What Lies Beneath The Clock Tower: Being An Adventure Of Your Own Choosing

by Margaret Killjoy

  He walks over to the voice-horn and shouts something unintelligible through it, something that sounds fairly angry.

  You stand uncomfortably for about five minutes before anything else of note transpires.

  Go to Fifty-Eight.

  Fifty-Three

  “You’re listening to a gnome!” you shout at the gendarmes.

  “Je ne parler pas anglais,” one of them replies.

  “Oh, hell,” you say, your options growing quite limited.

  To turn Gu’dal over to the gendarmes, go to Forty-Two.

  To fight, go to Forty-Seven.

  Fifty-Four

  You hear hundreds of pairs of feet closing in around you as people gather, and eventually, you are given the cue to speak.

  “My fellow sentient creatures,” you announce.

  “What does ‘sentient’ mean?” A’gog asks.

  “Er… my fellow smart creatures,” you say, and A’gog translates into Kabouter.

  “What’s the name of the gnomish city?” you ask A’gog.

  But A’gog translates your question into Kabouter as though it were part of your speech, and the crowd answers “Hak’kal.”

  “Right then. The city of Hak’kal was built on top of dead kabouters. Every building crafted by unpaid labor, every brick held in place by snot mined of your noses. The history of the Hak’kal is the history of your enslavement!” You yell this with fervor, warming to the subject, and A’gog translates.

  Several kabouters shout back at you. “They say that they are happy to help the gnomes, because the gnomes gave them the cave for Underburg. The kabouters are stupid,” A’gog translates and interprets.

  “The gnomes gave you a city so that they could exploit you!”

  The kabouters yell back.

  “I don’t think this is working. I don’t think they understand the consequences of their bourgeois sympathies,” A’gog informs you.

  Just then, a speck of light appears in the distance, growing rapidly. The kabouters yell out as though they were one being, shrieking like some demon from the pages of a penny-dreadful. The lights get close and blind you. Clammy hands hold you.

  When your eyes finally adjust, you see a single gnomish guard surrounded by wide-eyed kabouters, all of whom point with pale fingers at A’gog and yourself.

  The gnome speaks to A’gog, who spits against the guard’s face-shield. The guard then turns to you and speaks English. “You have been judged as a liar, a man who disturbs the peace of Hak’kal. As a creature of the surface world, you have no rights and will have no trial. You are to be garroted.”

  You attempt to break free, but the grip of the kabouters is too strong. You are forced to your knees, and the guard chokes the life out of you with a thin bit of rope.

  The End

  Fifty-Five

  “A’gog might be right,” you weigh in, “we don’t need propaganda on the walls, we need propaganda of the deed. A poison plot is called for, I think, and serves two purposes: one, we kill the police who are reporting on us to Hak’kal; and two, we show people that resistance is possible, that our enemies are vulnerable. That we can fight, that we can win.”

  “I believe you,” Sergei says. “I’m convinced. I’ve spent my entire adult life skulking around in the silence, waiting for something, anything, to happen so that I could join in, so that I could be useful, that I could advance the cause of freedom. But maybe what I need is to make that thing happen myself.”

  For a moment, you’re struck by déjà vu and think you’re speaking to Anton, the Russian man with whom your brother fled for France. Of course, it’s partly the accent, but it’s also the words. He spoke that way. And since you can’t see your companion…

  “Very well,” you say, trying to forget that when your brother went down this path, he ended up deported to the prison colonies.

  “I’ll secure poison tomorrow," Sergei says. "The day after, I’ll slip it into the officers’ morning tea."

  “What will we do,” you ask.

  “You two? You two are going to be my bodyguards. If anyone starts anything, you light a torch and we fight our way to freedom.”

  “Do you think it will work?” A’gog asks.

  “Sure,” Sergei says. “You two know how to fight, don’t you?”

  You don’t have the heart to tell him the truth.

