The Clockmaker’s Window

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Who's ready for the truss fall?

Hello, I'm Wilkins' stories all the time.

Vlad, you are here.

Let's get into it.

It started that October morning, a kind of mistake for the beginning of winter, though

the calendar insists otherwise.

The sea fog was heavier than in recent memory.

From my front steep, the world was swallowed to a handful of yards the pavement gleamed, puddles

blurred, and houses became just streaks of gloom behind railings.

The only sound was the far off climb of the old clock tower, its chimes muffled, oddly

uneven that day, at effect going from somewhere too large for our time but far too small for

the sky.

It's rare to hear nothing else here no bicycles rattling down high street, no goals

arguing above wet rooftops, just silence and the pulse of the sea beating beneath

the boards.

Trudging uphill, the fog snaked along the alleys, making each familiar turn to solve

as I moved through it.

There at the top of our silly lane stood the old clockmaker shop.

It's a modest place about a green sign, dog-eared onings, window boxes never replanted

after the last storm.

Shopfronts along this high walk are mostly vacant now, shades pulled, butchers and beckers

long since replaced by break-top doors.

The clockmakers is always different.

On their single front window faces the alias slab of glass somehow always clean, the

only pain in town that never fogs, no matter the weather.

To route this morning, though the rest of the shop was draped in grey, interior glowed

faintly gold, as if the lamps within shone for just that window alone.

The alias looked on to doesn't keep to one shape, sometimes wide, sometimes barely

wide enough for a cap, a trick of the mist, perhaps, but enough to give you pause.

I always pause there.

There is something about the way that window sits, polished in defiance, as if it's looking

back at me, I drew closer, inside, the workbench appeared as I remembered precision tools

laid in ranks, jaws of blackened cogs, sheaves of paper-aged amber, and unusual this time

a thick splay of ledgers, open and stacked, neat as a priest's bookstained.

I watched, waiting for the patterns of dust or light to resolve into something noble.

The cold had reached my mirror and I was ready to move on, but that's when the shot

bell sounded clear from within a bright, banish and jingle.

I know that bell hasn't ran in years.

Not since we'll have be vanished.

Which I'm hung in the air impossible to ignore.

My breath caught.

Through the glass, something shifted a pale, hunched figure at the bench, one hand writing,

the other keeping the page steady.

His face struck me, drawn, searching, light from somewhere unseen, falling full on his

bra.

I blinked, and then the fog thickened, swallowing the figure, leaving only the steady gold glow.

I lingered, telling myself I'd imagined it all, but I found my gaze drawn to the clock

up of the alley and on it brass face with the glass cracked a quarter past the iron.

The hands pointed to 10-7.

I checked my diary, a habit as much muscle as memory, and was surprised.

The date stood as a blank no-no, no appointments, nothing reddened for this day, nor for this

date on any past year I could find.

As if the date itself had never quite happened before.

I muttered aloud, embarrassed, as if the window could hear.

It's always the window.

It's always listening.

The words tasted metallic.

My thoughts shurred in the cold.

Willoughby was gone, had taken more than his clocks with him, and yet the window endured,

erasing time's fog as quickly as it formed.

That morning, I resolved to find out why the past never quite stays, but in our seaside

town and why that window has never fogged over, not once.

My life, by most measures, is a gentle one.

I retired from the county library 10 years ago, settling into the contentment of regular

walks, volunteer archiving, and cups of T-so punctual my cattle could be a timepiece

in the town square.

The fog is an old companion, seeping into routines.

The half-remembered story is shared at the bakery queue, the faded postcards and ship

manifests at catalog and rescue from old.

My world is one of record ledgers, programmes, council minutes, odd clippings collected since

before I arrived here and certainly before I was entrusted to keep the past safe from

itself.

The town stretches along a low-tie crescent, batch by terraces built when Victorians chased

health and seer.

Wains fall through blue and vast street lamps, I'm a gruss, and fishmongers jukes out

live their fish.

The saltwind peels paint back, as steadfast as a memory children dare each other done the

alas, but their laughter always dissolves in the ever-present mist.

It runs in families here, names repeat in the birth columns, and faces in photographs

rarely lack for ancestors who wore the same bra.

