by Paige Britt
me, and I haven’t been the same since. From that day on, I wandered around
and around in a daze, asking people if they had the time. Of course they
didn’t! That was my job. As you know, time will tell, and it wasn’t long
before Chronos heard the news. And you can’t have a Timekeeper who can’t
keep track of time. He locked me away as quick as you could say, ‘tick-tock.’
Now everyone is short on time. Chronos is so very stingy. He wouldn’t give
you the time of day if you asked him.” The Timekeeper sat silently for a
moment and then shook his head quickly as if to dislodge a memory. He
turned to Dill and Penelope and asked brightly, “And how long will you
be staying?”
“Well, we were only sentenced to twenty minutes around the clock,”
answered Penelope. “So we should be out in no time.”
“I hate to tell you this,” confided the Timekeeper, “but ‘no-time’ is just a
myth. So is a ‘jiffy’ and the ever-popular ‘just-a-moment.’ If someone says
they’ll be back in a jiffy, you know you’re in for a wait. Everything takes longer
than you think, that much I know. After being here for . . .” The Timekeeper
paused with a distressed look on his face. “. . . for . . .”
Dill and Penelope leaned forward expectantly.
“. . . for five thousand years,” he said triumphantly, “I’ve figured out a
few things. Your prison sentence is connected to how much time you’ve wasted.
Now then, exactly what are you in for?”
“Idling,” answered Penelope.
“Well, this is how it works,” continued the Timekeeper cheerfully.
“You’re expected to work around the clock to make up for the time you
lost idling. But what they don’t tell you is that it can’t be done. You could work
for twenty minutes or twenty years. It won’t matter. You can never make up for
lost time.” The Timekeeper settled back in his chair and smiled pleasantly. “So
you see, you’ll be here forever. Just like me.”
Dill slammed the table with his fist. “I expected something tricky just
like this!”
“This is a disaster!” cried Penelope.
“It’s not so bad,” offered the Timekeeper, gently patting her arm,
“especially if you lose track of time. I’ll be happy to show you how.” And
with that, the Timekeeper buried his face in his beard and promptly fell
asleep.
“Time to get up!”
A voice from the prison intercom woke Penelope with a start. She lay on
her bench, staring at the ceiling as her memory of yesterday came into focus.
After the Timekeeper fell asleep, Dill and Penelope had spent the rest of the day
and much of the night trying to come up with a plan of escape. Considering
what the Timekeeper had told them, they were expected to work around the
clock for the rest of their lives! Neither of them knew exactly what their work
assignment was, but they assumed they would be building roads, operating
machinery, or breaking rocks — the sort of thing convicts usually did. They
decided to spend the first work shift on the lookout for escape routes. They would
reconvene at the next possible chance, compare notes, and decide how to make
their getaway. Once they were free, they would do what they could to find the
Great Moodler and then hurry back to meet the Coo-Coo.
Penelope didn’t remember falling asleep, but here it was the next morn-
ing. She sat up and looked around. Dill was stirring on the bench next to hers,
but the Timekeeper, who had not moved from his spot at the table, slept on.
Suddenly there was a loud click and the cell was flooded with a garish
yellow light. “Time for breakfast!” the intercom blasted again.
Dill and Penelope stumbled out of bed and watched while a mechanical
chapter fourteen
cart rolled down the corridor and stopped in front of a small opening in their
cell door. The cart was laden with bowls of lumpy oatmeal, burnt toast, and a
pot of tea. They took the items from the cart, one by one, slipping them through
the opening.
“Remember,” said Dill, busily spreading a glob of oatmeal between two
pieces of toast, “today is all about reconnaissance. We keep our heads down,
noses clean, and eyes open for a way out of here. Oh, and worse comes to worst,
don’t forget to hum.”
“Got it,” said Penelope. She made a mental note to add reconnaissance to her
notebook. If she ever got the chance, that is. There hadn’t been much opportu-
nity for writing since she’d arrived in Chronos City.
Halfway through their breakfast the Timekeeper woke. “What a delight-
ful little nap,” he said, stretching and yawning. When he saw the cart he clapped
his hands in delight. “Just in time for dinner! Do you mind if I join you?” He
immediately began to serve himself.
“But it isn’t time for dinner,” Penelope tried to explain. “It’s time for
breakfast.”
“All the same to me,” said the Timekeeper through a mouthful of toast.
Once the Timekeeper had finished his meal, he wiped his mouth with his
handkerchief. “Delicious, don’t you think?” And then, with a long stretch, he
got up from the table, returned to his spot on the floor, and curled up into a
ball. “It must be very late. Midnight at least,” he said to no one in particular and,
after a soft “Good night,” he fell back asleep.
