Everybody dies, don't they?

Everybody come back, isn't that so?

You tried to get into the locked drawer today, didn't you?

How do the dead comeback, mother?

What's the secrets of the night? The chimes of the Locked Drown today, didn't you? You tried. How do the dead comeback, mother? What's the secret?

The chimes at midnight.

By Paula R.C. Redmond.

High above me, the Hunter's Moon cast its lengthy shadows as the first flurries of snow fell.

The bitter wind tugged at my skirt as I crossed the wide, expansive lawn at the front of Crowhurst Hall.

It was a journey I'd made many times before.

In the past, I had failed in my effort to put right a wrong that has been done.

As the snow swirled around me, seeming almost to sweep

me up and over the threshold of my old home, it felt different this time. In the cold hallway,

I stood, dressed in what had once been my finery, before the old long-case clock. I studied its delicate, ornate hands. In the past,

as a child, I'd found them fascinating too, but then they marked the passing of a happier time.

Now, as I watched the seconds tick away and waited for its hourly chimes, but they did not come. Instead,

they evoke some half-remembered remark in which I recalled that the past and the present,

like the sweeping hands of a clock, run together. Yet to me it seemed like only yesterday,

when I heard it ring out its melancholy chimes to mark my passing.

They resonated around my ice-cold body before the soil fell, clattering upon my coffin lid, as the mourners left me beneath the frosty ground.

Now the only sound I heard was the ticking of the clock. I wondered what had disturbed

the tranquility of my eternal slumber. I knew I could remain only for so long within these

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