Pocket watch, ship and mandala sleeve

Eighty years ago a wool ship called the Saint Ysolde left Bristol with a clockmaker's son aboard, a lad named Tobiah Frane who had been sent to sea because he could not stop taking things apart. He carried a pocket watch his father had built, its face worn smooth by his thumb. Off the Scilly rocks a storm came up out of the west, and the water went black as a cellar. The men swore that something rose beside the hull that night, a grey arm the length of a mast, feeling along the planking like a man searching for a dropped coin.

Tobiah did not pray. He opened the watch, lifted out the balance wheel, and tied the hairspring to the rail with a strip torn from his own shirt. The ship went quiet in the swell. The creature, which had been counting on the rolling to do its work, lost interest and sank back under the foam. Dawn came grey and small, and the watch had stopped at four minutes past three. It never ran again, though Tobiah carried it until he was an old man keeping accounts in a Lisbon chandlery.

The abbot used to say the monster was never the point. What mattered was a boy who knew that a moving thing could be made to stand still long enough to be safe. Now bed, all of you, and mind the candles. Above the refectory door, the old clock still shows four minutes past three, and nobody here has ever dared to wind it.