Grandfather Clock
Jan. 9th, 2012 08:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
danalwynSo, I'm trying to write some stuff more regularly because I'm beginning to think that my writing's not improving. Part of this is that I've become embedded in longer works, which have nothing that can be released piecemeal, so this leaves me in a long stretch without anything to challenge myself with. For now I'm trying to present something at a writing group (which is another event which I have a hard time evaluating fairly), but I figured I might as well put it here too so people can mock it.
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The deep booming of the grandfather clock echoed through the room, bringing Marcus temporarily out of a fitful, pain-ridden slumber. His aching muscles, all of which seemed to be racing around and pulling any alarm bell they could get ahold of to get his attention, jerked him out of rest. Combined with the almost subsonic ringing of the clock, they conspired just enough to bring some faint touch of lucidity to him, before he fell back through the bed and into sleep.
A thought stayed behind and tugged at him, pulled at him, slowly making a pest of itself and preventing unconsciousness from returning. It buried itself under his blankets, pulled itself through his sheets, and slowly made its way up his side, burrowing beneath his arm until it was close enough to whisper in his ear. He tried to shut the voice out but it was persistent, buzzing at him until the faint light of consciousness finally began to return.
“Wait a minute,” one eye opened slowly, lazily, “We don’t have a grandfather clock.”
The clock boomed one last time, as if to mock his logic, and then fell silent.
The problem, Marcus realized as he lay there, quiet and half-uncomprehending, was not in the grandfather clock. The problem was that if there was now a grandfather clock here, a probability that seemed remote but with the added evidence of the sound of the bell in the distance, possible, there was possibly also something else here. And the problem with that, if you really sat down and thought about it, was that he had no idea what that something else was.
Still trying to chase sleepiness out of his thoughts he somehow managed to navigate his way out of his cramped room and into the apartment’s living room without banging his toe even once. There, much to his discontent, sitting in the middle of the room on the patched throw rug that had been thrown down to cover the stain on the floor, was a grandfather clock.
It was shoulder-height on Marcus, made out of a wood that could be either a very deep and rich brown, or a glittering black in the absence of light. The glass front door, behind which the pendulum swung hypnotically, glinted with a reflection of distant skyscrapers and the glitzy reds and greens of the city’s advertisements. The minute hand and the hour hand were both pointed straight up, and the sharp, varnished apex of the clock’s plain roof. It was standing exactly where absolutely nothing had been standing only a few hours ago, when Marcus had come by on his way to bed.
“Why,” he asked nobody particular, “is there a clock in this room?”
And then, because there was absolutely no answer, and because the answer could thus be narrowed down to only one possible subject, he filled in the blanks, “Rhynn?”
It should have been impossible for a woman in a white dress to hide on a sofa that was at least nominally black in the darkness when there was enough ambient light for Marcus to see the hands of a clock, but he had not seen Rhynn until she jumped up from the couch. Her dress billowed about her until, like the petals of a folding flower, it settled down around her again.
“Yes?” she asked perkily. It always amazed Marcus that she could be perky in pretty much any situation. Coffee probably got itself ready when it saw her coming.
“Why do we have a clock?” he asked, suspiciously.
“Because they’re cool!” she proclaimed, “I mean look at it. Isn’t it cool? And then it makes that awesome noise, like ‘bong’!”
It was an interesting feature of Rhynn that she felt that simply saying the word ‘bong’ in a theatrically loud voice was insufficient to fully capture the feel of the moment. She had to vibrate like a gong, until her shoes rattled on the floor.
“Right,” Marcus sighed.
“And anyway, we need to have a clock!” she proclaimed, “That way, if someone gets murdered, the detective can call everyone together and then he can pace in front of the clock and tell them all that they were very clever, and then he can point and tell them all that the butler did it, and he can prove it!”
“Have people been letting you watch TV again?” Marcus asked suspiciously.
“Ummm...maybe?” Rhynn hazarded.
“And we don’t have a butler,” Marcus pointed out.
“But we have you. You’re like a butler, right? I mean, you go around and do what we tell you. Um...so you’re the one who did it, right?”
“No,” Marcus said, “because the only thing which has been ‘done’, in the sense where we have to find out ‘who did it’, is the fact that we now have a grandfather clock. Which leads me to my next question. Where did you get it?”
