Image by Myriam Zilles from Pixabay Modified by Me Using PhotoShop
Jenny crept down the corridor. Each creaky floorboard was mapped out in her head and she stepped from corner to corner like constructing the perfect puzzle world in Minecraft.
She never thought she'd miss school.
Mrs Granger with her funny long nose and that warty lip. Her friend Sam had her in fits of giggles flapping his lips as she chalked on the board. A pang of guilt sliced through her belly whenever she thought about their private joke about warty Granger.
They were all memories now. She resisted stamping her foot and kicked the wall softly instead. It was so boring living with her uncle after her father had died of Covid-19. Now cities were off limits for kids and the whole world was in stasis.
Covid-24 had taken hold and mass-crops had developed some type of antibacterial super strain. We were all shipped off to the country. Child laborers conscripted to cottage gardens and stately homes, organic farms and microbreweries.
Anywhere producing untreated, heirloom varieties of foods.
She giggled at the thought of the text she'd got from her friend Roger.
Working @ Goodachres brewery by Guildford. I drink as much as I make and spit in every second bottle. Goodachres' supply the underground parliament. C ya Soon Jen lol 😜
She stepped across the corridor to the next spot and a loud creak split the stale air.
Shit, she'd forgotten the sequence. The grandfather clock loomed large ahead of her, only two meters distant.
The tippy-tap of typing stopped in the study a few doors down and she held her breath. A creaking and shifting noise from just beyond the door froze her in place. She leaned in to the wall and held her breath, scared of her uncle’s reaction if he saw her near the clock again.
His obsession with antiques, and that clock was not normal.
Don't touch.
Don't go poking about... and especially that clock.
I don't even want to see you look at it.
She carried on, moving from safe spot to safe spot until that mahogany monster stared down clucking its repetitive metallic beat.
"Father," a loud call echoed down the corridor.
She spun around and saw Andrew, her cousin at the top of the stairs grinning.
A loud stomping came from the study and the door was flung wide, just as that obnoxious brat piped up again.
"Father, Jenny is messing with the clock again."
Uncle Steven strode down the corridor, fists clenching at his sides "What have I told you about touching that clock."
Jenny hunkered down knowing what was to come.
"I was just looking."
She steeled that place inside, swallowed the bile down to that diamond hard spot in her stomach which turned her blood to stone.
As she stared up at her uncle, his upraised fist shaking she could see the reflection of the clock face in the dusty glass of the portrait on the wall.
One second to twelve.
Tick.
His fist began to descend.
The first bell of midday chimed.
His fist halted.
The second bell never arrived. Dust motes drifted across the sunbeam in the corridor, illuminating and settling on the two wax work dummies.
The clock face lay still.
Image by She glanced up at her uncle's eyes caught in a perpetual look of fear laced with fire. She had seen that look the last time he hit her and didn’t understand the fear. It was like a fading reflection.
The clock loomed above, engraved figures adorned its gilt edges. Naked nymphs cavorted with bearded baroque gods, a scene sweeping to a central motif of a river snaking toward distant mountains and a waterfall.
This was why she risked her uncle’s ire to come and look at the clock, it was magic she was sure.
As she stared at the clock, pictures within pictures formed in paint throughout the grain. Sharp icy crystalline sylphs made up the body of the bearded god. All intertwined in a dance of limbs making a whole greater than its parts.
The sun seemed a giant mechanical wheel, swallowing itself in flares of light cascading over the valley.
Jenny jumped as she heard a scratching from inside the panels of the walls, like long fingernails down a blackboard. An icy wind wound up from beside her as if emanating from Uncle Steven and tore along the corridor toward Andrew and his perpetual sneer.
Uncle Steven still stood, his right arm upraised like the statue of liberty. Andrew in frozen sneer at the end of the corridor.
As she stared the space seemed to elongate, stretching away into itself like an optical illusion after staring out of the window of a fast train.
Footsteps thumped down the corridor from invisible feet as icicles shot down her spine. Jenny grabbed her uncle’s arm and cowered behind his inanimate frame.
“Steven, you despicable boy, what have I told you about neglecting your studies.”
Jenny peeked through the tiny gap between his chest and armpit.
