The Clockmaker's Widow

Arthur Pendleton's shop sat on a narrow lane in Kensington, the kind of lane where fog pooled like dirty water between the cobblestones. The sign above the door read simply: A. PENDLETON, HOROLOGIST. Inside, three hundred clocks ticked at slightly different rhythms, creating a sound like a room full of insects breathing.

Evelyn came home on the fourteenth of October, 1893, exactly twenty-three years to the day since she had arrived on this planet. She was late by seventeen minutes. Arthur was polishing a pocket watch when she opened the front door, and he noticed immediately that her hands were shaking. Not the small tremor of cold London weather, but the violent shaking of someone who had been holding something terrible inside for a very long time.

"They're here," she said. Not a question. A statement. As if she had been waiting for these words and knew exactly how to say them.

Arthur set down his polishing cloth. He had noticed things over the past twenty-three years of marriage. The way Evelyn never ate English food. The way she looked at the moon with something that was not love, not exactly, but something older and sadder. The way her skin caught the candlelight in the evenings, as if it were made of something that was not quite skin. He had never said anything. Marriage, he had learned, was a series of small silences stacked on top of each other until they formed a wall.

That night, the sky tore open above London.

Arthur watched from the shop window as silver ships descended through the fog like falling stars. There were dozens of them, perhaps hundreds, each one the size of a cathedral. They moved with a silence that was more frightening than any explosion. One of them struck London Bridge, and the tower crumbled into the Thames without a sound. Another struck St. Paul's, and the dome collapsed like a sigh.

Evelyn opened the fireplace. Behind it, hidden behind a panel of false brickwork that Arthur had never noticed in twenty-three years, was a weapons cache. Plasma rifles, energy cells, something that hummed with a light that was not quite visible to the human eye. She picked up a rifle and looked at Arthur. Her eyes were silver now, not brown.

"I married you for revenge," she said. "Not love. Revenge."

Arthur poured two cups of tea. He placed one in front of her, on the workbench between them, where he usually set down his tools. "You're late," he said.

She looked at the tea, then at him, then at the rifle in her hands. For a moment, something flickered across her face—something that might have been guilt, might have been love, might have been the ghost of a feeling that had been buried so deep she had forgotten it was there. Then she turned and walked out into the burning street.

Arthur sat in his shop and watched London die. He thought about the twenty-three years. He thought about the way Evelyn smiled when she thought he was not looking. He thought about the pocket watch she had given him on their first anniversary, a watch that had stopped at the exact moment they had been married. He had never wound it. He did not need to. It was perfect the way it was.

When Evelyn returned, the city was in flames. The military command center on Whitehall was gone. The Admiralty was gone. The Tower of London was gone. She had done what she came to do. She stood in the doorway, her clothes covered in ash, her face blank.

Arthur handed her the cup of tea. It was still warm.

"You're late," he said again.

Then he picked up his tweezers—the fine steel ones he used for adjusting balance wheels—and drove them into his own heart.

Evelyn did not scream. She did not cry. She sat down in Arthur's chair and watched him bleed onto the floor among the gears and springs and escapements. When he was dead, she took off his face.

Not literally. She took off the mask he had worn for twenty-three years—the mask of the quiet clockmaker, the mask of the man who loved her, the mask that had allowed her to get close enough to destroy everything she had sworn to destroy. She held it in her hands and felt nothing. Or rather, she felt everything, and that was worse.

At Arthur's funeral, she wore his last pocket watch on a chain around her neck. It still showed the time of their wedding. She went back to the shop and began repairing the clocks that no one would ever collect. She worked for forty more years, alone, in a room full of ticking. She never took off Arthur's face. Not because she could not, but because the face he had worn—the face of a man who loved her despite everything—was the only face she had ever wanted to see.

OTMES v2 Codes:
M1=8.0 M2=0.5 M3=6.0 M4=10.0 M5=2.0 M6=3.0 M7=7.0 M8=5.0 M9=8.0 M10=4.0
N1=0.3 N2=0.4 N3=0.6 N4=0.5 N5=0.4
I1=0.8 I2=1.0 I3=0.3 I4=0.6
Theta=180.0 R=0.0 TI=68.0

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