Speaker 1: Hollo, I molcoed stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Speaker 1: Let's get into it.
Speaker 2: The day I found the ledger, mare Import was waking
Speaker 2: gently from winter, the air in the museum's back storage
Speaker 2: sharp with salt and dust. I'd volunteered for a season,
Speaker 2: maybe two, telling myself it would be a way to
Speaker 2: ease into retirement without quite becoming invisible. My eyes were
Speaker 2: still as sharp as ever, or so I thought, and
Speaker 2: I liked the feeling of cold brass drawer pulls, the
Speaker 2: slow patience of labeling, and the odd privilege of turning
Speaker 2: over objects nobody saw, except perhaps their ghosts. I'd begun
Speaker 2: the morning by opening the ledgers from the Four Families collection,
Speaker 2: all those thick hand bound records from the respected lines
Speaker 2: who kept our famous clock tower, the reeds, cartwrites, Benson's
Speaker 2: and Dales. Over the years, their receipts, repair logs, and
Speaker 2: diaries had been cataloged as living roof of the town's
Speaker 2: unbroken histories. That was why the margins caught me off guard.
Speaker 2: Neat little clusters of blankness, precision ruled spaces spanning exactly
Speaker 2: nine months, reappearing every seven years, always across the same
Speaker 2: set of families, sometimes overlapping, more often staggered, but always recurring.
Speaker 2: Not errors, not missing pages or obvious damage, but the
Speaker 2: careful silence of omission. I traced three generations of these
Speaker 2: absences across two ledgers, pausing first in amusement and then
Speaker 2: with a kind of creeping mathematical interest. Something in the
Speaker 2: unbroken regularity, each cycle, as clean as the moon's, refused
Speaker 2: any careless explanation. Why, if these were gaps of mere
Speaker 2: chance or family misfortune, were they so precisely coordinated? Rewind,
Speaker 2: say to nineteen twenty eight. The Reeds father and sons,
Speaker 2: their signatures missing from the workshop register, no sales slips,
Speaker 2: no market debts, signed out on the last day of March,
Speaker 2: and back in exactly nine months, not a flicker in between.
Speaker 2: Next year's signature flowed in the same looping hand as
Speaker 2: if returned after a good night's sleep. At first the
Speaker 2: effect was subtle, Then it wasn't. The further I flipped,
Speaker 2: the more the rhythm stacked up, ledger after ledger, the
Speaker 2: families working for years, vanishing, returning, always leaving tools, laid out,
Speaker 2: contracts resolved, clocks wound tight and ticking. There were even
Speaker 2: reassuring little notes workshop in order, spring chimes wound in
Speaker 2: the curator's hand, as if documenting a tradition every one shared.
Speaker 2: I made a note in my catalog, vague and self conscious,
Speaker 2: recurring nine month gaps in all four Clockmaker families documentation
Speaker 2: see page eighty four f F. Perhaps this was some
Speaker 2: old time redundancy, like planting fallow fields or once necessary
Speaker 2: holiday cloaked in paperwork. But the quiet perfection of the
Speaker 2: return benches, dusted accounts clear, every time piece, never gaining
Speaker 2: or losing so much as a minute, bothered me more
Speaker 2: than if I had found a break in. The Clockmakers
Speaker 2: were the last families in town any one expected to
Speaker 2: leave loose ends. But nowhere did the official history mention
Speaker 2: such a rhythm, No reference in the histories, the local
Speaker 2: oral collections, or the pile of festival programs. This in
Speaker 2: a town so besotted with the poetry of unbroken days
Speaker 2: that it published centennial commemorations of the clocks every minor overhaul.
Speaker 2: And so I left the ledgers open and walked back
Speaker 2: past the grandfather clocks crowding the main room, thinking, as
Speaker 2: any teacher might, there must be something here. They're not teaching.
Speaker 2: I told myself I'd ask missus Avery before shelving the question,
Speaker 2: but not yet. The best curiosities, after all, do not
Speaker 2: tolerate tidy answers on demand. The next morning, I found
Speaker 2: myself returning to the ledgers before clocking in, this time
Speaker 2: with a cup of coffee and more deliberate intent. I'd
Speaker 2: been back in Merinport three years, long enough to be
Speaker 2: tolerated as a familiar face, too short to stop being
Speaker 2: the new miss fern March. Even if I wore my
Speaker 2: family name like the sea worn pebble, it was retired.
Speaker 2: From thirty years of high school mathematics. I was used
Speaker 2: to routines, rules, and the sorts of small rebellions that
Speaker 2: passed for excitement among teenagers. Maybe that's why these nine
Speaker 2: months silences, regular as eclipses, unsettled me so much. Their
Speaker 2: neatness was the opposite of randomness. Merinport, four thousand souls strong,
Speaker 2: pressed its way into the world where New England's rocky
Speaker 2: coast dips toward islands and maritime fog. The clock tower
Speaker 2: was the town's defining feature, visible from every street, even
Speaker 2: from the harbor, where lobster pots stacked in impossible. Pyramids
Speaker 2: and crews swapped. The old war stories now faded to
Speaker 2: familial myth. The clock gives us our pulse. Missus Avery
Speaker 2: liked to intone, mostly for the benefit of tourists, but
Speaker 2: I found the phrase endearing. It was true. The clock
Speaker 2: marked everything, noon lunches, fish market auctions, curfews for bored
Speaker 2: teenagers who broke them anyway, and the sevens chime, the
Speaker 2: festival that once every seven years reset the local fishing
Speaker 2: calendar with general jubilation. Nowhere was this routine more visible
Speaker 2: than in the subtle choreography between the clockmaker families and
Speaker 2: the rest of us. Their houses, always a bit grander,
Speaker 2: always perfectly maintained, stood in a long curving crescent near
Speaker 2: the old church, gardens clipped in patterns older than any
Speaker 2: living gardener. Each family supplied a roll read for winding,
Speaker 2: Benson for repairs, Dale for calibration, cartwrite for tending, chiming
Speaker 2: sequences no one else would touch. Their names were printed
Speaker 2: on plaques and street signs, immortalized in plays and birthday cakes.
Speaker 2: But I'd never once heard more than a sentence or
Speaker 2: two slip from their private routines. I liked to watch
Speaker 2: the clockmakers at dawn, sipping my tea by the cracked
Speaker 2: window as sealers read, always in a blue coat, passed
Speaker 2: with his keys, head down, faced too somber for a
Speaker 2: man starting his day. He never waved, but always nodded once.
