Clock Work

by Blythe, Jameson Scott

  Reed knew nothing of the building's history, only that it had once been splendid, decadent, and now it was in ruins. Much like the man he was here to see.

  ***

  The floor below was occupied by a series of steam rooms and elaborate baths. Reed guessed it had once been an exclusive spa or brothel (or perhaps some combination of the two), and the entryway above the private entrance of a prestigious member—perhaps a vampire who had used the baths as a hunting ground, a buffet of naked flesh and thrumming arteries.

  Or perhaps not a vampire, but some other abomination. Like the thing standing before him now.

  The thing resembled a skeleton packed with scraps of spoiled meat and tied together with rags. It was dressed in a robe stained with unidentified fluids. It was male and had been human at some point, or at least more human. Reed had speculated that it was in fact the original owner of the bathhouse—a wealthy man who had sought immortality through black magic, or an immortal cursed with a flesh-corrupting plague.

  The history of the thing didn't matter to Reed, nor did the fact that its presence disgusted him. What did matter was that the thing's soiled robe had deep pockets; Reed was earning a handsome sum for the simple acquisition of a device.

  Or what should have been a simple acquisition. Things had gotten unexpectedly complicated in the past hours.

  They stood surrounded by thick, humid heat. Despite the building's ruined appearance, the pipes and boilers were functioning. Reed had removed his jacket and rolled the sleeves of his shirt to his elbows before descending from upstairs.

  In the steam-filled room, Reed recounted his progress (tracking the device to a local shop) as well as his setbacks (the thieves he'd hired to steal the device had been killed, and the device was presently missing).

  "You came all the way here to tell me almost nothing?" The thing sounded like it was speaking with a mouth full of soup.

  "Well, you wanted a status report, and you don't own a phone."

  Thick, stringy drool dripped past the round wound of the thing's mouth. A stained sleeve wiped it away. "What are you doing to find it?"

  3.

  Strange dream, Parker thought as she woke. She felt warm and comfortable. When had her bed gotten so cozy? It usually felt like a slab of concrete. She'd been complaining about it since she moved into the small, pre-furnished apartment.

  She sat up and rubbed her eyes. It was early, still dark. She didn't remember getting home. She'd fallen asleep in her clothes and makeup.

  Daylight peered past the blinds covering the window. A window that was on the wrong side of the room. Parker felt spider legs of dread creep up her spine as she realized she wasn't in her apartment, wasn't in her own bed.

  She found a lamp and turned it on. She also was not in her own clothes. Or at least not all her own clothes. A bulky sweater had been pulled over her t-shirt. She slipped out of the garment and looked at her forearm. It was bandaged. She unwrapped it. Under the gauze, dark green leaves had been stuck to her skin. She peeled those away too and found teeth marks, two crescents of evenly spaced punctures in the meat of the limb. They looked small and irritated, but the blistering, the red veins of infection, were gone. So was the pain in her back and legs, and the fogged thinking. She felt tired, but clear. Like she was waking from a post-run nap.

  Parker replaced the leaves and the bandages.

  The walls of the room were bare, scarred with spackling paste. The bed was massive and old. The other furnishings were simple—a heavy dresser, a large steamer trunk set in the middle of the floor, a full-length mirror. And on the other side of the room, a weight bench and a free-standing punching bag that had been patched and re-patched with tape.

  Floorboards creaked as she stepped off the bed.

  Parker took a moment to look at herself in the mirror. She might have felt okay, but she looked like hell, like she'd spent a month bingeing on booze and video games. Her dirty blonde hair looked more dirty than blonde, half her curls tangled and the other half flattened from sleep. The eye makeup she'd had on was streaked down her cheeks, making her look like a picture of a panda painted by Salvador Dali.

  As best as she could, she combed her fingers through her hair, licked her thumbs, and rubbed away the streaks of eyeliner.

  Cold, she picked the sweater up off the bed and pulled it on again. Time to find out where she was.

  A narrow stairwell led down to the floor below and the rest of the apartment.

  She found him in a large room at the end of a hall, asleep on the couch, barefoot and wearing jeans and a t-shirt. The sword he'd had with him at the warehouse was on the coffee table. The TV was on, showing the menu screen of a DVD. She didn't recognize the movie.

  Parker stood a moment, wondering what would be the best way to wake him, and getting distracted by the little details of his appearance—the length of his eyelashes, the way his arms fit tightly inside the sleeves of his shirt, the shape of his chin.

  He stirred, as if sensing her presence, and opened his eyes.

  "Hey, you're awake," he said.

  "I was going to wake you," she said, trying to cover up her embarrassment, afraid he would think it was creepy that she'd been standing over him. "What time is it?"

  He looked at his phone. "Four."

  She'd been asleep the better part of a day.

  "How are you feeling?" He rubbed the side of his face that he'd been sleeping on. He had a deep voice. The kind of voice that managed to make an Irish accent seem exotic to her ears, even after eight months in the country.

  "Much better," she said.

  "Can I see your arm?"

  She stepped closer to him and rolled up the sleeve of the sweater. The bandage was loose from when she'd unwrapped it before. Gently, he pulled away the gauze and the leaves underneath.

