The Hour Thief of Chimewick

Things My Toaster Won't Shut Up About

"Not too dark, not too dark — oh, please don't let her want it dark today," fretted the toaster.

I pushed the lever down anyway, medium, like always, and the toaster gave a little shudder of relief that nobody else in the world would ever feel. That's the thing about our kitchen at half-seven on a Tuesday. Everybody's talking. Nobody's listening. Except me.

The fridge hummed and got to its real work, which is gossip. "The milk's three days past. She'll never notice. The butter's onto its second week of pretending. Ooh, and the jam at the back — don't get me started on the jam." The fridge has never once kept a secret in its cold little life. If our fridge were a person it would lean over your garden fence and ruin your whole morning.

I buttered my toast and didn't answer any of them. That's rule one. You do not answer the toaster. You do not thank the kettle. You especially do not, under any circumstances, tell a single living human being that the appliances of Number Four Cooper's Lane have opinions, because once — once, when I was seven — I told Bonnie Maddox that her family's washing machine was frightened of her dad, and that was the end of me being a normal girl in Chimewick. Eleven now. Still not normal. But quieter about it.

Machines don't think the way you do. They think in one narrow stripe, shaped like their job. The toaster only ever worries about toast. The fridge only ever frets about cold. It's like overhearing somebody mutter the one thing they care about, over and over, forever. Most people would call it noise. I've learned to call it nothing, out loud, with my face very still.

"Cogling!" Pop's voice came up the back stairs, through the workshop smell of brass and oil that lives in our walls. "Down here, before your toast goes to fossil!"

I clattered down. The shop was already warm with lamplight, every shelf ticking — mantel clocks and carriage clocks and a wall of cuckoos all muttering their small countdowns — and Pop was at his bench in his apron, loupe screwed into one eye, looking up at me like I was the best surprise he'd had all week.

"Morning, Marmalade," he said.

Marmalade is our cat. Marmalade is, at that exact moment, asleep on the till.

"Wren," I said. "Pop. I'm Wren."

"Course you are." He laughed, easy, and tapped his temple like the mix-up was a joke he'd told on purpose. "Wren. Knew that. You've not got near enough fur to be the cat." He winked, and the wink was so warm and so much him that I let it go, the way you'd step over a crack you'd decided not to see. "Right. Why did the clockmaker get thrown out the orchestra?"

"I don't know, Pop. Why did the clockmaker get thrown out the orchestra?"

"Too many seconds." He wheezed at his own joke until his eyes watered. Pop's jokes are a crime against the county. I've heard every one of them four hundred times. I laughed anyway. You always laugh.

The shop phone rang and it was Mum, the way Mum always is — a voice, never a face. "Can't stop, love, we're held at a signal outside Carlisle," she said, with the great iron breathing of the train behind her, and I could hear the locomotive too, low and certain, forward, forward, forward, the calmest machine I know. "You minding Pop? You eating? You being good?"

"Yes. Yes. Define good."

"That's my girl. Love you to the moon and the next station after." Click. Gone, off up the spine of the country, while I stood in the warm with the toast crumbs and the ticking.

Before I left, Pop did the thing he does on important days, except he did it on a Tuesday, which it was not important on, and which he had also forgotten was Tuesday at all. He took two things off the shelf above his bench.

The first was the mantel clock. Plain, brown, steady. "This one's ticked since before your mum could walk," he said, "and it'll tick after we're all gone soft and grey, won't you, old thing." It ticked. It always ticks. It is the heartbeat under every memory I own.

The second he held in both hands like an egg. A pocket-watch, brass gone the colour of toffee, with a hairline crack across its face. "And this one," he said, quieter, "your great-great-grandad's. Holds one saved minute, for someday. Never ticked. Not once in a hundred years." I leaned in and listened with my secret ear, the way I can't help doing, and where every other machine in that shop was muttering its little stripe of worry — the pocket-watch said nothing. A held breath. A door not yet opened. The only silent machine I'd ever met. "When you've a minute that matters most," Pop said, "this is where you spend it." Then he grinned and ruined it. "Or it's broken. One of the two."

"Tell me the thirteen one," I said, because I'm eleven and I can't help that either.

"The night they built our tower," he said, dropping his voice the way you do for the good bit, "the very first night, it struck the hour — and then it struck again. Thirteen. And the old folk say that at the thirteenth hour, cogling, anything at all is possible." He tapped the cracked watch. "Saved minute. Thirteenth strike. Same kind of magic, if you ask an old fool." He put both treasures back, careful as careful. "Now go learn something they can't sell you."

