A Timeless Tale

From within that great house, the greatest in the neighborhood, came the tensest of tickings from the strangest of clocks. The girl who lived in the house was only sure of three things, the first two being that her name was Libby, and she served as the clock’s caretaker. She polished the face and wound it once a week (usually noon on Thursdays) with a great winding key.

The third thing she knew was the burdensome knowledge that one day, the clock would tick its last tock.

And something would happen. Something guaranteed to either destroy the last remnants of the family, or the world itself. Perhaps both.

Or so Great Grandfather Hermann had said on his deathbed, ages ago.

The weight of that something had furrowed into the hearts of her ancestors as a fungus intent on conquering. Nanny said the fear had killed Libby’s Father and Mother only five years after Libby’s birth.

The doctors had blamed a “Cardiac Event,” which sounded more like a goofy noncommittal party and than the rending of a family.

The clock had been made of red maple dangerously close to contracting heartrot (just three feet away, to be precise). It reported every hour with lolling tones, accompanied by a window opening above the clock face to reveal a scene of a lone man chopping eternally at a single tree. He never made any progress. But eventually, a fire popped up and ate away at the tree more efficiently than he ever could, and then he was thrust back inside of the clock and the window closed for another 59 minutes.

This was the simple, wooden grandfather around which her life revolved. In the absence of superfluous things like friends and imperative things like parents, Libby made a game of throwing all her dolls out the second-story window, then running downstairs to collect them and check for broken bones. She fussed over them thoroughly. She knew full well they’d never suffer; they were made of cloth and stuffing, not fine porcelain. Once she had assured them they wouldn’t die of complications (dolls were fussy things), she would hustle back to the second-story window and toss them out again.

She had a secret hope that the clock would continue ticking throughout her lifetime, and she’d become a nurse and take care of people. She’d die at the pleasant age of 76 surrounded by everyone she’d nurtured.

But Nanny said that life wasn’t kind like that, and the most she could hope for was to live a quiet life, and die without being too much trouble.

And so Libby prowled the halls, growing taller and taller and scratching each inch onto the wall to make some mark she had been there. Perhaps the marks were for archaeologists to discover thousands of years after the something happened, and they found this house at the center of the earth.

But, lately, amidst the onset of puberty, within her soul grew a restlessness. A discontentment. She’d been perfectly fine being caretaker of the clock for the last 12 years. But now, questions popped up here and there and everywhere. She’d always assumed the heartrot would stay three feet away—but maybe it had finally reached her.

Now, it was midwinter.

Libby was pleased to see not only another winter, but the middle of a winter—the darkest, richest type of winter. Nanny started a fire in the hearth of the living room, a poor attempt at heating the cavernous building. That was how Libby knew it would be the kind of snow that iced over and stayed for a while.

She went to open the second-story window to throw her dolls outside, but it had been frozen shut and was far too difficult a task. She froze—if she didn’t do this, what else could she do? She’d already counted the tiles in every bathroom and wooden planks in most of the rooms. She’d drawn secret smiley faces on the bottom of every piece of furniture.

The time was something dull, like 10:05 a.m., when the day has just started and you’re already exhausted and are more in the mindset for it to be 8:30 at night. So she had to come up with something to while away the hours.

One of the persnickety ponderings offered her an alluring pastime: exploring her parents’ bedroom. She wanted to touch her mother’s silk dresses and imagine the woman who once wore them. She wanted to search the bathroom counter for a hair, to confirm what color her father’s had been.

She wanted to know what shape to carve the half-seen memories into.

Libby had always had a sneaking suspicion that if she tried to go in her parents’ room, Nanny would appear like a spectre and warn her away. After all, Nanny was caretaker of the house, just as Libby was caretaker of the clock.

But adolescence curdles complacency into curiosity.

So Libby tiptoed to the room at the end of the second floor hallway, swallowed by shadows. She turned the gold-gilded door knob and expected it to be locked, or for the door to at least be extra heavy, but it was unlocked and as light as her own door. Hardly the kind of door that would accommodate secrets.

The room was spotless, as if Mother and Father were coming back tomorrow from a trip. The bed was made with a crispness that made Libby ashamed of her own attempts. She searched the room but could find no hairs or flakes—Nanny had done too good of a job.

Libby opened a large hope chest at the foot of the bed. Inside were piles and piles of journals, which made her heart thump a beat disjointed from the clock downstairs.

