August 9, 1923, England

he breeze was cold, but the air was clear and Harry Courtenay’s mug was warm in his hand, and his mind was thoroughly engaged in his work. He looked up from the book he was studying and sighed. Coffee made a good excuse to step outside onto the terrace for a bit of peaceful concentration, but it only lasted so long. Courtenay wanted a quiet study and a stocked library, and neither were to be had here. The Halliwell mansion sat fat and awkward on the side of a steep hill, sprawling ever larger with the constant additions and renovations, out of place, like the family themselves.

Courtenay shut the book and sighed again. It was a decent volume, coming from an amateur and a layman, but not the sort of academic material he needed for tomorrow’s expedition, and not deserving of the effusive praise its author would expect to receive. He would have to make his next move carefully. So much depended on this night, this party, this exchange. Courtenay was tired of pretending.

He turned at the sound of the door opening behind him and felt his heart quicken, as it always did, at the sight of Emma Halliwell. She smiled her ready smile at him.

“I thought you wanted to be a gentleman,” she teased.

He grinned at her, forgetting his predicament for the moment.

“I did—I do,” he said.

“Well, abandoning your host to go out on the balcony and read is hardly modish among the upper crust these days.”

Her joking reproach reminded him of the unpleasant business at hand.

“Yes, love. But what am I to say to him? I intend to continue with my work. With or without his sponsorship. I don’t want his money… I don’t need your family’s help and I don’t want—.”

The words came out harsh and pointed, and Courtenay stopped as Emma winced.

“I know that,” she said, looking away. “I don’t want you to feel beholden to me or to him or to my family, but there are—.”She searched for the right word. “...conventions to consider. Surely you understand that.”

Courtenay did understand. His tone softened. “I know. You’re playing a complicated game. Aren’t we all?”

Emma shrugged and smiled, gay and glad once more.

“Well, apply yourself to a less complicated one. You’re wanted in the billiard room.”

Draining the last of his coffee, Harry braced himself and turned the handle to the door into the game room.

ully! Good shot!” William Halliwell’s unctuous grumble rang out above the chatter of the party and the clack of billiard balls. His thin companion grinned a fishlike smile and recocked his cue, striking Harry Courtenay in the ribs with the butt end.

Courtenay attempted to maneuver out of the way and not spill the freshly mixed cocktail in his hand, but he was caught between the two shootists who turned and glared at him.

“Out of the way there, boy!” Lord Halliwell roared, forgetting his volume, as he tended to do under excitement. “Do it again, Dorsey, do it again!”

Dorsey bent over the table to measure his shot and Halliwell turned to Courtenay.

“What did you think, then, eh? That’s some real work for you! None of this scrabbling in the sand, then?”

Courtenay stiffened and held his tongue. “Indeed, sir, you’ve written quite an interesting book. I’ve no doubt many tourists will find it invaluable.”

He couldn’t resist a minor emphasis on the word “tourists”. No one two years removed from university would find the slightest bit of revelatory information in the slim volume.

The slight missed its mark and Halliwell guffawed with satisfaction.

“There, you see, Dorsey? This old man bears a brain yet.” Turning back to Courtenay, he grinned and said “Keep trying, old boy, you may make something of yourself yet.”

“Father, stop it. Harry’s making his own way in the field. Not all of us have fortunes and vanity projects.”

Having followed him inside, Emma now stood in the entrance with her arms folded. Even in his ire, Harry was reminded that this was why he loved her. She understood his heart and the passions that drove him, even when others did not.

“Oh, come now, he ought to apply himself to some real work if he wants to support a family. Time is the thing, you know, time is the thing.”

Courtenay smiled politely and excused himself to call a cab. He thought for a moment of making his goodbyes to Emma, but reconsidered. No use in upsetting her more, and he was in no mood to hide his feelings about her father. Still, a pang of remorse followed him out into the street. Emma Halliwell was everything a young man could want— and she wanted him. At least until tonight. They rarely disagreed, but she had a rare quality of heart that allowed her to forgive easily, even her father’s overbearing attitude. Courtenay hadn’t quite developed that quality yet. Still, she was worth fighting for. Worth a lifetime of William Halliwell as a father-in-law? A question that would take deliberate consideration, and Courtenay had other things on his mind. There was work to be done.

