In the middle of Lanternfield, the busiest town in the Realm, stands a clock tower. Its clock is old, honest and very proud. In three hundred years it had never once been late.
So when it began to run backwards, everybody noticed.
It started on a Tuesday afternoon. The big hand slid from four o’clock to five to four, then to ten to four. In the bakery, the bread in the oven slowly turned back into dough. The washing on the lines grew wet again. A boy who had just finished his homework found the page empty and had to do it all over, which he said was the worst magic he had ever seen.
“Someone has stolen an hour,” said the mayor. “If we don’t find it before midnight, this Tuesday will never end.”
Mira climbed the tower with Mr Pell, the clockmaker, a small man with very large spectacles. Inside, every gear was turning perfectly. Nothing was broken. Nothing was missing.
“It isn’t the clock’s works,” sighed Mr Pell. “It’s the clock’s mind.”
Mira looked out through the glass of the clock face. Across the square, the hat shop had hung up a brand-new mirror that morning, tall and shiny, so that customers could admire their hats from the street. And in that mirror, the clock could see itself.
In a mirror, everything is turned around. Left becomes right, and a clock going forwards looks as if it is going backwards. The proud old clock had stared at its reflection all afternoon and decided that the clock in the mirror must be the one telling the right time. So it copied it, hand for hand. Every minute it copied went missing from the day, and the missing minutes had piled up into a whole hour, hiding in the glass.
“A clock should never take advice from its own reflection,” said Mr Pell.
The hatmaker would not hear of taking the mirror down. So Mira had a better idea. She borrowed a hand mirror from the barber and held it up at the tower window, so that the clock could see the reflection of its reflection. Turned around twice, the face in the glass looked perfectly normal again.
The clock gave a long, embarrassed creak. Its hands stopped, thought it over, and began to move forwards. At the stroke of midnight, the stolen hour slipped out of the hat shop mirror and dropped back into place with a soft chime.
The next morning, Lanternfield had an extra-long breakfast, which everyone agreed was only fair.
The mirror still hangs on the square. Some say that if you look into it at four o’clock, you can catch the clock tower winking. And if you would like to mend a mirror of your own, the Enchanted Mirror is waiting for you.
