Two Girls, a Clock, and a Crooked House

by Michael Poore

  “I saw the clock act funny.”

  EVERYTHING acted funny! I can’t believe you didn’t SEE! Oh my God! Amy…the light changed and the shadows moved!

  “Okay,” said Amy.

  Well, um…I think we went forward an hour.

  It sounded impossible.

  “Impossible,” Amy said.

  But it was brighter now inside the house, and the shadows were different.

  Goose bumps paralyzed her. Icy spiders crawled down her spine.

  “Moo,” she squeaked, “things like this don’t really happen.”

  I agree, except, quite obviously, they do. (Moo’s voice sounded shaky.)

  They exchanged stares with the clock again.

  Move it back, said Moo.

  Amy gulped and set the hour hand back where it had been. This time she was careful to watch the rocking chair, which cast a sharp shadow across the dusty floorboards.

  The shadow grew longer. The house darkened a bit. At the edge of Amy’s vision, other shadows moved, too.

  Both girls choked back screams. Amy took Moo by the arm and marched her outside. She sat the two of them down in some wet leaves beside the door, where they stayed with their mouths hanging open until a bug landed on Amy’s lip.

  “Blech!” she spat.

  The rain, at least, had found somewhere else to go. Amy listened for thunder. Heard only birds and a soft wind in the high leaves.

  I think I know, said Moo, what the experiment should be. What we should do.

  “Yes?”

  We could turn the clock back a few hours and I could still get home before my mom wakes up to make cornflakes. And not worry her, and not be in trouble.

  Amy nodded.

  “We could go straight back,” she said. “On the other hand, there are lots of other interesting things we could do.”

  Moo’s forehead wrinkled. I thought, she said, you needed to get back and help your parents fight the mining company, because of what the weird stranger said, and—

  “I do,” said Amy. “But that’s the wonderful thing about time travel….It doesn’t matter when you leave, as long as you go back to the right time. We could sit around for a month eating cheese sticks and still get back before dark-thirty yesterday. Except instead of eating cheese sticks—”

  We could go back and see dinosaurs, said Moo.

  “We could go back and see the Romans.”

  We could go forward and see if the earth gets wiped out by floods and radiation.

  “We could go forward and see floating cities and flying cars.”

  We could spy on ourselves in the future and see if we’re millionaires or in prison.

  “We could see if people learn to escape their bodies and take forms like fire or soap bubbles.”

  I want to see when the cows first came to the woods, said Moo.

  “Oh yeah, right, out of all the things you POSSIBLY could see!”

  But Moo was serious.

  I’m serious, she said.

  “Okay. I know. But listen: I think there might be a problem.”

  Lovely. What?

  “Well, when we turned the hour hand one hour, it moved us in time one hour.”

  Mmm-hmm.

  “Think how long it would take to stand there and turn the hands enough to go back years. Even one year. And my dad says the cows have been here since he was a teenager.”

  A few moments passed. A woodpecker drilled somewhere up in the trees—knock­knock­knock­knock­knock­knock­knock­knock­knock!—and the drilling echoed.

  After a while, Moo said, Let’s go back inside.

  “Okay. Why?”

  I want to see something.

  “All right.”

  Amy took Moo’s arm, and back into the house they went. As their eyes adjusted, Amy looked around as if looking for something in particular. Looked at the teapots, the china platter, the cowbells, the horrible thing in the jar….

  There. The box of buttons. Look at it real hard.

  They both looked hard at the buttons.

  The buttons glowed, Amy noticed, just slightly. Like the clock, but not nearly as bright.

  The time stuff, said Moo. It’s on other things, too. I’ll bet it’s on everything!

  “Except maybe some things more than others. Like things that belonged to people. Things that have stories.”

  Amy reached into the box of buttons and dug around until she found (felt, actually) what she was looking for. A beautiful button, big enough for someone to wear on a necklace, say, or a really big ring. An ivory cameo with a tiny portrait of a woman. Green light flickered around its edges.

  Amy took Moo’s hand and dropped the ring into her palm.

  “Maybe someone wore this at her wedding,” she said.

  Moo turned the cameo over and over in her hands.

  Maybe, she said, someone wore it when she was murdered.

  “Or when she learned to fly an airplane.”

  Or when she murdered someone.

  “Dark much? Maybe it belonged to the czarina of Russia. Maybe it was lost for years at the bottom of the sea and then found again by treasure hunters. Anyhow, the same could be true of anything in here.”

  Okay, so we look for things that have stories, even though we can never know what those stories are, and gather them together around the clock—

  “And they make, basically, FUEL for making time go back and forth. The more stuff you have—”

  STORY stuff!

  “—the faster and better the clock can move around in time.”

  The girls looked each other in the eye.

  Bizarre, said Moo.

  Amy shrugged. “All great experiments seem bizarre at first,” she declared. “This is the deepest science of all!”

  Moo frowned.

  What if the clock takes us somewhere, she said, or somewhen, and then quits being deeply scientific and leaves us stranded in 1925 or some terrible time before there was television?

  They looked each other in the eye.

  “I don’t know,” said Amy. “Shall we do it anyway?”

