The Clock People

by Mark Roland Langdale

  ‘Yes Mother, absolutely Mother, will do Mother,’ Scarlet said nonchalantly picking up the thimble and putting it over Tippy and Wilbur so she could not see them. In truth Scarlet and Alfie’s mother would have had to look a lot closer to see them, a lot closer.

  ‘Yes Mother, no Mother, three bags full Mother, then as soon as my back’s turned you two scallywags will be at it hammer and tongs. Well, please leave the hammer out and as for the tongs, well, if I have to come up here again today those tongs will be attached to your tongues!’ the children’s mother growled then stormed back down the stairs. But before she re-entered the hat shop she composed herself, took a deep breath, and straightened her hair and her dress before calmly walking back into the shop to deal with the customers as if everything upstairs was all fine and dandy. ‘Lovely choice of hat, madam, it suits you. Goes with your sparkling emerald green eyes. Sorry about the noise, it’s the plumbing system, it’s playing up again.’

  ‘That was close!’ exclaimed Scarlet blowing out her cheeks as she lifted the thimble off the two children.

  ‘We didn’t think much of that humble abode, did we, Mrs Clockheimer,’ Wilbur joked.

  ‘No we didn’t, Mr Clockheimer, too dark and stuffy and no windows or stairs and cold as an icehouse. I will, however, recommend it to Mr and Mrs Thumbelina as they live in Denmark Street where the wind blows like it’s the North Pole,’ Tippy said pretending to shake and shiver.

  ‘Bravo, bravo, you two should be on the stage. Hours of endless entertainment. We don’t need the gramophone or the crystal radio set with you little people around. I should build you a stage like Hans Christian Andersen did with the help of his father,’ Scarlet laughed as Wilbur and Tippy bowed theatrically to the audience of one as if they were on the stage at the Hippodrome in London.

  ‘If you like, Wilbur, I could set up my train set and you could have a ride?’ Alfie said, all sweetness and light.

  ‘Hey, what about me, why can’t I go for a ride on the train?’ Tippy cried feeling she was once again playing the part of the Invisible Woman.

  ‘I don’t think either of you want a ride on The Potts Express, it’s always going off the rails!’ Scarlet said pulling a face as in her mind’s eye she saw two trains heading towards each other on the track then crashing into one another full steam ahead! ‘Oh and don’t put Wilbur in your toy cannon either, the one you normally shoot matchsticks out of, he’s not an acrobat or a part of a travelling show!’

  ‘As if I would,’ Alfie smiled playing the part of the wronged man to a T or at least a mad tea cup!

  Scarlet could see the wheels of her brother’s mind whirring like the perpetual motion clock and knew if she did not find something for those wheels to run upon they would undoubtedly run off the rails. Then there would be one almighty crash, which would bring everybody’s world crashing down around their ears, and dear brother Alfie would walk away without even a scratch.

  But Scarlet had one more trick up her sleeve for her brother, a nice now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t trick with a twist.

  ‘Now, Alfie, observe closely, little brother, for I have a conjuring trick to show you,’ Scarlet said sounding mysterious as her brother’s face became a picture of puzzlement.

  Scarlet put her hand over Wilbur and slowly drew it across where he was standing, uttering the magic word, ‘Abracadabra!’ as Wilbur Wigglesworth changed from Little Lord Fontleroy into Merlin the Magician, dressed in a black cloak and hat to match, both bespangled in gold and silver stars. ‘Hey presto, magic!’ Scarlet said finishing off the act in the tried and trust manner as both she and Wilbur bowed. Tippy was now standing at the top of the stairs overlooking the hallway in the dolls’ house where the trick was taking place and, in all her excitement jumping up and down and clapping wildly as if she had seen the greatest trick of all time, nearly fell over the banisters.

  Scarlet then picked Wilbur up and once again thrust him into the limelight, or at least right under Alfie’s nose. ‘If you do not do as I wish I will put a spell upon you and turn you into a toad!’ Wilbur shouted.

  ‘Wilbur said if you do not do as he wishes he will turn you into a toad!’ Scarlet exclaimed making sure little brother got the message loud and clear. Scarlet was imagining she had Merlin in her pocket, a pocket-sized Merlin she could bring out whenever she needed some help of the magical variety.

