Stop all the clocks || Theodore Nott

V. A Secret Life

The day that strange man came with the strange watch, Sienna Melrose set about in the evening to try and uncover what she could. She started slowly, choosing the large book on clockwork that used sand-timers, but nothing in those books was even remotely close. After a few more hours, she had upturned half the books in the store room, and still to no avail. At 11:57, the electricity went out. She should have called the electrician weeks ago, but had never got round to it.

Fumbling in the dark, she found a matchbox, and lit some of her Dad's old candles that used to decorate the shop, and stopped by the door to her Dad's room. She hadn't been in there since he left. He'd moved out of the flat - said he didn't want to take up space. Sienna said he should know he didn't have to do that, but he wouldn't listen. He was stubborn as anything, her dad.

Despite his absence, she felt like she was invading his space. Her father had been a kind man, always, but very much held privacy in high regard. Instinctively, she went for under the bed, where she'd imagined all sorts of secrets to lie as a child. Perhaps it came from the fact that he used to hide his birthday presents for her under there, so for a young Sienna it had always been a mysterious and forbidden land indeed. Getting down onto her knees, she began pulling out contents so thick with dust it made her cough and filled the room with a heavy air.

An old prayer mat, rolled up, tattered, both empty boxes and full ones filled with old ties, shoes, trinkets from his travels. She was starting to think that this was more trouble than it was worth; hours of leafing through her dad's old things to find nothing, only to have to spend hours putting them all back the next day. But never in her life had her father failed to tend to a watch; even the strangest, oldest concoctions. He would sit at his desk by candlelight (he preferred it that way), the magnifying lenses up to his eyes, and tinker away at dusk. He was a toy-maker and the best there was, only his toys played with time.

She dragged out a stack of old books, leaving a smear of grey dust on the wooden floor, and began to flick through them. They were books from his childhood, she guessed, with childish drawings and scribbles in poorly written Arabic. 'Yeti' she read phonetically, which annotated a rather comical drawing of what looked to be a particularly hairy relative, but apparently not. A few pagers over was a drawing of a rather sikly looking child which had 'Ghoul' (spelt Gool of course) next to it. She couldn't help but smile, and leaned through the next book. It was a diary, this time written in a mixture of Arabic and English.

Baba says that I cannot have a wand, which is unfair because Fatimah has one. I have made my own out of the tree in our garden, but I can't make any spells yet. When I do I know Baba will let me have a handsome one like Fatimah's.

Sienna chuckled, shaking her head. She had always known her dad was eccentric, but from what it looked like, this was not the only page of him complaining about wands. She had always guessed she had got her madness from her mother, but she was beginning to think the trait now lay on her father's side of the family. He almost never spoke about his family to her. In fact, never, of his own volition. Vague remarks, dead ends and roads leading to no-where. It seemed odd to think that they were so difficult to talk about when all her dad could write about as a child was not being allowed a silly toy. Sienna put the book down with a sigh, rubbing her eyes. She had lost the voracious energy she'd had at the start of the evening, but the more she searched it seemed the further answers became.