Hourbehind

What it looks like, and what it does

A hill village at dusk with a church clock showing four while a phone mast above it shows five. A telephone box with its receiver off the hook and ringing. Long afternoon light on the lower slopes only.

Passive. The village keeps its own time and observes the world's in a second column of the church register.

What is known

Hourbehind is a village of 320 people with no recorded cause for its clocks. Calls from its one telephone exchange arrive at the receiver an hour before they were dialled.

The residents have organised their lives around it. A mother in the village calls her son at three, and the phone rings at two. “Why are you calling?” he says. “It's two.” They have saved eleven lives by this method, by their own count, and lost three.

What it can do

• Delivers messages from the village one hour into the world's past
• Holds the village in the hour before the world's own

Where it stops

• The effect ends at the last milestone on the road
• Cannot carry anything heavier than a voice or a sheet of paper

An encounter

Lindgren has made the same call to the same number every day for eleven years. It is answered before she dials. It is always her sister, who says, “Not yet. Wait until the clock strikes.” Lindgren has never asked why. She says she is afraid that the answer will be easy.

Thea Lindgren, exchange operator, The telephone exchange, Hourbehind, A call dialled at 15:00

What is established, and what is only said

• established: Call-detail records show 4,200 calls from the village received before they were placed, always by 59 to 61 minutes.
• rumor: That the gap, when it reaches a full day, will close all at once.
• interpretation: The village may not be behind the world. The world may be an hour ahead of what it can bear.

Still unresolved

The gap is widening by about a minute a year. Letters from the village have begun to arrive a day early.

Where it has been recorded

• Hourbehind (confirmed) — Recorded by Thea Lindgren, exchange operator.

Stories about it

• Call Before You Call (Grotesque encounter, 4 min) — A night linesman at the Dunmore pump house answers a ringing exchange at three, and the call was not dialled until four.

Connected entities

• Station Forecast — Both give a district advance notice of itself. Neither has been asked to, and neither has stopped.
• The Speaking Clock — Both give a few minutes' advance on the world. One is a place and one a line. Neither has explained the sum.
• The Spare Day — Both are places with their own time. One is an hour behind the world. The other holds a day the world does not number.
• Outbound Street — Both exchange time for passage. One lends an hour of warning. The other takes eight years and returns the walker.
• The Slow Echo — Both carry a voice across time. One an hour, one eleven years. In neither place is anyone astonished.