The Night Clock

by Paul Meloy

  “Sabotage,” he said. “These mines have been abandoned for years. Now the Autoscopes have their Toyceivers working them again, drilling for materials for the war. I’m going to inconvenience them and buy us a little more time.”

  Sandy disappeared around the side of the shed. Alex climbed down and peered around the corner.

  He watched Sandy walk over to a heap of large wooden reels. He crouched down and inspected them, then pushed one over onto its side. It was the size of a barrel and tightly wound with steel cable. He rolled it across the yard until he reached the pithead then took hold of the end of the cable and unravelled about ten feet of it. It looked heavy and very strong but somehow Sandy managed to loop it around the foot of one of the supporting stanchions. He reached into an overall pocket and took something out; it was one of the many tools he had designed and made to fashion his sculptures, and he began working on the end of the cable. The yard was lit by intermittent bursts of blue light from the arc welders and a conveyor belt tipped a load of ore into a hopper with a sound like a brief, localized landslide.

  Alex kept watch while Sandy finished fashioning a hook onto the end of the cable and used it to fix the loop like a noose around the stanchion. He gave it a tug and it held firm.

  Sandy pushed the reel back across the yard and up to the rear of Railgrinder. He unravelled the remaining cable and kicked the empty spool away. It rolled in an arc and came to rest against a heap of slate.

  Sandy made another noose and hitched it to one of Railgrinder’s buffers.

  He returned to the cab and climbed in.

  Sandy released Railgrinder’s brake, and with a hiss and jolt, it started to pull away. They leaned over the back of the cab and watched as the cable grew taut. Railgrinder hauled against the weight of the pithead, steaming, its fire glowing white. The cable pulled tight against the corner of the first shed and bit into the wood. Railgrinder strained and began to gather momentum. Sparks gushed from beneath its boiler. The cable tore into the side of the shed and started to slice through it.

  Wood splintered and the cable sang like piano wire. It carved through the planks, splinters flying and suddenly the entire structure collapsed. The cable dragged against the side of the next shed and sliced it in half as Railgrinder gathered speed. The third shed shattered in an explosion of decayed timber and now Railgrinder was pulling against the leg of the pithead. There was a moment of resistance when Railgrinder’s fire seemed like a handful of tiny stars, blinding and tremendous, and Sandy and Alex had to cower against the heat, but then they heard the first screams of tortured wood and felt the sensation of something giving way.

  The pithead buckled and the leg attached to the cable tore from the ground. The flywheel at the top of the mast flew off its axle and plunged down into the shaft trailing chains and a jangling constellation of cogs. The drill snapped like a stick of rock and flew into the air, ricocheting against the legs of the pylon, shattering them like driftwood. It soared up, arcing over the yard and harpooned the roof of one of the factories. There was an explosion and screams from the creatures working within. Gas cylinders blew in a succession of flat, punchy detonations and the entire building was engulfed in flames.

  Railgrinder used its power to take down the entire structure. As they rode off into the forest, Sandy and Alex watched the pithead topple and crash down into the dry, rutted yard, flung to ruin in the grey earth.

  Sandy reached over, lifted the coil of cable from Railgrinder’s buffer and dropped it onto the rails.

  Railgrinder took them away from the yard and the chaos, back into the trees, before their presence was ever noticed; its back end, its fire and steam, its crew, all gone rocking down the rails, cloaked by the forest.

  Alex increased Railgrinder’s speed and they made quite a pace. Sandy leaned against the side of the cab and squinted into the draught. Sparks landed in his beard and glowed like fireflies.

  “Where does this line take us?” Alex asked.

  “To the sea,” Sandy said. “There’s a line that runs the length of the Quays. It’s been destroyed and the bridges are out East of here, but it should still be running to Quay-Endula. There are precautions in place.”

  Eventually they left the forest and Railgrinder crossed a dark moor. Immense, serrated tors rose from the earth, and bitter-smelling ferns grew in abundance, smothering the land. Visible in the moonlight, through a gap in the distant mountains, was a level horizon of ocean. The line where it met the sky appeared elevated owing to their altitude and it looked to Alex like a fractured dam, its pent waters about to inundate the moor.

