The Tick-Tock Man

by Kersten Hamilton

  Then the vile man tapped his temple. “My brother didn’t leave no plans. ’E kept it all in ’is ’ead. Dobbin!” Tick Tock’s burning eyes turned to the boy. “You made a deal with me.”

  “Oi.” Dobbin’s voice was shaking. “But you don’t play fair, Tick Tock. One job, you said, but you kept the keys, didn’t you? Made me work every day or you wouldn’t wind Briney!”

  Tick Tock sucked air in through his teeth. “Teach you to pay attention when consorting with criminals.” His hand went out, and clawlike fingers brushed Briney’s cheek. It was a surprisingly tender gesture.

  “Nobody ever ast me to save a life before. It was murder and theft they always wanted. It was novel, that’s wot. Who was I to make a deal like that?” Suddenly, his shoulders squared, and as he whirled toward, us he seemed to grow even larger. “Tick Tock, that’s who! Do you intend to ’onor your end of the deal, Dob?”

  “I would ’ave,” Dobbin cried. “You never told me what I ’ad to do!”

  “Don’t rush me,” Tick Tock growled. “It ’as to be something worth my time, don’t it? Something wot will give you ounce for ounce as much trouble as you both ’ave given me.” His eyes went to Wally once more, and suddenly he smiled. “I know wot’ll do it. Be a good man. From this day on, you be a good man, Dob. That’s my deal.”

  Then he turned away from us all, and a tremendous tremor went through him—and when he turned back, his own large clockwork heart was in his hand.

  “What’s this?” Constable Arbuckle cried, leaping to the criminal’s side.

  “Time,” Tick Tock whispered as he sank to his knees. “Time for Briney to grow up, as promised.”

  And with that, he toppled to the floor.

  Epilogue

  “Barely avoiding being abducted.” Constable Arbuckle’s hands were folded behind his back as his superior at Scotland Yard filled in Oliver and Calypso on the previous night’s happenings. We had all been hauled from the sewer to the Yard for questioning, and found Wally’s parents just arriving there. “Consorting with criminals,” the inspector said. “Sloshing through sewers.”

  At this point, Leander interrupted to offer the opinion that Wally had been very clever with his pyrotechnics, and incredibly brave when he saved us from the swine a second time. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself described the way the wonderful boy had leaped into action, his fingers as nimble as a surgeon’s as he swapped one mechanical heart for another. Rhodope mentioned that Dobbin had burst into tears when his sister opened her eyes.

  I was glad no one mentioned that Cy had slipped away in the darkness as we made our way from the sewer, thus evading arrest.

  The inspector silenced everyone with a glare, and then turned to the elder Kennewicketts.

  “So that’s what your son has been up to while you were away. What do you say?”

  Oliver and Calypso exchanged a glance.

  “Well done, Walter!” Oliver exclaimed. “I wish we could have been here!”

  “You handled the situation with compassion, courage, and intelligence,” Calypso agreed. “As expected of a Kennewickett!”

  “What?” The inspector stopped pacing.

  “Walter did just as we would have done,” Calypso explained.

  “But the danger!” the detective cried.

  “The outcome of adventures is always unknown,” Oliver opined. “You wouldn’t expect Walter to turn his back on a friend?”

  “I would expect him to find his friends in better places,” the detective said. “Now we’ve got these young ruffians to figure out.”

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stood up. “I can’t approve of children being dragged away to jail.”

  “An asylum for orphans would be better than the sewer,” Constable Arbuckle offered, but he looked uncomfortable suggesting it. “What else can we do with them?”

  “We’re going to take them with us, of course,” Oliver said.

  “Are we, dearest?” Calypso asked.

  “At once!” Oliver said. “If they are agreeable.”

  The detective’s hand went to his head. “Well, Arbuckle? It’s your case. What do you say?”

  “It’s a big responsibility,” Constable Arbuckle said, “taking on the likes of these. I don’t know what the family’s like, sir, and that’s a fact.”