  The details determined, you set about to sleep in the ventilation tunnel. You sleep lightly, tormented by dreams of gnomes (terrible monsters in your dreams, indeed as ugly as your goblin and kabouter companions) and the fear of a prison deep beneath the earth. Quite rational dreams.

  When you awake, you’re surprised to note that you’re still underground, and not asleep in your bedchamber as you suspected.

  “Good morning,” A’gog says. “Have some water?”

  “Thanks,” you say, taking a bottle pressed into your hand in the dark. “How did you know I was awake?”

  “You stopped snoring,” he laughs. “I was afraid you’d give us away, but Sergei assured me… let’s see, how did he put it? He said that the tunnel was like a dark place to the seeing. There’s so much white noise with the air and the vents and such that it’s hard to hear into. But I think he said that because he snored too. Maybe even worse than you.”

  “Alright,” you say, and you spend that day waiting in utter darkness. For a horrible hour, you fear insanity might set in. Then you realize that indeed, you’re still talking to a goblin, so it’s quite likely that insanity has already set in, and you just decide to run with it.

  Some hours later, Sergei returns to your encampment. “All is ready,” he says. “Tomorrow morning, my friends will open the doors to the officers’ quarters. We will go in, poison them, and escape. If anything goes wrong, you two will overpower our assailants. Be careful with your torch, though. Touch it to the wrong wall, or light it under a low ceiling, and we’ll all die in flames and suffocation.”

  “Right,” you say, because you’re so scared that you cannot find more words than that. You don’t want to die in the dark any way that you look at it: you don’t want to burn or suffocate or be torn asunder by pasty bat-person hands. You’d much rather poison some officials, liberate some populations of strange critters, then return to your writing enriched for the effort.

  The second night you don’t dream. You sleep lightly, your thoughts driven by a strong sense of purpose. Your fellows awaken, you straighten your clothes, and head off into the blackness, following Sergei’s footsteps. It’s easier than you think to follow sounds in the dark, a dark you’ve nearly grown used to, but you still bump into slimy walls and the occasional offended kabouter as you make your way through the city.

  “We’re here,” Sergei says, and a heavy gate creaks open.

  To suggest that you would be more useful outside the gates, where you could use your torch if need be, go to Seventy-Six.

  To follow Sergei into the officer’s quarters, go to Seventy-Eight.

  Fifty-Six

  The second clock tower is a domed, baroque thing about six stories in height, clearly abandoned. Both the minute and the hour hands hang slack, pointing to the roman VI, and the shutters are pulled tight and locked. Gu’dal picks the four padlocks on the door as you nervously keep guard.

  Then, with an alarming groan, the door opens. The inside of the building is a single open room, with only scaffolding providing access to the clock mechanics and bells above. And it is on this scaffolding that you see the most bizarre creature you’ve yet seen during this strange and long night. It is half your height, pasty-white with enormous, unseeing eyes, and has hairy, overlarge ears—the lobes of which rest upon the thing’s shoulders. It looks like a hyperbolic caricature of an old man. And it appears to occupy the tower alone.

  It shrieks twice in rapid succession, a painfully high-pitched cry, and drops nimble as an acrobat to the floor to stand in front of you.

  Gu’dal and the tower’s denizen immediately break into an excited conversation in a
language you can’t follow. The words sound almost Finnish; in fact it could be Finnish for all you know of the language.

  You pass the time with sips of Fernet Stock—a lovely and bitter liquor from the Kingdom of Bohemia—and by shadowboxing a reenactment of your fight with the gendarmes. You sip more heavily each time, and soon you begin to believe in your own bravery and battle-prowess, despite your wounded leg.

  By the time that Gu’dal and the strange creature are through with their conversation, you are so thoroughly soused that you cannot distinguish your eyeballs from your elbows. You collapse on your way out the door.

  You come to back in the belfry of your own clock tower, once more roused by smelling salts. You’re still quite drunk, but you’re drunk to that comfortable level you prefer to spend most of your days at, where your words and balance only occasionally fail you and your courage never does.

