The Presence in the Clock Shop
Excerpt: In the twilight hush of his father’s old clock shop, Theo began receiving strange, coded messages buried inside the ticking of the clocks — and he was certain they weren’t meant for him.
Theo stood amid the dim tick and sigh of his father’s shop, turning the brass key in an ancient black mantel clock. The shop hadn’t changed since before his father’s passing: the wallpaper still curling at the edges, the same brittle sign in the window, and clocks everywhere—grandfather, cuckoo, carriage—layered in undemanding, static time. For years, Theo had drifted through the familiar, the reliable: he kept the clocks wound, tinkered with the ones that faltered, and watched the local regulars pass in for repairs or friendly chatter. He spoke to the ticking, but it never answered.
But today, three days into his father’s anniversary, the clocks all stopped at precisely 4:17 p.m. No chime, no swing of the pendulums. Just silence as dense as dust.
Theo stared at his hands, the key sweaty in his palm. He wound the clock again, almost mechanically, feeling a chill work down his back: the brass felt colder than ever. When he held the ticking clock to his ear, he heard something else beneath the beat—a faint, erratic pattern, not music, not simply time. In a voice so soft and strange it almost seemed imaginary, he heard a message: three knocks, two ticks, one pause. A repeat.
That night, Theo lay in his tiny flat over the shop, unable to sleep for the ticking that wouldn’t synchronize. He remembered his father’s lessons: time is pattern, not order; clocks are memory, not just machines. Uneasily, Theo wondered if it meant something that ever since the old oak clock by the window stopped, his own memories had become harder to reach. He couldn’t remember his mother’s face, or the last word his father spoke, only the way the man had once shown him how to coax meaning from rhythm.
The next morning he waited for the town bell, but it never rang. He shuffled down to the shop, half-hoping it would all be ordinary again, but it wasn’t. The clocks were running—but slower, half a beat out of step with each other, as if each kept its own secret time. Among the clocks, on the back of the French table clock, a scrap of paper had appeared. It bore a single word, “Listen,” written in his father’s tight, looping hand.
Theo scoured his kitchen, his memory, and then the shop, for more clues. The regulars came and went, none noticing that Theo barely spoke, that he seemed always to be listening. Only Mrs. Hendricks, the widow from the post office, looked at him sideways. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said one afternoon, her voice thick with concern. “Is everything all right, Theo?”
He nearly told her about the messages, the secret syncopations. Instead, he smiled and said, “Just a little tired, Mrs. Hendricks. These old clocks need a lot more care nowadays.”
Day after day, the ticks carved coded letters into his sleeplessness. He began jotting them down: the knocks and ticks mapped into letters, forming phrases like “I AM NEAR” and “DO NOT TRUST THE CHIME.” He couldn’t say why, but each phrase left him more unsettled. Someone—or something—was using time in the shop to speak. Burdened with this lonely knowledge, Theo felt himself separating from the world: even the regulars seemed shadows on the far side of thick glass.
One evening near dusk, as rain slithered on the window, Theo heard the clocks begin to communicate—first only to him, then, it seemed, to each other. The ticking overlapped, forming a dense, layered cacophony. For a moment, Theo glimpsed himself standing outside the shop window, pale as a ghost, watching himself listen. Then it passed. He stood rooted, not knowing if he’d dozed off or simply blinked wrong.
That night, the coded message changed: “THE CHIME BREAKS THE MASK.” In the months since his father died, Theo had lived as though still waiting for the old man to come down those creaking stairs. Had he been ignoring something, hiding from an unwanted truth? Theo thought about the clocks, about rhythm and silence. When he set the clocks to chime together at midnight, the world strained around the building, growing too quiet. Paint cracked. Shadows twitched. Memory pressed in—harsh, clear, uninvited.
A voice, not his own, whispered his name from inside the grandfather clock. Theo yanked open the case: inside, behind the dangling weights, a small box glimmered in the lunar light. He opened it with shaking hands and found a key, newer than any in the shop, embossed with the word “REVEAL.” At the same moment, the shop’s clocks all froze at 12:00, and outside, the rain shimmered, stopped, and ran backward, all up the glass.
Suddenly, the room darkened and the clocks reversed: now they ran backward too, unspooling years. Theo watched as old memories grew sharp: his mother’s laughter in the fog, his father’s waning smile, the last time the clocks were all in time together. But most of all, he remembered the secret his father once whispered while teaching him to listen—to truly listen beyond the sound of time. “Sometimes,” he’d said, “when you’ve lost your place in the world, it’s because you’re meant to find it again, somewhere new.”
The shop around Theo became unfamiliar—rows of clocks now rearranged, the wallpaper new and brash, the sign glowing with electricity instead of paint. In this other present, Theo stood face to face not with Mrs. Hendricks, but with a child—his own face, younger, astonished, clutching the key he’d just found. The younger Theo stared at him, wide-eyed, and when the chimes sounded, he flinched.
Theo understood: the clocks were memories, and memory, too, can shape what’s real. In seeking the messages, Theo had awakened a sliver of himself still lost within time, still waiting for guidance. “It’s okay,” Theo whispered to the boy, to himself. “We have to listen together.”
As the younger Theo placed the key into the hidden box, time caught and shuddered; the two selves merged, the years collapsing into one another. Memory rushed into place—not only the pain but also the warm, forgiving love that underpinned it. The clocks settled back into their slow, familiar pattern, and this time, when they all chimed together, it was morning again.
Theo greeted Mrs. Hendricks with a smile he hadn’t managed in months. He noticed things he’d been blind to: the dust where his father’s gait left a trail, the comfort in odd melodies of mismatched clocks, the secret strength in watching and listening to everyone who needed help.
The messages no longer haunted him; the clocks ticked in ordinary time, and yet Theo knew he would never stop listening, never let pattern become habit. As for the key, it hung from his neck, a token of the day time offered a second chance. Whenever he felt alone, he touched it, reminding himself that memory—lived and heard—was its own kind of presence, unbroken and true.
###END###
