The House with a Clock In Its Walls by John Bellairs Page A

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 personinsisting 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 ahorribly 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.