  Yi’ta stands above you, smiling. “Well done,” he says. “I hear our plans would not be going forth without you.”

  “What happens now?” you ask.

  “We attack. In less than half an hour, our machines on the surface will shatter the front gates of Hak’kal—and, I suppose, about a city block of this city up here. The main force of our infantry will march in through the gates and be joined by the gnomish resistance movement within the city. Up here, our job will be to contain those gnomes who attempt to escape. Those who surrender to us will stand trial, and most will be pardoned. But Hak’kal must be destroyed. The colonization of our caverns will end, as will slavery. We goblins have a saying, ‘Let us have one last time of bloodshed and be done with it.’”

  To say, “Of course you have a saying about that. How many times have you said it? When has it been true? No, you must abandon your plans of terror and revolution. I won’t let you take so many lives, nor let you destroy an entire city block,” go to Sixty-Six.

  To say, “I volunteer my body for your cause. My brother fought for the Paris commune, and I’d be proud to fight for the emancipation of your people,” go toSeventy-One.

  To say, “You need to control the escape of the gnomes onto the surface, do you? Well I’ve got an idea. It involves a hot-air balloon, some guns, and a spyglass,” go to Seventy-Five.

  Fifty-Seven

  “Oh Gregory,” Gu’dal weeps when you present her the ring and your plan, “it’s as though you don’t know me at all!”

  When she says this, you begin to sob.

  “I can’t abandon my fellow goblins. I have to fight. I live only to fight against the gnomes. I thought you understood that!”

  But clearly you hadn’t. Broken-hearted, you climb down from the net and return to your cot.

  You don’t sleep well. In the morning, you join the horde. You chant and you scream, but the blood thirst escapes you.

  The steel doors open, and you rush forward, through tunnels and into the waiting lightrifles of the gnomes. You want only to die. You want Gu’dal to know you died in defense of the goblin cause.

  You get your wish.

  The End

  Fifty-Eight

  After several minutes, twenty guards come marching through the gates and, along with the captain, escort you into Hak’kal.

  As you first walk through the gate, you realize the inadequacy of your previous comparison: Hak’kal puts Prague to shame. Here, every building bears a clock as complex and impressive as Prague’s famed astronomical clock—and every bit as indecipherable to the layperson! Some aspects of the clock faces seem to move at the speed of frightened rabbits, while others might not have moved since the day of your birth. Each clock is strikingly unique and strikingly handsome. The buildings are striking as well. In fact, it is quite something that you are not immediately bludgeoned into unconsciousness, considering how often you are struck by this city!

  The architecture is ornate, in the high gothic. Buttresses fly out from tall, stone-block houses while other buildings appear to be carved out of the very earth and, thusly solid, require no such reinforcement.

  From above, you hear the clear sound of a remarkable choir, singing in—and you are both stunned by and certain of this—German! You cannot see the source, but suspect the presence of massive victrolas, developed past anything available on the surface. So remarkable, then, that they reproduce the work of Brahms!

  One foot in front of the other, you sleepwalk towards the center of the city, escorted by a score of riflegnomes, led at the fore by the strange figure of the captain. What a marvelous tale you will be able to spin upon your rousing, you think.

  Until suddenly, it occurs to you that the gnomes and goblins might be real and not merely be figments of your powerful and drunken mind. The reality seeps in, as does your responsibility to Gu’dal, to the goblins who are mad at work building some crazed rescue device in the tower above the ground, the tower in which you reside.

  That sort of makes the goblins your allies. And yet, the gnomes are every bit so civilized! Brahms! From the ceiling and sky!

  Beams of light cut through the air above you and bounce around the sides of buildings so that the city, while illuminated by gas-flame, glows in bright hues quite unfamiliar and marvelous. Everywhere around you, you see construction and activity. The miniature citizens of this city are working at a feverish pace to heighten buildings, tighten valves, ascend ladders into the darkness above, run pipe and wire, and align crystals.