My archive is orderly, draws labelled by decade, bound volley and shelled off bedically,

newsprint and handwritten lists from decades, and more than one 19th century plea to please

return Emma's umbrella, missed in the Tuesday after my comers.

I pride myself on completeness.

One of those mentioned lost or wandering, I was a cousin conquired after a seaside stroll,

an old woman found confused and went born on the pier right chalket up to sea air, the

mute as British weather, and the hazards of age.

But there are stories.

They're always are, and they have found their way to me over years of tea in the church

hall.

People mention blinking out eyes simply left and accounted for her.

The stories are accompanied by a shudder, availed clients of the window near the clockmakers.

No one ever seems to lose a day, a week, or a name just a handful of eyes, lost but not

missed until you look for them.

When you do, you find either fog-shotted silence or the gentle insistence from others.

It does you no good to dwell, let it go.

I remember Willoughby as a solitary figure, precise and carriage, need in his habits.

He came each Thursday to set the library clock, took tea alone, and paid his bills with

exact change.

No one knows when his hair went silver, only that he always wore the same suit, pressed

and dull, even in the heat of July.

Some say he kept an extra cot in his shop, and rarely crossed his own doorstep after dusk.

He was seen tracking times on little slips of card, always recording, never shivering, meticulous,

silent, but never in kind.

No one ever said he left.

One morning his shop was shutted, a note left in fine copper plate closed for repairs

will return when the clock needs mending.

The windows were wiped clean, the workbench wept, and not a single paper out of place.

The feeling-lingot, he had tidied himself away like a well-winspring, as someone said

at the pub.

Yet to this day, neighbours will munch in seeing the shadow of a figure, chalk pale, hunch

quietly over the bench, or noticing that a page in the ledger inside has turned since

the week before.

I am rational by habit, perhaps to a fault.

But the clock mickers window and mows me, gentle as a golden light.

I cannot say why, but each morning I check my diary and find, here and there, a blank

interest for days I cannot recall, as if a fog had erased them on the pages thoroughly

as it does the street outside.

After years of order, the possibility that memory is more fragile, more easily edited

than I'd like to believe, has become harder to dismiss.

Perhaps these absences are not mere signs of forgetting, nor the simple decay of age,

but something more deliberate and narrow, pattern, or presence making itself felt just

out of reach.

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One Thursday evening, I found myself deep in the archives below the library, seeking a

missing donation ledger for the Methodist Bazaar.

The abyssment's cold, chalky air is soothing.

The darkness knows what to keep.

As I returned a bundle of yellow pamphlets to their rightful box, something caught my

eye, a series of attendance records, note cards stacked by decade, each with a precise

date and time.

Odd here and there, names were missing, entire lines snipped away with a scalpel clean as

a surgeon's cut.

Never an entire week, never more than a single day in a season it struck me, suddenly

that the gaps never appeared at random.

November 1908, February 1934, August 1966.

Here's a part, but always a single day, missing clean.

The pattern pressed on my mind.

As I proved further, I found a small, battered ledger, oddly slotted among the garden and

club register's.

Flicking it open, my heart ticked a bit faster, it was not clobblest, but a record of times,

names, and short, disquieting observations.

Some names I recognized as stalwarts of town memory, and beside them, words such as

absent from square, or return days, a question by none.

Near the middle of the book, my own name appeared immediately into beneath the date that,

again, was conspicuously blank in my own diary from years past.

I fingered the entry uneasy.

That same date crossed with the town records, was marked by sudden town decisions, a road

routed, a quiet resignation, a vote taken in past with little memory of debate.

It was as if the day and whatever transpired had been excised, crisp a certificate's press

between wax leaves.

The air grew close around me.

The records were more than absent, they formed a pattern.

Always on days the fog was at a stances, always when the clockmakers window shone without

impossible clarity.

A coldness, independent of the weather, ran the length of my arms as I realised the window

was not innocent.

It was the only thing left to change.

I slept a little at night.

The next days became a fever of checking, cross-referencing, pouring over every municipal

list and personal no-dick of lay hands on.

Names in the clockmakers ledger appeared elsewhere sometimes as the newest council member, sometimes

as a simple shopkeeper or cat-daker.

I mapped them against stores publicly told in those whispered in classrooms or beside

the fire.

I stopped asking, I tried to tell myself.

