Here, suddenly, was the immense, frightening machinery of the Enemy, the Teller of Lives and Time. Here was the core of the town and its existence. Doug could feel all of the lives of the people he knew moving in the clock, suspended in bright oils and meshed in sharp cogs and ground down in clamped springs that clicked onward with no stopping. The clock moved silently. And now he knew that it had never ticked. No one in the town had ever actually heard it counting to itself; they had only listened so hard that they had heard their own hearts and the time of their lives moving in their wrists and their hearts and their heads. For here was only cold metal silence, quiet motion, gleams and glitters, murmurs and faint whispers of steel and brass.

Douglas trembled.

They were together at last, Doug and the clock that had risen like a lunar face throughout his life at every midnight. At any moment the great machine might uncoil its brass springs, snatch him up, and dump him in a grinder of cogs to mesh its endless future with his blood, in a forest of teeth and tines, waiting, like a music box, to play and tune his body, ribboning his flesh.

And then, as if it had waited just for this moment, the clock cleared its throat with a sound like July thunder. The vast spring hunched in upon itself as a cannon prepares for its next concussion. Before Douglas could turn, the clock erupted.

One! Two! Three!

It fired its bells! And he was a moth, a mouse in a bucket being kicked, and kicked again. An earthquake shook the tower, jolting him off his feet.

Four! Five! Six!

He staggered, clapping his hands over his ears to keep them from bursting.

Again, again – Seven! Eight! – the tempest tore the air. Shaken he fell against the wall, eyes shut, his heart stopped with each storm of sound.

‘Quick!’ Douglas shouted. ‘The crackers!’

‘Kill the darn thing!’ shouted Tom.

‘I’m supposed to say that,’ said Doug. ‘Kill it!’

There was a striking of matches and a lighting of fuses and the crackers were thrown into the maw of the vast machine.

Then there was a wild stomping and commotion as the boys fled.

They bolted through the third–floor window and almost fell down the fire escape and as they reached the bottom great explosions burst from the courthouse tower; a great metal racketing clangor. The clock struck again and again, over and over as it fought for its life. Pigeons blew like torn papers tossed from the roof. Bong! The clock voice chopped concussions to split the heavens. Ricochets, grindings, a last desperate twitch of hands. Then …

Silence.

At the bottom of the fire escape all the boys gazed up at the dead machine. There was no ticking, imagined or otherwise, no singing of birds, no purr of motors, only the soft exhalations of sleeping houses.