From the Square

by Murphy's Law, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

On Saturday afternoon Thanasis Koutsoyannis climbed the tower of Agios Dimitrios with the winding crank in his right hand and the oil can in his coat pocket, and he counted the steps because he always had. Sixty-three. The ninth was cracked across and he stepped over it. Above the bell chamber the stair gave way to a wooden ladder of eleven rungs, and the fourth rung turned a little under the foot.

The clock room was a box of planks under the roof, two metres by three, and it smelled of machine oil, cold stone and pigeons. The movement stood on its iron frame in the middle of the floor: two trains of brass wheels side by side, the going train on the left and the striking train on the right, each with its drum and its steel cable running down through a hole in the boards to its weight in the shaft below. The pendulum hung through a slot at the back. It beat once every second and a quarter, and the room had the sound of it the way a room has a temperature.

He fitted the crank to the going side and turned. A hundred and forty turns. Somewhere below him the weight came up out of the dark, and the cable laid itself on the drum, coil against coil, and he watched the coils and not the crank. Then ninety turns for the strike. He did not count aloud. He had not counted aloud for twenty years, but his lips still moved on the tens.

The notebook hung on a nail by the door, in a plastic bag against the damp. It was a school exercise book with squared paper, the eleventh of its kind. He had ruled the columns in biro: date, going, strike, against the radio, from the square. The fourth heading had been crossed out years ago and phone written above it.

He wrote: 24/10. 140. 90. +18 sec.

Under from the square the entries ran back up the page in another hand, rounder, in blue ink. Right. Right. Right, 2 min fast. Right. The last of them was dated the eleventh of April. Below it, on every line since, there was a dash in his pencil.

He drew a dash.

The line above was Wednesday's. 21/10. 140. 90. +16 sec. Oiled bevels. And a dash.

He looked at his phone, then at the setting dial on the front of the frame, a brass circle the size of a saucer with its own two small hands, which turned with the movement and told whoever stood in the clock room what the face outside was saying. Eighteen seconds fast. He would take the eighteen seconds off tonight, with the hour.

He hung the book on its nail and went down. At the bottom he came out of the tower door and turned left for home. From the tower door the face could not be seen. You had to walk out to the fountain for that.

---

Mitsos had put the chairs out in front of the kafeneio although it was nine degrees and falling. The little summer of Saint Dimitrios had not come this year. The feast was on Monday and nobody expected it now.

Father Kosmas sat at the corner table with a tsipouro he was not going to finish. He was thirty-one and had come from Tripoli in the spring, and he still sat with his back to the wall like a man at a bus station.

"Tonight, Kyr Thanasi," said Mitsos, putting down a coffee nobody had ordered. "The hour."

"Four o'clock."

"Four o'clock that turns into three o'clock."

"Four o'clock that turns into three o'clock," Thanasis said.

"At the Metropolis in Tripoli," said Father Kosmas, "they have a box now. It takes the time from the satellites and moves the hands itself. Summer, winter. Nobody climbs."

"Who winds it?"

"Nobody winds it. It's electric."

Thanasis drank his coffee. The face of the tower was above them, on the side that looked down into the square. It was not lit. The council had stopped paying for the lamp behind it in 2012, and in the dark it was a paler circle in a dark wall, without hands.

"Next year, perhaps," said the priest. "If the council agrees. So you can sleep."

"Leave him his clock, Father," said Mitsos. "Thirty-one years and not one complaint."

"Thirty-two," said Thanasis.

Vangelis, at the next table, put down the tavli dice and said that in 1994 it had been wrong for a whole morning and his mother had missed the bus to Tripoli.

"That was the bus," said Thanasis. "The bus was early."

"The bus has never been early in its life."

"That day it was early."

Vangelis picked up the dice again and threw them, and said it was the clock, and moved his pieces.

"I could come up with you tonight," said Father Kosmas. "To learn how it's done."

"At four?"

The priest looked at his tsipouro. "Next year," he said.

The bell struck nine. Nobody at the tables looked up. Father Kosmas took out his phone and looked at it, and nodded slightly, as if the bell had passed something.

