“Now turn on the alarm, sir,” Jupiter requested.
Mr. Felix did. Instantly the terrifying scream filled the little shop. Mr. Felix hurriedly moved the small knob on the back of the clock. The scream died away to a mere whisper. Mr. Felix picked up the clock and studied the back. He smiled.
“I remember this clock now,” he said. “That was a tricky job, though no more tricky than others I have done.”
“Then you made the clock scream?” Pete asked.
“Yes, I did. An ingenious mechanism, wouldn’t you say? But I am afraid I cannot tell you for whom I did it. All work that I do is confidential.”
“Yes, sir,” Jupiter said. “But you see, this clock was found thrown out in some trash. It must have been an accident. The owner obviously paid you a lot of money to make it scream for him, and he can’t have meant to throw it away. We’d like to return it.”
“I see,” said Mr. Felix thoughtfully.
“We were hoping there might be a reward,” Bob put in.
Mr. Felix nodded. “Well, that’s perfectly proper. Yes, it must have been discarded by accident. The clock works perfectly well Under the circumstances I believe that I can tell you as much as I am able. The name of the customer for whom I did the work was Clock.”
“Clock?” Bob and Pete repeated the word in surprise.
“He called himself A. Clock. Of course I always thought he was making a joke because he brought me a number of clocks to work on from time to time.”
“It doesn’t sound like a real name,” Jupiter mused. “But if he gave you his address, it wouldn’t matter. We could go there anyway.”
“Unfortunately, he just gave me a telephone number. Still, you could call him.”
He popped behind a counter and brought out a big record book. He turned a few pages, and stopped.
“A. Clock,” he read, “Telephone number — ”
And he gave a number which Bob, as record keeper, jotted down in a notebook.
“Can you tell us anything else, sir?” Jupiter asked. Mr. Felix shook his head.
“That’s all,” he said. “Perhaps I have said too much. Now excuse me, I have work to do. Time is precious, young gentlemen, and must be used well. Good-bye.”
He scurried off. Jupiter squared his shoulders.
“Well, we’ve made some progress,” he said. “Now we’ll go out and telephone that number. I saw a telephone booth at the corner.”
“What are you going to say?” Pete asked as Jupiter was entering the booth.
“I’m going to use strategy to get the address,” Jupe replied.
Bob and Pete squeezed in with him so they could listen to the conversation. The First Investigator dropped in a coin and dialled the number. After a moment a woman’s voice answered.
“Good afternoon,” Jupiter said, making his voice deep enough to sound like an adult. Jupe had a lot of acting ability, which he occasionally put to good use. “This is the telephone company calling. We are having trouble with crossed circuits.”
“Crossed circuits? I don’t understand,” the woman answered.
“We have had complaints of parties in your section getting wrong numbers,” Jupiter said. “Could you tell me the address from which you are answering? It will help us check the circuits.”
“The address? Why, this is 309 Franklin Street. But I don’t see how — ”
She was interrupted by a scream. It was a deep-voiced scream, as of a large man terribly frightened. All three boys would have jumped at the sound if they hadn’t been wedged into the phone booth so tightly. Then the phone went dead.
“Very good, Master Jones,” Worthington agreed. He drove slowly down Franklin Street. It was in the older part of town, once fashionable, and the houses that lined it were large, though somewhat rundown.
“There it is!” Pete cried.
Worthington stopped at the kerb. The boys climbed out and started up the walk, eyeing the house with interest. The shades were pulled down and the house almost seemed abandoned. There were two steps to the front door. The boys climbed them and Jupiter rang the bell.
For a long time nothing happened. Then the door creaked open. A woman stood there. She was not very old but she looked tired and unhappy.
“Excuse me,” Jupiter said. “May we speak to Mr. Clock?”
“Mr. Clock?” The woman seemed puzzled. “There’s nobody here by that name.”
“Perhaps that isn’t his real name,” Jupiter said. “But he’s someone interested in clocks. And he lives here. Or at least he used to.”
“Interested in clocks? You must mean Mr. Hadley. But Mr. Hadley is — ”
“Don’t tell them anything,” a voice suddenly broke in, and a black-haired boy of about seventeen pushed in front of the woman. He scowled at The Three Investigators. “Don’t even talk to them, Mom. Shut the door. They have no business coming here and asking questions.”
“Now, Harry,” his mother reproved the boy. “That’s not polite. They seem like perfectly nice boys and they’re looking for Mr. Hadley. At least I guess it’s Mr. Hadley.”
“Was it Mr. Hadley who screamed a few minutes ago?” Jupiter asked unexpectedly.
The boy glared at him. “Yes, it was!” he replied loudly. “That was his dying scream. Now you better get away from here, because we have to bury Mr. Hadley.” With that he slammed the door shut. “Did you hear that?” Pete exclaimed.
“They’ve killed somebody and now they have to bury him!”
“Hadn’t we better call the police?” Bob asked.
“Not yet,” Jupiter said. “We need more facts. We have to try to get into this house.”
“You mean break in?” Bob asked.
“No.” Jupe shook his head. “We have to get these people to let us in. I see Harry peeking through the window beside the door. I’m going to ring again.”
He rang, hard. The door flew open.
“I said to go away!” Harry shouted. “We don’t want anybody bothering us.”
“We don’t want to bother you,” Jupiter said quickly. “We’re investigating a mystery and we’d like your help. Look, here’s our business card.”
He whipped out one of the cards all three carried. Harry took it and looked at it. It said:
“What are the question marks for?” Harry sneered. “Do they mean you don’t know what you’re doing?”
