The House with a Clock In Its Walls (6 page)

He wanted to do something nice for Tarby. Something nice that would really impress him and make him a stronger friend than ever. Maybe he could get Uncle Jonathan to do a magic trick for Tarby. Sure, that would do it. Lewis hesitated a minute, remembering Jonathan saying that he was only a “parlor magician.” The kind that pulled rabbits out of hats and told you what card you were holding in your hand. But then he
had
said that he knew a few tricks that went beyond that. . . .

Lewis thought some more. Oh, well, Jonathan could probably do it. Anyone who could make windows change their pictures could do what Lewis had in mind. And anyway, Lewis thought that he remembered hearing Jonathan say that he had done such a thing once.

“Hey, Lewis! I hit the ball out to you about six hours ago. Did you go to sleep?”

Lewis looked up. “Huh? Oh, gee, I’m sorry, Tarby. Say, how would you like to see my uncle eclipse the moon?”

Tarby stared at him. “What did you say?”

“I said . . . oh, c’mon, Tarby, let’s go home. It’s too dark to see the ball. C’mon and I’ll tell you all about my Uncle Jonathan. He’s a real wizard.”

The two boys walked back under the streetlights, playing catch as they went. Lewis tried to explain about Uncle Jonathan’s magic powers, but he could see that Tarby was not convinced.

“Boy, I’ll
bet
your uncle can eclipse the moon. I’ll just
bet
he can. He prob’ly sits up in his room drinking beer, and then he goes out in back and stares up at the moon, and boy does it go rround . . . and . . . rraounnd.” Tarby staggered out into the street and rolled his eyes.

Lewis felt like hitting him, but he knew that Tarby could beat him up, so he just said, “You wanta see him do it?”

“Yeah,” said Tarby in a sneery voice. “I wanta see him do it.”

“Okay,” said Lewis. “I’ll ask him tonight. When he’s ready to do it, I’ll let you know.”

“Gee, I hope I won’t have to wait too long,” said Tarby sarcastically. “I really do want to see Old Lard Guts eclipse the moo-hoo-hoo, moo-hoo-ha. . . .”

“Stop it. Stop making fun of my uncle.” Lewis’s face was red, and he was almost crying.

“Make me,” said Tarby.

“I can’t, and you know it,” said Lewis.

Tarby went on moo-hooing until they reached the
khaki-colored mailbox at the foot of High Street. This time when they split up to go home, Lewis didn’t say goodby to Tarby. He didn’t even wave. But by the time he was inside the gate at 100 High Street, Lewis had gotten over his mad—more or less—and so he went straight inside to see his uncle. He found Jonathan laying out a game of solitaire on the dining-room table. It was a complicated game called “Napoleon at St. Helena,” and the layout covered most of the ivory-colored oilcloth pad. Jonathan looked up and smiled as Lewis walked into the room.

“Hi, Lewis! How’s baseball these days?”

“Getting better, I guess. Tarby helps me a lot. Say, Uncle Jonathan, do you suppose we could do something nice for Tarby? He really is a good friend of mine.”

“Sure, Lewis. We’ll invite him to dinner. Is that what you mean?”

Lewis blushed and fidgeted. “Uh . . . well, yeah . . . kind of. Do you think that maybe after dinner we could . . . uh, that is,
you
could . . . eclipse the moon for him?”

Jonathan stared at him. “Did I tell you I could do
that?
”

“Yes. Remember, one night when you were bragging . . . er, talking to Mrs. Zimmermann about whether earth magic was stronger than moon magic? You said that a moon wizard could eclipse the moon any time he felt like it, and that you were a moon wizard.”

Jonathan smiled and shook his head. “Did I say that? My, my, how I do run on. Let me see, I do seem to recall eclipsing the moon one night in 1932. That was during a picnic out at Wilder Creek Park. I remember the date, April 30, which is Walpurgis Night. That’s the night when witches and warlocks all over the world get together for whoop-te-doos. Ours was just a convention of the Capharnaum County Magicians Society, but some of them are real wizards. At any rate, to get back to what I was saying . . . ”

“Never mind,” said Lewis, turning away with a pouty look on his face. “I’ll tell Tarby that you can’t do it.”