Speaker 2: The tower, even at its quietest, pulsed with the sense
Speaker 2: of things in order. In contrast, my neighbor Lars Jensen,
Speaker 2: retired fishermen, some blackened and prone to humor, kept his
Speaker 2: windows open all hours, running his dog and trading stories,
Speaker 2: as if daring the clock to keep up. It was
Speaker 2: an odd thing, being welcomed and never quite invited. In
Speaker 2: the fishermen spoke of tides and winds. The clockmaker families
Speaker 2: floated in rumor and correctness, and the new folks built cafes,
Speaker 2: ran the school board, and attended costume balls in the
Speaker 2: civic hall. Most days, such boundaries were only faint, but
Speaker 2: the museum's quiet rooms made it clear how the old
Speaker 2: lines endured. Missus Avery, our white head Eaglide director, bestrode
Speaker 2: these lines as if she'd invented them. She edited every
Speaker 2: display placard, recited every former museum volunteer's birth date, and could,
Speaker 2: if pressed, recall the exact placement of a bucket in
Speaker 2: photographs up to eighty years old. She liked to patrol,
Speaker 2: her voice a stage whisper, even when alone, as if
Speaker 2: the past might escape from its casings. It was missus
Speaker 2: Avery who summarized the town's relationship with time, saying to me, once,
Speaker 2: some places keep their ghosts in the attic, mare import
Speaker 2: keeps them wound inside the clock. I laughed, but she
Speaker 2: barely smiled. Near By, the spring's largest project, curating the
Speaker 2: Seven's Chime exhibit, had begun. On alternating mornings, I'd catch
Speaker 2: a glimpse of Seala's Reed unlocking the clock tower's battered
Speaker 2: green door, vanishing inside with his toolkit, serious as a doctor.
Speaker 2: Cela's daughter Mabel, sometimes danced behind him, a flash of
Speaker 2: sneakers and wire hair. Otherwise, the families kept to themselves.
Speaker 2: The festival calendar marked another point of curiosity. Every seven years,
Speaker 2: the whole town celebrated a fishing bonanza, the chime Bonanza,
Speaker 2: as everyone called it. Its date set not by the
Speaker 2: tides or government decree, but by the clock towers twelve
Speaker 2: part chiming, a sequence passed only from one clockmaker generation
Speaker 2: to the next. It was regarded with both pride and
Speaker 2: a ritual seriousness out of step with modernity. I'd seen
Speaker 2: children tiptoe pass the tower during the week of the chime,
Speaker 2: and some said the fishing boat's luck depended on hearing
Speaker 2: every note. No more, no less. All of this I
Speaker 2: considered normal, or perhaps faintly odd, part of the subtle
Speaker 2: mythmaking that pervaded old New England towns. The seriousness with
Speaker 2: which people took the rituals fascinated me, but their longevity,
Speaker 2: how such customs endured unbroken seemed less suspicious to me
Speaker 2: than from remarkable. Yet the nine month absences echoed in
Speaker 2: Ledger after Ledger would not leave me alone. Such precision,
Speaker 2: carried on for generations, was not the stuff of lost
Speaker 2: holidays or clerical fancy. Why in a town obsessed with
Speaker 2: continuity and documentation, were these repeating silences never noticed, let
Speaker 2: alone explained? The real oddness began, as most does, with
Speaker 2: a walk. I taken to strolling early, cutting across the
Speaker 2: green and past the clockmaker Crescent. One morning, near the
Speaker 2: end of April, in a year that should have seen
Speaker 2: every house bustling with festival errands, I found the entire
Speaker 2: block of clockmaker homes for in a neat row, strangely silent.
Speaker 2: The curtains were drawn, the gardens immaculate hedges, clipped with
Speaker 2: military precision, but there were no cars in the driveways,
Speaker 2: no figures moving about. Even the cat that usually prowled
Speaker 2: the cartright porch was gone. I circled, feeling for all
Speaker 2: the world like a trespasser, peering through the spaces between
Speaker 2: drawn curtains. Inside, I glimpsed only the gleam of polished
Speaker 2: wood and the regular, faint, tic tick of clocks, A
Speaker 2: multitude of clocks, each unwound and perfect, their faces shining.
Speaker 2: I tried the gate of the Benson House locked, but
Speaker 2: the mail box was full, the doormat clear of leaves,
Speaker 2: no fliers, no newspapers, scattered, everything in perfect order, without
Speaker 2: a trace of occupancy, yet untouched by neglect. That evening
Speaker 2: I checked the museum's house registries, full of alphabetized minutiae
Speaker 2: and ancient electoral rolls. No interruption appeared, each family listed
Speaker 2: as occupied, head present. Even the school's attendance logs, which
Speaker 2: I was permitted to review, gave no indication of absence.
Speaker 2: Club rosters, church bulletins, volunteer lists, all seamless, not one
Speaker 2: reference to a missing family member, no explanations, no on sabbatical,
Speaker 2: no visiting kin. Even the birthday column in the town's
Speaker 2: weekly rag rattled on like clockwork, congratulating Sealers read on
Speaker 2: his fortieth, Mabel read on her sixteenth, all smack in
Speaker 2: the middle of what I had observed as a perfect silence.
Speaker 2: That contradiction gnawed at me. I could understand, perhaps that
Speaker 2: old pattens persisted in records by inertia. But birth days,
Speaker 2: church attendants, and school lists the living tissue of community.
Speaker 2: Not even a mention of travel, no wish you were
Speaker 2: here or away this week. The houses remained unentered, their
Speaker 2: absence invisible in public view, as if time itself glossed
Speaker 2: over them. I'd watched, I'd checked, and the evidence in
Speaker 2: my own mind was clear. Yet on paper they'd never
Speaker 2: been gone. I approached missus Avery, hoping perhaps for a
Speaker 2: benign explanation, some overlooked clockmaker custom dusted off for every
Speaker 2: seventh year. She was hunched over a stack of gallery placards,
Speaker 2: pen poised in the preternatural hush of the front exhibit room,
Speaker 2: I coughed to announce myself and she patted the seat
Speaker 2: beside her. Have you ever noticed, I began, as innocently
Speaker 2: as I could manage, that the ledgers are missing entries
Speaker 2: every seven years, entire months missing, sometimes whole cycles, with
Speaker 2: nothing but silence for a cluster of families. She pursed,
Speaker 2: her lips, the tip of her pen resting on a
Speaker 2: card describing the annual clock winding. Record Keeping used to
Speaker 2: be messier, Fern. But it's the service that matters, not
Speaker 2: the paperwork, except the pattern repeats. I pressed nine months
Speaker 2: every seventh year, not just in one family, but across
Speaker 2: all four clockmaker lines. Have you ever seen a period
Speaker 2: when they weren't here? She shook her head, as though
Speaker 2: hearing a question in a foreign tongue. Oh, the families
Speaker 2: have always been present. Sealers is father before him? The
Speaker 2: Benson's even longer. Not a miss day. Since I learned
Speaker 2: to tell time by the clock tower, their service is unbroken.
