The Night Clock Read online

  Daniel explained the circumstances prior to his call. Trevena was glad he was sitting down. There was something utterly compelling about the man and Trevena was experienced enough to recognise actual truth from the delusional truths believed and expounded upon by a proper madman. Daniel had called an ambulance for Rob and Graham and then left the scene to return to Elizabeth’s house. What the authorities would find beneath the walkway would be a recently deceased Neil Gollick. Daniel was unconcerned what they would make of the entire scene as once sufficiently recovered, Rob’s rendering of events would make nonsense of any careful cover-up, so he hadn’t bothered. Just let them get on with it. Graham might make more sense, but having been through what he’d experienced, Daniel admitted he probably wouldn’t be the same man when he recovered. Trevena was initially saddened, but Daniel counselled him not to waste much energy grieving for a man who cared little for him. It was comments like these that made Trevena listen and not look too hard for madness. Daniel’s insight was robust.

  Despite what followed, Trevena could detect no insanity in Daniel’s demeanour. He sipped his tea and watched the man with a keen assessor’s eye but couldn’t find anything he could nail down as symptomatic of an illness. And there was this woman, fussing around, concurring with everything he said. Again, Trevena looked for conspiracy, co-dependence or collusion, but found none at all. So he listened.

  WHEN HE HAD finished telling Trevena about his history, Daniel reflected that his first thoughts had been that his delusions had been an attempt to make sense of his past, to somehow modify the effects of his trauma and loss. That time was an element he could control and therefore strip of power, a textbook coping strategy, however unbalanced and, according to the psychiatrists, maladaptive.

  Elizabeth went over to Daniel and put a hand on his arm. He looked down at her and smiled. It was such a sweet smile, communicating such old friendship, that Trevena felt his eyes mist up. He took another sip of tea and let the steam blur his vision for a moment. He felt very tired.

  “You were never mad, though, Daniel,” she said. “You really could stop time.”

  Trevena looked up. Elizabeth turned to him and spoke again. Her expression was very serious.

  “Those places he went, they were real. He just needed time to understand why he could go there. But something stopped him before he could fully realise it.”

  Daniel nodded.

  “What happened?” Trevena asked.

  “They gave me ECT,” Daniel said.

  ONCE THE HOSPITAL had closed and Daniel found himself in a flat above a shop on the outskirts of town, the medic looking after him decided that he needed a more vigorous treatment regime to keep his symptoms in check. Against his wishes, but within the framework of Mental Health law, Daniel was forced to undergo lengthy courses of electro-convulsive treatment. It worked. Within weeks he had lost all ability to travel back in time. His mind became fogged, his thoughts slow and impoverished. He began to gain insight into his condition and the memories of his pain returned and he had nowhere to go to escape them. He began occasionally to see the dead again, brief incursions, flashbacks that clouded his vision with a green vapour and introduced shambling figures of rot. One small mercy was that his father was no longer amongst them.

  It was too much to bear. Daniel had made a decision. He took a train to the coast, to a place where his last sweet memories had been laid down, and, with hope and the final thought—can love make a moment last forever?—he ended his pain.

  Daniel went through the slot.

  “YOU WENT THROUGH the slot?” Trevena said.

  Daniel nodded. His tired, ancient eyes brightened a little and he smiled.

  “I did,” he said. Elizabeth, still standing at his side, put an arm around his waist.

  DANIEL STOOD BETWEEN the tracks and watched the train approach. He closed his eyes and waited for his pain to end.

  Following his father’s suicide, Daniel had suffered terrible nightmares. Paralysing visitations of a great face hanging beyond his bedroom window, the face of a woman with furious eyes and a mouth bleeding a torrent of black fluid. It screamed at him, blaming him for his part in his father’s death. How his very existence had caused his father to take his own life. This was untrue—as vile a lie as his unconscious mind could make up—but Daniel’s child psyche believed it, believed, as children do, that the blame for such catastrophic events must somehow lie with them. And there had been a sound, too. A noise that heralded her presence so jarring and hostile and filled with menace that he was unable to describe it. It was a machine sound; a shrieking vibration generated somewhere deep and terrifying, its source unknowable.

