I wished I could have said good-bye to the real Richard. The person in front of me wasn’t even a shell of the man I loved. He was a completely different person.
I shut my eyes, but not soon enough. Fat tears rolled down the sides of my face.
It’ll be all right. Henley said.
I looked at Richard, but he didn’t react at all. He simply stared past my head.
He’s just returning to the place he came from before he was alive.
I turned to see what Richard was staring at, and followed his gaze toward the window in the corner of the room. It was dark now, and the window reflected the image of what was playing out before me.
Richard stared and stared, and as a last effort to connect with him, I squinted at the windowpane. I blinked quickly to rid my eyes of the tears that shrouded them. And then I saw it.
The window wasn’t reflecting what was happening at all. It was reflecting me, kneeling in front of the bed. The figure in the reflection knelt, clasping her hands to herself, as if in prayer. Her face was open and looked strangely serene, as if waiting for a miracle.
The window reflected a lie. There was no miracle. There were tears streaked down the young woman’s face, which didn’t show in the reflection. Her lips were parted as if in accepting prayer, but only because she was sobbing out loud. None of it was captured as it was, but when I turned to face Richard, his graying lips were fixed in a smile.
“Henley, you have to do something.”
I grasped at my hands to keep them from shaking. My fingers turned white from the amount of pressure I put on them, but I didn’t care.
Richard started coughing again, but this time his body hardly moved. He looked too tired to force another cough out.
“Please, Henley,” I whispered, because I knew my voice would shake if I spoke any louder. “You have to try.”
I had no idea what I thought he could do, but I was at a point where there was nothing left. Even just trying—anything—would make me feel less helpless.
I’m trying. There’s nothing I can do. Henley’s voice sounded pained, and I knew he was trying in earnest. I knew it hurt him to see me like this, but I couldn’t stop crying, as much as I tried.
I tried to take a breath, but I cried out, seeing Richard’s body shudder.
Rebecca, I’m trying.
Through my tears, I was only vaguely aware of Richard’s body rising an inch off the bed from the force of Henley trying to influence the physical world. A palpable energy ran through the room.
My shoulders shook, and I didn’t know whether I was crying out loud or in silence anymore. Henley had to do something. He just had to.
Richard’s chest seemed to struggle to rise. And then it stopped.
“Oh God. Please.”
My head bowed with the pain in my own chest, and in that instant I felt Henley in every part of the room and every molecule of my body. It was as if he expanded in a crack of energy.
I felt the bed shift, as if a weight moved.
I looked up, but I could only see a blur of disorienting images. I wiped my eyes and tried to focus them on the shape on the bed.
There, in front of me, Richard sat up. His curly brown hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat, but other than that, he looked fine. His skin was losing the gray sheen it had worn only seconds ago, and a natural flush came to replace it.
I couldn’t believe it. I blinked, and he was still there.
My eyes ran across his face, watching him come alive. I watched as hands twitched awake, and his lips regained their color. My gaze swept over him, then froze at his eyes.
His normally soft-colored eyes were still warm and the color of honey, but something was different about them. Something was off. It was the light that hit them in a different way that made me pause. I stared into his eyes, and though what I found there was familiar, it wasn’t Richard at all.
“Henley, what have you done?”
The voice that replied was Richard’s in sound and tone, but everything else wasn’t him.
“I don’t know,” he began, stopping and starting. “I was trying to help, Rebecca. I was trying to do something. Anything. It was the way you looked. Devastated. Small. I was trying so hard to keep him alive. When Richard died, it felt like a vacuum was created. I was trying so hard to sustain him, for even a minute longer, that I somehow fell in. What I mean to say is that it felt like falling, or being sucked in—”
“My God . . .”
It really was Henley.
I reached out a hand, almost still testing if he was real. He placed his hand against mine, palm to palm.
I had lost a man I loved, but regained the man I was in love with.
We both straightened, hearing footsteps outside the door. The priest? Lady Sutton?
I looked Henley in the eye and nodded. The ache in my entire body had become almost too much to bear.
Reaching toward the bedside table, he felt past the silver pocket watch and grabbed the clock.
He held my hand as he moved the clock’s hands with the other.
“No, that’s too much into the future,” I said. “You’re in a mortal body. You can’t survive that.”
“I’m not supposed to be able to, but I wasn’t supposed to be alive either. We’ll see.”
Now that he had come back to me, I wouldn’t dare let go of him.
I lunged at the clock, but it was already happening. The colors around us started melting. Everything around us had already started morphing. It was too late. It was all I could do to hold his hand.
Henley had come back to me. I wasn’t about to lose him again.
EPILOGUE
THEY SAY A dead man walked that day. That he rose from his deathbed, hand in hand with the one who was blessed by God.
Others say he simply vanished, along with the woman who went into the room but never came out.
It was on everyone’s lips. It was a miracle. It was the very image of a resurrection—God’s work.
They say she was an angel. She came out of nowhere. Sent by God himself to deliver him.
Those who knew him say he was a good man. He never did anything wrong. The most deserving. He was chosen by him.
They say they walked, one foot in front of the other, out of Death’s door and into the light. Others say they floated toward the ceiling, disappearing into air. But all agree they were gone as quickly as they were here. Leaving no trace behind.
It was as if they had never lived. But everyone remembered. That was the day they walked hand in hand. Dead man walking. “My Lord . . .”
Everyone was fervently making the sign of the cross, and reaching to kiss the door.
“It’s a miracle!”
“We are witnessing God’s work!”
Hearing these cries, a priest came running down the hall, the very priest who had given the dying man his last rites. The people made way for a man of the cloth, and bowed their heads in reverence as he walked past and into the room.
“Father, this is a testament to God’s power!”
“It’s a miracle!”
He closed the door behind him.
“No,” he said. “It is the Devil’s work. Death should be final.”
He picked up a silver pocket watch from the bedside table.
“This cannot stand.”
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo by Bobby Quillard
ANNA CALTABIANO was born in British colonial Hong Kong to a Japanese mother and Italian-American father. She is a high school student in Palo Alto, California, as well as a frequent contributor to various publications, i
ncluding The Huffington Post and The Guardian. Her first novel, All That Is Red, was published when Anna was just fifteen years old. You can find Anna online at www.annacaltabiano.com and on Facebook and Twitter (@caltabiano_anna).
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BOOKS BY ANNA CALTABIANO
The Seventh Miss Hatfield
The Time of the Clockmaker
COPYRIGHT
THE TIME OF THE CLOCKMAKER. Copyright © 2015 by Anna Caltabiano. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ISBN: 978-0-06-240906-5
EPub Edition © October 2015 ISBN 9780062409065
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