Douglas climbed the stairs.

Two. Three.

Four. Five.

Reaching the tower window, Douglas looked out upon an ocean of rooftops and the great monster clock tower as time summed itself up.

Six. Seven.

His heart floundered.

Eight. Nine.

His flesh turned to snow.

Ten. Eleven.

A shower of dark leaves fell from a thousand trees.

Twelve!

Oh my God, yes, he thought.

The clock! Why hadn’t he thought of that?

The clock!

Chapter Twenty-One

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The last vibration of the great clock bell faded.

A wind swayed the trees outside and the pekoe curtain hung out on the air, a pale ghost.

Douglas felt his breath siphon.

You, he thought. How come I never noticed?

The great and terrible courthouse clock.

Just last year, hadn’t Grandpa laid out the machinery’s blueprint, lecturing?

The huge round lunar clock was a gristmill, he’d said. Shake down all the grains of Time – the big grains of centuries, and the small grains of years, and the tiny grains of hours and minutes – and the clock pulverized them, slid Time silently out in all directions in a fine pollen, carried by cold winds to blanket the town like dust, everywhere. Spores from that clock lodged in your flesh to wrinkle it, to grow bones to monstrous size, to burst feet from shoes like turnips. Oh, how that great machine at the town’s center dispensed Time in blowing weathers.

The clock!

That was the thing that bleached and ruined life, jerked people out of bed, hounded them to schools and graves! Not Quartermain and his band of old men, or Braling and his metronome; it was the clock that ran this town like a church.

Even on the clearest of nights it was misted, glowing, luminous, and old. It rose above town like a great dark burial mound, drawn to the skies by the summoning of the moon, calling out in a grieved voice of days long gone, and days that would come no more, whispering of other autumns when the town was young and all was beginning and there was no end.

‘So it’s you,’ whispered Douglas.

Midnight, said the clock. Time, it said, Darkness. Flights of night birds flew up to carry the final peal away, out over the lake and into the night country, gone.

Doug yanked down the shade so Time could not blow through the screen.

The clock light shone on the sidings of the house like a mist breathing on the windows.

Chapter Twenty-Two

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

‘Boy, I just heard the craziest things.’ Charlie strolled up, chewing on a clover–blossom. ‘I got me a secret service report from some girls.’

‘Girls!’

Charlie smiled at how his ten–inch firecracker had blown the laziness off his pals’ faces. ‘My sister said way back last July they got old lady Bentley to admit she never was young. I thought you’d like that news.’

‘Charlie, Charlie!’