The House with a Clock In Its Walls (13 page)

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.
Pop!
He pulled them all out.
Pop! 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 prying 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:

Hadn’t Mrs. Zimmermann said that she had seen old Isaac taking notes on the sky? There were dates here and entries after them. Lewis read a few entries, and his eyes opened wider. He leafed some more.

A spatter of rain hit the window. Lewis jumped. Outside he could see thick masses of blue clouds piled up in the west. Through them ran a jagged red streak. It looked to Lewis like a hungry mouth. As he watched, the mouth opened and a ray of blood-red light shot into the room. It lit up the page he was holding. On the page were scrawled these words:

Lewis felt very frightened. He gathered the papers together and started to get up. As he did so, he heard a noise. A very faint noise. Something was fluttering around down inside the organ case.

Lewis stumbled backward, knocking over the bench. The papers slid out of his hand and scattered over the floor. What should he do? Run for his life or save the papers? He gritted his teeth and knelt down. As he gathered up the sheets, he said to himself over and over again,
“Quia tu es Deus fortitudo mea . . . quia tu es Deus fortitudo mea.”

Now he had all the papers again. He was about to dash for the door when he saw something come floating up out of the darkness inside the organ. A moth. A moth with silver-gray wings. They shone like leaves in the moonlight.

Lewis ran to the door. He rattled the knob but he couldn’t get it open. Now he could feel the moth in his hair. Lewis went rigid. His face flushed. He was not scared any more. He was angry. Very angry.

He swatted at the moth and crushed it. Lewis felt a horrible runny stickiness in his hair, and all the fear came rushing back. He wiped his hand frantically on his trouser leg. Now Lewis was out in the hall, running and shouting, “Uncle Jonathan! Mrs. Zimmermann! Come quick! Oh, please come quick, I’ve found something! Uncle Jonathan!”

*   *   *

A little while later Jonathan, Lewis, and Mrs. Zimmermann were sitting around Mrs. Zimmermann’s kitchen table drinking cocoa. The dusty papers lay in a heap on the table. Jonathan put down his mug and said, “No, Lewis. I tell you again. They’re nothing to worry about. Old Isaac was crazy—crazy as a coot. This stuff has nothing to do with that ticking noise in the walls. Or if it does, it can’t help us any. It can only frighten us.”

“I’d say that was why Isaac left those papers there, wouldn’t you, Jonathan? To frighten us to death, I mean.”

This was Mrs. Zimmermann speaking. She was standing at the stove with her back to Lewis, and she was making a great show of stirring the cocoa.

“Sure. I’d say that was it, Florence,” said Jonathan, nodding. “One last trick for the road and that sort of thing.”

Lewis looked from one to the other. He knew they were covering up. But what could he say? One thing would lead to another, and before long he would have to tell about Halloween night. When you are hiding something, you get the feeling that every other secret is connected to your secret. Lewis couldn’t challenge anyone for fear of being exposed himself.

Late that same night, Lewis lay awake in his bed listening to Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann talking. They were in the study below and, as usual, their voices drifted up the hot-air register. And, as usual, he couldn’t quite make out what they were saying. He got out of bed and crawled over to the wooden grating in the floor. A warm
breath of heat softly beat at his face. He listened. Even now, he just couldn’t hear well enough. There was only one thing to do. He had to use the secret passageway.

Lewis put on his bathrobe and tiptoed down the back stairs. The kitchen was dark. Good. Slowly, carefully, he removed all the china from the shelves of the china cupboard. Then he tripped the hidden spring, and the cupboard swung outward. He walked softly in.

This time Lewis remembered to bring a flashlight. Not that he needed it much. He didn’t have far to go, and light shone through many chinks into the cobwebbed passage. Before long he was standing behind the bookcases that lined the wall of Jonathan’s study. He peered through a crack in the boards, and there, beyond the books, were Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann. Mrs. Zimmermann had just conjured up a match out of thin air, and she was lighting a long twisted cigar with it. She blew smoke out of both corners of her mouth.

“Well, now we know,” she said.

“Yes, now we know.” Jonathan’s voice came from his leather armchair, where he sat slumped. All that Lewis could see of him was one blue-sleeved arm and a set of hairy knuckles grasping the chair arm.

“The question is,” Jonathan went on, “can we do anything about it?”

Mrs. Zimmermann began to pace. Cigar smoke trailed off behind her. She scraped the large purple stone of her
ring along the whole length of a bookshelf. “Do?” she said. “Do? We fight them. What else?”

Jonathan gave a hoarse laugh. It made Lewis feel very uncomfortable.

“Easier said than done, Florence. They’re both stronger than we are, you know. We only fiddle around with magic; they gave their lives to it. As for her, she may have quite literally given her life for it.”

“But why would they want to do what they’re doing?” said Mrs. Zimmermann, folding her arms and puffing angrily at her cigar. “Why? This beautiful world. End it. Why?”

Jonathan thought a minute. “Well, Florence, I can’t really see into the workings of a mind like Isaac Izard’s, but I’d say the answer was scientific curiosity. Think of all that’s been written about the Last Day: graves opening, bodies rising up fresh and new. Some think there will be a whole new earth, much better than the present one. Wouldn’t you like to see it? And another thing occurs to me. Isaac and Selenna Izard didn’t enjoy this world very much. Why shouldn’t they try for the next one?”

Jonathan puffed on his hookah. There was silence for several minutes.

“And the clock,” said Mrs. Zimmermann. “I have to hand it to you. You were dead right. There
is
a real, literal clock in these walls. He calls it a ‘device,’ but it has to be a clock. He wasn’t kind enough to tell us where it is,
of course, though it seems to me that he tells practically everything else. He even gives hints about where he hid the key. Not that that matters now.” She broke her cigar in two and threw it into the fireplace.