Speaker 2: But there really were years without their signatures, entire seasons
Speaker 2: in every record, Fern. Old books lose pages, secretaries take
Speaker 2: short cuts. What matters is that every hour strikes true
Speaker 2: and the festival happens on time. That's what town history
Speaker 2: records continuity if you want a real mystery, find out
Speaker 2: where Missus Cartwright's cinnamon bun recipe disappeared to It hasn't
Speaker 2: been seen since nineteen eighty nine. She half smiled at
Speaker 2: her own joke, then signaled I'd best move on. I
Speaker 2: let her words sit, their smoothness oddly frustrating. I could
Speaker 2: not help but sense that beneath her assurance lay not evasion,
Speaker 2: but a genuine absence of concern or even of awareness,
Speaker 2: about the family's periodic vanishings, like a blank spot in
Speaker 2: the mind where a memory should be. I resolved quietly
Speaker 2: to observe the coming days with a closer eye. Unwilling
Speaker 2: to be so easily put off, I began to patrol
Speaker 2: the blocks before sunrise and after dusk, nothing overt, but
Speaker 2: enough to feel the boundaries of the family curious routine.
Speaker 2: Morning after morning, the clockmaker homes remained silent, their order undisturbed.
Speaker 2: No trash bins moved, no cars relocated, no garden tools
Speaker 2: left out of place. Window boxes bloomed perfectly, as if
Speaker 2: tended by a hidden hand. I passed the tower, which
Speaker 2: continued its relentless, resonant chiming, exactly on schedule, perhaps more
Speaker 2: exact than ever. According to Lars Jensen's running joke, you
Speaker 2: could set your heart by the clock, though I wouldn't
Speaker 2: recommend it. One day in June, the town's mail carrier,
Speaker 2: an older woman who prided herself on her punctuality, grumbled
Speaker 2: in the post office entryway. Too many unclaimed packages for
Speaker 2: the clockmaker families, year in, year out, the same then
Speaker 2: overnight there scooped up every signature, A perfect match, too perfect.
Speaker 2: Don't trust something that neat? I asked her if she
Speaker 2: remembered any one collecting for them, or if perhaps neighbors
Speaker 2: get gathered the mail. She scowled. A reed is a
Speaker 2: reed they signed for their own, I suppose, and they
Speaker 2: never miss a letter. In the end. I walked through
Speaker 2: the square and listened to the hour's chime, noticing for
Speaker 2: the first time how the bell's echoes seemed to smooth
Speaker 2: rough corners off. The day that evening, I rifled through
Speaker 2: the museum's public copy of school attendance ledgers years on end,
Speaker 2: names spelled out in looping, childlike scrawl, and found that, strangely,
Speaker 2: the clockmaker children's absences never appeared, not even on days
Speaker 2: that coincided with the gaps I had cataloged one year.
Speaker 2: A substitute teacher had penciled in absent beside Mabel Reed's
Speaker 2: name for three consecutive weeks, only to have the notations
Speaker 2: erased and replaced in careful blue ink, ink that was
Speaker 2: not her own, as subsequent comments in the teacher's hand confirmed.
Speaker 2: I tested the pattern with a simple chart, aligning each
Speaker 2: seven years with whatever details I could glean from town life,
Speaker 2: festival dates, tax records, shipment receipts, even local weather logs.
Speaker 2: Every single cycle, without fail, was nine months in length,
Speaker 2: measured to the day before the families reappeared, not a
Speaker 2: day early, not a day late, always in late January,
Speaker 2: coinciding with the month before the Seven's Chime Festival began
Speaker 2: to be planned. The effect stretched back a hundred years
Speaker 2: or more, linking generations with a precision more common to
Speaker 2: automation than to fallible people. Yet the town smiled on
Speaker 2: content in its rhythms. Conversations with Lars were rarely fruitful.
Speaker 2: He laughed off my questions with a practical air, saying
Speaker 2: things like time runs funny here, especially if you ask
Speaker 2: a clockmaker, good folks, but don't ask m to explain things.
Speaker 2: But not everyone dismissed the conversation so lightly. One old
Speaker 2: fisherman offered, over his bottle of dark ale that they
Speaker 2: d been one year when the wind sounded different, but
Speaker 2: the time was always perfect. He shrugged, leaving the words
Speaker 2: to drift uncertainly away, no follow up forthcoming. When I pressed,
Speaker 2: did you ever notice a year when the clockmakers weren't around?
Speaker 2: He squinted, as if searching for a lost boy. If
Speaker 2: the clocks never stopped, does it matter who was minding them?
Speaker 2: He replied. I left, feeling both closer and farther from
Speaker 2: anything like an answer. The regularity of the family's absences,
Speaker 2: never acknowledged in public record, seamlessly erased in the memories
Speaker 2: of all but the most skeptical, felt almost like a
Speaker 2: secret agreement, the kind everyone accepts because it makes life smoother.
Speaker 2: But I wondered, how could four clusters of homes filled
Speaker 2: with objects, habits, signs of daily life become invisible to
Speaker 2: a whole population and themselves, apparently without even a blink.
Speaker 2: I began tracking the cycles in earnest, drafting timelines not
Speaker 2: just backward but forward, projecting the next anticipated absence, the
Speaker 2: clean geometry of it. Seven years of presents. Nine months
Speaker 2: of blankness repeat suggested not merely a habit, but a mechanism,
Speaker 2: one immune to outside interference. I started to suspect that
Speaker 2: the pattern was not simply social or psychological, but rooted deeper,
Speaker 2: perhaps in time keeping itself. To probe still further, I
Speaker 2: changed my approach. My early assumption had been the town
Speaker 2: kept the secret, perhaps out of kindness, perhaps out of habit,
Speaker 2: But interviews suggested otherwise, people really didn't register the gap
Speaker 2: at all, even when pressed about specifics. Instead of a
Speaker 2: conspiracy of silence, it was something more enigmatic, a silence
Speaker 2: that nobody even thought to keep. I waited for the
Speaker 2: eve of the families imminent return. Late January. Mabel, read
Speaker 2: seventeen and bored at the library, was happy to help
Speaker 2: me rochelve returns. Do you ever go away for a
Speaker 2: long time? I asked, quietly, as offhand as I could manage.
