Tanglefoot: A Story of the Clockwork Century
Page 3
“Ted?” he called out, and then felt strange for it. “Doctor?” he tried instead, and he heard the old man muttering.
“Doctor, are you looking at Ted? You remember him, don’t you? Please don’t break him.”
At the bottom of the stairs, Dr. Smeeks was crouched over the prone and kicking Ted. The doctor said, “Underfoot, this thing is. Did it on purpose. I saw it. Turned itself on, sat itself up, and here it comes.”
But Edwin didn’t think the doctor was speaking to him. He was only speaking, and poking at Ted with a pencil like a boy prods an anthill.
“Sir? I turned him off, and I’m sorry if he turned himself on again. I’m not sure why it happens.”
“Because it wants to be on,” the doctor said firmly, and finally made eye contact. “It wants to make me fall, it practically told me so.”
“Ted never says anything,” Edwin said weakly. “He can’t talk.”
“He can talk. You can’t hear him. But I can hear him. I’ve heard him before, and he used to say pleasant things. He used to hum his name. Now he fusses and mutters like a demented old man. Yes,” he insisted, his eyes bugged and his eyebrows bushily hiked up his forehead. “Yes, this thing, when it mutters, it sounds like me.”
Edwin had another theory about the voices Dr. Smeeks occasionally heard, but he kept it to himself. “Sir, he cannot talk. He hasn’t got any lungs, or a tongue. Sir, I promise, he cannot speak.”
The doctor stood, and gazed down warily as Ted floundered. “He cannot flip his own switches either, yet he does.”
Edwin retrieved his friend and set it back on its little marching feet. “I must’ve done something wrong when I built him. I’ll try and fix it, sir. I’ll make him stop it.”
“Dear boy, I don’t believe you can.”
The doctor straightened himself and adjusted his lenses–a different pair, a set that Edwin had never seen before. He turned away from the boy and the automaton and reached for his paperwork again, saying, “Something smells good. Did you get breakfast?”
“Yes sir. Eggs and grits, with sausage.”
He was suddenly cheerful. “Wonderful! Won’t you join me here? I’ll clear you a spot.”
As he did so, Edwin moved the tray to the open space on the main laboratory table and removed the tray’s lid, revealing two sets of silverware and two plates loaded with food. He set one in front of the doctor, and took one for himself, and they ate with the kind of chatter that told Edwin Dr. Smeeks had already forgotten about his complaint with Ted.
As for Ted, the automaton stood still at the foot of the stairs–its face cocked at an angle that suggested it might be listening, or watching, or paying attention to something that no one else could see.
Edwin wouldn’t have liked to admit it, but when he glanced back at his friend, he felt a pang of unease. Nothing had changed and everything was fine; he was letting the doctor’s rattled mood unsettle him, that was all. Nothing had changed and everything was fine; but Ted was not marching and its arms were not swaying, and the switch behind the machine’s small shoulder was still set in the “on” position.
When the meal was finished and Edwin had gathered the empty plates to return them upstairs, he stopped by Ted and flipped the switch to the state of “off.” “You must’ve run down your winding,” he said. “That must be why you stopped moving.”
Then he called, “Doctor? I’m running upstairs to give these to Mrs. Criddle. I’ve turned Ted off, so he shouldn’t bother you, but keep an eye out, just in case. Maybe,” he said, balancing the tray on his crooked arm, “if you wanted to, you could open him up yourself and see if you can’t fix him.”
Dr. Smeeks didn’t answer, and Edwin left him alone–only for a few minutes, only long enough to return the tray with its plates and cutlery.”
It was long enough to return to strangeness.
Back in the laboratory Edwin found the doctor backed into a corner, holding a screwdriver and a large pair of scissors. Ted was seated on the edge of the laboratory table, its legs dangling over the side, unmoving, unmarching. The doctor looked alert and lucid–moreso than usual–and he did not quite look afraid. Shadows from the burners and beakers with their tiny glowing creatures made Dr. Smeeks look sinister and defensive, for the flickering bits of flame winked reflections off the edge of his scissors.
