The Clock People

by Mark Roland Langdale

  As the thief disappeared into the mists of time he had a curious thought. Perhaps every time he travelled through time his atoms reproduced themselves, so there were now three of him all in different time zones, the magical power of three Pythagoras’ Theorems. Yes, this was a most curious thought. Perhaps they should just call him the Mad Hatter, fit him for an uncomfortable straitjacket and be done with it!

  ‘He, he was standing on the Prime Meridian timeline when he disappeared,’ Scarlet said thinking out loud, sounding like Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson all rolled into one. Clearly Alfie could read her mind, which was working anything but like clockwork.

  ‘And your half-baked theory is because of this. He must have disappeared into time itself!’ Alfie spluttered almost falling about with laughter at the preposterous notion of such an absurd idea.

  ‘Look, if I can believe in little people, and admittedly I’m still struggling with that one, then like H.G. Wells I can believe in time travel,’ William Higginbottom said blowing out his cheeks.

  ‘But what time has he travelled to?’ Scarlet said quickly forgetting the implausibility of what she had just said to focus on the possibility of what she had just said.

  ‘You’d make a good mad scientist, sis, you and the Hatter who was mad!’ Alfie piped up scratching his head. ‘Fairies, time travel, so why not werewolves and vampires?’

  By this time Wilbur was jumping up and down like a madman trying to get their attention as he had a story to tell of his own. Finally Scarlet looked at the snuffbox in her hand.

  ‘Sorry Wilbur, in all the excitement I almost forgot you were there. What are you trying to tell us?’

  ‘Why doesn’t he write it down then we can look at it under a microscope?’ Alfie snapped thinking out loud and for once he was talking sense and not the nonsense he normally spouted.

  ‘Yes, yes, good idea, little brother, we’ll take Wilbur back home, after all we don’t want Mother and Father to see we’ve gone,’ Scarlet replied also thinking on her feet.

  ‘If they see us we’ll close our eyes and act like zombies as if we’ve been sleepwalking,’ added Alfie thinking on his feet.

  ‘Act like zombies? In your case, Alfie, that shouldn’t be too difficult!’ snapped Scarlet smirking inanely, something Alfie was prone to do after he thought he’d made a funny remark.

  ‘I’d like to see how the story turns out,’ said Billy who by now was as curious as it was possible to be without turning into a cat!

  ‘Look, we’ll all meet, same place, same time, tomorrow twelve o’clock. We can even take a look round the clock museum to pass the time – our treat for all your help,’ Scarlet said having a feeling that soon they were going to need more of that help.

  ‘You’ve got yourself a deal, miss,’ Billy said shaking Scarlet and Alfie’s hands then trying to shake Wilbur by the hand. Billy soon realised that was one thing that was impossible, unless a wizard appeared and put a shrinking spell on him or a growing spell on Wilbur! The pocket wizard would no doubt make a spanking good tale for the Penny Dreadfuls!

  ‘Where will you sleep tonight, William?’ Scarlet enquired.

  ‘On a park bench. Luckily it’s a warm night. Winter is worse, much worse. Time drags in winter when you’re living on the street,’ sighed Billy looking downcast as time appeared to weigh heavy upon his young shoulders… tick… tock… tick…

  31

  Father Time, the Greatest Showman of All Time

  ‘What time is it, I wonder?’ said the thief opening up the pocket watch and looking at the time. What he really wanted to know was what time zone he was in, the same one he had travelled back to the last time, or was he now in another time? It would have been useful if the chronometer in his hand told him this vital piece of information. You would have thought the maker of this fantastical timepiece would have thought of such a thing. What the thief had not seen was that as the moonlight struck the watch a small box appeared on the face of the watch telling you the exact day, month and year you were about to travel to. However, as soon as you arrived that date quickly disappeared.

  Why and how this was the curious case was as yet unknown to even the Clock People themselves, unless the Elders were not telling all they knew of the history of the watch. In all honesty to the thief it didn’t make a great deal of difference, after all he was a thief and thieves stole. It made little difference what time he was in.

