What the Clocks Know

by Rumer Haven

  Margot waited until the room cleared out, only to see Chloé’s empty seat.

  “Margot, I am—ry I didn—you—after class,” crackled through Margot’s mobile phone. “Something—ame up—had t—leave. I al—ost didn’t come—cause of it, but—ad promised you.”

  The broken voice carried over the airwaves softly, with intermittent zaps of frequency in between. Margot got the gist of it, however, and spoke back loudly into her mobile, as if volume would overcome a bad connection.

  “It’s okay, Chloé! I—what’s that? I can’t—no, I can’t really hear you! You must be out of service! Huh? What? Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Look, I’ll just try you later! Later!”

  Click.

  Exasperated, she sat at Rand’s desk and stewed.

  Though he’d required a hearty degree of convincing, her flatmate honored this week’s business trip to Luxembourg, trusting enough in Margot’s improvement. She missed him severely, having enjoyed the extra time with him while he and Gwen were “apart,” but it was good for her not to become too dependent. She’d been relying more and more on his unconditional encouragement, on him being there to give her a hug after every therapy session, but she needed to stand on her own inner strength. And this fortuitous timing allowed her to experiment in privacy.

  If she could commence said experiment that night. She was losing faith in her friend’s follow-through and didn’t know how to proceed without it. Even if she researched other strategies, she had no idea what the outcome could be, only that Chloé’s caution had been ominous. Maybe Margot did need a witness to testify on what happened if her consciousness drifted elsewhere. Maybe she needed someone there to cheer her in case the experience left her frightened and vulnerable. And maybe she needed someone there to intervene and bring her back if things turned unpleasant.

  She was urgent to quiet her churning mind, to fight restlessness with rest. So she lay down on the bed on her back, feeling like she was on Fitz’s couch.

  Maybe I have lost my mind…but if I have, I wouldn’t know it, right? So me analyzing this so much must mean I haven’t. But me convincing myself that I haven’t must mean I believe I haven’t, in which case I could have lost my mind and I just don’t know it.

  She yelped and sat up, grabbing her phone to dial Chloé.

  “Allo?”

  “Chloé.”

  “Margot, yes.”

  “Can you hear me okay?”

  “Yes, yes, I apologize. I was underground. Eh, I was heading down to the Underground, to the Tube.”

  “Oh, okay, fine. Um, so what’s the story, then?”

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t make it tonight.”

  “Chloé! Come on!”

  “No, I’m sorry, I can’t help you right now.”

  “But my session’s tomorrow. I really want to do this. Do you think I could just try on my own?” That wouldn’t have been Margot’s first choice at this point, but she was impatient. “You all right?”

  Chloé had lapsed into a mild coughing fit, but when she spoke, her grittier voice sounded short of breath. “I wish you wouldn’t, but I can’t argue now.”

  Seeing an opening, Margot launched a whiny “Pleeease?”

  “All right. I’ll give basic steps that you can try as a test. Stick to them, and be careful.”

  The candle’s flame flickered spastically after Margot set it down on one of the bathroom steps.

  She’d moments earlier relaxed on her bed in the dark for several minutes, listening to The Cure’s Disintegration album. As she used her tongue to pick a raspberry seed from between her teeth, the music lulled her to a calm state with its lush layers of lamentation, checking off the first item on Chloé’s list.

  The clock on the wall didn’t tick because she’d removed its batteries, and her mobile wouldn’t ring because she’d turned it off.

  All lamps in the flat were out, including the bathroom’s, so the flame now dancing on the wick was the only light source. Trying to keep her nerves at bay, Margot, in her yoga pants and gray cardigan, perched herself on the stool she’d positioned in front of the large bathroom mirror and wrapped a quilt around her legs like a little nest of security.

  Okay, candle behind me, and me in front of mirror. Check and check.

  Chloé’s next instructions dictated that she hold on to meaningful possessions, things that embodied who she was in order to tap into both her conscious and unconscious awareness. There were few things of great sentiment that Margot had lugged to England, so, by default, she’d grabbed her dream diary.

  What she really wanted, though, was the brooch. Even with its spooky connotations now, it held personal significance, so she conjured a visual of Grandma Grace’s ornament and imagined she could feel the weight of it resting at her clavicle.

  Check.

  The next step was to stare deeply into the dark depths of the mirror, without focusing. This was something Margot could ease into on command. It reminded her, actually, of those books she’d loved as a kid, with pages of three-dimensional images revealing themselves when looked at just right. She’d found entries about it in her sixth-grade journal, in fact, where she’d written how, despite struggles at first, she eventually impressed all her friends with her ability to see dinosaurs and space shuttles in the same patterns where they saw nothing. And perhaps she’d gotten a little cocky when she claimed to see objects outside of the books, too—like the vases and mantelpieces that appeared to her within wallpaper prints and wood grains.

  Wait… That sounded weird now that she thought about it, but it must’ve been another case of that pareidolia Fitz had talked about.

  Back to the task at hand, Margot regulated her breathing and visualized the brooch at her neck. Holding the closed diary firmly and staring into the mirror, she relaxed her vision.