“Doctor?”
“I was only going to fix him, like you said.”
“Doctor, it’s all right.”
The doctor said, “No, I don’t believe it’s all right, not at all. That nasty little thing, Parker, I don’t like it.” He shook his head, and the lenses across his eyes rattled in their frames.
“But he’s my friend.”
“He’s no friend of mine.”
Edwin held his hands up, like he was trying to calm a startled horse. “Dr. Smeeks, I’ll take him. I’ll fix him, you don’t have to do it. He’s only a machine, you know. Just an invention. He can’t hurt you.”
“He tried.”
“Sir, I really don’t think–”
“He tried to bite me. Could’ve taken my fingers off, if I’d caught them in that bear-trap of a face. You keep it away from me, Edwin. Keep it away or I’ll pull it apart, and turn it into a can opener.”
Before Edwin’s very own eyes, Ted’s head turned with a series of clicks, until the machine fully faced the doctor. And if its eyes had been more than glass bits that were once assigned to a badger, then they might have narrowed or gleamed; but they were only glass bits, and they only cast back the fragments of light from the bright things in the laboratory.
“Ted, come here. Ted, come with me,” Edwin said, gently pulling the automaton down from the table. “Ted, no one’s going to turn you into a can opener. Maybe you got wound funny, or wound too tight,” he added, mostly for the doctor’s benefit. “I’ll open you up and tinker, and you’ll be just fine.”
Back in the corner the doctor relaxed, and dropped the scissors. He set the screwdriver down beside a row of test tubes and placed both hands down on the table’s corner. “Edwin?” he said, so softly that Edwin almost didn’t hear him. “Edwin, did we finish breakfast? I don’t see my plate.”
“Yes sir,” the boy swore. He clutched Ted closely, and held the automaton away from the doctor, out of the man’s line of sight should he turn around.
“Oh. I suppose that’s right,” he said, and again Ted had been spared by the doctor’s dementia.
Edwin stuck Ted down firmly between the wall and his cot, and for one daft moment he considered binding the machine’s feet with twine or wire to keep it from wandering. But the thought drifted out of his head, chased away by the unresponsive lump against the wall. He whispered, “I don’t know how you’re doing it, but you need to stop. I don’t want the doctor to turn you into a can opener.”
Then, as a compromise to his thoughts about hobbling the automaton, he dropped his blanket over the thing’s head.
Bedtime was awkward that night.
When he reached for the clockwork boy he remembered the slow, calculated turn of the machine’s head, and he recalled the blinking bright flashes of firelight in the glass badger eyes.
The doctor had settled in his nook and was sleeping, and Edwin was still awake. He reclaimed his blanket and settled down on his side, facing the wall and facing Ted until he dozed, or he must have dozed. He assumed it was only sleep that made the steel jaw lower and clack; and it was only a dream that made the gears twist and lock into syllables.
“Ted?” Edwin breathed, hearing himself but not recognizing the sound of his own word.
And the clockwork face breathed back, not its own name but something else–something that even in the sleepy state of midnight and calm, Edwin could not understand.
The boy asked in the tiniest whisper he could muster, “Ted?”
Ted’s steel jaw worked, and the air in its mouth made the shape of a, “No.” It said, more distinctly this time, and with greater volume, “Tan…gle…foot.”
I must be asleep, he believed.
And then, eventually, he was.
Though not for long.
His sleep was not good. He was too warm, and then too cold, and then something was missing. Through the halls of his nightmares mechanical feet marched to their own tune; in the confined and cluttered space of the laboratory there was movement too large to come from rats, and too deliberate to be the random flipping of a switch.
Edwin awakened and sat upright in the same moment, with the same fluid fear propelling both events.
There was no reason for it, or so he told himself; and this was ridiculous, it was only the old Dr. Smeeks and his slipping mind, infecting the boy with strange stories–turning the child against his only true friend. Edwin shot his fingers over to the wall where Ted ought to be jammed, waiting for its winding and for the sliding of the button on its back.
