Prologue

The house on twenty-second Maple Street was a house of time where time did not exist. It was a house where clocks were more numerous than the dirty dishes in the sink, or pictures on the walls. The war conference room for clocks, where instead of battle plans and maps that line the walls, there were clocks. Or a typical college student’s dorm room, where the posters that litter the walls make the wallpaper. Here it was clocks. There were clocks on the walls, desks, tables, widow-sills, and clocks sitting against the walls patiently waiting to be hung. Over sixty clocks total, all different and distinctive from one another. Here the clocks lived, but did not breathe.
Where one expected there to be a hum of perpetual ticking, chiming, and ringing, droning like a swarm of bees, not a single bee flew, and not a single clock ticked. The clocks were frozen and petrified at 2:51, or 9:25. In the house on twenty-second Maple Street, time did not exist.