  "What is that?" she asked.

  "Bog mint. Great remedy for goblin bites. Also works wonders for a hangover."

  Parker smiled at the joke before the first part of what he'd said sunk in.

  "Did you say goblin?"

  "Yes."

  "Oh." She pulled the sweater over her arm. The wound itched against the wool.

  He smiled, realizing that she wasn't taking him seriously. "You're looking at me like I'm a crazy person."

  "Well, you did just tell me a goblin bit me."

  "What, you don't believe in goblins?"

  "I'd never given it much thought, but no."

  "The thing that attacked you, how would you describe it?"

  Parker took a moment to think and gather her thoughts. "Like a human. But with green, scaled skin. Pointed ears." She looked down at the wound on her arm. "Fangs. It was like a snake-man."

  "So snake-men can exist, but goblins are too fantastical for you?"

  This was without question the silliest conversation she'd ever had. It was made more so by the fact that she was having it so soon after she'd nearly been killed.

  "So," she said. "What is a goblin, exactly?"

  He grinned. A crooked, impish expression. "A goblin's basically a snake man."

  4.

  His name was Aran, like the sweater. After the discussion of goblins they eventually got around to introductions, and moved from the living room to the kitchen, where he put on a kettle of tea.

  "Never met a girl named Parker before."

  "It's not a common name."

  "It reminds me of a book I read—series of books actually—about a professional thief, an American."

  "Speaking of thieves, the snake-men…"

  "Goblins."

  "Whatever. What were they looking for?"

  "Do you remember me coming into the shop the other day? I bought a clock that ticked backwards. Wanted you to make it so it ticked forwards?"

  "Why were they after it?"

  "Someone hired them to. Goblins are mostly thugs, cheap hired muscle. Not known for careful planning or grand schemes."

  "Any idea who hired them?"

  "I have an idea."
/>   "Care to elaborate?"

  "You're still trying to wrap your head around goblins. Might want to give this some time. Might also be that the less you know, the better."

  "So what were you doing at the shop last night? How'd you know they'd be there?"

  "Same guy who told me what they were looking for told me when they'd be there. I thought I might try talking to them, find out who had hired them, why they wanted the thing they wanted. Plan changed when I saw you."

  "Thank you for that, by the way. I should have said that a lot sooner."

  "Think nothing of it. Not every day I get to rescue a pretty American girl from a gang of monsters."

  He was joking more than flirting, but still she blushed a little.

  ***

  Parker expected there to be police outside. She expected yellow tape and uniformed patrolmen to be holding back a gathering crowd. She expected detectives in suits and forensic experts in white scrubs.

  But the shop seemed as quiet as usual. So did the street in front of it.

  Parker pushed the door open. The shop was undisturbed. She hadn't been witness to the entire fight that took place here the night before, but she'd seen and heard enough to know there had been a mess in the aftermath. She looked at Aran then stepped forward, quickly moving through the aisles. There wasn't a single drop of blood. Not a single shelf item was out of place. No sign whatsoever of the events of the evening before.

  Mr. Connolly, one of the shop's owners, appeared from between two rows of shelves. "Miss Parker," he said in his usual, jovial voice. "I thought you had the day off."

  Parker nearly screamed. The normalcy of it was more terrifying than carnage. Fear on a deeper level. Fear that she'd lost her mind. That she was inside a waking dream. That she'd lost her grip on reality. It was like being underwater without being able to tell which way was up.

  "Hi," Parker said after a long moment. "Mr. Connolly," she added.

  "You alright, dear?"

  "Yes."

  Parker turned toward Aran, as if his presence would confirm that she was sane. If he's real, what happened here last night really happened.

  Mr. Connolly looked at Aran, and Parker was suddenly embarrassed—her strange behavior, walking around with a guy she barely knew, wearing the same clothes she'd had on the day before, it must look like she'd been out all night. Mr. Connolly was old in an indeterminate way—a prematurely aged sixty or a youthful eighty. He wouldn't approve of such things.

  Another terrifying thought—had Mr. Connolly disposed of the bodies, cleaned up the blood? Was he lying to her now? Was he hiding something?

  Again, Aran came to her rescue.

  "Hi, my name's Aran. Bought a clock here the other day. Miss Parker did some repairs on it. I was hoping to acquire another, same model. She said she'd look around and see if she had anything. We ran into one another at the cafe down the street just now."

  He shook hands with Mr. Connolly, who immediately went into salesperson mode, telling Aran about a new selection of pocket watches that had just been refurbished and how, even if they didn't quite have the clock he was looking for, he might consider another item.

  This gave Parker enough time to compose herself. She left the two men alone and wandered over to her workbench. She had to fight off a fresh wave of panic when she saw what had been left there: her keys. The same ones she'd jabbed into that thing's face the night before. Like the shop itself, they bore no trace of blood. They looked clean and polished, like a set of sharp metal dentures. There was something menacing and purposeful about the way they had been left there.

  Parker shook away the feeling. She grabbed her iPad and keys and went back to find Aran and her boss.

