The Disappearance of everette grey

This story began as something else entirely.

It emerged during an early draft of the second Valorium novel - one I ultimately chose not to

keep. That version of the book was expansive, ambitious, and fun to write, but it leaned too far

into excess. It relied on unnecessary leaps, too much spectacle, and ideas that felt ungrounded. In

the end, it didn’t ring true, so I let it go.

Almost all of it.

What remained was a single idea - one that fit thematically, but not contextually. It belonged

to a different era, a different weight of time. No matter how thoroughly I reworked the novel,

that idea refused to settle into place. So instead of forcing it to belong, I separated it completely.

I imagined the original draft had never existed.

This story was written as if it were the first thing to come from that idea - not a fragment,

not a remnant, but a beginning in its own right. Free from the demands of the larger narrative, it

became something quieter, more grounded, and more deliberate.

I have long been fascinated by the manipulation of time and the idea of other worlds. This

story was an opportunity to explore both - not through scale or spectacle, but through restraint.

That is why it exists.

The Disappearance of everette grey

1.

I started the case file with a sentence I did not believe.

Subject: Everette Grey

Status: Missing. Presumed dead.

Note: Footprints cease without physical cause.

Even writing it felt like endorsing someone else’s superstition. I underlined without ‘physical cause’, as if emphasis could turn doubt into evidence.

My name is Michael Kestrel. I have been a Constable of Brackenmere for eleven years. I’ve hauled drunks from the river, broken up knife fights at Millers’ Hall, and fetched home more than a few wandering husbands. In all that time, I never had reason to question the simple sequence of a day: dawn, work, supper, sleep. A thing left a mark when it passed and stayed gone when it left. That was the order of it.

Until Everette Grey.

He disappeared on the coldest night of January - the sort of cold that makes the air thin and brittle so that each sound carries too far and dies wrong. The fog had frozen in the reeds along the river, a white crust clinging like cobwebs turned to glass. The bridge over Brackenmere’s narrows was slick with frost; the boards complained under every step, a long wooden spine over black water.

They say he went out alone with a lantern. They say he moved with singular focus. They say many things. My work began at first light, not with rumors, but with what his absence had done to the town.

I was roused by a hard knock at my door. It was Mr. Aldren, the butcher, red-faced and breathless, his apron thrown over a sweater.

“Everette’s gone,” he said. No greeting. No preamble. “He never opened the shop. Light’s still on. Door’s ajar.”

Most men in town could go missing half a day and no one would fuss. Everette wasn’t most men. The clocks made him important.

Brackenmere runs on three sounds: the river, the mill, and Everette’s bells. He wound every public clock, every shop timepiece, the tower in Saint Olwen’s. He kept us all pointed in the same direction. Order, defined by gears and brass.

I pulled on my coat, took my ledger, and we walked.

Dawn came on thin and grey. The streets were half-silent, the way they are when people are awake too early for anything except worry. We found a small cluster outside Grey’s shop - Aldren’s wife, two of the dockhands, Martha from the grocer’s, shawl clutched to her neck.

“No one’s been inside,” Martha said, then, catching herself: “I mean… we don’t think so.”

The door stood open only an inch, the brass bell above it swaying with the draft. I stepped in first.

It was the smell that met me: oil, iron dust, pine resin, a faint trace of tobacco. Familiar. Comforting, even. Benches lined the walls, each laid out with tiny screwdrivers, pincers, coilsprings, shells of clocks at every stage of disassembly. It should have looked chaotic. It didn’t. Every gear was nested in its own small universe of order.

“Mr. Grey?” I called. My voice came back softer, as if the ticking absorbed it.

Because there was ticking. A lot of ticking. Layers of overlapping beats, some brisk, some languid, filling the room like rain on a tin roof. But it was wrong. If you listened closely, some ticks did not match the others. Little hesitations, syncopations.

On the counter where Everette usually greeted customers sat a small brass key, his spectacles folded neatly beside it. Behind the counter, the doorway into his private workroom yawned dark.

“Wait here,” I told them.

I moved through.

The back room was cluttered but precise - shelves of records, drawers labeled in tiny meticulous handwriting, a narrow bed with the blanket folded in a tight, squared corner. And on the central table, under a glass dome, was something that did not belong in any ordinary man’s house.

I had seen it once before, in passing. Everette had not offered to explain it, and I had not asked.

It was a clock, and it was not.