ack at the hotel he made a sandwich, lit his lamp and opened a few rather more useful books. The question was the latest controversy in the archaeology of the sub-Indian continent. Findings at the Sadakalikayi temple were pieces out of time—pots with glazing techniques far too advanced for their time. Carbon datings consistently showed that remnants of rice meal pointed to a civilization both contemporaneous and thousands of years younger than the surrounding cultures. Myths, legends, rumors that their king had grasped the secret of eternal life. And a tomb site that, maddeningly, inexplicably, bore these legends out. The ruins, like most in Ceylon, were not unknown. Explorers had combed through them, cartographers sketched their detail. But rumors were different this time. The ancient places had always seemed transfixed in time, but here time truly was divorced from meaning. Artifacts carried away from this site were uniformly of higher quality—better preserved—than those from any other dig. Whether by trick of the humid air, or by the site’s sheer obscurity, its remnants were strangely pristine. What trick of time held this place captive to its era? What force of God or nature crystallized the ruins in time and carried echoes of the past into the present?

These questions and many others carried Harry Courtenay off into an uneasy sleep.

October 29, 1923, Ceylon

win black mounds rose from the surrounding sands like the broaching back of a great cetacean from a dark and turbulent main. Between them sprawled the decrepit remains of the ancient temple.

The wind, slowed not a whit by the two rounded eminences, beat like the wings of an enraged bird of prey. Harry Courtenay unfastened and refastened his anorak habitually, though the gesture was meaningless against the impregnating cold. The afternoon had been smotheringly humid and gave no forewarning the air would quickly turn clammy with the falling sun. Ceylon, however beautiful it might be in every other respect, was fiendishly unpredictable with regards to the weather.

Courtenay’s mind was elsewhere occupied. His fingers moved with the absentminded motion of a man whose inward focus stilted all else, both physical action and sensation. Squatting low, he perched among the ruins, intent on the notebook cupped in his hands. The lucifer he held in his teeth petered out and he cursed and resettled himself on his haunches. Fishing in his pocket for another match, he heard nothing from behind as he struck the light on his pants.

Milton, his loquacious Sinhala guide, clumped up alongside him.

“Too dark? Darker than the inside of a gunny bag, eh? Ahahaha!”

Courtenay, startled, glancing at the man with irritation.

Manual labor was cheap, especially from the poorer castes, as they’d had no trouble assembling a crew of a dozen porters. But it cost in other ways. One wanted a certain sense of gravity on an archaeological dig, and the slight Sinhalese’s bootless commentary had been unstinting since setting out from Kandy two weeks ago.

Stuffing his notebook into his pocket, Courtenay bent and stood, working his hands at the back of his knees to relieve the stiffness.

“I suppose you’re right, Milton. Let’s call it a night.”

The final night of a fortnight’s expedition and precious little to show for it. The site was promising enough at first. Like all such sites on the island, the walls of the temple seemed to hold untold secrets, held captive by the grotesque carven figures that populated its obscure halls—lions with vaguely amphibious heads sat potbellied at the entrance, flanking a deep entryway that seemed to respire a warm and moist air, whose weird exhalation modulated in rhythm to some unknown engine. But if there had once been enough here to interest junk-sellers who’d picked the place clean, nothing now remained but the monoliths themselves, standing in silent defiance of such trifling rapacity.

Courtenay had ventured into the hallway. But he had seen and heard nothing but a series of faded murals and a vague undulating thump, somewhere far away, perhaps one of his own party excavating a ways off. The murals that littered the walls seemed to tell a story of a single monarch, great in power, wealthy, for the clarity and richness of the paintings bespoke the vast treasures that afforded such art. A man, followed by a light from heaven, stood upon a great mountain and surveyed his kingdom below. And at the foot of the mountain labored a cohort of slaves, building an edifice that dwarfed them. In the man’s left hand he held a white circle, circumscribed with strange symbols which Courtenay did not recognize. It dripped with stylized blood, and the figure’s side was shown to be gorily laid open, with his ribs protruding grotesquely from the wound.

The mural seemed to be a timeline of sorts—the antecedent image showed the king much advanced in years, leaning upon a staff, attended by several servants. His face stretched over his bones in exaggerated emaciation. Still he held the weird object, but no longer aloft. He clutched it close to his chest and his gaze was transfixed on it with an expression of greed and triumph.

The final image had been left undone, and Courtenay, scribbling furiously in his notebook, observed that this great king must have fallen into penury, for no longer was the painting of the quality of the earlier scenes. They were odd and misshapen, halting and amateurish. Not so much that Courtenay didn’t recognize the face of the king, though it was much reduced in age, stronger and bright-eyed in youth. His figure lay naked and muscular upon a couch, and about him lay the withered corpses of his servants. Inscribed beneath the figure of the king was a string of symbols in a script unknown to Courtenay’s research, though he racked his brain trying to decipher it.

