The Night Clock

by Paul Meloy

  Trevena glanced over at Bix. The dog had a daft expression on its face.

  “Open the window a bit, Jon,” he said. “Bix likes to feel the wind in his ears, you know.”

  Index wound the window down and Bix slid his nose out and shut his eyes. His ears looked like scarves, blowing in the wind.

  They drove for half an hour and Index said, “Turn off left here, Phil.”

  Trevena said, “It’s alright, Jon. I know where I’m going.”

  THE DEVIL-IN-DREAMS CAN feel the Firmament Surgeons gathering. That part of it able to ride the Dark Time flux—ride it, like a tanker steering through the swell of an infinite sea but no more able to control it than the fish that swim in it—is still able to plot a course. It identifies its target and pours out its filth, budding and blackening inside the man’s head, distorting his dreams and drawing him into the conflict. His name is Barry Cook and he is a sick man. He is hiding the vilest of thoughts in his head and the devil-in-dreams will use its power to increase the torment. The devil-in-dreams has detected one of the Ten and will use this Cook, use his sickness, to exterminate him in his Quay. One more kill and The Night Clock will belong to the Autoscopes for eternity.

  Daniel.

  The devil-in-dreams is blinded by its hatred of this one. More overpowering than anything he feels towards the others. He has put more effort into this one’s suffering, and yet he still stands. Still he fights. And it is this resilience that the devil-in-dreams abhors.

  Because it is so very frightening.

  RAILGRINDER SLID FROM the Gantry, its iron wheels screaming and sparking on the surface of the road. Its momentum carried it on a slanting course towards the sinkhole. Daniel slammed on the brake. The wheels locked, biting like blades, fracturing the potholed tarmac, gouging grooves in the loose grit beneath it.

  Daniel jammed the throttle into its forward position but the wheels wouldn’t turn. Daniel had reached the limits to his skill as an engine driver and he prepared to bail out of the cab. Railgrinder was slowing, though, and when its back end slid as far as the edge of the road, its wheels hit the kerbstones and shattered them like teeth. The engine bucked, throwing Daniel to the footplate, and came to rest a yard from the lip of the pit.

  Daniel stood and wiped coal dust from his hands onto his coat. He took a last look around Railgrinder’s cab, at the gauges and valves, feeling the last warmth from the ebbing firebox. There was a whistle chain hanging from a lever above the firebox. Daniel reached out and took hold of it. He pulled it gently and listened to the forlorn, wavering chord.

  Daniel turned and jumped down from the cab.

  He went over to the pub and opened the door.

  One man sat on a stool at the bar. Otherwise the pub was empty.

  Les smiled when Daniel walked it.

  “What’s the plan, Dan?” he said.

  Daniel pulled a stool out and sat down. He rested his elbows on the bar and put his chin on his clasped fingers. He stared into the flecked mirror below the optics.

  “It knows I’m here,” he said.

  Les nodded. “The whistle.”

  “Yes. A challenge. A summoning.”

  “That’ll piss it off,” Les said.

  “That,” said Daniel, “essentially is the plan.”

  Les was silent for a moment, and then he said, “You have to go back, don’t you?”

  Daniel nodded, still watching his reflection in the mirror.

  “I have to do my thing,” he said.

  “Will I see you again?”

  Daniel stood up. “I don’t know.” He said.

  Les held out a hand and Daniel took it.

  “I love you, Dan,” Les said.

  Daniel took the matchbox from his pocket and put it on the bar.

  Les picked it up and slid open the little drawer.

  “Hey, Bert,” he said. He looked up at Daniel, his eyes shining.

  “Take him,” Daniel said. “I don’t need him anymore. Not for what I have to do. Listen, though. Listen to what he says.”

  Les put the matchbox back on the bar, the tiny hermit crab cushioned on its grubby ball of wool.

  “Goodbye, Dan.”

  Daniel turned and walked out.

  DANIEL STOOD AT the lip of the pit. The wave of pressure was pulsing from the depths. He could feel it moving the air around him. The smell was awful, that shallow-burial stink. A memory came to him and for a moment he teetered on the edge of the sinkhole. It took him off-guard, ambushing him.

