The Night Clock Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title

  Indicia

  The Night Clock

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Epilogue

  First published 2015 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-84997-923-8

  Copyright © 2015 Paul Meloy

  Cover art by Ben Baldwin

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  There are weapons down there, weapons with minds,

  The armaments, darling, of the compartments of Hell.

  They clamber, these weapons, my dearest, they climb,

  At the awful sound of the Night Clock’s chime.

  I PULL LES out of the pub. He doesn’t complain. He’s a good old boy. He just raises his eyebrows and resists me long enough to put his pint down on the table nearest the door. I’ve grabbed Les because he’ll know; Les knows most things and he’s the one I call on when I come here. We go outside onto the street. It’s a narrow road through the village. You can see the hills climbing away behind the terraced cottages across the road. They begin to rise at the end of the long, narrow gardens and small allotments and roll gently into the distance, verdant and rugged. There’s another pub directly opposite ours. It’s called The Night Clock. It’s set back from the road and has benches out front. We don’t go there. Things come out from it and we have to fight them. We think the cellar is a compartment of Hell. So Les and I step outside and it’s bright blue sky and soft, warm summer air. Les looks up and shields his eyes with his hand. He squints, it’s so bright. He’s wearing brown corduroy trousers and a blue pullover the colour of the sky. I need to know something. It’s urgent but I don’t really know what it is, or how to articulate my need, but as usual, Les gets it. “Ah, yes,” he says. “That’s Mercury.” I look up and now I can see it, too. It’s been there all along, a pale and spectral disc. It’s about a third the diameter of the moon and is hanging over the village like a pallid eye just opened and already closing. As I watch it seems to drift across the sky like it wants to set behind the pitched roof of our pub. But this isn’t what I needed to know. It’s chilling and wonderful but not what I needed Les for.

  EARLIER I’M SITTING alone at one of the wooden benches in front of the pub we don’t go into. Behind me the honeysuckle growing over the porch is rotting, a blackening swag of compost, and the windows either side of the door are screens showing the bright reflection of the sky dulled like the silver at the back of an ancient mirror. I’m kicking my feet in the dust and thinking. Across the road I can hear voices from our pub, The Dog with its Eyes Shut, but this makes me feel lonely and I get up off the bench and walk onto the path. There’s something in the sky. I look up and see, moving with an unusual flickering, stop-frame jerkiness, a flying creature circling above me. It is quite large and has wings webbed like a bat and full of holes. Its legs and arms are thin like twigs and its head is odd, insect like. It drops lower through the blue sky and makes a sound like a jackdaw; a metallic clattering that fills me with sudden, profound disgust.

  THE SKY WAS white, featureless, and cold. I was sitting by the window in a carriage on a train. The tracks ran straight, past low fences at the ends of long back gardens. And then the train had stopped, and I was walking along a verge towards a space of grass. It was snowing; the snow had lain deep very fast. At the end of one of the long, bare gardens a little girl played with a pile of cogs. She was small, aged about three, and was wearing a grey flat cap. She looked up at me as I stood there, my hands in my pockets, tears in my eyes. She didn’t smile and her expression remained serious as she played in the snow at the end of this garden with those cogs in her cold hands. But somehow I felt her love for me, her good will, and I wanted so much to hold her.

  HE AWAKENS FROM these dreams in the small hours of every morning, at twenty past three exactly, and he’s weeping and he feels so tired. And he knows this place is real and he needs to find its equivalent in the waking world and all he can hear is the Night Clock, ticking, and ticking.

  What is the Night Clock?

  I see a wooden tower that leans back against a dark and restive sky. Clouds reel away in an unending stream behind it. I see a painted clock face; gray, peeling, and painted hands at five past three. The tower is empty; there are no workings, no cogs or wheels; no pendulum sways the seconds away.

  Yet still, the Night Clock ticks

  LEWIS WATCHED BARRY Cook stumble across the lawn with the green loop of a hosepipe caught around his ankle. He stopped, looked up. Lewis froze as Barry’s eyes, redblack as blood blisters, fixed on the kitchen window; his tongue lolled, redblack too, behind his teeth. His left arm reached out, fingers clawed, and made a feeble grabbing motion toward the window. His right arm was gone; just a stump remained, congealed and tattered, torn off at the shoulder. Through the glass, Lewis could just make out a low, miserable moaning sound. Barry looked down at the hosepipe snagging his ankle.

  Barry reached down, fingers still making that reflexive grabbing motion, and tried to unhook the hosepipe. The task was beyond him; he toppled forward and cracked his forehead against the marble birdbath.

  “Someone should put that poor sod out of his misery,” Dawn, Lewis’s mother, said as she joined Lewis at the window. She shook her head as Barry began levering himself up, using his one arm to push himself to his knees, his chin resting on the rim of the birdbath. He had sustained a gaping, bloodless gash to his brow. His expression was one of stunned incomprehension, that of someone perhaps fallen victim to fierce and unanticipated incontinence.