  But he was no ordinary thief, oh no, he was the Time Thief and the Time Thief literally stole time, stole it from right under the noses of the people he was stealing it from. If he caught somebody daydreaming their life away he would sneak up behind them and without them even realising it steal a small moment of time from them. Later, he would add this wasted time to his timeline. This way he would be able to live forever, or so he imagined. He even sold some of this stolen time on the black market for a large price, naturally!

  If Old Father Time caught the Time Thief, of course he might well have to stand trial in the Court of Time being tried by a grandfather clock and a jury of twelve mantelpiece clocks. This, the greatest showman of all time, Father Time, would demand, as would the Clock God. If found guilty the thief would have to serve out his time housed within the mechanism of a clock encased inside a glass dome. By the time he had finished his sentence he would be stone deaf due to the constant loud chimes of the clock, or so he imagined. It was said travel broadened the mind. For a time traveller it appeared it broadened the imagination too!

  *

  Scarlet and Alfie got back just in the nick of time, as Mr Potts couldn’t sleep so got up out of bed and went into the kitchen to fetch a glass of water.

  The next morning the children got up to see Wilbur hunched over a piece of paper trying to wield a pen as if it were a sword. It was said the pen was mightier than the sword. Try telling that to Wilbur whose hands were bleeding from suffering terrible paper cuts and he was as black as ink, as the pen leaked.

  ‘Wilbur, it looks like you’ve been in a sword fight!’ Scarlet exclaimed.

  ‘It’s the knights in my castle. When they can’t sleep they fight amongst themselves and with any elves and fairies that get caught in the fray, and by the looks of it the black dragon has got its claws into our Wilbur too!’ Alfie said making up fairy stories that for once weren’t a pack of lies. In truth half of history was fairytales, the other half myths and legends, which in theory left no room for the truth. Nothing was true. Everything, like time itself, was an illusion. It appeared the tellers of quantum wonder tales were right all along. We were all simply creating our own realities, the ones we wanted to believe in! In the circles horologists travelled in watches and clocks were called complications.

  Time and reality was more complicated than all the complex timepieces in the history of time itself and had more moving parts. As such, not only was the impossible possible, it was almost certainly where the fairytale ended and the truth began! Just imagine time running backwards and forwards like the tides and the sands of time in a giant hourglass stood upon its side.

  That was exactly what the Time Thief was doing right this minute as he strolled through London feeling like a king of the Elephant and Castle. It appeared he had all the time in the world, or was this like the Emperor’s New Clothes, simply just an illusion created by the mind? Once upon a time Harry Houdini had made an elephant disappear from a crate, and he could probably have made it appear as if the Elephant Man were flying if he so wished. Believe it or not, once upon a time another lifetime ago, there was even such a thing as an elephant clock! But could the master illusionist make time disappear? Surely even the greatest illusionist of them all, Merlin the Magician, couldn’t pull that trick off.

  ‘If I’m not careful another time thief will pick my pocket, steal my watch and add a moment of my time to his timeline,’ the thief said smiling to himself. ‘Time to pick a pocket or three, oh, and what a happy coincidence, th
e Greenwich Clock Museum is standing right in front of me. Now it would be plain rude and impolite of me not to pay it a visit, after all I do have all the time in the world!’ And with that the thief got to work stealing time, or if you want the truth, stealing timepieces, from the pockets of gentlemen walking around the museum and then when the museum closed timepieces from the museum itself. Would the pieces he stole then disappear from the collection in the future? Time would tell or perhaps it had already told.