Over the next few days, she pored over all the journals. Half were her fathers, the other half were her mothers. And they weren’t hairs or smells, but they helped form the Father and Mother that lived in her mind.

In her mother’s third journal, the entries grew feverish. She rambled about the clock and the curse, and eventually fell into writing the same thing over and over.

“What if something good happens?”

The last five pages of this journal were just that statement repeatedly, with differing amounts of question marks and exclamation points.

Finally, a declaration: “I believe something good will happen.”

Why had Libby always believed what would happen would be bad? She supposed the instructions left to her on how to take care of the house declared the clock would summon evil in a matter-of-fact, black-and-white, you’re-in-serious-trouble-mister sort of way.

So then why had her mother believed something good would happen?

Imagine it—something good. There was, in her chest, a lightness she had never felt in her budding life.

Maybe, instead, the most secret desires of her heart would be granted. Maybe, in a flash of light, she would find herself with a nursing degree helping people in war zones. Maybe the dolls would become real people she could nurse back to health.

Maybe she would wake up, and realize all this nonsense about the clock had just been a terrible dream, and she would be 30 and married and surrounded by children and love.

She grew more and more convinced. At the very least, it was a toss-up: a chance something bad would happen, equal to the chance something good would happen.

But the worst that could happen was growing old within these walls, watching Nanny and herself evaporate back into the clouds. Nanny had been wrong.

With a jolt, she came back to herself and left the fairy world she’d constructed. She realized she was supposed to wind the clock today. All the hope within her was extinguished, and she ran, panicked, to the clock.

Face to face with the clock, she hesitated for a deafeningly loud second—and then—

Tick.

It was still working.

She stomached a punch to the gut. Now, hearing the incessant tick tock tick tock, she wished it would stop and she could just get the something out of the way.

She sat there on her knees, as if in front of a deity. It peeked down at her with judgmental pallor.

She needed to open the compartment at the bottom of the clock, take the winding key, and do her duty.

But her mother’s words ran through her: “What if something good happens? I believe that something good will happen.”

She shut her eyes. “I believe something good will happen. I believe something good will happen.”

Still, the clock went tick tock.

“I need something to happen. Anything. I’m just so tired.”

Still, the clock went tick tock.

She backed away from it. It glared at her with its pointy multiple noses and its protruding forehead. It hated her, and now she knew, the something that would happen would be evil, simply because she had forsaken her post. Her soul had already been lost.

She ran upstairs to throw her dolls out the window again so she could nurse them back to health and feel like a good person, but the window was still frozen shut. For the rest of the day, she couldn’t bear walking past the clock, Judas that she was.

That night, she woke up and swore she heard three ticks from the clock, like the rooster crowing thrice.

In the morning she went down the stairs with trepidation at what she had done.

The front hallway lay silent for the first time in over a hundred years. It was tomblike, in the lacking. Like something was there that recently had a soul, but no longer. Like something could have been saved, but was not.

Like a winding key had not wound the clock.

She threw herself in front of the clock and half-expected it to fall down upon her, claiming her as a final sacrifice.

But nothing happened.

There was just silence. The clock had stopped ticking.

She had waited for this moment for so long. In fact, it was a bit anticlimactic—she had hoped she would wake up outside of these walls. She went to the window in case the house had transformed around her, and now she was on a tropical island—but a familiar, snowy landscape greeted her.

What else could have happened? Perhaps time had stopped for everyone else…

She paused for a moment to consider if she’d broken time itself—but Nanny walked in with two cups of tea whispering steam.

“The clock stopped,” Libby whispered. It wasn’t the full truth, but it wasn’t a lie, either.

Nanny raised an eyebrow. “Did it now? Well…what happened?”

“That’s just it,” said Libby. “Seemingly nothing. But it must’ve been something. We’ve been waiting for this all our lives. Me, my ancestors…we’ve been doing…nothing. In the event of…something.”

Libby stared at the hushed creature. It seemed to have grown smaller overnight. Was it always that small?

“We always assumed it was something bad,” she thought out loud. “Like the end of the world. Or the earth opening up.”

She checked outside the window once more. Maybe she had been miniaturized and was now encapsulated in a snowglobe. But surely Nanny wouldn’t be with her, then.

“Well—why don’t you check the house?” Nanny suggested. “I’ll start a fire. You can check everything, make sure it’s okay, and then we’ll sit by the fire for a bit. I can even help you.”

