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

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by Margaret Killjoy


  Until a sharp pain runs up through your leg and you stumble, dropping your friend and smashing your face on the cobbles. You’ve been shot, you realize.

  And although you survive that encounter—thanks to a remarkable bit of stone-throwing by your companion—, it certainly isn’t the last time the purple beam hits and hurts you.

  You spend the next six months of your life fighting as part of the gnomish Aboveground, raiding and skirmishing against the authorities. You fight alongside creatures of every sentient species, but it isn’t a war that is won overnight. It’s not until six months pass, and the sonalopticloopticamplificator is activated, that the goblins are able to overrun Hak’kal.

  Unfortunately, you’re killed in that battle.

  The End

  One Hundred and Twenty-Two

  “Well, you see, there are these gnomes…” You explain, in frightening detail, your adventures over the past—how long has it been since you went underground? You cannot recall.

  Although the woman dressed as a man looks at you incredulously, and Victor’s face is completely unreadable, you recognize that the second woman, who is in the garb of a well-to-do lady, believes you.

  “What utter shit,” the woman dressed as a man says.

  “You can have the weapons,” the woman dressed as a woman says.

  “What? You can’t be serious! Gnomes, kabouters? Goblins?!”

  “It’s my money what buys the guns, and I suggest we donate them to this gentleman.”

  You look to your proponent graciously, and she smiles.

  “Your money?! Your money? Just because your father is the goddam–” the poor woman begins, but cuts herself off before she reveals her comrade’s identity, “does not make it your money. It is the Underground’s money.”

  Victor sighs. “We’ll give him the guns. I don’t believe him any more than you, but it’s better to sacrifice two trunks of munitions than lose our source, you must understand.”

  The poor woman crosses her arms, but says no more.

  You pick your way back home carefully, doubling back quite often to make life difficult for anyone who might be tailing you. You wait anxiously in the dark, and as the bells above you strike eleven, a carriage trots up. As instructed, you remove two expensive wooden trunks from the empty carriage, and the driver nods at you before driving off.

  But as you step inside your clock tower, you realize that you cannot find the passageway under the stairs. You go over every inch of stonework, to no avail. Perhaps it was all fantasy.

  Instinct drives your hand into your pocket, reaching for a flask. But a new thought creeps into your mind. Perhaps it was all a dream of your feverish and drugged mind, but you’ve learned from it regardless.

  You’ve all the munitions to stage a slave rebellion.

  You wait for dawn, then proceed to the docks, trading an expensive pair of pistols for passage to the colonies. Your brother will be free, you decide, or else your body will lie beside his in some shallow tropical grave.

  The End

  One Hundred and Twenty-Three

  You look around the breakfast table. “I suppose the thing to do is get this business over with as swiftly as possible, so that, vow to the goblins sated, I may return to my correspondence in the world above. And besides, I may be hallucinating, but the rulers of Hak’kal have gone too far. Give me a gun and a wrench and a bit of a plan.”

  Eleven looks at you from where he stands on the table. “I can use you for riflegnome today,” he says, “we will make the attack. And we will make total destroy!”

  “What?!” Comrade Pneumatic H. Fourteen shouts, “No! Are you crazy? The Aboveground can’t afford to lose anyone in a frivolous attack on an impossible target! It was bad enough when you left last night to rescue that useless…” She gains control of her voice. “I simply won’t have it. No one will come with you.”

  “Autonomy!” Comrade Eleven Stroke B. declares, hopping down to stand on his chair. “You will not stop me or new riflegnome from the glorious attack we will make! Tomorrow, when freedom day, you will say many thanks! You have no brain-strength! When you place many fires in building, the building may burn. When you place no fires, nothing!”

  He hops down from the chair. “I go to the armory.”

  You stand up, bid your company adieu, and set off after Eleven.

  The armory, as it turns out, is nearly empty. A single lightrifle is held on a rack on the wall. A half-dozen slingshots sit on a cabinet that is next to a small barrel of rocks that is next to a hot-water heater—the armory clearly serving a double purpose.

