The Night Clock

by Paul Meloy

  Les closed his eyes and sat on the edge of the bed, his hands clasped on his lap. They were trembling.

  Daniel took the matchbox from his jacket pocket and slid it open.

  Daniel closed his eyes, too.

  “What about Phil?” asked Les.

  “Call him from the pub,” said the hermit crab in his seashore pink-orange voice, and they were gone.

  AT FIVE TO eleven the door to the shower cubicle opened. It stuck against the towel wedged beneath it and then flew open as something applied its whole weight to it.

  A man wearing a dirty parka coat stepped into the room. He stopped, breathing hard. He looked down at the figure sprawled on the bed. The shell of the old bastard. He’d missed him by fucking minutes.

  Furious, the man stamped his feet and growled. He reached inside his coat and pulled out the remains of a broken long sword. He grasped its pommel in both hands, the foot-long ragged remnant of the blade trembling above the guts of the old man.

  He paused and took a long, shuddering breath. He repositioned the sword in the belt of his jeans and closed his coat, toggling it with hands shaking with frustration and indecision. He looked around.

  He saw the cup on the old man’s bedside cabinet. Heavy National Health Service china. The man reached out and picked it up. He looked down at the old man.

  “Gone to a better place, have you, you old fuck,” the man said.

  He lashed out and smashed the cup against the wall.

  With the shard that remained in his bleeding fist, the man in the parka made it look like suicide,

  And when he was finished, he put the shard in the old man’s hand and went back into the shower cubicle and closed the door.

  “PHILIP? ARE YOU all right, Philip?”

  Trevena opened his eyes. He started to sit up, disorientation causing him to panic. Elizabeth was squatting beside him. He was sprawled on the kitchen floor, both feet beneath the breakfast bar, head jammed against the cupboard under the sink. He groaned and let Elizabeth help him up. His legs were shaking.

  “Fuck my life,” he muttered.

  Daniel hadn’t moved. He was still standing on the other side of the breakfast bar. He was smiling.

  Trevena staggered to his stool and sat down.

  “Les didn’t kill himself,” he said. “He didn’t kill himself.”

  “Of course he didn’t,” said Daniel.

  “How was I supposed to know that?” Trevena barked, suddenly angry. And then he laughed, the anger dissipating as quickly as it had come. Relief replaced it and with it, a shedding of guilt. “So who’s the bloke in the coat? Is he an Autoscope?”

  “No. His name is Cade. He was human but now he’s turned Toyceiver; he’s become the monster within, a mockery. He’s what you now might call a loose cannon. They used him once, because of his greed. He thinks they’ve betrayed him over power promised and never delivered. But now he’s trying to buy back their affections, as it were. He’s lashing out. If you want real madness, Phil, look no further than Cade. He’s the real thing.”

  Trevena put his hand over his face and rubbed his brow, dragged his palm down over his eyes, mouth and ran it over the stubble of his throat. He blinked a couple of times and then looked at Daniel in expectation of more revelations.

  He felt a lump rise in his throat. The silence in the kitchen and the expressions on Daniel’s and Elizabeth’s’ faces were explicit enough to tell him it wasn’t going to be good news.

  “What?” he said.

  “It’s Cade,” Daniel said. There was no emotion in his voice, nothing alarming or histrionic. It was deliberately calm; kindly, Trevena thought. Daniel spoke with the gentleness and compassion of a specialist giving a catastrophic diagnosis.

  “He’s inside you,” Daniel said.

  “TELL ME THE last thing you dreamed about,” Daniel said.

  Trevena thought for a moment, trying to remember the heated dream he had been awakened from earlier that night. It had become recurrent; a walk along a sunlit boulevard and suddenly he was inside a red castle. All the walls, the floors, the fitments, everything was red, and studded with leather. It was mildly erotic and not unpleasant to begin with but as it progressed it became darker, more revealing of his intimate frustrations. He wasn’t alone. There was a girl waiting for him in the bathroom. A young girl. Too young.

