‘There was an alternative story circling chronometer and horology circles that a magician put a spell on a goldsmith and watchmaker’s shop because he had entrusted a priceless gold antique fob watch with them which was stolen by one of the employees. As nobody in the shop would admit to stealing it, he put a spell on everybody in the shop – a shrinking spell – and imprisoned them in an old mantelpiece clock for all time. Some said the caster of the spell was Merlin the Magician, some said it was John Joseph Merlin, the watchmaker, who had the magic touch with all timepieces and mechanical complications.’
‘Yes, very nice story – sorry – stories. You can come round any time you like to my home address and tell it to my children when they cannot get off to sleep,’ scoffed the gentleman.
The candles in the shop flickered for a moment as if a wind shadow had crept into the shop through a cracked window or underneath the door. Then all the lights went out in the emporium as if this was part of a magic show act – now you see it, now you don’t!
Now, whether the proprietor had blown out all the candles himself so he could conduct this transaction in secret, being a humble storyteller I cannot possibly say. Perhaps the clocks needing to wind down for the day used their doors swinging on their hinges to blow the candles out so as to remind both gentlemen that procrastination really is the thief of time. Another scenario just as unlikely was in that exact moment time had stood still, freezing the two men in time and enabling a thief to sneak in and steal the watch, replacing it with a fake. An even more unlikely tale was that during that moment a Time Thief snuck into the emporium and robbed both men of a precious moment of their time, said by the Chinese to be more valuable than gold.
Both men had imagined they had briefly fallen into a bad dream. In the dream they were trapped in the slide of a magic lantern owned by a giant. Everything was dark and neither of the men could move a muscle. Both men feared being at the mercy of the giant, their days were numbered. The giant picked a slide out of a battered red and black box containing many colourful litho lantern slides and slipped it into the lantern. The slide the giant picked at random was the slide which contained both the men trapped in a glass prison. Everything in the bad dream then became as clear as a crystal Mediterranean Sea as they appeared on a giant screen as two shadows. The giant did not seem to like the image on the screen so removed the lantern slide featuring two shadowy figures standing in a shop bartering with one another. The giant roared with a laugh so loud it broke the glass and shattered it into a thousand pieces, cutting the men to ribbons.
Both men fell out of the bad dream, not as men but as red ribbons – the sort a woman uses on a bonnet or a child uses to tie up a present. The two ribbons twisted and twirled around and around in the air in ever-decreasing spirals as they gently fell to the ground. The ribbons then magically transformed from red to black, coiling themselves as if snakes or dragons about to strike. Then, in a split second, the ribbons once more turned back into men as if in a clever conjuring trick. And once again all this took place in the blink of an eye.
Suddenly the emporium was flooded with light. It must have appeared to anybody looking through the window of the emporium at this moment in time that the candles, by some act of dark magic or alchemy, had produced a spark and thus lit themselves. Both men rubbed their eyes as if just awakening from a dream and, like a phantasmagorical dream, illusionary by its very nature, quickly forgot what the dream was all about.
The proprietor and the gentleman shook hands mechanically like clockwork automatons and parted company, for that is where the transaction ended, with both men thinking they had got the best of the deal. A few minutes later the well-to-do gentleman left the emporium. The proprietor, still half asleep, was led willingly up the stairs by the Sandman to the land of dreams. Here he was to take part in another transaction with a shady fellow, known in the circles where dreams are bought and sold for a pittance as the Dream Merchant.
‘A watch that will repair itself, that’s some fairytale, very much in the style of Grand Fairy Teller Hans Christian Andersen, and not even the Grand Clockmaker John Joseph Merlin could perform such a clever conjuring trick I fear!’ the gentleman and new owner of the watch muttered, shaking his head as he took the watch out of his pocket to see the hands glide serenely across the face of the dial as smooth as silk. One thing was true: every time the gentleman entered this emporium of the fantastique with its many weird and wonderful delights time flew by. The only time it did not fly by was when bartering with the old man who clearly, in the eyes of the gentleman, was one cog short of a cuckoo clock.