  Barry regained his feet. The fall had dislodged the hosepipe and Barry used this new freedom of movement to gather enough momentum to propel him up the garden towards the house. He reeled across the patio and thudded against the back door. Dawn gasped, pushed past Lewis and tried to fumble the bolt across but Barry was already pushing his way into the kitchen. The side of his face and his butchered shoulder pressed against the frame, one unlit crimson eye glaring through the gap, the final incredulity of his own astonishing death still embossed in its expression. His mouth opened and he uttered a choked, throaty shout.

  Dawn leant against the door. “Go away, Barry!” she hissed. Barry’s expression didn’t change but at the mention of his name he doubled his efforts to get in. He was feeble but the kitchen tiles were slippery, Dawn was small, and she was wearing socks. Gradually, Barry managed to shove the door wide enough to squeeze his upper body and one leg through. Dawn staggered backwards and sprawled across the large wooden table that stood in the middle of the kitchen. Lewis ran to his mum and they stood together, their backs to the cooker, while Barry uttered more insensate cries, flailed one arm about, and gawped around the kitchen with those awful congested eyes.

  As Dawn and Lewis began edging away from the cooker, keeping the kitchen table between them and Barry, trying to get across the room to the door to the hall, Barry made up his mind what he wanted. He lu
nged for the cooker.

  Dawn and Lewis dodged away and made it to the hall. They heard a clatter and they both turned. Barry was at the stove. He was standing with his belly up against the oven door, leaning over the large saucepan of beef chilli Dawn had been stirring. He cocked his head and seemed for a moment to be responding to some kind of internal stimuli, perhaps just the aroma of the chilli and nothing more than that—a trace memory of chemical detection still functioning in his poor decomposing head; then he raised his left arm and thrust his hand into the pan. Dawn and Lewis cringed against each other as Barry scooped up palmfuls of steaming chilli and shoved them into his mouth. He choked, unable to swallow and a wad of mince flew against the tiles and slid down behind the grill. He plunged his hand into the pan again, and forced in another mouthful. This time he turned and displayed his sauce-smeared jaw to Dawn and Lewis. His mouth was jammed wide with a dense bolas of mince and kidney beans. His left arm was red up to the elbow; drops of sauce flew from the ends of his fingers. Barry staggered back against the cooker and clawed at his face. His eyes bulged.

  The kitchen door banged open and a man came in carrying a pitchfork. He squared his shoulders and took the pitchfork in both hands. “Come on, Barry. Time to go,” he said and walked across the kitchen.

  Barry shambled backwards, clattering into the cooker. His arm came up and he waved it in the man’s direction. The man advanced. Barry’s eyes continued to bulge but Dawn thought for a second she could see something new in his expression; fear perhaps? Barry’s last knowing thought?

  Barry tried to bolt but the man came up behind him and thrust the pitchfork through the middle of his back. Barry’s mouth flew wider still and the wad of chilli was ejected onto the draining board. He made an awful cackling, throat-filled rattle as the tines of the pitchfork punched through his chest. The man braced himself and leaned down on the handle. Barry went up on his toes. The man moved to his right. Barry sagged a little then swung to his left. He looked at Dawn as he was pushed past the door to the hall and Dawn would swear later that she had seen resignation on his face, even if it had been partially masked behind chilli sauce. Despite his condition, and in some primal way, Barry Cook knew his future.

  Dawn and Lewis edged out of the hall and went to the door. They held hands and watched as the man propelled Barry down the garden, across the lane and into the field opposite. Two men were walking towards the middle of the field. They stood together and waited for the man with the pitchfork to reach them. They were carrying jerry cans. They looked grainy and insubstantial in the overcast early-morning light, like an image on a hand-cranked camera. The man drove Barry across the field, both of them stumbling amidst the dark, blocky chunks of turned earth until they reached the others.

  The man stopped in front of the others. Barry hung from the tines of the pitchfork, his head down, arm limp by his side. One of the men approached and appeared to speak to him. Barry opened his mouth and tried to flail him away. Dawn heard his rasping shout, borne across to her on that sodden wind, and it was that as much as the sight of the cans of liquid being poured over him, and one of the men returning to strike the light, that made Dawn turn away from Barry, set ablaze up there on the hillside.

  ACROSS THE FLOOR of the play area, she pushes the wheeled wedge of the VTech baby walker. It looks like she’s been left to play in a frame of a cartoon the colours are so bright and unusual. The walker has a voice. It sings in an accent that is surprisingly highborn, like a throwback to Watch with Mother.

  She runs in her socks, tiptoe, delicate.

  A father in Matalan clothes with a blue chin ponders his son engulfed in the ball pit, nourished by the new adolescence of divorce; the sulks, the drink, the self.She’s sitting on the floor playing with a drum. The carpet tiles are a hideous stormy blue, a laboratory colour concocted to suggest good cheer by scientists with antisocial personalities. She looks like a chimney thrown into relief against a thundercloud.

  One of the children is jocose with Down’s syndrome. He plays in eternal delight, with hands displaying the form and dexterity of a drunken labourer, with a heap of stacking blocks. He seems a happy refutation of evolution.