Twelve concentric dials nested inside one another like ripples on water. Some bore numbers, others strange fine markings like notations on a musician’s staff. Three separate sets of hands moved in contrary rotations - some clockwise, other counter, some lurching in small increments, others gliding smooth. The casing was a polished dark metal I couldn’t name, almost black but catching light beneath, like banked coals.

This was The Meridian, his pet project.

Unlike the others, its ticking didn’t blend. It cut. A faint, high-pitched click like a fingernail tapped against glass, steady as a metronome and entirely indifferent to the rest.

I wrote, ‘Meridian present. In operation. No sign of struggle.’ Then I went looking for Everette.

We canvassed the neighbors. Mrs. Hobb saw his shop light after midnight. The dockhands swore they’d heard boots on the bridge sometime past three - “just one pair,” one of them said, as if that mattered. Martha, eyes red and wide, insisted she heard a single creak from the bridge in the hush before dawn, so pronounced it woke her from sleep. She looked ashamed saying it, like she knew it sounded mad to claim you knew one creak from another.

I followed the route they said he’d taken: down Green Lane, past the shuttered grocer’s, along the road where the gas lamps dwindled out and frost grew thicker, toward the river’s narrowest point. The air stung my lungs; my breath came out dense.

The bridge waited, stiff and white.

Boot prints marked the approach: standard size, worn heels, the right toe turned slightly outward - Everette’s gait, as recognized by half the town from watching him pace while he thought. They led up the wooden planks, darker ovals in the frost. I walked beside them, careful not to disturb the pattern.

Ten steps. Fifteen. Twenty.

Midway over the water, the prints simply stopped.

I crouched, my knees complaining. The boards were slick, the frost thin as breath.

Nothing. No smear, no drag, no broken rail. The river below moved slow and black; if a man had gone over, he would have shattered the ice sheets along the edges, left some sign. There was none.

The last pair of prints stood clear and unhurried. No deepening of tread to suggest a jump, no scuffle.

I checked the rails - Solid. The gaps - Narrow. I looked up; I don’t know why. Old reflex - as though the man might have taken wing.

Behind me, Aldren lingered at the entrance to the bridge, not daring to come further.

“Well?” he called.

“Well, he didn’t bloody evaporate,” I said.

The river said nothing. Somewhere distant, a mill whistle cried six o’clock.

I measured the distance by habit. The prints ended fourteen boards from the far side. Roughly the midpoint. I knelt again, gloved fingers tracing the woodgrain around the final step. My breath ghosted over it.

For a moment, I could have sworn the imprint grew sharper, as if fresh.

I stood abruptly.

By noon, I had taken statements, marked the prints in my ledger, and organized a search along both banks. Men with hooks broke the ice and dragged the shallows. They found nothing - no coat, no hat, no body. Not even the lantern.

By evening, the town had turned thoughtful. Brackenmere doesn’t panic. It simmers. People spoke softer, as if Everette might hear them.

At dusk, I returned to his workshop with a warrant and a headache.

Inside, the shop felt fuller, though nothing had moved. The ticking pried at me. I locked the door behind me out of habit, though from what, I couldn’t say.

I examined The Meridian.

Up close, it was worse. A normal clock offers comfort: one hand following another, small promises that each second holds the next. This thing refused to soothe.

The outer ring’s hand ticked forward with crisp authority, marking seconds. The next ring inward dragged itself backward, resistant, like something pushed against its will. Deeper yet, hands jerked in stuttering intervals, starting and stopping on no sequence I recognized.

Beneath the dome, condensation speckled faintly, from what source I didn’t know. It reminded me, absurdly, of a terrarium - a sealed world growing its own weather.

A brass plate at its base read: ‘Meridian I’ and beneath, etched much more faintly, almost scratched: ‘Not when. Where.’

“Stupid,” I muttered. “Clocks don’t measure places.”

Still, I found myself listening, trying to hear if its ticking matched my pocket watch. It didn’t. My watch counted in steady beats - one-two-three-four - while The Meridian interposed extra ticks and absences, like it was slipping them in between my seconds.

I closed my eyes for a moment.

Behind my lids came the bridge at dawn, detail-sharp: the prints, the frost, my own breath in the air. For an instant the memory sharpened into something too precise - I saw the exact pattern of Everette’s heel, the tiny nick on the edge of the board, a droplet of water that hadn’t been there. I opened my eyes quickly.

