The Backward Clock
Time is not what you think it is in this city.
Mystery || Science || Revelation || Clock
The clock — the pocket watch, gold-cased, with the chain that had been wrapped twice around Aldric Vane’s dead fingers — had been entered into the police evidence system with the category “personal effects” by the officer who had first attended the scene that morning. It sat in an evidence bag in the property room of the Canal District precinct substation, logged, sealed, and officially unexamined, because the original attending officer had not opened a homicide investigation and therefore had not requested a forensic examination. Mara opened the homicide investigation. She requested the watch. It arrived on her desk at four in the afternoon in its sealed bag.
She called the department’s forensic clock specialist — Valdenmoor was one of the few cities that had one, a legacy of a 1970s art theft case involving a collection of antique timepieces that had resulted in the department hiring a horologist named Dr. Cassel who had been there ever since, performing perhaps two relevant examinations per decade and spending the rest of his time in a comfortable basement office surrounded by clocks. She liked Dr. Cassel. He was the kind of specialist who had surrendered entirely to his subject, which gave him a quality of focused happiness she found restful in the way that focused happy people always are.
Dr. Cassel examined the watch for an hour and a half. His report — verbal, delivered in his office while he held the watch under a magnification lens and spoke without looking up — was startling in three specific ways. First: the watch was not an antique, despite its antique appearance. The case was genuinely old — circa 1890, he estimated, Swiss manufacture, high quality — but the movement inside it had been replaced. Replaced with a modern mechanism, precision-engineered to a degree that he described, with some awe, as “beyond commercial production.” The mechanism had been custom-made. Second: the watch was running backward. Not broken — backward. The movement had been deliberately engineered to run in reverse, the escapement modified, the gear train inverted. It was not a malfunction. It was a design. Someone had built a watch that ran backward and put it in an antique case and wrapped it around a dead man’s wrist. Third: the watch was a transmitter. A receiver-transmitter, rather, Dr. Cassel clarified: embedded in the movement alongside the mechanical clockwork was a component he could not identify by function, but which he described as consisting of a miniaturized antenna array and what appeared to be a receiver circuit tuned to a specific frequency. The watch was receiving a signal. From somewhere in the city. From something that was broadcasting, continuously, on a frequency he had not tried to identify. The hands were moving backward in response to this signal, not as a metaphor but as a literal measurement: the backward movement of the hands corresponded to a countdown. To something. To whatever Aldric Vane had been trying to reach in the Ferren Quarter on the last afternoon of his life.
Mara held the bagged watch and looked at the hands, moving their fractional backward motion in real time, and did the arithmetic she had been doing since she read the index card. The vault will be accessible within forty-eight hours, Vane had said. He had said it, according to Seline, on the afternoon of the day he died. He had been dead for approximately thirty hours when Mara found the file. The watch was counting down. She looked at Dr. Cassel. “How much time is left on the countdown?” He examined the watch again, taking measurements she didn’t entirely follow. “Based on the current rate of backward movement, and estimating the start position from the wear pattern on the mechanism—” He calculated. “Approximately sixteen hours.” She stood up. “Thank you, Dr. Cassel.” “Detective.” She was already at the door. “Whatever that signal is transmitting to the watch — the receiver is tuned to an extremely low frequency. A frequency consistent with penetration of significant depths of water and soil.” She stopped. Turned back. “You mean it’s a signal that can reach underground.” “Through considerable amounts of water and earth, yes. Whoever is sending it is broadcasting from somewhere that requires that kind of penetration.” He looked at her over his glasses. “Or to somewhere that does.”