Inside the gilded walls of an estate in La Dolid, a dramatic family secret begins to fall apart at the seams. While cries of independence sweep a nation under Spanish rule, behind closed doors is where the blood will spill. Secrets, demons, ghost...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
I find myself staring at the grandfather clock more often than I'd like to admit. If I'm quiet enough and breathe ever so deeply, I can feel the ticking of the pendulum align just right with the beating of my heart. There was a time this calmed me, even brought comfort to me, but now my heart falls behind as the pendulum keeps on swinging. Once, twice, thrice. Like a knife through velvet cloth the pendulum rocks, but I can already feel my bones rot.
The walls that made the corridor were haunted with the varnished immortality of a dozen paintings. The echo of the clock bounced off them and I felt as they glanced back to the calling. Waiting, listening, counting. But what for . . . and why now?
The faces that hung here were once known to me, but they are all gone now, their hearts and their bodies outpaced by the pendulum of the clock. Perhaps it is exactly that they now look for, time. What once came so easy when alive now sifts through the velvet curtains of the afterlife sprinkled like floating salt. Never quite falling into place and never enough to fully grasp again. And perhaps that explains why I find myself facing the clock so often now. I too join my ancestry in a quest for life, in a quest for time which belongs to the living. The pendulum keeps on swinging and my heart struggles to catch up, but the struggle is enough to remind me that I am still alive.
"How long has it been there, the grandfather clock?" I jumped surprised by the sudden intrusion, but I could never stay mad at Inocencia for long. Her wide brown eyes admired the details round the face of the clock, but it seemed to me she was bothered by the constant ticking of the pendulum.
"I'm not sure," I finally responded looking back at the beautiful carvings I so often neglected. Vines crawled up the sides of the clock and bloomed round its corners with lilies and bees and leaves. "It's been here since I was a child."
Inocencia smiled with a raised brow. "Then I'm sure it'll remain there for the rest of the day. Come now, it's time for breakfast and you wouldn't want to be late."
"I'm always late." I followed still listening to the swinging of the clock fading and joining the ghosts on the walls.
"One would think it otherwise since you spend most of your day staring at that clock." Inocencia waited for me to catch up and then walked me down the stairs. I often envied her. I envied the charcoal of her hair and the milkmaid braid she'd often sport. I envied her simple dress and the low heels most maids wore. I envied her days of work and her days off which she never took not wanting to leave me behind. She was only a fraction of a year younger than I was, yet so often she felt much older and wiser than me.
My father's estate was perhaps the biggest in all of La Dolid, but it had not been his when we first moved from Towns Valley. My mother made it common knowledge that the estate had been passed on to her and not her "incompetent" brother, whom no doubt walked beside her beyond the veil of life accompanied by his wife and all the other few hundred passengers who were unlucky enough to board The Circuit ship but never reach shore alive. After my mother's own death, many years following her brother's, the estate was then passed on to my father. One day it shall be passed on to whatever man rejoices in his pocket by deciding to marry me. Needless to say, I was not entirely fond of my father nor any of the suitors he'd shown interest in. And, entirely in my correct opinion, if he liked them so much I rather he marries one of them instead of me. As a matter of fact, he's welcomed to marry all of them. Perhaps then he'll find something else to obsess with.
