The Winding Key

I missed the funeral. I was in the Andaman islands, less contactable
than I had previously thought possible, but my mother somehow found me
and a message duly arrived, if too late, that my father, my real
father, was dead.

We went down to Bristol to scatter the ashes, and, with no instructions
or good ideas, emptied them without eulogy into the Severn. Me yawning
from the jetlag.

'So,' said Nick, breaking the silence, 'there's these three
Irishmen.'

Mum rolled her eyes and the three of us walked back to the car.

'Three drinking buddies right, best of friends, and then one of them
dies, and in his will he asks that the other two pour a bottle of good
whiskey on his grave so he can have a drink on the way to heaven. So
they buy a bottle of Bushmills and go down to the grave, and they're
standing there right, and one of them says to the other: Paddy, he
says, it seems a terrible waste.'

Nick did a lilting, musical, Irish accent.

'Ay Shamus, says the other, but we can't very well refuse him his last
request now can we?'

Nick turned to face us. 'No, but do you think he'd mind if we drank it
first.'

Through her laughter mum clutched my arm and said, 'I suppose we'd
better take you to see the shop.'

'Oh yes,' said Nick, 'where are you staying tonight bro?'

'I don't know,' I replied looking at my mother, I had assumed I'd go
back with her.

'There's a bed above the shop.'

'Okay.' I saw that this has been planned. 'I can do that.'

The shop, The Old Clock Shop to give it its full title, was a narrow,
glass fronted, terraced building squeezed tightly into a side street.
Nick opened the door with a coy flourish, as if he had built the place
himself, and gestured for me to go inside.

'Christ!' I said, 'I always assumed it was the shop that was old, not
the clocks.'

The interior was dark, cramped, and crowded with clocks. They chattered
like cicadas, a distant, amorphous, constant ticking. I ran my finger
along a shelf and it came back black with dirt.

'I thought you'd been here before,' said my Mother, hovering by the
entrance, 'when you came and visited.'

'No, we met at the restaurant.'

She looked at her watch. 'Are you two going to be okay? I'd better be
off.'

We both hugged her in turn and she said 'it's good to have you back'
quietly in my ear, and then we stood outside and waved as she drove
off.

'Good pub just down from here,' said Nick once she'd gone. 'Does a
smashing bangers and mash. Have to be your treat though.'

My first proper beer since getting home, pulled agonisingly slowly from
a hand pump and then delivered, warm and frothy, to my table by Nick. I
sunk into it, I embraced it, I drank half of it at once in great,
thankful, gulps, letting the aroma, the taste, the energy, infuse back
into me after our long absence.

'Christ you were thirsty,' said Nick.

'You have no idea how much I've missed this.'

'All frothy pissy stuff I suppose?'

'If anything.'

'So what do you think of the shop?'

'It's a pile of junk,' I said.

'It's our pile of junk now.'

'I know.'

'You think we should sell it?'

'I havent given it any thought.'

'But now you've seen it, you think we should sell it.'

'I just assumed? I mean? Do you want to keep it?'

'I kind of liked the idea of it, living here, being a
shopkeeper.'

'You know I can't, I have a career.'

'But you weren't going to go back to that for another three months
anyway.'

'So?'

He leaned forward, elbows either side of his pint glass. 'I thought you
and me could get it going, sort it out, and then I could run it and you
could be a, watchayacallit, sleeping partner.'

I said 'I don't know anything about running a shop.'

'Yeah but you know about stuff. How hard can it be? You can do the the
financial bit and I'll do the dogwork.'

'I'll think about it.'

'Mum thinks it's a good idea.'

'I'll think about it.'

Near midnight, drunk, we climbed the stairs to the flat above the shop.
It was small and old like the shop below, and full cardboard
boxes.

'All his stuff,' said Nick. 'I'm slowly getting through it. I'll sleep
on the sofa, you can have the bed.'

