What the Clocks Know

by Rumer Haven

  Stopping at another grave, she saw Christmas décor rotting away by her feet. A depressing sight in summer, the winter wreath made her fancy how the cemetery’s atmosphere must change with the seasons. She wouldn’t be in London long enough to see it burn in rust and gold, the falling leaves mimicking the footfall of a pursuing stranger and the plucked trees revealing more of the sky and buildings beyond. Yet she could imagine how, on one chilled day that would paint the scene gray, someone would kneel again at a name of diminishing meaning to the present world and place another wreath of scarlet ribbon and silver baubles. Only for it to waste away during the sun and rain of another spring and summer as the cycle continued: lather, rinse, repeat.

  The effect of time would be noticeable enough, and somehow she felt she’d already seen it all before and would again, her grandest déjà-vu yet. To preserve its enchantment, she didn’t analyze the reasons why this site had come to matter so much. She felt whole here. That was all to know.

  But her bladder waited for no man, living or dead. Picking up her pace, Margot hightailed it to the cemetery’s rear exit until a shiver clenched the muscles between her shoulder blades. Despite her urgency to get back home, she slowed to a full stop in front of a gabled gravestone. An ornate sprig of acacia crowned an inscription she hadn’t seen yet.

  READER, STAY.

  UNDERNEATH THIS STONE DOTH LIE

  AS MUCH BEAUTY AS COULD DIE;

  WHICH IN LIFE DID HARBOR GIVE

  TO MORE VIRTUE THAN DOTH LIVE.

  IF AT ALL SHE HAD A FAULT,

  LEAVE IT BURIED IN THIS VAULT.

  Rather than grab her pen and napkin to write the poem down, Margot just stood there, rereading it. Contemplating it. If there was an afterlife, could people really leave their failings behind to putrefy in the dirt, safe from anyone’s memory? She liked to think so.

  Her gaze rose to the name chiseled in the stone.

  CHARLOTTE PIDGEON

  It so happened that Charlotte Pidgeon was born on the same day as Margot, but her year of birth was 1848 and year of death 1874. Despite all the other gravestones she’d recorded onto her napkin, copying anything down from this one somehow seemed blasphemous. So she just kept standing, with gravity fastening her in place. Gawking, until a weight on her breastbone made it more difficult to breathe.

  The sensation was strange, no question. Margot had never felt anything like it. But she’d taken enough psychology courses as an advertising major to peg it for what it was: a psychosomatic response. The conditions were ideal for something like that. For one, the general creepy-factor of standing above thousands of corpses as black birds crowed their “Evermores” left and right. And now this moving inscription that kicked in her sympathies.

  There was otherwise no meaning in it—even if the given name made her think of Charlotte Sometimes. That wasn’t even coincidence enough to add to her diary. She must’ve seen a dozen Charlottes in that lot alone by now, along with all the Alices, Emmas, and Janes.

  And so what if their birthdays were the same? The ratio of 365 days to the billions of people ever born on Earth was basically nil. She had to stop pandering to what the human brain did naturally: form correlations when it noted them. Only this and nothing more.

  Exhausted with her overactive imagination and fantastically bored with herself, she didn’t want to stand there anymore. But she didn’t want to walk anywhere else either. Breathing heavily through her nose as a numbness dulled her, she didn’t want to be anywhere in that moment, not even in her own skin. The effort and futility of life bore down on her as she considered all the bodies underground, all those who’d borne the burden of existence and thought it mattered until they didn’t exist or matter anymore—just rotted in boxes under her feet.

  She had to go back to Rand’s. She didn’t want to; she needed to. Not for the toilet any longer, but a bath sounded nice—something that could warm her against the nip of her fears, wash away the soil she felt falling over her. Drown the thuds each shovelful made on the lid of her inner casket. That sounded purposeful enough.

  Forgive my intrusion, Miss Pidgeon. I will leave you to rest in peace.

