Here in this one building, lives were slotted, alphabetized in files and fingerprints; the children’s destinies put under seal! Men with blizzard faces and lightning–colored hair, carrying Time in their briefcases, hurried by to serve the clock, to run it with great sprockets and gears. At twilight they stepped out, all smiles, having found new ways to constrict, imprison, or entangle lives in fees and licenses. You could not even prove your death without these men, this building, this clock, and a certificate duly inked, stamped, and signed.
‘Here we are,’ whispered Douglas, all his pals clustered around him. ‘It’s almost quittin’ time. We gotta be careful. If we wait too long it’ll be so shut up there’ll be no way to get in. Right at twilight, when the last doors are being locked, that’s when we make our move, right? As they come out, we go in.’
‘Right,’ said everyone.
‘So,’ said Douglas. ‘Hold your breath.’
‘It’s held,’ said Tom. ‘But Doug, I got something to say.’
‘What?’ said Doug.
‘You know that no matter when we go in, if we go in all together, someone’s going to see us and they’re going to remember our faces and we’re going to get in trouble. It was bad enough with the chess pieces out front of the courthouse. We were seen, and we had to give everything back. So, why don’t we wait until it’s all locked up?’
‘We can’t do that. I just said why.’
‘Tell you what,’ said Tom. ‘Why don’t I go in now and hide in the men’s until everyone’s gone home? Then I’ll sneak upstairs and let you in one of the windows near the clock tower. Up there, on the third floor.’ He pointed to a spot high up the ancient brick walls.
‘Hey!’ said all the gang.
‘That won’t work,’ said Doug.
‘Why not?’ said Tom.
Before Doug had time to think of a reason, Charlie piped up.
‘Sure it’ll work,’ said Charlie. ‘Tom’s right. Tom, you want to go in and hide now?’
‘Sure,’ said Tom.
Everyone was looking at Doug, still their general, and he had to give his approval.
‘What I don’t like,’ said Doug, ‘is smart alecks who think they know everything. Okay, go in and hide. When it gets dark, let us in.’
‘Okay,’ said Tom.
And he was gone.
People were coming out through the big bronze doors and Doug and the others pulled back around the corner of the building and waited for the sun to go down.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The courthouse was finally completely quiet and the night was dark and the boys climbed up the fire escape on the side of the building, very quietly, until they got up to the third floor, near the clock tower.
They stopped at the window where Tom was supposed to appear, but no one was there.
‘Gosh,’ said Doug. ‘I hope he didn’t get locked in the men’s room.’
‘They never lock the men’s room,’ said Charlie. ‘He’ll be here.’
And sure enough, all of a sudden, there was Tom behind the glass pane, waving to them and opening and shutting his mouth, but they couldn’t hear what he was saying.
At long last he raised the window and the smell of the courthouse rushed out into the night around them.
‘Get in,’ commanded Tom.
‘We are,’ said Doug, angrily.
One by one the boys crawled inside the courthouse and snuck along the hallways till they reached the clock machinery door.
‘I bet you,’ said Tom, ‘this darned door’s locked, too.’
‘No bets,’ said Doug, and rattled the doorknob. ‘Good grief! Tom, I hate to say it, but you’re right. Has anybody got a firecracker?’
Suddenly six hands reached into six dungaree pockets and just as suddenly reappeared with three four–inchers and a few five–inch crackers.
‘It’s no good,’ said Tom, ‘unless someone has matches.’
More hands reached out with matches in each.
Doug stared at the door.
‘How can we fix the crackers so they’ll really do some good when they go off?’
‘Glue,’ said Tom.
Doug shook his head, scowling.
‘Yeah, glue, right,’ he said. ‘Does anyone just happen to have any glue on them?’
A single hand reached out on the air. It was Pete’s.
‘Here’s some Bulldog glue,’ he said. ‘Bought it for my airplane models and because I like the great picture of the bulldog on the label.’
‘Let’s give it a try.’
Doug applied glue along the length of one of the five–inchers and pressed it against the outside of the machinery room door.
‘Stand back,’ he said, and struck a match.
With his mob back in the shadows and his hands over his ears, Doug waited for the cracker to go off. The orange flame sizzled and zipped along the fuse.
There was a beautiful explosion.
For a long moment they all stared at the door in disappointment and then, very slowly, it drifted open.
‘I was right,’ said Tom.
‘Why don’t you just shut up,’ said Doug. ‘C’mon.’
