Short story · 6 min read · Set in Calder ·
The Hours Ask for Tests
Murrow's clocks have started sitting examinations, so the old clockmaker grades them, and one of the clocks asks to be failed.
The clocks in Calder began sitting exams in the wet week after the new crane went up at the harbour. Holle Prien kept the only clock shop left on the grey row behind the fish cellar, a narrow workshop between a shuttered hatter and the harbourmaster's annex, and at first he took the strangeness for damp, which in Calder accounts for nearly everything. A carriage clock runs slow in the wet. A bracket clock sulks. He serviced the pieces as he had serviced them for forty years, out of habit more than belief, because most of what came to his door was already stopped.
What happened first was this. On the ninth of the month a parish dial from the Terraces was left against his door overnight, and when he carried it in to see what trouble it had, he found inside the case a small slip of paper, ruled like a schoolbook page, with an hour drawn on it in pencil and a blank below, as if waiting for an answer.
He did what a workman does with a mystery that may only be somebody's advertising. He threw the slip out.
The clock ran. He checked the work, because he could not believe there was nothing wrong with the work; he checked it twice, then a third time with the loupe, and then he sat down. A dial that had not turned in four years was keeping time to the second, the slip was in the bin, and by evening a new slip had come into the case. Same ruling, same pencil. The hour drawn was 03:00, the blank still blank, and beneath it a small pressed channel where a point had begun an answer and lifted.
He graded it, in the end. That is the part I will be exact about, because the rest depends on it.
On the eleventh he put the slip back inside the case and wrote, under the drawn hour, the word his own master had used half a century gone, marking apprentice dials: kept. Lost, also, but kept first, because marking was the trade before repairing was. The carriage clock at the back of the shop, the one with the hairline over the nine, produced a slip that same night asking for the hour of the spring tide. He wrote it, and the clock kept to that hour for three days, and then asked for another.
By the fifteenth every clock in the shop had a slip in it. He ruled a ledger, because he is a man who rules ledgers: a column for the clock, a column for the question, a column for his mark. The dial clocks asked easy things. The number of gulls on the mole — he counted them at some cost to his knees and entered sixty-one, and the clock kept it. The regulator borrowed back from the harbourmaster's annex asked the rule for reading a fog, and he wrote: slowly, twice-yearly, by the sound of the buoys — and could not afterwards find anything in its train to explain why it had gained four seconds, which it had.
The bracket clock that had come from the empty house on Kestrel Road asked nothing at all for six nights. Each night he entered the word: withheld. On the seventh night the slip was gone from the case, the clock stood stopped and cold, and his pencil, moving before he had decided anything, wrote: failed.
He did not like the word. He sat with the ledger open for a long while and then amended the entry to: not yet ready. That night he woke at 03:00 exactly, in the dark, with the feeling of a room quietly preparing to be examined, and could not say whether he was the examiner in it or the other thing.
It matters, for what follows, to say that Holle Prien never once believed the clocks were speaking. Not in the way people mean when they mean that. He believed, and would have told anyone who asked, that a mechanism which runs long enough beside human hours begins to hold a shape the way sand holds a footprint — and that if you ask a question into a held shape, something answers, and it is not the sand. People had asked him over the years whether the shop was lonely. He had a strong answer ready. The shop was never quiet. Forty-one mechanisms counted the seconds in it, day and night, and a man who cannot hear forty-one counting is simply not listening.
The clock that could not be satisfied came up from the flats beyond the Slag Hills in the third week, open-cased, salt-bitten, with a tag from no address: found on the waterline. It ran badly, stopped, ran again, and its slips came thick and small as visitor cards. The hour of my winding. The number of my keeper's children. The name of my keeper's keeper. He answered what he knew and, where he did not, he wrote: withheld. Every withheld drew down the same mark — the hard beginning of an answer, pressed and lifted, pressed and lifted — until the slip wore soft along its fold like something read too often.
At the end of the fourth week the waterline clock asked its last question. Under the ruled line the drawn hour was 03:33, and below the blank, plain as a bidder's card, stood a request.
Fail me, it said. Whoever keeps this shop, I am asking to be failed.
He did not copy it into the ledger. He sat until the fishing boats' lamps came round the point, and then he took down his master's red pencil — kept, lost, kept, lost, forty years of it — and wrote, plainly, as one tradesman to another: You have kept every hour given to you and asked well for the ones that were not. The mark is kept. With honours.
The clock stopped that night between one tick and the next, mid-count, and has not asked again.
But that was not the end of it, and I will not pretend otherwise. Because when he opened the ledger to make his own entry for the waterline clock, he found the entry already there. Same red. Same narrow upright hand. His own, certainly his own, though he could not remember setting it down — not the mark only, but beneath it, in the column kept for questions, a line he has not answered yet and has stopped trying to.
It reads: Who grades the grader?
And ruling down the page under it, in the same red, ready and blank, are the small ruled boxes of an answer sheet, one for each night from now until the end of the year — and the first box is already warm, the way a page is warm when the pencil has just left it.
He has begun, out of forty years of habit and no other reason he would give you, to check his work.
The question on tonight's slip is drawn at 03:00, and the blank below it is very small, and the paper is soft at the fold, the way slips get when they have been read too often by the thing that wrote them.