  With the candle behind her, she couldn’t make out even an outline of her face, just the shimmering halo surrounding her silhouetted form, scrambled by her many eye floaters and pulsing with a glow as her vision adjusted. Deeper and deeper, she allowed her blurred sight to crawl farther into the reflective surface, which, when looked at this way, no longer appeared as a solid pane. It seemed to elongate, tunnel-like, beyond the wall and past the gardens, into what Margot imagined were the infinite corridors of her mind.

  Trying not to think too hard about anything, she couldn’t help but wonder if she was supposed to see something, like a metaphorical hallway lined with doors that she could open and peer into. Chloé hadn’t clarified whether the mirror served any purpose beyond simply giving a false perspective of depth to lose her sight into.

  Either way, she did see something.

  The glowing scribbles of her sight seemed to smooth over and grow dimmer and darker into an oval of black. Margot’s heart rate slowed as her body slumped by incremental degrees, her arms feeling heavy and her fingertips tingling against the diary’s linen cover. She succeeded in quieting her thoughts and letting go into the trance-like state, yet remained lucid as to everything she was seeing and hearing, including a barely audible, high-pitched tone.

  From the center of the dark concentration, a milky cloudiness slowly emerged and congealed into an egg shape that teetered on top of a broader, misty pediment.

  Margot numbly leaned forward, feeling drawn into the mirror just as the milky figure emerged out of it, the hum against her eardrums loudening to a mesmerizing ringing.

  Just when she met the image face-to-face, felt them fusing into one another like conjoined twins, a pressure at her throat threatened to close off her air passage. Margot seized and choked.

  Snatched from her trance, she started to her feet, entangled in her quilt as the diary clapped against the tile floor. She knelt at the toilet, feeling she might vomit. As soon as the sensation had come on, however, it passed, and she cautiously rose from her knees.

  In the pitch-black, her ears crackled with heightened sensitivity, and she could smell the flinty smoke of the candle no longer in view; it had burn
t out. As Margot rubbed the braille of her goose-bumped forearms, a pinpoint of light flashed into her periphery, and she willed herself to look over at it, expecting to see the blue orb from Rand’s bedroom. But no—it was only the toothbrush again with its insistent sign of recharging even though the bathroom’s main electric switch was off.

  Margot concentrated on gathering her props to return them upstairs. When she bumped into the sink as she picked up the stool, though, she realized that, sitting there, she couldn’t have gotten much closer to the mirror than the countertop’s edge. The sensation of passing into the mirror must have been a sheer trick of the mind, the choking a product of forgetting to breathe.

  She put everything away and sat at the bedroom desk to write a new entry in her diary.

  Starting with a brief description of what she’d just experienced, she then sketched the form she’d seen in the mirror. When she held the image away from her to get an overall look, she noticed the striking resemblance it bore to a bust statue. She hadn’t noticed that at the time, though, and, hearing Fitz’s voice in her head, she cautioned herself against retroactively painting in more human features than had actually been there.

  Icy fingertips tickled down her back, and all she knew was that she needed to flip the pages and confront that ominous sentence again, the one that Gwen had allegedly “found” and forced Margot to make up that ridiculous dream about being executed at the guillotine.

  How would you like to bet that bitch wrote it herself.

  But then she saw something else, newly penned.

  I pray the Lord my soul to take

  Every muscle—from the slabs braided at her thighs to the ribbons threaded through her finger joints—contracted so tightly that Margot stiffened like a corpse to the point of pain.

  She read the sentence again. It was in the same handwriting as the one before. The only distinction was the ink. This ink was black but faded and appeared to bleed into the page’s fibers with flecks of dark residue scattered beneath the letters. Grabbing her pen to test it, she drew sharp, defined strokes.

  She got to her feet, first fishing through Rand’s desk organizers to find only highlighters and pencils, then marching into the living room and kitchen to comb through every stack of envelopes and newspapers to be found on the table and countertops, searching for pens that might have been set aside there by her, Rand… Or anyone else who would have any business being in this flat and fucking helping herself to our possessions. But if Gwen and Rand were on a break, Gwen shouldn’t have been stopping in at the flat anymore during the day—unless she still did so out of convenience since Rand wouldn’t be around anyway.

  Margot found two writing utensils and knelt by the coffee table to test both on a blank diary page, but one was a blue ballpoint while the other turned out to be a mechanical pencil. Standing up and slapping them both down on the kitchen island, she was about to carry on her search-and-seizure in Rand’s bedroom when she realized Gwen probably carried the crime weapon in her purse.

  In frustration, she chewed her thumbnail, only then noticing that the fingertips of that hand—her left—were smudged in black. Margot was right-handed, though that didn’t mean she couldn’t have gotten her left hand dirty when removing the pen cap. Who knew.

  More irritated than scared now, she returned to the bathroom to wash the ink off. A smattering of dark spots also dotted the sink’s white surface, some larger than others and some smeared, which could’ve happened when she’d opened her mascara or liquid eyeliner that morning.

  But when she looked up at her reflection, it reminded her that she wasn’t wearing makeup that day. That she hadn’t in a few days.

