What the Clocks Know

by Rumer Haven

  “Huh.” Sylvie summarized as she counted on her fingers: “The honors student who made homecoming court. The sorority girl who hated frat guys. And now the yuppie who renounces job and possessions.”

  “Does that make me an oxymoron or just a moron?”

  “Stop,” Sylvie said. “This change you’re undertaking is surprisingly spontaneous of you, and that is good. Just know you don’t have to do everything on your own.” After a pause, she added with a smile, “And if all goes to pot, there’s always the vintage shop.”

  “What vintage shop?” Derek asked.

  But Sylvie didn’t explain, and Margot only smiled. “Right.” She slapped her lap. “Enough tangents. You’ve given me quite the love fest, kids, but don’t try so hard. I’m fine.”

  They looked half-convinced but didn’t put up a fight as she started unpacking the game board.

  “Are we playing this or what?”

  The Ouija session began straightforwardly enough. Derek kicked off the séance by asking whether there was a spirit present who would like to communicate with three mortals. The white plastic planchette immediately skidded toward Yes.

  The game was on.

  Straight away, the trio learned that, Yes, it was a good spirit, No, it wasn’t a male, and, for good measure, Yes, it was female.

  Warming up to the ritual, Sylvie clapped. “My turn!” Her toothy smile radiated rainbows and kittens; no wonder children gravitated toward her Story Hour in throngs at the public library. She boldly asked how the specter had passed away.

  The planchette didn’t budge.

  Again, Sylvie prompted, “How did you die?” Nothing. She pouted. “I’m not good at this.”

  “C’mon, neither of you can come up with a reason?” Margot accused, and the game’s typical argument ensued, with each of the three blaming the planchette’s movement on the other two. And all three of them denying it.

  They opted for a less open-ended question—“How old are you?”—so that someone could think up a quick answer. The plastic triangle nudged to the lower-left quadrant of the board until 2 was visible through its circular window. Then, with some friction, the device tugged their limbs toward the right in a non-linear path; it reached a point where it faltered and subtly wavered around the 6. After dawdling there for a few seconds, the energy lost strength and stopped.

  Margot shifted, unnerved that she’d just celebrated that same birthday. “Huh. When did you die, then?”

  Nothing happened.

  “You guys wanna skirt around that topic, don’t ya?” she asked, trying to lighten the mood in a literally darkening environment. Sylvie replied they might say the same of her.

  “Fine, we’ll sidestep the D word, Miss Eggshells,” Derek sassed at the ghost, “and do the math ourselves. When were you born?”

  1.

  Then, zigzagging to the right with less conviction, the planchette ultimately settled on 8 and powered out.

  “Eighteen,” Sylvie said. “Maybe she means the eighteen hundreds. Or the last two digits of the year, which could be any century.”

  “Or just one and eight,” Margot said, “as in any of the four digits in the year.”

  “Or it’s a month and date,” Derek offered. “January eighth or August first. Or the eighteenth of some month. If we really stretch, it could be the eighteenth hour in military time. So, like, six p.m.”

  Clearing her throat, Margot asked, “Is that your time of birth?”

  No.

  “Your date of birth?”

  No.

  “Your time of death?”

  Nothing.

  The pause lasted nearly half a minute, and Margot assumed their session had ended. But she followed the others’ cue and didn’t speak, just in case.

  Their darting glances still carried suspicion, though. Who was moving the planchette, and would they do it again, one last time for closure? Margot knew they were all curious how at least one of them would continue weaving this fictitious life story. It was the death story, though, that she wanted someone to tell, be who or what it may.

  Casting a wary eye at her companions, she noticed how the shadows of trees genuflected across Derek’s features. Sylvie kneeled across from him with her back to the window, her head crowned with a dull halo of sunlight from behind. Sitting adjacent to both, Margot had knotted her legs into a lotus position and could feel the contrast in her face’s temperature between illuminated and shadowed halves.

  There was a small intake of breath, which drew her gaze back to the board.

  The planchette had twitched back to life.

