The Clockmaker’s Heir

The bell over the door tinkled with a sound as delicate as a whisper, despite its rusted spring and age. Elliot Travers stepped into the clock shop his grandfather had owned for nearly sixty years, inhaling the scent of varnished wood, oil, and time. It hadn’t changed in the two decades since he’d last visited as a boy—though the man who once stood behind the counter, stooped and grinning, was now gone.

Old Benjamin Travers had died three weeks ago. Elliot had received the letter from a solicitor in a thick, cream-colored envelope, sealed with a wax insignia he didn’t recognize. It hadn’t just been a will—it was a summons.

"You are to take possession of The Golden Hour Clockworks immediately,” the letter had read. “Per your grandfather’s final wishes, the property and all it contains is now yours. But time, as you know, is never so simple.”

Elliot had never understood the cryptic way his grandfather talked, nor why his mother had distanced herself from the old man decades ago. She’d called him "obsessed with the past," said he "valued clocks more than people."

But standing now in the hushed warmth of the shop, Elliot could feel something unusual. There was a kind of hum in the walls—not sound, exactly, but the sense of a thing alive, ticking, watching.

He wandered to the back room where the workshop lay. Tools hung neatly on the wall, a bench sat piled with unfinished repairs, and on the far shelf stood a grandfather clock, larger than life, its pendulum swinging unnaturally slow.

Elliot approached it and noticed an envelope wedged in the wooden panel. It bore his name.

“To my heir,” it began.

“If you are reading this, it means I have finally joined your grandmother beyond the veil. But my work is unfinished—and now, it falls to you. Our clocks do not simply mark time—they hold it. Be careful which you wind. Some do not tick in this world alone."

Elliot frowned, assuming this was more of his grandfather’s eccentric rambling. But when he opened the drawer beneath the clock, he found a brass key unlike any he’d seen. It bore Roman numerals and symbols he couldn’t place, cool and heavy in his palm.

Drawn by a quiet compulsion, he approached the largest clock in the shop—the centerpiece that had once enchanted him as a child. It hadn’t worked in decades, but when he inserted the key into a hidden panel behind the pendulum and turned it, the gears groaned, clicked, and began to turn.

The clock began to tick. Backward.

The shop blurred.

Suddenly, Elliot stood in the same room—but it was brighter, cleaner. The clutter was gone. And behind the counter stood Benjamin Travers, younger, mustached, sleeves rolled.

"Elliot?” he asked, confused. “You’re... you’re early.”

Elliot staggered back. “Grandpa? You’re alive?”

The old man blinked slowly, recognition dawning. “So it’s true. The clock worked. You activated it.” He hurried over, inspecting Elliot. “You used the key. But from when?”

“2025,” Elliot stammered.

Benjamin’s eyes gleamed. “So it lasted that long…”

Over tea at a small wooden table, Benjamin explained. The clocks in the shop, specially crafted by him and his father before him, were not mere timepieces—they were vessels, capable of housing moments, even entire days. Some could take a person to the past. Others? To futures never lived.

“But each comes with a cost,” Benjamin warned. “To alter time is to tamper with memory. And the clocks... they remember too.”

Elliot learned that his mother had once tried to use a clock to change a memory—the day her brother drowned. She’d begged her father to fix it. But when he refused, she took matters into her own hands—and nearly destroyed the entire fabric of her own timeline. Benjamin had saved her, but at great cost: she forgot what had happened. Her anger never faded.

“And now?” Elliot asked.

Benjamin looked tired. “Now you must protect them. The clocks are old. Some are breaking down. If they fall into the wrong hands…”

He didn’t finish the sentence.

The vision faded. Elliot was back in the present, the ticking slowed, and then stopped.

He sat for hours, absorbing it all. He understood now. The shop was not simply an inheritance—it was a legacy. And a responsibility.

Days passed. Elliot began studying the journals Benjamin had left behind. He cataloged the clocks, learning which held memories, which twisted time, and which remained too dangerous to wind. He even started fixing some, gaining a strange satisfaction in restoring their delicate harmony.

One evening, a woman came in. Middle-aged, eyes puffy, holding an old locket.

“I heard you can... fix memories,” she said quietly.

Elliot hesitated. Then nodded. “Some, yes.”

He led her to a modest wall clock and asked her to describe the memory she wished to see. Carefully, he tuned the dials and opened the case. The hands spun, and the air shimmered.

For a moment, they both saw a young girl on a swing, her mother laughing nearby.

Tears rolled down the woman’s cheeks. “Thank you,” she whispered.

After she left, Elliot stood for a long time in the quiet.

He didn’t know if he was doing the right thing. But he understood now what his grandfather had meant.

Time is not a line. It is a circle of echoes and loops, of joys and regrets suspended in fragile glass.

And someone must keep the clocks.