  “Ahem,” Leander Smyth-Hops interrupted. “I say, consider the sausage!”

  “He means Noodles,” Wally explained.

  “I have observed that a dog always reflects the family life,” Mr. Smyth-Hops went on. “I’ve never seen a frisky dog in a gloomy family, or a sad dog in a happy one. Snarling people have snarling dogs; dangerous people have dangerous dogs. The Kennewicketts have—”

  “Noodles,” Wally finished.

  “The philosopher has returned!” Sir Arthur said.

  “Really?” Leander Smyth-Hops grinned. “Perhaps you could put that in one of your books. Sherlock Holmes could say—”

  “I repent.” Sir Arthur groaned. “I repent of ever creating Holmes!”

  “Nonetheless,” Rhodope said, “I believe there was some wisdom in his words. If you know Noodles, you know the Kennewicketts.”

  I realized that every eye was on me. I stopped scratching at once and tried to appear worthy of Wally—and dashingly dangerous.

  Constable Arbuckle nodded. “He’s a noble beast at that. What do you think, Briney? Dob?”

  Dobbin Winckles was backing away, but Briney grabbed his arm.

  “Please,” she said. “I want to go with Noodles.”

  “We can give your sister a heart that never needs winding,” Calypso offered.

  “Come on, Dob.” Wally offered his hand. “There is room for your workshop in our lab. I have some ideas for internal combustion you could assist me with.”

  “How do you feel about contraptions such as”—Dobbin glanced at the inspector—“men that’s, say, part mechanical?”

  Briney looked most intently at Walter, and I realized they were asking about Cy. The children were unwilling to leave their friend.

  “There’s enough room,” Wally said instantly. “More than enough!”

  Rhodope cheered as Dobbin’s grimy glove gripped Walter’s hand.

  “Well, that’s all gas and gaiters, then,” the detective said, sounding very pleased.

  “Pardon?” Oliver asked.

  “He means everything’s turned out right as rain,” Leander Smyth-Hops explained. Then, lowering his voice, he added, “You’re taking the members of a criminal gang off his hands.”

  “It’s settled, then!” Calypso declared.

  “And who are you again?” asked Constable Arbuckle, turning to Leander Smyth-Hops.

  “Oh.” Rhodope reddened. “Where are my manners? Detective, Constable Arbuckle, may I present Spring-Heeled Jack?”

  “At last!” the detective cried. “Someone we can arrest!”

  Leander Smyth-Hops resisted just long enough to blow Rhodope a kiss behind Constable Arbuckle’s back.

  “Perhaps I should be kinder to Scotland Yard,” Sir Arthur said as his greatest fan was hauled away in handcuffs.

  But everything wasn’t right as rain. There was no sign of the chrome-domed giant when we ventured down to collect the children’s things from their subterranean lair. This may have had something to do with the presence of the armed officers who had come to protect us from sewer swine.

  Briney took one last look at her former home, and tears welled in her eyes.

  Dobbin took a pencil from his pocket and wrote There’s room for friends at the Kennewicketts’ Inn on the wall before we left.

  Everyone was optimistic that Cy would be found; we would be in London for a month, after all, while Oliver and Calypso signed certain papers and pulled several strings to allow Briney and Dob to accompany us out of the country.

  Walter and the ex-urchins spent their time searching for Cy.

  But when not even Dobbin’s distasteful acquaintances knew of Cy’s whereabouts, the siblings were reduc
ed to dropping notes down sewer grates, hoping he might stumble upon one.

  “If we can’t find him,” Wally said at last, “he’ll have to find us.” Then he turned to the production of pyrotechnics, consulting Oliver often regarding chemical content and construction techniques.

  The night before we sailed, it seemed that all of London had spilled into the streets to see the sky over Trafalgar Square blossom with skyrockets that boomed and then burst into flowers, flags, or stars.

  The grand finale was the massive shell that Wally had worked on for weeks. The crowd went still as it climbed on a column of sparks and smoke.

  Then it burst, and words blossomed in the sky.

