12.
 Arthur tired of the conversation and didn’t answer. It opened too many old wounds, and didn’t solve anything. He had not spoken with his children Eddie and Katie (or their spouses and children) in more years than that. It seemed like an eternity…an eternity since the days of those smiling family portraits, the little kids, the innocence, the hopes, the family trips. Come to think of it, he’d never actually planned any of it. Gretchen had always organized all those things, be it the trip to the Grand Canyon, or a trip to the photographer’s for a family portrait. Arthur had always been too busy at the bank to think of those things. He still really missed Gretchen , though that last sorrow-filled year of her dying from leukemia was over a decade ago.
“Here we are,” Cup handle said, and Arthur was grateful for the break in his dreary thoughts. They got out and Cup handle punched in a number code on a pad beside a door, and then they were in the dry, temperature-controlled storage building. The stairs were unfinished plywood, the walls unfinished drywall. It was all as utilitarian and spare as could be. Cuphandle said: “Here’s your unit.”
“So how long has this clock sat here?” Arthur asked as the door swung open.
“Way longer than I’ve been here, and that’s about two years.” As he spoke, Cuphandle seemed to grow larger somehow, or was it his shadow thrown on the rough wall behind him by the hallway light? The closer he stood to the clock, the stronger his beard shadow, the bigger his forehead, and the higher his collar stood up around his ears. At first, Arthur didn’t quite notice these apparent changes much.
There the clock was: every bit as lovely and complex as Major Jarlid had said. The clock was feminine, with a full bottom and a narrow waist and a tapering top. Its clock face shimmered like an engraving with a thousand fine lines whirling in fingerprint complexity. Its numbers were Roman, large, stark, and black. Every available corner, surface, and edge was decorated with the finest carvings on marble and wood and metal surfaces. It gleamed, and seemed to call Arthur to it.
“Do you have the vest pocket watch?” Cuphandle asked.
“The what?” As Arthur regarded him, he noticed that the man seemed to have changed. Startled, Arthur pulled out the stop watch. “You mean this?”
“Yes.” Cuphandle grinned and rubbed his hands together. “So you signed the contract, I take it, and the clock is yours?”
“Yes,” Arthur said almost breathlessly. He hardly noticed the other man’s excited breathing, flushed cheeks, and gleaming eyes. The trainman’s watch burned in his palm as he took it out and held it up to the grandfather (grandmother?) clock. The clock almost pulled his eyes toward it, and there, just under the round clock face, was a depression shaped just like the watch.
“Go on,” Cuphandle urged. “You have to do this yourself. Go on, listen to your heart. The clock is telling you what to do.”
In modern, digitoid parlance, this was a kind of docking station for the watch. Without debating, Arthur held up the watch and moved it close to the concavity. The watch fit in, was almost sucked in, with the satisfying click of an expensive car door whispering shut. Levers and ratchets ground powerfully as the clock pulled its heart close, its child, its nestling. In that moment, something came over the clock and indeed over the entire room. Arthur half expected the clock to begin booming out the hours. Instead, a change happened in the clock face. He saw now what it was: He’d seen only the hour and minute hands, typical of clocks of its era. Now it seemed the clock face became animated in greater detail. A second-hand began ticking around the circle, and the clock’s tocking grew in intensity. Arthur wondered who had kept it wound all this time. Did it have an atomic engine of some sort? Had alchemists at the court of the Sun King, or at the divan of the Sultan, contrived to stoke this grand clock with a smidgin of the sun’s almost inexhaustible power? Did the fire of the sun and the gravity of the moon somehow keep its esoteric engines grinding in refined synchronicity?
“The energy of Time itself,” Cuphandle whispered. He seemed to have grown until he was eight feet tall. His upper arms had grown massive, rippling with muscles as he folded them across his chest. His clothing had changed, also, to something resembling a hybrid between a khaki flight suit and Turkish dress with pantaloons and puffy blouse. “Do you know who I am?” he boomed at Arthur.
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Copyright © 2014 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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