  Chapter 7

  Trespasses

  TURNED OUT, truancy was a tough habit to break. Seeing that her first absence from school hadn’t brought the world to a screeching halt, Margot took it as free license to try it out again the next day. Then the next day, and then the next couple of weeks after that.

  When she wasn’t visiting the cemetery instead of the classroom, she’d while away her afternoons on indulgences like daytime lounging and soaks in the tub. Then in the evenings when Rand was home from work and not otherwise committed to Gwen, they’d go out to the pubs or he’d bring home takeaway.

  This life as a Lady of Leisure was suiting her incredibly fine. Rather than fight her solitary moods out of some sense of guilt, she just gave in to them now. And just like that, her worries would disappear like the steam rising off her bathwater. Not even ghosts or death could scare her when she already felt halfway there, her brain and heart serving little more function than to keep her vaguely conscious of the mundaneness of day-in and day-out.

  Not entirely true. There was something her heart beat for with increasing interest. Someone, whose friendship had been easy as breathing and was like the sun she so rarely got to see anymore. Who was also out of reach. Which was just as well; while she couldn’t deny the attraction, even if availability were a factor, Margot still didn’t want to become someone else’s other half. Not until she felt whole on her own.

  In dreams, at least, she could safely lose herself to the lips and caresses she yearned for. Not anyone’s specifically, but palpable enough to satisfy the contact she missed. The phantasmic touches would glide down her spine and whisper over her breasts, nip at her lips and elicit sighs she hoped were only in her head and not audible to Rand. She’d written a couple of these dreams down in her diary but kept the rest safe from discovery.

  And now, as her ethereal lover was once again on the verge of filling her where she felt most empty, she heard a mournful creak. Curled on her bed, Margot woke up to early evening sunlight slanting in through the shade—then shot an evil eye at the door’s audacity to make her get up before she could get off.

  “Rand! Your flat’s broken!”

  “Sorry?” He walked to the entryway.

  She dragged herself to her bedroom door, smoothing her hair and adjusting her twisted leggings to look somewhat presentable. “This door never stays shut.”

  “Right.” He offered a thoughtful frown for a few seconds. “Well, I could fix that, but the ghost prefers it open.”

  “What?”

  “Being eternally confined to the building, you see, she can’t take a turn about the garden anymore. So she likes to walk around here. You like whist, don’t you? She’s a devil at whist.”

  Aware of her widened eyes, Margot narrowed them. “You’re joking.”

  “Obviously.”

  “What the hell?” She slapped his forearm.

  Stroking his chin like a man in a razor commercial, Rand gave a weak laugh and was in the process of turning away when his raised brow seemed to yank his attention back to her. “Do…?” He cocked his head.

  Margot readied for anything he might ask as her stomach quavered with something like wishful thinking. Her mind and body still tingled from the dream, which hadn’t fully released her from its spell given the door’s abrupt cock-block.

  “Miss Margot.” Rand’s high-pitched giggle could’ve just been his boyish charisma, but it sounded forced.

  She gave a coy side-smile to tempt the question from him. “Ye-es?”

  “Do you believe in ghosts?”

  Crestfallen, and not a little rattled in view of her recent graveyard musings, she stammered like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. “G-ghosts?”

  “Yeah. Do you?”

  “Methinks you’re the one who concocted that story a little too quickly.”

  “Methinks
thou dost protest too much.”

  It was one of those days when Rand relieved his corneas of contacts and wore spectacles of bronze wire, and his eyes twinkled the more for it. With arms crossed, he took a wider stance and shifted his weight slightly side to side outside her doorway. “So? Do you?”

  Just when she thought she’d exorcised them, ghosts were back to haunt her. Margot would’ve felt cornered if not for Rand’s playful grin.

  Shaking her head with an exhale that clicked in the back of her throat, she bristled a little but slapped on a smile. “Does it matter?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose the afterlife just makes for a stimulating if not inevitable talking point among friends, yeah?”

  “Right, inevitable.” Friends. “Death and taxes.” Margot crossed her arms for warmth against a draft, and she leaned on the doorframe to steady herself as her mind dizzied on an empty stomach. She shouldn’t have napped through lunchtime.

