It was a cold night when they found young John Dunn—face spattered with drying blood, knuckles white, back tense, eyes blank—standing over the broken body of his father, a mister Edward Dunn. The boy’s breath was shallow. Whatever tears he had shed had long since dried and left shiny streaks on his flush-red cheeks. The police tried their best to question the kid who, as most knew, was a verbose and jolly child when given the opportunity. But he never responded.
In truth, he never heard them. To young John Dunn, their voices, their clomping boots, their ringing sirens were all muted and hollow. Background noise. All he heard on that snowy December night was the ticking of the clock tower.
Tick-Tick-Tick.
***
Marlow’s End is an old town. It is a poor town. It is a town of brick that dates to its initial construction and asphalt only as new as the New Deal. It is a town only dwarfed in every sense by the divot it sits in high up in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
It is a few intersecting streets—there because they were there first—with local shoppes and food vendors from farming family lines as old as the town itself. It is new subdivisions that sprung up near uncertain boundaries for outsiders moving to the area for factory jobs down in the Shenandoah Valley or over in Charlottesville.
It is the solitary obelisk, the clock tower, rising from its heart.
The tower’s origins are more a matter of local legend than definitive fact. Its rustic brown-red brick atop a base level of quarried stone stands taller than all of Marlow’s End; erect like a single needle standing among a thin pile of rice. The clock face is sleek and clean. Its brass hands and fixtures gleam rain or shine. Its looming presence sets an order to life in the otherwise-prone-to-wile-away-the-hours town.
Its ticking has been a constant for centuries, thanks to the Dunn family. They did not build the place, but, by God, they keep it running like, well, clockwork.
The Dunns are a perpetually small clan, known for a few eccentricities throughout the years. In the late nineteen-sixties, there were only two: Edward Dunn, the father; and John Dunn, the son.
Many in town believe that, like some twisted mockery of the Holy Trinity, a ghost lives at the very top of the clock tower. But, of course, that was only a rumor. And rumors did not reach the ears of Edward Dunn. They were shared in secret, behind locked doors, where the elder Dunn could not hear them. It had something to do with respect for his father. And respect for the boy, of course. But no one did it for Edward Dunn.
Now there was a man with eccentricities. People blamed them on his time in Vietnam, early into the conflict as it was. The guerrilla raid on Saigon in fifty-nine left the man with a few screws loose when he came home with a cast and a perpetual limp.
John Dunn was born a year later, and with his birth came his mother’s death. And that, as they say, was that. Whatever damage was done to Edward took root and refused to be dug up.
“That father’ll scar the boy,” the people of Marlow’s End would say. They would titter and natter with gossip of the town oddity and his son, worry for the boy’s future, but none of them ever did anything. They were only talk. Edward never appeared to harm the boy, and the boy never seemed to have any bruises that were not easily explained by the faults of youth.
But they worried all the same.
And worried.
Little good it did, all that worry, when they never acted on it.
John Dunn attended Paula Young Elementary—a school named for the locally famous educator with a mind like iron and a ruler like steel. It’s a good school, a solid school, and the only school in town. The kids were lucky, locals argued, that the county had one of its elementary schools in their little mountain hovel.
Sure, it was luck. And a little force from the school’s namesake.
Most days John would head off to the school, near the western edge of town, with his bag slung over one shoulder, a skip in his step, and a perpetual hello to every passerby on his way to the schoolhouse gates. He was a chatty one, young John Dunn. The people of Marlow’s End liked him. He was the son of an oddball, sure, but the same could probably be said about their own children. The people of Marlow’s End could be, on occasion, quite equipped to handle a little self reflection. They just weren’t good at it on an everyday basis.
There was just something about the boy that made them realize their problems were not with him. It was in his smile, in his walk. John Dunn made the town feel lighter than air most days.
Other days, he had a bad habit. Most children have their bad habits. The townsfolk were glad at least the child’s bad habit wasn’t drugs from down in Charlottesville. No, his bad habit was more mundane. Granted, if the posthumous Paula Young had still been alive, the boy would have been hided for those bad habits and thanking the cranky old woman for it.
He skipped school, sometimes. It was an ultimately harmless fault. The boy was learned and curious, and many professed he had more brains than all the other youngsters that attended Paula Young. So sometimes, if he felt like he didn’t feel like relearning, he’d go off and be a kid: usually by a creek under the bridge near the east edge of town. He wasn’t trying to hide. The boy wasn’t sneaky. Most just assumed if they saw young John Dunn down by the creek with his little fishing pole or skipping stones that the lesson that day at Paula Young Elementary was something he already knew and had mastered at such a young age.
