ever been hooked up to anything.

  What a cheesy outfit, Lewis thought, I wonder if they're all like that. Let's see. He pulled at another. Fop! He pulled them all out. Fop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!

  Lewis laughed. He rolled the black tubes back and forth over the keyboard. But then he stopped and thought. He had read a story once where a car had had a dummy dashboard that came out so you could hide things behind it. What if this organ....?

  He got up and went downstairs. He went all the way down to the cellarway, where Jonathan kept his tools. He opened the toolbox and took out a screwdriver, a hammer, and a rusty butter knife that Jonathan kept there for pr
ying things open. Then he went back upstairs as fast as he could.

  Now Lewis was sitting at the organ again. He scanned the long wooden panel; seven round black holes stared back at him. There were four screws holding the panel to the organ case, and they came out easily. Lewis stuck his fingers into two of the holes and pulled. The panel was stuck. He thought a bit, then he picked up the butter knife and slid it into a crack. Skreek! A little eddy of dust rose and tickled his nostrils. He moved the knife along to the right a bit and pried again. Skreek! The panel flopped out onto the keyboard. Ah! Now we would see what was what.

  Lewis bent over and put his head close to the hole. He could smell a lot of dust, but he couldn't see a thing in there. Darn it, he had forgotten to bring a flashlight! He reached in and felt around. His arm went in all the way up to the armpit. He groped some more. What was this? Paper? He heard a dry crackling sound. Maybe it was money. He grabbed hold of the bundle and drew it out. His heart sank. It was just an old pile of papers.

  Lewis sat there staring at them in disgust. So this was the secret treasure of Izard's castle! Some treasure! Well, there might be something interesting in them, like secret formulas. He flipped through the papers. Hmm... hmmm... He flipped some more. The light in the room was very weak, and the old paper had turned practically the same shade as the copper-colored ink Isaac Izard had used. He figured the writing must be Isaac Izard's, since the first sheet said:

  CLOUD FORMATIONS AND

  OTHER PHENOMENA

  Observed from this Window by

  ISAAC IZARD