I went.

Chimewick in the morning is a town clearing its throat. We've made clocks here for two hundred years; you can't walk a street without something measuring you. Sundials in the churchyard. A parking meter that ticks down like it's got somewhere to be. The cobbled square, and at the top of it the clock-tower, tall and a bit crooked and beloved and unreliable, that has struck every single hour for a hundred years, whether the town deserved it or not.

The van was idling outside the bakery — Mr Odili's delivery van, my favourite voice in the whole town. "Morning, boss," it rumbled, the way it always does, because to a van everyone small is the boss. "Roads are dry. Good day for it. Good day for it, boss." I gave it a little nod, which you can do to a van without anyone noticing, and felt about ten feet tall.

Then I saw the notice.

Pasted fresh on the board by the square, the glue still shining wet at the corners. CHIMEWICK COUNCIL. And underneath, in the kind of tidy letters that have already decided: Public Notice. The tower clock, having been found unreliable, is to be removed and replaced with a modern digital display. There was a little picture. A flat black screen with red numbers, where the face has always been.

Removed. They make it sound like a splinter.

The school bell isn't due till nine, but the school bell has never let a chance go by. Even from the square I could feel it warming up across town, gleeful, cruel, the worst-natured machine in Chimewick: "Oh, they think they're free. They think they've got all morning. I'll teach them." The school bell is a sadist with a clapper. We do not get along.

I stood under the tower and waited for nine, because I always wait for nine — for the great clunk and whirr up in the dark, and then the strike rolling down over the rooftops, bong, the sound the whole town is built around without ever once thanking it for showing up.

The minute hand reached the top.

Nothing happened.

I waited. A breath. Two. The square went on around me, pigeons and puddles and the bakery smell.

No clunk. No whirr. No strike.

For the first time in a hundred years, the tower stayed silent — and all at once, like somebody had pulled a plug behind the whole world, every machine in the square went cold and quiet together. The parking meter. The van. The fridge-hum from the open shop doors. Off. Hushed. Stopped.

As if the entire town had just sucked in one held breath, and didn't dare let it out.

Dead Batteries and Other Lies

Ooh, a test next. They'll hate it. I LIVE for this.

That was the school bell, three minutes before the end of break, practically rubbing its little brass hands together. School bells are the meanest machines in Chimewick. They only have one job and they adore it.

I'd stopped answering bells out loud years ago. You learn. You learn after you're nine and you mutter oh shut up at the dinner gong and your whole class hears, and after that you're the Pocket girl who talks to the cutlery. So I just thought traitor at the bell and filed into Mr. Aldous's room with everybody else, and I sat in the back by the radiator, which is where I always sit, because radiators only ever say one thing — warm, warm, warm — and it's restful.

Mr. Aldous was halfway through the kings and queens of England, which is mostly a list of people called Henry, when the clock on the wall above the whiteboard stopped.

Not slowed. Not skipped. Stopped, with its hands at quarter past eleven, the big red second hand frozen mid-stride like it had walked into glass.

And the minute went wrong.

I can't say it better than that. Mr. Aldous said, "—and so, in 1485—" and then he said, "—and so, in 1485—" again, exactly the same, the same little cough before so, the same chalk-tap on the board. The light from the window went thick and slow, the colour of old honey. Outside, a magpie was falling past the glass and it kept not-quite-landing, falling and falling in the same six inches of air. My own heart did one long beat that lasted a holiday.

Then the clock spoke. Wall clocks don't, much — they only ever count, tick-the-one, tick-the-two, dull as a dripping tap. But this one's voice came out cracked and small and going away from me, the way Pop's voice goes when he's drifting off in his chair.

…cold…

A breath of frost crawled out from the wall under it. I watched it bloom across the paint in feathers, white and sudden, and the radiator beside my knee — my restful radiator, my warm, warm, warm — gave one shudder and fell completely silent. Cold to the touch. Cold like a held breath.

Then the minute let go. The magpie landed. Mr. Aldous said "—the Battle of Bosworth—" and walked on into Henry the Seventh, and nobody, nobody, had noticed a thing.

I put my hand up. I didn't want to. My hand did it before my sense could stop it.

"Sir. The clock's stopped."

He glanced up. "So it has. Dead battery." He wrote BOSWORTH on the board. "Remind me at lunch."

