The clock had been there forever.  Or at least it seemed that way, its pendulum rocking back and forth like an inhabited tree swing on a sunny spring day.  The clock was like a great obelisk in the center of the house, mysterious and attractive and even slightly threatening in the way it stood there tight-lipped, refusing to tell anything it knew other than the hours and minutes.  The Gentry kids, however, weren’t interested in asking the clock any questions.  To them it was just another toy. 

At evenly spaced ages of four, six, and eight, the kids were at that point when curiosity was the driving motivational force behind each and every action.  Even Joseph, the oldest, hadn’t gotten to the point that the clock had lost any of its intrigue.  In his mind, he envisioned all sorts of grim histories surrounding the making and subsequent export of the clock from some Scandinavian village.  He was at the age now where monster movies were cool, and clocks like this were featured in all of the Lugosi, Chaney, and Karloff pictures.  The other two, Jana and Jacqueline, fancied the clock because it was like a massive tree that they were predestined to climb.  On any given day they could be seen scrambling up the side of the clock, tiny fingers grappling at the hour and minute hands for purchase.  Jana and Jacqueline were both small girls, and nobody really thought they could do any harm.  Of course kids are always a constant surprise, and these two managed to do what no one believed they could. 

They broke the clock. 

It was actually a freak accident but one that did a tremendous amount of damage to the heavy mahogany front of the old time piece.  One moment they were pretending it was a giant totem pole meant to be scaled by the likes of little girls.  The next it was toppling over like a sleeping cigar store Indian.  For a moment, there was only the sound of wood splintering and the resonating drone of the chime inside.  Then, there was silence.  Jana and Jacqueline both covered their mouths in amazement and horror, shocked by what they had done.  It didn’t take long for Joseph to come running in, breathless, wondering what all the commotion was about.  After delightedly explaining the numerous ways that Hank and Marietta Gentry would punish the girls for what they had done, Joseph helped them right the grandfather clock and inspect the damage.  He was the first to notice the infant. 

The baby nestled inside the hollow of the clock was already dead and had been so for years.  It looked more like a sideshow curiosity than an actual human infant.  But the face is what actually distinguished it, gave it character, made its demise all the more frightening and sad.  Tiny, sightless eyes peered back at the two girls.  A deep mortal gash in its mummified scalp told the story of its death. 

"Go get mom," Joseph told his sisters, no longer so excited by the prospect of their transgression.  "Go and get her now."

As could be expected, Marietta Gentry was mortified by what she saw.  She was also confused.  All sorts of questions were running through her head.  Where had the baby come from? Whose baby was it?  How long had it been there sleeping its death away quietly in the bowels of the grandfather clock?  Why had someone gone to the trouble to put the infant there? What should she do with it now?

At first, she wasn’t really sure what to do.  Certainly she should call her husband at work to let him know what was going on.  But what about the authorities? Calling the police seemed like the best approach. 

Hank Gentry told her different.  After hearing what his wife had to say over the phone, Hank rushed home from work to have a look at the fetus.  He didn’t seem nearly as shocked or mortified by the decaying fetus.  "That baby’s been dead for years and years.  There’s no possible good that could come from reporting it."

Marietta was horrified by her husband’s response.  "You don’t mean that," she said although it was clear he did.

"What will people start to think of us if they hear that a murdered baby has been found inside the grandfather clock?"

"They won’t think anything about us at all.  You said yourself that the baby’s been dead for a long time.  It’s inconceivable that the child could even belong to us.  As far as the public will be concerned, we just stumbled across an old mystery."

Hank seemed unconvinced.  "You ever heard the saying ‘Let Sleeping Dogs Lie?’  The same goes for babies.  If the mother of this baby is still alive, think of what it would do to her."

"It would give her a sense of closure."

"Unless she’s the one who put it there in the first place."

"Why are you so dead set against this?"  Marietta asked. 

Hank sighed.  "I just don’t want to ruin our lives over something that doesn’t involve us.  Maybe one of the Gentry women miscarried and was too ashamed to admit it.  Maybe she hid the fetus inside the clock to keep anyone from knowing.  Maybe she didn’t even know she was pregnant until the miscarriage.  No doubt a young girl would get into a heap of trouble if her parents found out that she was sexually active.  Times were different then.  Of course, bringing any of that to light would direct unwanted attention at us which brings me back to my original point about tarnishing the family name."

"Miscarriages usually don’t cause head trauma," Marietta reminded him.  "Besides, this was intentional.  Someone went to all of the trouble to put the baby inside the clock.  There is a very definite criminal element involved here."

"We’re not calling the police," Hank said, a little firmer this time.  "I’m putting my foot down."

"Fine," Marietta said.  "I won’t call the police."

And she meant that. 

Of course, she never said that she wouldn’t investigate it on her own. 

Marietta had always been interested in family trees and genealogy and seized the opportunity to do a little digging into the roots of her husband’s lineage.  Until now, she’d never had any reason to think that the Gentrys were anything other than good-natured, God-fearing people.  Yet there was something about Hank’s attitude that bothered her about the whole thing.  Maybe it was the fact that he was so worried about maintaining the family name that made her think he knew something about all of this.  Or maybe it was the defiant stand he took against calling the police. 

