The Clock People

by Mark Roland Langdale

  ‘It’s raining!’ Wilbur spat as two drops of water fell on his head, almost drowning him in the process, which was mighty strange what with the sun shining outside. Perhaps there would be a rainbow in the house. Now if this had been the Swan King Wilhelm II’s house, who had a castle built upon the top of a mountainside, then perhaps this would have been a true story, and not an unlikely one, as the king was said to own a rainbow-making machine. Wilbur fell back and, as if by instinct, started to swim before realising he was swimming on dry land. More than a little red-faced he got to his feet and looked around hoping nobody had seen him make a complete and utter Charlie out of himself. Wilbur was glad none of the apprentices had seen this, otherwise they would never have let him forget it. ‘Look, here comes Fish Boy, no, better make that Carpet Boy, the boy who can swim on dry land!’ they would all cry as one, or so Wilbur was imagining. ‘Don’t lose the thread!’ Wilbur chastised himself realising he had bigger fish to fry.

  By this time Scarlet was at the foot of the window with the glass of water still in her hand. She swiftly lifted the magnifying glass with her other hand and poured the water onto the fire. The fire was extinguished almost immediately.

  ‘Help, help!’ Tippy cried as she went from the frying pan into the fire, the water almost drowning her as it had Wilbur not a few seconds earlier. To Tippy it felt like she was under a giant waterfall.

  ‘Oh, what have I done? I didn’t see you had a ladybird under the magnifying glass. How could you be so cruel, Alfie?!’ scolded Scarlet, her eyes filling with salt water tears.

  ‘Stop it, stop crying, I’m drowning in your pool of tears. Now I know how Alice felt!’ cried Tippy as another tear-shaped water bomb landed on top of her head. Once again these cries fell on deaf ears. One has to wonder how the children came to hear so many stories from the world of the giants. Perhaps the Clock People were fairy folk and had shrunk the books down to get them through the clock doors. Or perhaps their travelling troubadour storytellers had overheard the giant reading stories to his children and had written them down.

  Scarlet stopped dead in her tracks as a look of horror followed by disbelief appeared upon her face. Leaning closer to the magnifying glass she took an even closer look. For a brief second she thought she was looking at a tiny mermaid, then a damselfly in distress, then a fairy, then a ladybird as her imagination ran wild. Soon she came to her senses and realised it wasn’t a ladybird but a tiny girl so small that the fairytale girl Thumbelina was a good inch taller than her.

  ‘Alfie, Alfie, come and take a look at this, you won’t believe your eyes. A tiny person!’

  ‘Yes, very amusing, I must say. Don’t believe a word of it, you won’t fool me that easily, I know all your tricks,’ Alfie replied turning his back on his sister to swat a fly out of the air with his hand.

  ‘My tricks, that’s rich coming from the world’s greatest trickster!’ Scarlet snapped back caustically.

  Wilbur could see Tippy was safe, or at least for now. Unfortunately he wasn’t. ‘What’s that thrumming sound?’ Wilbur turned around just in time to see a large black creature with a thousand legs rushing towards him at alarming speed. Then everything went black.

  ‘I don’t believe my eyes, another fairy. We’re living in Fairyland and we don’t even have a garden, just a window box. I didn’t know fairies lived in window boxes. Dwarf boxes perhaps but window boxes? I wouldn’t imagine so, not for even a second. I suppose not all fairies are rich enough to own a garden!’ Scarlet exclaimed rubbing her tired eyes. Scarlet had always been a girl of inventive mind so took a piece of blotting paper from her father’s writing desk and scooped Tippy up with it in the hope this would dry the girl out. Tippy was high and dry but Wilbur was sopping wet, not due to the shower he had been caught in but due to the saliva that was dripping from the spider’s jaws. Both the spider and Wilbur appeared to be in a trance, stuck in an amber resin. The truth of the matter was they were both stuck in a jam, strawberry jam as it happens. Alfie had dropped a piece of toast with butter and jam on it then picked it up and put it straight in his mouth. It was a wonder the boy hadn’t picked up some incurable disease, or so his mother had said on many occasions.

