Clockwise

by T W M Ashford

  ‘Someone’s coming.’

  Clanging footsteps grew louder on the other side of the wall. It sounded as if somebody was swatting a pipe with a wrench as they walked. No sooner had the footsteps come to a stop, did a screeching, grating, ear-splitting sound begin - someone was turning a crank-handle on the other side of the door.

  With a rusty creak the door swung open.

  One by one, three men stepped through. They wore cloaks and sandals, and each stood about seven feet tall. Their heads were shaved. Their eyes were black. Their skin was a deep ocean blue. The first two flanked the door through which they’d entered, holding spears that looked as if they’d been fashioned from recycled railings. The last of them came to a stop in the centre of the room. This one wore a chain of gold around his neck. There were empty, broken links hanging along its length, as if something had been removed from it by force.

  The blue man smiled. It wasn’t a very friendly smile.

  ‘Welcome, guests,’ he said, in a voice that sounded like the low end of a piano, all echoing and thudding, haloed by a bright ring. ‘Are you comfortable? Of course you’re not. I’d offer you something to eat or drink, but unfortunately there isn’t anything to eat or drink, not here. At least there’s no thirst or hunger, either. You do come to miss it, though. You come to miss everything. Can I assume from your expression that you know where you are, hmm?’

  Pierre realised that the question was being aimed at him. He stopped squeezing Viola’s arm and nodded.

  ‘The Space Between Worlds,’ he said.

  ‘The Space Between Worlds,’ repeated the strange, blue man. He rapped his long, slender fingers against the knuckles of his other hand. When he blinked his eyelids closed from the left and right, not above and below.

  ‘And do you know who we are?’ he asked, once a suitably dramatic pause had passed.

  Viola cleared her throat before Pierre could summon a diplomatic answer.

  ‘Are you… Are you the Gatecrashers?’ she asked. Pierre winced.

  The blue man’s expression froze.

  ‘Gatecrashers?’ he said, baring his teeth. ‘Gatecrashers? Is that what they call us? Those lying, backstabbing control-freaks, forever feeding off their sycophants, divvying up reality for everyone else one piece at a time… Of course they wouldn’t… of course…’

  He drew himself up to his full height and puffed out his chest.

  ‘We are the Torri-Tau, a people imprisoned for a crime we did not commit,’ he said. ‘My name is Makka-Soj. I am the leader of my people, in as much as it’s possible to lead in a place as empty and forsaken as this.’

  ‘Right. Well I’m Pierre and this is Viola, and now we’d really like to leave. Someone seems to have made a terrible mistake. We’re not criminals, you see. I’m…’

  ‘The concierge at Le Petit Monde, correct? And no, Pierre. Your presence here is no mistake, I assure you.’

  Pierre felt the air in his lungs turn cold.

  ‘How do you know where I work?’ he asked.

  Makka-Soj’s smile returned, no warmer than before.

  ‘Here’s a question for you, Pierre,’ he said. ‘What stories does the Council tell of my people? What horrors does it say we committed, to deserve being locked away in such a lifeless dimension for all eternity? Hmm?’

  Pierre swallowed hard. His mouth felt like sandpaper.

  ‘Well, it’s been such a long time,’ he replied, looking down at his shoes. ‘They hardly even mention you anymore.’

  ‘But you have heard tales, yes?’

  ‘They say you are - were - a race of monsters,’ said Pierre, looking up into the man’s jet-black eyes. ‘They say you swarmed from planet to planet like a plague, turning the earth to ash and the seas to mud. You left a universe of dried-out husks in your wake and the only way to make sure your kind didn’t hop over into another universe and do the same there - do the same to all the universes - was to banish you somewhere from which you could never escape. Somewhere you could do no harm, because there was nothing to harm. Not even yourselves.’

  In the silence that followed Pierre could hear Makka-Soj grinding his teeth. The blue man stepped forward and peered down at him.

  ‘And do we look like we swarm, Pierre?’

  Pierre couldn’t meet his gaze. ‘Not right now, sir, no,’ he muttered.