  But the waters held; the sea drew nearer, and soon they travelled a pass through the mountains and emerged, panting steam and throwing metal light, onto a sweeping line that took them down, and down, in graceful curves, to the edge of the sea. They passed a boarded, derelict town, and a castle, red as rust, rearing from the beach. Crimson lights shone in some of the windows and shadows flexed in the lines between the shutters. Alex shivered and felt a strange tingle in his belly, an excitement he had not experienced before, an anticipation of something inside him wanting to mature, to find expression.

  “Is that a bad place?” He asked.

  Sandy was also looking up at the castle. His eyes shone with those snug, crimson lines of light.

  “It might turn out to be,” he said. “There’s a battle raging in there. It’s another incursion.”

  “Should we help?”

  “No. It needs to take its own course. We’ve got our own agenda, Alex.”

  The castle receded, and with it, so did Alex’s sudden and powerful sense of longing. The light, though; those warm red gashes of light and the limber shadows that moved within them. They stayed with him for a little longer.

  “Stop the train a hundred yards from here,” Sandy said. “There’s a siding and a shed. I want to show you something, but we have to go on foot.”

  As they neared the siding, Sandy jumped down and ran ahead, towards a set of points. He pulled a lever and Railgrinder clacked off the main line and onto the siding. Sandy jumped back into the cab.

  The train shed was long and high with a curving corrugated metal roof. Alex engaged the brake and Railgrinder drew to a halt halfway along the length of the shed. He and Sandy climbed down onto the narrow platform.

  “This way,” Sandy said, and led them the remaining length of the shed and out onto the siding.

  Once outside, and with the Railgrinder’s noise no longer dominant, Alex could hear a new sound. Again, hectic industry; clangs and thuds and squeals. It was coming from further along the beach.

  They slid down a bank and onto a fractured concrete promenade.

  “Keep close,” Sandy said.

  The high half-moon shone bright enough to throw shadows.They reached a row of storm-damaged beach huts and they crept along the promenade keeping to the cover beneath the awnings of the huts.

  “There,” said sandy, and pointed down onto the beach.

  The beach was teeming with activity. In the moonlight they could see hundreds of creatures dragging pieces of wood and metal across the pebbles. There were wrecks piled against the rocks, the remains of dozens of ships driven up onto the beach. The creatures were plundering them, ripping off planks and struts, sheets of steel, throwing huge chunks of machinery over the sides, burrowing into the engine rooms and tearing the mechanisms and instruments out. Alex watched as a group of three creatures tore a great, rusted propeller from the stern of a ship and sent it spinning up the beach like a wheel.

  “What is this place?” He asked.

  Sandy replied, “Contraption Beach. This is where the Toyceivers make their war engines, the Uproar Contraptions. When they’re constructed, they’ll be driven through the remaining Quays and used to destroy them. “

  “What can we do?”

  “Nothing here,” Sandy said. “We need to reach Quay-Endula. That’s our purpose.”

  They continued to creep along the promenade, looking for som
e steps to take them back up to the rails. The beach huts were dismal looking things, more like garden sheds than cheerful cabins. Their wood was splintering and the roofs sagged. They each had a small, railed veranda, just big enough to sit on and some of them had no door. Inside they looked cramped and damp and unwelcoming. Alex could smell mildew.

  As they passed one of the huts, Alex heard a sound from inside. It was a furtive scrape, like twigs being dragged across the plank floor. He turned and looked and as he did so, the door opened and he saw what was making the sound.

  It was a dreadful looking thing. It had a small torso, like a child’s and a white, skeletal face. It wore an absurd crimson woolly hat, pulled tightly down over its bulging forehead. It had eight spiny, segmented legs, like a crab’s, which ended in sharp points that scratched and scraped on the concrete. It hissed at Alex, and grinned.

