The House with a Clock In Its Walls by John Bellairs Read Free Book Online Page A

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 longrollers 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