Uncertainly, she slowed the car and rummaged for a map.   According to that and the scribbled notes, she was still going in the right direction, it just didn't feel like it.   Then the car reached the gate and she was staring, in relief, at the sharply hidden turn, the entrance to a narrow overgrown track, bearing little resemblance to its image on the map.

She dropped the window and took stock.   A mossy, unpainted wooden finger-post, almost invisible in the vigor of the hedgerow, read   ‘Church Only.’   So she was on course spacially, but what about temporally?   She glanced down at her wristwatch, a tiny but elegant antique, her favourite, wonderfully reliable but totally unsuitable for workaday usage.   She checked it against the clock on the dash, ancient and modern in agreement for once.   So far so good.

With a couple of hours to go, the company's fat-cat celebrity would only just be sitting down for his free lunch.   A smile crossed her lips, fat-cats might be predictable, but you never could tell with clocks.   Collecting them, their histories and mysteries was her hobby.   In fact, the possibility of uncovering such a riddle was just about the only thing that could have got her down this neglected country track.   The scent of crushed greenery disturbed her, she closed the window and continued, jolting and swerving amongst the pot-holes.

After a while, probably not as long a time as it had seemed, the track took a final right-angle, revealing for the first time a view of the promised church.   Rowan grunted in surprise, it was supposed to have been disused for years, but it certainly didn't look it.   The churchyard had been mown and its surrounding wall maintained.   Tall junipers, dotted among the tidy graves, were even then in the process of being clipped.   The single jarring note in the whole idyllic scene was the brand-new, bright-blue cabinet of Booster Four, brutal and ugly in its shiny chain-link cage twenty metres beyond the east-end of the church.

The booster's domed top, sporting a punk hairstyle of outsize cooling fins, seemed to leer into the churchyard, giving Rowan the weird feeling that here was some robo-hooligan bent on mischief.   She parked on the narrow verge by the wrought-iron gate and got out to hail the gardener, but she was too late.   As soon as he'd spotted the car, the bare-chested young man had dropped his shears and dissappeared round the end of the chancel.   Never mind, she would start by inspecting the booster station.   Picking up her case, she crossed the churchyard and swung over the wall into the field.

It surprised her that the blue monstrosity had been sited so close to the ancient building, on the layout plan the gap had seemed much greater.   With a grin, she noticed that she was not the only one to have remarked on the unpleasant contrast between booster and church.   Somebody, she guessed it must have been the gardener, had been attempting to bury it in grass-clippings.   Technically, she didn't suppose it would matter, so long as the radiant surfaces were clear.   She thumbed the fact into her report text.

She prepped the four small foil covered test packs and hung them on the mesh.   To set them going, all she had to do was be there at the right moment and pull the tabs.   The next thing was to position the magnetometer about ten metres from the booster.   She vaulted back into the churchyard, found a suitable site and pushed its support stake into the earth.   There was a slight reading coming vaguely from the direction of the church, but as the iron railings round a nearby grave were the most likely source, she zeroed it out, waited for the readout to settle, then left it recording.

Continuing her walk north of the church, she came to another gate in the boundary wall.   Beyond that, partly hidden among a forest of lilac and laburnum was a small vicarage.   She opened the gate and approached the door, but before she could knock, it opened to reveal the gardener from the churchyard.   Presumably he hadn't realised she was there, since, after one startled look, he started to close it again.

“Hey! Hang on!” she exclaimed, “If you're Allen then I'm Rowan.   I've come about your great uncle Henry's watch.”   She noticed, ruefully, that he was now wearing a rather loud check shirt.

“What?” he exclaimed, hesitating.

“The watch, I've come about the watch.”

“I do beg your pardon!” he said, going red in the face, “It was the colour of your car.   I thought you were from the bloody bright-blue power company.”

“That too.   I'm afraid,” she replied, noting, with a wry smile, the return of his previous irritation.   “But, don't worry, I'm not here to complain about the way somebody appears to be trying to convert the booster-station into a compost heap.”

“Rowan? Rowan Matabele? On eBay? ‘Wanted, mysteries surrounding clocks and watches,’ that was it, wasn't it?   I'd never have replied if I'd know it was one of the blue bastard's plots.”

