‘Is that the best place we can find? I just don’t feel like it blends in.’ Laura sagged slightly against the door frame and tilted her head to one side. 

‘I know: the wood’s a little dark, and it’s a bit…massive. That’s part of the charm, though, don’t you think? Makes a bold statement.’ Toby had finally finished installing the grandfather clock in the recess in the hallway where the entrance fire had previously stood. 

‘Leonard would have liked it,’ he said, which was met with silence. They both fought to wriggle free from the memory of standing in the doorway in front of Toby’s father collapsed and gnarled on the tiles. Toby slotted the clock’s crank into each winding point and turned until the weights hung snug against the wooden partition. A series of dense, airless ticks pinged through the hallway. 

‘There. He’s watching over us now.’ Laura was glad that her husband had paused to bend down and catch his breath; she could have done without the effort of wiping the doubt from her face. 

*** 

The day was murky and blustery. Laura called Toby at lunchtime after her quarterly sales meeting, and he wandered animatedly around the house with his wife’s voice piping from his headset. Just after five, the light grew vitreous and his home office suddenly felt underwater. He switched off his PC and kneaded his knuckles into his face. 

The shock from the freezing bedclothes was delicious. It was just after eleven and he was still radiant from the heat of the shower as he folded himself under the covers. His mind sketched her movements from the percussion of her feet and the scattershot falling water. Finally, she strode into the bedroom with a comet tail of steam in her wake. One bewitching wink, followed by ‘I’ll just go and make sure I turned everything off,’ and an eclipse into the front room. ‘If you want to make sure everything’s turned off, you’re going the right way about it,’ Toby thought almost perceptibly loudly. 

When she slunk back into the bedroom, she was met with a fog of darkness and silence. ‘Couldn’t even wait five minutes for me?’ she asked out loud, only to be met with a thicker layer of silence. She shrugged herself out of her bathrobe and climbed into bed next to the angular body of her husband. Her hands must have been glacial on his ribs, because he gasped at her touch. 

‘What the hell took you so long?’ 

‘What do you mean?’ 

He rolled over out of her grasp and slapped the light button on their bedside alarm clock, which lit up to read 02:42. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘I just went to check the stove and the TV and the router.’ 

Toby shifted his hips and manoeuvred her into his arms. ‘We’ll talk about it in the morning.’ 

Five minutes later, the pressure from his bladder dragged him out of bed. He sat on the toilet in the darkness for thirty seconds, chilled at the idea of Laura’s mind crumbling like sandstone. He would call their family doctor in the morning and make an appointment for some sort of scan. When he gently pushed the door of the bedroom open, he had to squint at the glare of the light. The curtains were open, the clock read 11:47 and his wife was sitting up in bed, reading a book. ‘Told you’, she said. 

He hurled his gaze around the room. His fingers twitched and he finally made his way over to the bed. With one tentative hand on his wife’s knee, he murmured an apology and tried to look her in the eye. 

‘It’s feeding on time,’ he eventually said. 

‘What is?’ 

‘The clock.’ 

‘We both walked past it dozens of times yesterday and nothing happened’, deciding to humour him. ‘Why should it be any different at night?’ She felt a mixture of concern and irritation rise in her gullet. 

‘I don’t know. We don’t eat all the time, do we? Maybe it feeds only when it’s hungry. I don’t know.’ 

She flung the bedclothes to one side as her book got swallowed up in the mass. ‘How much have we honestly been sleeping recently? We need a holiday. I’m going to talk to my boss today and get some solid time off. You’re welcome to join me.’

*** 

Half an hour after Laura had left for work, Toby stood three metres down the front path. The door to the house was open and he hefted the porcupine crags of a broken corner of paving stone in his fingers. It was surely too hungry for the clock to be hungry again. He gave his best prim attempt at a roar and flung the stone towards the clock face. The stone whirled unevenly on its axis and gradually slowed until it was floating a hand’s breath from the grinding hands, trapped in some thick, invisible amber. Toby waited for the stone to drop to the floor or for it to smash the clock’s mechanism into intricate fragments; neither happened. Perhaps such a bloodless threat was too impersonal, he reckoned. There was no time to be stolen from a rock. Perhaps the gauntlet of a more visceral wager was needed. Toby bounced on his heels, puffed himself up like a desert lizard and ran with all his might at the timepiece. 

It was dark before Laura’s car pulled up outside. She sat in the car for almost a minute after arriving, waiting for her favourite song to finish on the radio. When she slotted her key into the door-shaped shadow at the house’s entrance and tumbled forwards, her arm narrowly caught the door frame before she fell. As she flicked on the light, the coldness against her leg coalesced violently into the mass of her husband’s body, collapsed on the floor with his gnarled hand outstretched. The mahogany clock chimed a dead metal heartbeat through the hall.