He tried to scream as he stared down at the tool jutting from his chest, but instead drew in a gasp of frigid air. Pain flooded through him and he managed a high, keening wail that merged with the howl of the wind, torn from his lips and lost in the night sky.
His knees began to give out, but the shadow grabbed hold of him. He felt a flicker of hope that it had been some kind of misunderstanding, that he had stepped into a fight that was not his own, that he would see Navbahar again and would cast aside any guilt about her being his second cousin and profess his love to her. That smile. It lived in his heart.
Those hands danced him backward and over the edge, and then he felt himself falling. The wind whipped past him and he hit the snow and the loose rockfall, bounced, and kept falling. Sorrow swallowed him whole, and then his head struck a rocky outcropping as he fell, and Navbahar would never know his love.
Kemal tumbled from the ledge a moment later, cast farther out from the cave, hurtling faster, striking harder, tumbling over and over as his bones snapped and his limbs twisted grotesquely.
In time both dead men came to rest more than a thousand meters below the cave.
The snow kept falling, lightly but steadily. By morning, it would have obscured any trace of Arjen and Kemal.
And the real storm had not yet arrived.
NINE
Adam wakes from a nightmare in the guest room at his grandmother’s house. He can hear a ticking from the baseboard heating and the occasional pop from the hardwood floor. He doesn’t remember the nightmare, but his heart is still drumming hard and so he lies awake for a while, listening to the heat and the house and breathing in the powdery sweet sachet smells of his grandmother’s house. He stays with Gramma Evie every couple of weeks and he loves being here, but he doesn’t like being awake at night. Not when Gramma Evie’s sleeping. And he especially does not like to get out of bed when the house is so quiet. But now he has to pee and though he tries to forget—thinking that if he doesn’t focus on it, the feeling might go away—it’s too late. If he doesn’t get up, he’ll wet the bed.
Sighing, he pulls back the covers and slips his legs out from under the covers. His toes are reluctant to touch the braided rug but he forces himself to get up, and then—once committed—he moves quickly, practically scurrying out of the room and down the short hallway. He passes Gramma Evie’s room. She should be snoring in there. He can see her in bed, lying on her side like always, but without her usual snoring she looks almost…
No. He won’t think that.
The noises of the house seem to hush now, as he arrives at the bathroom door. He reaches inside, fingers searching for the light switch, and he can hear his heart beating.
No. That’s not his heart.
Adam glances to the left. At the end of the little hallway, just at the edge of the living room, is the grandfather clock. He blinks, because something isn’t right.
It isn’t right at all.
The clock is facing him, turned so that he can see the face of it from the hall. It should be facing into the living room and this doesn’t make sense at all. Gramma Evie wouldn’t have turned it like that. Heck, she couldn’t have turned it like that, not without help from him. She calls him her big, strapping boy, and this is why he knows she has not turned the clock by herself.
But still it is facing him.
Ticktock goes the pendulum. Slowly, though. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Back and forth like a hypnotist’s pocket watch in one of the cop shows Gramma Evie lets him watch.
Heart thumping but strangely calm now, like the hypnotist has done his job, Adam lets his hand fall to his side and then he is moving down the hallway toward the living room, toward the clock that should not be facing him. Gramma Evie leaves a light on, a three-way bulb on its dimmest setting, an antique lamp with a frosted glass dome covered in hand-painted roses. The roses turn the light a reddish hue, so the living room has a hellish little glow.
The heat has stopped popping in the baseboards. The floors have ceased creaking underfoot. All he can hear is the pendulum in the grandfather clock. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. His heart has slowed to match that slow cadence.
His feet are cold on the long, braided rug in the hall, the one Gramma Evie made herself.
Ticktock. The pendulum draws him on.
Draws him with its rhythm. Draws him with the mystery of how it came to be turned toward the hall instead of into the room. Draws him with the memory of the story Gramma Evie has told so often. The story of the dybbuk inside the clock, the evil spirit that had possessed her father and had been driven out and trapped inside the clock. The warning that if the clock ever stopped, the dybbuk would escape and poison the soul of whomever it entered next.
An awful story, Adam’s father said. An old wives’ tale, meant to frighten small children. He’d been furious with his mother for telling it to Adam. Gramma Evie has never told it again, nor has she ever admitted it is anything but the truth.
His bare feet slide along the floor. Now the bed calls to him. Cloaked in silence, suffocated in it, he takes another step toward the clock. And another. He tells himself to run, to hide under the covers, at the same time that his father’s voice echoes in his mind. An old wives’ tale, that’s what it is.
The red glow from the rose-painted lamp glints off the pendulum as it swings. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Tick.
The next tock never comes.
The pendulum has stopped.
Adam’s heart stops along with it. His breath freezes in his lungs. A scream rises within him, but never makes it to his lips. He stares with a horror that makes him tremble, stares at the darkness behind the stilled pendulum, waiting. A second or two or five. Seconds mean nothing with the clock stopped.
Something shifts there, behind the pendulum.
Hands appear. Long, thin fingers, withered things with mere wisps of flesh-covered bones. Eyes glitter in the darkness at the back of the clock case, the eyes of the dark figure standing in the rain in his dream, and he knows what it is. That it’s here for him. Those skeletal fingers reach out past the pendulum, grip the sides of the case, and its face emerges from the darkness, nudging the pendulum aside.
It has horns.
Adam has seen it before. Impossible, but he knows that he has. He knows this evil. Knows it well.
He screams….
He woke. The scream in his nightmare turned out to be silent. He sat up, casting aside the thick flap of his sleep sack, and whipped around the inside of his tent, searching for the grandfather clock. Fully expecting it to be there with him—there in the stall, in the ark, in the tent—facing him with the pendulum frozen.
For a moment all he could hear was the hammering of his heart. The sachet smell of his grandmother’s house remained in his nose, but then the frigid air snapped him more fully awake and stole that dream away. A low snoring made him twist around, thinking he might see Gramma Evie there with him, but it was only Meryam. She lay on her side, a bit of drool at the corner of her mouth, snoring quietly. Her brows were knitted, her sleep troubled, having her own bad dreams.