  "I do have the day off, Mr. Connolly," she said, interrupting the conversation. Mr. Connolly was showing Aran the selection of pocket watches. "I was stopping in to pick up my iPad—I left it here last night. But since Aran is here, I'd like to show him a few things in the warehouse, if you don't mind. I won't count it toward overtime or anything."

  Mr. Connolly smiled. "Be my guest."

  Parker led Aran into the warehouse where, only hours before, she'd been run down and bitten by a human-sized reptile.

  "Am I losing my mind?" she asked when they were out of earshot.

  Aran walked around, looking at everything closely. "Does the floor look cleaner to you?"

  "You mean it hasn't got blood all over it? Yeah, that's the reason I'm freaking out. I'm afraid you're my imaginary friend. That all those nights alone I've been spending put me off the deep end."

  "No, look at the floor. Did it look this clean when you showed me around a few days ago? Or yesterday morning when you got to work?"

  Parker looked down at the area around her feet. It was polished concrete. The gray looked lighter than she remembered. Less scuffed.

  "I see what you're saying."

  "This place looked like a butcher shop last night. You didn't see the half of it. Someone cleaned it up, and they did it fast and they did it well."

  Parker whispered. "Do you think it was Mr. Connolly?"

  Aran shook his head. "I did a background check on him and anyone who works here. They're not hiding anything. Not anything serious anyway. And it wouldn't make sense, why would Connolly hire someone to rob his place of something he didn't even know he had."

  Parker mentally scolded herself for the dumb, paranoid theory. She wasn't used to this type of thinking. She made sure her next question was better.

  "What is this thing? The thing they're after, the thing you bought from here the other day?"

  "Something very old and very valuable."

  It was half an answer. He was dodging the question.

  Aran smiled. "I'm hungry, would you want to have dinner with me?"

  5.

  The room was spacious, as was the rest of the flat. Having spent his childhood inside a cramped, single room shared with his three siblings and their mother, Reed now surrounded himself with space.

  He wasn’t nocturnal for any other reason that he didn't much care for the sun. The flat had large windows that would have filled it with natural light, but Reed much preferred the view of more distant stars.

  A laptop rested on the floor next to the enormous bed, its screen tilted toward the keyboard like a half-closed eyelid.

  On that screen was a map, and on that map, a blinking red dot. Reed had watched it for a minute or two before tilting the screen—enough to shield some of the glow, not enough to put the machine to sleep—and set it aside.

  The blinking dot had been in a different location then, but as the day moved on to evening, it began to move. First, away from the shop, and then to a different part of the city, where it stopped again. The program that tracked these movements also recorded them. When he woke, Reed would have a log of all known locations throughout the day.

  The red dot marked a small tracking device he had placed on the keychain he’d found at the antique shop. It had been in the warehouse behind the showroom. The brass was stained red, the teeth had bits of flesh in it. Scaled flesh. Someone had used the keys as a makeshift knuckleduster on one of the thugs he'd hired.

  Adjacent to the keys, a small amount of blood. Human, not goblin.

  Reed had pieced it together in his head. Someone comes back to the shop, surprises the thugs. Hits one of them in the face with a fistful of keys. Is wounded and incapacitated, most likely from a bite, a goblin's weapon of choice. Then they get up and dismember their attackers?

  No, someone else showed up. The carnage he'd found in the showroom was the work of an experienced killer. Someone not only trained, but practiced. They had been armed with an edged weapon, a sword. Someone with that skill level would never have allowed themselves to be bitten. They wouldn't need to resort to using a pocketful of keys as a weapon.

  Who?

  Someone else was looking for the device, and in all likelihood, they already had it.

  This person would be hard to find. The only thing h
e knew about them was that they were good with a blade.

  The person whose keys he’d found would be easier to locate. If they had keys to the shop, they would be an employee. There were only three to choose from: a) the old shop keeper, Mr. Connolly; b) his business partner, the slightly younger, more portly Mr. Donnelly; and c) the college girl with the pierced nose.

  There were three keys on the ring, and an equal number of key chains. One was a bottle opener. Another was a small pig that oinked and shot lasers from its eyes when you pressed down on its back. The third, a grungy plush animal, some kind of cartoon.

  Looks like the correct answer is c, for college girl.

  As he waited for the cleaners to arrive, Reed washed the keys in the bathroom sink. He stuffed a small tracking chip inside the plush cartoon, and left them on a workbench, next to an iPad and a small soldering iron.

  There was no guarantee the plan would work. The girl might have died from the bite, or her rescuer may have treated her wound and left her at a hospital without properly introducing his or herself. But it was something.

  And if the device was long gone, Reed was in no danger. The ground meat that had hired him to find it would soon pass its expiration date.

  6.

  Parker and Aran travelled across the city to a small pub where she was the only non-local. They started with buttered brown bread and tea, before moving on to a hearty lamb stew. She ate more that he did. As soon as food was in front of her, Parker found that she was ravenous; the events of the night before had left her feeling weak and hungry.

  When they finished, they wandered for a bit, settling into a quiet cafe where they ordered more tea.

  He asked her questions about America—where she lived, what school was like, what she did for fun. And she asked him questions—where he had learned to fight with a sword, what he did for a living.