  The spider was itching to get to Wilbur while Wilbur, understandably so, was itching to get away from the spider, but neither was in a position to do anything but struggle in the glue-like jam they were stuck in.

  ‘Help, I’m stuck fast, help!’ cried Wilbur as the spider squealed loudly as if in pain. Wilbur knew it was the survival of the fittest and whoever freed themselves first would more than likely be the victor. To the victor go the spoils. That’s what it said in all the old storybooks about brave knights and fierce dragons. Wilbur had often imagined an imaginary civil war in the mechanism between the Elders and the apprentices, a war he imagined the apprentices won every time the war was fought out in his head.

  The spider struggled wildly to free itself from the jam using all of its legs to do so and bit by bit it started to move forward as its internal combustion engine got up a head of steam. Wilbur imagined the spider was a metal monster powered by steam and one that he would happily have seen combust on the spot! Wilbur looked on in horror as the beast drew ever closer, for he still couldn’t move a muscle other than the cerebral muscle in his brain which was working overtime as usual. Wiggling his toes violently might have helped an escapologist free himself from his manacles but it wasn’t helping Wilbur one little bit.

  Wilbur gazed up to see a giant shadow hanging over him and imagined a giant was about to end his life even before the spider could. But the shadow was not that of a giant but a grandfather clock. Wilbur heard the loud ticking of the clock as the pendulum swished back and forth like an upturned axe, like in the story by the writer of Gothic horror tales, Edgar Allen Poe, The Pit and the Pendulum. Wilbur did not know why he hadn’t heard the clock before now. It was probably the fear and the sound of his own heartbeat pounding in his chest that had drowned out the sound of the giant clock.

  Wilbur seemed mesmerised by the clock. It was almost as if he felt this giant clock was not just a simple timepiece but the Clock God there to tell him his time was up. ‘No point struggling, Apprentice Wigglesworth Second Class, it is time to clock off for the final time!’

  The spider’s arms flailed in all directions, relieved to have freed itself from the glue-like jam, but rather than attacking Wilbur it suddenly stopped as if it had run out of steam. Then it sprang back into life, but still the spider did not attack, in fact it appeared to Wilbur as if it were licking its legs clean. Wilbur would rather the spider had been licking its wounds having fled with its tail between its legs – more wishful thinking from the boy wonder. Perhaps its hunger had been satisfied thought Wilbur, trying out some last-ditch wishful thinking. The spider shook its whole body violently almost as if something or someone had walked over its grave covered in cobwebs so dark it was hard to see the gravestone through them.

  Then the spider started moving towards Wilbur. It was surely just a matter of time before the spider cast a web around him. Then it would slowly reel him in and eat him alive, surely a fate worse than death. Wilbur could feel the hot breath of the spider on his face as it closed in for the kill. Wilbur closed his eyes for the last time and said a short prayer to the Clock God for a quick end as he waited for the darkness to envelope him. This prayer did not include his safe passage into the light but a prayer that his colleague Tippy Handle would be spared the fate that now awaited him. This time he would not escape the darkness by walking towards the light for the Clock God was punishing him for disobeying his wishes. He should never have left the safety of the clock. The Clock Elders had been right all along. What a reckless fool he had been. The Clock Elders were also right about youth: it was wasted on the young. The young wasted so many ticks and tocks on nothing more than time-wasting ventures, time they would never manage to get back… tick tock, tick…

  14

&
nbsp; The Time Thief Loses Track of Time

  Unbeknownst to the Clock People they were now living in a new home, a shack in the country owned by the thief, although as far as they were concerned they were still living in their old home, that of the fob watch, which in turn sat in a nice house in London. Housewise it seemed the Clock People had downsized. This in the history of the Clock People was nothing new, for once upon a time they had been living in a clock and were now living inside a fob watch. Downsizing further would mean moving into a grandfather clock in a dolls’ house and even the Clock People were not that tiny – actually they were but one has one’s standards! The truth was there was one more move the Clock People could make: downsizing to a home they could call their own. But that is another unlikely story for another day.