She knew it was probably dishonest of her to investigate Hank’s family without bothering to mention it to him.  But she also knew that he would try to discourage her if she revealed what she was doing. 

Until she actually started digging, Marietta had never really given much thought to the fact that there weren’t many pictures lying around of Hank’s family.  There were a few, yes, but not nearly enough to give her any insight into the kind of people that Hank was related to.  A fire had claimed Hank’s house when he was eighteen and taken all of the evidence of his heritage away.  Predictably, it was difficult to piece any kind of family tree together given the amount of research materials available.  The library and Internet weren’t much help either.

As it turned out, it was actually one of Marietta’s own children that gave her the nudge in the right direction she so desperately needed. 

This time it was Joseph’s turn to be negligent.  As eight-year-old boys are prone to do sometimes, Joseph was swinging his baseball bat inside the house and pretending that he had been the one to actually find the human fetus inside the grandfather clock.  Only he wasn’t practicing on that particular clock, but on another imported cuckoo clock that sat on a stand beside the television.  One miscalculated swing was all it took to reduce the clock to errant splinters and gears. 

Horrified at what he had done, Joseph instinctively dropped the bat and awaited the punishment that his mother was sure to dole out.  And then he saw it, buried there amidst the matchstick detritus, the springs, the toothy sprockets, underneath the cuckoo’s moth-eaten carcass.  It was a single eye and it was staring back at him. 

No longer caring if his mother found out what he had done, Joseph screamed.  Marietta came at once.  They both stared at the glassy eye for a moment and then at each other, unsure of what was actually going on.  The fetus had been unsettling and a little scary.  This was downright strange.  But there was a very definite connection between the two events that deserved investigating. 

Fueled by this most recent development, Marietta spent the rest of the day digging into the Gentry family tree with little result.  The few photographs she had were basically useless.  Yet there was one thing that she did realize.  In every one of the pictures, there was some sort of a clock in the background.  That wouldn’t have seemed quite so bizarre if not for the strange cargo located inside the belly of the grandfather clock and inside the domicile of the matted, dusty cuckoo. 

Although she was afraid of what she might find, Marietta knew what she had to do.  Her husband wasn’t much of a carpenter or a handyman, but like most men, he owned a hammer.  She grabbed the alarm clock off of the night stand and rushed outside to Hank’s workshop see if her theory was correct.  It only took two blows from the hammer to dismantle the cheap clock.  As she had expected, buried there amidst the rubble was a severed finger. 

Marietta, fearing the worst, began to sob . . .  and to gather up the other clocks in the house.  By the time she was done she had uncovered a lower jawbone with the teeth still attached, an entire decayed foot, a severed ear, and a set of genitalia.

What did it all mean?

Marietta looked at her watch and realized that she had about an hour to study the photographs again before her husband got off of work.  Maybe the culprit was actually in one of those pictures.  She checked to make sure that the kids were playing outside before digging out the family album.

This time she only had to scan through three pictures before she found something.  Although most of the faces in the shot were blurry, she could tell enough to discern that it was a family reunion photograph.  She flipped it over and read the date on the back.  1954.  She couldn’t be certain of anything because the quality of the picture was poor, but she thought she recognized several of the people featured.  One of them even looked like her husband.  Of course, that was impossible.  If that were the case, that would mean that Hank hadn’t aged in fifty years.  More than likely, the man she mistook for Hank was actually Hank’s father, Carl.  She realized that wasn’t the case, however, when she saw Carl smiling for the camera from the back row of Gentrys.

Although it pained her to admit it, this very definitely involved Hank.  Another thought confirmed this: the majority of the clocks in this house hadn’t been inherited as the grandfather clock had been.  Hank had purchased most of them. 

Whatever was going on, he was at the center of it. 

***

She put on her best face for Hank when he got home, smiled, and kissed him as she had done for the past ten years.  The whole charade repulsed her because she felt like she was being lied to.  More than anything else, she wanted to just come out and ask him what was really going on.  But on some instinctive level, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. 

The worried look on Hank’s face convinced her of that. 

"Is something wrong?" she asked as he shouldered his way past her, heading off down the hall.  Hank grunted noncommittally.  He followed that grunt with a scream once he reached the back of the house. 

"The clocks," he shrieked, running frantically toward the front door.

"What’s wrong?"  Marietta asked. 

"You destroyed my clocks," Hank exclaimed as he headed out to the garage.  "One wasn’t so bad.  I could live with that.  But all of them? Do you know what you’ve forced me to do?"

A moment later she heard Hank’s truck rumble out of the driveway. 

She looked out just in time to see her children waving at her from the bed of the Ford F150. 

Horrified, Marietta ran into the kitchen and grabbed her own car keys off of a hook beneath the telephone.  She ran out of the house without even bothering to shut the door behind her.  She didn’t know what Hank was planning or what he had in mind, but she knew that it couldn’t be good.  True enough, the children had been smiling and waving at her as they left the driveway, but as far as they knew, things were fine. 