  It circled an etching of the moon twice before settling back on No, where it gained momentum and vacillated so fervently it might have scraped the board’s surface had it lasted more than a few seconds. Instead, it drifted down to I, then L, back to I, then sank a centimeter, where the tops of both the U and V sprouted into view through the clear lens.

  During a pause, Sylvie twisted and reached an arm behind her for the pen and paper she’d used earlier to itemize storage boxes. Margot nodded her kudos as Sylvie recorded letter for letter with her free hand, labeling the U and V with a question mark and using a slash to mark the pause.

  In the meantime, the planchette had made its way back to the crescent moon, resting there for a while until slowly dragging to the far left, dwelling around that side of the alphabet.

  BOO, Sylvie wrote with a heavy exhale and eye roll. This ghost wasn’t very original, making Margot picture a white cotton sheet with eyeholes. Yet the plastic hadn’t stopped moving beneath their fingertips.

  I, N, G. Pause. P, A, L, E, R. Pause. O, R, C, H, I, D. Finally, it stopped spelling but dragged back up to the moon.

  In the quiet, Margot stared at the little etching of the moon nesting in a puff of dark clouds. Her chest tightened with a keen sense of familiarity, and, trying to place it, her mind wandered its way back to her Grandma Grace and this gaudy yet amazing brooch she’d given Margot years ago—a large pearl set in a cluster of sapphire and turquoise stones that she always thought looked like the night sky. Such a random memory. Yet now she wondered if she would come across that brooch somewhere in her closet. In all her nostalgia, her muscles relaxed and allowed the pads of her fingers to lie more passively on the planchette.

  The activity picked up in intensity after that, leaving Sylvie with three more “words” to add to her notes as the grand finale:

  I M / O P E N D I G / H E A R T C L O T

  Derek shattered the stillness by flicking the planchette off the board, which he then clapped shut with a “See ya!” Sylvie trembled with exaggeration, like she had the heebie-jeebies, and bolted straight for the light switch. Margot sat in serenity.

  Returning to her spot on the floor, Sylvie twiddled the pen between her fingers. “Why don’t we debrief here.”

  “Welp,” Derek started, “we supposedly dealt with a benevolent female spirit, who is stubbornly tight-lipped about her death. But we know she’s twenty-six—”

  “Or sixty-two,” Margot said, “in case it was transmitted out of sequence.” She really didn’t want to think of someone dying at her young age.

  “Okay, so she’s twenty-six or sixty-two, which could mean the eighteen is actually eighty-one, but we don’t know what that would mean anyway as far as when she was born.”

  “Aw, we never asked for her name!” Sylvie lamented, personable to the last.

  “She might’ve given it to us at the end,” Margot said. “Read that back to us. I stopped keeping track.”

  “Well, first of all, before I started writing anything down, there was that weird thing with the moon and the No. What’s with that?”

  “No kidding,” Margot said. “What’s the deal almost ruining the board? Have some respect for my brother’s old crap.”

  “For the last damn time,” Derek said, “it wasn’t me.”

  “Me neither!” the women groaned.

  “I don’t know,” Sylvie said, “but when it was doin
g all that back-and-forth, it reminded me of this one kid who launched into a raging tantrum at the library the other day. His mom was making him leave earlier than he wanted to or something, and he just sat there screaming, ‘No, no, no, no, NO!’” Her effective impression convinced Margot that Little Girl Sylvie had brought down her parents’ roof with similar theatrics. “You know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, totally,” Margot said. “It actually felt that way, too. Very insistent. But about what? We hadn’t asked anything, had we?”

  Derek looked up as if to find the memory in his eyebrows. “We’d asked about her death again, so it could’ve been a delayed answer to that.”

  Sylvie bit the tip of her pen cap. “Maybe she doesn’t know she’s dead. Couldn’t that be why she was here in the first place? If she really was.”

  “Ahh,” Derek and Margot both mused.

  “All right,” Margot said, “I’m satisfied with that. Now back to the notes.”

