The Clock
Paul F Walsh
Time should be ticking like a bomb.
But time was not ticking.
This Seth Thomas clock had died at the exact moment that this Seth Thomas was born.
And this Seth Thomas was named after the clock.
His mother had been struck by the apparent coincidence.
The clock preserved the time of her son’s birth much as a dinosaur could be preserved as a fossil encased in stone.
8.21 pm, or was it 8.21 am?
Now that his mother was as dead as the clock, Seth could only speculate as to whether he was born in the morning or the evening.
Seth supposed that such a fact could be determined from his birth certificate, but his birth certificate was dead too, having been the victim of a terrorist bombing at the registry office.
Whether the bomber’s target had been a birth, death or marriage was unclear.
Seth could only speculate, and Seth was born to speculate.
Yes, time should be ticking like a bomb.
But time was not ticking, just as the fossil of a dinosaur encased in stone was not breathing.
And Seth supposed that this particular Seth Thomas clock had much in common with a dinosaur fossil.
Seth knew a lot about dinosaur fossils, and not a lot about clocks.
But Seth had researched this particular clock.
SPARTA was stamped on the clock’s base, though why the sons of Seth Thomas had presumably chosen this particular name for this particular model of mantel clock was unknown to this particular Seth Thomas.
Seth speculated that the name may have been inspired by the clock’s two Greek columns.
SPARTA.
Seth had once announced to the world’s media that he had discovered the fossil of a fallen angel near one of the mythical gates of Hades at Thermopylae, the site most famous for the tale of King Leonidas I and his 300 Spartans.
Yes, that moment of wrongful speculation was as stamped in Seth’s speculative memory as the word SPARTA was stamped on the base of this particular Seth Thomas clock that he now held upside down in order to study a second stamp on the base, which read: 5091 E.
Seth’s fallen angel was later determined to be the fossil of a giant moth from the Jurassic period.
Seth may have been big on speculative media announcements and small on fact, but such speculation had made him one of the most famous palaeontologists in the world.
The world’s media loved him.
And Seth loved them back.
Seth’s fame grew further when he wrongfully identified the fossilized remains of an Egyptian priest near the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza as being the skeleton of an alien.
Seth had gone on to speculate that this alien had built the pyramids and the Sphinx.
And the world’s media loved Seth even more.
Seth was dubbed The Great Speculator by the world’s media, and he did not disappoint when he announced his discovery of the fossilised skeleton of Emperor Caligula’s horse.
Seth had proudly speculated that Incitatus was still wearing his consular garb.
The Great Speculator had not lost his touch.
The skeleton of Incitatus was eventually exposed by the world’s media to be the wooden remains of a Roman vaulting horse.
Seth was not ticked off by this exposé because Seth was absolutely shameless.
Yes, Incitatus had been a swift and defining vault in his rise to international fame.
No equine regret could be seen etched on the face of this particular Seth Thomas as he studied his own reflection in the original crystal cover over the original paper dial of this particular Seth Thomas clock.
Seth toyed with one of the clock’s ornamental lion heads as he entertained a speculative memory of his alien building the Sphinx.
Seth smiled at his own reflection once more, and he noted that the flickering flames of the coal fire in his grate were also reflecting from this particular Seth Thomas clock.
Seth did hope that his fallen angel, the giant Jurassic moth, would not be attracted.
Seth had initially thought of calling his Thermopylae find the Angel of Death at the gates of Hades.
Seth sat back, warmed both by his Spartan memory and the flickering fossil fuel of his coal fire.
‘Strike me!’ Seth said, with no hint of irony or premonition.
Seth stared at the dead hands of the clock.
8.21
Seth speculated that this frozen time might never reveal its fossilised secrets.
The silent stillness of the hour hand and the roaring quietude of the minute hand echoed in Seth’s mind like the ambiguous last words of a dying man.
But Seth was wrong.
There was no ambiguity here, no lack of simultaneous meaning.
Seth was often wrong.
Seth was famous for being wrong.
Wrong was the new right!
Seth once again turned the clock upside down, and stared at the second stamp: 5091 E.
For once, Seth did not have to speculate.
His research had revealed the meaning of this second stamp.
This particular Seth Thomas clock was born in May 1905. For reasons best known to Seth Thomas Sons & Co., the digits appeared in reverse and the E, being the fifth letter of the alphabet, represented the fifth month.
Seth could have speculated on the reasons for this temporal code, but, on this particular occasion, Seth gave speculation a rare rest.
Well, that is not completely true, since Seth was distracted from speculating about the temporal code by the need to speculate about the claws or feet of this particular Seth Thomas clock.
What was it about May 1905 that set Seth’s inner alarm bell ringing?
For whom, or what, was his bell tolling?
And then he remembered.
In May 1905, the famous fossil hunter, Barnum Brown, had sent a fossil to Henry Fairfield Osborn at the American Museum of Natural History.
And Osborn had named this fossil Tyrannosaurus Rex (or Tyrant Lizard King).
It was truly remarkable, given the clock’s death at the moment of Seth’s birth, that the month in 1905 of this first official naming of a Tyrannosaurus Rex coincided with the birth month of this particular Seth Thomas clock.
This was an appealing pealing of coincidence, but Seth was almost deaf to such cerebral campanology because his senses were now utterly consumed by the clock feet before him.
Yes, art imitating life, or perhaps art imitating myth, but what life or what myth?
To what species of creature did the primordial, reptilian snouts of these metal pretend feet belong?
A mythical dragon, perhaps?
But this particular Seth Thomas inevitably speculated that this particular Seth Thomas clock was standing on the snouts of dinosaurs.
And the fossils of these pretend dinosaurs were emerging snout-first from the Adamantine black and green-marble-effect casing in which they were embedded.
Being a breech birth himself, this particular Seth Thomas envied any creature that could stick its snout out first to see what kind of a world was waiting outside.
And Seth knew what was waiting outside at this particular moment.
The world’s media was waiting.
Seth had deliberately timed the media conference for 8.21 to align with the moment of his birth.
This particular timing seemed appropriate.
After all, Seth was about to announce the birth of a whole new field of palaeontology.
This particular Seth Thomas then noted that his fob watch was slowly but surely approaching agreement with his dead Seth Thomas clock.
This media announcement would shock the world.
Seth threw the doors open, turning at the last second to enter the next world bum-first.
The world’s media surged forward, and this particular Seth Thomas dropped dead at precisely 8.21 am.
Time should be ticking like a bomb, but this bomb had exploded with no ticks.
There was not even a tock as Seth’s mortal clock case hit the marble floor.
Seth had always been a rather broken, eight-day wonder, an antique with a missing key and no spring in his step.
But even a broken clock gets things right twice a day, and this particular Seth Thomas clock had surely surpassed itself.
This particular Seth Thomas was born at 8.21 and died at 8.21.
The world’s media has long pondered what it was that The Great Speculator wanted to announce just prior to his untimely death.
The world’s media did not get to hear Seth’s final speculation that a certain bulge in the fossil indicated a pouch.
And that this pouch meant that Seth had discovered the first marsupial dinosaur, a mammalian, reptilian Tyrannosaurus Rex, embedded in coal, aptly named by Seth for Old King Coal as Tyrannosaurus Rex Carbo Marsupialis.
But the world’s media did hear the medical announcement after the doctor had finished trying to wind this particular Seth Thomas back to life.
‘His ticker gave out,’ the doctor said. ‘He always did have a bad ticker.’
Copyright Paul F Walsh 2022