The House with a Clock in Its Walls (Lewis Barnavelt, #1)

by John Bellairs

It smelled like Old Spice talcum powder. Books that smelled that way were usually fun to read.

He loved to eat candy while he read, and lots of his favorite books at home had brown smudges on the corners of the pages.

He remembered the other window very well. It had been a big oval window that showed a red tomato sun setting into a blue sea the color of old medicine bottles. The oval frame was still there, but in it Lewis found a window that showed a man fleeing from a forest. The forest was plum colored, and the grass under the man’s feet was bright green. The sky in the picture was a squirming, oily, brownish-red. It reminded Lewis of furniture polish.

He would have to find out why Jonathan prowled the house every night with a flashlight in his hand.

They weren’t new troubles. They were the troubles that a fat boy who can’t play baseball carries around with him from place to place.

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.

But it was full of strange things, most of them purple. Mrs. Zimmermann had a thing about the color purple. Her rugs, her wallpaper, her staircase runner, her toilet paper, and her bath soap were all purple. So was the large surrealistic painting of a dragon that hung in her living room. It had been done for her specially by the French painter Odilon Redon.

But it was not until he was a grown-up man, working as an astronomer at Mount Palomar, that he was able to discover that property of the magic egg.

When you are hiding something, you get the feeling that every other secret is connected to your secret.