Three Knocks

Text 1: Twelve Minutes Slow, by Catrin Elwood

An original novel extract.

At half past five, Ruth unlocked the side door of the town hall and began her monthly climb to the clock chamber. The clock was twelve minutes slow. A simple fault, she decided: dust in the mechanism, perhaps, or a loose connection. She liked faults that could be named. Named faults could be fixed.

Above her, something knocked three times.

Ruth paused on the first landing. Old buildings settled. Pipes complained. She adjusted the weight of her tool bag and continued upwards, counting the steps without meaning to. Forty-one, forty-two, forty-three.

On the second landing, the dust had been disturbed. A narrow trail crossed the floorboards and disappeared beneath the next flight of stairs. Ruth crouched. The marks were dark and damp at the edges, as though someone had climbed the tower in wet shoes. Yet she had unlocked the only door, and the key had been hanging in her workshop all week.

Behind her, the stairwell door swung shut.

Ruth laughed, but the sound fell away from her like a coin dropped into a well. She pulled the door open again and wedged it with her tool bag. Then she climbed more quickly, no longer counting.

The clock chamber smelled of metal and old oil. The great pendulum hung motionless, but somewhere inside the mechanism a wheel was turning with a soft, determined click. On the workbench lay an open access panel. Ruth remembered tightening its four screws herself the previous month. Now the screws stood in a neat row beside it.

She reached into her pocket for her phone. No signal.

The clicking stopped.

For a moment there was only Ruth’s breathing. Then the minute hand moved backwards by one mark. From the darkness behind the clock face came three slow, patient knocks.