“Um, you know, around,” Rhynn said, making a circling, hugging gesture with her arms.
“No, I don’t know. That’s the problem,” Marcus said.
“Uh, how do most people get grandfather clocks?” she asked.
“By buying them. Which I know you didn’t do, because you don’t have any money. Which I know, because I keep it all to myself,” Marcus said. He did not continue and add to keep you from doing things like this. Some things did not need to be said.
“Well, there was a big grandfather clock, and nobody was using it, so I took it,” Rhynn said.
There was a moment of disagreement where Marcus waited for more output while Rhynn waited for more input. Rhynn, who was still making soft ‘bong’-ing noises, had the definite advantage in the waiting game as she was now self-entertained for at least the next thirty minutes, which was probably longer then Marcus could stay awake.
“Where was this big grandfather clock that nobody was using?” Marcus asked.
“Not telling!” Rhynn crossed her arms in front of her chest.
“Why not?” Marcus asked. That was new. Usually it took more work to stop getting information from Rhynn then to start getting it.
“Because you’ll try and take it back, and I don’t want you to do that,” Rhynn said, and for good measure stuck out her tongue.
Not able to say anything, because that was pretty much what Marcus had in mind, he just sighed and tried to figure out what the hell he was going to do now. There was not much to work with. There was a clock in his living room that clearly did not belong there. That by itself yielded relatively little in terms of clues. What he should do was get it out of his living room, because he highly suspected that its presence would constitute Incriminating Evidence, except that he could not figure out where he was going to throw it that would not look even more suspicious.
Or where Rhynn would not immediately go grab it and return it, thus compounding the current problem.
“So you’re going to make me find where you got it myself, aren’t you?” Marcus finally asked.
“No, you should leave it alone and just let it sit here and go ‘bong’!” Rhynn vibrated again.
Marcus stared at her. He stared at the clock. It was still there. It was rather smugly there actually, taunting his lack of sleep with its continued, intolerable existence.
“Also, you can’t tell the others. I don’t want them to know,” Rhynn said.
Marcus blinked, “You think they won’t notice?”
“They might not.”
Marcus glanced back down the hallway, at the other tightly closed bedroom doors in the apartment, and raised his voice just enough to resonate through the apartment without waking the neighbors, “Is anyone in here not eavesdropping on this conversation?”
Kerrick’s voice was muffled by the door, but still clearly enunciated, “It would be impossible for me to satisfactorily enumerate the profusion of purposes in which my time would be better spent than eavesdropping on this rather trite caricature of domestic disagreement. Honestly, do you enjoy demonstrating your idiocy to the world, or have you forgotten that parody requires wit to rise above embarrassment?”
Marcus sighed and ignored it. There was not much more you could do in the middle of the night when Kerrick was talking to you. By policy you waited until morning.
“Bong!” Rhynn vibrated.
“Stop that,” Marcus said.
“No. Bong!”
Marcus glared at her. Judging by past history, the length of Rhynn’s fixations was approximately equal to the amount of annoyance that they caused him, with a maximum upper bound of a week. This was going to be a long week.
“Bong!” Rhynn repeated.
“If you don’t stop that right now,” Marcus sighed, bringing out his trump card, “you’ll get no dessert for a week.”
That brought her up short, “You wouldn’t do that.”
“Try me,” Marcus said.
Her lip began to wobble, “You wouldn’t do that. I’ll cry. You wouldn’t make a girl cry, would you?”
If any police officer had been present to see the look Marcus directed at her, he probably would have been arrested for domestic violence on the spot.
“That’s not fair,” Rhynn said in a very small voice. Then, bowing her head down, she shuffled off down the hallway back to her room. As she went there was a very faint soprano ‘bong’ noise.
“I heard that,” Marcus grumbled.
“No you didn’t,” the sparkle was back in Rhynn’s voice. Then she kicked up her heels and disappeared in a flash of white.
Marcus glanced at her vanished form. He glanced at the grandfather clock. It was still there, silently denying his attempts to alter reality.
“Okay, I’m going back to sleep,” he said, more to himself then to the passive grandfather clock, or the crowd of eavesdroppers, “I’ll deal with this in the morning.”