“But it's not.   It really isn't,” insisted Rowan, “That's just a coincidence.”

Allen's hostility seemed to be wavering, perhaps the mystery of the watch was more important to him than his protest at an insensitive corporate colour choice.   Either way he invited her in and was obviously about to put the kettle on when he noticed her looking at her watch.   “Of course, you must also be one of their so-called ‘Safety Officers’ here for the switch-on.   If the thing's safe why do you need to check?   That's what I want to know.”

“European directive, that's why: ‘All new power distribution technol...’

“Yeah, Yeah! I know all that.   I also know you have to deliberately overload that sort of super-conductor to get it started.   A thousand percent overload, I'm told.”

“But only for a split second.   They've tested them to twice that.   It's absolutely safe.”

“Twice the voltage or twice the time-span?” asked Allen.   That's when she realised he was no fool, despite being caught gardening in a disused churchyard.

“I can't tell you that, it's confidential,” she said.

“Well then, why should I trust you with my great-uncle's family secrets.”

“Sorry!” It was her turn to apologise.   “Can't we call a truce, say until switch-on time?”

“That gives us nearly an hour,” confirmed Allen, simmering down as he returned to the kettle, “Henry's watch is over there.”   He was waving at the table, where a scuffed leather pouch was lying between the uncleared breakfast plates.

She picked it up and drew out a well worn gold half-hunter.   The hands were stopped at two o'clock.

“That's odd,” she said, “It's showing the exact time when the power-line will come on.   Is that some little deviousness of your own?”

“No, I haven't touched the setting.   It's not even been wound up recently,” he replied.

When she turned it over, there was an inscription, in copper-plate script it said:

Presented
to Reverend Henry Brown
on the occasion of his first service
at St. Anselm's Church,
May 3rd. 1873.

“Very nice!” said Rowan, gently stroking the words, “But what's the mystery?”

“The Angel of Time, that's the mystery.   That and the Missing Hours, You'll see them tallied in his diary.”

That was also on the table, calf bound and almost as elegant as the watch.   She picked it up, a frayed silk ribbon marked the place.   “Only another seven minutes missed today, my Angel has lost her appetite.   The sum is now exactly three scores and five.” She looked for earlier entries, there were a number of similar ones, showing how the account of missing hours had risen, tick by tick.   Beyond the bookmark the diary was blank.

“What happened?” she asked, taking the proffered teacup.

“He fell ill, with consumption, TB that is, and died along with over half the village.   As you will have noticed, the place never recovered.   Apart from some occasional campers, I'm the only inhabitant.   If you look at the diary you will find that there are exactly sixty days between his entry about unblocking the door and the point where it goes blank.   According to family rumour he died five days after that.   Personally I think it's a rather tenuous connection, why hours for days and why not apply the number to some other period or event.”

She turned back to the entry Allen had mentioned and read it.   “What does he mean by the Angel of Time and what door did he have to unblock?”

“For that we must visit the church,” answered Allen, sipping his tea.   “We can do that later after you've had a chance to play at safety officers.”

“I'm sorry, but the data I take has to be back at the lab as quickly as possible.”

“Can't you just text it, or post it online?”

“Not possible.   The safety checks are biological, sort of bacterial litmus papers.   They start to decay as soon as they are exposed.   All useful data is lost within two hours and the lab is fifteen miles away.   I shall have to rush.”   She downed her tea, “Let's go.”

“OK, but there's a lot more to tell.”

They left the cottage and headed for the church.   Allen opened the small north door of the chancel and they went in.   “What we've just done doesn't worry you?” he asked.

“You mean entering a church through a Devil's Door?   Doesn't worry me, but it does make me curious.   Surely somebody would have bricked it up yonks ago? But, of course! Now I understand, it's the one he had to unblock! But why?”

“You read it, ‘For the Angel’ he says in the diary.   “Look, here.” Allen was pointing at the end of the altar.   And there she was, The Reverend Henry's Angel of Time, in bas-relief, a dark angel, carved out of the dull black stone.   In her right hand she held an hourglass and in the other a hoe.   She was gazing, longingly, directly at the reputed Devil's Door.