  Sylvie sucked at her pen as she read off her paper. “Okay. There was that time it got stuck between the U and V. But…if we assume it was V, then it almost spells out I live. Ha! Validation!”

  “Creeeepy,” was all Derek offered up.

  Margot leaned closer to Sylvie to read ahead on the page.

  “Then there was boo?” Sylvie scrunched her face. “But then I, N, G, so maybe it’s the action of booing. That’s a weird thing to say. So is paler orchid.”

  “Maybe pale-colored orchids were her favorite flower,” Margot suggested.

  Sylvie nodded. “Maybe pale orchids were on her grave.”

  “Or maybe she was impaled by an orchid,” Derek said, “and that’s how she died.”

  Margot raised her brow at him. “Unfortunate accident?”

  “Nope. Murder.”

  “Interesting coroner’s report.”

  “I suspect: Colonel Mustard. In the Conservatory. With the Orchid.”

  “Guys, a few more words here,” Sylvie pleaded in the waning light. “Can we just wrap this up?” She let them read her final notations for themselves.

  “I-M,” Margot said. “Initials, maybe?” She glanced at Derek.

  “Or a contraction. There’s no punctuation on the board, so I say we let her buy a vowel to solve this puzzle as I am to win the ten-day cruise and advance to the bonus round.”

  “Fair enough,” Margot said as she looked at the rest of the page. “Looks like those”—she pointed at the paper—“can be broken up into open dig and heart clot. Ew.” She screwed her face. “Maybe open dig refers to her grave?”

  Sylvie’s eyes widened. “She was dug up.”

  “Or dug herself out.”

  “And heart clot is cause of death,” Derek said.

  Sylvie grinned at him. “That would trump your orchid theory.”

  “Not if it’s the orchid that clogged the artery.”

  “I’m thinking,” Margot said, “that even if it were possible for a plant stem to stab through your heart, a ‘clot’ would hardly be the way to describe it.”

  Shaking her head, Sylvie reached for the box cover and contemplated it for a moment. “Amazing how they can mass-produce portals to the dead.”

  Derek snorted. “Yeah, makes you wonder what could’ve crept into the Monopoly boards at the warehouse. Maybe all the little green plastic houses are haunted.”

  “And that’s why Santa—an anagram of Satan—gave both games to my brother,” Margot said. “Mwa-ha-ha!”

  “Or as Satan Santa would say, mwo-ho-ho.”

  “But seriously,” Sylvie insisted, “it seems a little irresponsible, doesn’t it? Marketing a séance as a game?”

  “It’s a scam, is what it is,” Derek said. “Created by ye old charlatans and still cashed in on by ye new capitalists.”

  “Money talks more than ghosts do,” Margot said, bobbing her head.

  “But, relax, Sylvie,” Derek said. “If you think there’s something to this, as long as you make your peaceful goodbyes, you sever the contact and no ghost can haunt or possess you. At least not permanently.”

  “Hardy-har.”

  Margot glanced out the window at the low sun. Its fading light on the window screen applied a sepia filter to her view of the yard outside, like an old photograph. A chill gripped her spine just then, and she sat upright, rigid. “I don’t remember saying goodbye. Do you?”

  “Well, do we have to actually say it?” Derek asked. “Shouldn’t the ghost bear the burden?”

  Sylvie huffed. “Do you invite guests over for a party, just to let them see themselves out while you sit on your inhospitable ass?”

  “Absolutely. Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?”

  “Host with the Most.”

  “Thank you, and she’s Ghost with the Most for understanding.”

  Margot leaned over to snatch the brittle playing instructions from the Ouija box. “How depressing that paper printed in our childhood is already yellowing.” She murmured a stream of directions, skimming for something relevant. “Doesn’t say anything about ending the game, just protocol for asking questions.”

  “Guess we have nothing to worry about, then.” Sylvie shrugged and, packing up the game as they’d found it, checked with Margot for her final sorting task. “So, where does this belong?”

  “Eh, the Discard pile.”