In my hands, my watch had stopped at 3:07.

I hadn’t wound it to that time. I hadn’t wound it at all today.

I rewound, checking the mechanism. Perfectly intact. When I set it again, it resumed without complaint.

“Everette Grey,” I said to the empty room, half-chiding, half-inviting, “whatever you’ve built here, it’s interfering with my work.”

I removed the dome.

No burst of cold. No sulfur. Just the exposed machine and that high thin ticking, which seemed somehow louder without the glass.

The case at the back showed four recessed screws, their slots unmarred. Everette had not opened it since finishing. I didn’t either, though something in me itched to.

Instead, I searched his desk.

Ledgers, as expected. Lists of customers. Diagrams of escapements and pendulums. Then a slimmer notebook, spine cracked, filled with tighter script. The headings were different here: Resonant Hours, Echo Harmonics, Interval Displacement. No dates, only sequences:

2:13 — weak.

2:47 — stronger. Auditory bleed.

3:07 — consistent. Bridge.

Under 3:07, he had drawn a ring of small marks. Footsteps.

I read it twice. The rational part of my mind wrote it off as private obsession, the way clever men sometimes burrow into absurdities when left alone too long. Another part of me - the part that counted those boards on the bridge again in memory and arrived at the same midpoint - went very quiet.

When I left the shop, I locked it and kept the key.

Walking home along the river, I passed the bridge in the last light. Men had tramped it all day; the prints were gone, scuffed into anonymity.

Halfway across, the boards groaned.

Nothing unusual. Bridges complain. Wood settles. The sound went through me all the same.

I paused at the midpoint. Looked down. The river moved black beneath, bits of ice knotted on its surface like floating bone.

“Not without physical cause,” I said to the water, as much to steady myself as to contradict my own growing unease.

By the time I reached my door, I’d convinced myself of the simplest version: Everette slipped. The river took him whole. We’d find him downstream snared in reeds, pockets sized with tools, face waxen, mystery ended.

I filed my report. I made tea. I loaded my revolver, though I had no expectation of using it.

That night, I woke in the dark with the taste of river water in my throat and the sound of wood creaking once, clean and singular.

The clock by my bedside, set faithfully by Everette a week prior, showed 3:07.

Somewhere in town, across the black ribbon of water, the unseen gears of The Meridian ticked on.

And for the first time in eleven orderly years, I had the feeling that an investigation was not unfolding forward, but being watched from its end.

2.

I logged the sound as if it were a complaint.

03:07 — woke to creak consistent with bridge timbers under load. No visible cause.

That was how the second day began: pretending I could cage unease in a line of ink.

Morning came low and colourless. I went through the motions - shave, cold water, uniform - but the rhythm felt a half-step off, the way a song does when someone claps just out of time. On my kitchen shelf, the wall clock Everette had serviced two weeks prior ticked briskly along.

I waited, listening.

There it was - underneath its beat, softer than breath: another tick, slightly late. An echo of the first.

I shook it off. Men in my position turn jumps at shadows into ulcers. I locked my door and walked toward town.

The streets were busier, which is to say more people were out pretending they had errands that took them past Grey’s shop. There is a particular gait to a worried town - too slow for efficiency, too fast for leisure.

Martha stood outside the grocer’s, sleeves rolled up, hair pinned in a rush. She caught me as I passed.

“Constable,” she said. “Have you… ”

“We’re still dragging,” I said. “We’ll find him.”

“That’s not…” She stopped, pressing her lips together, as if the words might bite. “Our kitchen clock stopped at three-oh-seven. Twice. Yesterday and again today. It… jumped. Like it fell.”

“Clocks stop,” I said.

“Not this one,” she answered, with a conviction that made me wish she’d shouted instead. “He tuned it himself last month. Said it’d outlast him.”

Behind her, the clock hung crooked on the wall above sacks of grain. The hands pointed cleanly at eight twenty-one. As I watched, the second hand shuddered. Stalled. Jumped forward in a small, spiteful lurch.

“I’ll have a look this afternoon,” I lied, because I had no intention of becoming Brackenmere’s mechanic of anxieties.

I walked on. At Hobb’s bakery, I got the same question framed differently: “Any news?” At the mill, the foreman asked if he should ring the noon bell “in case it confuses the clocks.” Men laughed, thinly.