  ‘This beauty must be worth a pretty penny. Pretty sovereign of a golden colour, I’d imagine. Such lovely engraving and it’s pretty heavy. Worth its weight in gold, one might say. It could well be twenty-four-carat gold. A couple more days like yesterday and I can move up in the world, buy a house on a hill,’ muttered the thief to himself as he sat in an old whicker rocking chair on his porch, dangling the watch in front of his eyes. If anyone had been passing it would have looked to them as if he were trying to hypnotise himself or send himself off to sleep. All this time the Clock People went about their business of keeping the fob watch ticking over – that and fobbing off the young apprentices with reasons why they should not leave the safety of the mechanism. However, as soon as the Elders needed to replenish food supplies they would realise they had fallen on hard times – the ones they had read about in Charles Dickens’ book of the same name.

  ‘Need to stretch the old legs. I’ll take a walk down by the river, as my luck appears to have changed. Might even catch a fish or two for supper. Perhaps tomorrow I will take a walk down Memory Lane, in other words down Piddlington Street,’ the thief said licking his lips in anticipation of the catch, although he had already made a catch fishing the fob watch out of the gentleman’s pocket and, like the fish, he didn’t feel a thing. So he set off to the river carrying an old fishing rod over his shoulder, whistling to himself as if he hadn’t a care in the world like in the storybook The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The thief didn’t seem in the least bit worried that the gentleman he had stolen the watch off may have reported the watch missing to the police, having remembered someone had bumped into him in the street. As the man had a scar it was not a face he was likely to forget. Perhaps the long arm of the law reached as far as the country. Perhaps his time as a free man would soon be coming to an end.

  However, none of these thoughts passed through his head, only thoughts of how much money he would get for the valuable gold watch and what he would spend it on. One other thought did occur to him, however, and that was the watch may be his fortune in more ways than one. It could be a lucky omen and lucky omens were worth more than their weight in gold. But were they worth more than time? Only time would tell on that score.

  Twenty minutes later and having stretched his legs as far as he wanted to stretch them, and not being in the least bit interested in stretching his imagination any further, the thief found himself down by the river. He took out his rod and cast the line out, soon losing track of time, however he did not catch anything. Perhaps the watch wasn’t so lucky after all. Half an hour later the thief fell asleep by the riverbank catching flies as they say as he dreamt of possessing a life he had never imagined in a million years. The thief appeared to be having a dream or a nightmare, thrashing from side to side as if he imagined he was fighting off a river monster or was a fish on a hook. Then he lay still. The river monster must have been defeated and now he was probably cooking it over an open fire. What the thief wasn’t aware of was while he was tossing and turning the fob watch had fallen out of his pocket and was now lying out in the sun. The sun was sparkling upon the water and on the back of the watch made of pure gold. This was more than enough to catch the eye of another thief but this thief had the ability to fly. A black and white bird appeared from nowhere and landed right by the shiny golden object. The bird looked at it for a moment in a curious manner as if trying to decide its value. Perhaps the bird had been a goldsmith in a previous life? The bird pecked at the moonstone face of the watch then backed away. The ticking sound appeared to frighten it a little but not enough to stop it going back for a second look. The bird looked into the back of the watch, almost as if it were admiring itself in the golden mirror. Then all of a sudden the bird made a grab for the watch, pulling the gold chain so the watch moved but only so it moved a few inches. The bird did this several times, as it seemed to sense the sleeping giant might awake at any moment. The bird had not heard the rhyme ‘four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie’, but even if it had it would not have worried, for the bird was a magpie, known to all in the bird world as a thief who feathered its nest with any shiny objects it could lay its beak or claws upon.