That is, no one ever asked him why he was down at the creek instead of at school. They only ever asked if the fishing was good, or if his father knew where he was.
“They’re biting something fierce!” he’d shout up to them. Or, the rehearsed reply, “Pa knows I’m here.”
It was a lie. One of the few lies John Dunn ever told when he was young. He was the sort of kid that thought the truth didn’t hurt, but, sometimes, a little white lie was like a sheath around a very sharp knife.
The truth was, on those days when John Dunn skipped school, his father did not, in fact, know he was at the creek. His father was, well, John Dunn decided the proper word was “indisposed”.
His earliest memories of his father were of a somber but caring man. He heard that Edward was never the same again after his beloved Helen passed in childbirth. He heard the people talk, but those early years Edward was the kind of father that took his son places, told him stories at bed time, and even played music for him by the fireplace.
John missed those days.
His father spoke to voices that weren’t there. Most of what he said was nonsense. It was clear he only did it when he didn’t think John was around and listening, but sometimes the words reached his boy’s ears when Edward was up late, drink in hand, sitting by the cold fireplace and listening. Listening to what?
The ticking.
The Dunns lived in the Marlow’s End clock tower. The first floor of the structure was a normal home. There was a kitchen, a foyer, a living room, two bedrooms, and a spacious bathroom. It was, mostly, the sort of place any kid John’s age hoped to live.
Things got strange when one looked up in the foyer.
A hole of brick and exposed wood reached up to a box filled with exposed gears. A pendulum swung in the very center like a waggling tongue surrounded by gnashing teeth. John did his best to never look up. It made his stomach flip in rough circles. Whenever he glanced into the inner workings of the clock, it felt like he would be pulled up and ground between the spinning metal, becoming little more than a pink, squishy paste.
That didn’t stop his father.
One night, John Dunn left his room to get a drink from the kitchen. The house was quiet. His steps less than a whisper. He grabbed a glass from the upper cabinet with the help of a stool, turned the tap in the sink, and happened to glance to his left.
Beyond the kitchen, barefoot and bare chested in the foyer, was Edward Dunn. He looked thin and frail. His lips moved with words John couldn’t hear. His head was cocked back, eyes locked on the inner workings of the clock tower his family spent centuries maintaining.
“Pa?” John Dunn asked.
His father did not respond. He just looked up and up, lips moving, and reached up with one arm like he saw a hand coming down to grasp him.
“Pa!”
Life entered his father’s eyes. His fingers twitched. Edward looked around like he only just realized he was standing in the foyer wearing only his pajama pants.
His father rubbed his eyes. “Shouldn’t you be in bed?”
“Was just thirsty,” John said and turned back to his room with his glass of water. “Night, Pa.”
“Right,” Edward said. “Right. Night.”
John shut the door and clambered into bed. He never heard his father retreat back to his own bedroom.
Similar events repeated over time. The only thing that changed, every time, was what John was doing when he caught his father. Edward was always in the Foyer. Edward was always reaching towards the clockwork with a trembling hand, muttering quietly to himself.
In the later part of the nineteen sixties, the earliest parts of sixty-eight to be precise, Edward’s behavior took a turn for the worse.
One January morning, John Dunn returned from school to find his father—his father with a bad leg and a limp—a few feet up into the tower hammering new wood into place.
John’s grandfather, Edward’s father, had destroyed the steps that led up into the guts of the clock tower. He didn’t tell Edward why. But now, John grew suspicious.
Children are, on the whole—despite what adults may think—more adapt at noticing small changes in the elders around them. It comes from exposure to their habits over time. They are wondrous marvels of observation in their own right, children. John Dunn was no different. As he gazed up at his father, bare feet and jeans and patched flannel in the bottom of the bowels of the tower, thoughts he struggled to word tugged at the corners of his young mind.
“Pa?” John said as he laid his school bag near the door. “What’re you doing?”
“Huh?” His father looked down at him. New nails from Davis Hardware fell from his teeth when he spoke. Edward cursed to himself, stumbled a little on his perch, but got his balance.
“Shouldn’t you be at school?” Edward asked.
“Day’s done.”