Under it all, a sound. Not constant, but recurring - a faint tick in places that shouldn’t tick. The hitch between one spoken word and the next. The pause before a door hinge gave. I rubbed at my temple.

By mid-morning, I stood again inside Everette Grey’s shop with the key in my hand, the door locked behind me. I told myself it was necessary: evidence, records, understanding the man. I didn’t note that I was also fleeing the open air.

Within, the clocks resumed their chorus, surrounding me in carefully partitioned time. And beneath them, the clean, incisive click of The Meridian.

The dome was clear today. No misting. The concentric dials spun their contradictory paths in perfect defiance of ordinary sense.

I set my pocket watch on the counter beside it. For a moment, the two rhythms ran side by side: my watch,  steady; The Meridian, absolutely regular, but other.

Then, with a gentle surrender, my watch fell into step with The Meridian’s faster pulse.

The second hand began to race, matching the inner ring. I snatched it up. It stopped dead at 3:07.

My scalp prickled.

I put the watch away and turned to the notebooks.

Everette’s working ledgers were as before: names, repairs, dates. I slid past them, drawn again to the narrower volume with its unfamiliar headings. Resonant Hours. Echo Harmonics. Interval Displacement. Ink darker, as if he pressed harder the deeper he went.

I pulled it under the lamplight.

There are hours that repeat. Not in sequence, but in resonance. The way a note on a violin will wake a glass across the room. 3:07 is one such hour in Brackenmere. The bridge hears it.

Another page:

Everywhere is nowhere until observed. Time is obedient only to the witness. Where many eyes fix is where the seams thin.

He had circled the word where again and again until the paper had nearly torn.

On a later page:

The iron used to nail the bridge was drawn from the same vein as the Meridian’s casing. Like tuned forks. Two points on a single curve. We do not traverse hours; we traverse loci of attention along that curve.

In the margin, in smaller, sharper script, sat another line:

The hour has eyes. The bridge is its pupil.

My hand drifted towards that last sentence. The ink looked fresher than the rest.

I realized, slowly, that the smaller script was my own.

I had not written it.

I closed the journal, heartbeat high.

“Everette,” I said to the empty room. “What did you want seen?”

The ticking gave no answer.

In the afternoon, we found nothing in the river and called it a day to spare the men frostbitten hands. I kept Aldren on another hour, out of my own stubborn hope.

“You know him better than most,” I told him. “Walk the banks once more. From the bridge down to the bend. Look for anything that doesn’t belong.”

He grunted assent. Aldren wasn’t sentimental, but he’d bought his first watch from Everette and never forgave lateness.

Twilight thickened. I’d meant to meet him by the bridge at six. Instead, I found myself back at my desk, watching the minute hand crawl, listening to phantom ticks.

By the time I went down, the light had gone.

The bridge cut a black line across the silver-sown water. Breath smoked from my mouth. No sign of Aldren.

“Aldren?” I called.

No answer. Only the slow, big-bellied groan of the river under ice.

I walked onto the bridge, boots thudding. The planks complained. At the midpoint, I stopped.

There they were: fresh prints. Heavier than Everette’s, deeper, walking straight and unhurried from town toward the center. They ended on the same board.

No scuff. No dragged heel. No broken rail.

“Aldren,” I tried again, softer.

Wind moved through the uprights, humming like breath through teeth. Beneath it, very clear, came the faint sound of a voice.

Not above. Below.

I went to one knee, leaned over the rail. The river slid black underneath, dragging broken ice. The sound grew clearer: words spoken in a low, rough voice - Aldren’s - only backwards. Not language, but its cadence reversed. A whole conversation unwinding under water.

I stayed like that too long, trying to force sense out of nonsense. The cold needled my cheeks. At last I pushed myself up, throat tight.

By midnight, Aldren was officially missing. By one in the morning, I’d signed my name at the bottom of a second case file with too many of the same notes.

Subject: Aldren Cole.

Status: Missing. Last known location: Brackenmere Bridge, midpoint.

Note: Footprints cease without physical cause.

I stared at the repetition until the ink blurred.

When I finally lay down - boots off, revolver on the bedside table - I couldn’t sleep. The house ticked. Not just the clocks. The rooms. The spaces between the floorboards. My own teeth.

I took my pocket watch from my coat. It lay inert in my palm, hands at twelve.

“Enough,” I muttered. I pried its case open with my thumb.

