And Gramps, lost in another time, murmured of that year and how the temperature was and what the people were like moving in that town.
Then Douglas said, ‘1869.’
And Grandpa was lost four years after Lincoln was shot.
Standing there, watching, Douglas realized that if he visited here night after night and spoke to Grandpa, Grandpa, asleep, would be his teacher and that if he spent six months or a year or two years coming to this special long–after–midnight school, he would have an education that nobody else in the world would have. Grandpa would give his knowledge as a teacher, without knowing it, and Doug would drink it in and not tell Tom or his parents or anybody.
‘That’s it,’ whispered Doug. ‘Thank you, Grandpa, for all you say, asleep or awake. And thanks again for today and your advice on the purloineds. I don’t want to say any more. I don’t want to wake you up.’
So Douglas, his ears full up and his mind full brimmed, left his grandpa sleeping there and crept toward the stairs and the tower room because he wanted to have one more encounter with the night town and the moon.
Just then the great clock across town, an immense moon, a full moon of stunned sound and round illumination, cleared its ratchety throat and let free a midnight sound.
One.
Douglas climbed the stairs.
Two. Three.
Four. Five.
Reaching the tower window, Douglas looked out upon an ocean of rooftops and the great monster clock tower as time summed itself up.
Six. Seven.
His heart floundered.
Eight. Nine.
His flesh turned to snow.
Ten. Eleven.
A shower of dark leaves fell from a thousand trees.
Twelve!
Oh my God, yes, he thought.
The clock! Why hadn’t he thought of that?
The clock!
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The last vibration of the great clock bell faded.
A wind swayed the trees outside and the pekoe curtain hung out on the air, a pale ghost.
Douglas felt his breath siphon.
You, he thought. How come I never noticed?
The great and terrible courthouse clock.
Just last year, hadn’t Grandpa laid out the machinery’s blueprint, lecturing?
The huge round lunar clock was a gristmill, he’d said. Shake down all the grains of Time – the big grains of centuries, and the small grains of years, and the tiny grains of hours and minutes – and the clock pulverized them, slid Time silently out in all directions in a fine pollen, carried by cold winds to blanket the town like dust, everywhere. Spores from that clock lodged in your flesh to wrinkle it, to grow bones to monstrous size, to burst feet from shoes like turnips. Oh, how that great machine at the town’s center dispensed Time in blowing weathers.