“How beautiful,” exclaimed Rowan, checking her watch - she would soon have to get out there and prime the tests - “But what's an angel doing with a hoe and egg-timer?”

“Great Uncle Henry spent most of the last years of his life trying to answer that.   It was he who started the tradition that only a Brown should maintain the churchyard.   Probably did a lot of it himself, my father continued in his memory, now it's me.   That was how he interpreted the hoe, you see.   He reckoned that if she had been an Angel of Death she would have had a scythe, so he needed an alternative explanation.   When he took up the living, the grounds were neglected and overgrown.   Being a romantic, he fell in love with her forlorn image in the stone, so he did the hoeing for her.”

“And opened the doorway so she could see what he had done.   That's so sad, he must have been very lonely.   But where does the watch come in?”

“At first he couldn't explain the hourglass, except that it must be something to do with time.   Then to regulate his service, he placed the watch on the back of the altar, where he could see it during mass.   Within seconds, it had stopped, as frozen in time as its parallel in stone.

When the service was over he took it back to the Vicarage, where a slight shake restarted it.   After that it was never reliable, especially when it came near the altar.   He never corrected its setting, but wrote in his diary that “She has taken from me a gift of time.   How shall she feel if I recall it?”

It became an obsession of his to keep track of the cumulative time that it lost.   The total must have had some strong significance for him, but unfortunately for us, he never confided it to his diary.   The family's interpretation came later.   That's the mystery, an unreliable pocket-watch, an obsessed vicar and a stone angel.   So what do you think?”

Rowan was staring at the stone.   “I think we're in trouble,” she announced, picking at it with a fingernail, “Your little angel is carved out of magnetite.   In fact I think the whole altar is one massive lodestone.   Perfectly capable of stopping a watch by displacing the hairspring.” Here she looked at her own watch.   According to that, there was still plenty of time before switch-on, in fact, the same amount as there had been earlier.   She held it to her ear and, yes, it had stopped.

“What's the time? Quick!” she yelled.   Allen consulted his own wristwatch, it was still working because it was digital.   “In Washington it's....” But she didn't let him finish.   Grabbing his arm and giving it a twist, she saw that the moment was almost upon them.   There were only seconds to go.   They couldn't stop it now.

“Exactly where does the new power-line run?” she asked, her voice full of urgency.”

“Right under the church, despite the Bishop's protests,” he replied, “They used a laser guided mole.”

“My God!” she groaned, “The one thing we had to avoid at all costs were large areas of geological magnetism.   That's why they ran it through here, where there's plenty of nice safe chalk and clay.   We never thought we'd need to check out all the medieval altars along the way.”

“Is it serious?” grunted Allen, as she barged him out through the Devil's Door.   They sprawled among the graves, listening to the mega-voltage crackle of the rising current.   “Phased feedback!” she howled above the noise.   Then the booster reached full charge.

The overload should have flashed down the exactly measured straight-line length of the conductor and bounced, thus creating the necessary standing-wave, before dropping to working voltage.   It didn't, it hit the magnetic field of the alter and backed-up instead.

Booster Four didn't like it!   It expressed that dislike by changing from cold blue to hot red.   Rowan and Allen watched in horror, as a pulse of fire tore a channel through the ground towards the east wall of the church, penetrated the footings and exploded up through the altar.   It wasn't the end of the world, but it felt like it.

Afterwards they staggered back to the vicarage.   They were bruised and bloody from flying debris, but still alive, which would certainly not have been the case had they remained in the chancel.   Allen crawled to the phone, hit the nine button and kept on hitting it until he got through.

Rowan, fighting off an imminent collapse, dragged herself to the table, compelled by a desperate desire to take another look at the Reverend's watch.   She hauled herself onto a chair and pulled it from its pouch.   Somehow it didn't surprise her that it was ticking happily.   Perhaps it had been an effect of the shock-wave, or just another curious coincidence, but her last serious thought before the delayed reaction got her, was ‘I bet it keeps perfect time from now on!’ - and of course it has.

— • —

Copyright The Mundesley Hermit ©1997 & ©2007.  All rights reserved.

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