The guts had been Everette’s work; I’d watched him clean and oil them once, neat and precise. Now there was nothing. No gears, no springs. Only a ring of dark metal fused perfectly into the casing, as if it had always been a single piece.

Like the gear in The Meridian.

I closed the watch with a snap and dropped it in the drawer.

When sleep finally dragged me under, my dream placed me on the bridge. Not above, but below it, standing on black water hard as glass. Overhead, I saw my own boots on the planks, paused mid-step. I called up to myself. The figure above did not stir.

Somewhere behind me in the dark, someone was counting. The numbers were wrong. They went: one, one, one, one -

I woke with a gasp, throat raw.

The bedroom clock read 3:07.

The third morning brought frost so thick it turned the town into a sketch. Lines and edges, no warmth.

Brackenmere runs on habit; people worked, because work was the only thing they had left that obeyed sequence. But they lingered as I passed, hanging back with tidings that wanted to be rumors and didn’t know how.

“Constable,” murmured Mrs. Hobb, flour up to her elbows. “I asked Arthur if he’d stoke the ovens and he said ‘I already have’ - and then he did. Twice. Same words. Like the first had slipped behind us.”

“Probably tired,” I said.

“At eight in the morning?”

The millhand posted at the yard’s gate stopped me next.

“You ever seen the tower clock do that?” he asked, jerking his chin upward.

Saint Olwen’s tower rises over Brackenmere, its face a pale circle in any weather. I looked up.

The long hand crawled toward the twelve. As it almost met it, it shuddered backwards to the eleven, then jerked forward again, as if fighting itself.

“Loose gear,” I said.

“Everette fixed it last month,” the man said. “Said it was the truest clock in the county. Said if it ever lied, we’d know the world’d gone wrong.”

Behind us, the mill’s own clock struck the half hour. Saint Olwen’s, confused, answered with three solemn chimes.

“That’s nothing,” the millhand added, voice down. “Last night my little boy told me the man from the clock shop waved at him from the puddle in the yard. But there wasn’t anyone there. Only the sky.”

I didn’t answer. I was already hearing it: three o’clock, sounding in things that had no bells.

Back in Everette’s workshop, I went straight to The Meridian.

The dome had frosted from the inside again, delicate crystals feathering outward from the center. My breath fogged the glass. I wiped a small circle with my sleeve.

My reflection stared back, pale, eyes ringed. Behind it, the concentric hands whirled.

I raised my right hand. In the glass, my reflected hand stayed down a fraction too long, then lifted, a beat late.

I froze.

The reflection smiled. I did not.

In that instant, I understood there are two kinds of fear: the kind that shouts run and the kind that says very softly do not move. This was the second.

A blink later, everything was ordinary again. My reflection matched me, unsmiling. The Meridian ticked its empty, precise rhythm.

I stepped back. The floorboard beneath my heel creaked with the exact pitch I’d heard on the bridge at 3:07.

Everette’s journal lay open on the desk, though I had left it closed. A draft from the door had rifled the pages, I told myself.

The final leaf was half-filled now.

Resonant point achieved. 3:07. Stable at bridge and device. Audio bleeds constant. Visual anomalies increasing. Return through recurrence. Do not follow -

The line ended in a flare of ink, mid-stroke.

Beneath, in a taut, spidery hand that was and was not Everette’s, new words had appeared:

He follows.

The ink shone wet.

I pressed my thumb to it on instinct. Dry. No smear. Just the illusion of freshness.

“No one is following anyone,” I said aloud.

From all around me, the clocks answered with a single, collective tick.

That night, every clock in Brackenmere struck three.

Not according to their own faces - they had no agreement there - but in their bells, their guts. Wall clocks in kitchens, pocket watches in drawers, the tower at Saint Olwen’s, the mill, the station, even the rusted carcass of an old longcase in Mrs. Perrow’s parlor that hadn’t run since her husband died - they all exhaled their bent notes together.

The sound rolled through the town like a slow wave: three.

People woke. Dogs howled. Somewhere, glass cracked.

I was already on my feet, boots half-laced, drawn like iron.

The streets wore the color of drowned bone. No one stopped me; those who watched from windows looked away quick, as if catching a man in his private shame.

The bridge waited where it always waited.

I stepped onto it. Each bootfall sounded too loud. Halfway, I paused.

Silence fell sudden and deep. No river. No wind. Only the malingered echo of that massed chime, humming in the bones of the wood.

I looked down.

