The Night Clock

by Paul Meloy

  Still smiling, Chloe strolled through the meadow and headed towards the town.

  CHLOE WALKED THROUGH town. It was deserted and the bright morning sun lit the dewy cobbles of the high street and made them gleam like the bottom of a streambed. She took her time, strolling, her arms swinging, her eyes wide and taking it all in. The high street was narrow and lined with small, crooked buildings. At intervals alleyways and narrow lanes led off and she could see more buildings lining these.

  Chloe stopped and peered through the window of one of the buildings. The room beyond was dark but she could make out shapes, rows of shelves filled with small faded box-shapes stacked together. She frowned as a picture formed in her mind, and a word came with it.

  Books.

  And then more, pulled into her head from some reservoir fathoms deep and stocked with bright shoals of information:

  Books hop.

  Chloe’s focus pulled back, away from the interior and she regarded her own reflection. She wrinkled her nose. She smiled, her brow creased. She lifted her hand and waggled her fingers.

  “Hi,” she said. Then she laughed, and the bright sound of it rang down the street. And the word came again, and she spoke it aloud.

  “Bookshop!”

  She stepped up to the door and tried the handle. It was unlocked. Chloe opened the door and walked in.

  CHLOE SPENT THE next hour perusing the shelves, lifting down books and gazing at them. She liked the smell of them, and the weight and substance of them. She blew dust from their pages and riffled them to liberate more of their aged, sour yet amiable fragrance. Chloe knew these were important things.

  At the back of the shop, which was really only one small room with a set of dark, slender steps leading up to a trapdoor in the ceiling, she found a box full of larger books, stacked on top of each other. She lifted some out and sat on the floor cross-legged with them in her lap. They were heavy and she discovered when she opened them, they were full of pictures.

  Chloe smiled. The words that filled the books on the shelves were as mysterious as code, but these... these she could comprehend. Her eyelids fluttered as the pages turned and the surface of that unfathomable reservoir inside her head began to churn with sparkles of light, as it began to boil with new words, new information.

  And then she took up the last book remaining in the bottom of the box.

  She sat down with it, head swimming, elated and bright-eyed, her lips moist and her heart thumping, and opened it, unable to read its title, of course, and flipped through a few pages, and immediately blacked out and lay inert on the floor of that book shop with A Clock Mender’s Handbook open on her belly, her eyes moving with great rapidity behind their closed lids, her fingers twitching, and stayed like that for hours.

  And only opened her eyes again after it had got dark.

  AND WHILE SHE slept, something came to town, sent out from a benighted mind:

  Find her kill her

  She’s here

  Find her kill her

  and things poured into the street, from alleyways and niches, and holes in the ground; from the fields they came, lifting from the dirt, shucking clods of filth as their legs unhinged and stretched out to propel them. They came with bodies and faces and eyes of glass, of ill flesh, of all metals that might soften and be worked; and with brains and hearts of silver gas and fire

  Find her kill her

  and scraped and scoured the high street and side roads and lots and yards and porches and rooftops and clattered and strutted on stick legs and scuttled on a dozen spider’s apiece and stamped with limbs like tree trunks

  Find her kill her she’s here

  and could not find her and could not see her though they pressed awful faces or flattened eyes or swarmed like vile molecules across the windows and could not smell her for the peppery dust from the books that were everywhere covering her scent and could not bear it for too long, or the thing with the voice could not, because it choked on the stink of the books and began to fade

  Find her kill

  and the things it had sent also faded, collapsed their many-jointed legs beneath their hollow bodies, their only organs things of weakening light that fluttered in lucent fibrillations and they dragged themselves away and hid, or died there on the cobbles and remained sprawled like ghosts of horrendous sculptures

  CHLOE SAT UP. A Clock Mender’s Handbook slid off her lap onto the floor. She blinked, startled by the sudden darkness and felt a wave of panic wash through her. She stood up and stared around trying to find something to look at to orient herself but all she could see was nothing. Chloe started gasping, and stepped forward, her arms raised, hands palm outwards with the fingers splayed. She stumbled, kicking something flat and heavy across the floor. It triggered a memory, breaking through the panic; pictures. Book.

  She was in a bookshop. What had happened? Had she fallen asleep? No. The book. The book of clocks had done something to her. She felt her breathing slow and now there was a watery quality to the darkness, a lessening of its totality. Chloe took another more careful step forward and emerged from between two high rows of shelves to find herself standing in front of the window. The glass was smeared and filthy. Chloe wiped a finger down the glass but her fingertip came away clean but for a silvery pad of dust. The filth was on the outside.

  Chloe frowned. She turned and peered towards the rear of the shop. Her eyes were becoming accustomed to the poor light and so she moved back along the row of shelves and picked up the book she had kicked. On its wide rectangular cover was a picture of the workings of a clock—cogs, wheels, pendulums and hands—all arrayed on a velvet cloth.

  Chloe put the book under her arm and left the shop.