  And as he walked through the castle, its impossible dimensions expanding around him, he could hear a voice. It was a hectoring voice, coming towards him over a great distance, but the person calling was already there, in the castle. Like a projection sent ahead, too agitated and impatient to travel the distance bodily, somehow powerful enough to reach into Trevena’s head, his unconscious, and establish a presence.

  Trevena described the dream to Daniel.

  “That’s Cade,” Daniel said.

  “I’m possessed?”

  “Not yet,” Daniel said. “I’ve been able to intervene. And Les helped, containing him with a psychotic ritual. It was too complex for Cade to fathom in the short term. It limited his movements. But now he’s out. And he’ll want you.”

  “For what?”

  Daniel and Elizabeth exchanged glances. There was nothing sly about it, it was just a look of understanding between two old friends. Nevertheless, Trevena felt outside a certain, essential loop. He waited.

  “If we don’t act, in the near future, you’ll do some things that are very bad, Phil. Or Cade will, through you.”

  Trevena swallowed. “I do?”

  “But we can’t let that happen. Too much at stake.”

  “Can you stop him? Stop Cade?”

  “I think so. If you let me take you through. We can hunt the bastard down.”

  “What do you have to do?”

  Elizabeth went over and took Daniel’s hand.

  “When Index sent me back, he gave me instructions. He told me to find Elizabeth, which is the first thing I did. It’s no accident she’s living here. While I was gone, she started seeing things again. Visions where her eye had been. Scaffolding and black wings spiralling up from the ground, like before, when she was a child. Elizabeth is a prescient. She has always been the link between my gift and the timing of my purpose. Her love is my fuel. I’m able to do what I do because she facilitates it. And that is what makes my gift so confounding. It’s so weak and yet it’s the most powerful thing we have. Its simplicity is its potency. Elizabeth never judged me.”

  “That I understand,” Trevena said. “Okay, folks. You want to do this now?”

  WHILE DANIEL PREPARED to take Trevena through the slot, Elizabeth busied herself making a bed up on the sofa in the lounge.

  “You lie there, Philip, and let yourself drop off. You must be exhausted.”

  “You want me to go to sleep?”

  “You have to be asleep. It’s how Daniel works.”

  “What if I wake up?”

  “You won’t be able to,” Elizabeth said, plumping some cushions against the floral arm of her sofa. “Lie down and make yourself comfy.”

  Passivity the greater force owing to exhaustion and perplexity, Trevena did as he was told. Elizabeth arranged a yellow blanket over his knees. Trevena kicked off his shoes and settled back against the cushions.

  “Why?” Trevena asked, still determined to understand some of the process.

  “Because Daniel is the hypnopomp,” she said. She didn’t bother to wait for any more of Trevena’s questions and continued: “It’s his gift, his purpose. They all have gifts, which compliment each other. Daniel can stop time and bring people to the point of awakening but maintain the quanta of their dreams. They are at the point of being awake; yet still believe they are dreaming. You can show people a lot when they are in that state, and they don’t suffer any of the trauma or stress. It’s real, but their cognitive processes don’t lay down the same deep-rooted pathways. No flashbacks, no dissociation, just the vague memories of a dream. Sometimes unpleasant but nowhere near as devastating if experienced conscious
ly.”

  Trevena closed his eyes. From the kitchen he heard Daniel say, “I’m going to take us into Chloe’s Quay, Phil. I don’t know the environment so I don’t know what to expect. I’ll look after you but you’ll still be thinking for yourself, so try and keep that in mind. See you in there.”

  “Righ—” said Trevena, and fell asleep.

  The Night Clock’s ticks are like the cooling of some infernal engine, something powered up from the beginning of time to run histories of our unlived and wasted potential. Its painted hands are at a quarter past three.

  DR NATUS LIVES in a two-litre Kilner jar with a heavy glass lid held down with metal closing clips. The rubber-sealing band has rotted and clings to the lid like mould. Many years ago Daniel made sloe vodka in jars like these. Two months of shaking and that stuff was rocket fuel. Dr Natus floats in a blue fluid the colour of autumn sloes. In fact Daniel thinks he might have grown in the vodka left in an old jar he forgot about, and left for years in the back of a dark cupboard, in the kitchen of his flat. The flat is above a shop, on a side street, off the seafront.