Dill and Penelope had just finished loading the cart with their dirty dishes
when a loud, unpleasant voice shouted, “Time for work!”
This time the command came from Officer X, who was striding down the
corridor as fast as his short legs would go. He stopped at their cell door and,
after fumbling around with his keys, yanked it open. “Come along! This isn’t a
resort, you know.” He scowled in the direction of the sleeping Timekeeper.
Officer X led them past the cells full of sleeping fluff balls and out the
prison doors into a dark, empty hallway. He took off with purpose. Click-clack.
Click-clack. His footsteps kept a strict rhythm and, without thinking, Penelope
fell into it. Step-step. Step-step. Dill, however, kept his own pace and even started
humming.
“Stop that this instant!” Officer X swung around, one finger pointed at
Dill. “Humming is Impossible, by decree of Chronos. It slows productivity and
encourages lollygagging.”
“Not another peep.” Dill made a motion as if locking his lips with a key.
They walked along in silence, but every so often Penelope saw Dill’s head
bob back and forth, as if he were listening to some music only he could hear.
After a while, the hall took a sharp left, then right, before ending in front of a
small alcove.
“Here we are,” said Officer X, motioning for them to stop. They were
staring at a strange little door. Instead of being rectangular, like most doors, or
even square, like some doors, this door was perfectly round, like no other door
Penelope had ever seen. It looked like a clock, complete with an hour hand, a
minute hand, and twelve numbers.
Officer X took out his pocket watch to check the time — 7:49. Then he
rearranged the hands on the door. He moved the hour hand
to 7 and the minute
hand to 49. Sure enough, there was a sharp click and the door slid open.
“After you,” said Officer X with a malicious smile.
When Penelope stepped inside, her heart sank. She was standing in a
round stone chamber with a staircase hugging its side. Instead of going down,
these stairs wound up. They wouldn’t be working outside, building roads or
breaking rocks. They were going to the top of the tower!
Penelope tried to catch Dill’s eye, but he was already moving up the
stairs. Officer X pointed for her to follow and she began the slow climb, each
step taking her closer to a fate she did not want to discover. A distant roar came
from above. It grew louder as they climbed, and as it grew louder, it grew
clearer. It moved from an indistinct roar to a booming
tick-tock.
The stairs ended at another round door. It rattled in its hinges from the
force of the sound. Officer X checked the time again and unlocked it.
TICK-TOCK-TICK-TOCK.
They stood looking out on a room at the very top of the tower. Four
impossibly E-NOR-MOUS clocks made up its walls. Gigantic hands marched
around clock faces that were — eight, nine, ten? — stories high. The vibration
of their thunderous ticking shook the air. The clocks glowed a greenish-yellow that
robbed everything of its natural color. Blues looked gray. Reds looked brown.
And skin tones? They were the worst. Dill and Officer X were both a strange
and unhappy olive green.
Through the thick, clear glass of the clocks, Penelope could see the sky, or
what she assumed was the sky. The Shadow hung like a blanket over the tower
and turned the day a dull gray infused with the tower’s unnatural fluores-
cent light.
An engine made of a million moving parts sat in the middle of the room.
Knobs and dials, rods and levers, blinking, beeping consoles — all of them
worked to power the great clocks. Whirring, grinding gears churned around
and around, endlessly feeding into one another. Gears spun, springs sprang,
pistons pumped, and gray-blue smoke rings rose from exhaust pipes.
A swarm of workers dressed in blue coveralls and blue hats tended to
all the equipment. They looked exactly like the people Penelope had seen in
the terminal and offices outside the courtroom. She realized they must be
Clockworkers. They moved with a regimented precision dictated by the beat of
the four clocks. Tick. A hand went up. Tock. A knob was pulled. Tick. The knob
was released. Tock. The hand went down. Several Clockworkers with silver
badges on their chests stood on a high platform rhythmically scanning the room.
Just then, the clocks began to chime eight o’clock.
GONG, GONG,
GONG . . . The sound made Penelope’s knees shake and her teeth chatter.
Dill had the good sense to stick his fingers in his ears, and Penelope quickly
followed suit.
When the gonging stopped, Officer X took out his pocket watch. “Right on
time,” he said smugly. “Which means, you two had better get to work. As you
can see, you’ll be working around the clock for the duration of your sentence.”
Oh, yes, Penelope could see. Now she knew exactly what working around
the clock meant.
Officer X slapped Dill and Penelope both on the back (a little harder than
Penelope thought necessary) and disappeared down the stairs.
One of the Clockworkers approached. She greeted Dill and Penelope with
a stiff bow. “You-are-quite-wel-come-to-the-clock-tow-er,” she said, each word
uttered in time with the ticking clock.
“Oh, hello,” said Dill, bowing back.