  The magpie finally sensed it was now or never, so grasped the chain in its mouth and flew up into the sky. For the thief it looked as if the rhyme of the magpie, ‘one for sorrow’, for him at least was true. The thief flew over the river but the watch was far too heavy for it to hold onto for any length of time and so the chain started to slip through its beak. The magpie bit down even harder upon the chain hoping to hold onto its valuable cargo but it was no use, as the chain slowly slipped through its beak and fell into the river. As the watch hit the water it made a loud plopping sound, the sound a kingfisher makes when diving into the water as it searches for its prey. This propelled a spurt of water upwards like a hot spring in the land that the Vikings owned – Norway.

  A dragonfly who just happened to be passing blinked its big magic lantern-like eyes several times – click, click, click – as if taking photographs of this happening before landing on top of a large brown reed swaying gently in the breeze.

  The watch sank deeper and deeper into the murky waters of the river until it reached the bottom of the riverbed where it sat upright in the thick sludge. There was a slight judder and jarring sensation inside the mechanism but not enough to cause alarm or make the people of the clock think anything was amiss and nor had the thief at this moment in time. The maker of the watch, Horace H. Humdinger, had designed a self-righting mechanism, so no matter what the position of the watch – lying on a table, sitting upright in a pocket or even held upside down – the little people inside would be as right as rain. In other words, the world of the Clock People would not be turned upside down no matter what – well, unless, say, the clock sprang a leak! If this happened the self-righting mechanism may stop working and have to be repaired.

  The Clock People had no idea what had just happened, had no idea how much danger they were in, but they soon would as slowly the chamber of the mechanism started to flood with water. It was fair to say at this point in Greenwich Mean Time, Eugenius Broadbent, the chief engineer of the mechanism, was wishing he had designed a system for the mechanism, that of the balloon fish, for if he had an air bag would have inflated outside the mechanism and the watch would have floated to the surface just like a dead fish. But Eugenius Broadbent, Engineer Second Class, hadn’t, and all the wishful thinking in the world was not going to change that. It seemed Eugenius was not such a genius after all. If he had been blessed with the genius of Leonardo da Vinci or the engineer Eugenius Birch, the Victorian pier builder, he surely would have done so. But then again he was a second-class engineer and not a first-class mechanician like John Joseph Merlin and his partner, the jeweller James Cox, who invented the Cox Timepiece, the mechanisms of which worked by using atmospheric pressure, a truly revolutionary timing device at the time it was created. Some imagined Merlin and Cox were gods or at the very least had the ability of Merlin the Magician. In some magic circles it was said Merlin and John Joseph Merlin were one and the same man, a man who could travel through the mechanism of time itself. This most people thought was nothing but a fantastical story, one more
in keeping with Tales of Wonder and Magic for the young reader of an imaginative mind or fictional stories like ‘Master Humphrey’s Clock’ by Charles Dickens than ones based upon facts for the reader of more scientific periodicals.

  It seemed the story of the Clock People, like the people of Atlantis, would end in a watery grave like so much sunken treasure that is never found, lying forgotten on the bottom of the ocean bed. Perhaps one day a treasure hunter in a diving bell or diving suit, brass helmet, lead boots and all, would find the treasure like divers found the greatest timepiece of all antiquity, the Antikythera mechanism.

  ‘Water! Somebody must have knocked over one of the water barrels. If it gets in the mechanism it will turn to rust as will we all!’ exclaimed an old woman shaking her head, wishing she lived in a shoe rather than a clock, as she imagined she was simply a clockwork figure living inside a town clock.

  ‘Are you sure it isn’t the beer barrels from the Wheel & Watchmaker’s Tavern that have spilt?’ laughed a barrel-chested man in jocular fashion.

  ‘There’s more water over here and look, it’s coming in through the roof at twelve o’clock,’ a young boy said pointing upwards. Using the numbers of a clock as a point of reference made it fairly easy to know where a trouble spot was, and this was a common way for sailors and pilots to tell their colleagues where the enemy was approaching from. Right now the only enemy was the water pouring into the clock at an alarming rate!

  ‘Ring the time bell, abandon ship, there’s a flood!’ one of the Clock Elders shouted, holding a flickering oil lamp up as people ran here, there and everywhere in a terrible panic. ‘Where’s Noah when you need him?!’