A strange thought occurred to the well-to-do gentleman as he left the emporium, which was that perhaps the proprietor was a Time Thief who collected other people’s wasted time and added it to his own. He was probably five hundred years old! What sort of curious thought was this? It was best he put this thought in the draw of the cabinet of curiosity in his head, lock it and never open it again, or better still throw away that key so it could never be found. The gentleman hadn’t the time for such wild imaginings. He wasn’t a storyteller, he was a businessman, a man who liked life to work like clockwork at all times!
2
Timeslip
‘Hold on to your hats, we’re on the move again,’ an old woman muttered as the tables and chairs in the room slid back and forth as if they were aboard a ship.
‘Time is always on the go,’ a younger man piped up as he slid across the floor straight into a broom cupboard.
‘The mechanism isn’t working properly, it should have righted us by now!’ bellowed a man, his face covered in grease.
‘I can’t get this screw out, pass me the bigger screwdriver then things will be ticketyboo in no time at all,’ replied the clockmaker to his young apprentice as the mechanism appeared to vibrate like the body of a bee in a hive.
‘Yes sir, right, right away sir,’ replied his apprentice as his teeth chattered as the clock continued to shake, rattle but thankfully not roll like a penny in an arcade. The apprentice then passed the clockmaker a larger screwdriver from the black apron tied around his waist. The two clockmakers busied themselves like bees in a hive all working towards one common goal to keep the clock running on time.
Now from this short conversation one might have thought this was all taking place on top of a bench in the back of a jeweller’s shop somewhere in the world where earth tremors occurred. But surely clock repairers would use tiny instruments to repair the inner workings of the mechanism like entomologists dissecting the body of a dragonfly, not tools one would imagine were made for a giant watchmaker? However, this world wasn’t quite the world one may have imagined. No, this world was a world inside a world, a world where the Clock People lived. You see, the two clockmakers were repairing a fob watch from the inside.
How was this remotely possible? I hear you enquire. Had they taken a shrinking spell like Alice, or was this a giant’s fob watch, in which case to the Clock People the watch was their earth? Once upon a time Diderot, the Enlightenment philosopher, wrote, ‘The whole world is like a machine with wheels, ropes, pulleys, springs and weights.’ Perhaps the story the proprietor in the antiques emporium had sold the gentleman wasn’t a fairy story after all. Could it possibly be this impossibly highly unlikely story had been written by John Joseph Merlin’s famous storytelling automaton?
Well, to answer those two questions as precisely as an atomic clock all I can say is that you see people of all shapes and sizes upon this jewel-like earth of ours. Then there are the fairy folk at the end of your back garden, the ones you cannot see or, in this curious case, the Clock People who lived in an antique fob watch. The Clock People did not like to be called fairies, elves, pixies or sprites for they were not any of these good folk. They also did not take kindly to being referred to as the little people, as in their world they were the perfect size – not too big, not too small, just right – and you can forget the Goldilocks story, f
or glue-like porridge eaten inside the workings of a precision timepiece would only gum up the workings!
Now, I know this all sounds a little complicated, like the complication or mechanism of a fantastical timepiece belonging to a royal patron, but that was not the curious case, not a bit of it, and this is simply a bit of the story, a tiny fragment of time taken and examined through a microscope.
The story takes place in seventeenth-century England at the very height of the greatest clockmakers on earth, or at least one part of it does. Back then royalty and the well-to-do even had their own clockmakers who were called guardians. However, they were not Old Father Time, the Guardian of Time who lived in a giant glass-domed clock, the whereabouts of which were a well-kept secret.
Now, as time is getting on I think that is enough information to be getting on with so let us get on with the story, as I know the speed of life has quickened considerably since the times in which this tale is set. (Here the Clockwork Storyteller drops a slide into a magic lantern, a tiny click is heard and as if by magic the slide appears upon a screen.)
