After impulsively buying an antique cuckoo clock the previous day, Claire has spent a pleasant morning reading a book from her aunt’s collection, Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill. Her little terrier, Lute, has been keeping her company. She sets the book down on the dining room table and goes to the kitchen for a drink. That’s when she hears a mysterious sound, a sound that has no reasonable explanation…

From Clockwise, Chapter 2

Puck of Pook’s Hill still lay on the table, but it was no longer closed. The book rested open on its covers, splayed and vulnerable, and as Claire watched silently, several early pages curved upward of their own accord, paused at the midway point, and then gently tipped over to the left, as if someone were reading a few lines, considering them, and then idly turning a few more pages.

Claire glanced toward the window, wondering how the breeze could be doing this, knowing with certainty that it could not. The curtains hung still. Through the screened window, she could hear the neighbor’s small granddaughter randomly striking notes on a toy xylophone. Lute was whimpering.

The prickling sensation from yesterday returned, stronger than before, raising the hair in a strip from the nape of Claire’s neck over the top of her scalp, misting her forehead with perspiration, electrifying the skin around her lips. Her breath stuttered in her chest, and her hands drew up into icy fists. Several more pages turned part way, deliberated, and then continued on their trip to the opposite side of the book. The air above the pages fluttered lightly, tantalizingly.

Tendrils of coolness reached out for Claire, touched her wrists and shoulders and face. Sadness and longing that were not her own seeped through her, like spring water welling up into porous rock. Images of tiny white lights in bare tree branches, exotic purple flowers, and twisted locks of sun-bleached hair flashed through her mind, accompanied by a spiraling flute melody. She was, she realized, trembling with fear—definitely her fear rather than this other’s.

“Who are you? What are you?” she croaked.

At the sound of her voice, whatever was in the room withdrew. The coolness, the charged air, the contagious sorrow, the mysterious images—all were gone.

Claire emerged from the doorway, unclenched her fingers, and pressed them deliberately on the table, one hand on each side of the book. It looked perfectly ordinary now. Bending over it, breathing as if she’d been running, chilled now from the clamminess of her t-shirt, she noted that the open pages were numbers 62 and 63.

The clock’s steady ticking sounded like tiny feet marching.

“Hey,” she said shakily to the empty room. “Don’t you know that it’s hard on the binding to leave a book open like that?” And she shut her aunt’s volume with a snap.

© 2020 by Susan Borden
SusanBordenWriter.com