  Alex reached out and grabbed hold of one of the wooden railings running around a veranda. He pulled and it came away with a soft, splintery crunch. It was nearly rotten, but he held it up and brandished it as the creature strutted towards him.

  Alex stepped forward and jabbed the railing at the creature’s head. It darted to the side and rose up on four of its legs. It growled, its horrible pale eyes gleaming deep in their sockets. It fenced with its front legs, using them like four articulated spears. Alex clouted two of them out of the way and kicked it in the chest. It yelped and flipped over onto its back. It flailed its legs, the knee joints rattling against the concrete like hollow seashells. Alex ran towards Sandy.

  Sandy looked pleased. “Well done, son,” he said. “A good clean fight! If you can take care of Bom-Bertil, you can hold your own against others like him.”

  Alex looked back at the struggling creature. Its legs sounded like a teaspoon rattling in a china cup. Suddenly it sprang over onto its feet and spun around. It was glowering and furious. Its hat had come down over one of its eyes.

  “Bom-Bertil?” Alex said. “You know him?”

  “Oh, I know them all, Alex,” Sandy said. “I’ve been dreaming about them since I was a child. Let’s get back to Railgrinder, and I’ll tell you more about it.”

  They went up the steps, leaving Bom-Bertil strutting in fury, but cowed into inaction, humiliated by the boy. They retraced the line back to the shed and climbed up onto Railgrinder. Sandy took over the controls, disengaged the brake and took them out in a grey tempest of steam and smoke.

  “I’ll tell you what happened, when I was a boy no older than you are now,” he said.

  On they went, to Quay-Endula.

  I WAS OUT playing with my best friend, David. It was getting on for evening and we were down on the railway tracks that ran past our village. It was summer and the day was long but we were getting tired and hungry. We were picking stuff up from amongst the pebbles alongside the line, examining them, pocketing the odd treasure. David was searching for pieces of jettisoned engine parts. We were making models in my dad’s shed: robots, machines, gearboxes, spacecraft; all junk but good oily fun.

  I was feeling distracted. I had been having nightmares for weeks. Awful places that were like dimensions full of gloom and menace. I was being chased by something that wanted to take me up, absorb me and carry me inside it deep within these dimensions, forever.

  David was a good lad. We had always been close, best mates for years, and he knew I was troubled. He was sensitive like that, gentle. I had told him all my secrets.

  I used to be kind of small. Weedy. Vulnerable. David protected me from bullies, but he couldn’t protect me from what happened that evening.

  We were standing at the tunnel mouth and suddenly I experienced an effect on my mood so profound that I realised complete hopelessness and despair was all I would ever know and that this was my lot. My mind emptied of everything other than utter doom and I got one thought, like a black firework going off against a dying sky: It would be best to die.

  I remember turning to David and seeing the expression on his face.

  My heart broke, then, because I knew he had seen it, too. My future. No child should have such existential insight. Life stretches too far ahead to sustain it, an impossible slog towards nothingness.

  But David was looking past me. At what was coming through the tunnel.

  He stepped back, his hands raised and nearly fell. I stood, passive in the path of it, and felt the dark wind rush by as it pressed against the air. It stank of death. But it was a death that would always be alive.

  David fled. He clambered up the bank and I watched him go. I understood. I reached out but he was gone. I was glad for him. I loved him and I was glad he was going to be safe.

  I turned and watched as Junction Creature swelled from the tunnel and engulfed me in its black, eye-filled mouth.

  I hung in the guts of Junction Creature as it roared back through the tunnel. It was vast, and the whole of its mass was filled with eyes. They drifted up to me in thousands and gazed at me, lidless and full of blood, but still seeing. Seeing forever. I felt Junction Creature’s fury at being thwarted. I could hear its hideous, thundering mind as it raged. And all the time I could feel it, planting nightmares all over the world. Pieces of it constantly feeling, probing, budding out and using the dimensions of dreams to be everywhere, at all times. But it needed more. It had been after David, not me. I could sense it, calculating, fuming. To take away David’s future and the good things he would do. The hope he would give people. And the son he’d have. I saw them, through Junction Creature’s million stolen eyes, in a future place. I wanted to cry, to fight, but it was hopeless. It needed David, and others like him. Not feeble little boys like me. It wanted Firmament Surgeons, and it wanted the Dark Time they controlled. It wanted to be everywhere forever, not just constrained to doing this endless labour, this reaching. It was missing things. It knew it was limited and it loathed it.