  Closing her eyes for a few seconds, she concentrated on her next words. “All right, well, I was raised to believe in an immortal spirit that survives our mortal body, so it wouldn’t be that big a stretch to believe in ghosts.”

  “Do you, then?”

  She shrugged.

  “Do you want to?”

  What Margot wanted was an attorney present if she was about to be interrogated on this again. As if the call with Derek hadn’t been enough. She fidgeted, feeling lighter-headed by the second as though about to lift outside of herself.

  “I…can’t say that I do.”

  Rand squinted. “Why not?”

  “Well, sometimes I think I do,” because I thought I saw one in your bedroom, “because it’s comforting to think we’ll live forever in some form and, you know, always be with loved ones. But in a way it’s scary, too, to think there could be presences around us that we don’t know or that aren’t good, or that could maybe take us by surprise—like appearing by the bed at night? Holy crap.”

  Rand chuckled. “Ever happen to you?”

  “Thank God no. But I remember as a kid, I’d squeeze my eyes shut at bedtime just in case something did show up. I definitely didn’t want to believe then.”

  “But don’t you think in that fear was belief? Wouldn’t that be proof of it?”

  “I guess. But at that St. Paul’s debate, a scientist argued the soul is really just misprints in our genes that give us unique personalities. Imaging shows how the brain lights up when we feel one way or another, so it’s all more or less chemical, not something disembodied that survives after we die. You know, like…neurotransmitters, and…”

  Though he’d laughed before, a light had visibly gone out in Rand, like when a child wakes too early on Christmas morning and sees Mom eating the cookies and stuffing the stockings. Margot remained silent a moment, breaking her eye contact to demurely look at the carpet as she grew more faint. Her vision swam, whether it was to do with low blood sugar or an upcoming migraine. To keep steady, she started talking again.

  “You know what I mean, though, right? There’s science, and then there’s…fairies and witches…pixie dust…” The carpeting rippled beneath her. “Mirage.”

  “Yes, I see the point. You always did cater to redundancy in your ad copy.”

  That snapped her attention back to his face. A friendly smirk implied he’d meant it in jest, but the critique stung, echoing what she’d heard in actual performance reviews. She gave a little huff as her ears crackled, and she was feeling so cold now, she half expected to see her breath come out in a frosty mist.

  “But all right,” he said. “You don’t believe, and hopefully death isn’t something you dwell on often.” His eyes, locked on hers, appeared to pose this as a question. “I only ask because…well, I was just won—”

  Bzzzzz! blared the door buzzer from just a meter away.

  “Christ!” Rand spun to grab its phone-like receiver. “Yeah, hi?”

  “It’s me.”

  A female voice, as best as Margot could hear. And a haughty one, she felt. As her head continued to swoon, a fierce territorialism swelled in her breast.

  “Right, I’ll come down straight away,” Rand had barely said before Margot leaned toward the intercom and blurted out a peal of coquettish laughter. Shooting her a baffled look, he quickly added, “Actually, come on up!” He stabbed the unlock button and firmly held it down as he stared at Margot with an intensity that said their conversation wasn’t over yet.

  But Margot squared her shoulders and marched backwards into her bedroom, shoving the door into his next words—“It’s Gwen”—to smash and send them wilting to the floor.

  The door stayed shut.

  (Dream Entry—June 30)

  She rises aloft to meet her salvation, the mourners at her feet, shrouded in anonymity, but their pain is distinct… They sink, they slump, they writhe, they grind their fists to their teeth and convulse if not retch with her at the center…not prostrate with stiff hands arranged in artifice at her bosom, not her. She, wholly beneath cloth of ivory, lies on her side, revealing womanly hips and scandalously outlined thigh… A face, just barely perceptible where the fabric gathers at the nose and is pulled taut by gravity, but the fingers are flesh from where they peer… An arm that had slipped from her side… She looks slovenly, as though no care was tended to make her proper on Earth whereas the angels exalt her gracious divinity and cradle the infant in holy arms.

