Skirmish

It was a good watch. It had been a good watch for more than thirty years. His father had owned it first, and his mother had saved it for him after his father died and had given it to him on his eighteenth birthday. For all the years since then it had served him faithfully.
But now, comparing it with the clock on the newsroom wall, looking from his wrist to the big face of the clock over the coat cabinets, Joe Crane was forced to admit that his watch was wrong. It was an hour fast. His watch said seven o’clock and the clock on the wall insisted it was only six.
Come to think of it, it had seemed unusually dark driving down to work, and the streets had appeared singularly deserted.
He stood quietly in the empty newsroom, listening to the muttering of the row of teletype machines. Overhead lights shone here and there, gleaming on waiting telephones, on typewriters, on the china whiteness of the pastepots huddled in a group on the copy desk.
Quiet now, he thought, quiet and peace and shadows, but in another hour the place would spring to life. Ed Lane, the news editor, would arrive at six-thirty, and shortly after that Frank McKay, the city editor, would come lumbering in.
Crane put up a hand and rubbed his eyes. He could have used that extra hour of sleep. He could have -
Wait a minute! He had not got up by the watch upon his wrist. The alarm clock had awakened him. And that meant the alarm clock was an hour fast, too.
‘It don’t make sense,’ said Crane, aloud.
He shuffled past the copy desk, heading for his chair and typewriter. Something moved on the desk alongside the typewriter — a thing that glinted, rat-sized and shiny and with a certain undefinable manner about it that made him stop short in his tracks with a sense of gulping emptiness in his throat and belly.
The thing squatted beside the typewriter and stared across the room at him. There was no sign of eyes, no hint of face, and yet he knew it stared.
Acting almost instinctively, Crane reached out and grabbed a pastepot off the copy desk. He hurled it with a vicious motion and it became a white blur in the lamplight, spinning end over end. It caught the staring thing squarely, lifted it, and swept it off the desk. The pastepot hit the floor and broke, scattering broken shards and oozy gobs of half-dried paste.