The letters appeared to be akin to Sanskrit, though rounder, more sinuous and suggestive. They brought unbidden to Courtenay’s mind images of lust and the flesh, of ancient wanton courtesans and the untamed machinations of an earlier age, when fortunes were lost and won by the power of one’s cunning and warlike-ness. Harry Courtenay looked back in his mind and wished for those times, for the simplicity of life by the sword, for the age of conquest and power and control, for the undimmed honesty of violent men. His own life, with its immutably preordained role—of servility, deference, entrapment—in a genteel but false society, angered and disgusted him. Not one day of this unnamed king’s life had been wasted currying favor to a capricious father-of-the-bride, or dabbling in the nauseating games of lineage that dogged him now. When a man wanted a bride, he took one, and the fates be damned if they opposed his course.

ilton’s loud “Halloa!” jerked him from his reverie, and he was ordinary, ineligible Harry Courtenay once more. Courtenay shook his head and reluctantly left the cave. Milton had pored over the murals and the script, much more than his salary had called for, but apart from noting that the script bore some superficial resemblances to Sinhala and that the murals were fairly typical of the region, could offer little in the way of help.

Courtenay stood at the base of the crumbling wall just beyond the cave-mouth and looked back. One giant pagoda rose above the rest of the rubble, a black spire penetrating the bruise-blue sky above. The spire seemed to signify something, an X marking the spot of some forgotten secret. But nothing that could be picked up and carted away remained. The wet stones bearded with moss gave no answer to the questions that clouded the humid air. Courtenay had spent an infuriating afternoon with his pick and brush, probing and prodding the intractable stone face of the monolithic walls, his impatience growing with the heat till his curses ran in confluence with the sweat from his forehead.

Now, with a final imprecation at the temple, the expedition, the archaeological society and the entire country in general, Courtenay threw his tools in the sand and stumped away, sitting heavily under the shade they had set up a few yards from the wall.

The entire affair had been a waste of time. Of time, and of money, and he could spare neither. The time had been borrowed against his education, and the money from his… well, hardly likely to be his father in law now. Wasn’t that the reason he had accepted the damned loan in the first place? To show he had prospects. Potential. Show that he could be trusted with the daughter of a high-born family. The Halliwells. Now that was a family. High-bred, high-strung. Quality. They were, every one of them, beautiful, intelligent people. And Emma was special, in the very essence of that word. There was no one to touch her for beauty, even in a family of beautiful people. A broad forehead crowned with honey-gold hair above a high regal neck and deep blue eyes that noticed everything and laughed silently, even when she herself did not, which was rarely. He loved her, and she saw potential in him, which was more than most eligible women did. Was she wrong?

What hurt more was her father. Archaeology was all the rage among the elite of this part of the country. Every manor’s mantelpiece proudly displayed a carved sarcophagus, a plaster deathmask, an embalmed hand. Halliwell fancied himself an amateur field hand, had written a minor guide for other amateurs, but hardly thought sullying his hands with the dust of some backwater outpost was befitting of his station. No, he hadn’t the mettle— but he had the money. Courtenay had no money, and any mettle he had, felt to the old man, like an insult.

Halliwell loved his daughter honestly, but that affection took the form of manipulating her like a chess piece. He assumed that she, like himself, desired nothing so much as entrée into that high-class world, and her marriage would necessarily take the form of an intricate social gambit, precisely calculated for maximum social advantage. Harry Courtenay was immediately, firmly and irrevocably ineligible. He had proven that at that dreadful dinner. So much for a hero’s sendoff.

Shaking himself from his reverie, Courtenay returned to the wall, dropped to his knees and pawed the ground for his tools. This damned wind had kicked up the sand and partially buried his kit. That thumping was getting louder too, and Courtenay now felt sure it was thunder portending a storm he did not care to be caught in. He looked peevishly up at the sky as his hands felt for the last of his instruments.

“Achh!” he spat as his hand brushed over something sharp.