  If this was the case the thief could pretend he had found the timepieces that a thief, in his hurry, had dropped somewhere on the banks of the River Thames. Not only would he be a hero, a feeling he had never experienced before in his life, he would get a reward. Then he could steal them again and the next time he could sell them on the black market to a collector of historic chronometers. The thief licked his lips at the thought of such a devious and despicable but highly profitable endeavour as this one. Being a time thief was far more profitable than one could ever have imagined and it turned out a good deal easier and safer to boot. And unless a time detective turned up to spoil his little game he was on easy street for the foreseeable past, present and future or, Time Street or Times Square, if you want to stretch your imagination a little further. Perhaps if he stretched it a little bit further he would end up on Imagination Street?!

  In time, the thief imagined he would dispose of the Time Thief moniker and instead he would call himself a simple Time Traveller dealing in antiques and antiquities of a horologic nature. And the first time antiquity on his hit list would be the Marie Antoinette watch which meant travelling to France during the time of the French Revolution where, if caught, he would undoubtedly lose his head. Next, if successful in this daring heist, he would aim even higher by trying to secure the Antikythera mechanism for his fantastical collection of timepieces of an antiquarian nature. This, naturally enough, would mean travelling to Ancient Greece. He’d get his passport updated. No time like the present! Yes, what a capital notion, he could even set up his own shop, several shops in fact. Nothing small-time for our thief, it was time to go big time in a big way.

  The thief would quickly be able to accumulate several antique shops in several different countries and in several different time zones, from Constantinople to Timbuktu! The Time Thief would have so much money he could probably buy an apprenticeship with Old Father Time and extend his timeline even further! The mind of the thief wasn’t so much running like clockwork as running like Leonardo da Vinci’s Infinity Clock. If it kept going in this manner, surely it was just a matter of time before the mechanism of his mind combusted like a steam-powered clock that had been overwound! The trouble with some of this thinking was he would only find out about the Antikythera mechanism if he had travelled to the future, for that was where it had been found, in the seas off the island of Antikythera, or what was left of it.

  While the thief was getting way ahead of himself, Scarlet was trying not to get too far behind herself but stay in the moment, as hard as that was. In truth the only way to stay in the moment was to be trapped inside a photograph or a magic lantern slide for all time, but that was very constricting, a bit like being in a straitjacket in a lunatic asylum!

  Tick tock, tick tock, tick…

  32

  Merlin’s Mechanical Museum

  Scarlet carefully picked Wilbur up and gently placed him upon the palm of her hand. Then she daubed him ever so gently with a tiny piece of blotting paper to staunch the blood caused by the paper cuts. After she cleaned Wilbur up the best she was able, she once again picked him up, but this time she placed him into the labyrinth in her ear so she could hear what he was trying to tell her.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep so at first I read that book, well, two pages of it,’ Wilbur said shouting into the labyrinth in Scarlet’s ear as he then pointed at the open book Alfie had left on the floor that night. This was the floor space that contained his clothes and an assortment of toys, some broken, some not. By this time his mother had put the Museum of Boykind into the toy cupboard for safe-keeping otherwise, like most of his toys, that would also have got broken. Just another toy to add to his ever-growing pile to add to the toy junkyard in his bedroom! One thing was sure, the Toy Museum in London was never going to be interested in Alfie’s toys, although in mint condition antique toys were worth a lot of money, especially teddy bears. In the future toys would become even more valuable, especially if they still had the original boxes they came in. Toy tin soldiers in mint condition in particular would be worth a pretty penny. But whenever anybody suggested Alfie be more careful with his toys, he just looked at them as if they had gone stark raving mad and said, ‘Toys are for playing with and toys are for breaking,’ and that was the end of the subject as far as Alfie’s short toy story went.

  ‘Yes, I can see you’ve been reading my book, Beauty and the Beast!’ snapped Alfie first, holding the magnifying glass up to Wilbur to see the expressions upon his tiny face, then to examine the tiny red footprints which stained the pages of the book as if he were the Moonstone Detective.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ Wilbur said sheepishly.

  ‘How did you read it?’ Scarlet asked, also reading the expressions upon Wilbur’s face, something both the children were getting used to by now. She then picked Wilbur up and placed him into the labyrinth in her ear to make things easier for both of them.