And not, he told himself, in a fit of homicidal rage. No, he would be careful and deliberate, and figure out where to take this particular clock.
Unless there were two of them. Then he was probably going to break something.
--------------------------------------------------
The deep booming of the grandfather clock echoed through the room, bringing Marcus temporarily out of a fitful, pain-ridden slumber. His aching muscles, all of which seemed to be racing around and pulling any alarm bell they could get ahold of to get his attention, jerked him out of rest. Combined with the almost subsonic ringing of the clock, they conspired just enough to bring some faint touch of lucidity to him, before he fell back through the bed and into sleep.
A thought stayed behind and tugged at him, pulled at him, slowly making a pest of itself and preventing unconsciousness from returning. It buried itself under his blankets, pulled itself through his sheets, and slowly made its way up his side, burrowing beneath his arm until it was close enough to whisper in his ear. He tried to shut the voice out but it was persistent, buzzing at him until the faint light of consciousness finally began to return.
“Wait a minute,” one eye opened slowly, lazily, “We don’t have a grandfather clock.”
The clock boomed one last time, as if to mock his logic, and then fell silent.
The problem, Marcus realized as he lay there, quiet and half-uncomprehending, was not in the grandfather clock. The problem was that if there was now a grandfather clock here, a probability that seemed remote but with the added evidence of the sound of the bell in the distance, possible, there was possibly also something else here. And the problem with that, if you really sat down and thought about it, was that he had no idea what that something else was.
Still trying to chase sleepiness out of his thoughts he somehow managed to navigate his way out of his cramped room and into the apartment’s living room without banging his toe even once. There, much to his discontent, sitting in the middle of the room on the patched throw rug that had been thrown down to cover the stain on the floor, was a grandfather clock.
It was shoulder-height on Marcus, made out of a wood that could be either a very deep and rich brown, or a glittering black in the absence of light. The glass front door, behind which the pendulum swung hypnotically, glinted with a reflection of distant skyscrapers and the glitzy reds and greens of the city’s advertisements. The minute hand and the hour hand were both pointed straight up, and the sharp, varnished apex of the clock’s plain roof. It was standing exactly where absolutely nothing had been standing only a few hours ago, when Marcus had come by on his way to bed.
“Why,” he asked nobody particular, “is there a clock in this room?”
And then, because there was absolutely no answer, and because the answer could thus be narrowed down to only one possible subject, he filled in the blanks, “Rhynn?”
It should have been impossible for a woman in a white dress to hide on a sofa that was at least nominally black in the darkness when there was enough ambient light for Marcus to see the hands of a clock, but he had not seen Rhynn until she jumped up from the couch. Her dress billowed about her until, like the petals of a folding flower, it settled down around her again.
“Yes?” she asked perkily. It always amazed Marcus that she could be perky in pretty much any situation. Coffee probably got itself ready when it saw her coming.
“Why do we have a clock?” he asked, suspiciously.
“Because they’re cool!” she proclaimed, “I mean look at it. Isn’t it cool? And then it makes that awesome noise, like ‘bong’!”
It was an interesting feature of Rhynn that she felt that simply saying the word ‘bong’ in a theatrically loud voice was insufficient to fully capture the feel of the moment. She had to vibrate like a gong, until her shoes rattled on the floor.
“Right,” Marcus sighed.
“And anyway, we need to have a clock!” she proclaimed, “That way, if someone gets murdered, the detective can call everyone together and then he can pace in front of the clock and tell them all that they were very clever, and then he can point and tell them all that the butler did it, and he can prove it!”
“Have people been letting you watch TV again?” Marcus asked suspiciously.
“Ummm...maybe?” Rhynn hazarded.
“And we don’t have a butler,” Marcus pointed out.
“But we have you. You’re like a butler, right? I mean, you go around and do what we tell you. Um...so you’re the one who did it, right?”
“No,” Marcus said, “because the only thing which has been ‘done’, in the sense where we have to find out ‘who did it’, is the fact that we now have a grandfather clock. Which leads me to my next question. Where did you get it?”
“Um, you know, around,” Rhynn said, making a circling, hugging gesture with her arms.
“No, I don’t know. That’s the problem,” Marcus said.
