by Scott Hale
“Okay,” Trent said. Hand still pressed against his eye, he could have sworn he felt a force trying to pry it away, to force him to look at the clock. “Alright. Let me go get cleaned up.”
TRENT GEMMA CAMILLA
Post-war dinners were always the worst. No one spoke, let alone looked at each other. Instead, they communicated through how they ate. How loudly they clinked their silverware; how violently they sawed their steaks. If Dad guzzled his drink and choked down his food, then Gemma knew he would be as good as gone before desserts came out. If Mom nursed her wine like it was the last of the stuff on Earth, then Gemma knew she would be in the kitchen the rest of the night, busying herself with tasks, buying herself time until Dad fell asleep, so that she could crawl into bed without conflict.
But tonight was different. Her mom and dad were acting… normal. Whatever that word meant anymore. Dad was smiling, making small talk. And Mom was joining in, not talking over him, but with him. And they seemed to be enjoying the steak and potatoes, not forcing it down their throats like they were doused in poison and twice-baked with razor blades. It was freaking weird.
“Fairgrounds are going to be open next week,” Dad said. “Want to go?”
“Eh.” Gemma impaled a piece of meat. “I don’t know. There’s a lot of trashy people that go there. I’m not about that life anymore.”
“Not about that life? Who are you?” Dad smirked. “Well, how about we go just to grab a funnel cake or two?”
Her mom flashed her a look that told her to say yes, so she bit the side of her lip and reluctantly said, “Sure.”
Cringing, Dad stared at his plate and said, “That clock is something else, isn’t it?”
Mom leaned out of her chair, as though to check on the beastly thing. “Uh, huh.”
He’s trying to play nice, Gemma thought. She scooped out a forkful of potato and ate it. Before she could swallow it, the piece had slithered down her throat. On its own.
“Ugh,” she said, waving off her parents’ concern as she took a drink of water.
Mom sighed, somewhat offended. “Is my cooking really that bad?”
“No, no.” Gemma took another drink. This time, it had the aftertaste of rust. “Sorry. I’m just—”
“So how much you think you can flip it for?” Dad interrupted. Money. It always came back to money.
“A lot,” Mom said. She had been vague about the demonic idol standing in their living room ever since it had arrived. Gemma was starting to get the feeling she’d bought it on a whim and was doing her best not to admit she had.
“I got to tell you—” Dad eyed the fridge for a beer, then settled for his glass of water, instead, “—it’s not what I expected. You sure you want it in here?”
“Looks cursed,” Gemma said.
Dad nodded.
Mom took a drink of wine, let it run over her teeth some. Voice deeper than usual, she said, “You two just going to keep giving me a hard time about it?”
Gemma, the diligent diplomat, quickly said, “No, it’s cool, Mom.”
“It’s hundreds of years old, you know?” Mom was staring at her hands, touching the veins that bulged from them, as though to make them go away. “It was built…” Her brows knitted. She cocked her head, like someone was talking to her. “It was built in a convent.”
“Is it one of a kind?” Dad asked.
Mom nodded. She picked up her fork, raw meat clinging to it, and pressed it to her veins.
Gemma leaned forward, saying, “Uh, Mom?”
And then Mom put the fork down and smiled. “I think we’ll have to put a lot into it, but the clock will be worth it.”
TRENT GEMMA CAMILLA
What time is it? Camilla’s eyes fluttered open to the gray dark of her room. She was sprawled out across the bed, taking advantage of the space afforded to her by having Trent sleep on the couch. She licked her lips, turned over. The alarm clock on the nightstand seared the numbers 12:54 AM into her mind.
“Ugh, god,” she said, rolling back over. Nothing pissed her off more than waking up in the middle of the night. Well, besides Trent.
As soon as she was about to fall asleep, she heard someone run down the hall. Jolted awake, she checked the time—12:56 AM—and sat up. One leg over the side of the bed, she leaned forward. The door to her room was cracked—didn’t she shut it?—and she was trying to see what was going on beyond it.