  ‘Not ever. The Council lied to you, boy. It’s been lying to all of you, ever since it began. I should know. I was invited to join it not long after it first formed.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ interjected Viola. ‘You were around when the Council was formed? But wasn’t that, like, ten billion years ago, or something?’

  Makka-Soj sighed. ‘Apparently so. Time doesn’t work the same way here as it does out in the multiverse. There’s no space-fabric for it to be weaved through, so it doesn’t really… work. Everybody here was alive the day we were sentenced. Nobody dies here… but nobody has been born here, either. And nobody truly lives, not really. There’s nothing to do here but wait for more nothingness. There’s nothing here…’

  His mind appeared to drift away for a moment, only to return with a sudden clarity.

  ‘That’s why we have to leave,’ he continued. ‘We must be set free. Our children must have the chance to grow old. The old must have a chance to die. And the Council… the Council must answer for what it did that day. Not just to the Torri-Tau, but to every species in the multiverse. The past must be put right.’

  ‘Right.’ Pierre nodded as if milling the prospect over in his head. ‘Well, I’m not really the best person to speak to about all that. I don’t know much about it one way or the other. Good luck to you, all the same. Can Viola and I go now? I mean, our species didn’t even exist when you got banished here. Plus I’m already in enough trouble with the Council as it is, without getting myself involved in somebody else’s appeal process. Sorry.’

  ‘Ah, but you are the best person to speak to,’ laughed Makka-Soj. ‘After all, you’ve already given me everything I need.’

  From the recesses of his robe he brought out a single, golden key.

  Pierre’s hand darted to the ring of keys hanging from his belt. As soon as he touched it he knew the one bestowed upon him by the Council - the only key in his possession that was truly unique - was missing. It was a feeling Pierre would go on to describe as like waking up to discover one of your minor organs is missing, like an appendix or a kidney.

  ‘You have to give that back,’ he said, rushing forwards. Viola pulled him back. The two guards at the door stepped forwards and lowered their makeshift spears. ‘You don’t have the right to use it.’

  ‘I am the only one here with the right to use it!’ Makka-Soj shouted. Pierre shrunk back against the wall and the guards relaxed their stance.

  ‘No, that’s not true,’ he said in a quieter, gentler voice, ‘and once upon an age I knew that not to be true. I argued that case harder than any other, and yet… Well, things have changed. Needs have changed.’

  ‘Please. You don’t understand. There’s an inspector out there adrift in the multiverse - lost, probably eaten…’

  Viola groaned and pinched the bridge of her nose.

  ‘Oh, Pierre,’ smiled the big, blue man. ‘Haven’t you worked it out yet? My word. There never was an inspector, you poor man.’

  ‘But Ms. Rundleford…’

  ‘Never existed. We made her up. She certainly didn’t get munched on by anything, so relax. Your inspector was the untangled octowürm the whole time.’

  ‘The Council never sent anyone to check up on you,’ said Viola, sighing. ‘These blue guys just needed someone to steal your key for them.’

  ‘To be honest, it’s you that deserves all the credit for bringing it here,’ said Makka-Soj. ‘The octowürm was only supposed to grab your keys and choose the most suitable doors at your hotel for our return. From what she tells me, it all got a bit out of hand when you pushed her through one of them. If you hadn’t made such an effort to go after her, wel
l… she probably would have returned to us empty-handed. You brought the key right to us. Though I dare say we would have got hold of it by other means eventually.’

  Pierre screamed into the palms of his hands.

  ‘If you can send an octowürm back and forth from the Space Between Worlds, why do you even need the key?’ he asked. ‘Why not escape that way?’

  ‘Oh, we could,’ nodded Makka-Soj. ‘We could. And we’d certainly have the time to do it, wouldn’t we? An eternity in which to teleport out, one by one, with the last person leaving a thousand years after the first. Scattered across the multiverse like grains of sand on different shores, destined to die alone, and gradually grow extinct, so it’ll be as if we never even existed at all. Just how the Council would like it, I’m sure.’

  ‘Is freedom not better than a cage, no matter the cost?’ asked Viola.