Surveying his hand, he saw a small cut almost in the precise center of his palm. Not his pick, he had collected that first. Scanning the sugar-white sand he spotted a pointed protuberance sticking about half an inch up from the ground. It was a variegated white and brown. Courtenay’s heart sank at the memory of Milton’s repeated warnings of the abbas ketuva, a local species of cone snail feared for its venom. A timorous poke at the protuberance to knock off the sand revealed not a shell but the ornamental spike of a clock.

ourtenay brushed away the sand that shallowly concealed the machine, with more puzzlement than excitement. This was not an ancient artifact, or even very old. He had seen it before— yes, it was the same object in the mural. At least, the fresco depicted a highly stylized rendition of it— the symbols circumscribing the face were the same, instantly familiar in their strangeness. Courtenay’s heart began to beat with excitement, then subsided. This dial, this clock, whatever it was, was not old. The face was bone-white, unsullied by time or sand, the symbols circumscribing the face cut as sharply and deeply as if the clock had been made yesterday. Odd, but then local craftsmen often produced replicas of anything represented in the murals. This was probably nothing but a cheap trinket intended for an easily-awed tourist. Courtenay picked up the clock and held it close to his ear. No ticking, no sound at all. He shook it and was surprised at its solidness: heavy for its size, with no loose or rattling parts. But then the hands weren’t moving either. Purely ornamental, thought Courtenay with some disdain. He was about to toss it away, but he stopped, and laid it gently in the sand. A strange feeling of reverence suffused him as he walked away.

Milton had finished yapping orders at the porters and packing up his own belongings.

“Best to bed here for the night. Porters say they fear the kunatuva— how you say, the storm.”

As if in concert with the guide’s warning, there was a sudden crack of lightning and a roll of thunder. Courtenay had seen enough of Ceylon’s untamable oceans to make his acquiescence quite quick. He pitched the small tent with Milton’s help, who did little to ease the operation. At last the two men lay down, back to back. The incessant honk of Milton’s snores told Courtenay this would not be a particularly restful night. Hang it all, it was too cold for sleep anyhow.

The rain chilled the already clammy air and seeped into the sloppily-erected tent.

Courtenay kicked off the covers and grabbed his coat. Sitting under an overhang of the great walls where he had dug that afternoon, he fished in his pocket for his pipe and matches. Covering the flame with his hand against the wind and rain, he singed the scratch on his hand and remembered the clock. Might as well scrounge a souvenir from this useless trip. Where had he left it?

Harry felt panic rising inside him unbidden, and a fear for the loss of something precious. The strange thought flashed through his mind that he had thrown away his one chance— the one chance at greatness. He stumbled along the path in the wet night, heedless of the rain that stung his face and blurred his vision. The clock lay beside his sodden toolkit. Odd. He had paid no mind to where he had thrown it. Gathering his things, he stole back to the tent and lay down. A sense of calm immediately came over him.

Halliwell would be eager to see him, hoping for something stupendous to impress his guests at the inevitable welcome ball. Damn it all, the party would be a test—the test. See what the old boy had dragged back, eh? What has it he’d picked up while playing in the sand? Impressive enough for the old man? Impressive enough for a dowry? Wasn’t that what it boiled down to? Impress the father to get the girl. Yet another complication in the infuriating machinery of social graces.

Irritated, Courtenay reached over for his vest and pulled out the clock. Hardly impressive enough to win over the docent of a local museum, let alone Lord Halliwell.

In the dark, he felt the structure of the object: it reminded him of nothing so much as a stringless yo-yo. He twisted the halves in opposite directions, and the action of the twisting was strangely pleasing. Smooth and precise, even for something so presumably ancient, with a satisfying click at regular intervals. He twisted it back and forth, then again and again in one direction. The dial did not tighten and stop as he suspected it would. The halves turned endlessly with the same smooth motion.

Something moved in the dark. Milton’s snoring had stopped. But Courtenay hardly noticed. With each turn of the clock, he felt a shock rend through him from his fingers to his chest, like electricity, though he felt no pain— only an ever-increasing feeling of power and will and resolve. A bolt from beyond the reach of man.

ourtenay slept at last, but slumber brought dreams of a kind to make one afraid of sleeping again. Short, warped visions—naked of meaning or context: a man standing on the summit of a bone-white hill, a gash in his chest; a king, great and cruel and avaricious, holding a child aloft. But when he lowered the child, its face was old and withered. And last, before Courtenay awoke with that awful start that seems to cut short the beating of one’s very heart, he saw Emma.

She stood at the edge of a bier and wept, but her eyes were cold and white. Courtenay saw himself reach out his hand to her, offering her the clock. And all the world seemed suspended in the pause before her response. At last she spoke, though her voice made no sound. Her words insinuated into his mind.

“Upon such ground as demons tread

Should men themselves forbear to walk.

To rob of life the living dead

Is all the power of the clock.

And when all thy plundered life is spent,

The breath from out thy soul is rent,

Shalt recompense all thou hast robbed—

Touch not, touch not the Clock of God!

