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

of a name at all. It was as if someone else was guiding his hand. With one last down-stroke of the chalk he completed the word:
Selenna
. It was a strange name. Lewis had never known anyone called Selenna. He didn’t even know how to pronounce the name. But there it was.
    He stood up with the creased paper in his hand. Nowhe started to chant in a high-pitched nervous voice:
Aba bēbē bachabē
 . . . 
    He stopped. Tarby, who was crouched beside him, grabbed his arm and squeezed it hard. From deep within the tomb came a sound.
Boom!
A deep hollow sound. The iron doors jolted, as if they had been struck a blow from inside. The chain rattled, and there was a
clunk
on the pavement. The padlock had fallen off. And now, as the boys knelt, terrified, two small spots of freezing gray light appeared. They hovered and danced before the doors of the tomb, which now stood ajar. And something black—blacker than the night, blacker than ink spilled into water—was oozing from the space between the doors.
    Tarby shook Lewis and squeezed his arm harder. “Run!” he shouted.
    They tumbled over the bank and started to scramble down the hillside. Part of the way Lewis slid on his belly, with roots scratching at his face. He clawed at the wet slippery grass, but he could not get a handhold. Then he was tumbling over and over, and then he was sliding on his back. Rocks scraped his shoulder blades and bumped the back of his head. And then he was sitting on the dirt road, thoroughly shaken and sick and scared.
    The moon drifted out from behind a thin veil of clouds and stared down at Lewis as if it were scared too. Tarby was sprawled near him in a weedy ditch. He got up quickly and stared back up the hillside. Now he was tugging at Lewis’s arm. “Come on! We’ve got to get out of here! It might come after us! Oh, come on! Please come on!”

    Lewis was dazed and shaken, but he got up and followed Tarby over the next stage of the hillside, and the next one. They waded across the stream and were soon on the gravel road that led back to New Zebedee.
    As they walked along, Lewis kept stopping and shuddering. Tarby told him to quit it.
    “I can’t help it,” said Lewis in a sick voice. “Did you see it? It was awful!”
    “I don’t know what I saw,” said Tarby sullenly. “Maybe it was the moonlight or something.”
    Lewis stared at him. Was Tarby kidding, or was he trying to deny to himself that he had seen what he really had seen? Lewis didn’t know, and he didn’t care. All he knew was that he was terribly frightened.
    Lewis sneaked back into the house a little before three A.M. He tiptoed up the back stairs, checked to make sure that his uncle was asleep—he was—and quietly opened the door of his own room. Just as quietly, he shut it behind him. Then he slowly began to strip off his wet and dirty clothes, which he wadded up and threw into a dark corner of his closet. Where was his flashlight? Tarby must have taken it. He would get it back from him later. As for the clothes, he could get them cleaned without Jonathan knowing about it.
    Lewis went to bed. He tried to sleep, but all he could see when he closed his eyes were those two burningcircles of light. Finally he did drift off, but he had a strange dream. Clock hands and skeleton bones were chasing him around and around a high stone tomb. Lewis awoke with a start and, for a moment, it seemed that his room, and the whole house, was filled with a loud ticking noise.

CHAPTER SIX
    The next morning, when Lewis came down to breakfast, Uncle Jonathan was reading an article on the front page of the New Zebedee
Chronicle
. Curious, Lewis leaned over his shoulder and this is what he read:
    TOMB DESECRATED BY VANDALS

    Answers Sought to Senseless Act

    Last night vandals broke into the Old Izard mausoleum in Oakridge Cemetery. The doors of the tomb were found standing ajar, with the padlock lying shattered on the pavement. This incident has sadly marred what wasotherwise a