“Ver-y-well-thank-you.” The Clockworker bowed again. There was some-
thing off about her response and her excellent manners, as if she were reading
them from a script.
The Clockworker turned to Penelope and repeated her greeting, then
turned back toward the room. “Right-this-way-please,” she said, leading them
forward with jerky, halting steps. She walked like she was a piece of machinery.
“This-is-the-time-ma-chine,” explained the Clockworker, pausing in front
of the engine. Dill and Penelope were careful not to get too close. Even though
it was bolted to the floor, it looked like it might run over them. It heaved and
moaned, huffed and puffed, churning out billows of smoke. The Clockworker
explained how it worked: Every second it spit out a series of silver tokens onto
a conveyor belt. Clockworkers were lined up along the belt, sorting the tokens
according to size. The tokens were pieces of time — seconds, minutes, and
hours. Once they were properly sorted, another set of Clockworkers would
feed them — clink, clink, clink — into the appropriate time slot.
There were three slots at the end of the conveyor belt — a second slot, a
minute slot, and an hour slot. Once a time piece had been spent, it was col-
lected in a large metal box labeled
time after time. These tokens were melted
down in a furnace and sent back to the elaborate machine to be used again.
Every so often, a very large time piece would shoot out and land with a
thud on the belt. These tokens didn’t fit into any of the time slots and were
quickly discarded as spare time. Spare time was completely unacceptable and
was returned to the machine for reprocessing.
The tokens that did fit into a slot rolled down a glass pipe, gathering speed
as they went, until — cling! — they reached the bottom, where they triggered
a long metal rod. The rod was several stories high and had four spokes that spun
out at the top. The spokes were attached to the second hand of each clock, pro-
pelling them faithfully around and around. There were similar rods for the
minute and hour hands. The loud ticking that filled the room actually came
from the engine as it made time — second after second, minute after minute,
hour after hour.
The Clockworker pointed to the conveyor belt. “If-you-don’t-mind,” she
said, indicating that Dill and Penelope should take their places alongside the
other workers.
They did as they were told. Dill sorted time pieces while Penelope put
them in the correct slots. Every millisecond the machine flung a token at the
conveyor belt. Penelope stared at the time pieces rushing past her. It was like a
river and each of the hundreds, thousands, millions of tokens were drops of
water rushing toward forever.
Penelope reached for a token. Then another. And another. There were so
many of them! How would she ever keep up? She accidentally put a minute
token into the hour slot. Beep! Beep! Beep! An alarm rang out. A Clockworker
pulled a lever, releasing a shriek of steam, and the time machine thundered to a
halt just long enough for him to fix the mistake. Then it started up again.
The Clockworkers around Penelope moved with absolute precision.
They moved in time with the clock and never misplaced a token or fell
behind. Penelope worked so hard to keep up the pace that she didn’t
have time to even think about escape routes. She could feel the
seconds as they marched by, turning into minutes that became
hours. Tick-tock-tick-tock . . . T
he tide of time went endlessly
on. Would it really matter if she went with it?
Tick. A token dropped onto the belt. Tock.
Penelope’s hand reached out. Tick. She took
the token. Tock. She dropped it into the slot.
“Penelope!” hissed Dill.
Penelope snapped out of her reverie.
“Don’t move in time with
the clock, and remember
to hum!” he whispered,
before a Clockworker
silenced him with
a stare.
After that, Penelope tried not to look at the conveyor belt as the time
pieces rushed past. She hummed softly under her breath to keep from being
sucked into the rhythm. Dill was right. Something about humming helped. It
was a reminder that she could sing her own tune in the midst of all the noise.
Still, it was a tremendous effort not to give in to the constant ticking. When a
chime rang, indicating a change in shift, Penelope was actually relieved to see
Officer X. The day was finally over.
— — —
Back at their cell, the Timekeeper was awake, munching on a meager dinner.
“Welcome!” he said cheerfully, waving a piece of bread in the air before taking
a large bite. “Hope you don’t mind I started without you. I never know how long
I’ve been waiting so I’ve stopped waiting altogether.” He popped a piece of
greenish cheese in his mouth and continued talking. “Have a seat and tell me
how you are. You’ve been gone for ages.”
“It feels like ages,” agreed Penelope, slumping into her chair.
Dill joined them and served himself some dry bread. “Don’t suppose
you’ve got any mushrooms growing in this place?” he asked, looking around
hopefully.
“Not that I know of,” answered the Timekeeper.
Dill stacked a slice of cheese on top of his bread. “Too bad. Mushrooms
would come in handy, working around the clock as we are.”
“Goodness gracious!” said the Timekeeper. “There’s no end to that work.
You’ll be busy for about, oh, I don’t know, eternity. Give or take a millennia.”