  He sits in the middle of a round table in the topmost room in the attic above the shop. The shop is called Elegant Lady and has a front still in the nineteen-fifties: green marble sills and porch columns and a heavy glass door with a large brass art deco handle and long brass hinges.

  DR NATUS WAS removed from his mother’s teratogenic womb on the sixteenth of February 1953.

  He told Daniel this the night he found him in the back of the cupboard. He told Daniel his father was Berlyn Brixner, head photographer for the Trinity test, the first nuclear weapons test of an atomic bomb. Brixner had shown his mother a photograph of the first 0.016 seconds of the explosion, as the light bubble had inflated across the desert, and she had fallen immediately pregnant.

  Daniel taps on the side of the jar, tok tok tok, and Dr Natus twitches in his thick blue fluid and drifts a little. His face drags up against the curved inner surface of the glass, smearing his cheek that scrunches his right eye and pushes his tiny cupid lips into even more of a pout. His useless little arms endeavour to push against the glass but they don’t reach, they’re like wren’s legs. His legs, and long feet with their tiny, pearlescent toes, are more effective and with a kick he propels himself back from the glass and hangs in the fluid in the middle of the jar. His eyelids are as bulging and heavily veined as a dead baby bird’s. They remain closed, as always, but Daniel can see the dark pinpricks of the pupils behind them. He floats blue above a disc of silt, a dead baby with the mind of a god.

  HE TOLD DANIEL he was a god in the pantheon of ancient Greece. But then he’d told him he was Roman, Egyptian, Aztec and Babylonian too. He features everywhere, him and his friends. He tells Daniel they are the source of all myths. He tells him that Herod the Great had him killed during the Massacre of the Innocents, when he was searching for Christ, and he was reborn in his mother’s womb in the immaculate light from the Trinity explosion. Herod, he says, was the most ruthless of all the Toyceivers. This is a word he has made up, Daniel is sure. A neologism dredged from the density of his floating dreams and undependable memories.

  AT TEN PAST three they step out onto the road. Daniel carries Dr. Natus in his jar close to his chest. He swills about, tiny fingers flexing like cilia. Daniel can hear him thinking.

  They step up onto the black-and-white tiled step beneath the porch over the Art Deco door to Elegant Lady and wait. At twenty past three Daniel hear footsteps.

  The man is wearing a shoddy old parka with the hood up. He peers out at Daniel through a mane of matted fur.

  Daniel invites him to step up onto the checkerboard tiles, which he does with a stumbling lurch.

  Daniel can hear his breathing, and beneath that the constant wintry sound of the low calm waves moving up the shingle and lapping, with mild, feline caresses, around the legs of the pier.

  The man is trembling. He is staring at Dr. Natus. The fluid is dark; there is only a little light reflected back off the wet pavement from a single streetlight on the corner and Dr. Natus is mostly obscured. Occasionally a fraction of him drifts or presses against the glass and he is glimpsed; a flutter of fingers or toes, a curve of belly, a wrinkled buttock. He is restless, excited. He loves this part.

  Daniel lifts the jar in front of his face and starts to agitate it, gently at first, then with greater rhythm. The silt at the bottom of the jar lifts and spreads throughout the fluid and Dr. Natus is fully concealed.

  “Close your eyes,” Daniel says to the man. “Don’t open them again until I tell you.”

  He closes his eyes. His lips pout and his nose wrinkles with the effort of compliance. He looks like a child awaiting a surprise present.

  Daniel gives the jar one last shake and Dr. Natus takes them to the Quay.

  CHLOE HAD NO recollection of arriving here. She had awakened, curled into a ball on her left side, at the mouth of a cave cut thirty feet up into the side of a hill of dark red rock. As her eyes had opened, the lowering late afternoon sun had cut through the treetops, turning the entire cave crimson around her. The rock seemed to pulse; Chloe closed her eyes.

  She stayed like that for a while and when she opened her eyes again it was dark. Chloe was cold. Shivering, she sat and looked up at the craggy oval of moonlight shining in through the cave mouth. She stood, feeling unsteady.

