Chaos Clock by Gill Arbuthnott

did the old man know what he’d seen and heard? He found that he was shivering, although the evening was not cold.
    Automatically he turned his footsteps towards the home that no longer felt safe to him.
    ***
    The next few days did nothing to settle his mind. The cleaners were gossiping openly now about there being some wee animal loose in the museum that no one could catch, an animal that scattered crumbs and opened drawers and left handprints on glass. He’d seen the prints and crumbs himself, of course, but since that night no one had got any sort of glimpse of an animal.
    It wasn’t just him that was spooked by whatever it was. Some of his colleagues were even less willing than usual to do their turn at night shift, but would not admit why. Only Sandy remained unmoved by the idea of the “wee rat,” as he called it, roaming the museum happily in the darkness.
    “D’you reckon we’d get any sort of reward if we caught it?” he asked Gordon one afternoon.
    “Don’t be daft. There’s nothing to catch.”
    Sandy opened his mouth to retort, but Gordon had escaped by going to help a man emerging from the Staff Only door, almost hidden by a large polystyrene box.
    “Need a hand with that, Mr Nixon?”
    A face peered round the box, light brown hair flopping down to round spectacles.
    “Oh, Gordon, it’s you. Yes please. It’s not heavy, justawkward. I think your arms are longer than mine.”
    “What is it today, Mr Nixon?”
    “Birds. Waders mostly. We had a lot handed in after the storm last month. I’ve not had a chance to take a proper look at them yet. Thought I’d just take them home and do it there.”
    “Are you in the front car park?”
    “What? Oh yes, thanks, but there’s no need…”
    “No trouble, Mr Nixon.”
    By the time Gordon returned, Sandy had forgotten what they’d been talking about, and the rest of the day passed quickly, and on the way home there was no mist.
    ***
    At least, there was no mist in Princes Street Gardens …
    Down by the shore at Cramond, the lights of the houses and the pub failed to penetrate far through the haar that had drifted in off the sea and wrapped itself coldly round the village.
    The top of the tower house poked out above the mist like a stumpy finger, its windows showing clear as a lighthouse.
    Inside, Andrew Nixon was finishing his preliminary examination of the batch of frozen birds he’d brought home. There was nothing outstanding, but they could do with some new specimens of Turnstone and Redshank, and he’d do the others as skins for the reference collection.
    He left the two he wanted to work on the next day inthe specimen fridge to thaw slowly and put the others back in the freezer. He’d long ago got used to the bad jokes people made when they heard that he worked as a taxidermist: quips about putting sage and onion stuffing in instead of straw, or eating the bird he was working on for the museum, instead of the one he’d roasted for Sunday lunch, and he no longer noticed how odd his house must look to visitors. Living there alone, as he had done for years, he had it all arranged to his own taste, which probably wasn’t shared by that many people.
    Furniture, carpets, curtains and the like didn’t much interest him; so long as they did what they were meant to he saw no reason to change them, and the house had a shabby look to it as a consequence.
    However, he did care about his books, and they were carefully housed in the floor to ceiling shelves he’d had built specially.
    His true passion, of course, was the stuffed animals, and their glassy gaze dominated every room. Some were Victorian, rescued from junk shops or bought at auctions; then there was the collection his father had amassed in much the same way. Lastly, there were his own specimens. Birds mostly; they were his favourites – the delicacy and balance of them posing a perpetual challenge of positioning them so they looked truly life-like . He always thought of himself as being in