  OUTSIDE, A HIGH sea of clouds was lit in a patch to a sullen grey from above by the force of a gleaming but thwarted full moon. A strong wind was blowing along the high street funnelling in from the fields that surrounded it, and as Chloe stood there on the cobbles, book tucked against her ribs, the clouds broke and she had to squint as the moonlight bore down on the town through the rent, as sudden and diamond-white as a revelation, and then she shrieked, and stumbled back into the doorway of the shop because it really was a revelation; the light showed her the things that had died in the road.

  Even in the pure, cleansing glare of the moonlight, and dead husks that they had become—oxidizing plates and wine-glass thin shells, of liquid meat and powdering bone—they were terrible. They were a nightmare installation set up in a deserted town by a troupe of artists obeying the compulsive, baying creativity of their disrupted and railing minds.

  Chloe hugged the book to her chest, her chin against the slender spine, as if protecting her throat and heart. She looked along the length of the high street in both directions. The shapes of things gleamed in the moonlight, some piled up or craning over each other, some alone in gutters, drawn in on themselves and dissolving as she watched. She looked to her left and cringed back from the silhouette of something as tall as the gutters still clasping the wall even as it bowed towards her as it rotted.

  Chloe turned and ducked back into the bookshop.

  CHLOE SUFFERED A long night, but she felt safe there, tucked away in the back of that bookshop behind a battlement of shelves.

  She passed time by going through the moonlit shop looking for more picture books (A Clock Mender’s Handbook was wrapped in a sheet of soft cloth she had found in a drawer and was stashed in a nook beneath the window. She wasn’t going to be perusing that particular tome again tonight. Not here, anyway.) and she amused herself by learning about vehicles, and buildings, and animals and insects, and trees and flowers, and...

  Food.

  Cookbook.

  Chloe sat staring down at the glossy photographs and felt her mouth fill up with saliva. A clear spot of dribble dropped from her bottom lip onto the page. She wiped it away with her thumb, lifted her thumb to her mouth and licked it. She tasted something. Another word rose up in her mind; she experienced it emerging as a sensa
tion of warm blocks rising through a lavish medium, dark and swirling

  chocolate

  and again her eyes rolled up and she slumped forward over the book in her lap.

  But this time she fed.

  Or, was fed by someone else.

  AND WHILE CHLOE took sustenance, her body resting, her mind processing all the new things she had seen and learned, outside on the street all the dead frames rotted away.

  When Chloe awoke the next morning refreshed, she gathered up a collection of books she liked best (A Clock Mender’s Handbook, Chocolates and Confections: Formula, Theory and Technique for the Artisan Confectioner, Little Garden People and What they Do) and walked out into a chilly but cloudless day.

  The street was empty now. Any evidence that it had been host to a horde of monsters the previous day had been erased.

  Intrigue overtook the desire to run back to the cave. Chloe turned and walked further down the street, her books clutched to her breast. She stopped at intervals to peer through the dusty windows of the shops but all she could see were more rooms full of books. She continued exploring and as she did so she began to feel the weight and immensity of information these shops contained pressing out at her, rousing that fathomless ocean at the core of her being, forcing fissures and threatening a deluge where once there had been a stream; it was almost overwhelming, and she stopped, and closed her eyes, and willed it to abate.

  When she opened her eyes again, the pressure dumped back to a manageable level (it was still there, though, in the background, a sense of standing with her back to something colossal, planetary, and trying to ignore its hideous attendance plucking at her periphery, as if turning to face it would, indeed, drop her dead) Chloe breathed deeply and turned to walk back to the cave. She felt exposed, and suddenly exhausted.

  But as she turned she noticed something glittering in the window of a small store across the street. She walked over and realised it was sunlight glinting off metal.

  Hardware

  The word came as she looked at the objects in the display behind the glass.

  Interesting.

  Chloe tried the door. It opened.

  ALMOST ABSENTLY, CHLOE wandered through the shop. Again, it was only tiny but crammed with shelves and counters full of stuff. At the back was a door, which she opened to discover an aisle splitting a long, low corrugated-roofed storeroom. She stepped back and pulled the door shut, her head pounding. She managed a weak smile but didn’t open the door again. The storeroom was so rammed with stuff—with words —that she had experienced them as an almost physical mob, pouncing into her mind, trying to establish their existence with profuse, open-handed glee.

  Chloe returned to the front of the shop where she had seen a display of large canvas bags. She took one and slipped the strap over her shoulder.

  Bug-out bag.

  She smiled at the words, liking the sound of them in her head but not really knowing their significance.

  She slid her three books into the bag and then went through the shop taking items as she felt inspired. Finally, she walked out the proud owner of a Swiss Army knife bristling with attachments, a roll of pipe and flange protection tape, a hack saw, a pair of bright yellow neoprene industrial hazard gloves, a set of screwdrivers, an orange-handled claw hammer and a compartmentalised clear plastic box of nails of various sizes, a heavy duty LED lantern light (batteries included) with a strap and a handle, a red Zippo lighter, propane gas canister, a box of night lights, and, unable to resist, shiny hardback copies of Remodelista: A Manual for the Remodelled Home, Renovating for Profit, and The Big Book of Weekend Woodworking.