  High on the wall, clearly in the place of honor, is a handcrafted and exquisitely designed weapon that reminds you of nothing you’ve ever fancied. The barrel is of steel as bright as silver, both enameled and engraved with hieroglyphic writing. The stock seems carved of ivory. Sprouting haphazardly at all angles are the most complex crystal and mirror workings you have yet seen.

  “Is that the–” you begin.

  “Eleven Stroke B.”

  Eleven picks up his namesake, and you admire it for another moment before he tells you to take the lightrifle.

  “You are riflegnome. I am saboteur. If you see gnome with helmet or rifle, you shoot them. Don’t shoot them in the armor. Only Eleven Stroke B. will shoot them in the armor. You follow?”

  You nod.

  “Good. When you die, you die like gnome, like goblin, like kabouter. Like human. But maybe you don’t die today. Maybe today is victory.”

  You take a pull from your flask and follow Comrade Eleven Stroke B. out through a labyrinth of work tunnels. Soon, everything is pitch black, and you follow the sound of gnome footsteps.

  A door opens, you step through, and hear a scream. The last thing you see is a beam of purple striking your comrade, and the searing microwave heat of a ray-weapon drives into your back. You collapse, like a gnome, like a goblin, like a kabouter, or like a human. Most of all, you collapse like so much meat, dead and cooking.

  The End

  One Hundred and Twenty-Four

  “An empire cannot stand without communications, or so my brother always said when we were little. Of course, he was justifying his theft of stationary from the post office. But regardless, let us go to the central exchange.” You stand, straighten your bowler, and look to your company. Eleven shakes his head and heads off with the remainder of the breakfast bowl, leaving you with Pneumatic and Difference.

  “Right then, to the ventilation system,” Pneumatic says, and leaves the cafeteria for the hallway outside.

  “It’s a bit cramped for us tall folk,” Difference apologizes.

  The two women lead you to a vent grill as tall as your waist. Pneumatic unlatches an innumerable series of locks and catches, and the vent swings open. Inside is darkness and wind.

  “Just follow me,” the gnome says.

  You crouch down to hands and knees and crawl into the air vent after Pneumatic. Difference enters behind you.

  “We can get to most any part of Hak’kal this way,” Pneumatic explains, her voice echoing metallic, “it’s how the Aboveground operates.”

  “What exactly is it that you all do?” you ask.

  “Oh, plotting and planning, mostly. Sometimes we sabotage works in progress. A few decades back we staged a raid on a goblin work camp, freed some folk, found them new homes.”

  “A few decades ago? How long has the Aboveground been around?”

  “There’s always been the Aboveground. As long as there has been empire, we’ve been around to contest it.”

  “Lot of good it’s done anyone,” you whisper. If anyone heard, they made no remark.

  Occasional light filters in through vents set into the side of the tunnel, but you haven’t the time to stop to peer out. Your guide, able to walk freely, is clearly impatient at waiting for you to clamber along behind. For the most part, you are crawling in utter darkness, following the sound of footsteps. You turn a few times, moving up and down shallow in
clines.

  The better part of an aching, muscle-torturing hour later, Pneumatic stops in front of a grill set into the tunnel wall and puts her face against it to see through. You catch up, and do likewise.

  It’s as though you are looking at the guts of a massive animal: the twisted intestines of metal tubing, curving organically, surrounded by glass arteries through which pump pneumatic canisters, expanding well past your limited field of vision.

  “This is it,” Pneumatic whispers, “the central hub of their communication networks. Some of these pipes run for leagues… out to the fungus farms, the mines, even the surface collaborators. It’s pretty well guarded.”

  “How well guarded?” you ask.

  “A patrol comes through every fifteen minutes or so.”

  “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “I don’t see how that would be possible. We have two completely different contexts. That’s why I thought to bring you here, really. You’re going to think of different things than I am.”

  “Alright, alright. What we need to do is wait until the guards pass by, and then…”

  To finish your sentence with, “And then find a good-sized stick and begin to bash the machinery into pieces,” go to One Hundred and Twenty-Five.

