And he answered, “I have told you it is a very special clock. Never question me again.”
And so now we spent every day with Grandfather and no longer saw Mrs Bumble. Everything changed. We used to go to church on Sundays with Mrs Bumble and her family. Grandfather would march us out in little white dresses with our shoes all scuffed, wonky bows in our hair. We would sings the hymns and listen to the vicar give long and fumbling sermons about forgiveness and wickedness, his long finger tapping on the pulpit, his great tongue lapping in and out. He had a weedy smell, as if you lifted up a rock by a pool and put your nose close to it. The church was made of cold grey stone with an enormous painting of Christ crucified, a weeping woman at his feet. Around him were a group of men who looked too puzzled or stupefied to move: they just gazed at him dying.
“He died so we might live,” the vicar would say.
I wondered if Christ preferred the company of the dead.
Grandfather didn’t want us to attend church anymore. We were no longer allowed to leave the house. All day and night he would sit in his chair by the clock and listen. Listen for what, we wondered? The eyeballs of the clock moving back and forth, back and forth, ever watching and smiling.
I remember Mrs Bumble knocking at our door and speaking to Grandfather, and he told her to go away. He told her to mind her own business.
The night before I died, I dreamt I had turned into a ladybird.
When I woke up, I knew this was that last time I would see my sisters. I ran to the door to get Mrs Bumble to help, but the door was locked and the windows bolted. I screamed and Grandfather put his hands round my mouth.
He sat on his chair in front of the clock. He said that he had something very important to tell us. He said the grandfather clock was a god and had spoken to him during the night. He said that the clock wanted to turn us into ladybirds. He said he had built a wooden box under the bed.
He has gone mad, I thought.
He told my sisters to get into the wooden box. They were so frightened they did what he said, and then he nailed it shut.
He opened the clock and told me to get inside.
“No,” I said. My sisters were screaming. The clock started to chime.
He picked me up and stuffed me inside the grandfather clock and locked me in.
I can’t tell you how long I was in there. I remember thinking I was inside a stomach. I heard the beating of ladybird wings. I think I was being eaten.
After the darkness, time unravelled, deep, soft and black as ink. I became full of emptiness. It coiled into me like liquid, oozing through me, replacing me. Something was eating my eyes.
I remember hearing voices of men shouting and banging. I remember trying to cry out but my voice was gone. I remember the door of the grandfather clock opening and sunlight as bright as fire burning my face as I was lifted gently out by a policeman, whose name was Goliath. I was five years old and all my sisters were dead.
My grandfather was arrested and committed to an asylum. It was Mrs Bumble who had gone to the police and demanded they do something. If only you had gone sooner, Mrs Bumble. My grandfather claimed at his trial that the clock whispered in his ear. Said terrible, dreadful, wonderful things to him. He said he had no choice.
Goliath was a detective with Scotland Yard, then. When he carried me out of the grandfather clock, I begged him never to leave me. I screamed when he left my side, even for a moment. And so he stayed and vowed to protect me from that day forth. And he has kept his promise.
We arrive at Whitby station. Orange and brown butterfly wings dance over the hedges at the platform. We grab our bags and shuffle outside where great puffs of steam billow out of the train.
“I’m hungry,” I say, and Goliath grins and produces sausage butties from his bag and hands me one. I sink my teeth into it as a vampire into a human neck; delicious!
We sit on a bench and I can hear the seagulls crying, and smell salt and smoked kippers. My nostrils suck it all in. I love the smells here. Goliath tells me that we are going to be visiting a lady called Mrs Florence Pigwittle. He says that Mrs Pigwittle is a medium and she performs séances. He hopes she may be able to help me. He says that she is a celebrity of sorts and apparently has made contact with Lord Byron and Napoleon, and one of her guests last year was Arthur Conan Doyle, who praised her spiritual gifts. He seems sad when he tells me this; he doesn’t want to let me down.