Speaker 2: She wrinkled her nose. Not really. We sometimes visit Aunt
Speaker 2: Jean in Hingham, but only on weekends. Why ever been
Speaker 2: gone for say, most of a year, maybe with your family?
Speaker 2: She looked at me with the mild scorned teenager's reserve
Speaker 2: for adults. Asking about the Internet, that's a long time. No,
Speaker 2: nothing like that. Why did I miss something? I dropped it,
Speaker 2: sensing genuine confusion. She really didn't remember, or possibly had
Speaker 2: never even experienced a blank stretch. The episode forced me
Speaker 2: to reconsider perhaps the clockmakers themselves did not remember leaving.
Speaker 2: Maybe their absence belonged to some other continuity parallel to
Speaker 2: the one all around us. A maintenance job performed on
Speaker 2: a plane inaccessible to the rest of the town. I
Speaker 2: diverted myself that evening with the comforting dullness of the storeroom,
Speaker 2: putting away seven chime memorabilia and artifacts from the tower itself.
Speaker 2: As I polished old brass finials, I came upon a
Speaker 2: cog thicker and heavier than the rest, engraved with pared
Speaker 2: years always seven years apart, spanning almost a century. On
Speaker 2: one rim in fine, almost secret script, ran an inscription
Speaker 2: kept for both, kept for both. The phrase sent a
Speaker 2: pulse up my spine, A riddle as plain and as
Speaker 2: cryptic as the absences for both what or whom, both cycles,
Speaker 2: both communities, or both sides of a divide, hidden by
Speaker 2: something as ordinary as a clock face. This, combined with
Speaker 2: the mechanical regularity of the phenomenon, the ticking ever renewed order,
Speaker 2: I realized, might mean that the clockmakers were not acting
Speaker 2: in secret, but in service to something unseen and essential,
Speaker 2: keeping time not just for mere import, but also for
Speaker 2: some alternate order or memory or place. My unease, previously
Speaker 2: irritation shift did to wonder. Suppose I thought that time
Speaker 2: in merimport was not an arrow, but a paired process,
Speaker 2: one visible, one invisible, both wound and tended, their consequences,
Speaker 2: drifting into the subtle fabric of daily life without conscious notice.
Speaker 2: If this was true, and my heart beat faster with
Speaker 2: the thought, the secrecy was less about hiding and more
Speaker 2: about sustaining something so basic, so fundamental, that nobody could
Speaker 2: see it at all. That night, I set a plan
Speaker 2: in motion from the first moment the clockmaker families reappeared.
Speaker 2: I would follow record and note every observable detail as
Speaker 2: a mathematician might, as a newly minted volunteer might, as
Speaker 2: any human facing the unknown might, by looking for patterns
Speaker 2: and by refusing to let the oddity slip quietly back
Speaker 2: to sleep. But the clues gathered faster than I could
Speaker 2: dissect them. The next week, rain pummeled the streets, and
Speaker 2: the wind rattled loose slates from the hall. The clock
Speaker 2: struck twelve, a minute ahead of my kitchen wristwise, a
Speaker 2: happening so rare. I recalibrated both instruments twice. Was it
Speaker 2: my error or the clock s that was the town's joke?
Speaker 2: The clock was always correct, even if everything else was wrong.
Speaker 2: Emboldened by my string of petty discoveries, I resolved to
Speaker 2: breach the invisible wall and see what else might hide
Speaker 2: behind the clock tower's green door. It was open for
Speaker 2: the first time I could remember, and no one seemed
Speaker 2: to notice or care. Inside, an iron staircase rose in silence.
Speaker 2: At the second landing, the sound of gears, the living
Speaker 2: heartbeat of the tower grew louder, reverberating through my shoes
Speaker 2: and up my spine. A door presented itself, usually locked,
Speaker 2: now unsecured. Within was an alcove, spare and cold, furnished
Speaker 2: only with a battered desk and a dusty, high backed chair. There,
Speaker 2: bound in cracked black leather lay a set of log books.
Speaker 2: Their edges were worn and smoothed by generations of hands.
Speaker 2: I opened the cover. The inside revealed pages meticulously inscribed
Speaker 2: ledgers of absence for each family, each gap marked neatly
Speaker 2: in red ink, pairs of dates columned side by side.
Speaker 2: It was not just one year or a decade, but
Speaker 2: a record nearly as old as the clock itself. The
Speaker 2: next set of pages displayed dates in pairs, always a
Speaker 2: current year than one seven years distant, alternating forward and
Speaker 2: backward through the margin. Cryptic notations, dual winding restore for
Speaker 2: the other cycle not to be broken. Mechanical diagrams appeared
Speaker 2: in red and blue, mysterious as sea charts, symbols reminiscent
Speaker 2: of leap year algorithms and tidal puzzles. There were references
Speaker 2: to events I'd never heard mentioned, Bonanza of the Other Side,
Speaker 2: Storm of the Missing May, the Hidden Festival, dated only
Speaker 2: within the cycle gaps, with a commentary that they had
Speaker 2: been kept from the waking town. I pieced together with
Speaker 2: relentless careful effort that the clockmaker families were absent, not
Speaker 2: as a ruse or a vacation, nor as a result
Speaker 2: of some hereditary malaise, but as part of maintaining a
Speaker 2: second calendar, a calendar concurrent, parallel, perhaps even interwoven with
Speaker 2: the daily clockwork. Mere import knew and loved it. Was
Speaker 2: no longer clear even to me what was real and
Speaker 2: what was maintained only as a shimmer of practiced routine.
Speaker 2: If the families left, they did so in service to
Speaker 2: something both more abstract and more immediate than tradition, the
Speaker 2: upholding of a world that flickered between presents and absence,
Speaker 2: each supporting the other in turn. Emerging from the alcove
Speaker 2: log book pages burned into my memory, I felt less
Speaker 2: anxious than charged, a kind of fascination humming at the
Speaker 2: edges of my thoughts. If there was another cycle, what
Speaker 2: or where was it? What did it mean for the
Speaker 2: town's fishing bonanzas, its uncannily flawless weather, its near legendary
Speaker 2: avoidance of disaster, What exactly did the clockmakers absentee labor produce,
Speaker 2: and for who or what did they keep the time
Speaker 2: My steps led me almost automatically back to the museum.
Speaker 2: I scoured the oral history archives for legends, stories, anything
Speaker 2: to ground what I was learning in the soil of
Speaker 2: shared myth. Beneath a pile of faded recipe cards and
Speaker 2: headless wooden dolls, I found a sealed envelope, unsigned and undated,
Speaker 2: containing a single page in spidery cursive to be preserved
Speaker 2: in the cycles drift, keep the chimes bound for both shores,
Speaker 2: lest the current carry fortune away. Missus avery, when I
Speaker 2: pressed her, leaned on her cane, and hesitated so long
Speaker 2: I almost retreated. Finally she spoke, voice suddenly small. Once
Speaker 2: as a child, I woke up in a house empty
Speaker 2: for days. Couldn't say how long My parents, my brother's gone.
