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TLDorian Tick Tock

I usually spend the days after the storms searching the beach below the cottage. I'm a bit of a collector, of unusual things. The odder the better. Sharks teeth, ammonites, whale bones, I lovingly retrieve from the surfs fluid tentacles and take home to hang on the walls of my little cottage above the wind swept cliffs. There we can both sit together and admire each other like old lovers recently reunited.

Bleached white rubber ducks, a box of surgeon's instruments, small pieces of scrimshaw with delicate etchings of whaling ships from times gone by cut into their surfaces. I have a place for them all.

A ships figurine carved in the shape of a mermaid, her skin tanned deep brown by the elements stands in my front lawn and judges the occasional passer–by with her beautifully sad face and simmering golden eyes. I don't sell the things I find, that would be rude, they have travelled so far to find me. Why would I when they have been so lovingly crafted by the elements. The tumultuous sea, the ravaging sand, the blanching of the sun can turn something quite ordinary into a thing of uncommon strangeness? I once found ball of ivory ambergris washed up in the foam on the water's edge, the vomit of the whale so prised by perfumers. I still have it, tucked away in the one of the drawers in my bureau.

Sometimes when the storms rage I stand on the beach watching the brooding ocean, my coat flapping angrily around my ankles, listening to the shrieking of gulls lifted high by the winds. Sprays of surf roll off the towering waves, wild horses trying to break free of the surface only to come crashing down in giant plumes of spray and be dragged back kicking frantically into the torrid green depths.

The locals must think me odd but it's what I do. It interests me.

The beach here shelves off deeply. Dulgot's Trench lies but two hundred feet out. Named after the man who first surveyed it, Dulgot lived in my house. He spent his life mapping the trench, working up and down the coast in a weathered old trawler, with nothing but a sounding line in his hand and the voice of the sea whispering in his head. The trench is too deep to dive. We have travelled into the moon, mars, visited inhospitable planets and reached out to touch the distant realms of space but still our oceans evade us.

When he was too old to take a boat out alone he used to walk the beach like me, collecting. The locals left him alone, after all it was his trench. They say he went mad, driven so by the outlandish things he used to collect from the beach and nightmares bought on by the thoughts of what might lurk down there in the trench. He was taken to the sanatorium over on the moors and buried at the church at St Mawkes amongst the bent trees and wilting flowers. It is a bleak place. I have looked, there is no tombstone for him there but it is a tale as folks around here would have you believe.

Yesterday a storm brewed up from the west and came down upon us like the ancient furies. Torn from their chthonic world they raced along the shore crying vengeance and havoc.

Barely had they left and I'm scouring the foreshore for finds. I pick up an ancient shell from the water's edge, thrown up by the recklessness waters. Oval, black, glassily green, to most it's nothing special but I have an eye for such things. It's deceptively heavy, as I walk back up the beech I spin it in my pocket and test the surface, round and smooth.

At the cottage I check it carefully, it has a small hairline crack in it, the merest chink as I run my fingernail across it. It was not there when I picked it up. Perhaps it's a dragon's egg. The thought makes me chuckle to myself. I caress it for a few moments then lay it on the rug in front of the crackling fire.

I stoke the fire, make some broth and sit and watch my new find. Outside it's getting dark, I dose off in to a fitful sleep crowded with dragons and mermaids.

I wake up with a jolt. The fire glows an infernal heat. He is sitting there on my couch, he has found my tobacco and sucks thoughtfully at my pipe. Smoke grows like ivy in a tangle of wisps and trails about him.

'Ah, you're awake.' He picks up a cephalopod fossil from the table next to him and explores the surface with his glittering eyes. 'This is nice.'

'It's old, very old, washed up from the trench.'

He looks up. 'Not so old. Many things have lain down there longer.'

The pendulum in the grandfather clock in the hallway has stopped moving. I notice the absence of the reassuring rhythmic sound of the movement. The second hand on my Captains clock on the mantelpiece stands suspended, inert. Oblivious to the passing of time.

He follows my eyes and leans forward as if we are to enter a Faustian pact. 'I'm Mr Tick.' His face twists into something odd as if he has made a joke.

