The Clock Stops

The tall clock in the front hall had stopped only once in Cal Mercer's whole life, the year he was ten, and when it stopped again that evening, he knew, before he even turned from the kitchen sink, exactly what it meant.

He stood with his hands in the dishwater and listened to the silence where the ticking had been. For thirty-eight years that sound had been the heartbeat of the house, steady through the winters and the births and all the burials but one. His great-great-grandfather Josiah had built the clock with his own hands when he raised the farm, and it had run ever since, wound every Sunday, passed down with the land. There was only one thing that ever stopped it. Everyone born a Mercer learned it before they learned to read.

When the clock stops on its own, the Collector is coming.

Cal dried his hands very slowly. Outside the window the valley was going blue with dusk, the woods at the far edge of the lower field already black. Somewhere up the stairs he could hear his daughter Nell singing to her dolls, five years old and tuneless and alive, and his son Will arguing with her about whose turn it was, eight and certain of everything. Hannah was up there too, getting them ready for bed, with no idea yet that the clock had stopped.

He had been waiting for this his whole adult life, and dreading it, and praying in a way he didn't believe in that it would hold off one more generation, that it would be his children's burden and not his, and then hating himself for the prayer, because wishing it onto them was the worst thing a father could do.

It came once a generation. That was the only mercy in it, if you could call it mercy. It had come for his grandfather's people, and it had come when Cal was ten years old, and now it had come again, and there was no question of whether. The clock had stopped. In a night or two, maybe three (it was never exact, it liked to make you wait), a tall figure would walk up out of those black woods and across the lower field and it would come to the house, and it would take one of them.

One of the blood. It only ever came for the blood.

Cal looked at his own hands on the dish towel, and then up at the ceiling, toward the small sounds of his children, and something in his chest went hard and cold and still.

His father had stood in this kitchen once and heard this same silence, and his father had done what every Mercer before him had done. He had barred the doors and gathered the family in the dark and waited, and in the morning Cal's older brother Eli was gone, and they never spoke of it again, because that was how you survived a thing like this. You paid it, and you endured, and you taught your children to pay it too.

That was the old way. It had kept Mercers alive in this valley for a hundred and fifty years.

Cal walked into the front hall and stood in front of the stopped clock, the founder's clock, its long brass pendulum hanging dead and straight. On the wall of the front room beyond, the founder's portrait watched the way it always had, a tall stooped man in a long dark coat, the paint gone so dark with the years that Cal had long since stopped seeing it at all. He made his family a promise he did not yet know how he would keep.

Not my children. Not this time.

He didn't know how to fight a thing that had been taking his blood since before he was born. He didn't know if it could be fought. But he knew, standing there in the dark hall, that he was not going to bar the doors and herd Will and Nell into a black room and let some thing from the woods choose which one of them to carry off. He would rather die. He would, he understood with a strange calm, very probably have to.

Upstairs, Nell laughed at something, bright and unafraid.

Cal reached out and stopped the dead pendulum from swinging where the draft had nudged it, so it hung perfectly still, and he whispered to the house and to the founder who built it and to the thing that was already, somewhere down in those woods, beginning to walk.

"Not them," he said. "You've had enough of us. You're not having them."