We took turns in the bathroom and I climbed over boxes into the
bedroom. 'Nick.' I shouted. 'He didn't die in here did he?'

'No.' Shouted Nick. 'He died in Tescos.'

I woke at four in the morning of course, jetlag. At first I didn't know
where I was and immediately groped for my rucksack and panicked when I
couldn't find it, convinced it had been stolen. Then I found a
light-switch and turned it on and everything came flooding back. I
emptied my bladder and got myself a glass of water and lay back down
wide awake. I could hear Nick snoring in the other room and cars still
moving about the city. The long dark nights in the tropics seemed a
long way away. I wasn't going to do it now, my circumnavigation, my
adventure, instead I would be sorting out this dump of a shop. But
still, if it worked out, it would be good for Nick.

I gave up trying to sleep and tiptoed downstairs. Orange streetlight
glowed through the window and cast weird shadows on the faces of the
clocks. I sat down behind the till and opened the desk drawers, looking
for a ledger, paperwork, anything that would give me an idea what I was
taking on. I found only pencils and yellow crosswords torn from
newspapers. Then, as I closed the last drawer, I had the strangest
sensation that someone was in the room with me.

There was nobody there of course, just the rows of silent clocks. And
that was when it struck me, the silence of the clocks.

They had stopped ticking.

I don't think they had been ticking since I entered the room. I walked
between the two shelves, each and every clock had stopped at exactly
five minutes to four. The clocks stopping was no surprise, I doubt they
had been wound since my father died, but them all stopping at the same
time was a phenomenon I could not explain.

I picked one up and turned it around, there was no key, another, no
key, I went through them clock by clock, row by row, none of them had a
key. When I sat back down I had turned every clock around to face the
walls but had not started one of them. I looked through the drawers
again, where on earth had he kept the winding keys. I sat and tried to
think where they might be. At some point I must have dozed off.

Nick woke me at about ten o-clock and asked what I was doing down
there.

'I couldn't sleep,' I said.

'Why are all the clocks facing the wrong way?'

'They all stopped.'

'They're going now.'

I stood up with a start, sure enough the room was filled with the
constant chatter of ticking clocks.

'I swear,' I said slowly, 'last night they had all stopped.'

'Must have dreamt it,' said Nick. 'What do you want for breakfast?
Because if it's not cornflakes you might be a bit disappointed.'

Over breakfast we discussed what needed to be done. 'There must be a
ledger or something, some kind of record, he didn't have a computer did
he?'

'No,' said Nick, 'but there's a box of financial type stuff on the
fridge.'

I picked up the box, it was full of receipts and bank statements. 'Well
if that's all we've got.' I looked out the window and saw it was
raining. 'I suppose I'll have to go through it.'

'Right,' said Nick, 'can I help with that?'

'No, but downstairs needs a clean.'

'That I can do.'

'And winding keys,' I said, 'I couldn't find any winding keys.'

We worked while outside it rained. I sat at the kitchen table slowly
excavating the finances of shop while Nick cleaned and ran back and
forth up and down the stairs. Around late afternoon he dropped a
cardboard box on the table.

'Winding keys. Found them under the bed.'

I sifted a hand through the contents. 'I suppose we'll just have to
match them each to their clocks.'

'Why do you suppose he kept them under the bed?'

'Hide them from burglars perhaps,' I said, 'like if they were car
keys.'

'Hardly the same thing,' said Nick.

We went down together to match keys to clocks. Nick had done a good job
cleaning, better than I had expected, and the old shop looked almost
presentable. We each took a row and went along it, clock by clock,
trying keys in the back and giving each clock a wind.

'What do you want to do for dinner?' asked Nick.

'Pub again?'

He said: 'Suits me,' and then, 'oh I give up.'

'What?'

'I can't find a key for this clock.'