Speaker 2: The clocks all ticked, every bell in place. A week
Speaker 2: later they were there again. Nothing changed, and I I
Speaker 2: remember less than a fog, except for the ache that
Speaker 2: something was very wrong. She shook her head, surprised at
Speaker 2: her own admission. I must have dreamt it. I don't
Speaker 2: dwell on it. I copied down the oldest myth. I
Speaker 2: found a rhyme buried in the archive's folklore fhile seven
Speaker 2: gone nine they hold slash Time's bargain for the double gold.
Speaker 2: The line was inexplicable out of context, but felt like
Speaker 2: a key to everything in its very opacity. To test
Speaker 2: the human edge of the phenomenon, I brought the question
Speaker 2: to the docks, where fishermen old and young loitered between
Speaker 2: nets and dinner. To the elder. I asked how time
Speaker 2: was kept in Merinport. Clocks have always kept the tides
Speaker 2: friendly here, he said, casting a weathered glance back at
Speaker 2: the tower. That's all I know, tides clocks luck. Ask
Speaker 2: more and the sea will take a toll. His mate,
Speaker 2: half his age and city raised, shook his head, bemused,
Speaker 2: it's all good fortune and coincidence. The clocks are just clocks. Right.
Speaker 2: As more pieces fell into place, the strangeness of the
Speaker 2: silence overwhelmed all easy answers. It was not that the
Speaker 2: absences were unremarked, but rather that they were woven invisibly
Speaker 2: into the core of the town's vitality. All the evidence
Speaker 2: of prosperity, of unbroken time, of seasonal turnings and mythic plenty,
Speaker 2: depended not on oversight, but on the active maintenance of
Speaker 2: an order that ran deeper than any civic record could express.
Speaker 2: In the slanting light of a late afternoon, I lingered
Speaker 2: on the museum steps, log books and stories whirring in
Speaker 2: my head, and watched as the towns people went about
Speaker 2: their routines, shopping, laughing, waving children across the green. Somewhere
Speaker 2: behind it all, the mechanism ticked perfect and inscrutable. In
Speaker 2: that moment, I saw anew, the neat ledger cycles, the
Speaker 2: clock's uncanny precision, the prosperity that pulsed with every chime.
Speaker 2: None of it could be explained by quaint tradition or
Speaker 2: institutional forgetfulness. I stood at the true midpoint of revelation.
Speaker 2: Mare import existed in not one but two orders of time,
Speaker 2: and the clockmakers, in concert with the Great Tower, served
Speaker 2: as its silent stewards, threading presents and absence in a
Speaker 2: ritual as unnoticeable as breathing. The town's very reality, Its calenders,
Speaker 2: its invisible bargains, lay in a woven system too precise
Speaker 2: to belong only to memory. And though I could not
Speaker 2: yet say how or what it meant, the world, it seemed,
Speaker 2: was held together not by solidity, but by these patient,
Speaker 2: persistent migrations, stitched tight as the finest spring chime. I
Speaker 2: let the afternoon light stain the marble entry of the museum,
Speaker 2: its cool slabs, patterned with a grid of gold and
Speaker 2: pale shadows from the tall windows above. In the offing
Speaker 2: the town's sense of business, Bikes rattling down hillcrest, grossers
Speaker 2: packing away crates, the distant sweet monotony of the clock
Speaker 2: tower's third quarter went on as if nothing unseen, nothing
Speaker 2: extraordinary threaded through every sweep of the hands above it all.
Speaker 2: I kept the log books close, running my thumb along
Speaker 2: their battered spines. No one in the passing knots of people,
Speaker 2: women with market bags, kids rushing back from the soccer field,
Speaker 2: glanced twice at me. My mind hummed with the double
Speaker 2: order I'd pieced together two times, two calenders, a silent,
Speaker 2: precise bargain, held together by the ritual migration of the
Speaker 2: clockmaker families, not excel, not secrecy, stewardship. Yet what did
Speaker 2: that really mean for those living inside such a system?
Speaker 2: What was given, what was received? And what if anything
Speaker 2: was lost? I walked home past the clock tower that evening, drawn,
Speaker 2: it seemed by its insistent presence. The green door was locked,
Speaker 2: now sleek and impassive, but the tower itself seemed more alive.
Speaker 2: The ringing of the half hour, trembling in the mild,
Speaker 2: salty air, I noticed and knew how the clock's face,
Speaker 2: just beginning to halo with the sunset, never faltered, not
Speaker 2: a trace of weathering, no lopsidedness to the painted numerals.
Speaker 2: It had stood through decades untold, and I knew now why.
Speaker 2: Because the world here was not so much protected as
Speaker 2: braided tightly into a maintenance job. Older than any one admitted,
Speaker 2: the lines between curiosity and intrusion felt thin. Still I
Speaker 2: could not let go, not now when I understood enough
Speaker 2: to sense there was something vital, perhaps even perilous, in
Speaker 2: reforming the knowledge I had gathered into something new. That night,
Speaker 2: as the wind brought an edge of sea chill under
Speaker 2: my window sill, I sat at my kitchen table, with
Speaker 2: the museum's log book, open, notes, and time lands arrayed
Speaker 2: before me. I ran through every fact, every rumor, every
Speaker 2: unshakable pattern, and tried to see beyond them. Nine months
Speaker 2: gone every seven years, matching prosperity, fishing halls, and gentle seasons,
Speaker 2: all cycling not just in public fortune, but in the
Speaker 2: unspoken vigilance of absence and return kept for what were
Speaker 2: the both? Both times? Certainly? But might it be both fortunes,
Speaker 2: both possible towns, both versions of memory? Why would so
Speaker 2: many act and forget acting if not for an effect
Speaker 2: they themselves could not name? Sleep came late and patchy.
Speaker 2: Around midnight. I heard steps on the path a measured,
Speaker 2: slow approach than a tap at my door. No one
Speaker 2: called out, but somehow I was neither startled nor afraid.
