Twelve Short Stories of Christmas 6: Cuckoo Clock

The cuckoo clock was broken. The woman who had bought it into the shop for Martha to fix had seemed perplexed. “It’s fine during the day,” she said as she handed the clock over, “But at midnight, it just keeps going and going until I go down and reset it,”

Martha had taken the clock and taken apart all its mechanisms. She couldn’t see anything inside that could be jamming the gears so it would keep chiming. or keep cuckooing, as the term should be.

She had set the time to midnight around two, but the clock seemed to work perfectly fine, stopping at twelve just as it should.

Martha had told the woman that the clock would be ready by tomorrow and she had never yet been late with a repairing since she had opened the shop. So, tonight, she determined to stay up until midnight and see once and for all what was going wrong with the clock.

Midnight came, and Martha was dozing quietly in her workshop. The first cuckoo from the clock woke her up and she started to count them. The clock chimed twelve and just as the woman had said kept going. Martha reached to reset the clock, but it made no difference, the cuckoo kept chiming long past thirteen, long past twenty, even. She picked up the clock and pulled the cuckoo off its spring on the front of the clock. The mechanism behind it kept moving forward, but the sound itself was coming from the cuckoo she now held in her hand. It was carved out of wood, it couldn’t be real at all, it couldn’t be making a sound of its own, when the speakers were inside the clock. In terror, Martha dropped the cuckoo down onto the floor and ran out of her workshop, ran out of the town and into the forest hearing the cuckoo ring in her ears all the while.