3
Nightdreaming
‘Watch out down below,’ hollered a worker as he accidentally dropped a hammer from a great height. Then he took the weight off his feet by sitting down upon a weight inside the mechanism. But not the weight of the world, you understand, that was Atlas’s job! One may have imagined the man to be recreating Galileo’s famous experiment of dropping two weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa – one heavy and one light. However, this was not the case. Clearly one can have too much imagination for one’s own and everybody else’s good!
‘Be careful, man, that hammer nearly split my head open and I’ve already got a splitting headache from the hammering chimes of the clock!’ cried the foreman shaking his fist furiously at the man on the ladder as he ticked one of his workers off.
‘Sorry guv, won’t be a tick,’ shouted the man, banging his fist against a follet. ‘There we go, the good old-fashioned hit-it-and-hope technique works every time!’ And with that the mechanism of the fob watch kicked into life and all was well with the clock and the people who lived inside the clock.
‘Our lives are hanging by a thread. One slip and we’re clocking off for the last time,’ the old man muttered scratching his whiskers as he climbed into one of the many lifts going up and down inside the mechanism housed within the timepiece. The lifts were based upon the escapement system of a cuckoo clock – a series of chains pulled the lifts up and down which, for the most part, ran like clockwork.
‘That is true but then as our world hangs on the end of a chain I suppose that is only to be expected,’ laughed another worker inside the mechanism, trying hard to keep a smile off his dial as he clocked off from the nightshift.
‘Living in a clock I prefer the story of the old woman who lived in a shoe,’ chimed an old woman, her face well worn by time, although not tides. Tides inside a clock would only rust the mechanism. However, the mechanism was not airtight which meant the invisible River of Time still washed over the inhabitants of this small world, whether they knew it or not.
‘Wouldn’t you like to see the light, see what it’s like in the world above?’ a young man sighed, his eyes shining like a magic lantern.
‘Adventure is for the young, a waste of time for an old duffer like me, I’m afraid, and I prefer the relative safety of the mechanism. Step outside and you could be stepped on by one of the giants, gentle or otherwise. Or eaten by any number of beastly things, from spiders to giant man-eating ants!’ the old man replied as a frown appeared upon his antiquarian dial.
‘Yes, adventure is for the young. Us old folk are happy to live out the rest of our lives inside the safety of the clock,’ an old woman sighed, happy to mark time in the womb of the mechanical cocoon.
‘In time I will travel see the world and hopefully before I go stone deaf,’ the boy replied shouting into the old man’s brass ear trumpet.
‘It could be worse, boy, you could live inside a time bell or a diving bell!’ the old man chuckled as he stepped out of the lift with the boy, and walked along a gantry and into a small room.
‘Yes, that would be a nightmare, like the one I had last night. I was standing on a clock face when the big hand sliced my head off!’ the boy grimaced pulling a face like he had just stuck his head in between the jaws of two giant metal wheels!
‘There would be more room if we lived inside an old Gothic clock,’ muttered the old woman who went by the name of Mrs Drebbles as she looked up from doing some paperwork. The woman’s ancestors had been named after the famous watchmaker Arthur Drebbles, as had the Cole’s after John Cole, the Huygens’s after Christiaan Huygens and the Shepherds after Charles Shepherd – all clockmakers par excellence and members of the esteemed and ancient Guild of Watchmakers Extraordinaire. Every year the meetings were held in secret in a famous clock somewhere in the world. Even when the members had clocked off permanently their names were still read out as if their body clocks were still keeping perfect time.
‘Thinking of moving?’ enquired the old man.
‘Not likely, think of all that extra spring cleaning. I would never get any free time!’ the woman chuckled.
‘All time is free,’ the man chuckled, deliberately being mischievous.
‘You may be able to wind a clock up but you cannot wind me up quite so easily, Mr Drebbles,’ replied the woman, her face as straight as the hand of a clock.
‘Anyway, time for bed as this old body clock of mine needs to wind down,’ grunted the old man pulling out his fob watch and winding it up. ‘Pity we don’t have the luxury of having little people living inside our timepieces, then we wouldn’t have to keep repairing them!’