The water below was wrong. It moved, but not with the slow, sullen drag of winterriver. It turned in tight, deliberate eddies, like gears without teeth trying to catch.

Between those motions, I saw a second surface: dull, still, a black mirror. In it, a man stood where my reflection should be.

He wore my coat, my hat. His boots aligned with mine. But his head tilted a fraction aside, studying me with an interest I reserve for crime scenes and loaded weapons.

I lifted my hand. Above the boards, my fingers obeyed. Below, in the mirror, the other hand lagged, then rose a beat late, like the reflection in The Meridian’s dome.

His mouth opened.

The sound that came up through the planks was ticking. Layered, multitudinous ticks, as if every clock in Brackenmere had leaned in to whisper through his teeth.

One. One. One. One.

I stepped back so fast my heel caught on a plank. The world snapped back: the river, the cold, the far-off bark of a dog.

The mirror was gone. Only rippled black water, shrugging at the intrusion.

I did not run. I walked, because I’m a constable and Brackenmere expects certain things of me. But inside, something fundamental had shifted, like a gear jumping its track.

In my pocket, the empty watch thrummed against my leg, warm as a living thing.

By the time I closed my door and slid the bolt, the horror had arranged itself into a shape I could almost name.

Everette Grey had not fallen, nor fled, nor been taken by any ordinary hand.

He had stepped sideways into a moment he’d taught to open.

And something on the other side of that opening had noticed us noticing it back.

3.

The town came apart quietly.

You would expect more noise. Sirens, screaming, fire. Instead the sounds in Brackenmere simply forgot whose they were.

The morning after the clocks all struck three together, I walked High Street and felt as if I were arriving a moment too late to every step. I’d put my right foot down and know that I had already put it down, and some memory of the movement was just now catching up.

Mrs. Perrow stopped me outside her gate.

“Constable,” she said. “Have I told you about the mirror?”

“You’re telling me now.”

“No,” she answered slowly. “I’ve told you already.”

She hadn’t. But I believed her.

She lifted a trembling hand toward the sitting room window. “I came in from the kitchen, and I saw myself in the glass. Only I was still washing the dishes. It… lingered. Just a beat. Then it caught up. It keeps happening when the clock says three minutes past… any hour.”

Two houses down, Mr. Hobb stood in his bakery doorway, watching flour fall. It was drifting upward, a fine white veil returning to his hands - no, that’s not true. It only looked that way for a blink, like my eyes had remembered the spill in reverse.

I wrote in my ledger:

Subject: Brackenmere (general).

Observation: Slippages. Residents reporting echoes of action & speech. Possible mass hysteria.

Underneath, in smaller script I did not recall forming, another line appeared:

Or perfectly rational observation of irrational order.

I shut the book.

By noon, three separate people told me they’d greeted me earlier in the day, though I’d only just seen them. Martha swore I’d already bought bread from her, exact coins, exact thanks. Her face crumpled when I denied it, like maybe I was lying, or the world was.

I began to notice my own handwriting on notices I hadn’t written yet. A message tacked inside the station, in my hand: River checks extended to east bank. Hours later, I gave that instruction. I had no memory of posting the notice.

None of this is admissible evidence. I record it anyway.

I went back to Everette’s shop because there was nowhere else left to go that didn’t feel already occupied by my own unfinished movements.

The key stuck in the lock as if it, too, had been used one time too many in one too few days.

Inside, the ticking should have calmed me. It didn’t. I listened carefully and realized the clocks were not out of sync anymore; they were painfully, perfectly aligned. Every wheel and gear in that crowded room moved to the same mechanical heartbeat.

Except The Meridian.

Its tick cut across the choir as it had before, high and precise. Only now it seemed… thinner. Like a sound made in another room and heard through a wall.

I approached.

The dome strained with a lace of frost from within. Beneath the glass, the nested hands performed their contradictory orbits.

I lifted the dome. The air around the device hummed faintly, the way a wineglass sings after you run a finger along its rim.

“Enough,” I told it. “You’ve had your say.”

I turned the clock gently onto its back. The rear plate still held four tiny screws. Everette hadn’t opened it. Neither had I.

I did, then.

Each screw came free too easily, as if they’d been waiting. The back plate slid off.

There were no guts inside. No gears. No springs. No fused ring of metal like the one they found when they opened it after Everette vanished.

