Radley's Labyrinth for Horny Monsters by Annabelle Hawthorne (highly recommended books .txt) 📕

at the mess on the floor. Hours of painstakingly crafting gears, modeling them on her computer, and then using the 3D printer at school to make them. She had brought home several prototypes, hoping to find the proper combination that would allow the clock to work again. She had even visited an antique clock repair business downtown, letting the octogenarian owner show her how they ticked, but to no avail. None of the obvious patterns fit, and research on the clock itself yielded nothing, which made her think it was a one of a kind creation. She stared at the random assembly in front of her, the strange stack she had formed that now lay scattered across her floor.

She needed a drink. She went to the fridge to grab a beer, her eyes instead settling on the bottle of vodka tucked in the vegetable crisper. A beer sounded nice and cold, refreshing even.

She didn’t want refreshing—she wanted something with bite. She pulled the top off the vodka and sucked greedily at the bottle, wondering how long it would take for fire to fill her belly, for the edges of the world to blur. Staring over the railing at the motorcycle on the floor of the garage, Dana poured a tiny bit of vodka over the side, watching it splash on the cold concrete.

“For Alex.” She drank again, stopping herself before she took it too far. She knew better than most what would happen if she kept drinking. The vodka would catch up with her, and who knew where she would wake up. After picking up her keys and wallet, she tossed them in the back of her sock drawer. She didn’t need to go anywhere, and she didn’t want to be tempted to.

What time was it anyway? Picking up her phone, she frowned at the time. It was almost one in the morning. There really wasn’t anywhere for her to go after all. She saw that she had a voicemail so put the phone on speaker and set it down on her desk.

“Hey, Dana, it’s Rick!” The voice from her phone was friendly but tired. Rick was a college dropout who was trying to support his mom and little sister by working sixty hours a week at multiple jobs. He spent most of those hours slinging pies behind the counter at the pizza place where she worked. Dana stripped out of her pants and tossed them on the bed.

“Hi, Rick,” she muttered in response, though it was just a recording.

“Hey, look, so the reason I called was some guy came in here tonight asking about some deliveries we made. It was to that creepy old house, the one everyone says is haunted. I think you did a delivery there last week, maybe?”

Still listening, she picked her pants back up and checked the pockets. She found the tube of ChapStick she had been looking for and set it on the desk. She threw her pants even farther, the legs catching her comforter just right so that her pants now dangled over the other end of her bed.

“Anyway, he wanted to speak with you, but I wouldn’t give him your info, told him it was company policy, but he did give me twenty bucks to give you his number, so here it is.” Rick then recited a phone number for her, making sure to carefully pronounce each number.

Dana paused and looked at her phone. Why would somebody want to talk to her about Mike’s house?

“Okay, so I’ll see you when I see you. Take care.” With that, Rick had hung up his phone.

Dana took off her shirt and slid into a tank top. Looking at the bed, she found her gaze drawn once more to the clock.

How many hours had she lost already trying to fix the damn thing? She moved closer, tugging gently on the minute hand. The clockface swung open, revealing the complex machine inside. When properly assembled, there would be nearly no room for anything else. Dana had devoted hours to carefully removing the cracked and broken gears, documenting where each one went on a large piece of butcher paper she had taped to her desk. Her protractor, triangle, and compass had received more use in the last forty-eight hours than they had through high school and college. There was something soothing about the diagrams, imagining how all the pieces fit together, wondering what sound the chime would make.

“What the fuck?” Dana ran her fingers along the edge of the paper. Several lines had been drawn on the side, tiny arrows that pointed off the page. She untaped the butcher paper and flipped it over.

An exploded diagram of a clock assembly had been drawn on the back. It was expertly shaded and heavily detailed to the extent that Dana couldn’t tell if she was looking at a drawing or a photograph. In awe, she put the paper back on the desk, the new image toward her, and taped it down.

Breathing heavily, she knelt to the floor and picked up one of her new gears. Hovering it over the image, she found its counterpart. When she set the gear in place, it was a perfect fit.

Had she drawn this in her sleep? After grabbing some more parts from the floor, she put them in the correct places. Older parts were shaded differently, slightly darker than the rest. She set her vodka to the side, then moved the pieces around, figuring out which ones worked and which didn’t.

Though she sat in silence, the steady ticking of a clock filled her mind as she continued tinkering into the night.

“So what should I call you?” Beth asked. “I’ve read enough books to know that you won’t give me your real name. Or at least that you shouldn’t.”

The demon sipped at his wine and smiled. “You can call me Oliver. I once had the fortune of working with a man by that name and have been fond of it ever since.”

“Okay, Oliver.