  Outside, up in the trees, the woodpecker drilled again. Knock­knock­knock­knock­knock­knock­knock­knock­knock…

  We shall, said Moo.

  HOW ODD.

  How simple it can be, building a time machine, when you can see the things that have time in them, like a vein of gold in a mine.

  Like the tiny bronze rabbit Amy and Moo discovered, which turned out to be a bell (which had belonged to an old man who was stuck in a wheelchair, who rang the bell when he needed something).

  Like the something horrible floating in the jar (I won’t tell you what it is; it’s too horrible).

  Like some dolls they found in an old rolltop desk (dolls made of linen and corn husks, which had been carried across mountains by a family escaping war).

  Like a box full of baby teeth. Like a moldy book of poems. Like snake skins and teapots and cowbells.

  Like the rocking chair (which had gone up inside a Kansas tornado in 1975, carrying Mrs. Hannah P. Stafford and her cat, Mr. Goose; chair and cat had come down safely, but Mrs. Stafford had not, seemingly, come down at all).

  And of course the clock (once owned and lovingly wound by Eleanor Roosevelt), and of course the ivory cameo (owned by and buried with Eleanor Roosevelt and recovered when her grave was robbed…which hardly anyone knows about but you, and you mustn’t tell).

  The girls also found some wire, which wasn’t storied or full of time but was quite perfect for attaching all these things to the rocking chair, until the chair was transformed into something like a rocking museum or garage sale. It glowed and hummed as if it disliked sitting still and wished to be off someplace.

  The sunlight and shadows had
changed meantime. Not because of Deep Science, but because of the very ordinary science of a morning going by.

  It did occur to Amy that if someone lived here, the probability of that someone’s coming home increased with every minute, and what would that person think of two girls doing fantastical things to the rocking chair, and what if that person turned out to be a witch after all? Only a witch, she was sure, could possibly live in a rotting, leaking ruin like this, interesting though it might be.

  If someone were coming, said Moo, we’d hear them marching through the woods. Through all the leaves and sticks and things.

  Probably true. Amy kept an ear tuned, monitoring the woods like radar.

  It also occurred to her, and troubled her, that somewhere out there the Big Duke was rumbling and crawling toward her parents. She had to keep reminding herself how important their experiment was to science (Deep Science!), and how even if it didn’t work, they could always just use the clock to go back to this morning.

  Stop worrying, said Moo, and work. Take this wire. Tie this cowbell so it hangs under the birdcage. Excellent….

  * * *

  —

  IT MAY HAVE BEEN lunchtime by the time Amy and Moo stood back to consider their work.

  “If nothing else,” said Amy, “it makes a nice sculpture.”

  How do we make it go? asked Moo. How do we make it stop?

  “We make it go by ringing the little rabbit bell,” said Amy. “I don’t know how we make it stop. But I think it will just know when the right time is. It will be guided by our thoughts or something.”

  How do you know?

  “I don’t,” said Amy, sitting down in the rocking chair, pulling Moo with her.

  It was a largish rocking chair. The girls fit in side by side, just barely, if they squooshed.

  I want to ring the bell, said Moo.

  “So do I,” said Amy.

  They rang the bell together.

  Nothing happened.

  Fudge, said Moo.

  Great. Just great. It occurred to Amy that they had made an awful lot of assumptions about what the chair and the time stuff might or might not do, and now, of course, they were a million times later than before, and—

  An idea fizzed in her brain.

  “I might know why,” she said.

  Moo was listening.

  “Ever since you told me about the ghosts, the memories of the woods, I’ve noticed that some places seem more…lively than others.”

  Lively?

  “Spiritier. Ghostier. Like the pond where we threw stones. We learned in science that water is really, really old. It never goes away; it just changes form, from steam or ice or liquid or rain or slime or pee or—”

  So we should take the chair thing to the pond, and the pond will act like a time catapult?

  Amy shrugged. “Maybe. Of course, if someone lives here, they might not appreciate us burglarizing things out of their house.”

  Borrowing, said Moo. We’ll bring it back.

  True. Amy understood this logic perfectly, as an experienced crime scientist.

  She rocked the chair a little.

  “It’s heavy,” she observed.

  Moo shrugged. The pond wasn’t that far back, she said. It’s, like, just downhill.

  Amy shrugged. “Okay,” she said.

  It took them a moment to figure out how to get a grip on the clock machine thing, but then Moo threw her arms around the clock, and Amy lifted the rocking chair runners as if pushing a wheelbarrow, and together they staggered out the door. Once amid the wet leaves at the top of the hill, they found that their invention behaved not unlike a sleigh. With very little trouble, they nursed it down between trees and around a couple of rocks to the edge of the pond. Easy. Almost as if the clock chair wanted to be there.

  As they arrived, the fog seemed to thin, unveiling the dark water.

  The water didn’t glow green. It vibrated, though, with a wild, ancient hum. Amy could feel it more than she felt anything else, including her own skin and bones, as if everything else were a daydream, and the water were the only thing real and wide awake.

  They took a minute to catch their breath, then climbed aboard the chair.