“Oh,” Edward looked up into the clock at the top of the tower. “I’m just… there’s a gear that’s making noise, boy. I need to get up there before the time goes all weird.”
“Be careful, Pa.” The words left his lips, somewhat a command to his father and somewhat a prayer.
His father produced a nail from the bag on his belt and beat it into to the still loose board hanging in the wall. The hammer struck Edward’s thumb, but it was only a light tap. “I always am.”
**
So went sixty-eight until March. Edward was careful never to let his son see his work. John would return from school—his bad habit hadn’t started just yet—and a new plank or two would be hammered into place, starting a precarious spiral up the square tower.
In March, he found his father in a frantic panic on a board halfway up the wall of brick. His words were intense, beat-for-beat perfect with the ticking of the loudest gears.
“I can’t make it in time,” he’d say to himself, hammer ready to strike another nail. “The higher I go, the further away it seems!”
“Pa?”
“John! Sorry, sorry!” His father scrambled down the posts with a nimbleness quite unlike a wounded veteran. “I always try to finish before you get back from school but I’m… I’m starting to run low on time.”
John Dunn listened to the clock. Tick-Tick-Tick. It was the same as it always was: steady and reliable and oh, so mechanical. Again those wordless thoughts tugged at his mind. They were pure emotion. Instinct. He had a hard time parsing what they meant, exactly, but a shiver ran up his spine when his father touched down on the hardwood floor of the foyer.
“Can I help, Pa?”
His father’s jaw flexed as he mulled his response. Elation and sorrow flashed through his eyes like competing bolts of lightning. Whatever ran through his thoughts, there was a dizzying amount of calculus at play.
“No, son.” Edward said at last. “I have to do this myself. I can’t have you falling from way up there, now can I?”
“Be careful, Pa.”
“I always am.”
John worried for his father. Any son that loves their father would worry. Edward wasn’t a bad man. He experienced a few bad things, lost a few things that were important to him, but he was always a kind father.
His worrying grew worse as March turned to April. His father was up late into the night, hammering away until early in the morning. That was when John Dunn’s bad habit started. He just wanted to be out of that house, away from the noise and the stress and his father’s muttering. School wouldn’t do. At school he had to think and talk. Little noises made him jump in his skin.
The creek became his escape. It wasn’t silent—nature is never silent—but the chirping birds and bugs, the occasional whirring engine, and the clack of wheels over the eastern bridge were far better than ravings and the constant thunk of a hammer.
The fish did, in fact, bite. John Dunn did some good fishing out on the creek. His skills and his prizes were a local legend among his peers by summer, and his bad habits were starting to brew his own strange reputation among the adults.
“Something must be wrong,” they would say.
They worried.
But they never did anything.
Spring turned to summer, the school year came to a close, and the summer of sixty-eight passed without much note. The routine since March remained, but John was no longer alone. He and his friends—because unlike Edward, his strange habits had yet to chase those away—explored the woods around town, rode their bikes, took trips with parents other than Edward to Charlottesville for museums and parks and festivals.
Summer ended, September arrived, and as the weather turned cold and dark so did Edward.
John’s nights were a constant stress of hammering and shouts at the ticking gears.
And then in November—when the river started to freeze in an unusually cold fall, when frost clung to grass like a heavy blanket, when fog floated out of the firs and spruce like ghostly smoke—the nights quieted. Edward, for once since the year began, slept soundless in his bed.
John was relieved to have some reprieve from the endless noise.
All the while, the clock tower ticked.
Tick-Tick-Tick.
***
The last week of school before Christmas break was uneventful, save for one peculiar thing: there was to be a movie night. They set up a fanciful projector in the cramped auditorium at Paula Young. The students, their siblings, and their parents were invited. Someone had, somehow, managed to acquire a reel of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer by Rankin/Bass. It was an equal measure of the laughter of older kids; the middle children, parents, and teachers singing; and the younger children hiding from the unsettling animation and figures behind closed eyes.
John found himself alone. Edward had still been asleep when John tried to rouse his father from bed. The dim streets to the school felt darker, oppressive, as he walked to his school alone. The sky above was several shades of grey, even as the sun set beyond the Valley. The wind smelled of frost and snow.
Sure enough, when the movie ended and the families all piled out of the elementary school to their station wagons and trucks for the drive home, little white flakes flurried from the sky and dusted the ground. The snow was thick enough for his booted feet to leave small imprints with every step. The clock tower was only a short walk from the school in the grand scheme of things, but as he walked down Procession Street towards its intersection with East Main Street, he thought he heard something.