“Gemma?” she called, coming to her feet. Her daughter’s room was at the end of the hall, but the bathroom was in between. Maybe she tripped on her way out.
Camilla went to the door. Had the other half of her brain been awake, she might have flipped on a light. But since she was a few yawns away from full-blown hibernation, she just grabbed the door and flung it back.
There was someone in the hall. They looked like Gemma, but it was hard to tell. Too dark, and Camilla’s eyes were all gummed up from her allergies. Rubbing them, she shuffled forward, trying to make sense of why her daughter—yes, it had to have been—was squatting down in the middle of the hall.
“Gemma? Hey, honey, are you okay?”
There was a squelching sound. Her daughter shifted, let out a moan. A foul smell rose off her and closed around Camilla’s face like a wet, dirty hand.
“Jesus,” Camilla cried, about to vomit.
Her daughter, still not much more than a shadow, then stood and took off down the hallway, blending into the blackness that gathered at the end of it.
“Gemma?”
Camilla, covering her nose, backtracked to her room and switched on the light. There, in the middle of the hallway, where the shadow of her daughter had been sitting, was a puddle of bloody shit.
“Oh god.”
Camilla leaned back into her room, trying to get some fresh air, but it was impossible. The smell was everywhere, and it seeped into everything. Even her hands over her nose smelled awful, like sweaty copper and meaty feces.
Concern propelled her forward. She tried to jump over the steaming puddle, but her heel caught the edge of it, making her stomach sink. Somewhere between angry and terrified, she kept going, past the bathroom, to her daughter’s room.
Camilla pushed the door open and flicked on the lights. Gemma was lying in bed, the blankets kicked off. Her back was to her mother, and she was holding onto Scram the bat for dear life. She was snoring, and her pajama shorts weren’t stained.
“Gemma?” Camilla was about to go to her daughter’s bedside when she realized the smell was gone. Instead, she looked over her shoulder, back into the hallway. The pile of bloody shit had disappeared.
Camilla covered her mouth, mumbled, “Okay. Okay, what the fuck?” as she wandered out of her daughter’s room, back to the place where she had vacated her bowels. But there was nothing there. No feces, no gore.
“Mom?” Gemma called out behind her.
Camilla ignored her and slipped back into her room. Her head, so filled with confusion and doubt, felt as though it were going to explode. She sat down on the bed. The alarm clock read 1:00 AM. She didn’t go back to sleep after that.
TRENT GEMMA CAMILLA
Trent woke up at eighty-thirty in the morning to the hot sunlight that left him clammy and sick. He hadn’t slept well. The family room couch was more like a torture device than a piece of furniture. That, and he had kept hearing noises all night, too. A kind of low whining, something like a scared cat would make, coming from the living room. That’s where the grandfather clock was, and that’s what he figured the noise had been. It’s gears, maybe; its workings, winding up and getting ready to do what it was meant to do. Or something. He wasn’t an expert on that stuff.
Getting up from the couch’s quicksand center, something crunched beneath the cushions.
“The hell?”
He dug in the crevice, found an envelope smashed against the abandoned hide-a-bed. Camilla was hiding bills again? It was something she used to do all the time, then stopped when she started talking about getting a divorce. He cou
ld already feel his blood boiling, but maybe this was a sign she was changing her mind on leaving him.
“What did you blow money on this time?” He tore open the unmarked envelope. Instead of a bill, there was a letter. And it read:
Trent,
These last few years have been difficult. I think that we both can agree on that. And I think we can also both agree that we would give just about anything to get back what we used to have so long ago. It hurts me to say that it is gone, but… I don’t know anymore. How much longer can we hold out? All we do is hurt each other. And Gemma… I can already see it now, her doing everything to make us suffer for putting her through this. It turns my stomach, Trent.