"It's not the battery, sir, it went — the whole minute went —"

"Wren." He had the kind voice teachers use that's worse than the cross one. "It's a clock. It stopped. Sit down."

So I sat down, and I held the dead radiator with both hands like you'd hold something that had fainted, and I waited the longest hour and a quarter of my life for the bell that loves us.

By Pop's it was no better. I ran the whole way home, past Mrs. Galt's shop where every clock in the window was still going, thank goodness, thank goodness, and burst in under our own bell on the door so hard it clattered. Pop was at the bench with his eyeglass screwed in, breathing on a balance wheel.

"Pop. The school clock died. Properly died. And there was frost, and the minute — the minute looped, it happened twice, and I heard —"

I stopped. I almost never tell him the heard part.

"I heard it say it was cold."

Pop set the wheel down very gently, the way he sets down everything, and looked at me over the top of his glasses with his whole soft creased face.

"Old spring, cogling," he said. "They tire. Like the rest of us." He tapped his own chest and gave me the wink. "You've got your mum's imagination, you have. Worth more than any clock." Then his eyes went somewhere else for a second, the way they do now, that little blank shutter, and he said, "Was I doing the balance wheel?" and picked it back up, and the moment closed over like water.

I went and sat on the back step with the cat-that-isn't-ours and I felt about the size of a screw.

That's the thing nobody warns you about, being the only one who hears. It isn't the hearing. It's the after, when you say the true thing and watch it land on people like a snowflake, melt, and leave nothing.

I didn't hear Dot Okafor come up the alley. I heard her wagon.

It was a rusty red trolley loaded with what looked like the inside of three broken washing machines, and it sang the whole gravelly way down — squeak, clatter, the bolt that's about to go. Dot was new-ish, term-and-a-half new, the girl who got sent out of Science for "improving" the Bunsen taps. She stopped in front of our step and looked at me, dead serious.

"You were talking to the radiator," she said. "In class. I sit two along. You do it a lot. You think nobody clocks it but I clock everything." She crouched, eye to eye. "What does it say?"

Here is the thing I will remember about Dot for the rest of my life. She didn't say weird. She didn't laugh. She leaned in like I was the most important machine in the room.

"It says it's warm," I told her, before I could be careful. "Usually. Today it went cold."

"Cold." She breathed it like a prize. Then she was up and rummaging in the wagon, talking at the speed of a runaway clock. "Okay so I built this — I call it the Tick-Meter, the name's still in beta — it measures vibration, see, off anything that hums, fridges, pylons, my nan's chair —" She thrust at me a lunchbox stuck with a dial off a bike speedometer and two forks. "If clocks are dying for real and not just sir being sir, this'll see it. We'll have data. Adults love data. Statistically, data is how you make them listen."

I looked at the forks. I looked at her face, all lit up and fearless.

"They won't listen," I said. "I've tried for eleven years."

"You've never tried with me," said Dot.

And I don't know. Maybe that's exactly when I started to be brave, sitting on a step with a fork-box in my lap.

Because then I understood it.

The school clock. And — Mrs. Galt's window had been fine, all of them ticking. So it wasn't everywhere. It wasn't random. It was a line. I shut my eyes and stopped trying to hear, which is the trick, and just let them come — the small thoughts of the whole street.

They were grieving.

The chip-shop fryer, three doors down: cold by the cobbler's, cold, who turned it cold. The cobbler's till, further on, gone quiet as a stone. And past that, fainter, a parking meter mourning into the dark — missing, missing, the one on the corner's gone missing — each little machine keening for the dead clock nearest it, and each dead clock a cold step further down the hill, a string of frostbitten silences laid out for me like lamps on a path.

A path only I could walk.

"This way," I said, and stood up. "Bring the wagon."

Dot didn't ask where. She just hauled the handle, grinning like Christmas, and the wagon sang, and we followed the cold downhill through the lanes — fryer, till, meter, a frozen shop sundial, a phone box gone dumb — the trail of mourning appliances thickening with frost-breath the whole way, straight down, straight on, straight to the great cobbled square.

Where it ended.

At the foot of the clock-tower, at the iron door that is always locked, that has been locked my entire life and Pop's whole life before me.

Tonight it stood open a crack. Cold air poured out of the black gap like the building was breathing winter. And from far, far up inside, deep in the dark above us, a voice came down — a deep, cranky, scraping, metallic voice, grumbling to no one at all:

"— filthy, feather-brained, ungrateful pigeons —"