  And its limitations saved me.

  I heard Junction Creature roar. We were no longer in a tunnel. It had emerged onto a plain of ruins. A bombsite pitted and populated with blown buildings and fragments of ancient machines. Junction Creature slid through the wreckage. It was enormous. Junction Creature was supreme here.

  And then it fixed its eyes on a building and swarmed towards it. It was a tower block, and as we drew closer, Junction Creature saw the man standing on a splintering parapet. I felt its hate grow immense, and with it, a determination to destroy this man. The building was collapsing. Junction Creature pressed against the block and it began to crumble. The man fell.

  As he fell, I felt something. In my darkened mind, against the despair like a lamp held up by a distant guide, I felt a splinter of hope lodge there.

  Junction Creature screamed, and I experienced a wave of pressure as its entire mass flexed against the awful irritation of my hope. It bucked away from the building and as it reeled, I felt myself moving through it, pushed to its rim. I drifted there, terrified.

  And then the balloon rose alongside Junction Creature, buffeted by the air stirred by its rippling flanks.

  A hot air balloon, piloted by a little girl. And the man was there. And a tiger. And I thought I must be dreaming again, of course, and I must wake up soon. And that hope was growing, and Junction Creature was enraged by it. And it ejected me like vomit.

  The man caught me. He lifted me into the basket and the girl opened up the burner and we floated away. So serene. Junction Creature dropped away beneath us, flattening like a cumulus cloud full of all the storms left in the world to be spent.

  They set me down, in an apple orchard by a stream. There was a house there. It was large, sprawling with an annexe with French windows that opened out onto the orchard. The man took my hand and led me through the orchard and into the annexe. It looked like a doctor’s office. He told me to wait five minutes and then go out through the door facing the French windows. He told me his name was Doctor Mocking and that the girl was his daughter, Lesley. He told me that when I went through the door I would be different. I would have a ne
w ability. He took something down from the wall and gave it to me. It was a long, slender tube. As soon as he gave it to me, I knew what it was. It was a pontil rod. A glassblower’s blowing tube. I liked the feel of it immediately.

  Doctor Mocking told me that I should hide it somewhere when I left because I wouldn’t need it for a long time if I was lucky.

  He also told me that I wouldn’t see David again and that when I left this office time would be very different for me.

  I understood. This man had saved me from an eternity in Hell and I accepted the new life he was freely offering me with gratitude and joy.

  As Doctor Mocking turned to leave, he said, “You don’t have to go through that door.” He smiled and walked out into the orchard.

  “I OPENED THE door and awoke, in my bed, in my house. Nothing was different. Lying across the foot of the bed was the glass blower’s pipe. I sat up and held it, turning it in my hands. I could hear someone coming, so I rolled over and slid it beneath my mattress.

  The door opened and my brother came in.

  “Your breakfast’s ready,” he said.

  I was delighted to see him, relieved, euphoric. I leaped out of bed and followed him downstairs. Mum and dad were there. Nothing was different. I ate my breakfast and got dressed for school. I looked in my bag. Same books, same teachers’ names on the covers.

  I left the house and walked to the bus stop.

  The bus came, number 5, nothing had changed. The children were the same. I went upstairs and looked around, my heart beating faster. The bullies were at the back, a tight-knit group of spiteful little faces.

  “There’s Sandicap!” One of them shouted the length of the bus. “Still seeing the doctor cos you wet the bed?”

  I backed down the stairs and sat on a seat nearest the driver. I hugged my book bag to my chest and turned my face towards the tinted Perspex partition of the driver’s cab. I could see my reflection, and the tears that ran down my face.