But that is not my way.

No one, not a single soul, a question to remember, anything about these recorded absences.

Always my polite inquiry would draw a puzzled squint of polite you must be mistaken, dear,

or a shop, almost afraid glance, as if I pressed too close to some family a little we could

as best left have mentioned.

One elderly neighbor, Mrs. Heindel, faltered, it's the window, you know it doesn't just

show what's inside, sometimes if you stare everything else moves on, but you hold still,

or maybe you go somewhere else until the sunset brings you back.

Most shrugged eager to move the topic on.

I was left with fragments and nagging sense of an ease, and each cleave driving its hook

deeper beneath my skin.

My rational mind clung to process to habit.

But then, while returning over due books to the old corner letterbox, I discovered a plain

envelope tucked at the bottom, addressed in shaky script to the one who keeps record.

I hadn't seen that handwriting since before will if you left.

Inside, a cluster of folded notes all ensigned, but pleading requests for restoring what's

gone, for the return of precious ires, and it disturbingly a warning written in blocky

capitals, record nothing that cannot be forgotten.

It didn't read as a threat, but rather as a desperate caution, as if writing itself

was a risk in our town.

Far rolled in again that evening, thick as cream.

My feet found the alley before the clockmaker's shop, hard hammering.

Staring through the dust of this window, the air seemed stretched sometimes to solving

to reveal, and possibly, the bright market square from when I was a child, sometimes

only the antipresent street uns flickery.

It felt as though the window was showing me ears upon ears, stack along the same sliver

of street, a palimpsest of town memory.

That night unable to contain my compulsions were the question festering within me, I returned,

this town carrying a flashlight and a pack of all brass keys.

The lock yielded after gentle pressure at the jingling balance I'd sounded again, but

now muffled as a thunderwater.

The bench greased me untouched for years, but layered with keff lorda.

L edges stacked, mechanical parts glinting, sketches of clocks, and window angles pinned

to the wall like insect wings.

Near the back I found a shallow drawer.

Dauge by use, it slid halfway open.

Dozens of torn larger pages rested within, each bore a time and name, a phrase a window

clear of ridden in Willoughby's tidy hand.

Flipping through, I saw that each date matched a gap in my own or the town's rickers,

an absence mocked with the same inscrutable finality.

Some entries had been amended after the fact, infaded as a fritten years later in hope

of reconstructing what was lost.

I pressed my palm flat to the bench, dizzy.

While he had not started the erasers, he catalogued them as if seeking to keep the

damage contained or perhaps, measurable.

As the fog pressed against the window pains, assembled the pattern, matching ledger to

record, named forgotten event.

The evidence grew clear, something was orchestrating the removals.

The clockmaker observed, but did not prevent, in keeping meticulous account, he stayed the

boundaries of loss.

The next days forecast called for the thickest fog in months.

The ledger suggested another window vent in absence, another writing was imminent.

I vowed to be there to watch it if I could intervene.

Valk.

The town was cloaked in a grey soup so thick it pressed up fingers into one scalp.

I stood, collar up, outside the clockmaker's shop, watching for any sign of routine

endangerment.

I had predicted, as Willoughby's records allowed, that 10-7 would be the iron of occurrence.

As the clock high above the alley-taken next would be forward, first up, second through

the Mr. Local Council member, Carolyn Price appearing on shore as she drifted up the lane, no

but clutched in gloved hands.

I waited pasting my breath.

At the precise eye, or she halted, turning an airingly toward the window.

At that instant, the old shop bell rang.

She stared, motionless, her face slack, mouth parted in a silent question.

For breathless moment, the reflections in the glass wavered, rippling like water disturbed.

I saw, layed in its depths, snatches of early days bustling markets and argument over

paving stones, a little girl weeping in rain, all spinning around Carolyn's lightness,

as if her memories were being sampled, replayed, or rewritten.

A sudden shout broke the spell, a child's voice, panicked, darted through the alley.

Carolyn was gunvanished.

Time pinched the street-lurch beneath me.

A second later, a glimpsed her reappear at the next corner, gazed cloddy, post-ariged,

walking away as if nothing had happened.

My phone chirped then another from somewhere further up the lane.

