Farewell Summer (Green Town 3)

‘It’s no good,’ said Tom, ‘unless someone has matches.’

More hands reached out with matches in each.

Doug stared at the door.

‘How can we fix the crackers so they’ll really do some good when they go off?’

‘Glue,’ said Tom.

Doug shook his head, scowling.

‘Yeah, glue, right,’ he said. ‘Does anyone just happen to have any glue on them?’

A single hand reached out on the air. It was Pete’s.

‘Here’s some Bulldog glue,’ he said. ‘Bought it for my airplane models and because I like the great picture of the bulldog on the label.’

‘Let’s give it a try.’

Doug applied glue along the length of one of the five–inchers and pressed it against the outside of the machinery room door.

‘Stand back,’ he said, and struck a match.

With his mob back in the shadows and his hands over his ears, Doug waited for the cracker to go off. The orange flame sizzled and zipped along the fuse.

There was a beautiful explosion.

For a long moment they all stared at the door in disappointment and then, very slowly, it drifted open.

‘I was right,’ said Tom.

‘Why don’t you just shut up,’ said Doug. ‘C’mon.’

He pulled the door and it opened wide.

There was a sound below.

‘Who’s there?’ a voice cried from deep down in the courthouse.

‘Ohmigosh,’ whispered Tom. ‘I bet that’s the janitor.’

‘Who’s up there?’ the voice cried again.

‘Quick!’ said Doug, leading his army through the door.

And now, at last, they were inside the clock.

Here, suddenly, was the immense, frightening machinery of the Enemy, the Teller of Lives and Time. Here was the core of the town and its existence. Doug could feel all of the lives of the people he knew moving in the clock, suspended in bright oils and meshed in sharp cogs and ground down in clamped springs that clicked onward with no stopping. The clock moved silently. And now he knew that it had never ticked. No one in the town had ever actually heard it counting to itself; they had only listened so hard that they had heard their own hearts and the time of their lives moving in their wrists and their hearts and their heads. For here was only cold metal silence, quiet motion, gleams and glitters, murmurs and faint whispers of steel and brass.

Douglas trembled.

They were together at last, Doug and the clock that had risen like a lunar face throughout his life at every midnight. At any moment the great machine might uncoil its brass springs, snatch him up, and dump him in a grinder of cogs to mesh its endless future with his blood, in a forest of teeth and tines, waiting, like a music box, to play and tune his body, ribboning his flesh.

And then, as if it had waited just for this moment, the clock cleared its throat with a sound like July thunder. The vast spring hunched in upon itself as a cannon prepares for its next concussion. Before Douglas could turn, the clock erupted.

One! Two! Three!

It fired its bells! And he was a moth, a mouse in a bucket being kicked, and kicked again. An earthquake shook the tower, jolting him off his feet.