We’re better than this. We deserve better than this. I’m not happy anymore, and I know you can’t be, either. We’re too comfortable. Even the fighting is comfortable. It isn’t supposed to be this way. We become something else when we are around each other. Our marriage has become something else, too. I don’t hate you, but I don’t love you. Not like I want to. Not anymore. Help me end it. It’s the only—
There was no more to Camilla’s letter. She had stopped there. He had an idea when she might have written it. There had been a night a few months back when he came into the family room and she was on the couch. She jumped, and then started chewing on the pen in her hand. They fought that night, but it wasn’t like it usually was. She kept trying to end it, and he kept it going, confirming what she’d already known for years on end.
Trent shoved the letter back under the couch cushion. Tears in his eyes, he slipped out the back door and onto the porch to watch the ocean awhile.
TRENT GEMMA CAMILLA
“Did you get sick last night?”
Tongue firmly planted in the side of her ice cream scoop, Gemma shook her head and mumbled a very tongue-numbed, “No.”
It was Saturday afternoon at the Dairy Delight. This was supposed to be their special, stress-free time of the week. Yet Mom looked anything but stress-free. She had the same expression Gemma imagined the queen had in her sand castles right before the waves rolled in.
“I thought I heard you.” Mom sipped loudly on her straw, her diet soda nothing more than icy dregs.
Gemma lowered her cone. The warm summer air rushed over the Dairy Delight’s pavilion, helping to melt everyone’s ice cream there. The garishly colored store wasn’t as busy as it usually was. Might have been the storm that blew away most of the tourists.
“I won’t be mad.”
“Mom, I didn’t get sick. What? What is it?”
Her mom shook her head.
Two of Gemma’s classmates, Britney and Ashley, passed by the pavilion. They were in shorts and tops that may have well been bathing suits or stripper outfits. They had stupid grins on their faces, and while they stared at her and her mom, they whispered underneath their bubblegum breath. It didn’t bother Gemma as much as they probably would’ve liked, but it would catch up with her later when she was in bed with Scram, unburdening her soul to the stuffed bat.
“I can tell, Mom. You look… disturbed,” she finally said, the two bitches bouncing along to the next store. “What’s wrong? Is it Dad?”
“It’s always something with your father.” Mom took a plastic spoon and snitched with it a bit of ice cream from Gemma’s cone. “That clock—” she laughed, savored the minty flavor of her pilfering, “—it’s something else, isn’t it?”
Popping her lips, Gemma said, “Oh yeah.”
Mom ran her fingers through her oily hair. “Feels good to be out of the house. The last few days, I’ve felt kind of bad. Summer cold? I don’t know.” Slurp, slurp, slurp, and then: “You hate the clock, don’t you?”
Gemma didn’t know how to respond, so she didn’t.
“It has a name.”
Gemma leaned in, intrigued. Not so much to hear the name, but to see how her mom came up with it. Because like last night, when she mentioned it being made in a convent, it seemed like she was winging these details, making it up as she went. Whenever she talked about the clock, her eyes went elsewhere, like someone was talking to her. Someone, AKA, her imagination.
“The Dread Clock.” Her eyes went elsewhere, her brows bobbing up and down to some unheard utterance.
Did Gemma just hear something, too? Words on the wind, cold and whispered. She scanned the pavilion. Had to have been the diabetes-riddled family at the next table over, admiring their quadruple chocolate chunk ice cream bowl. She shook her head, felt like a jerk.
“The nuns at the convent called it the Dread Clock.”
“Where was the convent?”
“Somewhere near Russia, in the countryside, I think.”
“We have a thing called the ‘Dread Clock’ in our living room?” Gemma snorted. “Where is my mom, and what did you do with her?”
“Stop. It’s an antique.” Her mom took out her keys and dug them into her hip. “They built it because—” she stopped speaking, focused harder, “—there was so much sin in the world. They thought time and sin were connected.”
“Oh, I get it,” Gemma said. “Like how they say there’s a murder every five seconds sort of thing?”
Mom’s eyes shone with faint, red light. “Yes!” She put her keys away. “Exactly. I think they thought of the Dread Clock as being a kind of dream catcher.”
“Sin catcher.”
Mom nodded enthusiastically. “More or less. It would suck up all the sin in the world. Maybe even stop bad things from happening in the future.”