Texts spilled onto news fees and announcement, the council, after months of contentious debate,

had suddenly voted to preserve the condemned assembly hall.

No one seemed to remember having ever opposed its preservation, as if a different outcome

had never existed.

I put a trembling finger to the window.

The glass pulsated as surface alive, not reflecting so much as absorbing.

My mind accepted, with an also unlike anything else, that the window wasn't a witness.

It was an instrument intervening, deleting, and rewriting moments wielded perhaps by the

absent clockmaker or by the town itself.

Will have be had chronicle diswerkins, perhaps seeking to contain a force that sought, cyclically,

to edit our story.

No sleep came that night.

Coffee cooled beside blueprints and ledges, as a chase easy answers some trek, some mechanical

device, a projector, a cunning two-way mirror.

But every explanation faltered.

The shop's construction was plain as cow and stone, timber, nothing hidden save the drawer

of torn pages and will office drawings of the windows viewed from every conceivable angle.

No wires, no electronics.

The only ingredient unaccounted for our own histories, written and written without consent.

The next morning, I combed through the library's oldest property records and a shelf of brittle,

dog-eared focal.

Each tale circled the same anxious refrain references you watch for pains, windows that

let in the future sores of the town periodically, shedding scandals, debts, or inexplicable sadness.

Some accounts claimed events vanished where river glass cracked between night and morning

wind.

The phrase chilled me.

I mapped every disappearance and every controversial town vote.

The match was near perfect.

Before every consequential decision or the resolution of a bit of conflict came, I was

or days erased, witnesses whose memories stuttered, whose accounts to solve luck ink in rain.

Willoughby's private notes, deciphered with effort, suggested a duty not to cause, but

to record his ledges a fragile bulwark against and check loss.

The window, it began to seem, functioned like a safety valve for the community, swallowing

was smooth in the most abrasive pockets of memory.

Still, the cycle was accelerating.

I could not ignore the growing number of erasers, but town's very identity is sense of what

had really occurred, was eroding.

I had to confront what Willoughby had merely logged.

I called for a town meeting, disregarding the embarrassment I felt at such a strange

summons.

Invitations went to council members, to the lifers whose names appeared throughout

the ledges, the shopkeepers who inherited both their businesses and their elders rumours.

We gathered as the forecast promised a new tide of fog, in the open square facing the

clockmakers' window.

I took my place at the old market table, a raid with a hand-drawn timeline, disappearances

match to decisions torn record side by side with Willoughby's book.

Doutan and Zity pulled in the muddy footprints at our feet.

I spoke soft at first, then loud at, as conviction found me, too many moments have gone

without so much as a word.

We have all known the feeling the lost dire at the shifted plan, the line in the diary

we can't recall, I believe the answer lies here, in this window, in wooded holes and

highs from us.

As I spoke, a fog thickened.

From the shop behind us, the window's surface began to waver, catching the tavern lights

and folding them in upon themselves.

We all drew together in the gloom, the bell in the church tower began to tell, and a

low vibration percoled in my feet.

Suddenly the window bloomed with images not mere reflections, but living, moving vignettes,

scenes of past arguments and reconcilations of angry petitions for and against the assembly

hall, the clockmaker hunched over his books, noting each vanishing and reappearance with

dog good resignation.

The square filled with gasps and disbelieving cries as towns folk saw snatches of themselves,

were living fragments of memory, baritore excised.

Emotions surged panic grief, recognition.

A few staggered away, clutching at the temples.

Others dropped to their knees, sobbing the names of long gone friends.

The window, glimmering with a weight of centuries, seemed to vibrate with their uncertainty.

I felt the pull like a tide in the blood.

I resisted, refusing the temptation to forget, focusing on the council ledger the one anchor

of record clutching it as I spoke, we must remember, the town must preserve its past,

not smooth of every wound, we need dough and our broken hearts and foolishness, just as

we own our small moments of courage.

In that instant, my own reflection in the window grew sharper.

Standing beside me a presence, first shimmering, and tangible a gaunt figure in a faded

whisk coat, will laugh be.

His eyes cool as the northern sea, met my in the glass.

We stood together watching the crowd.

In his reflection, I glimped the heavy sadness of someone who knows memory cannot mend what

is already lost, only witness it with dignity.

The bell chined its last note.