  Chapter 13

  Research

  “MORNING, MARGOT. Lovely to see you again.”

  “Likewise, how are you?”

  “Doing well. No one committed yet this week.”

  Wow, that’s inappropriate.

  “But I shouldn’t joke.” Fitz’s earrings, which looked like shellacked coffee beans, jangled. “So, have you given any further thought to what we discussed last time? I kept my next hour open just in case it’s something you’re inclined to do.”

  “Weeell, about that.”

  “Uh-oh,” the doctor said with a kidding smile.

  “I sort of did a little experiment on my own first.”

  “Uh-oh.” The doctor frowned this time.

  Sitting on the sofa, Margot rested her interlocked arms on her knees, digging the toe of her sneaker into the rug’s fibers as she summarized the self-hypnosis method Chloé had taught her.

  “How long have you known this classmate?”

  “Only since June.”

  “Yet you’ve become intimate?”

  Margot hesitated. “What?”

  “You’re good friends, close enough that you speak this candidly with one another?”

  As her cheeks burned, she replied, “Oh! Yeah, we hang out outside of class. We’re friends.”

  Fitz narrowed her eyes for a few seconds before following up on her own question. “I see. So, have you told her about Charlotte?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I hardly saw her after the real shit-show happened, and by the time I did, you’d helped me rule out most of it as anything…beyond natural explanation.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. So, what was the outcome of this ‘little experiment’?”

  Margot pulled the dream diary out of her bag and read aloud about her session at the mirror. While she was at it, she showed Fitz the two cryptic entries also scribbled in the journal but not by Margot’s hand.

  Regarding both “freaky-ass” passages, as Margot described them, Fitz referred back to the ideomotor effect and proposed that, as with the Ouija planchette, Margot had likely performed automatic writing. When Margot mentioned there’d been no pen present the second time, the doctor suspected maybe Gwen had indeed written it, as Margot had originally thought. Given Gwen’s instability in her relationship with Rand, if she was willing to lie about a ghost, she could be willing to lie about Margot, who would serve as a reasonable object of jealousy. Or, Gwen might really believe in the things she’d seen without assuming accountability for their creation; in either case, the doctor believed Gwen sounded like a good candidate for therapy. She handed Margot another of her business cards.

  But for as easy—and desirable—as it had been to blame Gwen for what she’d encountered last night, if it meant finding the connections that would piece everything together, Margot wanted to scatter all the possibilities out there again.

  So, when Fitz asked her if she’d ever experienced anything similar to her hypnotic state before, she wasn’t ashamed to finally talk about her other incident at the cemetery.

  “You fell asleep? The entire night?”

  “Not the whole night, but long enough to miss the gates closing. I don’t know why. But it was definitely some kind of trance. All I remember is a pigeon following me and somehow ending up back at Charlotte’s grave. And then I was seized with an extreme feeling that I had to hide.”

  “Hide from what?”

  “It felt like someone was watching me, but there was no one else around. Just statues and birds.”

  “So, when you hid, you…?”

  “Laid down in the tall grass. On a grave.”

  “Were you frightened when you woke up?”

  “Oddly, not as much as you’d think. It was still dark, so I just found shelter and waited for sunrise.”

  “Hm. To be frank, you’re either very brave or very in denial.”

  “In denial? Of what?”

  “Whatever it was you thought you were hiding from. Now, you don’t seem to have a chronically paranoid personality. You distrust Gwen, that much is clear, but I don’t see suspicion entering into your view of others. So where this paranoia is springing from…”

  Fitz explained that Margot could have possibly allowed her conflicted thoughts and emotions to manifest into an external
entity, one that had existed in her perception, not her reality.

  “Or perhaps of the non-human bodies that did exist—the statues and birds—you anthropomorphized them into perceived threats by attributing human traits to them. You may have thought you saw someone spying on you at the cemetery through this sort of projection and, in your paranoia, even further projected onto it a distrust or dislike of you.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because you distrusted or disliked yourself. Your insecurities may have gotten the best of you that night. We never know how far our minds can take us, which is why so many phenomena are misinterpreted as having external causes. You’ve heard of poltergeist?”

  Margot caught her breath, unnerved if Fitz was about to change her tune and subscribe to the spirit world after all. “Yeah?”

  But Fitz continued in a medical tone. “It’s German for ‘noisy ghost,’ yet poltergeist is more likely connected to subconscious psychokinesis. That is, that the people experiencing the activity are the ones, in fact, causing it.”

  “What, through Jedi mind tricks or something?”

  “Well, yes, in a way. It’s transference of energy from one form to another. For whatever that’s worth.”

  “Because you don’t believe in ghosts anyway.”

  “What I believe is irrelevant. And I don’t know that I believe in psychokinesis either; the research is conflicting. I only bring it up for sake of argument. Remember, no stone left unturned.”

  Margot expelled her breath in thought before asking, “You do believe in energy, though, right? That there is something we exchange as living beings, because that was your whole explanation of empaths.”

  “True.”

  “But then…if energy can’t be created or destroyed, what happens to our energy when we die?”