  Chapter 2

  Dear Diary

  SITTING ALONE IN THE CENTER of closet clutter, Margot continued enforcing method on the madness until bedtime. Her friends had stayed for dinner, then left after a little more sorting. Still no sign of Grandma Grace’s brooch yet. She heaved a sigh just as her bedroom door creaked open.

  “Hel-lo,” Margot sang with high-low inflection.

  “Hel-lo,” a disembodied voice replied, but with an intonation that asked, How ya doin’?

  Without looking up from where her cheek rested in her palm, Margot said, “I’m o-kay.”

  “Yup, sounds like it.”

  Footsteps padded closer, and then she felt a hand caress up and down her back.

  “Oh, honey,” her mom said, kneeling beside her. “This, too, shall pass.”

  The tears Margot had been trying to hold in slid down into her hand. She sniffed.

  “Margot, what is it?”

  Digging her voice out from the lump that contained it like a raging fist, she sputtered in an octave higher than normal, “Everything!”

  “James? Your job? Or is it leaving home for a while?”

  “All of it. I don’t know!”

  “Honey.” Her mother’s strokes became firmer as if she could knead all the pain of the world out of Margot’s back. “I think it’s just a lot of change at once. You’ll get adjusted, wait and see. And you never know, you might end up finding something that makes you happy in London and, you know, stay there.”

  At this, Margot glanced up and saw her mom’s face break into a trembling struggle to maintain composure, which looked comical and heartachingly sweet at once.

  “Just remember when you’re over there this summer,” her mother continued as she sniffed and glanced out the darkened window, “that when you look at the moon, I’ll be looking at it, too.”

  Margot didn’t have the heart to point out that a six-hour time difference would narrow the odds on that. She just wiped her nose on the dish towel her mom had carried in and grappled with the full weight of the breakup as it finally hit her.

  Her weekend with James had otherwise been going so well. Every Chicago-to-Boston visit had been one more for Margot to count down. One step closer to ending their cycle of honeymoon hellos and grieving goodbyes. Seated at a tapas restaurant near James’s apartment on that frigid yet fun January night, she’d hoped, as always, that her smiling interest in his work stories would reinforce her devotion to him. Perhaps inspire him to reciprocate, to understand the consequences his decisions had for her, too, and be willing to sacrifice in return. To move back for her. Soon.

  She’d felt certain they were getting closer to
the same page until he’d opened his mouth to announce his job offer in Zurich.

  “I won’t work like this the rest of my life,” he’d said. “The idea is to suck it up now and retire early, you know?”

  Margot had said nothing as he proceeded to chatter on about his shining prospects, setting her jaw when he told her he’d already accepted the offer. He then raised his wine glass to toast the fine life they’d have together in Europe. Obliging, she stopped mutilating her patatas bravas with her fork and pinched the stem of her glass instead. Lifted it from the ivory tablecloth that would be rouged in the Rioja ricocheting off James’s handsome features seconds later.

  That shut him up at least. A bit frozen herself as time seemed to stand still, Margot then did the first thing she could think of.

  She ran.

  Tick-tick tap-tap-tick went her stilettos on the slick pavement as she stomped away from that restaurant. She couldn’t hear over the tapping if James was following her, just tried to pace her breathing as her shoes tap-tap-ticked with the same clockwork monotony as his thumbs on his smartphone keypad—the usual rhythm of his deals moving forward while the gears of her inner mechanism rusted to a stop. Clutching the lapels of her wool coat around her neck, she wanted to keep going until she reached the sea.

  But there never was another sound of footfall, no one calling her name in pursuit. Only the ghoulish wisps of her cold breath trailed behind, chastising her for striking off into the night alone with no game plan.

  At least running away meant she wasn’t following. And she would’ve had to follow him this time. No more sucking on her pride like a sour sweet instead of swallowing it. No more refusing like two years before when James had already foregone her and Chicago for greener pastures, fertilized in bullshit. Rounding the corner, Margot had tick-tick-ticked her way through the revolving door of the first hotel she’d found, booking a room for that night and a flight the next morning.