  Even the children seem hard at work, with all of the grins and laughter one would associate with play. There are no taskmasters, no weapons. The only pugilists are the ones who surround you.

  The guards escort you to a building that appears as a miniature cathedral. Fortunately, what seems massive to a gnome is sized well for your stature, and you fit through the doorway without stooping. There is no door in the entryway to the structure, and you suddenly understand that one is not necessary. The city is impregnable from external attack, and must be—you assume—situated on some kind of thermal vent, because the weather is as pleasant as a summer’s eve. (Indeed, a summer not in England, but a real summer, the likes they have on the mainland and in the colonies.)

  Inside is a hallway, much like the tunnel you first explored on your way to the city, brimming with steam pipes, steam pipe accessories, gadgets, and gadget accessories.

  “You will stay here this evening. You are not free to wander,” a guard tells you.

  You are led past multiple doors, each a plain and solid sheet of steel, before one is opened and you, with a lightrifle suddenly pressed squarely against your back, step inside what you now presume to be your cell. The door slams behind you.

  This cell, however, is outfitted far finer than any hotel you might have hoped to stay at aboveground. There is a wardrobe, sink, toilet, bidet, and bed. The window is open to the outside, lacking glass or bars.

  You think to escape, but promptly collapse, having been up for an untold number of hours—one that clearly exceeds your usual twenty—and are roused only by a good, solid shaking of your shoulders some time later.

  You come to your senses, or at least to a fuzzy facsimile of them, and see a gnome standing above you, a man of uncommon beauty. He has ear-length hair that is unmistakably the color of copper, truly metallic and shiny, with eyes of brass and skin as pale as silver.

  “We have not much, in the way of…” the gnome’s accent is nearly unintelligible, but you gather that he is searching for a word.

  “Time?” you suggest.

  “I don’t know,” he replies.

  You sit up and find your jacket hung from a bedpost then pull your pocket watch—still quite broken—from its pocket. You open it and show him the clock.

  “Yes! Yes! We have not much in the way of time!”

  “Well I’m glad that is settled, because I was afraid we might not have much in the way of wormwood.” You sit up properly and begin to rub your eyes.

  “I don’t understand,” the gnome says.

  “Pardon. It’s nothing. Please go on.”

  �
��We have not much time and you need to help us, help the gnome Aboveground. We want free the goblins from the tyranny, cruelty, despotism of Ji’ka!” For lacking a complete grammar, the gnome has a remarkable political vocabulary.

  Your eyes well rubbed, you double-check. Sure enough, the short man in front of you is indeed a gnome, and not a goblin. Square teeth, green-less skin, comes higher than your knees.

  “Alright,” you say, because there’s not so much that you can really say to such a request. “How may I be of service?”

  “Your actions are your own. There is a word in Gnomish, and in English it is perhaps… autonomy. Free will. We are not your Gods. You can join us, fight with us. Or you can want your audience, and study information for us.”

  “And if I refuse to help? If I side with the council of Hak’kal?”

  “Then tomorrow we will kill you. You will not study us to them.”

  Free will appears to have its limits.

  To inform him that you are here to act as an ambassador for the goblins, and intend to seek resolution by means of words, go to Sixty-Seven.

  To escape your cell through the open window and join the gnomish Aboveground, go to Seventy-Two.

  To verbally express your discontent with the gnomish Aboveground’s threats upon your health, then shout for your guard to capture the interloper, go to Seventy-Seven.

  Fifty-Nine

  Trevor takes a long time to respond. “There’s a part of me that wants to say no. There’s a part of me that says ‘you cannot abandon your people.’ But it’s said that to deny one’s desires is to deny what makes one a goblin.” Trevor looks up at you and smiles his delightful smile of fangs. “So yes, Gregory, yes! Let’s leave this nightmare behind us and have an adventure!”

  Which is exactly what you do.

  The End