  She’s on the plastic slide; she waves. Leftley waves back. She’s trying to avoid the unwanted attention of a three-year-old called Olly who keeps approaching her with an open and mystified expression.

  Now she’s horned in on another girl’s playtime with her mother on a dwarfish pine rocking horse. There’s an unspoken obligation to be inclusive, but who wants the bother of someone else’s kid? Her narrow sidelong glances over at Leftley sitting there in his chair with his book indicate a wish for him to entertain his own kid. He smiles and takes a sip of his coffee.

  He watches her play at a low table with some kind of tortured abacus attached to it. She plays sweetly with the other children.

  Leftley finishes his coffee, closes his book—it’s A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, his favourite book—and puts it on the table next to a cold bowl of chips he had bought for his daughter half an hour earlier. There’s a sachet of vinegar and some salt and pepper. He was going to share with her, putting some chips on a serviette before dousing his own, but she was too busy playing and he didn’t really feel that hungry.

  She’s waving again.

  He doesn’t wave back this time.

  Instead, he reaches into the sports bag at the side of his chair.

  He stands, a gun in his hand, walks towards the play area, and starts shooting.

  NEIL GOLLICK WAS happy with his limitations. Said limitations were externally imposed and so boundaried him with a municipal comfort. He patrolled his roads and alleyways, overpasses and balconies, with easy confidence. He wore the rustling, high-visibility coat, the waterproof trousers, and the slash-peaked cap with authority, and with the buoyancy of an astronaut riding within the complex, life-sustaining casing of his space suit. He had everything he needed on his belt and in his many capacious inner and outer pockets.

  Gollick was a bit of a cock. Everyone that knew him, worked with him or had the misfortune to run afoul of him on the streets of the estate, thought as much. A small dog had once nipped a tiny turd off on a verge while its owner, an elderly lady, kyphotic and bandy, had been chatting to a friend at the bus stop and had not noticed her pet trembling at the end of its leash. But Gollick had noticed and had presented the old girl with a ticket, a fine. Forty quid.

  He’d laughed as he’d watched her attempt to right the wrong, plucking at the soggy mess with a fragile leaf of Kleenex, watching it cake her fingers. She needn’t have bothered.

  Police Community Support Officer Gollick was the guardian of minor civic misdemeanours. His powers were boundaried by a strict code of professional conduct and if you give a fool a set of rules you can be sure he will apply them without an iota of flexibility. Why is this? The more menial the job the more rigidly those employed to execute it enforce their regulations. Have you ever sat blocked in your car while a dustcart shudders like a docking ferry in the middle of the road and watched as its malodorous operatives stroll its flanks dreaming only of what might come later, after work; beers, footie, gash?

  Gollick marched through the long, cold shadows of the overpasses with an assured step. Eastern Europeans passed him; Gollick could tell them by their big hard faces, round-headed with complexions like dusty grey stone, small fierce eyes, ex-army physiques and terrible strength in their hands. The girls had great bodies but faces like a witness description.

  Gollick emerged onto a wide expanse of concrete. Behind him rose one of the blocks of flats that stood in a row across the middle of the estate. Their balconies were painted in faded toy box colours, an attempt to make them appear optimistic, welcoming, but all that they achieved was a dissipated and domineering aspect; they were full of filth, with atriums of blasted charcoal caused by arson and faulty wiring, piss-puddled nodes and walls tigered with forensic stripes of blood and bile.

  How could there be authenti
c cheer here? Gollick hated it, but appreciated that it needed to exist, with its perplexing and demoralising warrens, inbuilt structural rot, gutters, alleys and stairwells choked with domestic and human waste, in the same way ghettoes and shanties were an unavoidable feature of society in other parts of the world. Gollick continued his patrol. His heavy boots strode across the fractured pavement, across constellations of chewing gum grey and imperishable with age, his coat and trousers crackling like a crisp packet. He eyed the buildings, the low utilitarian blocks of housing, the lockups and the garages with both vigilance and proprietorial licence. His mind was clear of distraction, indeed clear of most things. Gollick was on his rounds and the estate was a safer place for having his visible and reassuring presence.

  Gollick crossed the main road that ran through the estate and approached the shopping parade. Two shops remained open: a Ladbrokes and Balv’s, the general store. Everything else was boarded up. The parade was sheltered beneath a concrete walkway. At the end of the walkway was the estate pub, the Snowcat. It had reinforced glass windows and the edges of its flat roof were tinselled with rolls of razor wire. There was an old bench outside and a plank table. The table held at least six wide metal ashtrays each containing a pile of cigarette butts built up with the care and complexity of a model for ancient Incan architecture.

  Gollick entered Balv’s. Not so long ago he had stumbled upon a crime being committed in the shop. As he had approached the parade, rainlashed and cagouled, on a nasty autumn morning, Gollick had heard the distinct sound of banging. Trepidation augmented by the rigours of training prevented him from running towards the sound, and so he stopped and pressed himself against the shuttered metal door covering the front of the old kebab shop next door. The metal gave a little beneath his bulk and made a sound like a car reversing into a garage door. Gollick kept calm and stepped back out onto the parade.