A woman stalked down the corridor, pale flesh dripped from her face like wax melting from a candle. Blue fire blazed in her eyes with the same intensity she’d seen in Uncle Steven’s gaze, terrible like the death of a star or the onset of a cold snap after spring has unwound.
She was a zombie, but portly with wide hips and a face like a brick. What was left of it anyway. Bone glistened through the flesh of lips that slipped from her jaw as spittle flew, only to disappear in sparkling tendrils.
“How many times have I told you to stop staring at that clock and get back to your studies?” Spittle flew cascades of silver fire.
This was too much for Jenny.
A giggle escaped clenched lips at the absurd beauty of the ethereal spittle that still cast streamers through the air.
“What have we here?”
A glowing blue eye narrowed in the gap between Uncle Steven’s armpit, as the sprouting tears froze in her ducts. She blinked once, twice but that eye was still there.
She shuddered and felt her legs buckle.
Almost at the same time on cue Uncle Steven’s legs buckled and they huddled in a cowering mess together on the floor. Steven’s eyes still glazed, one arm limp the other still upraised but flapping, useless.
She pinched him as the woman loomed over them. Fear slithered through her guts like a leach latching to her stomach to feed, before moving up her throat and bleeding her tongue numb.
The woman slowly leaned down as she pulled a birch stick from her belt. That blue fire burning Jenny to her core in wordless, mindless terror.
The ghost woman grinned, and thrashed Jenny across her arm where a scar of black and worming welts spread through her veins.
Leaches started to wriggle up Jenny’s throat, following the stream of blood that ran down her chin gushing from her open mouth.
The woman raised the birch stick “Disobedient children must learn their lesson.”
That terrible stick reached an apex above her head and Jenny pinched her uncle again one last time turning her head as he woke from his trance.
They stared at each other. Leaches writhed from both their mouths in a black mass of blood soaked molten flesh.
He coughed once spewing the rest of the parasites from his mouth.
“Jenny. How are you in my dream?”
The birch stick slashed down once across his still upraised arm causing rivulets of cerulean fire to course through his muscles. These flames changed as they followed their course through some sick mitosis into black leaches that pulsed under his skin at his neck line.
She stared at this man who’d shown her nothing but hatred and saw a deep, repeated pain in his eyes.
Then she was looking at a boy a few years younger than her, thirteen or so. The eyes were the same and a strange weary look. There was no anger now, only terror.
“It is not a dream, it’s real. Look at the clock.”
Tears flooded from his eyes as his veins inflamed with turquoise pulsing to flow through his neck with sapphire hue. He stared up at the clock and watched as the second hand moved to click to two seconds past twelve.
He vomited more leaches, flicking an errant hanger from his lip as blood coursed through his teeth.
“Not a dream.” He muttered confused.
The birch stick descended.
Flesh broke away from the ghost's jaw as she smiled in sadistic glee.
Jenny lifted her hand and caught the stick, as Steven followed her and caught it in his left hand.
Together they caught the stave in two upraised hands and grasped it, as frozen welts raised on their palms they ripped it from their tormentor.
The echo of a thousand children's screams ripped down the corridor. Andrew awoke from time’s uneasy suspension, eyes popping wide before he fainted and soiled his trousers.
“I’m so sorry child” the boy wrapped Jenny in a hug, squeezing her tighter than she'd have thought possible with those skinny arms.
They both looked at the clock.
In the crashing maelstrom of the waterfall a portly figure tumbled. Petticoats and flannel undergarments wrapped her as she spun in unending turmoil. The gods, nymphs and secret creatures of the forest pointed, hooting in merriment at her perpetual spin.
Crystalline sylphs gesticulated and flashed their private parts at the tumbling zombie. The endless mechanical fractal sun kept spinning in an infinite dance.
Chaos intoned wonder within the strike of each of the clock's midday chimes. A sun shower seemed to rain upwards from land to sky in that moving cascade wood engraved world. The healing waters spilled out from the gilt of the clock's mahogany frame, welling upwards to fill the eyes of Jenny and Steven.
Healing, magical waters.
Jenny looked up at her uncle, now stood in almost exactly the same pose as his upraised arm slipped to his side and he shook with sobs.
“She has been with me for so long.”
Jenny pulled away from his unfamiliar hug and the musty smell of his study.
He blinked through the strange torrent of tears flowing from the clock.
“I am so sorry for what I have done Jenny.”
The end.
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