And he felt only the smooth, faintly damp texture of the painted stone.
His hands flapped and flailed, slapping at the emptiness and the flat, blank wall. “Ted?” he said, too loudly. “Ted?” he cried with even more volume, and he was answered by the short, swift footsteps that couldn’t have belonged to the doctor.
From his bed in the nook at the other end of the laboratory, the doctor answered with a groggy groan. “Parker?”
“Yes sir!” Edwin said, because it was close enough. “Sir, there’s…” and what could he say? That he feared his friend had become unhinged, and that Ted was fully wound, and roaming?
“What is it, son?”
The doctor’s voice came from miles away, at the bottom of a well–or that’s how it sounded to Edwin, who untangled himself from the sheets and toppled to the floor. He stopped his fall with his hands, and stood, but then could scarcely walk.
As a matter of necessity he dropped his bottom on the edge of the cot and felt for his feet, where something tight was cinched around his ankles.
There, he found a length of wire bent into a loop and secured.
It hobbled his legs together, cutting his stride in half.
“Parker?” the doctor asked, awakening further but confused. “Boy?”
Edwin forced his voice to project a calm he wasn’t feeling. “Sir, stay where you are, unless you have a light. My friend, Ted. He’s gotten loose again. I don’t want…I don’t want you to hurt yourself.”
“I can’t find my candle.”
“I can’t find mine either,” Edwin admitted. “You stay there. I’ll come to you.”
But across the floor the marching feet were treading steadily, and the boy had no idea where his automaton had gone. Every sound bounced off glass or wood, or banged around the room from wall to wall; and even the blue-gold shadows cast by the shimmering solutions could not reveal the clockwork boy.
Edwin struggled with the bizarre bind on his legs and stumbled forward regardless of it. No matter how hard his fingers twisted and pulled the wires only dug into his skin and cut it when he yanked too sharply. He gave up and stepped as wide as he could and found that, if he was careful, he could still walk and even, in half-hops and uneven staggers, he could run.
His light was nowhere to be found, and he gave up on that, too.
“Sir, I’m coming!” he cried out again, since the doctor was awake already and he wanted Ted to think he was aware, and acting. But what could Ted think? Ted was only a collection of cogs and springs.
Edwin remembered the red-haired Madeline with the strap-marks on her wrists. She’d said Ted had no soul, but she’d implied that one might come along.
The darkness baffled him, even in the laboratory he knew by heart. Hobbled as he was, and terrified by the pattering of unnatural feet, the basement’s windowless night worked against him and he panicked.
He needed help, but where could it come from?
The orderlies upstairs frightened him in a vague way, as harbingers of physical authority; and the doctors and nurses might think he was as crazy as the other children, wild and loud–or as mad as his mother.
Like Madeline.
Her name tinkled at the edge of his ears, or through the nightmare confusion that moved him in jilting circles. Maybe Madeline knew something he didn’t–maybe she could help. She wouldn’t make fun of him, at any rate. She wouldn’t tell him he was frightened for nothing, and to go back to sleep.
He knew where her room was located; at least he knew of its wing, and he could gather its direction.
The stairs jabbed up sharp and hard against his exploring fingers, and his hands were more free than his feet so he used them to climb–knocking his knees against each angle and bruising his shins with every yard. Along the wall above him there was a handrail someplace, but he couldn’t find it so he made do without it.
He crawled so fast that his ascent might have been called a scramble.
He hated to leave the doctor alone down there with Ted, but then again, the doctor had taken up the screwdriver and the scissors once before. Perhaps he could be trusted to defend himself again.
At the top of the stairs Edwin found more light and his eyes were relieved. He stood up, seized the handrail, and fell forward because he’d already forgotten about the wire wrapped around his ankles. His hands stung from the landing, slapping hard against the tile floor, but he picked himself up and began a shuffling run, in tiny skips and dragging leaps down the corridor.
A gurney loomed skeletal and shining in the ambient light from the windows and the moon outside. Edwin fell past it and clipped it with his shoulder. The rattling of its wheels haunted him down the hallway, past the nurse’s station where an elderly woman was asleep with the most recent issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine lying across her breasts.