“Okay,” Libby said. “Perhaps Mother and Father came back from the dead and are upstairs in their bedroom; they might want to play a game of cards. Or maybe the bathtub is overflowing and my tragedy is to drown.”

And so they split up, and began to tear through the house. Nanny took the first floor, and Libby took the second floor. They didn’t know exactly what they were looking for—Nanny was mainly looking for something terrible, and Libby was looking for something pleasant.

In the hallway, the clock’s minute hand moved ever so slightly. Was it like the reflexes of a snake, where even after death it can lash out? Or was it the flicker of life—of anger?

All that can be reported was that a sprinkling of sparks escaped from the hearth and fell onto the ground. They were small, but they licked the carpet ravenously and spread like heartrot. Soon the flames trailed up the table which still held the cups of tea.

The smoke reached Libby first. She left her parents bedroom, casting one last glance in case anything hit her as out of the ordinary—but everything was as it always had been.

When she got to the top of the stairs, smoke was pouring from the living room.

“Nanny!” She screamed. The flames were travelling too far too fast, as if they’d been lying in wait for this moment.

This was it. This was what would happen, if she did not wind the clock, if she did not polish its faces.

“Libby!” Nanny emerged from the gullet of the house and quickly took inventory of the situation: the flames, the child. The fire neared the clock, which glowed red and seemed to lean forward in a threatening manner. The inferno reeled, then turned to easier territory: the stairs.

“I have to save my dolls!” Libby foolishly retreated up the stairs. Nanny took them two by two and grabbed her by the arm.

“They’ll be fine!” Nanny lied. “They have practiced jumping from the window many times, without harm. Come outside with me, and nurse them at the bottom.”

Libby followed her, but she cried fat tears as Nanny towed her towards the back door. But just then, a fiery wooden beam fell from the ceiling and denied them their exit.

“We’re trapped!” Libby sobbed. Nanny prayed for forgiveness that she hadn’t believed in the curse. She fell to her knees and raised her eyes to the ceiling, where the fallen beam had left a searing wound.

If only Libby were on the second floor, and she could hurl herself from the window into the snow. It always looked so plushy, like her favorite down pillow.

Window.

Libby grabbed a nearby lamp, heavy and ancient and hideous. No one would miss it. She rammed it into the nearest window once, twice, three times. Nanny awoke from her stupefaction when she saw that the glass was cracking.

She took the lamp from the little girl and finished the job. Crash! Was it the window, or the dining room collapsing in on itself? Crash! Was it the last chunks of glass, or the living room imploding?

Nanny helped Libby out the window. She landed delicately on the downy snow. Then, Nanny climbed out the window, careful to gather her skirts about her.

They stood there, for a while, in the snow. The fire went tssss when it reached the frozen tundra; it wanted to crisp Libby and bake the Nanny. But they were too far away. It protested with a groaning of the house, and a collapsing of a few more beams.

Libby sniffed. The tears at her eyes formed icicles, which entertained her enough to keep her from sobbing. “My dolls aren’t safe, are they?”

Nanny shook her head. “Probably not.”

“But we are.”

Nanny nodded. “I suppose there really was something to that clock story.”

Libby couldn’t look away from the mesmerizing fire. As comforting as the fire they’d set in the hearth in the living room.

“I didn’t wind the clock today,” Libby admitted in a solemn whisper. “I found Mother’s old journals. She was convinced something good would happen. And so, I was convinced too.” She shuddered. “I thought I could bring the onset. We could stop waiting and wondering. I could become a nurse, and—”

Her house was a charred crust; a seashell abandoned by its owner, only able to sing songs of the ocean it once knew. “I’m not sure what I did.”

“All there is to do is to go forward. And to not cause a scene.” Nanny was so practical.

Eventually, the cold nipped at their fingers, and they realized how unprepared they were to be standing in the snow. They flagged a car down and caught a ride to town.

Nanny sensibly kept cash in her bra for times such as these, and she bought each of them a new coat. Then she went about leasing an apartment with her savings, and the two made up for lost time.

The house had tried to stunt Libby’s growth by hiding her from the sun and making her wait for her sure demise; now, she read voraciously and learned with almost an angry ambition.

For years, Libby was haunted by the knowledge that she had brought on the terrible something by shirking her duty. But sometimes, you can only know the true nature of a happening once it is a pinprick on the horizon.

In the rearview mirror of her life, Libby realized—refusing to wind the clock that last time caused something good to happen. Just as her mother had hoped.

And finally—she was timeless.