He handed over a brass clock with an unusually small face, in the back
the winding hole was much larger than any of the keys, perhaps three
quarters of an inch across. I peered into the hole but saw only
darkness so I took it upstairs to the kitchen where Nick had a torch
and used that. Still I saw nothing, no mechanism and no clue as to what
shape key I was looking for. I looked closer and thought I saw a tiny
movement inside the clock, perhaps the escapism working, I angled the
torch differently and looked again.

What I saw made me scream out loud and leap backwards straight into the
arms of Nick who had just walked through the door. I dropped the torch
on the floor where it immediately went out.

'What is it?' said Nick.

'There's an eye in there,' I said, pointing at the clock.

'A what?'

'An eye, looking at me.'

Nick picked the torch up off the floor, screwed it back together and
peered himself into the brass clock.

'You pillock,' he said, 'it's a mirror.'

'I think,' I said with a sigh, 'that we should maybe stop for the day
and go to the pub.'

We had dinner and a couple of drinks and then came home about nine
thirty because I was tired.

'An eye,' Nick mocked as we walked in the door, still finding it funny.
'A horrible eye.'

He rushed upstairs to get to the bathroom first and left me standing
amongst the clocks. They were ticking but it seemed different, almost
nonchalant, false, ticking to disguise some other activity, as if our
early return had interrupted them and now they were merely pretending
to tick. I was trying to identify what it was that gave me this strange
impression, when Nick returned brandishing the brass clock.

'Look,' he said, 'I've worked it out,' and he stuck his finger in the
winding hole.

I lunged forward to stop him but it was too late, he was already
winding his finger around like a key accompanied by the familiar
ratchet sound of a clock spring.

'This is really weird,' he said, 'it grips your finger when you turn
but not when it's still. Do you want a go?'

'No.'

'What's up with you?'

'I just had this vision of the mechanism slicing the tip of your finger
off.'

'You need to get more sleep.'

I woke at four again, and again did not know where I was for a moment.
I could hear voices and thought at first there were burglars in the
shop before realising it was the television. I crept to the lounge
where Nick had fallen asleep on the sofa. I turned off the television
and pulled a blanket over him, as I did so I noticed that he had a
plaster on his forefinger. On the table, facing the sofa, was the brass
clock with the small face. I picked it up and saw a tiny fleck of blood
around the winding hole, so Nick had cut his finger after all.

The clock seemed to give a flutter of movement, the mechanism turning
no doubt, but for a second I got the definite impression I was holding
a living thing and nearly dropped it in surprise. I put it up to my ear
and listened, it had a bifurcated tick like a heartbeat, tick-tick,
tick-tick. I put it back down on the table facing away from Nick.

I remembered the clocks stopping last night and went to check
downstairs. Walking down I knew there was nothing unusual because I
could already hear the muffled prattle of ticking through the wall, but
when I opened the door every single clock fell silent.

I swear it, on my life, they ticked as I descended the stairs and
stopped as I entered the room.

I stood there for what seemed like an age, staring at the massed ranks
of clocks which seemed for all the world to stare back at me. I felt
outnumbered and vulnerable, like a man staring down a pack of dogs. I
tried to physically shake away the feeling, they were just clocks for
Christ's sake, but I could not escape the notion that they were
conspiring against me, that this ominous silence was a challenge, that
alone, at night, I was defenceless against them. I was being watched,
examined, and weighed up. I was being regarded with malevolent disdain
by their cold, spring wound, mechanical minds.

In a moment the fear overwhelmed me and I ran upstairs to wake my
brother.

I babbled at him incoherently, shaking him by the shoulders and telling
him over and over that the clocks had stopped. Then I saw it, and it
scared all the words out of me so that for a moment all I could do was
dumbly point.

'The clock,' I finally spluttered, 'its turned around.'

'No,' said Nick. 'I left it facing that way.'

'But I did not.'

The brass clock with the unusually small face had turned around on the
table and was looking at Nick again.

'Go back to bed,' he said, and rolled over on the sofa.

'What happened to your finger?' I asked, but he did not reply.