Only a shallow hollow, edges scored with faint, burned-in markings—circles within circles, crossed by a straight line: a bridge through ripples. At the very center, three digits etched so small I nearly missed them.

3:07.

Something cold touched my spine from within.

Folded once along the inner curve lay a strip of paper, thin as onion skin. It crackled when I teased it free.

Everette’s hand:

The hour is not a number; it is a place where attention gathers. I have found its entrance. The bridge is iron and river and gaze. The Meridian binds the locus. I go to see if there is a road that does not lead downhill into rot.

Beneath, written with hurried care, a different line:

If I am not gone, then I am everywhere the hour holds its breath.

The last word trailed off, as if interrupted. Or as if he’d stepped away mid-stroke and never needed to come back.

I read it three times.

Loose interpretations: he was unwell. He was building belief around grief. He had done something irrevocable to himself in the name of order.

The truer interpretation pressed at the edges: he had succeeded.

Without the plate, The Meridian’s hollow hummed louder. I could feel it in my teeth. It seemed to answer something distant: the bridge timbers groaning, the tower clock’s reluctant swing, the shallow breath before a chime.

“You built a door,” I said. “Or you found one and built a handle.”

My reflection in the empty casing nodded with me, half a beat late.

I shut the back of the clock, leaving the cavity unfilled. It didn’t stop the hum, but it softened it.

The journal on his desk lay open again of its own accord.

My name was on the final page now.

Kestrel observes accurately. Does not yet accept. He stands where I stood. Resonant.

There was no attribution.

I shut the book very carefully, put my hand flat on the cover, and left it that way until my heart slowed. When I lifted my palm, the skin bore faint impressions of letters.

Back at the station I tried, for an hour, to write a normal incident report. The words turned sideways.

Subject: Michael Kestrel.

Status: Pending.

I scratched it out until the paper tore.

On the last night, I did not mean to go to the bridge. I mean that in the same way a man does not mean to fall asleep. Intention becomes irrelevant when the mechanism has been wound.

The town was unnaturally quiet - no late drunks, no foxes turning bins. Even the river sounded stalled.

I found myself standing on the road with The Meridian under my arm and my revolver in my pocket. At some point in the evening I had loaded it, checked the cylinder twice, placed it where my hand would fall. I did not remember that choice, but I recognized my own preparation.

Frost limned every rail and stone. The lamps along the road burned with a steady, bloodless light. No wind.

My boots met the first plank of the bridge.

Each step landed with the weight of something rehearsed. I had walked this way to check prints, to search for Aldren, to prove there were no miracles here, only wood and error.

Tonight, as I moved forward, I saw myself.

Not a metaphor. Across the span, faint as breath on glass, other versions of me occupied other nights, layered in the air: one holding a lantern, one measuring strides, one kneeling to examine where prints stopped. They were translucent, already past. Each moved in its own little loop, repeating the motions I remembered.

I walked through them. They didn’t feel like anything. But I remembered being them, and that remembering aligned with their repetition so precisely my stomach turned.

Halfway.

Here is the fact of it: the boards at the midpoint vibrated under my soles with a frequency too slow to hear, too precise not to feel. A low, patient note.

Below, the river.

I have looked down from that spot dozens of times. The black water sliding between ice, the drifting shards. Ordinary. That night it had a sheen too smooth to be anything but reflection.

I saw the sky. I saw myself.

Only not quite.

The man in the water wore my coat, my hat. He stood where my reflection should stand, but his posture was wrong, his head tilted like Everette’s when listening for a delicate hitch in a gear. His eyes were very bright.

I raised my left hand. Above, my fingers lifted. Below, his right hand rose a heartbeat late.

I put The Meridian casing on the rail between us. The reflection of the empty shell sat in his world as in mine.

He opened his mouth.

The sound that came up through the bridge was not speech. It was the steady, merciless tick I had been hearing inside walls and silences. It poured out of his throat like spilled nails. Behind it, faint but there, another undertone: words running backward, sentences unspooling.

I leaned closer, against all wisdom.

In the choked rattle of ticks, shapes formed:

not gone… merely elsewhere…

My own voice, from some earlier entry, folded back at me.

My hand went to the revolver. I drew it, useless weight, more habit than defense. The man in the water mirrored the motion a half-second off, steel glinting upward from the black sheen.

I thought: This is wrong. I thought: This is exact.

“Everette Grey,” I said. My breath smoked.