Speaker 2: I opened the door to find Seiler's reed coat zipped high,
Speaker 2: eyes as steady as the clocks he wound. He'd never
Speaker 2: come to me before. He stood in silence, glancing at
Speaker 2: the yellow rectangles of light that spilled from my hallway
Speaker 2: on to the flagstones. For a moment he seemed to
Speaker 2: weigh something far heavier than a social call. I know
Speaker 2: you've been looking, he said, you found the logs. I nodded,
Speaker 2: unsure whether to apologize. It's all right, he said, his
Speaker 2: voice almost a whisper. I think I want to know too,
Speaker 2: or as much as any one can know. He stepped inside,
Speaker 2: and I made us tea, filling my battered kettle, feeling
Speaker 2: both awkward and oddly honored. For so long, the clockmaker
Speaker 2: families had lived in a fortress of tradition and secrecy,
Speaker 2: buttressed by habits so smooth no one could breach them.
Speaker 2: Now Here were Sealers, folding his broad hands around a mug,
Speaker 2: admitting to something like uncertainty. I remember dreams sometimes. After
Speaker 2: a seven's chime, he said, not making eye contact. I
Speaker 2: wake thinking its next spring. But the morning is always
Speaker 2: the same. My wife calls it my chime hangover. Maybe
Speaker 2: it's just the work, or maybe he didn't finish. I
Speaker 2: realized how rarely he voiced the possibility of the unusual,
Speaker 2: how much effort it cost him to let the words
Speaker 2: out at all. I think you do the work so well,
Speaker 2: we don't notice you're gone, I said, after a while,
Speaker 2: But what about you? Does it feel in your bones
Speaker 2: like some thing you've done and forgotten? He looked at
Speaker 2: his hands, thinking, some days there's a feeling a piece missing,
Speaker 2: a season slightly, he twisted the mug out of reach.
Speaker 2: But there's always been enough harvest, enough steady clocks, enough fortune.
Speaker 2: I learned from my father not to question it. Still,
Speaker 2: you see things, sometimes, shadows where there ought to be faces.
Speaker 2: Maybe I chose not to see. He straightened, determinations, settling in.
Speaker 2: There's something I want to show you, not many people
Speaker 2: have seen it. Tomorrow, before dawn, come to the tower.
Speaker 2: I'll let you in. We finished the tea in loaded silence,
Speaker 2: each holding back a thousand questions, knowing none would have
Speaker 2: easy answers. I barely slept the next morning came sharp
Speaker 2: with frost. Though it was already late spring by the calendar.
Speaker 2: I walked to the clock tower under a dull, rose
Speaker 2: tinged sky. The streets were silent, frost crackling under foot.
Speaker 2: At the base of the tower, Sealers waited, keys in hand.
Speaker 2: He gestured for me to follow. No words exchanged. Inside
Speaker 2: the dim stairwell, breathed with old dust and mechanical oil.
Speaker 2: Gears and pendulums traced patterns in the half light. But
Speaker 2: instead of taking the main staircase up to the mechanism's heart,
Speaker 2: Sealers ducked under a low arch behind the first landing.
Speaker 2: We passed through a door hidden from casual visitors by
Speaker 2: a stack of unused sand bags, and entered a room
Speaker 2: dense with the scent of metal and cold stone, the
Speaker 2: air charged by static from turning machinery. Spread across one
Speaker 2: wall was a rack of ancient tools, mallets, keys, measuring rods,
Speaker 2: each carved, as I saw now with knowledge the others
Speaker 2: would miss, with notations not only upside down and backwards,
Speaker 2: but in a coded script, one that seemed on inspection
Speaker 2: less like English than the spiky shorthand of tied tables.
Speaker 2: The cyclic notation of mathematicians projecting lunar returns or leap years.
Speaker 2: He pointed to a battered curling chart tacked above the
Speaker 2: work bench. The ink was faded, weathered by generations of
Speaker 2: eyes and hands. It showed two sequences of years, moving
Speaker 2: like double helixes down the column, one tracked and familiar,
Speaker 2: the other shifting forward and backward out of step by
Speaker 2: precise intervals. The separation and reunion, each marked with a
Speaker 2: flourish or a red circle, corresponded exactly with every cycle
Speaker 2: I had mapped. We wind both clocks, he said, gesturing
Speaker 2: not to the one face I knew, but to the
Speaker 2: invisible sequence beside it. I reached out, tracing a finger
Speaker 2: along the chart. But you you don't remember the gap,
Speaker 2: He shook his head, eyes pinched in the dimness. No
Speaker 2: one really does. But were trained to keep good hands,
Speaker 2: to accept the work, even if some of it slips.
Speaker 2: My father said, some absences are part of the job.
Speaker 2: Sealers don't worry the edges. But seeing this, he pointed
Speaker 2: to the cipher, the shifting years makes it feel more real,
Speaker 2: like I've only touched one side of the mechanism. An
Speaker 2: odd thrill rippled through me. It was confirmation not just
Speaker 2: of an anomaly, but of participation in something no one
Speaker 2: fully owned or controlled. Here in the restricted heart of
Speaker 2: the clock tower, the truth was visible, if only for
Speaker 2: those willing to read its language. We spent that hour
Speaker 2: running our fingers along wheels and notched rods, comparing the
Speaker 2: codes on each some in a system akin to maritime
Speaker 2: weather marks, some in cycles whose periodicity matched nothing in
Speaker 2: the town's public life. I felt the mathematicians hunger in
Speaker 2: my gut. Evidence so clear, it was almost elegant in
Speaker 2: its complexity, and yet so subjective, so lived, that it
Speaker 2: skated the edge of the unprovable. As we finished, Sealers
Speaker 2: handed me a tiny brass disc engraved as I squinted
Speaker 2: at it, with a familiar inscription, kept for both on
Speaker 2: the reverse two clocks, each set to a different time,
Speaker 2: yet both pointing now to the hour at hand. The
Speaker 2: room's quiet was broken only by the faint syncopation of
Speaker 2: the tower's deepest gears, those whose slow, ancient rotations kept
Speaker 2: both faces seen and unseen. Turning in tandem, we emerged
Speaker 2: to sunrise. Sealers kept his hand at the small of
Speaker 2: my back, steadying both his breath and mine not everything
Speaker 2: you find here makes sense, he said, But I think
Speaker 2: maybe it isn't supposed to. The Next day, armed with
Speaker 2: sealer's tacit blessing, I dove into the museum's archives in
Speaker 2: search of the bargain's true route. I squeezed behind bookshelves
Speaker 2: in our smallest records room, prising open a crumbling folder
Speaker 2: bristling with nineteenth century parchment, labeled only as founding Voyages
Speaker 2: Tallies Myths. It was an unpromising heap of water marked pages.
Speaker 2: Half Way through I uncovered a set of hand copied folios,
Speaker 2: transcriptions of oral accounts dated all the way back to
Speaker 2: Merimport's earliest day. One written in shaky but bold lines, started,
Speaker 2: we came to the bay when the old world's luck soured.