  Smiling all the way, Chloe retraced her steps back to the cave.

  BACK IN HER cave, Chloe unpacked her bag and sat cross-legged on her rugs, her things arrayed before her; if she’d known about Christmas, then it would have been Christmas she would have been thinking about. She picked everything up in turn and examined each one, trying them out. She sat for a while in her big chunky gloves, then pulled them off and unhinged all the attachments on her Army knife. She was particularly taken with the miniature scissors, the magnifying glass and the corkscrew. She hefted the hammer, liking its weight and balance. She put the hacksaw aside; she thought she would use this to take off the lower branches of the nearest tree to the cave, the one she had used earlier to climb down and then back up. She had an instinctive impression this would make her feel safer. Her mind was already considering options, and she was planning her next trip to the hardware store the following day and making a list of things to bring back, rope and ladders at the top.

  She popped the Zippo lid and ran the ball of her thumb across the wheel. It sparked but did not light. She picked up the gas canister put it in her lap and slid the lighter out of its case. She was going on instinct again, but was not surprised that working knowledge came to her in this way. It was normal development for Chloe.

  She pressed the canister’s nozzle into the hole in the bottom of the lighter and pushed. Gas whooshed in a cold spray over her hand but she watched as the woolly filling darkened and once it was sufficiently saturated, she removed the nozzle and slid the lighter back into its case. She flipped the lid open and again struck the wheel.

  Flame bloomed and ran down the case and across the back of her hand like liquid.

  “Shit!” Chloe shouted, and hurled the lighter the length of the cave. The coating of gas on her hand burned off almost instantaneously, evaporating in a bluish wisp, but the lighter remained burning at the cave mouth like a tiny beacon. A little shaken, Chloe rose and retrieved it. She clicked the lid over the flame and extinguished it.

  She returned to her rugs and sat down.

  “Shit,” she said. “Shit!” She grinned, wondering where that word had come from. A picture rose in her mind. It was similar in many ways to one she had had earlier, in the bookshop. Dark warm blocks rising through a thick, lustrous brown medium.

  “Ew!” Chloe said. “Nasty.”

  THE NEXT DAY, Chloe went back to the town. This time she was more cautious, vigilant for those nightmare creatures, but saw none.

  She went straight for the hardware store and gathered more gear. She helped herself to a padded body warmer and a pair of sturdy walking boots. Then she grabbed a loop of orange nylon rope and a set of ladders and went back outside. She was leaning the ladders against the side of the building when she heard something.

  She ducked back inside the shop and peered through the window out onto the street.

  The sound grew louder. It was choppy, metallic; Chloe could summon no mental image to identify it. She frowned and looked around. Hanging on a hook by the counter was a leather utility belt. She kept low and went over and unhooked it. She put it around her waist and buckled it beneath her body warmer. She took a large hatchet and a vicious-looking hunting knife from a shelf and pushed them through two of the belt’s loops, one over each hip.

  Thus tooled, Chloe went back to the window just in time to see the noisemaker rumble into town.

  It was a lime-green split-screen Volkswagen campervan. It had white mudguards and was lidded with a striped green and white pop-top roof. Chloe smiled, despite the utter oddness of its appearance. She had seen similar vehicles in one of the books and had been rather taken by these cheerful-looking things with their pleasing lines and snug interiors.

  This one was different, though. As it trundled up the high street, Chloe noticed that it was covered in antenna, glittering like quills, and on the roof above the windscreen sat a small metal dish.

  The camper slowed and then stopped, idling at the kerb outside the hardware store. Chloe could hear the repetitive knock of some sort of mechanism. The driver turned his head, scanning the road ahead and the buildings on either side. Chloe ducked below the window ledge.

  A moment later she heard the motor rev and she risked another peek.

  The driver was looking directly at her.

  Chloe gasped, but before she could react and take cover again, the d
river cut the engine, climbed from his seat and disappeared into the back of the van. Chloe frowned. The mechanical knocking sound increased in volume and tempo, becoming a low thrum. And then, from gaps and alleyways between the buildings, and from over roofs and walls and gates, poured huge spiders in hundreds.

  They converged on the van, their foul lobed abdomens suspended a foot above the ground between long, slender racks of racing legs. Chloe could see their eyes; each spider had a pair, like bulbs of black jelly.

  They converged on the van and began to clamber over it, smothering it with their bodies, jabbing at the chassis with their legs. Chloe could hear the scraping sound of them as they jarred against the windows and doors.

  She cringed as she heard movement on the roof of the shop. And then more spiders were pouring down the window, spilling across the path the join the others at the van. For a moment, Chloe was frozen with terror, and then she was reeling back against the shop counter as one of the spiders reared up and scrabbled at the window, its legs rattling like needle-sharp canes and putting long scratches in the glass. The glass began to crack and now others had joined it; Chloe was repulsed by the sight of their soft bodies flattening against the glass and the jagged mouthparts revealed like fistfuls of glass, and the vile articulations of their undersides, the churning of their their legs as they rose and fell, hard joints socketed in spongy cups of meat.