The reflection’s mouth moved around that name like he’d worn it for a while.

“You brought it here,” I told him. Or myself. Or the hour. “Whatever door you found. You left it open.”

The boards thrummed.

Behind me, in all those ghost-selves strung along the span, I saw understanding dawn at different times. One Michael looked up sharply. One backed away. One never noticed.

I understood then that my investigation had been a tour through completed choices. That I had been walking the groove left by Everette’s decision, not cutting a new path.

I could leave, I thought. I could turn, step back the way I came. The image was clear: boots on wood, solid ground, closing my office ledger on an unfinished case file. Let the new man sort the ghosts of clocks.

Down in the water, the other Michael watched that idea cross me. He smiled, kind as a hanging judge.

I realized with a kind of tired clarity that no one’s prints had ever stopped here.

They continued. Just not on wood.

The revolver felt very heavy. Between one breath and the next, my fingers uncocked the hammer, slid the weapon back into my pocket. A refusal, or a concession; I don’t know.

I put my bare hand flat on the plank at the midpoint. The wood beneath my palm was as cold as metal. In my bones, the counting began.

One.

One.

One.

A single moment, held tight.

The hum built. The world around the bridge—town, river, my own body—blurred like something seen through moving water. In that smear I saw other nights, other winters, faces I knew and did not know looking down from other centuries. Flickers only. A feeling of being observed from both shores of something narrow and deep.

I said, or thought, very distinctly: I see you.

The ticking stopped.

Silence.

Not the absence of sound. The presence of something that does not require it.

For that spanless span, there was no cold on my hands. No weight in my chest. No bridge.

Then the world exhaled.

I was standing at the rail, alone. The Meridian casing sat where I’d placed it. The river moved as rivers move. Ice huddled along the banks. No reflection but the true one.

Behind me, the length of the bridge lay empty. No afterimages. No echo-men.

My right bootprint overlapped the left of the last man to stand there: Everette’s. It fit imperfectly.

I picked up the casing. It was warm.

I walked back toward town. My boots left clear marks in the frost all the way to the cobbles.

I checked.

Twice.

After that night, Brackenmere quieted.

The clocks behaved themselves. Saint Olwen’s chimed the right hours at the right times. The mill bell rang when men pulled its rope, not on some shared, haunted cue.

People still spoke of oddities, but in past tense, the way one discusses a fever dream once it breaks.

Aldren’s wife wore black. No body was ever found. Everette’s shop stayed locked. Sometimes, Martha would stand outside it as if listening. Once, passing by, I heard a faint ticking from inside where no clock should be running.

I did not open the door.

I filed my reports carefully, stacked in chronological order. They made no sense as a sequence. They circled. But that is true of most lives once written down.

At some point — I do not remember the exact day, which troubles me - I wrote the following in my own case file:

Subject: Michael Kestrel.

Status: Unknown.

Last known location: Brackenmere Bridge, midpoint.

Note: No prints recorded beyond this line.

The script is mine. The ink is older than I think it should be.

I don’t know if I wrote it before or after that last walk.

Sometimes, when I read back through these pages, I find entries I don’t remember making. Observations from angles I never took. A mention of a new constable from London, arriving to look into our string of vanished men. He is described with a precision that feels more like memory than prediction. He holds these files, my files, and frowns at the phrase without physical cause.

When I blink and look again, that section is gone. Or I cannot find it. Or I decide I dreamed it.

I hear him anyway, sometimes. Turning pages. Pausing at my name.

On still nights, when I wake for no reason, the house is very quiet.

If I hold my breath, I can hear the bridge creak once, far off in the dark. A clean, familiar complaint of wood under the measured weight of a man crossing.

3:07.

I tell myself someone is out there, checking the rails, as I did. Doing his due diligence. Writing his lines. Underlining his doubts.

In the space between one heartbeat and the next, I am almost sure I remember standing where he stands now, reading words I have not yet written, told by a voice that sounds like my own, and Everette’s, and anyone’s who has ever thought that stepping outside the order of things would mean escape, and not simply another kind of obedience.

Then ordinary time resumes. The sound folds itself away.

The clocks in Brackenmere tick on, modest and well-behaved.

The Meridian’s empty casing sits on a shelf in the station, a harmless curiosity. When fog presses against the glass window, faint letters bloom and fade there in the condensation, gone too quickly for the new constable to see.

I see them.

Not gone. Merely elsewhere.