“Uh, how do most people get grandfather clocks?” she asked.
“By buying them. Which I know you didn’t do, because you don’t have any money. Which I know, because I keep it all to myself,” Marcus said. He did not continue and add to keep you from doing things like this. Some things did not need to be said.
“Well, there was a big grandfather clock, and nobody was using it, so I took it,” Rhynn said.
There was a moment of disagreement where Marcus waited for more output while Rhynn waited for more input. Rhynn, who was still making soft ‘bong’-ing noises, had the definite advantage in the waiting game as she was now self-entertained for at least the next thirty minutes, which was probably longer then Marcus could stay awake.
“Where was this big grandfather clock that nobody was using?” Marcus asked.
“Not telling!” Rhynn crossed her arms in front of her chest.
“Why not?” Marcus asked. That was new. Usually it took more work to stop getting information from Rhynn then to start getting it.
“Because you’ll try and take it back, and I don’t want you to do that,” Rhynn said, and for good measure stuck out her tongue.
Not able to say anything, because that was pretty much what Marcus had in mind, he just sighed and tried to figure out what the hell he was going to do now. There was not much to work with. There was a clock in his living room that clearly did not belong there. That by itself yielded relatively little in terms of clues. What he should do was get it out of his living room, because he highly suspected that its presence would constitute Incriminating Evidence, except that he could not figure out where he was going to throw it that would not look even more suspicious.
Or where Rhynn would not immediately go grab it and return it, thus compounding the current problem.
“So you’re going to make me find where you got it myself, aren’t you?” Marcus finally asked.
“No, you should leave it alone and just let it sit here and go ‘bong’!” Rhynn vibrated again.
Marcus stared at her. He stared at the clock. It was still there. It was rather smugly there actually, taunting his lack of sleep with its continued, intolerable existence.
“Also, you can’t tell the others. I don’t want them to know,” Rhynn said.
Marcus blinked, “You think they won’t notice?”
“They might not.”
Marcus glanced back down the hallway, at the other tightly closed bedroom doors in the apartment, and raised his voice just enough to resonate through the apartment without waking the neighbors, “Is anyone in here not eavesdropping on this conversation?”
Kerrick’s voice was muffled by the door, but still clearly enunciated, “It would be impossible for me to satisfactorily enumerate the profusion of purposes in which my time would be better spent than eavesdropping on this rather trite caricature of domestic disagreement. Honestly, do you enjoy demonstrating your idiocy to the world, or have you forgotten that parody requires wit to rise above embarrassment?”
Marcus sighed and ignored it. There was not much more you could do in the middle of the night when Kerrick was talking to you. By policy you waited until morning.
“Bong!” Rhynn vibrated.
“Stop that,” Marcus said.
“No. Bong!”
Marcus glared at her. Judging by past history, the length of Rhynn’s fixations was approximately equal to the amount of annoyance that they caused him, with a maximum upper bound of a week. This was going to be a long week.
“Bong!” Rhynn repeated.
“If you don’t stop that right now,” Marcus sighed, bringing out his trump card, “you’ll get no dessert for a week.”
That brought her up short, “You wouldn’t do that.”
“Try me,” Marcus said.
Her lip began to wobble, “You wouldn’t do that. I’ll cry. You wouldn’t make a girl cry, would you?”
If any police officer had been present to see the look Marcus directed at her, he probably would have been arrested for domestic violence on the spot.
“That’s not fair,” Rhynn said in a very small voice. Then, bowing her head down, she shuffled off down the hallway back to her room. As she went there was a very faint soprano ‘bong’ noise.
“I heard that,” Marcus grumbled.
“No you didn’t,” the sparkle was back in Rhynn’s voice. Then she kicked up her heels and disappeared in a flash of white.
Marcus glanced at her vanished form. He glanced at the grandfather clock. It was still there, silently denying his attempts to alter reality.
“Okay, I’m going back to sleep,” he said, more to himself then to the passive grandfather clock, or the crowd of eavesdroppers, “I’ll deal with this in the morning.”
And not, he told himself, in a fit of homicidal rage. No, he would be careful and deliberate, and figure out where to take this particular clock.
Unless there were two of them. Then he was probably going to break something.