She didn’t budge, not even when the gurney rolled creakily into the center of the hallway, following in Edwin’s wake.
When he reached the right wing, he whispered, “Madeline? Madeline, can you hear me?”
All the windows in the doors to the inmate rooms were well off the ground and Edwin wasn’t tall enough to reach, so he couldn’t see inside. He hissed her name from door to door, and eventually she came forward. Her hands wrapped around the bars at the top, coiling around them like small white snakes. She held her face up to the small window and said, “Boy?”
He dashed to the door and pushed himself against it. “Madeline? It’s me.”
“The boy.” Her mouth was held up to the window; she must have been standing on her tip-toes to reach it.
Edwin stood on his tip-toes also, but he couldn’t touch the window, high above his head. He said, “I need your help. Something’s wrong with Ted.”
For a moment he heard only her breathing, rushed and hot above him. Then she said, “Not your Ted any longer. I warned you.”
“I know you did!” he said, almost crying. “I need your help! He tied my feet together, all tangled up–and I think he’s trying to hurt Dr. Smeeks!”
“Tangled, did he? Oh, that vicious little changeling,” she said, almost wheezing with exertion. She let go of whatever was holding her up, and Edwin heard her feet land back on the floor with a thump. She said through the door’s frame, beside its hinges, “You must let me out, little boy. If you let me out, I’ll come and help your doctor. I know what to do with changelings.”
It was a bad thought, and a bad plan. It was a bad thing to consider and Edwin knew it all too well; but when he looked back over his shoulder at the nurse’s station with the old lady snoring within, and when he thought of the clattering automaton roaming the laboratory darkness with his dear Dr. Smeeks, he leaped at the prospect of aid.
He reached for the lever to open the door and hung from it, letting it hold his full weight while he reached up to undo the lock.
Edwin no sooner heard the click
of the fastener unlatching then the door burst open in a quick swing that knocked him off his hobbled feet. With a smarting head and bruised elbow he fought to stand again but Madeline grabbed him by the shoulder. She lifted him up as if he were as light as a doll, and she lugged him down the hallway. Her cotton shift billowed dirtily behind her, and her hair slapped Edwin in the eyes as she ran.
Edwin squeezed at her arm, trying to hold himself out of the way of the displaced gurneys and medical trays that clogged the hall; but his airborne feet smacked the window of the nurse’s station as Madeline swiftly hauled him past it, awakening the nurse and startling her into motion.
If Madeline noticed, she did not stop to comment.
She reached the top of the stairs and flung herself down them, her feet battering an alternating time so fast that her descent sounded like firecrackers. Edwin banged along behind her, twisted in her grip and unable to move quickly even if she were to set him down.
He wondered if he hadn’t made an awful mistake when she all but cast him aside. His body flopped gracelessly against a wall. But he was back on his feet in a moment and there was light in the laboratory–a flickering, uncertain light that was moving like mad.
Dr. Smeeks was holding it; he’d found his light after all, and he’d raised the wick on the hurricane lamp. The glass-jarred lantern gleamed and flashed as he swung it back and forth, sweeping the floor for something Edwin couldn’t see.
The doctor cried out, “Parker? Parker? Something’s here, something’s in the laboratory!”
And Edwin answered, “I know, sir! But I’ve brought help!”
The light shifted, the hurricane lamp swung, and Madeline was standing in front of the doctor–a blazing figure doused in gold and red, and black-edged shadows. She said nothing, but held out her hand and took the doctor’s wrist; she shoved his wrist up, forcing the lamp higher. The illumination increased accordingly and Edwin started to cry.
The laboratory was in a disarray so complete that it might never be restored to order. Glass glimmered in piles of dust, shattered tubes and broken beakers were smeared with the shining residue of the blue-green substance that lived and glowed in the dark. It spilled and died, losing its luminescence with every passing second–and there was the doctor, his hand held aloft and his lamp bathing the chaos with revelation.