What-The-Hours-Spelled
She worked it through the night, while the constable dozed against the doorframe and the lamp burned low.
First she tried the obvious and was disappointed by it. The times in the order she had found them spelled nothing; arranged smallest to largest they spelled nothing; read as a sum they came to a number that meant no birthday, no anniversary, no street she knew. She had nearly given it up to grief when she remembered the thing Silas always said when she fussed over which clock to trust: *Read them in their order on the wall, girl. A clock keeps its place better than its time.*
So she stood in the centre of the room and read them not as she'd found them, but as they hung — sunwise, beginning at the door, the way you'd read a page. And this time she did not read the hour. She read the cuckoo's little door, which on the twelve was open; the chronometer's case, which he'd left unlatched; each clock he had touched, she now saw, he had also *opened*, its face swung wide or its pendulum door ajar. Every one but four of them. And those four, closed and dark, sat at the four corners of the room like the corners of an envelope.
She understood then that the open clocks were the message and the closed ones were only the frame. She read the open faces alone, sunwise from the door — and their hours, set down in that order, were not hours at all. Nine. Five. One. Four. A clockmaker's