“Oh, Lewis!” cried Jonathan, throwing the pack of cards down on the table. “You are the most easily discouraged boy I ever met. If I did it once, I can do it again. It’s just that it’s not a normal occurrence. And everything has to be just right. In the heavens, that is.”

“Oh.”

“Yes, oh. Now, as soon as I have won this silly game from myself, you and I will go to the library and consult the almanac. So be quiet for a minute.”

Lewis fidgeted and clasped and unclasped his hands and stared at the light fixture until Jonathan finished his game. Then the two of them went to the library, slid back the panelled doors, and entered the marvelous room that smelled of damp paper, wood smoke, and Turkoman’s Terror, Jonathan’s personal tobacco blend. Jonathan
moved the stepladder to the part of the wall that contained his magic books, climbed up, and pulled down a thick dusty volume labelled:

He flipped to the section on eclipses, did some rapid mental calculations, and said, “You’re in luck, Lewis. 1948 is a good year for lunar eclipses. The planets will be favorable next Friday. Invite Tarby to dinner for that night. I’ll be ready.”

Friday night came around, and Lewis brought Tarby home for dinner. There was nothing especially magic about the meal, except that the cider jug on the table burped a lot, and that might have been because the cider was getting hard. After the dishes were cleared away, Jonathan asked Lewis and Tarby to help Mrs. Zimmermann carry some kitchen chairs out into the back yard. Then he walked out into the front hall and consulted his cane rack, a blue Willoware vase full of walking sticks of all sizes and shapes. Some had ivory or bone handles, some were tough, crooked old pieces of hickory or maplewood, and some had thin springy swords concealed inside. But only one cane was magic.

It was a long black rod of some very hard wood. At one end was a ferrule of polished brass, and at the other was a glass globe the size of a baseball. It seemed to be snowing inside the globe. Through the swirling little flakes you could see, now and then, an odd little miniature castle. The globe burned with an icy gray light. Jonathan picked up the cane, hefted it, and walked back toward the kitchen with it tucked under his arm.

Out in the back yard, the audience was ready. Mrs. Zimmermann, Lewis, and Tarby sat in straight chairs facing the birdbath. It was a chilly, clear October night. All the stars were out, and a large full moon was rising over the four elm trees at the far end of Jonathan’s yard. The screen door slammed, and everyone looked up. The magician had arrived.

Without saying a word, Jonathan went around to the north side of the house. An old mossy rain barrel stood there against the sandstone wall. Jonathan looked into the barrel, breathed three times on the dark water, and with his left forefinger cut the faintly shimmering surface into four quarters. Then he leaned low over the mouth of the barrel and began whispering in a strange language. The three spectators had not left their chairs—Jonathan had told them to stay where they were—but they craned their necks around a good deal trying to figure out what the wizard was doing.

The whispering, weirdly magnified by the mouth of
the barrel, went on for some time. Lewis twisted way around in his chair, but all he could see was the dark shape of Uncle Jonathan and the faintly glowing gray globe of the magic cane. Finally Jonathan returned. In one hand he held the cane, and in the other he had a saucepan full of rain water.

“Is your uncle going to wash his hair?” whispered Tarby.

“Oh, be quiet!” hissed Lewis. “He knows what he’s doing. Just you watch.”

Tarby, Lewis, and Mrs. Zimmermann watched anxiously as Jonathan poured the saucepan into the birdbath. Then he went back to the rain barrel for more.
Dip. Splash
. He came back with another panful. He emptied it. And he went back for a third.

The third panful seemed to be enough. Jonathan set down the empty pan and picked up his cane, which had been leaning against the birdbath. The glass ball glowed and sent out a ray of dusty gray light. The ray rested on the surface of the water in the birdbath. Jonathan made signs over the water with the cane and started muttering again.

