With each passing person, Jack craned his neck farther. His knuckles grew white as he pressed them into the windowsill.
“No sign of him yet?” Adam asked after the eleventh worker had passed.
Jack shook his head without speaking.
Adam felt bad for Jack. If his own father had ever worked for someone like the Gold Mold, or had come home with bruises from work, he’d be worried, too. He also noticed that Jack’s eyes kept darting surreptitiously to the music box.
Suddenly, Jack’s face lit up, and his shoulders collapsed in relief. “Dad!” he called.
Down the street, a middle-aged man was trudging up the slope. He had gray hair and smile lines underneath his tired eyes. When he heard Jack call, he waved.
Jack disappeared from the window and emerged from the front door of the house. He ran down to greet his father. As he did, he called over his shoulder to Adam, “Thanks for waiting with me!”
Adam raised his hand. “You’re welcome,” he faltered, but Jack had already sprinted down the street out of earshot. Adam stood still and watched as father and son embraced on the sidewalk. The father swung Jack onto his shoulders. Jack spread out his arms as if he were a bird or, more likely, an airplane. Something tugged inside Adam’s chest.
He stepped back to look at the front door: 18 Oak Street. Adam memorized the address.
It was perhaps good he did, because when he turned to look at Jack and his father again, they were gone. The town was gone. He was back in his own room. The snow globe sat lopsided in his hand, the swirling snowflake confetti just beginning to settle inside the empty glass.
On Monday morning, Adam woke up extra early. He trekked to the local library before school to research the town of Candlewick. He’d wanted to go sooner—the minute the snow globe brought him back home, in fact—but it had been late on Saturday when he returned, and then on Sunday the library had been closed. Moreover, it was Halloween. Business at the Biscuit Basket was booming, and Adam was kept busy helping Uncle Henry. As he’d handed out free candy corn to each customer, he thought back to the Gold Mold buying out every candy shop in Jack’s town. One thing was certain—his own uncle would never sell out to the Gold Mold, no matter how much he was offered.
At the library, Adam breathlessly looked up the town of Candlewick. It was indeed a real place, located several dozen miles north of New York City near the Hudson Valley. According to the last U.S. census, the town had around three hundred people.
Then Adam paused in the middle of his research. He did a double take.
“No way,” he whispered, rereading the passage that had caught his attention. Shivers crawled up his spine.
The town’s namesake candle factory had burned down in 1967, killing most of its workers.
CHAPTER TENIN WHICH BAD LUCK PREVAILS
Not long after New Year’s Day in 1909, Santiago fell deathly ill. Shortly after, he passed away.
It was a curious incident, though nobody was there to witness it. The clocks in the shop all stopped ticking at the time of the clockmaker’s death. Only when someone found him the next morning did the clocks start working again.
The funeral that followed was small. Several neighbors and some of Santiago’s loyal customers were in attendance. Elbert delivered a heartfelt eulogy he had written in memory of the clockmaker.
At the end of the funeral, Elbert lit two of Santiago’s homemade candles, one on each side of the clockmaker’s casket. The sweet scent of lavender filled the small room.
That was the last time anyone would see Elbert for a while.
His performances stopped for several months. The streets whispered and speculated about the magician’s sudden disappearance. Nobody knew where he had gone.
Several months later, Elbert made a brief reappearance one spring evening when he at last felt ready to stop by the clockmaker’s familiar shop again. When he entered, he was aghast to find city officials clearing out Santiago’s possessions. Clocks, pocket watches, springs, tools, and various gears were piled inside crates.
“Stop!” shouted Elbert. “What are you doing?”
The city officials said they were reclaiming the shop. “Santiago didn’t leave an heir in his will,” one of them explained. “All his items belong to the city now.”
With some light pleading—and a little hypnotic help from his golden pendulum—Elbert managed to secure the two valuables he’d promised Santiago he’d take care of. Then he disappeared once more, the music box and notebook under his arm.
While the rest of the world puzzled over Elbert the Excellent’s retreat from the stage, the young magician was undergoing a change. After Santiago’s death, he no longer found enjoyment in magic tricks and hypnotism. Instead, he became fixated on the mysteries of the time touch, just like his mentor.
In his new studio apartment at the edge of the city, he immersed himself in Santiago’s scrawling notes. The pages were filled with scientific diagrams and personal anecdotes, theoretical ideas and half-finished sentences. Each night, with his pet dove perched on his shoulder, Elbert slowly and painstakingly rewrote the notes into a notebook of his own, filling in the blanks with his best guesses, until finally, weeks later, he had pieced together the nearly illegible diary.
From this exercise, he gleaned some insight into Santiago’s past. The clockmaker had apparently had a rough childhood. There were bits and bobs about stowing away on a ship from Argentina with his sister as children, about life on the streets in London, about his emergence as a renowned clockmaker in the United States. There were recurring notes about a motherly figure he simply called “the Governess.” From what Elbert could tell, the Governess had adopted Santiago and his sister back in London, and for a few golden years, they’d all been happy. But then the Governess’s sudden death had led the clockmaker to an obsession with time and the story