The next morning brought with it unalloyed relief, a glad respite from the dreams. Courtenay stood a little ways out from the tent, looking out over that impossibly-blue sea, breathing deeply so as to imprint his memory with this: the scent of the island. The pervasive yet subtle odour of salted limes, the scent of seawater and spice inherent to it as a fingerprint. That he would remember and miss, maybe, and the people, slim and beautiful with ever-present smiles and a natural, guileless goodwill completely foreign to the West. Even in Milton’s unceasing conversation there was nothing malicious, only innocent camaraderie.

Milton.

Courtenay glanced at his watch and cursed.

They were certain to be late.

He turned back and sprinted the twenty paces back to the tent, ripping away the sleeping bags and found Milton curled in his clothes. He was dead.

Recoiling from the sight, Courtenay took care where he put his hands. With his booted foot he pushed aside the bedclothes and looked closer. The body in the tent was blackened, wizened and frail, but intact. He’d seen this kind of decomposition before at other sites.

It dawned on him then that the paintings in that accursed crypt were prophetic—the clock had lost none of its power. Milton had been dead for centuries.

September 9, 2048

he hills were the only safe place I had for weeks. Not that a death in these hills was uncommon. Snakes, kidnappings, bandits, feuds. People sometimes just got lost. But I was not unsuspected. I had left that awful morning, above the camp, watching the porters tear apart the site. I saw them carry Milton’s body back to their village and return carrying knives and axes.

It was nearly three weeks before I was able to return home. I told no one anything. Who would believe me? Who, having once come to believe my story, would not hold me as I hold myself—a murderer of the basest kind?

My reception in England was not all I’d hoped. The clock was appraised by the docent at the university, who deemed it “neat but otherwise unremarkable, most likely a modern artifact built for tourists.”

I do not know why its powers seemed to respond only to me, for the docent twisted the mechanism several times to no effect. In my sojourn in the hills of Ceylon I wrestled, like Jacob, but not with an angel. With myself. With the knowledge that one death was not enough.

Hah! God had not won there, either. Upon my return to England, I made haste to visit the house of Halliwell. I offered it to him—I loathe to think of it now—like a servile devotee to a god. I posited to him that, together, we might at last understand the great mystery of mortality. Like Cain, asking for acceptance from a cold and haughty father.

He laughed.

The power of life and death I held in my hand, and offered it to him, and he laughed. Poor damned fool. He thought so little of me that he forbade me to contact Emma.

I had hoped the woman I loved would come to my defense, as she had that cold night so long ago. A change had come over her. She was afraid. She whispered to me of dreams she’d had—a multitude of corpses stacked like cordwood, the sound of weeping lingering in the air, mourning their stolen years.

I will say that the old man died peacefully, and was buried with all the pomp and decorum he would have wished. The swiftness with which the end came raised eyebrows, but the physician found nothing the matter other than old age.

His daughter’s death was not so simple. The inquest found no reason as to why a lovely young woman should have withered away. The attending physician declared the state of her brain and her heart to be that of a woman of two-hundred years old. I can only assume my love for her had interfered with my control over the Clock, tenuous as it was. I never meant to kill her—but I was not in control. Forces were at work, far beyond my feeble knowledge and power to command.

There were too many questions. I was immediately under suspicion and the physician called the authorities. I was tried and convicted—on trumped-up charges, for they could prove nothing—and sent away.

The prison term I could bear, for I had realized by then that I would outlast it. More difficult to bear was the ineluctable passage of time. Release was welcome, as it would have been for any prisoner. But there is more than one kind of prison.

I saw my country plunged into a Great War—the Final War, they said, though it was quickly followed by another. I saw an entire city melt under a new and terrible weapon that turned the sky to fire. I saw many men and women live their lives, good and bad, great and small—the evil that men do never changes.

Great God! That I should be the instrument by which my beloved Emma should perish. Many times have I attempted to consign myself to that fate. God knows I deserve it, and perhaps in his mercy would see fit to rejoin me with her in the hereafter. But I have assayed now more than fifteen times. Pistol, razor, noose and poison have all proven useless. Like that damned king upon the crypt’s wall, my body grows in youthful vigour even as my soul grows ever more corrupt.

Pray God that my dread suspicions prove true— that the sum of my unknowing victims’ lives is my only sentence. Patience, dear Emma! I have passed now the spans combined of poor Milton and your father. 125 years without you! A century and a quarter that the Clock measures out, every second paid in fear and loneliness.

Your blessed life is now my final penance. 19 years and I return to thee!

It is not too much to bear.

And yet, the days are bitter and the nights are cold and sleepless when I hear the chiming of the clocks of God.