Four! Five! Six!
He staggered, clapping his hands over his ears to keep them from bursting.
Again, again – Seven! Eight! – the tempest tore the air. Shaken he fell against the wall, eyes shut, his heart stopped with each storm of sound.
‘Quick!’ Douglas shouted. ‘The crackers!’
‘Kill the darn thing!’ shouted Tom.
‘I’m supposed to say that,’ said Doug. ‘Kill it!’
There was a striking of matches and a lighting of fuses and the crackers were thrown into the maw of the vast machine.
Then there was a wild stomping and commotion as the boys fled.
They bolted through the third–floor window and almost fell down the fire escape and as they reached the bottom great explosions burst from the courthouse tower; a great metal racketing clangor. The clock struck a
gain and again, over and over as it fought for its life. Pigeons blew like torn papers tossed from the roof. Bong! The clock voice chopped concussions to split the heavens. Ricochets, grindings, a last desperate twitch of hands. Then …
Silence.
At the bottom of the fire escape all the boys gazed up at the dead machine. There was no ticking, imagined or otherwise, no singing of birds, no purr of motors, only the soft exhalations of sleeping houses.
At any moment the boys, looking up, expected the slain tower face, hands, numerals, guts, to groan, slide, and tumble in a grinding avalanche of brass intestines and iron meteor showers, down, down upon the lawn, heaping, rumbling, burying them in minutes, hours, years, and eternities.
But there was only silence and the clock, a mindless ghost, hanging in the sky with limp, dead hands, saying naught, doing nothing. Silence and yet another long silence, while all about lights blinked on in houses, bright winks stretching out into the country, and people began to come out on porches and wonder at the darkening sky.
Douglas stared up, all drenched with sweat, and was about to speak when:
‘I did it!’ cried Tom.
‘Tom!’ cried Doug. ‘We! All of us did it. But, good grief, what did we do?’
‘Before it falls on us,’ said Tom, ‘we’d better run.’
‘Who says?’ said Douglas.
‘Sorry,’ said Tom.
‘Run!’ cried Doug.
And the victorious army ran away into the night.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
It was the middle of the night and Tom still couldn’t sleep.
Doug knew this because several times he heard Tom’s bedclothes fall to the floor, as if he were tossing and turning, and each time he heard the sound of the sheets and coverlet being reassembled.
At about two in the morning Doug went down to the icebox and brought a dish of ice cream up to Tom, which, he figured, might cause Tom to speak more freely.
Tom sat up in bed and hardly touched the ice cream. He sat there staring at it as it melted and then said, ‘Doug, an awful thing has happened.’
‘Yeah, Tom,’ said Doug.
‘We thought if we stopped the big courthouse clock we might stop the old people from holding on to – stealing – our time. But nothing’s been stopped, has it?’
‘No, sir,’ said Doug.