  Come home with us, Cy!

  The letters coruscated, then faded and fell.

  I leaned against Briney’s legs as we waited.

  “’E ’as to ’ave seen that!” Dobbin cried at last. But the crowds left, and all was still.

  “He could have had some distance to travel,” Wally offered. We waited some more.

  Big Ben had started its ten o’clock strike and a river mist was rising around us when at last, an enormous man in silk robes and a turban strode out of the night.

  Briney flung herself into his arms.

  Rhodope turned to Oliver and Calypso and made the appropriate introductions, and all was gas and gaiters at last.

  Of course.

  Walter Kennewickett was on the case!

  Author’s Note

  Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle trained and worked as a physician. As a young man, he excelled at cricket, loved playing football (soccer, in Britain) and golf, and single-handedly introduced the British to the sport of skiing. But by the time he was forty, his figure, like that of Noodles, could have been described as “respectable.” When the Boer War broke out, Doyle attempted to enlist, only to be told he was too fat to fight.

  Doyle loved adventures, inventions, and books. His literary career began while he was still a medical student. He was friends with Bram Stoker, who wrote Dracula, and J. M. Barrie, who wrote Peter Pan. Doyle, however, was far more productive than his literary acquaintances. He wrote historical novels, science fiction, plays, romances, poetry, nonfiction, and, to his eventual regret, detective stories about Sherlock Holmes.

  After publishing a few tales of the dauntless detective, Doyle grew tired of his creation. Holmes was a skeptic. Doyle was not.

  In fact, Doyle believed in fairies, hunted ghosts, and attended séances. He much preferred his historical novels about archers and knights, or his science fiction featuring the passionate Professor Challenger, to his crime fiction.

  Eventually, Doyle grew to dislike writing about Holmes so much that he decided to be done with the detective. First, he attempted to raise his fees so that publishers would not buy new Sherlock Holmes stories. The publishers happily paid what he asked, and fans hounded Doyle for more.

  When his first plan to rid himself of Holmes didn’t work, Doyle was forced to take more drastic measures. He wrote a short story called “The Final Problem,” in which Holmes plummeted to his death at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. The author hoped that with the death of Holmes, fans of his work would turn to his other books with equal passion. But they did not.

  Sherlock Holmes was more than a fictional character. He was a phenomenon, the most famous fictional detective the world had ever known. When “The Final Problem” was published, fans went into mourning. Some even wore black armbands in the streets to protest the fictional detective’s death.

  Still, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle might never have relented and resurrected Holmes if he hadn’t needed money for his growing family—but he did. Ten years after his famous fall, Sherlock Holmes returned for many more adventures.

  Doyle may not have enjoyed writing about Sherlock Holmes, but the character he created changed the world. When Doyle invented his detective, police depended on eyewitness reports and confessions to convict criminals. No one analyzed crime scenes, collected fingerprints, or examined blood.

  Doyle was inventing forensic science—the science of collecting evidence to be used in a court of law—as he wrote. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle may not have been a skeptic, but he was as passionate about justice as Sherlock Holmes was. Twice Doyle used the “Holmes Method” in real life to prove the innocence of two men who had been imprisoned for crimes they did not commit.

  After Doyle’s death, a séance was conducted at the Royal Albert Hall in an attempt to contact his spirit. Thousands of loyal Sherlock Holmes fans attended, but sadly, Sir Arthur did not appear.

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  About the Author and Illustrator

  KERSTEN HAMILTON is the author of several picture books and many novels, including the critically acclaimed young adult trilogy the Goblin Wars. She has worked as a ranch hand, a wood-cutter, a lumberjack, a census taker, a wrangler for wilderness guides, and an archeological surveyor. Now, when she’s not writing, she hunts dinosaurs in the deserts and badlands of New Mexico and tends to the animals on her farm in Kentucky. For more about Kersten, please visit www.kerstenhamilton.com.

  JAMES HAMILTON is an artist and designer who lives in San Mateo, California. This is his second book.