The Clockmaker’s Secret

In the crooked alleyway of Evernight Lane, tucked between a burnt-out bakery and an abandoned tailor’s shop, sat an unremarkable store called Thatch & Tinker: Timepieces Repaired. The brass letters on the door had dulled with age, and the ticking sounds from within were often drowned out by the world passing it by.

No one paid much attention to the old clockmaker who worked inside. He was called Mr. Thatch — a quiet, wiry man with silver-rimmed spectacles and a gaze that always seemed lost in another century. Children whispered he was a ghost. Adults muttered that he simply had nowhere else to go. Both were partly right.

Every morning, Mr. Thatch wound the clocks. Grandfather clocks, pocket watches, mantel clocks, even a cuckoo clock missing its cuckoo. But there was one he never touched — a black, ornate timepiece that sat on a velvet cloth behind glass. Its hands hadn’t moved in over seventy years.

It was this clock that seventeen-year-old Elsie Carter noticed when she wandered in, chasing the echo of chimes that no one else seemed to hear.

“You heard it too,” Mr. Thatch said, without looking up.

“Heard what?”

“The strike at midnight. You wouldn’t have found this shop otherwise.”

Elsie frowned. “I was just walking home—”

“No. You were looking for something. Or someone.”

She stared at the old man. “How do you know?”

He finally looked at her. “Because that’s how I came here. Looking for someone.”

Elsie stepped closer to the glass. The black clock’s hands were frozen at 12:01. There was something haunting about it — not just its silence, but the feeling that it was watching her.

“Whose is that?” she asked.

“My daughter’s,” Mr. Thatch said softly. “Her name was Clara.”

Elsie turned, sensing pain in his voice.

“She vanished during the Blitz. 1942. One moment she was here, and the next—gone. All that remained was this clock. Stopped the very minute she disappeared.”

Elsie glanced back at the timepiece. A small plaque read:

"Time fractures for love and grief alike."

“I tried to move on,” he continued, “but the clocks wouldn't let me. They started ticking backwards. Some stopped altogether. And then I realized—this shop doesn’t run on time. It runs on memory.”

Elsie felt a chill. “Why am I here, then?”

Mr. Thatch stepped aside. “Because your brother went missing last year.”

She gasped. “How do you—”

“Same as you,” he interrupted gently. “Drawn to the chimes. To the broken time.”

He lifted the glass case and carefully handed her the black clock.

“It’s waiting for someone willing to wind it.”

Her hands trembled. “What happens if I do?”

“You'll see what happened. But be warned: time might show you the truth, or it might trap you.”

Elsie hesitated, then turned the key.

The room darkened.

Clocks began to tick furiously — forward, backward, sideways. The glass fogged, and the black clock’s hands moved. One second. Two.

And suddenly, Elsie wasn’t in the shop anymore.

She stood on a cobbled street under a red sky. Bombs echoed in the distance. A little girl in a blue dress was crying. A boy — her brother, Jamie — was running toward her.

Elsie screamed, “Jamie!”

He turned, startled. “Elsie? How—?”

The world warped again.

Back in the shop, the black clock now read 12:02.

Mr. Thatch stood there, tears falling freely.

“You brought them back,” he whispered.

Behind him, a girl in a blue dress and a boy in a torn hoodie blinked in confusion.

Elsie looked down at the clock in her hands. Its ticking had stopped once more.

Only now, it was smiling.