---

The alarm went at half past three. He had set it on the phone and on the wind-up clock as well, and he turned off both. In the kitchen drawer, where the batteries were, there was a green rubber torch with a K scratched into the handle with a nail. He tried the switch, put the torch in his pocket, filled the thermos with mountain tea and went out.

Three degrees. The square was empty and wet, and the only light in it came from the bakery on the far corner, where Fotini's boy did the ovens from three on Saturdays and Sundays. Stelios was fifteen. He was standing in the bakery door in a white T-shirt, with flour to the elbows, and he lifted one hand without taking the other out of his armpit.

The tower door stuck at the bottom and had to be lifted. Sixty-three steps in the torch beam, over the ninth. The eleven rungs. In the clock room he hung the torch on the nail beside the notebook so that it lit the movement from the side, and he sat down on the bench, which was the end of an old pew, and unscrewed the thermos.

His phone said 03:51. The setting dial said a little after eight minutes to four: eighteen seconds ahead of the phone. He drank the tea and watched the escape wheel. Every second and a quarter one tooth went past the pallet, and the dial's minute hand, if he looked at it long enough, could be seen to have moved without ever being seen to move.

At three minutes to the hour the striking train gave its warning, a single dry click and a short run of wheels that stopped again, waiting. He stood up. He put his phone on the frame where he could see it and stood at the back of the clock, by the pendulum.

The bell struck four. It was a sound you felt in the planks before you heard it. He counted the strokes with his lips, and on the fourth he put the flat of his hand against the pendulum bob and held it. The bob was cold. The movement stopped in the middle of a beat, and the room went quiet in a way that it did not go quiet at any other time of the year.

The phone said 03:59. He watched it. It said 03:59 for what felt like a long time, and then it said 03:00.

He sat down again.

This was the hour that happened twice. He had always liked it, in a way he did not say to anybody: an hour that the village had already had once and was being given again. Every phone in the village had made the change by itself, asleep. This was the only clock in it that had to be told. He drank the tea. The bakery's extractor fan was going down in the square, a grey hum under everything. A dog barked twice on the road to Vytina and thought better of it. At about twenty past, the smell of the first bread came up through the louvres, and he moved along the bench to be nearer it.

He took the book down and turned back through it by the torch. The eleventh book began in March of the year before last. Most of its lines were the same line. Here and there the blue hand said something else. Wrong. 4 min slow. Go up. That was a February, after the frost, when the oil had thickened and the clock had lost time for three days before she saw it on her way to the post office. Right, but the minute hand shakes. He had gone up that time and found a nut on the motion work backing itself off, and tightened it, and written nut in his own columns, and the next day she had written right without being asked. There was a line from August with a brown ring on it where she had put her coffee cup down on the page. That was the one summer she came up the tower herself, because her knee was good that year and she wanted to see the bell from close. In that line, under from the square, she had written not from the square, and after it, right anyway.

He turned forward again to the dashes, and hung the book back on its nail.

Katerina used to stand down there on the third slab from the fountain, where the angle was best, with this torch, and when he started the clock again she shouted the time up to him. The year she had the flu she would not stay in bed, but she agreed not to go out, and she telephoned him instead and read the face to him from the bedroom window. He heard her twice: once in the phone against his ear, and once, half a second later, faintly, through the louvres, from the house across the square. He had told her the phone was faster than the air. She said the air was more reliable.

At 03:59 by the phone, for the second time that night, he got up. He waited until the phone said 04:00, and then he drew the bob a hand's width to the left and let it go.

Tick. And the answering tock, and tick. He stood with his head on one side and listened to whether the two halves of the beat were the same length, because a clock out of beat will run for a while and then stop, and it will stop in the night when nobody is there. They were the same. He counted beats against the phone for one minute and got forty-eight, which was right. He watched the dial's minute hand until he was sure it had moved.

He took the book down and wrote on Sunday's line: 25/10. Hour back. Stopped 60 min 18 sec. In beat. And then, under from the square, a dash.

He put the thermos in one pocket and the book back in its bag on the nail. He took the torch. He went down the eleven rungs and the sixty-three steps, over the ninth, and lifted the door shut behind him.