Speaker 2: The clockmaker's son heard two chimes, one from land, one
Speaker 2: from surf. We followed both, and where the chimes aligned,
Speaker 2: we stayed. It continued, with a strange elliptical logic. The
Speaker 2: bargain keep both ours. If one is idle, the sea
Speaker 2: will claim double its fill. If one is hidden, time's
Speaker 2: luck will dry our nets. So keep both and you
Speaker 2: will prosper. Forget and let time fracture. One side remembers
Speaker 2: one is washed away. Every strand of my curiosity tightened.
Speaker 2: It was less a myth than an engineering riddle transposed
Speaker 2: into folk poetry. The bargain was literal. The community's prosperity
Speaker 2: did not depend only on tide and labor, but also
Speaker 2: on keeping the two orders of time synchronized, the visible
Speaker 2: and the other. Dust falling in the shaft of late
Speaker 2: morning sun light, I traced the myth's logic. Why in
Speaker 2: this pragmatic town would an entire class of families generation
Speaker 2: after generation except a fate that both granted fortune and
Speaker 2: erased their own memory of service? Were the clockmakers chosen
Speaker 2: by chance? Or had they accepted a responsibility so subtle
Speaker 2: only those awake to both chimes could bear it. Among
Speaker 2: the pile I found a slip of parchment, perhaps a
Speaker 2: child's work, its painted border storm swept, its center, graced
Speaker 2: by a rhyme far older than the one. Missus Avery recalled,
Speaker 2: twelve bells wake the land and see, but seven gone
Speaker 2: nine they keep. Should the watcher drift from fee, neither
Speaker 2: side wakes from its sleep. I closed the file and
Speaker 2: leaned back, letting the sense of its settle down onto
Speaker 2: my mind. The bargain was maintenance, not magic, a system
Speaker 2: designed to keep order in both lived and invisible worlds,
Speaker 2: as insurance against the unpredictable, the ruinous, the unremembered that afternoon,
Speaker 2: the museum was quiet, packing crates for the seven's chimed
Speaker 2: display stacked in the hallway. Missus Avery re arranging a
Speaker 2: placard for the dozenth time. She caught my eye, and,
Speaker 2: seeing an old pain or perhaps relief in it, motioned
Speaker 2: me over. You've started to understand, I think, she said,
Speaker 2: lowering her voice. The rhyme says a bargain, but it's
Speaker 2: really a duty. My grandmother called it the kindest curse, said,
Speaker 2: it keeps us whole, even as it divides us from ourselves.
Speaker 2: I let the confession pass without pressing her. But if
Speaker 2: the families don't remember, isn't it a sort of theft?
Speaker 2: A bargain made by ancestors and kept by the innocent.
Speaker 2: She considered that, smoothing her skirt. Perhaps my brother used
Speaker 2: to say, no clock runs without where some one always
Speaker 2: must wine the spring, even if they forget it. In
Speaker 2: the morning, she smiled one and private, and returned to
Speaker 2: her work. Bits of local myth became tangible over the
Speaker 2: next few days, behind a faded mural hidden by a
Speaker 2: movable bookshelf, I found a painting neglected for a century.
Speaker 2: The mere import clocks split neatly in two, each side
Speaker 2: with a keeper, one in fisherman's gear, the other suited
Speaker 2: in the archaic frock coat of old world clockmakers. The
Speaker 2: sea on one side rose high, nearly breaching the numerals.
Speaker 2: The other side lay tranquil. A line like a river
Speaker 2: of gold ran between both halves. Near the margin words
Speaker 2: both chimes, each shore fortune floes, or fils by their winding.
Speaker 2: I couldn't help but imagine the earliest arrivals to this
Speaker 2: patch of coast, superstitious travelers, wary of losing everything, building
Speaker 2: not just a clock, but a system that safeguarded both
Speaker 2: their fortunes and those of a world they could sense
Speaker 2: but not see. Later in the week I sat with
Speaker 2: Lars Jensen, my neighbor, nursing a cup of co old coffee.
Speaker 2: As always, his approach was irreverent, his skepticism a kind
Speaker 2: of armor. All this about clockmakers, and two times he scoffed,
Speaker 2: shaking his head. You have too much time, Fern, What
Speaker 2: are you hoping to find? Atlantis? At the bottom of
Speaker 2: the bell tower. But you remember years when their houses
Speaker 2: were dark, I probed. He shrugged. I do, he said,
Speaker 2: more quietly than I expected. But my wife doesn't, says
Speaker 2: she partied with the cartwrights every summer, year in year out.
Speaker 2: Shows me pictures I don't remember. But there I am
Speaker 2: holding a slice of birthday cake. How's that for a joke.
Speaker 2: His amusement was half forced, half defensive. Underneath a crack.
Speaker 2: There a recognition of something discontinuous, some aspect of time,
Speaker 2: not quite under any one's control, yet too woven into
Speaker 2: their lives for any one to resist. All around town,
Speaker 2: subtle differences of perception became clear when I followed other threads.
Speaker 2: I met two visiting graduate students, historians from Boston who
Speaker 2: had heard of the double time rumor through folklore forums.
Speaker 2: They treated it with gentle condescension as evidence of rural imagination. Statistically,
Speaker 2: said the younger one, community records always paint themselves as
Speaker 2: more continuous than they are. People invent the past, they need.
Speaker 2: His colleague agreed, and cycles, especially seven year cycles, are
Speaker 2: everywhere in old records, agricultural, fiscal, marital. The rest is
Speaker 2: just good story telling. But I could not share their certainty.
Speaker 2: I'd seen too much, and too much of it was
Speaker 2: too exact, a smoothness, a dove tilling of fact and absence, memory,
Speaker 2: and gap that went beyond creative embellishment. Their resistance only
Speaker 2: sharpened my curiosity. If the world were truly this fissured.
Speaker 2: Was it not more extraordinary that no one noticed than
Speaker 2: that some, myself included, were beginning to see the strands
Speaker 2: unravel and reknit year after cycle. To test the heart
Speaker 2: of the system, I decided I would need more than
Speaker 2: records and stories. I would need to see the hand
Speaker 2: off itself, the moment if it happened, when the cycles
Speaker 2: rejoined and fortune returned the clock tower chiming in a
Speaker 2: harmony that went unheard by those within. Seilers, for his part,
Speaker 2: did not refuse me. In fact, he appeared more at ease, relieved,
Speaker 2: possibly to share the labor of carrying half remembered burdens
Speaker 2: with someone who, though knew, had no claim on forgetting together.