  He was attending his father’s funeral and, disoriented by the unreality he felt, and the unremitting absence of his father, and the rain that fell in a fine sheet across the cemetery, he stumbled away from the small group he was with and found himself standing in a small lot surrounded by a grove of trees at the edge of the graveyard. He was only lost for a few moments, but as he looked around he saw the most incongruous thing and it made him stop, his eyes wide, a hand plastered to his mouth.

  There were toys here. They were soiled with age, rusty and untended, the effort of placing them there so terrible it was as if they had been fled from, never to be revisited. There was a tin windmill on a plastic stick. It rattled round on its tarnished pin in the sheeting rain. Sodden, ragged dolls and teddy bears slumped in the understanding of their empty comfort. And photos in frames, of children, when they had been briefly alive and smiling without knowledge of the ground. How could they know?

  Daniel had sobbed, looking around at the children’s graves. He had never imagined a place like this, set apart like a sanatorium, away from those that had lived fuller lives. He felt suddenly terribly exposed. It was like he had walked unwittingly into a minefield and could now see the detonators everywhere, poking from the ground. The graves, and the toys that consoled them, corralled him in the misty rain. He wondered – and wished he hadn’t – whether cold, decaying little fingers reached through the earth during the night to touch these old beloveds, to play and spin the corroded tops, to listen to their dead hum and they turned in the dark.

  Daniel stumbled from the lip of the pit, much as he had stumbled away from the graves as a child. But now there was no mother to catch him, to fret over him in the projection of her own guilt and grief. And he was glad of it. He wiped his brow and glared at the pit.

  “You bastard,” he said.

  He made fists and stuck them in the pockets of his coat. He closed his eyes. He locked himself onto the flux of Dark Time he could feel rushing up through the sinkhole. He could feel its corruption, its rage. He concentrated, waiting.

  The dream came to him, and the identity of the dreamer.

  The devil-in-dreams was in there, as Daniel had hoped, its entirety whipping up the filth it found there. It was using this man as its final push to eliminate him but it was distracted by its hatred.

  “Come on,” Daniel said through his teeth. “Make it personal.”

  He allowed the pressure wave to take him out of the Quay and he entered Dark Time.

  TREVENA FOLLOWED A dirt road up to the farm. He knew it well, knew where the ruts and potholes were deepest. He had driven it many times before.

  Barry Cook was one of the most unpleasant patients on his caseload. He cropped up with dispiriting regularity complaining of depression. Trevena’s ethical code strained almost audibly at the necessity to offer this man a service, but it was all non-judgemental, this job. Like fuck. He nursed this young man with a cold heart.

  “He’s a sex-offender,” Trevena said. “A proper fiddler.”

  Index said nothing, just stared ahead through the windscreen.

  “On the register. He reckons he’s reformed but I’d like to have a look at what he’s got on his hard drive. Well, I wouldn’t, but I’d like someone else to. Someone with the authority to put the little shit away forever. It’s part of his conditions that he doesn’t use a computer but his family’s collusive. They can’t believe their little Baz could be capable of that kind of thing. There’s computers all over the house and I
bet they’re not password protected.”

  Trevena stopped rambling. He was nervous. He was frightened. What did they want with Barry Cook?

  AT EXACTLY TWENTY past three the previous night—about the same time Graham Knott was undergoing radical amputation—Barry Cook had jolted awake. He had been fighting sleep paralysis, coming up from the nightmare but unable to completely wake up. He sat up and looked around, a searing panic crushing his chest like a heart attack. He was sweating and his right arm was completely dead. The dream was vivid still. He had been doing those terrible, unforgivable things again. His urge was back, raging like an unslaked addiction. He knew the signs of old, the creeping obsessions that built to a point where it was impossible for him to resist them, but this was new, an irresistible clawing inside his mind. He swung his feet off the bed and put them on the cold floor. He froze.

  There was someone in his room.

  Barry cowered, his right arm flopping, and whispered, “Dad?”