Gemma polished off her ice cream and started chewing on the cone. “You sure they were nuns? That sounds a little witchy.” With a mouthful of waffle, she blabbered, “It’s got horns, Mom! Freaking horns!”
“Gemma,” her mom cried. Red faced, she shot her arm out and almost grabbed Gemma’s wrist. “Please, don’t make fun of me for it.”
Gemma fell back in her seat. “Okay,” she said. What the heck? she thought. This is the way she acted with Dad, not with her. What the heck was wrong with her?
“Sorry.” Mom retracted her arm. “Your dad questions everything I do. I don’t mean to take it out on you.”
She shrugged.
“Researchers—”
Researchers? Gemma couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Researchers? She bought this thing out of Gethin’s shop. Why was she acting like it was some priceless artifact? Some scientific marvel?
“—think it wasn’t always in the form of a clock.”
Weirded out to the point of sounding like a robot, Gemma said, “Oh?” and went on studying her mom like the imposter she might have been.
“The oldest grandfather clock was made in the 1600s, but people think the Dread Clock is much older.” She took the straw out of her cup, curled it up, and popped it into her mouth to chew on it.
Gemma was becoming acutely aware of how strange her mother was acting, and how many people were watching them on the pavilion. She started cleaning up the table, trying to signal to her mother it was time to go.
Mom swallowed. “So we really lucked out, sweetie.” The straw wasn’t in her mouth anymore. “You’re ready to go? You sure you’re not sick? Let’s go somewhere else, then. It feels good to be out.”
“Mom?”
“Hmm?”
Gemma scooted out her chair. The metal it was made of ground against the concrete. When she stood, something cold skidded down her leg from in between her thighs. It felt like a finger, nail first, scraping down her skin.
“What is it, Gemma?”
She went sideways, hiding her leg. “How do you think Gethin got ahold of something like that?”
Mom shrugged, stood up, too. “Maybe we should get back to the house. I should probably get back to restoring the clock.”
“So we can sell it?”
A dark shadow stole across the pavilion. “Yeah,” Mom said. She took out her keys and jingled them. “Want to drive?”
TRENT GEMMA CAMILLA
Trent didn’t say anything at dinner t
onight. Camilla brought up the cost of the clock and the divorce papers, which were coming any day now (they weren’t), but he wouldn’t bite. Instead, he sat in the family room, gloomily shoveling spaghetti into his mouth, while he watched a high school girls’ volleyball team play on public access. She had to send Gemma in to change the channel, and when she did, Gemma came back saying that Dad was asleep, the spaghetti mostly in his lap. Camilla left him there after dinner was over to clean himself up on his own.
It was about 9:00 PM when Camilla settled down in the living room with her pride and joy, the Dread Clock. All this talk of repairing and restoring it, and yet sitting here at the foot of the thing, her and its shadow now one, she couldn’t find anything wrong with it. As far as she could tell, the Dread Clock was perfect. She knew she had seen images of it before—when, exactly, she couldn’t remember—and everything about it looked in order. And she liked that. No mess, no flaws. Everything as it ought to be. Ugly and raw, maybe, but genuine, without pretention or promise.
Camilla went to her knees and pressed her hands to the glass case where the dark, almost organic pendulum swung. What shape had the Dread Clock taken before being confined to this wooden body? An hourglass? A sundial? A jet-black obelisk? And what remained? What had been carried down through the ages? What was the constant that made this thing tick and tock and suck the sin from this world? She touched the glass case and wondered if she could fit Gemma inside it.
TRENT GEMMA CAMILLA
I have to be inside her to show her I love her. I have to be inside her to show her I love her. I have to be inside her to show her I love her. I have to be inside her to show her I love her.
TRENT GEMMA CAMILLA
Scram the bat sat like a sentry on Gemma’s pillow as she lay on the floor, cell phone held high above her head, trying to find something, anything, on Mom’s Dread Clock. It was midnight now, and she had already been at it for an hour. So far, the most she had come up with were a bunch of urban legends about creepy clocks and some crappy digital art that looked like it was done by a four-year-old.