I picked up the brass clock and took it downstairs. There I sat behind
the desk and kept vigil on the silent clocks. I was determined not to
sleep, so much so that I took a pencil from the drawer and pushed it
repeatedly into the palm of my hand, but it did not work, and for the
second morning in a row Nick shook me awake on the chair.

The clocks, brashly, were ticking. But the brass clock with the small
face had gone.

'Where is it?' I asked.

'What?'

'The clock, the brass clock.'

'Oh that, I took that back upstairs.'

'Why?'

'I don't know, I like it. Do you want breakfast?'

I looked at my brother, what did he mean he liked it? He walked up the
stairs and left me alone with the other clocks. What was there to read
on their blank countenances; in the reassuring light of the day
nothing, no hint of intelligence, but still, a sense of trepidation
lurked at the back of my mind.

The day went slowly, I was too exhausted to do anything but could not
sleep. Nick worked hard though, polishing all of the clocks one by one
starting with the brass one. I sat in the chair and watched him work
harder on those clocks than I had ever known him work in his life.
There was a rising dread in me, a prickling sense of approaching evil,
more than anything I did not want to spend another night in that
place.

'Lets get out of here,' I said. 'Let's drive down to Mum's'

'What?'

'Come on. We'll go tonight.'

Nick looked at me. 'Are you mad, what do you want to leave for?'

'I don't know.' I said. 'I can't sleep here.'

Nick did something then that scared me outright. Before answering he
looked directly at the small brass clock, he turned and looked at it,
like a married man looking at his wife before making a mutual decision.
The act was unmistakable, Nick was looking at the clock for
conformation.

'No,' he said. 'It's silly. You won't sleep there either.'

I forgot all about sleeping then, all I wanted to do was destroy the
brass clock. I decided I would take it upstairs and throw it from the
window and claim I dropped it by accident. I picked it up and stepped
towards the door.

'Hey,' said Nick. 'Where are you going with that?'

'Upstairs,' I said.

'What for?'

'To tell the time, what else.'

Nick held out the clock he was working on. 'Take this one, I like that
one.'

'I wanted to have a look at the winding mechanism,' I said, instantly
forming a new plan, I would take the damn thing apart.

'You can't.'

'What?'

'You can't open it up, I looked the other night.'

'Nonsense,' I said, turning the clock over and examining it.

Nick looked on. I turned the clock over and over but I could not find a
way in, no seam, no join, for all I could tell it was composed of one
solid lump of brass.

'See,' said Nick.

'This is stupid, it must be put together somehow, I'm going to look at
it under the light,'

I moved to leave the room but Nick stood up and snatched the clock from
me. We looked at each other and said nothing, there was anger in him. I
went upstairs and lay down on the bed. I would take the clock when he
slept.

The next thing I knew I woke up in the dark, the curtains were open and
I was clothed on top of the covers. I lay still, listening, trying to
work out if Nick was awake or not. The silence had an attitude of
stillness that told me it was the dead of the night, I could not hear
the television, nor any movement, but neither could I head my brother's
snore. As I listened I discerned clearly the ticking of clocks, the
sound rising unmuffled through the floorboards. It was the noise of
many clocks but it was slowly gathering order, like the clapping of a
crowd it was falling into phase. With each tick more clocks joined the
chorus until they were all beating in unison and the great pounding
heartbeat rose to a deafening crescendo. And then stopped.

With sudden panic I leaped from the bed. Silence. I ran downstairs to
the shop. There, the clocks were pulled from the shelves and gathered
in a circle on the floor. Each freshly polished and gleaming, solemn
and silent. In the centre of the circle was the brass clock with the
small face. Curled around it was my brother, his finger in the winding
hole, his body frighteningly pale and breathing thinly.

I pulled the clock from his hand, it came away sticky with blood. Nick
was unconscious, I shook him but he did not respond. I ran to the desk
to call an ambulance. As I picked up the receiver the brass clock with
the small face gave a fat, satisfied, tick.