  If you’d rather say, “And then I’ll stop up the tubes with uh… with my hat,” go to One Hundred and Twenty-Six.

  One Hundred and Twenty-Five

  You wait, silent as you are able, for long minutes. The rumble of the machine, the whoosh of canisters and bonk of switches fill the windy air. Finally, a bored trio of gnomes, be-helmeted and armed, crosses from your left to your right.

  After they are gone, Pneumatic works quickly with her folding pocketwrench, unbolting the vent. She pushes it forward with great care, setting it down on the stone floor of the machine room.

  You burst out, anxious to get on with the work. You’ve been mucking about tunnels for too long. Your muscles hurt and your brain is tired of this constant hallucinating. It will be nice to be through with it, you decide.

  You grab a protruding lever and give it a yank, meaning to pry it free. It slips, and suddenly the canisters begin to travel at a frenzied pace. You curse yourself under your breath for having abandoned your cane. Then you twist the lever, find it loose, and unscrew it from its base.

  Ball-headed lever held as a cudgel, you swing at the nearest glass. It shatters with a satisfying pop, glass flying back at your face from the pressurized air within. Your face is cut, and you enter something of a blood-rage, acting as though you had drunk a bottle of spirits to yourself.

  Smash and crash and shatter and noise, noise, noise. You barely notice the fear painted on the faces of your hosts as you swing with wild enthusiasm. What you lack in strength—and what you lack in strength is, indeed, a sizable amount—you make up for in sheer insanity. No glass stays unbroken, no brass unbent. You’ve built up quite a bit of rage, being underground and confused, and finally you have a yielding object to take it out on.

  You are stopped only by a searing purple light that cuts across your body with the agony of sunburn. Soon you drop, turning to see that the guards have returned and are shooting you and your friends with their painful lightrifles.

  It’s possible that your valiant sabotage threw the fascist machinery of the gnomes into chaos, a chaos as virulent to empire as a plague is to humanity. It’s possible that the oppressed creatures of the underworld threw off their yokes as the communication systems of their oppressors broke down and rid themselves of Hak’kal for once and all.

  But you will never know, because you are dead.

  The End

  One Hundred and Twenty-Six

  You crouch in the noisy darkness, watching canisters fly through tubes. Eventually, three gnomes pace across your line of sight, wearing helmets and bearing lightrifles.

  As soon as they’re gone, Eleven pulls a folding pocketwrench from her pocket and sets to work opening the grate. It comes loose and she lowers it carefully onto the floor of the central exchange hub.

  “Are you certain this will work?” Difference asks you.

  “No, of course not. It’s a ridiculous plan. But, I figure, I’m crawling through ventilation tunnels nearly a league below the earth, consorting with gnomes and goblins. So really, it seems as possible as anything else.”

  “Fair enough,” Difference replies.

  Pneumatic, for her part, looks skeptical and is inspecting the machine.

  “Can you open one of these pipes?” you ask the gnome as you walk over to one as thick as your head.

  “Of course,” Pneumatic says. She applies her pocketwrench to a joint and soon has the pipe in pieces. Air rushes from the bottom half, and soon a heavy brass-and-glass canister pops out and drops to the ground.

  You take off your hat and place it into the receiving end of the tube, where suction holds it in place. Pneumatic replaces the joint and you make a hasty retreat, stopping only to grab the heavy canister on the ground.

  You heart is racing nearly the entire crawl back to the Aboveground headquarters. The ventilation’s wind is now at your back, and even your cramps seem to have disappeared, overwhelmed by the potential immensity of your simple action.

  You return to the command center to find it in chaos. Pneumatic is informed immediately that the city’s communications are down, and she smiles. A gnome’s smile, as you realize, is nothing like a human’s, nor a goblin’s. A gnome’s smile is all teeth, top and bottom, lips pulled back until the red of the gums glint like a drunkard’s eyes.