‘Very true,’ Mrs Drebbles replied rubbing her tired eyes, and then almost as an afterthought added, ‘I take it you did clock off after finishing in the mechanism?’
‘I knew there was something I was trying to remember. Problem is, I was also trying to forget that I had to get up again early on the morrow to work in the mechanism!’ coughed old man Drebbles, seemingly about to expire as he wearily walked back into the part of the mechanism where a machine stood at which the workers punched in and punched out their employment cards.
‘Goodnight Father,’ the boy cried stuffing cotton wool into his ears then covering his head with a pillow so the ticking of the mechanisms did not keep him awake.
‘A good nightmare. No such thing, son!’ exclaimed old man Drebbles mishearing for the umpteenth time as he wearily climbed back into his bed trying not to disturb Mrs Drebbles.
‘Do you believe there are other worlds like ours, Father?’ asked the boy half tucked into a dream and half tucked out before he was even asleep.
‘You mean Clock World’s nothing but a giant mechanism encased inside a moonstone face spinning silently in a black void? You sound like the philosopher Diderot and to my mind he talked a lot of rot, which is something you will never find in a clock. Rust, yes, but rot never,’ the old man yawned.
‘Yes, Giant Clock World’s full of people whose job it is to keep the world ticking over,’ the boy replied as he imagined a shop owned by a giant clockmaker with thousands of clocks hanging on the walls all full of little people. It sounded like the boy was talking about aliens from another galaxy rather than his own world, which unbelievably enough was an antique fob watch.
‘Sounds like a fairytale to me and one starring Old Father Time, either that or one of those apothecary tales that are supposed to teach you a lesson or a tale from the Clock Bible,’ mumbled old man Drebbles trying desperately to rub the sleep into his tired eyes.
‘Apothecary is an old chemist’s shop that sold tonics and potions, most that, like your tired mind, never worked. For what you meant to say, Mr Drebbles, was not “apothecary” but “allegory” which is a tale written in between the lines like that story, The Book Mites, which I recently read to our
Wilbur. Their story is about little people no bigger than the dot over the letter i who lived in between the lines of a book they called home. It sent me and the money spiders in our bed chambers off to sleep, even if it didn’t send Wilbur off to sleep!’ Mr Drebbles yawned, ear-wigging into the conversation.
‘A more than likely tale, knowing my befuddled brain, Mrs Drebbles. I stand corrected even if I am lying down. My old mother, God bless her, the worst time-keeper of all time, told me stories to get me off to sleep as a child. One such story was of how once upon a time her ancestors left the clock to see the world outside which was green and blue and full of many wonders. But they were probably just folk tales and nothing more,’ sighed the old man as in the ticking of a clock he travelled back to his childhood and then, just as quickly, returned to the here and now.
Most of the books housed in the library in the clock were books on horology, timepieces and maps and blueprints of the workings of the inside of the clock. To the Clock Elders the white enamel face represented the moon and the gold back face the sun. Some fob watches had a cover which protected the glass face which flipped open when the owner wished to know the time. Others did not have a cover. Once upon a time the fob watch that kept the people of the clock shielded from harm was fitted with a protective cover, but somewhere along the way the cover was lost. The story went that the clock was so ancient that the hinges on the cover rusted away and eventually fell off. The cover was far too heavy for the clock people to retrieve and stories of giants and ogres kept them from straying too far from the inner workings of the mechanism. The material the clock was made of ranged from brass to ivory, silver to gold, gemstones to clear moonstone.
The clock house was, in essence, a four-storey building and all the floors were made of moonstone so if you were standing, say, in the basement, you could see all the way up to the ceiling. However, the clock house had more than four storybooks in its library! Sorry about that thought, it was time for a little joke, after all this is an awful lot of information to take in at one time. Perhaps like the dragonfly known in nature as a time warper with its magic-lantern-like eyes we should take one frame at a time, thus we can then study this information at greater length, stretch time, you may say, like the dragonfly does so well. Of course, like the dragonfly we could always speed-read the story as if it were a Victorian children’s flicker book.
The Clock People Page 2