The illusion faded.

The fog dissipated, peeling back to shore the square again the townsfolk scattered,

tearing around as if startled from a collective sleepwork.

The timeline before me bloated at the edges, but the ledgers on the table reordered themselves,

rippling the wayrees due in a sudden fresh wind.

I saw, with rising an ease, new entrants in the bachiche in my own handwriting, as though

I had begun unwillingly or not, to inherit Willoughby's task.

With relief, fatigue, and no small measure of fear, I realized my memory of the event

was already starting to fade, as if the act of watching not the act itself was what kept

our past intact.

The days after felt emptied out, as though I'd returned from a long, sick fever.

The fog retreated, then returned, now holding a different kind of way.

My routine's resumed.

Teammate at 7-12, library keys returned at noon, twice a week walks up Westerly Lane.

Suddenly, the town adjusted, some faces, once familiar, became hesitant, even apologetic

were drawing from all this buttes, seeking out unlikely companions, or simply avoiding

eye contact in the square.

Others, restless, circled the council with petitions, as if compelled to revisit issues

they once thought settled.

A genuine confusion lingued, the affitaste of having swallowed the answer, one does not

wish to know.

The sharp remain closed, it paint peeling, the glass now slightly dulled clouded, but still

never admitting dust, not even after a storm blown autumn.

Odd things began to happen with the records.

Page is missing for decades reappeared overnight.

Some boring familiar corrections, some were fooled in with the hasty, almost childish girl

a hand I could not identify, but which reminded me, distantly, of my younger self.

People meetings were suddenly uncomfortable affairs.

House votes, even those passed unanimously, came up for new debate.

It was as if the townsfolk stood by the confrontation, could sense that the decisions

rested on and certain foundations.

Something in the act of gathering, confronting, of striving to remember, had shifted the

town's perspective, but I couldn't know if this was an awakening or yet another cycle

begun.

Through it all, I worked slower now at my desk.

Every vent, every apology or recounted quarrel, I recorded in a new ledger, careful to

catalog the gaps as much as the facts.

I understood now, as long as someone watched and wrote, the past might not be lost.

But Figilance is a meager bulwark, it asks for more than a lone librarian, more than

a solitary shotkeeper bent over a bench.

I still think of Willoughby, not as a gatekeeper, nor a magician, just a man who knew the cost

of forgetting, and who had trusted that someone, Sunday, would take up the same charge after.

Weeks drifted by.

One damp Thursday evening, fog bunched along the gutters in the town's street umscloed

haggard amber.

Coming up hill from the seaside road, I paused before the old shop out of habit more than

hope.

The window was cool against my palm, lightly cludded, but fast it is as always.

As I peed through, and served in if I sought reassurance or revelation, a shaped cot in

the glass made my heart jolt a child's handprint faint but a mistakeable finger-splayed, palm-pressed

at shoulder height.

A memory of a return to midden, years ago, a girl lost in the alas, a frantic search,

her tiny hands made greasy against the glass as we waited for word.

That mark had been washed away, I recalled.

Yet here it was, pressed fresh as a bruise in the fog.

As I watched, the world beyond the window-chirrened image is blooming and fading.

There, a child's face illuminated by candlelight, a pair of arms welcoming home someone thought

forever lost, a slow motion embrace at a funeral that, by all records, had never taken

place.

Snatches of dialogue, never written anywhere echoed in the hushed the lost and the

found, the once-remorseless returning home.

From somewhere inside the glass, a low, measured ticking began.

Not from a visible clock, but from the pain itself steady, judging at if the glass counted

not ears but bargains and mistakes.

As the fog rose again, drawing ghostly lines between myself and the rest of the square,

I understood.

The window was not just a tool, nor a mere artifact.

It was a witness and a judge, for quiet arbiter of what our town remembers and what it cannot

bear to store.

Its clarity was both invitation and sentence.

I traced the outline of my own face in the glass, watched the handprint fade but never

vanish and whispered to the empty shop we remember as long as someone is willing to watch.

Then, as mistaken in my reflection blurred, I walked away.

Behind me in the window, the child's handprint persisted sharper, clearer as if waiting for

the next keeper of the record to notice and to remember or to forget.

And that is the end.

Thank you for listening and I will see you in the next one.

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