  ‘A dirty trick if you ask me!’ Alfie grunted turning away in a huff as everybody fell about laughing, by which time Tippy was on a stage of a different kind: Scarlet’s outstretched hand. You could say Scarlet had the little people eating out of her hand and in some ways she had, for, you see, she had placed a table and two chairs on her hand along with a dolls’ tea set. She had also brought some crumbs of cake and set them upon tiny plates. Scarlet had cleverly created some new costumes for her two travelling troubadors – Tippy was playing the part of Alice and Wilbur the Mad Hatter. Dear Alfie naturally was still playing the fool standing in the shadows wishing all three further!

  ‘Alfie, be a dear and move that stage scenery in the background, it’s blocking out the light. I need the spotlight to be shining on my actors. Oh sorry Alfie, you’re the background scenery. Do you think you could move that big head of yours, you’re blocking out the sun!’ Scarlet beamed playing the part of a perfect ray of sunshine. Alfie muttered a few choice words under his breath and, clearly under the weather, stomped off back to his bedroom, climbed in bed and pulled the sheets over his head. Alfie thought he was clearly having a nightmare where his sister appeared to be playing the part of the trickster. In truth it made a change for the roles to be reversed. Scarlet certainly thought so as she wore a smile the Cheshire Cat would have been proud of for the rest of the evening… tick tick, tick tock, tick…

  20

  The Time Thief Gets Up a Head of Steam

  The thief awoke to a sound. Someone was in his house. Some no good, thieving rapscallion was about to steal his valuable timepieces, the ones he’d worked so hard for, as he steamed in with both guns blazing.

  ‘What are you doing in my house!’ the thief cried sounding like the giant in the Jack and the Beanstalk story.

  ‘Your house? This is our house. Dear, there’s a thief in our house, call the constable!’ cried a woman as a man and two children appeared behind her.

  ‘We’re being robbed!’ the man exclaimed as he picked up a hammer and went to confront the thief.

  ‘Me a thief? This is my house, you’re the thieves, it should be me calling the police,’ the thief cried then stopped dead in his tracks. ‘Call the police’? What on earth was he saying? The last thing he wanted to do was call the police. The thief tried to clear his brain from the fog that it was wrapped in. Perhaps in his tiredness he had wandered off the beaten track and had gone into the wrong house. Anyway, why was he worried about an old broken-down shack? With his ill-gotten gains he could afford a palace. Well, perhaps not a palace but a nice property in London Mayfair, Park Lane, Berkeley Square. ‘Don’t harm me, I’m just a tramp, didn’t think this rundown old place was occupied so I slept here for the night. I’ll be moving on now, sorry, I won’t bother you again,’ the thief grunted head down as he ran out of the house and disappeared into the gloaming, a favourite place for all shadowy figures to disappear into.

  ‘Maybe this is a sign the watch is my lucky charm telling me the police could find me at the shack at any time. I’ll grow a beard, get some fancy clothes, rent a house and hide in plain sight. I’ll still keep my hand in from time to time, pick the odd pocket or three, but only the rich pockets and dressed as a toff they’ll never take me for a thief. Just call me Raffles and be done with it,’ the thief laughed as he rubbed the fob watch with his sleeve as if it were Aladdin’s lamp.

  The thief had almost forgotten the dream of waking up in another time, more like a nightmare. The first thing he did was sell a watch he had stolen three months previous. It was best not to se
ll a stolen watch straight away, not while it was hot. Best let it cool down, everything cooled down in time, even the universe. It wasn’t long before greed took hold of the thief and he was on the lookout to pick a pocket or three. It was like being a drunk or a gambler – he couldn’t help himself, couldn’t resist putting his hand in a pocket. Picking his own pocket unfortunately didn’t have the same effect!