  ‘I walked up and down the letters. Not all the story made sense but from what I could gather the story was about a beast and a beautiful princess, then to get a clearer picture of the words and the pictures I climbed onto that book using a comb as a ladder,’ Wilbur said pointing to the comb propped up against the book as he retold a short story and told it quite beautifully as it happens, or so Scarlet thought. In truth Wilbur had wished it was a short story, as his legs felt as if they had walked their last due to tramping up and down the pages of the book in automaton-like fashion.

  ‘Yes, it’s a true story, Beauty and the Beast. I’m the beauty and Alfie’s the beast and a perfectly beastly beast he is too!’ laughed Scarlet as Alfie went through a quick metamorphosis turning into the beast right before her very eyes, as if by the magic of the storyteller.

  As Alfie moved closer, Wilbur felt the hot breath of the boy on him. It felt to Wilbur as if he were standing in a desert during a sand storm as tiny pieces of food flew out of Alfie’s mouth. Wilbur moved back. Not only was his breath hot but it also stunk of pickles and something else pungent that Wilbur couldn’t quite make out. Whatever it was it nearly knocked him into next week. Before he knew it, his eyes were watering so much he was almost drowning in his own tears. Even Alice in Wonderland hadn’t suffered such appalling ignominies as these.

  ‘Alfie, have you been eating Mother’s pickles from the pickle pantry, you little pickle?!’ Scarlet exclaimed accusingly.

  ‘What if I have?’ Alfie replied defensively.

  ‘Because your stinky breath nearly knocked poor old Wilbur off his feet!’ Scarlet shouted pushing her brother backwards so he fell over.

  ‘Hey!’ Alfie cried as he fell like a giant tree in a less than enchanted forest.

  ‘Never mind about your thick head, look at what Wilbur has written on the paper: ‘Thank you’. The writing’s a bit wonky and the K is upside down and the N is back to front but I think that’s what it says,’ Scarlet said as a smiling Wilbur gave the children the international sign that this summation was correct –– the thumbs-up sign.

  ‘What do you think we should do next, Wilbur?’ Scarlet asked. ‘Unbelievable, quite unbelievable!’ Scarlet exclaimed as Wilbur told her the full story – or the full story his grandfather had told him – of the two timepieces made of moonstone: a fob watch and a dragonfly timepiece made for a prince and his princess. It was only while telling the short fairy story that Wilbur realised the story was true and what’s more the watch he and the Clock People were living in was a miniature time machine.

  ‘W
hat’s unbelievable, quite unbelievable?’ cried Alfie, his curiosity so close to reaching its peak it was a wonder he didn’t suffer a rare case of spontaneous human combustion without the engine!

  Scarlet started to tell the story then stopped to pick Wilbur out of her ear and then placed him into Alfie’s ear. ‘He’ll tell you the story, I need time to think what to do next.’

  ‘Unbelievable, quite unbelievable!’ exclaimed Alfie as Wilbur told Alfie the same story he had told Scarlet not a moment ago word for word, well, mostly, he might have embellished a little second time round. Most stories get stretched like the imagination when retold. It was a bit like the game Chinese Whispers, although Wilbur was more shouting the story than whispering it, though to Alfie it sounded like a whisper.

  ‘So now what?’ Alfie asked raising his eyebrows along with a good point.

  ‘Well, I’ve given it a lot of thought, Alfred the Great, and I think we’ll have to break into Merlin’s Mechanical Museum as I know there is a dragonfly timepiece in their collection in a glass cabinet. Now, whether it’s the same one as in Wilbur’s story I couldn’t say but it could be. Of course we’ll need the help of Billy the Whiz. Then we’ll wait for the thief to return from his little omnibusman’s holiday in time, and when he decides to take another little trip we’ll follow him to Greenwich timeline and use the dragonfly watch to follow him back in time for I think that is where the answers lie,’ Scarlet said gabbling excitedly, the words coming out of her mouth at great speed as her eyes lit up like a magic lantern.