The clock was a monster, its flat brass dial so richly studded with circles and hands and curious symbols that it looked like a cross scowly face. Martin dragged over a stool, the better to study it eye to eye, as it were. Cool, damp air breathed from inside its cabinet as it would from the mouth of a cave. As we watched the clock whirred to life and chimed the hour: nine o’clock at night.

Little Jane yawned. Martin stared at the clock furiously, meeting its crooked gaze, mussing his own hair without noticing it, as he did when something vexed him.

He hopped down.

“Bloody hell,” he said. “Rupes, take a look inside. What do you see?”

I obediently bent my head to look into the cabinet, and Martin pinned my arms and attempted to shove me inside. It was his idea of a joke. He was always shouldering me into closets and down stairs. There was nothing sinister in it, we were just bored to sobs.

“Leave off, Martin,” Fiona said, but without much conviction.

We tussled; the clock wobbled dangerously; he was stronger, but leverage was on my side, and eventually I got my shoulders jammed in the opening in such a way as to make further progress impossible. I sometimes wonder if things would have been different had he succeeded. But as it was he saw there was no more fun to be had, and he let me up. I was red-faced and breathing hard, my collar popped up on one side. He swaggered away in a circle to show that he hadn’t really meant it.

“Really, have a look,” he said. “There’s no works inside. No pendulum. What makes it go?”

No one was much intrigued by this mystery. Jane picked at a bit of peeling wallpaper. Fiona leaned against a wall and rolled her eyes at boys.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll get in myself.”

Martin was determined to get some comic material out of this empty clock, one way or the other. As the eldest I think he felt responsible for entertaining us. He began stuffing himself into the clock’s wooden body. I don’t think he expected to succeed—his shoulders were filling out even then—and I remember his curious frown when he reached an arm in and couldn’t find the back. He ducked whole upper body inside. It looked like stage magic, one of Houdini’s trapdoor boxes.

I saw him hesitate, but only for a moment. He put one foot in, then the other, then he was gone. We all looked at each other. Fiona, irritated at the idea that a trick was being played on her, put her head in next. Only seven and small for her age, she barely had to duck. She disappeared inside too.

Helen and I stared.