  ‘Maybe. Maybe not. But one thing’s for sure: it wouldn’t put anything right. And it wouldn’t work, for another. Time might not be a concern here, but it is on the other side. Even if we kept her here whenever she wasn’t carrying us back and forth, the octowürm would be dead long before we managed to get everyone across. That wouldn’t be fair on her. She’s done enough for my people as it is.’

  ‘Yeah, wait a second.’ Pierre removed his hands from his face. ‘Why on Earth is an octowürm helping you?’

  ‘Do you really think the Torri-Tau are the only species the Council has ever gone after? Not all of them were - huh - lucky enough to be sent here. For no greater crime than having a natural ability to teleport from universe to universe, the octowürm were hunted to extinction. Or near enough. There are probably fewer than half a dozen of them left across the entire multiverse, including the one that brought you both here. She was looking for a place to hide when she found us, actually. We thank the stars she did. Everything you see here - every wall, every weapon - she brought us the materials to build. Without her, most of us would still be standing in a sea of white.’

  ‘And what a bang-up job you’ve done,’ said Pierre, pursing his lips and looking around the cell. ‘Really made the place feel homely.’

  Makka-Soj laughed, which sounded like a piano being dropped out of a third-storey window.

  ‘Good thing it’s only temporary.’

  One of the guards stepped forward and whispered in Makka-Soj’s ear.

  ‘It is time, if there can be said to be such a thing here,’ Makka-Soj said. He turned to approach the door but paused. ‘Bring these two along,’ he said, speaking to the guard who’d done the whispering. ‘It’s only fair they bear witness.’

  He faced Pierre and Viola. ‘No harm will come to you, I promise you that.’

  They were escorted out of their rickety metal cell and into a corridor that was no better put together. It was then that Pierre realised everything really had been built out of scrap - that which the octowürm could pilfer and steal from markets and favelas and scrapyards. Good thing she’d had so many arms with which to carry all of it. Smothered amongst the lopsided sheets of corrugated iron were a red STOP sign and a blue plaque memorialising Charles Dickens’ birthplace.

  Viola and Pierre followed Makka-Soj down the long length of the hallway, kept in pace by the two guards behind them. There was a lot of clanging involved.

  ‘Don’t tell me you built a whole city out of this,’ Viola said, gawping at the walls.

  ‘Not a whole city, no,’ smiled Makka-Soj, with little humour. ‘But perhaps the semblance of one.’

  There were doors running all along their left. None had keyholes. Instead they each had the sort of circular handle common to the hatches of ships and submarines. Halfway down on the right was a window. Pierre and Viola froze when they passed it.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Makka-Soj, holding out a hand to stop the guards from shoving their prisoners forward. ‘It’s okay. I forget how few have ever seen this view.’

  It was immediate and it was endless. It was white. It had no shape or scale. Here and there, members of the Torri-Tau species floated through the blank void, accompanied by specks of interstellar garbage and debris. There was no up, no down. Nobody and nothing seemed to be doing very much of anything.

  ‘It’s a breathtaking view for the first hundred years or so,’ said Makka-Soj, standing beside them. ‘Then it grows a little old. Come on. People are waiting.’

  ‘How did you not go mad?’ asked Viola, staying put. ‘How did you not just… stop?’

  ‘By holding onto hope,’ said the big, blue face looming beside her. ‘Now - keep moving, if you will.’

  One of the guards hurried past them to wrench open another door with a round handle at the end of the corridor. They were ushered towards it.

  On the other side was a grand hall like a senate chamber. The curved walls were panelled with polished oak and divided by rotund marble columns. Though no light burst from its diamond, teardrop candles, a chandelier as splendid as any Le Petit Monde had ever boasted hung suspended from the centre of the domed ceiling, which was painted in gold leaf. Or at least, Pierre assumed it was only gold leaf.

  Ringed around the chamber in the shape of a horseshoe were four staggered rows of benches. Each was higher up than the last, like the seats of an ancient amphitheatre. There was space for two hundred spectators, maybe more. A sea of tranquil blue stood up to greet them as they entered, its voices dropping from an excited buzz to an anxious hush.