Hank already had a good head start by the time Marietta backed out of the driveway in her Accord.  But Crowley’s Point was a small town.  There were only a limited number of ways he could have gone and a limited number of places he could be taking them.

Fortunately, Marietta headed in the right direction the first time and saw the Ford’s taillights in the distance.  She could also see her children riding in the bed of the truck.  It made her think of the dead baby that had been cleverly hidden away in the belly of the clock like a stillborn inside its mother.

She pushed the accelerator to the floor and cried out in horror as the Ford made a left hand turn.  The truck was far enough ahead that she couldn’t be exactly sure which road it had taken.  By the time she got to the approximate spot where Hank had turned off she realized that it was going to be nearly impossible to find them now.  They could have turned any number of directions, doubled-back, or continued straight ahead.

Marietta spent the next fifteen minutes driving around and weeping uncontrollably.  Not knowing what else to do, she pulled over to the side of the road and sobbed.  It was only as the worst of the crying was over with that she got an idea.  She thought about all that had happened thus far.  First, the grandfather clock.  Then, the cuckoo clock.  Then, every other clock in the house.  The fact that she had destroyed every clock in the house was also what had sent Hank into a frenzy. 

Suddenly, she knew where they had gone. 

The clock tower in the center of town looked like something out of a Victorian photograph.  It also looked inhabited.  She saw her husband’s truck parked alongside the clock.  The door leading up to the actual mechanics of the clock was standing wide open.  Her children chirped and shrieked with delight from within.  No doubt they were under the impression that their father was taking them on some sort of adventure.  Marietta still didn’t know what Hank was doing, only that he was an immediate threat to her offspring. 

She took the steps two at a time yet with a controlled grace that silenced her movements.  She got to the top just in time to see the gleam of a killing blade.  Hank had a knife. 

"Stop," she screamed, drawing Hank’s attention away from the children. 

"Mommy," all of them shouted in unison.  By the looks on their faces, it was clear that they were glad to see her. 

"Get away from your father," she said to them in a controlled voice.  "Do it now."

"I don’t think so," Hank said, stepping out of the shadows.  Marietta gasped at the sight of his face.  He looked like a mummy that had been reanimated.  The kids, seeing the true face of their father for the first time, began to cry.

"What is going on?"  Marietta demanded. 

"Sacrifice," Hank said, spitting the word out like a bad taste.  "Kronos won’t restore my youth without an offering."

"Kronos?"  Marietta said, confused. 

"The god of hours and minutes," Hank explained. 

Marietta remembered the family reunion photograph and realized that Hank was telling the truth.  He had been the one to kill that baby from the grandfather clock and lay it on the altar of time.  He was also the one who had killed those others, the ones whose body parts had been stashed inside each and every clock in their home.  It made her sick to think about it all.  It made her even more sick to contemplate what he had in mind for their own children. 

Without another word, he grabbed Joseph, wrapping his liver-spotted arm around the boy’s neck.  Joseph fought and thrashed but his father was too strong. 

"No," Marietta cried.  "Don’t hurt him.  Offer me instead."

"I don’t need you," Hank hissed.  "You’re not young anymore.  Kronos wouldn’t be very receptive to that kind of an offering."

"Don’t you dare hurt those kids," Marietta said, trembling with fear and outrage. 

Hank ignored her and began reciting the incantation that would make him young again.  His words echoed off of the walls and were nearly buried beneath the grind of the massive gears that kept the clock working.

Jana and Jacqueline clung to each of Hank Gentry’s legs like barnacles to the hull of an old ship.  But they didn’t slow the old man down much. 

They did, however, distract him enough to give Marietta a chance to make her move.  She eyed the enormous clock gears and calculated her strategy.  She knew she would only get one chance at this.  One wrong move and at least one of her kids would end up dead.  Maybe all three. 

It seemed as if Hank Gentry was getting older and older by the minute.  His strength seemed to be ebbing along with his looks.  Joseph was actually starting to wear his father down.  But Hank still had the knife.  He put the blade to Joseph’s throat, and the boy stopped moving immediately.

The gears, however, were built to continually move and track the footprints of time. 

Afraid of dying, Joseph looked to his mother for help.  She mouthed the word ‘bite’ and Joseph didn’t seem to understand at first.  Then she bit down on her own arm, and Joseph’s face lit up with understanding. 

Hank was too busy trying to kick Jana and Jacqueline off of his legs to notice what Marietta was doing.  He realized his mistake as Joseph’s teeth sank deep into the rotting flesh of his arm.  Hank Gentry howled in pain and released his grip.  That was when Marietta made her move, charging her husband like a bull with a red cape in its sights.  She hit him dead-on.  He landed on one of the massive clock gears.  One sprocket interlocked with another, and it took only a matter of seconds for Hank to find himself wedged between the gears’ teeth.  His screams were short-lived, and soon the steady tick-tock of the clock was all there was.

Marietta quickly gathered her children around her and hugged them close.  Jana and Jacqueline were crying.  Joseph had a faraway look in his eyes.  Yet Marietta knew they would all be okay eventually. 

All they needed was a little time.

Wasn’t that what everyone needed?