The letter had been typed on a machine with a sticky e, and it had been addressed to The Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Things Nobody Can Explain, which, Mulder said, was how it had found its way downstairs.

"Somebody in the mailroom has a sense of humor," said Scully.

"Somebody in the mailroom has a very accurate sense of where things belong." He passed it across the desk. "Read it. It's short."

It was short. For twenty-three nights, it said, every clock in Aldon, Pennsylvania, has stopped at seventeen minutes past four in the morning and started again at twenty-six minutes past. I have repaired clocks in this town for fifty-one years. I know when a clock is telling the truth. These are not broken. Something is taking nine minutes from us every night, and I would like to know what. Respectfully, Emil Hartung.

Scully set it down. "A power interruption. Nine minutes, at the same hour every night. The utility company is probably doing maintenance and nobody told the town."

"Every clock, Scully." Mulder leaned back until his chair creaked. "Wristwatches. Wind-up alarm clocks. The clock in the church steeple, which, according to the town's one-page brochure, has been wound by hand every Sunday since 1887. You can't cut the power to a pocket watch."

She looked at the letter again. At the careful margins, the sticky e, the Respectfully. She had the uncomfortable feeling that she already liked Emil Hartung.

"How far is Aldon?" she said.

*

Aldon was four hours west, at the far end of Nine Mile Road, in a fold of the Alleghenies where the radio stations gave up one by one until there was nothing on the dial but a farm report and static. It had fourteen hundred people, one blinking yellow light, a Methodist church with the famous steeple, and, between the barber and the five-and-dime, a narrow shop with a hand-lettered sign: E. Hartung, Clocks & Watches Repaired.

Inside, it was like standing in a heartbeat. There were clocks on every wall and every shelf, mantel clocks and cuckoo clocks and grandfather clocks and one enormous railroad clock over the counter, and all of them were ticking, each at its own pace, so that the room was full of a soft, busy, overlapping sound, like rain on a tin roof.

Emil Hartung was eighty-one years old, small and neat, in a gray cardigan with a jeweler's loupe on a cord around his neck. He shook both their hands. He did not seem at all surprised that the FBI had come.

"You'll want to see the book," he said, and brought out a ledger. In it, in careful columns, he had recorded every night for twenty-three nights. The time the ticking stopped. The time it started. The amount every clock in his shop was slow the next morning when he checked it against the time signal on his shortwave radio, which came from very far away, from outside Aldon.

Every entry was the same. Nine minutes.

"You were awake for this?" Scully asked. "Every night?"

"I am an old man, Agent Scully. I don't sleep much. And I thought someone should be." He hesitated. "But I must tell you, I have never seen it happen. Not once. It is four-seventeen, and I am watching the second hand of that railroad clock, and then it is simply four-twenty-six, and I have not blinked. There is no gap. There is no moment when it stops. There is only the radio, afterward, telling me I am nine minutes behind the rest of the world."

Mulder had gone very quiet, the way he did when something had hooked him. "Then nobody inside the town can see it," he said slowly. "Because they stop too."

"Yes," said Emil Hartung. "That is what I think."

*

They made a plan that Scully, to her own surprise, did not argue with. She would stay in town, in Emil Hartung's shop, with a borrowed video camera trained on the railroad clock and her own wristwatch synchronized to the shortwave. Mulder would drive out Nine Mile Road past the town line, park on the ridge where he could see the church steeple and the yellow light, and watch Aldon from outside.

"If you're right," Scully said, at a quarter to four in the morning, standing by his car in the cold, "then for nine minutes I won't exist."

"You'll exist. You just won't be moving."

"That's very reassuring, Mulder."

He looked at her for a second longer than he needed to. "Call me the second it's over," he said. "Your time."

*

At four-sixteen, Scully sat on a stool in the clock shop with Emil Hartung beside her and watched the second hand of the railroad clock sweep toward the twelve. The room ticked and ticked around them. The old man had taken something out of his cardigan pocket, a small gold pocket watch, and was holding it in his palm, very still.

The second hand reached the twelve. Four-seventeen.

Nothing happened. The second hand kept moving. One second. Two. The shop kept ticking.

And her cell phone rang.

She fumbled it open. "Mulder, nothing's—"

"It happened." His voice was strange, rough. "Scully, it happened. What time do you have?"

"Four-seventeen and. . ." She looked. "Twelve seconds."

"I have four-twenty-six." A pause. "I watched it. The whole town. The yellow light stopped in the middle of a blink and stayed lit. There was a car on Main Street, just one, and it stopped, not like it braked, like somebody pressed pause. There was smoke coming out of a chimney and it just. . . hung there. Nine minutes. I counted every one." He took a breath. "You were in there."

She looked at the video camera. Its little red light was on. The timestamp in the viewfinder said 4:17:31, and kept counting. She knew already what it would show when they played it back: nothing. A clock ticking. An old man and a woman sitting very still. No gap at all.

Beside her, Emil Hartung was looking down at the pocket watch in his hand. Its hands, she saw, were not moving. They were stopped at seventeen minutes past four.

*

He told them over coffee in the shop, with the sun coming up gray over the ridge.

The watch had been his wife's. Her name was Liesl. Thirty years ago this autumn, she had been very sick, and he had sat up with her in the hospital in the next town over, night after night, in a hard chair by her bed. On the last night, he fell asleep. Only for a little while. When he woke up, it was four-twenty-six by her watch on the bedside table, and she was gone. The nurse said it had happened a few minutes before. Peacefully. In her sleep.

"Nine minutes," he said. "I was nine minutes away, in a chair, and I did not wake up."

The watch had stopped that same week, and he had put it in a drawer, and for thirty years he had fixed every clock in Aldon but that one. About a month ago, going through the drawer for something else, he had taken it out and cleaned it and set it running. For her, he said. So that something of hers would be keeping time again.

"And the next night," said Mulder quietly, "the town lost nine minutes."

Scully said nothing. She was a scientist. She was thinking of electromagnetic fields, of mass suggestion, of a dozen things she would write in her report. She was also thinking of the chimney smoke Mulder had described, hanging in the air like a held breath, and of a hard hospital chair, and she found she did not want to say any of the scientific things out loud in this room.

"I think," Emil Hartung said, "that I have been asking for those nine minutes back. Every night. Without knowing I was asking." He turned the little watch over in his fingers. "But I cannot have them, can I? Even when they come, I am frozen inside them with everyone else. It is no good to me. It is only taking them from my neighbors."

He opened the back of the watch with his thumbnail, reached in with a tiny screwdriver, and did something delicate. Then he closed it and set it on the counter, face up, and they all looked at it. Its hands pointed to seventeen past four. They did not move.

"There," he said. "Now she has stopped where she stopped. And I will let her."

*

The next night, Scully sat up in the motel with her watch in her hand, and at four-seventeen the second hand kept moving, and at four-eighteen it kept moving, and when Mulder called from the ridge at four-thirty, his watch and hers agreed to the second.

Her report said the phenomenon had ceased and was likely attributable to a localized electrical anomaly, since corrected. Skinner read it, and looked at her over his glasses, and signed it without a word.

Her own wristwatch, she discovered on the drive home, was nine minutes slow. It must have been from that first night. She meant to reset it.

She didn't, for a long time.

~ END ~

Author's note: For my grandfather, who fixed clocks, and never did get around to fixing the one in my grandmother's kitchen. Feedback makes my week: send it through Colleen at the archive address.