  Chloe looked through the treetops camouflaging the entrance to the cave and saw that she was at the edge of a forest. She had no way of gauging how big the forest was because the moonlight was insufficient to define depth or density, but she perceived the mass of it, pressing against the rock face both left and right of the cave and could hear the flat drumming of night air on the canopy, an outlying roar of shivering foliage like a drowsy tide.

  Chloe turned and walked back through the cave. The floor was flat and smooth and she made her way to the back wall without obstacle. The cave was narrow; Chloe could reach out and touch both walls with her fingertips at the same time. The back wall was slightly rounded and to her left was an alcove big enough for her to stand in. If she stood on tip toes she could just touch the ceiling.

  On the floor at the back of the cave was a pile of rugs. Chloe nudged them with her foot. Nothing moved or scuttled out from under them. She knelt down. They were soft and fluffy. She curled up amongst them and stared out into the night. For a long time, before she fell asleep, Chloe lay there and wondered who she was.

  HER HEAD HADN’T been empty, exactly. She knew the names of certain things, and how a lot of them worked, or could be adapted to work, although sometimes, when she looked at something, there was a sensation of blankness in her mind. She knew she was safe in the cave; something about the quality of the red rock—she knew the rock was red, and that it was rock—seemed to comfort her.

  No, her head wasn’t empty but there was a sense that it might once have been, and not so long ago, and that it had been filled at once with a massive amount of information and instructions. She had no memories beyond the cave; her mind just stalled, and teetered on the brink of some preceding, historical oblivion. It made her light-headed and fretful to consider this pale eternity behind her. How did she know—or at least intuit—this? She didn’t know. Nor could she find out. In a town that appeared to be made up almost entirely of bookshops, Chloe was unable to find a single volume that could help her research herself. She could hold a book, a fragrant case of paper rectangles, and know it was a book, but that was all.

  Chloe couldn’t read.

  This fact didn’t frustrate her, because there was no learning either misunderstood or abstruse that had gone before to cause her to stumble, to not learn. It was, like trying to think back beyond awakening in the cave, something that had never been there in the first place.

  She could speak. She knew her name was Chloe. She knew she was alone.

  She just didn’t know why.

  CHLOE HAD DISCOVERED the town the next day after waking in the cave. She had wanted to explore
her surroundings, make more connections, force more neural pathways in her brain; to stay in the cave was not an option. Chloe knew this, too. She wasn’t to wait. She was to investigate.

  Wearing the plain, loose-fitting clothes she had first awoken in, Chloe stood at the mouth of the cave and looked out across the forest in daylight. She looked down, to where the base of the cliff met the forest floor in a sloping, jagged contour of rocks. If she fell, she would die or be injured on those rocks. From white timelessness into an infinity of black hours. What would this bubble of existence have been, then? A singularity failed to inflate? Chloe shook her head. Numbers seemed to run behind her eyes like a ribbon of code. Numbers?

  Chloe realised she could count.

  She smiled, reached out for the branch of the nearest tree.

  “One, two, three…” She jumped.

  HAVING MARKED THE position of the cave in her memory in relation to the tree she had climbed down and those in its proximity, Chloe began to head into the forest. She tried to keep her course straight so that her return journey would be oriented as straightforwardly as possible. If she got lost she reckoned that as long as she found her way back to the cliff face she could edge along until she could see the cave, but she felt that now was not the best time to wander. She picked a path with caution, scuffing the virgin leaves to mark a darker trail, and snapped protruding twigs to act as flags along the way.

  After some time the deep, cool light through which she walked began to dapple and shade up into a brighter, livelier green. Ahead, Chloe could see where the trees began to thin and beyond, a great burnished cauldron of blue pressing down on everything.

  At the edge of the forest, Chloe stood, hands on hips, and grinned. She squinted in the wonderful broad, flat light of a clear day and, as her eyes adjusted, she could see across a long meadow, waist-high with feathery grasses, and in the distance, like a pile of someone’s boxed-up belongings, the compact huddle of a town’s buildings. They looked like crenellations against the horizon, flattened into two dimensions by distance and the quality of the light behind it, like a cog protruding from the vast workings of the earth.