  “We have our visitor to thank for that,” Pneumatic informs the resistance. “He has single-handedly clogged the entire pneumatic tube network of Hak’kal.”

  “That was the civil communication as well as the governmental?” you ask.

  “Of course, of course. They’re all connected. It’s a network, a series of tubes. When you try to shove too much information, too many canisters through one clogged tube, the breakdown reverberates throughout the rest. I thought you knew that? Isn’t that why you clogged that pipe?”

  “Of course,” you lie.

  For the next several hours, no one is permitted to enter or exit the compound. It’s too dangerous, the Aboveground claims. They will sit and wait for information, as they always do.

  Finally, a messengergoblin peeks her head through the hatchway in the floor and speaks to the assembled group: “There’s a general revolt at the mines.”

  The Aboveground cheers, a high-pitched chorus, the pure joy of children. According to the messenger, the taskmasters weren’t relieved on time, and when half of them went back to Hak’kal to investigate the problem, the workers revolted and seized the weaponry. Hak’kal is surrounded, as the goblins and kabouters lay siege.

  Immediately, the room is divided. Half of those present, mostly the gnomes, feel it prudent, or perhaps strategic, to stay put and see how things develop. The other half felt the need to gather arms and join the besieging army.

  “How about it?” Difference asks you.

  To indicate that you’ve done your part but that you must return to the letters that sit unanswered at your desk on the surface, go to One Hundred and Twenty-Seven.

  To announce that you’ve sat and talked enough already in your life, that you’re ready to take gun in hand and join the battle for liberation, go to One Hundred and Twenty-Eight.

  One Hundred and Twenty-Seven

  Comrade Difference Engine looks at you. Perhaps she is disappointed, perhaps she is unsurprised. Perhaps she is sad to see you leave. But no emotion crosses her face. “Farewell, then. Return to your letters. If you’d like to reach us, address one to ‘Aboveground, Hak’kal,’ and a comrade will intercept it.”

  The strangers in the room bid you a fond farewell, and soon Comrade Eleven Stroke B. leads you through back tunnels and deposits you at the base of the steps to your tower.

  “Will you be returning to the Aboveground?” you ask him.

  He spits. “Yo
u cannot take feathers from a naked chicken, no? The Aboveground? They will put their hands into their… into their, I don’t know the word. They will do nothing. But I will make total destroy on Hak’kal.” He un-shoulders his lightrifle. He salutes with his six-fingered hand, then turns and stalks down the tunnel, whistling a tune whose words you will never know.

  You, for your part, return to your room, your wine, your letters, and your bed. You open the pneumatic canister, and try to read the message scrawled within, but it is quite foreign to you. Your thoughts turn to your brother, over in the prison colonies. You ponder his fate, you ponder your own.

  You think of how, when your brother was deported so rudely, you said nothing. You were too insignificant. You merely hoped. But perhaps, perhaps you have agency. If you can free the goblins, surely you can free your family. First though, to sleep.

  The End

  One Hundred and Twenty-Eight

  Comrade Difference Engine, Comrade Eleven Stroke B., the goblins, the kabouters, and yourself scrap together what arms you can and make for the least guarded entrance to the city.

  The guards never saw you coming, and soon you add the weapons you pry from their dead hands to those of your own and open the doors to the workers outside the gates.

  One door at a time you storm through the city, soft as hummingbirds, swift as lightning, cruel as vengeance. You cut down guards without mercy or thought, open doors to let in wave after wave of angry slaves.

  As you approach what you think to be the last door, you’re blinded by friendly fire and drop to the ground. By the time your vision is restored, the fight is over.

  “Did we win?” you ask a passing goblin. But she cannot speak your language, and she passes by.

  “Did we win?” you ask a passing kabouter. But he is bleeding from a clearly soon-to-be-fatal head wound, and pays you no mind.

  For nearly an hour you stumble through the strange battlefield, the beautiful streets of Hak’kal littered with the wounded and dead. Eventually, you find Comrade Difference Engine idling near the entryway to a small cathedral and you posit her your question.

 

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