  Daniel stepped from the shadows by Barry’s desk. A laptop blinked a small blue light as it charged.

  “Who… who are you?” Barry said.

  “I am the hypnopomp,” Daniel said. “You’re dreaming.”

  Barry’s expression glazed over.

  Daniel moved some books and magazines around on Barry’s desk with the tips of his fingers. He found a spiral bound notebook.

  “Come here,” Daniel said.

  Barry stood up and walked to the desk.

  “Write what I tell you,” Daniel said.

  Barry picked up a pen and leaned over the desk.

  “Are you right or left handed?”

  “Left,” said Barry.

  “Aren’t you lucky.”

  Barry smiled, sly and collusive. “Always,” he said.

  Daniel told Barry what to put in the note.

  BARRY FOLLOWED DANIEL through the house and down to the front door. At one point a man stepped out from a bedroom and stood in the hallway watching them. He stood aside as they approached. No surprise registered on the man’s face. In fact he smiled as they passed and then continued on down the hall and went into the bathroom.

  Barry was mute, his arm lolling at his side. If he tried to lift it, it flew out at an angle, unresponsive to his brain’s attempts to direct it. He tried to keep it by his side. In the end he held it there with his left hand.

  They walked across the yard to a barn. Daniel led Barry over to one of the machines. It was a hay-baler, attached to the back of a tractor.

  “Make it work,” Daniel said.

  Barry walked over to the machine and pushed a button. He reached up into the tractor’s cab and switched it on. The tractor rumbled and came to life. Barry looked at Daniel. “It needs to be running,” he said. “For the PTO shaft to turn.”

  “Get in,” Daniel said.

  Barry got up into the cab and put the tractor in gear. He pulled away, aiming the tractor’s nose at the open barn doors. The baler began to turn, its tines and augurs rotating within the unguarded pickup.

  Daniel walked over to the side of the tractor and stepped onto a footplate beneath the door to the cab. He opened the door. He put his foot next to Barry’s on the throttle and then kicked it away, replacing it with his own.

  “Get out,” he said.

  Barry climbed past Daniel and jumped to the floor of the barn.

  “Follow the baler,” Daniel said. The tractor trundled through the barn. Daniel kept his foot on the throttle but ensured the tractor was crawling at the slowest speed possible without stalling.

  Barry walked alongside, his right arm clasped to his side. He looked pale but was looking up at Daniel as he walked.

  Daniel watched Barry in the long wing mirror.

  The barn doors were wide and the tractor trundled out into the night. It headed towards a high whitewashed wall encompassing a cowshed.

  “Now,” said Daniel,” Put your arm in the baler. Make it look like suicide.”

  Barry looked down at the baler and let go of his right arm. Seemingly of its own accord, it shot sideways and plunged into the pickup.

  Barry watched as his arm was mangled. He hopped along beside the baler, the flesh tearing from his arm, muscle from bone, bone from socket. Daniel heard the pop and crack as the arm tore from Barry’s shoulder and he took his foot from the throttle and jumped down from the cab.

  He was confident of his plan, at least in regards to its execution. The denouement was new territory, though, hard to predict. Perhaps impossible. He went to where Barry stood, arterial blood jetting from his stump.

  “Sit down,” he said. Barry sat cross-legged in the dirt of the yard and watched with disinterest as the tractor ploughed into the wall and stalled. Daniel tore a strip of material from his shirt and made a tourniquet that he used to tie around Barry’s shoulder. It wasn’t intended to save, merely prolong. He looked at his watch. Four o’clock. He was unsure how long the others would be, so he sat with Barry in the dirt and waited.

  He cast out his power as far as he was able, keeping people who would be coming awake soon in a dream-state, hoping it would be enough.

  He sensed something, a presence behind and above him, and he craned around to look.

  A purple hot air balloon was drifting above the farm house.

  TREVENA PARKED THE truck and they all piled out. He had stopped in front of the farm house and as they gathered, a man opened the front door dressed in overalls and headed over towards them. He stopped.

  “Morning,” he said. Then he turned and walked off around the side of the house.

  Trevena and Index exchanged glances.