  The thief was drawn back to his old haunt, the street where he had stolen the watch that had become his lucky charm. By this time he had grown a beard and was looking much more respectable. He was even wearing a monocle, a proper toff he was. But underneath he was still a thief. Once a thief, always a thief. He had been thieving since he was in his cot, so his mother once told him. The first pocket he picked was his grandfather’s at the age of five while he was sitting on his knee. He even picked the pocket of a constable for a dare when he was fourteen and he’d got away with it. And what’s more, he still had that watch. It was one of his prize possessions.

  The thief hadn’t been back in London more than five minutes when it dawned upon him that something wasn’t right. The buildings looked different, as did the people. Like in his dream they were dressed in a peculiar manner as if they’d just come off the stage having appeared in a Shakespeare production, possibly A Midsummer Night’s Dream he joked to himself. Perhaps the joke was on him. The whole of London had ganged up to play the biggest practical joke of all time to teach him a lesson. What an imagination he had. It would certainly help to embellish his memoirs. He saw a man reading a newspaper in the street and casually walked up to him to see the date on the paper. He could kill two birds with one stone while he was at it, especially if one was a thieving magpie. Yes, find out the date and pick the man’s pocket. He would leave him with the newspaper, after all he wasn’t a complete scoundrel.

  The thief casually walked up to the man. The date on the paper was 1st July 1770 but it couldn’t be. Forgetting the pickpocketing for the moment he found another man reading a paper. The date on the paper was the same.

  How could this be? He must be going mad like poor King George III. He imagined he was one step away from being fitted for an unfashionable straitjacket and thrown into Bedlam until someone found the mind he had quite clearly lost. But wait a minute, don’t throw away the key yet, perhaps he had travelled back in time? What a curious thought! Where did that come from? He should be writing for the Penny Dreadfuls! Clearly he was wasting his talent by thieving and robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, mainly himself! The thief stopped riveted to the spot for what to him seemed like an age before he pulled out the watch from his waistcoat pocket. He examined it closely with a keen eye as if he were wearing a pair of watchmaker’s scopical glasses. That was strange, he hadn’t noticed that before, there was a small opening on the dial of the watch. It was a date: 1st July 1770. In some ways it was as if he were seeing the watch for the first time in its true light.

  The thief knew the watch was special. It had brought him good fortune. He even knew the face of the glass was made of clear moonstone and his friend the jeweller had said something about the Romans believing moonstone was magical in some way. But that sort of thing was for storybooks – H.G. Wells’ Time Machine, or one of Jules Verne’s nonsensical stories of impossible things being possible. Even so, he thought a watch that would enable him to travel in time would be quite something. He then recalled the dream, or what he thought at the time was a dream, when he fell asleep on the bench in Greenwich not far from the Royal Greenwich Observatory and the Prime Meridian timeline.

  The story he had made up in his head was that by travelling in time he could buy new timepieces from the past, travel back to the present and sell them as antiques, and furthermore they would be in mint condition. He could steal all the famous priceless timepieces along the timeline and become the richest man in London. Yes, that wasn’t a bad premise for a book. Forget stealing, he’d become a crime writer and write about thieves and all their thieving little ways and more than he wanted to know about the local constabulary. At least it would be more realistic than the Penny Dreadfuls he’d read as a child, which even to his uneducated mind were dreadful!

  While the thief’s mind was running anything like clockwork the Clock People were making sure the mechanism of the watch kept perfect time. Climbing up and down the ladders in the mechanism in such a mechanical and ordered fashion one would have imagined them to be automatons rather than real people made of flesh and blood. It seemed this was how the minds of the Clock People worked – like clockwork, not thinking at all just doing, as if they had become apart of the mechanism itself. Perhaps these tasks were so monotonous, like so many jobs were, that this helped to pass the time. In a way this was no different from the people who lived and worked in the outside world. In some ways the Clock Elders were happy with this, for even when the workers clocked off for the day they still lived their lives like clockwork and thus did not want, desire or imagine anything else but the lives they lived.

  To the Clock Elders, imagination and curiosity were the devil’s work. Most common in the young they needed to be stamped out as soon as possible. It was safer for all concerned if this was the case. Curiosity and imagination had caused several of the Clock People to risk venturing outside and they were never seen again. It was imagined they must have come to a sticky end in a beehive, a mouse trap or a spider’s web, or drowned in a drain.