  In the very centre of the hall, beneath all the rows of benches, was a circle of fabulous golden chairs, all facing towards one another. And in their centre was…

  ‘A door,’ whispered Viola. Even with her voice low, in the solemn silence it was barely masked by the sound of their footsteps. ‘Look, Pierre - they stole themselves a door!’

  He could see that. And not just any door - a door from Le Petit Monde. His hotel. He knew each one like he knew the teeth inside his own head… and besides, it still had its room number attached. 271. He was certain that room had still possessed its door when he’d left the hotel that morning.

  They hadn’t even kept it in its original frame. It was squeezed into a fixture of the same makeshift garbage that made up everything outside of the chamber, and that fixture was bolted down hard into the otherwise pristine marble floor. It was not a particularly elegant solution.

  Makka-Soj marched into the centre of the hall with all the bombast of a ringmaster addressing a mesmerised circus audience. Pierre and Viola were directed to the side of the chamber, beside the very end of the benches, where they were flanked by the two guards.

  ‘Friends,’ came his booming, piano-key voice. ‘For too long - for much too long - we have been confined to this prison. For too long - for much too long - we have been denied the most basic of rights. Not just food, or water, or a place to lay our heads at night, but the right to feel hunger and thirst, to feel ourselves grow tired… or to even see the sun in the sky turn to stars. The right to die, when our time comes. The right to live until it does.

  ‘And for what did we pay this price? Daring to go against the will of the Council, that’s what. Daring to stand up for what is right. For what is everyone’s right! I’ll tell you why we’re here, friends. They cast us into this madness to justify their own! Well, no longer. The time has come, at long last, for us to take our rightful place in the worlds from which they banished us. And we shall take it from them, take it, not as we would have done back then but as they said we would - whether they like it or not.’

  He withdrew the key from his sleeve, just as he had done back in the cell. The crowd roared with deafening excitement - not just in the chamber, but from someplace outside as well. Makka-Soj let everyone celebrate for a few seconds before raising his hand for silence. The noise dropped back down to a murmur.

  ‘Is this bad?’ whispered Viola. ‘Because this all feels very, very bad.’

  ‘Yes, it is. This makes pushing an inspector into the arms of the Yakuza seem like fetching an old lady’s cat out of a tree in comparison. It’
s that sort of bad.’

  ‘When we go through this door,’ Makka-Soj continued, ‘we are free. We are free to travel across the multiverse as we should have always been free to do. The Council wants to tell our story as if we were parasites, sucking worlds dry? So be it. We’ll go through this door, and then we’ll go through every door - to every time and every place there is and will ever be - and we will show them what a plague looks like. There won’t be an inch of the multiverse we haven’t touched. Want to erase us from existence? Just try and erase us now.’

  The cheering rose back to deafening proportions as Makka-Soj stepped towards the door, key in hand.

  ‘Aren’t you going to do something?’ hissed Viola.

  ‘Like what?’ Pierre hissed back. ‘Do you really think either one of us can stop an entire species from opening a bloody door?’

  ‘Maybe if we work together?’

  ‘Two against two billion. How do you think that one’s going to play out?’

  Makka-Soj put the key into the door and turned it. Pierre could see the blue man sag with relief when the lock clicked free. He pushed the door open and a burst of warm light came flowing through from the other side. It wasn’t until that moment that Pierre realised how cold and washed-out the colours in the Space Between Worlds were.

  ‘Open the doors,’ shouted Makka-Soj, beaming. His words could barely be heard above the rapturous applause, but the guards on the other side of the chamber knew their orders. Putting their spears aside - and with a great deal of effort - they pulled apart the great scrap-metal doors that had been assembled opposite the benches.

  Outside was an endless river of blue, standing and cheering on a bridge of scrap and salvage, stretching out and away into the endless white nothingness.

  ‘Last one out, turn off the lights,’ laughed Makka-Soj. He beckoned the queue forwards.

  They rushed ahead with all the eagerness of teenage girls at a boy-band concert. Nobody was pushed out of the way or trampled underfoot, however. They charged as one, like a surge wave crashing through a small crack in a cliff wall. A wave that kept crashing long after impact, without ever drawing back.