Read Online Eleven New Ghost Stories by David Paul Nixon - Free Book Online

tastes. It was a fine specimen of its type, in
good condition, but not very ornate. More of a clock for an
official or a judge than a wealthy nobleman of some standing.
    The clock was a mystery, which
was why my uncle was distracted by it. It was something he was
determined to get to the bottom of. But the clock needed repairing
too. Although outwardly, it had been well looked after, it hadn’t
told the time in many years. Guillam spent all afternoon making
measurements and making sketches. He recognised the mechanism, but
felt that somehow the pieces were out of proportion, not the sizes
he’d expected, and certainly not the work of a master craftsman. He
garnered the opinion that it was a botch job; that some amateur had
attempted to mend the clock after its original workings had worn
through.
    The clock presented a challenge,
if a frustrating one. The clock’s owner, who knew something of the
clock’s strangeness and obscurity, had promised that if Guillam
could make it tick, and solve the mystery of its origin, he would
allow him to display it in his museum for six months, along with
full payment for his services. As if the fulfilment of this bargain
was a certainty, Guillam had already made a place for it in his
hallowed museum; a high shelf on the right-hand wall.
    Uncle Guillam, though a man of
considerable skill, had no sense of aesthetics. His museum was a
mess. His clocks and watches badly organised on these unattractive
metal shelving stacks, all too crowded together and
over-stocked.
    His other mistake, which I
suppose was more understandable, was to have all his clocks working
in his museum. You can understand why, after all, that was his job,
to make his clocks tick. But the noise! It was like a field of
crickets going bananas – tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick,
tick . It was an incredible sound, quite something to
experience, but not something you could stand for very long.
    Uncle Guillam liked to say that
he could listen to the sounds of the clocks ticking and tell
instantly if any of them had lost time. Of course this was absolute
nonsense; when it was the turn of the hour, clocks would start to
ring their bells and chimes five minutes before and some ten
minutes afterwards.
    It really was quite a collection
tough; there were extraordinary items in there: Grandfather clocks,
pocket watches, wall clocks, astrolabes… The cuckoo clocks were my
favourite growing up; sometimes they were very imaginative and
playful. Little wood cutters would pop out and chop the wood, or
little canaries would come out and sing just for a little
moment.
    Amongst them the black clock
looked positively miserable. Yet it got pride of place on a high
shelf above the wall clocks with the hanging chimes. The hands,
although one of them was broken at the end, pointed to just after
four-thirty. I swear to you, to this day, if I ever look at a clock
and it’s four-thirty-two or four-thirty-three, it sends a shiver
right down my spine.
    Now, I’ll tell you what
happened: Although my main love was the inn’s barmaid – I wish I
could remember what the pub was called, although I think it’s gone
now – I had struck up a relationship with the grocer’s daughter.
Entirely through self-interest of course, because she had daily
access to boiled sweets and was good at stealing them without her
father noticing.
    We’d become friends in the
Easter holiday before. Her father wasn’t sure what to think of me,
probably because of my family, but her mother absolutely encouraged
our games. I think she hoped that we might be married one day and
that her daughter might be moved up the social ladder. Seems silly,
doesn’t it, that we really thought like that back then.
    But we did get on famously… Iris
was her name. I wonder what happened to her. She was a loner like
myself; a dreamer with her head in the clouds and not good at
paying attention at school. We both liked to draw and to walk in
the country. We weren’t so far from the edge