  This was Margot’s most vivid dream yet, and she took care to jot as much detail as fleeting memory would allow. Rereading the entry to the light of the computer monitor that had turned itself on and woken her again, she used a thumbnail to plow away crusty remnants of drool at the corner of her lips.

  It was approaching ten o’clock, the sun only first giving in to its lengthened summer curfew so that the moon could step out. The blackbirds’ erratic lullabies seemed to urge Margot to face the music of a mess she’d so foolishly strewn. First Derek, now this.

  She started when a dull thud on the door sharpened into three knocks.

  “Margot?”

  The desk chair answered with a creak as she lifted her weight from it to open the door. Keeping her palm on the knob, she stepped into the threshold, hesitating several seconds before raising her meek eyes. Luckily, the face she met was not the scowling Byronic hero she’d expected.

  “Hi, you all right?” Rand’s tone sounded like he hadn’t analyzed the incident to remotely the same extreme as Margot had. He probably hadn’t even given her a second thought before going out on his planned evening with Gwen.

  “Sure.” She felt sickened by their resumed positions in the doorway and suggested relocating to the living room, where she sat timidly on Rand’s club chair like a child sent to the principal’s office.

  “Gwen was here just briefly,” he said, “then we went for dinner. There’s leftover pizza if you like.”

  “That’s nice of you. I’m fine, though.”

  “You did eat, then?”

  No. “Yeah, but thanks.”

  “What were you up to tonight?”

  “Oh, just slept. Taking advantage of the fact I can.”

  “You have seemed knackered lately. I assume from late nights studying. That takes its toll.” His tone was light enough, but the words sounded strained.

  “Haven’t been to class in a while, to be honest.”

  “Oh?”

  “Nah. I mean, what’s actually at stake anyway? What do grades mean at this point?”

  Rand rubbed his chin slowly as speculation shadowed his eyes. “Well, you’re an adult. I suppose you know what you’re doing.”

  Not likely, but she was grateful he didn’t get didactic on her. Still, she tried to salvage her studious reputation to an extent.

  “I still meet with my project partner, so she brings me up to speed. A lot of the stuff assigned is common sense or straight out of work experience, so I’m making good headway.” That was half true; she’d sporadically returned phone calls and emailed bare-minimum contri
butions to at least not sabotage Chloé’s credits.

  “Interesting projects? Challenging?”

  “Not really.”

  Rand didn’t probe further, even though it was an area of his own expertise. Among so many things, Margot appreciated this about him—that he knew where to draw lines and let her be. To a degree.

  “What were you working on just now?” he asked.

  “Huh?”

  “I saw a notebook open on the desk. You were writing?”

  “Yeah, sort of. Just something on my mind.”

  “What is on your mind, may I ask?”

  Shit. I walked right into that. She didn’t know where to even begin explaining something she herself didn’t understand, but she owed him a try.

  “Not much. I don’t know.” She exhaled loudly to concede defeat. “Look, I’m really, really sorry for my behavior. Before. I don’t pretend to have a reason. I was tired and started to feel sick, but that doesn’t excuse my rudeness. I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, you were a bit of a prat, weren’t you? Rather unexpected. What made you fancy laughing in hysterics like that? Only to slam the door in my face the next instant?”

  So, he did think about it. Just took some “polite” passive-aggressive beating around the bush to get down to it. “I’m really embarrassed. I’m not sure. Did Gwen hear?”

  His brows elevated. “Quite clearly, yes. I believe that was the point?”

  Fuck. Blame hormones? “At the risk of playing into stereotype, I think I’m PMSing.”

  “Really now.”

  A prickling heat rushed to Margot’s skin, washing over her entire body and tensing her muscles. Pressure seemed to shift in her brain as, provoked, she lifted the tail from between her legs and attacked—again.

  “Why in hell can’t men just respect that?” Even she knew this was an idiotic comeback, but she was riled. “Hasn’t Gwen trained you to track her cycle by now? Or is she just a bitch all the time?”