The Ticking Of The Clock

• Corwyn Susanto, Grade 8
• Short Story
• 2018

Suddenly, the whole street went dark. “IT’S YOUR STUPID SPELLS AGAIN!” he heard from the cranky next-door neighbour, Florence. Jonathan has been looking for a clock in his house’s walls, that has been annoying him since he moved in several months ago. He has tried doing many things to drown out the noise of the ticking, like placing other clocks everywhere in the house and using silencing charms, however he is bad at doing them, and it always ends up being a darkness charm, which removes light from everywhere within a 100m radius. He does know one person who can do a silencing charm well – his cranky neighbour, Florence. She cannot do magic for whatever reason, which sucks for Jonathan.

The next thing he knew, there was pounding on the door, and when he opened it, there was the whole street of neighbours at his door, and they looked sleepy. He looked at the nearest clocks to him, they read: [2:57]. The closest one to him then asked him to keep it down during the night, or he would call the police. Another one asked about all the noise has been making all the time, and Jonathan responded with the same excuse he always uses during this scenario: “It’s the house.” Annoyed, everyone went home. As soon as Jonathan shut the door, he heard a loud ‘DONG!’ followed by 7 more dongs.

When it was time for afternoon tea, Florence came in to Jonathan’s house with her famous (to Jonathan) cookies and said to him, “How would like your cookies this time? Crushed and poured down your pants, or stuffed in your mouth?” As they were EATING the cookies, Jonathan said to Florence, “I think that there is a clock in these walls, and I need to find it. Could you help by any chance?” Florence then replied with the obvious answer, “FINE!” When it was 3pm, there were 7 loud dongs from that clock. Florence thought to herself, “Last time it was eight, now it’s 7, what happens when it gets to one!”

The next day, Jonathan came back from the local warehouse with the following: 2 axes, 2 jackhammers, 1000 horseshoes, a 1 kg bag of pumpkin seeds, a hammer, earmuffs, 10 clocks and who knows what else. He got all of these to help with finding the clock-in-the-walls-of-my-house project. They started with a plan to find the clock, and then started looking for it, starting in the attic.

After a few hours, they reached the boiler room. They opened the base of the boiler, which surprisingly, lead to a ladder, which lead to the clock. Then Jonathan took out his axe and started hitting what seemed to be a keyhole. But when he did, a bolt of some sort of energy shot out from the keyhole and hit them both. When they woke up, they were in the living room and could not remember a thing about what happened.