  “Daniel’s here,” Index said. “Come on.”

  Together, they followed the man around the farmhouse. They watched him trudge across the yard in his filthy boots and head towards the barn. He walked past three people standing in the middle of the yard and seemed to pay no attention whatsoever to the hot air balloon moored on his land. He went straight past them and collected a stainless steel bucket from inside the barn and returned the way he had come. He didn’t seem to notice the tractor, either, buried nose-first in the cowshed. Trevena could hear the lowing of agitated beasts.

  Trevena was amazed to see his psychiatrist standing with Daniel and a mutilated Barry Cook. Truly amazed. He felt light-headed and bent forward, his hands on his knees.

  “Steady, Phil,” Index said. Trevena knew what he meant. This was real. No unconscious protection now. What he saw from here on in would stay with him for the rest of his life; hard facts, laid down in his brain. He breathed deeply and stood up.

  Doctor Mocking came over to him. He put a hand on Trevena’s arm.

  “Hello, Phil,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

  Trevena laughed.

  “You tell me, doc,” he said.

  Doctor Mocking smiled. Then his eyes lit up and he said, “Excuse me, Phil,” and stepped into their midst and scooped Anna up and hugged her to him. Anna was crying.

  Trevena went over to Daniel. He looked exhausted, strained to a point Trevena couldn’t even begin to estimate. He gazed at the raw stump where Barry Cook’s right arm used to be.

  “Bet that stings a bit,” he said.

  Barry regarded him from beneath half-closed eyelids.

  “Anything I can do?” Trevena asked.

  Daniel managed a weak smile. “Hold me up?”

  “If you need me to,” Trevena said, and put a hand out to steady him.

  “How long have you been here?”

  Daniel shrugged. “Three, three and a half hours.”

  Trevena’s head swam. “How could you have?”

  “I’m using Dark Time,” he said. “It’s not linear.”

  “Right,” said Trevena.

  Index, Mick and Sandy were talking with Doctor Mocking. Alex and Anna were playing with Bix, throwing an old plastic ball they’d found for him. He pranced dutifully through the muck but wouldn’t pick the ball up in his mouth. He nosed it back towards the chil
dren with a look of suffering on his chops.

  Then his ears pricked up and he started to bark. He was looking towards the entrance to the farm.

  Cars were coming up the lane.

  AN OLD WHITE Hillman Minx arrived first, followed by a crappy looking Ford Cortina. There was a sticker on the front bumper of the Cortina. It read, Colin Dack’s Caravan Courses. It swung around and Trevena saw another similar sticker on the rear bumper, this one defaced with the additional words, for cocks, scrawled in marker pen, or biro, which lacklustre scrubbing had failed to erase.

  The Minx stopped and a young man got out followed by a girl of about ten years old. She stopped, her hands raised to her chest, and then hurled herself at Doctor Mocking. She cried, “Daddy!” and then she saw Anna and burst into tears. Anna was scooped up again and the three of them held each other and the Doctor rocked his girls and kissed them. His eyes were closed tightly with delight.

  The young man knelt on the ground and Bix barrelled into him, knocking him over. “Oh, Bix, you made it. You good boy! Good boy! Well done, my good boy!”

  Trevena was still holding onto Daniel’s arm.

  “Who’s that?” he asked.

  “That’s John Stainwright,” Daniel said. “One of us. And that’s Lesley.”

  The Cortina wheezed to a halt and the occupants got out. An elderly man in Bermuda shorts got out of the passenger side and stretched. He had a long, thinning grey ponytail and bandaged hands. He saw Bix and grinned.

  “Hey, Bixter!” He shouted. Bix bounded over and got some more love from the man. “Glad you made it, my friend,” he said. He waved to John Stainwright, who had regained his feet. “He made it, John!”

  John nodded, gave him a thumbs up.

  The driver was a man in his late thirties with short dark hair turning grey at the temples. He looked tired. He opened the back door for the huge figure hulking in the back. The man that emerged was bigger than Index. He had a wild beard and a huge mass of tangled, dreadlocked hair. His long coat reached almost down to his heavy, worn boots.