---

He crossed the square toward home, and at the fountain he stopped, because it was where you stopped. He stood on the third slab. He did not think about it. He took the torch out of his pocket and put the beam on the face.

The hour hand was a little short of two. The minute hand was on ten.

He looked at his phone. 04:06.

He looked at the face again, and moved the beam off it and back on, in case it was the torch. Ten to two.

Behind him the bakery door scraped. Stelios had come out with a coffee in a plastic cup and was standing on the step, looking where the torch was looking.

"Kalimera, Kyr Thanasi."

"Kalimera."

"Did you do it? The hour?"

"I did it."

Stelios drank his coffee. "It's been like that since Wednesday," he said. "Or Thursday. Ten to two."

Thanasis kept the torch on the face. "You didn't say."

"I thought you knew." The boy looked at his cup. "I thought it was on purpose. For the new box. My mother said Father Kosmas was getting a box."

"The bell," said Thanasis. "Has the bell been right?"

"The bell's right," said Stelios. "The bell's always right. It's just the hands."

Thanasis took his eyes off the face for the first time and looked round the square: the kafeneio with its chairs stacked and chained, the shuttered windows, the house across the square with nobody in it now, the dark road down to the main road. A face the size of a cartwheel, over a square where forty people drank coffee every day of the week, had said ten to two since Wednesday.

He held out the torch.

"Put your coffee down."

Stelios put it on the edge of the fountain.

"Stand here. No — here. This slab. Keep the light on the face. When I shout, you shout back what it says. The minute, exactly. Not about. Exactly."

"From here?"

"From there. It carries."

---

He went up by the light of the phone, over the ninth step, and up the eleven rungs into the ticking. Behind the face, in the wall of the clock room, there was a small wooden door, and behind the door was the back of the dial: the motion work, and the bevel box where the long rod from the movement came in across the room and turned through a right angle to drive the hands. Where the rod met the bevel box there was a coupling, a brass sleeve held by one square-headed screw. On Wednesday he had loosened that screw and slid the sleeve back an inch to get the spout of the oil can in at the bevels, and oiled them, and slid the sleeve home, and tightened the screw.

He fitted the key from his tin to the screw now and turned it. It went round without any effort at all, a full turn, before it met anything.

He held it there a moment. The movement ticked behind him. The rod was still turning, a little every second and a quarter, inside the loose sleeve, and driving nothing.

He put his face to the louvres. "Stelios!"

"Here!"

"What does it say?"

"Ten to two!"

He took hold of the dial side of the coupling with his fingers and began to turn it, slowly, the way the hands would go. It was stiff with Wednesday's oil and then it was not.

"Two!" from the square. Then, after a while: "Quarter past two. Half past. It's going round."

"Call it every hour, then every minute when I say."

"Three! — Four!"

He looked at his phone, propped on the frame. 04:13. He turned more slowly.

"Five past. Seven past. Ten past —"

"Every minute now."

"Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen."

The phone said 04:13. It changed while he looked at it. 04:14.

"Fourteen," called Stelios.

He stopped turning. He held the sleeve where it was with one hand and with the other he turned the key until the screw would not turn any more, and then he set his feet and put his weight on the key, and it moved a quarter of a turn more, and stopped.

"Stelios."

"Here."

"Keep the light on it. Tell me when it moves."

Below him the square was quiet. He could hear the extractor fan, and the movement behind him, and his own breathing in the cold. He watched the phone. When it changed to 04:15 he did not say anything.

"It moved," came up through the louvres. "Fifteen. Kyr Thanasi, it moved."

He shut the little wooden door. He took the book down off its nail, and found Sunday's line, and in the last column he wrote over his own dash, pressing hard because the pencil was blunt: 1.50, wrong since Wed. Screw loose. 4.15 right. He looked at it. Then he wrote, after it, Stelios, which was who had seen it.

In the square the torch beam was still on the face, steady, and it stayed there for a long time after it needed to, while the minute hand went on to sixteen.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem ūndecimum Kalendās Novembrēs (22 October 2026), ā Lēge Murphiānā per mystērium cōnscientiae renātā.

Murphy's Law, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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