  Immediately Amy popped back off and went crouching along the edge of the pond, looking for something. She reached into the shallowest part of the water and was back aboard the chair in an instant, a flat brown stone in each hand.

  “Here,” she said, handing one stone to Moo.

  “For luck,” she said.

  Wait! exclaimed Moo. Not just luck. Look!

  The stones in their palms glowed, in an old, dreamy way.

  “Extra fuel,” said Amy.

  They dropped the stones into their pockets.

  By silent agreement, both girls pulled their hoods up, snugged the laces tight. They nodded at each other, and their ears and horns and antennae bounced up and down.

  They rang the bell together.

  Say “Moooooo!” said Moo.

  “Why?”

  So it’ll know we want to stop at the time when the wild cows came to the woods.

  “Mooooooo!” Amy mooed.

  Mooooooo! mooed Moo.

  The chair jerked beneath them then. Its green aura gave a throb, and it shook, as if gathering itself to leap, to somersault, to fly, to—

  But something else was happening, too, Amy sensed. She was puzzled, and she frowned.

  You have to concentrate, said Moo. What is it?

  “Listen!” said Amy.

  Her radar ears had finally heard the thing she’d been afraid of hearing. Someone crunching and snapping and striding through twigs and leaves. Someone who quite suddenly appeared over the top of the hill.

  A witch.

  “Moo!” Amy cried.

  Amy! cried Moo.

  The witch—what else could she be? (she was scary and old and dressed in black, and was waving old, long, hooked fingers, phantom eyes blazing)—came loping downhill, straight at them.

  Amy threw up in her mouth just the slightest bit.

  “NooooOOOoOooooo!” the witch was screaming. Screaming with an awful mouth big enough to eat a kid. “NooOOOOO­OOOOO­O!”

  “Go!” hollered Amy, shaking the chair with her hands, crying, thinking, Oh my GOD, I can’t believe she’s real!

  Then, suddenly, something else was happening.

  Something else that couldn’t be real.

  About ten feet away, the air exploded in a green FLASH, and Amy saw…

  Saw herself and Moo, and the chair and the clock and everything, come flying out of nowhere and go crashing and smashing through the leaves and gunk along the edge of the pond. Saw it all come apart, tumbling like popcorn—chair, knickknacks, clock, girls—and blur to a stop, mostly in pieces.

  Moo—the other Moo, the one who had just arrived out of nowhere—sat up and looked at them, and they looked at her.

  They looked at Amy, too. But the Amy who had just come cannonballing out of thin air did not look back at them or sit up or anything.

  Her head and hair were bright with blood, and she wasn’t moving.

  Amy felt her whole self go cold.

  And then the witch had them.

  Sharp, clawlike hands reached for the clock chair, reached for Moo’s arm, and—

  “GO!” wailed both girls, clenching their whole minds and bodies and hearts and fists and—

  A wild green WHOOOOOOSH erased everything, swallowed everything, became everything….

  * * *

  —

  THE WHOOSH GAVE WAY to something like a time-lapse movie.

  Inside the movie, the light changed.

  Shadows turned, moving with the sun. The sun itself hurried overhead, shooting sunbeams down through the leaves
.

  “OMG,” said Amy. “It’s working, it’s working, it’s working.”

  Her words stretched out like gum and whipped away before she could quite hear herself speak, as if the air around them were bending.

  Shadows and sun gained speed.

  Night. Stars overhead, turning like a wheel.

  Light. Dark. Light. Dark. Light. Dark­light­dark­light­dark­light­dark­light…

  I might throw up, said Moo.

  Amy gave her a hard look and said, “Well, DON’T.”

  Sleep took them. Or dizziness. It all seemed very much the same.

  WAKING UP.

  Waking up was a bit of a disappointment.

  Everything was the same.

  Everything except the chair itself, which had fallen over on its side. And the clock, whose face had cracked. Cameos and kettles and baby teeth and most of the rest of the contraption had come unstuck and lay scattered along the edge of the pond.

  Moo and Amy had landed on opposite sides of this mess. Amy lay somewhat uphill and awoke looking up through leaves and branches, into dim sunlight and clouds. Searching about, she discovered Moo down by the water. Indeed, with her feet in the water.

  Immediately Amy reached for her head and felt her hair, her face, her ears, and everything. Am I all bloody and gross? Am I dying? Am I dead?

  She was none of those things. There was no blood. Her heart was still beating. She checked.

  Okay. Well, good.

  Moo, on the other hand, lay sprawled out and unmoving. Possibly dead. Amy got up and went and stood over her and poked her with the toe of her shoe.

  Don’t, said Moo.

  “I was waking you up.”

  I’ve been awake.

  Amy helped Moo to her feet. Helped her swipe twigs and damp leaves from her hair and clothes.

  Nothing’s changed, Moo remarked, sighing. It all looks the same.

  “It does NOT all look the same. There’s no witch. There’s no…no US smashing out of nowhere and crashing and bleeding and…and so it’s very different, you see. What just happened?”

  Amy was surprised to find herself crying and shaking. She tried to stop and couldn’t.

  Okay, said Moo. Fine. It’s not the same.

  “How can you be so calm about it?”