Speaker 2: We mapped the calendar, cross checking the log book entries
Speaker 2: with the festival schedule, the tides and catches, the extraordinary
Speaker 2: alignment of good years and quiet catastrophes, where the nine
Speaker 2: months of clockmaker absence fell. The town's records blurred, some
Speaker 2: files reporting a normal summer, others only entries as empty
Speaker 2: as the families, houses, inventories showing surplus and deficit, both
Speaker 2: prosperity too regular to trust. See here, I said, pointing
Speaker 2: at a line in the nineteen seventy two harvest log
Speaker 2: reported catch four times the average, but receipts from shipping
Speaker 2: companies are doubled. No one knows whose tally is real.
Speaker 2: Sealers laughed, but quietly, without much mirth. My grandfather said,
Speaker 2: don't count the fish twice, or the sea starts collecting interest.
Speaker 2: As the new cycle neared a return year, festival preparations
Speaker 2: rising to a fever, Sealers came to me one night
Speaker 2: with a request. To morrow's the double winding, he said.
Speaker 2: Midnight the day shifts and the cycle returns. If you
Speaker 2: want a sea, come to the tower. I'll let you up.
Speaker 2: The invitation quickened my heart. That night, the town was
Speaker 2: blanketed in a hush rare even for mere import, A
Speaker 2: fog rolling in off the bay, low and luminous in
Speaker 2: the street, lamps muting distant voices. I crossed the green
Speaker 2: to the clock tower as the eleven o'clock chime faded,
Speaker 2: heart pounding, breath lifting cloudlets in the cold, Celas stood
Speaker 2: at the door, keys in hand, coat buttoned high. For
Speaker 2: a moment, there was only the sound of water on
Speaker 2: stone as we climbed the narrow stair, each step echoing.
Speaker 2: We reached the heart of the mechanism, bronze, iron, wood,
Speaker 2: all interlocked in slow, inexorable motion. Not just one face,
Speaker 2: but two, the great civic dial and behind it an
Speaker 2: inset panel whose hands turned at an imperceptibly different tempo,
Speaker 2: close but not quite synchronizing with the official hour. Sealers
Speaker 2: turned a heavy iron key, eyes shining with something I
Speaker 2: had never seen. Nervous anticipation may be, or respect for
Speaker 2: what was coming. Now, he said, comes the double winding.
Speaker 2: He invited me forward. The mechanism was as intricate as
Speaker 2: a cathedral, the gears polished by generations of touch. I
Speaker 2: felt the mechanism vibrate under my palm, a deep, gentle
Speaker 2: shudder that ran through the floor, through the stone, up
Speaker 2: the walls, and out into the fog. At the moment
Speaker 2: the hands reached the chime, Sealers and I each gripped
Speaker 2: our respective keys, fitting them into both panels. He counted
Speaker 2: under his breath eleven, twelve. He wound the main clock,
Speaker 2: and I, trembling, marveling that I had been trusted for this,
Speaker 2: set the inner one into motion. The chimes rolled out
Speaker 2: twelve deep notes from above, and another softer twelve, resonating
Speaker 2: from the hidden panel. For a split second, the two
Speaker 2: sets overlapped. In that moment, everything in the tower, every
Speaker 2: shaft of light, every whir of gear, every breath seemed
Speaker 2: doubled two of each, not mirrored, but layered, as if
Speaker 2: two realities were perfectly aligned. Before slipping by degrees apart again.
Speaker 2: As the sound faded, I had an overwhelming sense of fullness,
Speaker 2: of a presence filling out a hollow of a town
Speaker 2: settling back into itself After a long exhalation. The inscription
Speaker 2: on the innermost panel flashed as the gears slowed. Caught
Speaker 2: by the lantern, time kept in two fortune flows through
Speaker 2: the seam, as one world sleeps the other men's the dream.
Speaker 2: I looked at Seilers, who was blinking in recognition. He
Speaker 2: seemed for a heartbeat, both older and younger, the memory
Speaker 2: of absence and return flickering through his features. It always feels.
Speaker 2: He searched for the word complete. We stood there as
Speaker 2: the last echo faded below. The march morning glimmered with ordinary,
Speaker 2: reassuring coldness. The fog drifted, clearing the square. If anyone
Speaker 2: had walked by, they would have seen no interruption in
Speaker 2: that moment, though the shape of the bargain was clear.
Speaker 2: The absences, the silence, the duplication of memory itself, they
Speaker 2: were not side effects, not mere tradition or oversight, but
Speaker 2: the central duty the families had to both visible and
Speaker 2: invisible worlds. Their migration was the winding of not one
Speaker 2: but two realities, each keeping the other from unraveling, each
Speaker 2: restoring what might otherwise have been lost fortune, time, perhaps
Speaker 2: even the town itself. On the street, as we stepped out,
Speaker 2: a few early rises cycled through the square, none the
Speaker 2: wiser for our vigil. The first boats stirred across the
Speaker 2: dawn rough water. Sealers shoved his hands in his pockets.
Speaker 2: You see now, he said, not ours to choose, but
Speaker 2: ours to keep. It works as long as someone keeps track,
Speaker 2: even if the record is only a feeling some one
Speaker 2: can't shake loose. I nodded, feeling the last of my
Speaker 2: questions fold up like a map after a long journey.
Speaker 2: The following day passed quietly, the return unmarked by anything
Speaker 2: more than a faint brightening in the air around the
Speaker 2: clockmaker houses. As the families filtered back into daily life,
Speaker 2: no memory of departure, no strange stories, only routines resumed,
Speaker 2: tools picked up, gardens trimmed. The whole town carried on
Speaker 2: the pattern held. I found myself standing beneath the tower
Speaker 2: as the noon chime rang out, looking at the hands
Speaker 2: gleaming against the sky's blue promise, perfectly aligned in their
Speaker 2: silent labor. The feeling was not of conclusion, but of
Speaker 2: ongoing stewardship, of knowing that beneath every visible order lay
Speaker 2: another unnoticed, pressed up against it, like the shadow behind
Speaker 2: a sunlit wall. That evening, as I set my notes aside,
Speaker 2: the final question turned in my mind, not any longer,
Speaker 2: where do they go? But if every place runs on
Speaker 2: such bargains, unseen, unremarked, what migrations do we accept in
Speaker 2: our own lives? What hands wine the hours that keep
Speaker 2: our fortunes whole while we forget mercifully the price? The
Speaker 2: clock struck, and beneath its song, the world spun on,
Speaker 2: more complete, for all all that it could not explain.
Speaker 1: And that is the end. Thank you for listening, and
Speaker 1: I will see you in the next one.