The closer he got to the clock tower, the deeper his heart sank.
His father was screaming.
John Dunn ran as fast as he could and abandoned his bag on the sidewalk to lighten the load. He dashed through the doors of his home—he didn’t know it then, but he chipped the bones in his shoulder from the impact with the door—and expected to find his father fighting off some intruder.
Instead, he found drops of blood on the stone floor of the foyer. John felt a lump form in his throat. His eyes wavered. His lips trembled. His ears did their best to block out the raucous noise from up above.
He looked up, verging on tears.
Edward Dunn stood—shirtless, shoe-less—on a long beam right beneath the exposed gears of the clock. His voice was like a banshee; his wails the wails of torment. His words poured out of his lips, John realized, to the ticking of the clock.
“I can’t find it!” He screamed at the clock, voice raw and cracked like he was trying to talk over a rowdy crowd. “I can’t find it!”
“Pa!” John cried up to his father.
From John’s place in the foyer, he saw his father’s feet were a bloody mess. The wood he’d been nailing into the walls of the clock tower was rough and untreated. As the steps climbed, John saw more and more blood. How his father managed to stand on his pulverized soles, John had no idea.
Edward raised a hand to the clock tower. Tick-Tick-Tick. “I can’t find it! Where? Here? Here!”
His father shoved his right hand into the gears of the clock and screamed. John, below, covered his mouth. What had his father just done? What brought on this madness?
“I have it!” Edward screamed between gasps of pain. “I have it! Pull? Pull!”
Edward—his frame languid from unmistakable neglect, his leg lame, his mind clearly gone—pulled with a might John did not expect the man who just had his hand turned to a gushing pulp to have. Muscles along his back twisted. His shoulders heaved. With a roar, Edward pulled back from the clock—
—and slid. His bloody, bloody feet had slicked the wood. His momentum pushed him backwards, his feet shot from under him, and Edward Dunn—crank of Marlow’s End, crazy clock tower keeper, father of John Dunn, lonely widower—fell. He tumbled and screamed, “I have it! I have it! I have—”
Edward crashed in a heap before John, head first. The son’s eyes went wide at his father’s broken, twisted body. Blood speckled the boy’s face like freckles on impact with the ground. Bone poked out from Edward’s shoulders. His feet were shredded skin and gushing blood. His head was caved in at the side, exposing brain and skull, where it slammed into the stone floor and bounced. His bloodied hand…
His bloodied hand held a tiny gear the shade and color of mined quartz.
Tick-Tick-Tick.
Sirens started elsewhere in town. The police were likely alerted to the screaming.
Tick-Tick.
Tears rolled down John’s face.
Tick.
A great toll, like one from an iron bell taller than any man, reverberated down the tower. That wasn’t right. There were no bells. There was never a great ringing as the hours changed.
It tolled again. John looked up into the guts of the clock and regretted it.
Spectral faces, all of them torn and shredded from age and rot, looked down at him from between the blood-greased gears of the Marlow’s End clock tower. Their hair was ragged, their eyes hallow and sunken, their skin full of holes and dribbling some spectral fluid.
They spoke. They spoke of the tower, of the mountain, of the stars above and the shadows below. They spoke of the duty of the tower keeper, of the grinding gears, of the importance of time, of sacrifices of blood.
They spoke to the rhythm of the turning clock, their very words replaced the ticking of the intricate insides of the massive machine overhead.
John’s tears dried. His father’s blood spread and stained the boy’s shoes. He couldn’t move. He didn’t want to think. All he did was stare, like Edward, into the hive of ghosts high in the clock tower, at the bloodied boards, and did his best to ignore the knell of the ghostly bell like the toll of the dead.
***
It was a cold night when they found young John Dunn—face spattered with drying blood, knuckles white, back tense, eyes blank—standing over the broken body of his father, a mister Edward Dunn. The boy’s breath was shallow. Whatever tears he had shed had long since dried and left shiny streaks on his flush-red cheeks. The police tried their best to question the kid who, as most knew, was a verbose and jolly child when given the opportunity. But he never responded.
In truth, he never heard them. To young John Dunn, their voices, their clomping boots, their ringing sirens were all muted and hollow. Background noise. All he heard on that snowy December night was the ticking of the clock tower.
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