He pulled the door and it opened wide.
There was a sound below.
‘Who’s there?’ a voice cried from deep down in the courthouse.
‘Ohmigosh,’ whispered Tom. ‘I bet that’s the janitor.’
‘Who’s up there?’ the voice cried again.
‘Quick!’ said Doug, leading his army through the door.
And now, at last, they were inside the clock.
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 a
gain 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.
At any moment the boys, looking up, expected the slain tower face, hands, numerals, guts, to groan, slide, and tumble in a grinding avalanche of brass intestines and iron meteor showers, down, down upon the lawn, heaping, rumbling, burying them in minutes, hours, years, and eternities.
But there was only silence and the clock, a mindless ghost, hanging in the sky with limp, dead hands, saying naught, doing nothing. Silence and yet another long silence, while all about lights blinked on in houses, bright winks stretching out into the country, and people began to come out on porches and wonder at the darkening sky.
Douglas stared up, all drenched with sweat, and was about to speak when:
‘I did it!’ cried Tom.
‘Tom!’ cried Doug. ‘We! All of us did it. But, good grief, what did we do?’
‘Before it falls on us,’ said Tom, ‘we’d better run.’
‘Who says?’ said Douglas.
‘Sorry,’ said Tom.
‘Run!’ cried Doug.
And the victorious army ran away into the night.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
It was the middle of the night and Tom still couldn’t sleep.
Doug knew this because several times he heard Tom’s bedclothes fall to the floor, as if he were tossing and turning, and each time he heard the sound of the sheets and coverlet being reassembled.
At about two in the morning Doug went down to the icebox and brought a dish of ice cream up to Tom, which, he figured, might cause Tom to speak more freely.
Tom sat up in bed and hardly touched the ice cream. He sat there staring at it as it melted and then said, ‘Doug, an awful thing has happened.’
‘Yeah, Tom,’ said Doug.
‘We thought if we stopped the big courthouse clock we might stop the old people from holding on to – stealing – our time. But nothing’s been stopped, has it?’
‘No, sir,’ said Doug.
‘I mean,’ said Tom, ‘Time’s still moving. Nothing’s changed. Running home, I looked at all the lights around us and none of them had gone out. I saw some policemen in the distance, down the street, and they hadn’t been stopped. I kept waiting for all the lights to go out or something to happen to show that we’d really done something. But instead it looks as if someone might have been hurt. I mean, when you think about Will and Bo and the others, kinda limping home from the courthouse. I’ve got a feeling nobody’s gonna sleep tonight and maybe when they do get to sleep, they’ll sleep late, my gosh, they’re gonna lie around, doing nothin’, staying in bed, keeping quiet, and here I am for the first time in years, wide awake. I can’t even shut my eyes. What are we going to do about it, Doug? I mean, you kept saying we had to kill the clock, but how do we make it live again, if we have to?’
‘The clock wasn’t alive,’ said Doug softly.
‘But you said,’ said Tom. ‘Well, I said. I guess I started it. We all kept saying that we had to do it in, so we did, but what now? It looks like we’ll all be in trouble now,’ Tom finished.
‘Only me,’ said Doug. ‘Grandpa will give me a talking–to.’
‘But we went along, Doug. It was swell. We liked it. We had fun. But now, if the clock was never alive, how do we bring it back from the dead? We can’t have it both ways, but something’s got to be done. What’s next?’
‘Maybe I’ve got to go down to the courthouse and sign some sort of paper,’ said Doug. ‘I could tell ’em I’ll give them my allowance for eight or ten years, so they can fix that clock.’
‘Ohmigosh, Doug!’
‘That’s about the size of it,’ said Doug, ‘when you want to revive a big thing like that. Eight or ten years. But what the heck, I guess I deserve it. So maybe tomorrow I’ll go down and turn myself in.’
‘I’ll go with you, Doug.’
‘No, sir,’ said Doug.
‘Yes, I will. You’re not going anywhere without old Tom.’
‘Tom,’ said Doug. ‘I got only one thing to say to you.’
‘What?’
‘I’m glad I’ve got you for a younger brother.’
Doug turned, his face flushed, and started to walk out of the room.
‘I think I can make you gladder,’ said Tom.
Doug halted.