“Come on and look,” he said, motioning to the three spectators. They got up and walked over to the birdbath. The water in the flat, shallow concrete pan had started to heave and pitch, like ocean water in a storm. Lewis was surprised to see tiny whitecaps forming. Then long
rollers began to crash silently into the rim, sending pinpoint flecks of foam out onto the grass. Jonathan watched for a while along with the rest. Then, suddenly, he raised the cane and cried, “Peace! Peace to the waters of the earth! Show unto us the round disk of the moon, even as she now appeareth in the heavens above!”

The water calmed down. Soon it was a flat pool again, and floating on the still black surface was the cold reflection of the full moon. Now Jonathan did something very unlikely. As the others watched, he bent over and pulled a small boulder out of the pile of rocks at the base of the birdbath. Then, lifting it high in the air, he shouted, “Stand back!” and dropped the rock.
Splash!
Water slopped everywhere, and Lewis did not get out of the way soon enough to keep from getting some on his shoes.

When the water had calmed down again, Jonathan picked up the rock and looked into the pool. There, wobbly and creased with ripples, was the moon’s reflection.

“Still there?” said Jonathan, grinning. “Well, we’ll just see about that!”

He reached down into the water and picked up the reflection. It might have been a trick, but the cold, icy-gray disk he held up looked like the reflection that had floated in the pool a moment before. And sure enough, when Lewis looked into the water, all he saw now was a shiny blackness.

Jonathan held up the reflection and turned it back and forth as if it were a dinner plate. The disk burned cold and bitter, and sparkled like freshly fallen snow. It hurt Lewis’s eyes to stare at it for very long. Now Jonathan snapped his wrist and sent the disk flying across the yard. It sailed clear across to the dark thicket in front of the four elm trees. Then Jonathan, cane in hand, ran off after the disk. It was a long yard and, even in the moonlight, the boys and Mrs. Zimmermann could not see what he was doing down there.

Suddenly the air was filled with the inane glockling and blockling of bamboo wind chimes. There was a set of them hanging from one of the elm trees, and Jonathan had given it a good hard yank. Now he came dancing back up the yard, dueling with shadows and saying things like, “Ha! Have at you in your bladder for a blaggardly slacker! Hoo! Hunh! And the third in his bosom!”

He stopped in front of the birdbath and held the ball of the cane up under his chin so that his face looked like an actor’s face when it is lit from below by footlights. Slowly he raised his right hand and pointed at the sky. “Look!” he cried.

All three of the spectators looked up. At first they saw nothing strange. Then, slowly, a black, tarry, drippy shadow oozed down over the face of the surprised moon. In no time at all the moon was dark, completely dark, blacked out, without even the faint brownish umbra that marks its place during an ordinary eclipse.

And now Uncle Jonathan’s back yard came to life. It was full of strange sights and sounds. The grass glowed a phosphorescent green, and red worms wriggled through the tall blades with a hushing sound. Strange insects dropped down out of the overhanging boughs of the willow tree and started to dance on the picnic table. They waltzed and wiggled in a shaking blue light, and the music they danced to, faint though it was, sounded to Lewis like “Rugbug,” the famous fox trot composed by Maxine Hollister. This was one of the tunes that Jonathan’s parlor organ played.

Uncle Jonathan walked over to the tulip bed, put his ear to the ground, and listened. He motioned for the others to join him. Lewis put his ear to the damp earth, and he heard strange things. He heard the noise that earthworms make as they slowly inch along, breaking hard black clods with their blunt heads. He heard the secret inwound conversations of bulbs and roots, and the breathing of flowers. And Lewis knew strange things, without knowing how he came to know them. He knew that there was a cat named Texaco buried in the patch of ground he knelt on. Its delicate ivory skeleton was falling slowly to pieces down there, and its dank fur was shrivelled and matted and rotten. The boy who had buried the cat had buried a sand pail full of shells near it. Lewis did not know the name of the boy, or how long ago he had buried the cat and the pail, but he could see the red and blue pail clearly. Blotches of brown rust
were eating up the bright designs, and the shells were covered with green mold.