Mr Tick has shaggy oiled hair like seaweed I think, he's pale like the moon. He is wearing one of my suits, one I purchased for a funeral of a friend long ago, one who has long since left these strange shores. It's dark and sleek and mirrors its wearer well. My jet cufflinks flash their teeth from under his cuffs. His long white fingers delve into my tobacco pouch and pull out a weft of weed.

He notices the broken shell on the floor and reaches down and throws it into the flames, instantly the fire flares a sodium yellow throwing grotesque shadows across the roughhewn walls of the little room. A fugue of evil smells fills the room, deep and earthy like something left slowly rotting for eons now disturbed. For a moment I feel dizzy, disoriented by the thick fumes.

'Like some?' He hands me my tobacco pouch. His fingers are cold to the touch like they have been held under icy water.

We sit in silence getting the measure of one another. Outside the wind bellows and roars and pounds its fists upon the walls.

'Your home is most…. interesting.' He is unconvincing. He stands and picks up a battered wood voodoo mask and inspects it, his bitter eyes flicking from it to me as he turns it in his chilled fingers. The mask seems to shrink and grow before him as if his touch has bought alive an extinct magic from within it. He drops it with a clatter and moves on, prodding, turning and checking. Like an inquisitive child looking for an entertainment to assuage his boredom.

'I travelled once, when I was young, I collected things. I still do here on the beach by the sea.' I remark. He is holding the plastic duck. He's going to ask what it means but decides not to, replacing it with an air of distain on the table.

Outside the twigs of the branches of the twisted bushes driven to impetuosity by the wind claw upon the surface of the windows. Drawn by their scratching he stands and stares up at the night sky and the stars. 'Did you know that by looking at the light of the stars you are looking back in time. Up there far away is the Andromeda galaxy. We see it as it was two million years ago not as it is now.'

'When humans first walked on the Earth.'

'Exactly,' he swings around. 'Can you imagine what it would take to travel such an infinite distance. Nothing could survive it.'

'Nothing.' I agree.

'Unless of course you had the mastery of time itself. Then such a thing would be possible.'

'Is such a thing possible?'

He ignores my question. 'You have travelled you say? I have travelled too. We were cast like seeds into the solar wind to drift across the vast unknown realms of space, a journey that should last an eternity, gone in an instant. Such are the vagaries of physics.' As if to emphasise his point he quickly strikes his match, the flare lighting up his pockmarked face, 'We arrived as the masters of time on a planet where all things would be beholden to us.'

He blows out his match. His tongue is long and redder than ochre.

'To land at the bottom of the trench is something you cannot have foreseen.' I offer.

'Down in the fathomless depths where the strange things lurk and whirl through the primordial soup their great jaws snapping at the darkness. I have seen perplexing things during my solace down there while I waited. But it was only time,' his voice elevates. 'I have waited a long time or is it no time at all? A conundrum. My friends are waiting for me to get them.'

'It will not be easy, others have tried.'

'Others?' he tilts his head and reflects. 'I'll manage. Your world rests in a timeless sleep. No rush.'

'Is that the time?' I look at the clock, the hands have not moved.

'How it's flown.' Mr Tick smiles and steps toward me his hand outstretched. 'I think your moment has come, hasn't it? I have work to do and your home will suit me while I undertake my labours. I yearn to be with my friends again. You understand.'

'Before you do have you seen this?' I show him the two halves I hold in my palms. They are smooth, lustrous like green jade. Two sides of a stone shell.

He steps back and raises his hand, his face twisting in confusion.

I clap them together in the air. No flashes, no bangs. It's as simple as that.

Mr Tick has gone.

'You can call me Mr Tock', I say to myself. 'I was once Mr Dulgot. And before that something else, I forget now. I open the drawer on my bureau and drop the shell in amongst the others.

I check my fob watch, the one I keep close to my chest. It always runs true, guided by my heart it never misses a beat. I then adjust my clocks and add back the lost five minutes. It always takes five minutes. They like to talk and I don't like to rush them, I don't get much company. My fob watch runs twelve hours, ten minutes ahead of every one else's. It serves as a reminder to me of the number of jade stones I have in my collection.

I sense there's another storm brewing. I should go down to the beach.

After all I am a collector. Of unusual things.