‘When you think about the money,’ said Tom. ‘What if the whole gang of us, the whole mob, went up in the clock tower and cleaned it up, if we did the whole machine over somehow? We couldn’t repair the whole darned thing, no, but we could spend a couple hours and make it look right and maybe run right, maybe we could save all the expenses and save you from being a slave for the rest of your life.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Doug.
‘We could give it a try,’ said Tom. ‘Ask Grandpa. He’ll ask the courthouse people if they’ll let us up there again, this time with lots of polish and oil and sweat, and maybe we could bring the darn dead machine back to life. It’s gotta work. It’s gonna work, Doug. Let’s do it.’
Doug turned and walked back to Tom’s bed and sat on the edge. ‘Dibs on some of that ice cream,’ he said.
‘Sure,’ said Tom. ‘You get the first bite.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The next day, at noon, Douglas walked home from school to have lunch. When he got there, his mother sent him straight next door to his grandparents’ house. Grandpa was waiting, sitting in his favorite chair in a pool of light from his favorite lamp, in the library, where all was stillness and all the books on the shelves were standing alert and ready to be read.
Hearing the front door open, Grandpa, without looking up from his book, said, ‘Douglas?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Come in, boy, and sit down.’
It wasn’t often that Grandpa offered you a chance to sit down, which meant there was very serious business ahead.
Douglas entered quietly and sat on the sofa across from Grandpa and waited.
Finally Grandpa put aside his book, which was also a sign of the serious nature of things, and took off his gold–rimmed specs, which was even more serious, and looked at Douglas with what could only be called a piercing stare.
‘Now, Doug,’ he said, ‘I’ve been reading one of my favorite authors, Mr Conan Doyle, and one of my favorite characters in all the books by Conan Doyle is Mr Sherlock Holmes. He has honed my spirit and sharpened my aspects. So on a day like today, I woke up feeling very much like that detective on Baker Street in London a long time ago.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Douglas, quietly.
‘I’ve been putting together bits and pieces of information and it seems to me that right now the town is afflicted by lots of boys who are suddenly staying home from school, sick, they say, or something or other. Number one is this: I heard tell from Grandma this morning a full report from your house next door. It seems that your brother Tom is doing poorly.’
‘I wouldn’t say that exactly,’ said Doug.
‘Well, if you won’t, I will,’ said Grandpa. ‘He feels poorly enough to stay home from school. It’s not often Tom feels poorly. He’s usually so full of pep and energy, I rarely see him when he isn’t running. You have any idea about his affliction, Doug?’
‘No, sir,’ said Doug.
‘I would hate to contradict you, boy, but I think you do know. But wait for me to add up all the other clues. I got a list here of the boys in your group, the ones I regularly see running under the apple trees, or climbing in them, or kicking the can down the street. They’re usually the ones with firecrackers in one hand and a lit match in the
other.’
At this Douglas shut his eyes and swallowed hard.
‘I made it my business,’ said Grandpa, ‘to call the homes of all those boys and, strange to say, they’re all in bed. That seems most peculiar, Doug. Can you give me any reason why? Those boys are usually like squirrels on the sidewalk, you can’t see ’em they move so fast. But they’re all feeling sick, sleeping late. How about you, Doug?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You don’t look so fine to me. In fact, you look a little bit under the weather. Taking that together with the boys missing school and Tom feeling poorly and here you are, looking kind of pale around the gills, I figure there must have been some great commotion somewhere last night.’
Grandpa stopped and picked up a piece of paper he’d been holding on his lap.
‘I got a phone call a little earlier from the courthouse clerk. It seems they found a whole lot of fire–cracker paper somewhere in the City Hall this morning. Now that is a most peculiar place to find burnt firecracker paper. The clerk told me they’re going to have to do quite a lot of repairs in City Hall. They don’t say quite what it is they have to fix, but the bill is sizeable and I figure if we apportion it out to various homesteads in the town, it will come to about …’ Here Grandpa put his glasses back on his fine big nose before continuing. ‘… $70.90 per homestead. Now, most of the people I know around here don’t have that kind of money. In order to get it, the people in those homes will have to work quite a few days or maybe weeks or, who knows, months. Would you like to see the list of repairs that have to be done in City Hall, Doug? I’ve got it right here.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Doug.
‘I think you’d better look and study, boy. Here goes.’ He handed the piece of paper to Doug.
Doug stared at the list. His eyes were so fogged that he couldn’t read it. The numbers were immense and they seemed to extend far into the future, not just weeks or months, but ohmigosh, years.