“They stand for mysteries unsolved, riddles unanswered, puzzles of any kind,” Jupiter said. “Our motto is right there, ‘We Investigate Anything.’ Right now we’re investigating a very strange clock. See, here it is.”
He brought out the clock and handed it to Harry. Curiosity made the boy look it over.
“What’s so mysterious about it?” Harry demanded.
“We’ll demonstrate if you’ll let us use an electric socket,” Jupiter said.
He stepped forward as if certain that Harry would let him in. Harry stood aside and they entered a dark, narrow hallway, with stairs on one side going up to the second floor. On the other side was a big grandfather clock, going tick-tock, tick-tock. Beside the clock was a table with a telephone.
Bob and Pete peered around for the body of the mysterious Mr. Hadley, but they saw nothing. Jupiter spotted an electricity point beside the grandfather clock.
“I’ll just plug the clock in here,” he said, “and now I’ll switch on the alarm lever and — listen!”
The clock screamed again. Its eerie wail in the dark hall brought out goose-pimples on Pete and Bob.
“There” Jupiter said, unplugging the clock.
“Wouldn’t you say that’s a mysterious clock worth investigating?”
“Nope!” Harry answered rudely. “Anyone can make a clock scream. Listen and I’ll show you.”
He reached behind the grandfather clock and pulled out an electric cord. He plugged it in and their hair stood on end as a man’s deep voice rose in a scream, then faded away, as if he were falling over a high cliff.
The grandfather clock had screamed! This must be what they had heard over the telephone earlier.
The woman came hurrying out of a back room.
“Harry, for goodness sake, what — ” she began. Then she saw The Three Investigators. “Oh,” she said in confusion, “you let them in. What are you doing, Harry? What do they want here?”
“They have a screaming clock,” Harry said as he pulled out the electric cord. “A little one. I never saw it before but it must have been Mr. Hadley’s.”
He took the clock from the table and handed it to his mother. She shook her head.
“No, I never saw it before,” she said. “You’re sure it was Mr. Hadley’s?”
“Positive, Mom,” Harry said. “Nobody else would have a clock fixed so it would scream, would they?”
“No,” his mother shook her head. “I guess not. But where did these boys get it?”
“I don’t know yet,” Harry said, still sounding almost angry but more friendly than he had been. “They’re some kind of investigators and since they have one of Mr. Hadley’s clocks I figured I might as well see what they want.”
He opened a door and gestured for the three to go through it. They found themselves in a spacious library with panelled walls. On the walls were several framed oil paintings and at the other end of the room was a large mirror which reflected them and made the room seem bigger. There were shelves from floor to ceiling containing hundreds of books.
But what they noticed most were the clocks. There were a dozen or more of them in the room, some standing on the floor like the grandfather clock, others on tables and shelves. They all seemed old and valuable. Apparently they had all been electrified, as they didn’t tick, but merely hummed.
“You see those clocks?” Harry demanded. “Well, I’ll tell you something. Every one of them screams.”
Harry sat at a desk, manipulating a set of switches to make the room scream. It was now apparent to The Three Investigators that all of the clocks in the room were equipped with screaming devices, probably similar to that in their alarm clock, and Harry was making them scream one by one and all together, with the ease of much practice.
He grinned at them, enjoying their amazement, and finally turned all the switches off, letting the room become silent.
“Bet you never heard anything like that before,” he said. “You can see why your clock didn’t mean anything to me. I’m used to clocks screaming.”
“Is this room soundproofed?” Jupiter asked. “If it isn’t, the neighbours will certainly be calling the police by now.”
“Of course it’s soundproofed,” Harry said loftily. “This is Mr. Hadley’s screaming room. He used to sit here at night and make all the clocks scream. He taught me how to do it before he — anyway, he taught me.”
“Did something happen to Mr. Hadley?” Jupiter asked.
“No, of course not. Why should it?” Harry flared up.
“You started to say, ‘before he — ’ then you stopped. I thought you might have been going to say something happened to him.”
“He went away, that’s all. What’s it to you, anyway?”
“We started out to investigate a screaming clock,” Jupiter said. “Now we’ve run into a whole roomful of screaming clocks. It seems to me we have a much bigger mystery. Why should anyone have so many clocks fixed so they could scream like people and animals? It just doesn’t make sense.”
“I’ll buy a double helping of that,” Pete agreed. “It’s about as wacky as anything I ever heard of.”
“It was Mr. Hadley’s hobby.” Harry was defensive now. “A hobby doesn’t have to make sense. He wanted a hobby nobody else had and he collected screaming clocks. What’s your hobby?” He shot the final question at Jupiter.
“Solving mysteries,” Jupe said. “Like this one.”
“I tell you there isn’t any mystery here!”
“Well, maybe there isn’t a mystery but something’s bothering you. You act as if you hate everybody. Why not tell us about it? Maybe we could help somehow.”
“How could you help?” Harry flared up. “I mean, there’s nothing bothering me. Except you guys. You’re bothering me. Now why don’t you get out and leave me alone.”
He ran to the door and opened it.
“This way out!” he said. “And don’t come back because — oh!” He broke off suddenly. The front door of the house had opened and a large man was coming in. He was not too tall, but he was very broad across the shoulders. He looked at Harry, then stared at the three boys. He scowled.
“What’s this, Harry?” he demanded. “You’ve brought friends in the house to play, to make a lot of noise, to upset me? You know I must have absolute quiet.”
“We aren’t making any noise, Mr. Jeeters,”
Harry said, his tone sullen. “Anyway, this room is soundproof.”
The big man gave Bob, Pete and Jupiter a long look, as if memorizing their appearance.
“I’ll have to have a little talk with your mother,” he said.