  There was a story that many moons ago one of the Clock People, Caruthers Manners, had gone exploring outside the clock and had written a journal about his travels. He’d also drawn sketches of the wonders he’d seen: mountains, caves, lakes, oceans and great creatures, both upon the ground and in the air. He even claimed he’d seen a flying tiger. It was funny how the mountains looked like the shelves in a library, the caves the open mouth of a bearskin rug, the lakes a kitchen sink, the oceans a bath, the great creatures a cat and a dog, and the flying tiger bees and wasps. One day Caruthers Manners went out exploring in the world outside and was never seen or heard of ever again. The book he wrote, Adventures Outside the Clock, disappeared off the bookshelf as if by dark magic one day and was never seen again. But that was a story of another time, so let’s get back to the present day as the clock is ticking… tick tock, tick tock, tick tock, tick… ‘Hey, what happened to the tock?’ ‘Sorry!’ TOCK!

  There had been a few teething problems after the water had seeped into the watch when it was dropped in the river by a thieving magpie. But by this time everything was ticking over nicely, or so the Clock People imagined. It hadn’t taken long for everything to get back to working like clockwork and the folk who had seen the wonders of the outside world appeared to have by and large forgotten all about them. One young apprentice with a vivid imagination had suggested all the people of the clock had been gathered together in a room. Here the Elders stood on a stage swinging watches to and fro on their chains in front of their bleary eyes in an attempt to hypnotise them into forgetting the whole sorry episode. But that was just another unlikely story to add to all the others, probably!

  ‘I still can’t find Apprentice Handle or Apprentice Wigglesworth,’ the foreman sighed scratching his head.

  ‘They’re probably playing a joke on you, hiding in the mechanism somewhere. You know what children are like, full of mischief,’ laughed an older man stroking his whiskers in a playful manner.

  ‘Well, if they don’t come out of hiding in two ticks then they’ll get the biggest ticking off of their young lives. If they’re not careful the council might decide they are not apprentice material,’ bellowed the foreman Cornelius Carbuncle as he put a loud hailer to his lips. Carbuncle’s voice echoed throughout the clock but the two young apprentices did not appear. Later, after a complete search of the clock top to bottom and bottom to top, not leaving out the middle of course, and with the apprentices still missing, it was decided by the council that two older watchmen would venture outside the clock to try and track them
down.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mrs Wigglesworth, Mrs Handle, they probably went out looking for an adventure. I’m sure they’ll be back soon,’ one of the Clock Elders said comforting both Wilbur and Tippy’s mothers who by now were worried sick.

  ‘Yes, don’t worry, they’ll be fine, they’ve both got their heads screwed on properly, well, at least Tippy has,’ Mrs Mumbles said, living up to her name as the last five words came out of her mouth as a low indecipherable mumble.

  ‘Yes, right as rain, you’ll see, they’ll be back in no time at all I hope. Probably. Maybe not. It’s a big world out there, full of dangers. Never mind about adventures, misadventures is the more likely story,’ wobbled Mrs Collywobbles, also living up to her name admirably.

  21

  The Miniature Magician

  ‘I’m back!’ Alfie shouted popping up out of nowhere.

  ‘Yes and I wish you weren’t!’ Scarlet exclaimed hands on hips, frowning for all she was worth.

  ‘I see you’re still playing with your imaginary friends!’ beamed Alfie having not clocked off from teasing his sister for the day.

  ‘Look, Alfie, sit down for five seconds, I want to talk to you,’ Scarlet said calmly trying to get her brother on side.

  ‘Yes, sure you do, more like you want to tie me to that chair like in a game of cowboys and Red Indians then scalp me!’ Alfie snapped backing away nervously.

  ‘Don’t talk rot, Alfie, that and I’ll leave the barber to scalp you, as on Saturday Mother takes you to get your hair cut. Mind you, if the barber’s Sweeney Todd the Demon Barber of Fleet Street then perhaps you’ll end up in a pie. Still, at least then we’d all get a bit of peace and quiet. Look, I really do want to talk to you about the little people you’re doing your level best to scare the life out of!’ Scarlet said laying down the law as nicely as she could.