  Daniel heard that sound now as the train came. He opened his eyes and the train was ten feet away. It was the sound of the brakes grinding against the wheels, thunderous and full of pressure and sparks. It was the sound he had heard all his life and it triggered two things: an opening in his mind that revealed in extraordinary detail all the events of his past, both real and imagined, and in a moment—in a singularity—expanded them to form a periodic table of experience, an accumulation of shells that allowed him for a brief second to glimpse the possibility that order and goodness existed and that he was a part of it all.

  And it opened a line of light in the air in front of him.

  Daniel blinked, his eyes filling with tears, held his breath, and discovered that he could stop time again.

  The front of the train was frozen, shimmering in its own heat. Daniel could smell its hot metal. It bulged like an image straining to propel itself from a cinema screen.

  The slot opened in the air and Daniel peered in. Love, the emotion out of all so easily crushed in its endless search for rapture, burst through him. He could see what lay beyond the slot and it wasn’t darkness, and it wasn’t for him to fill it because it was already full, and it wasn’t for him to people because people stood there now.

  Daniel breathed, and went through.

  TREVENA PUT HIS mug down on the worktop and rubbed his eyes. He was glad he wasn’t going to have to write this all up. This was definitely off the record. Daniel was smiling and Trevena got the impression that he knew what he was thinking. It was an unsettling feeling but not a particularly invasive one.

  “Les was the first to find me,” Daniel said. “He came to my office one afternoon. I was sitting in my old broken wooden chair behind my empty desk and I remember staring out of the window across the cricket field and watching starlings flock above the pavilion. He knocked once, and came in.”

  THE MAN WAS about forty and Daniel recognised him from seeing him around the asylum for as long as he had been there. His gait was unusually erect and rhythmic. Daniel assumed that he perhaps needed less medication than others. He always seemed quite serene; maybe his breakdown had done a perfect job of erasing his worries in one great sandblast of an event.

  The man walked over to the desk, his old, soft and faded shoes treading through drifts of leaves and bits of paper strewn across the concrete floor. He looked down at Daniel with his peaceful, pale brown eyes. He smiled.

  “What can you do?” he said.

  Daniel shrugged. “I’m not sure,” he said.

  The man smiled more widely. His teeth were quite clean and bright in the dimness of the room.

  “Have you got your Instrument?” he asked.

  Daniel reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a worn and battered matchbox. He placed it on the desk. “I’ve got this,” he said.

  “Open it.”

  Daniel held the sides of the box gently between thumb and index finger of his left hand and slid the drawer open with the index finger of his right.

  The man leaned forward and looked at what had been revealed, in its tiny manger of cotton wool.

  “Lovely,” he said. “That’s it.”

  “What do I do?” Daniel asked.

  “Don’t you know?”

  Daniel looked down at the matchbox. “What do you want me to do?”

/>   The man straightened up. He raised his hands, the palms grimy and lined. It was a gesture that communicated total confidence.“I want you to take me back to the happiest day of my life,” the man said.

  Daniel understood. “Okay,” he said.

  The man closed his eyes, his expression sweet delight.

  Daniel reached the tips of his fingers into the matchbox, took out what nestled within and held it up in front of his face, inspecting it, as he did every day.

  Still perfect, despite the years; still so reminiscent of happy times, delicate as clockwork and many times more complex and important, Daniel smiled at the tiny hermit crab crouching in its conical shell. It was as dry and hollow as a fossil and its brilliant orange colour had faded to a distant pink, but it was still whole. Even its minuscule eyes, on their hairsbreadth stalks, remained.

  “This is Bert,” Daniel said.

  The man nodded. “Bert,” he said, “I’m Les. Shall we?”

  “Close your eyes,” said Bert. They both heard him. It was the unmistakeable voice of a long-dead crab. It was bossy, it was comical, it had the sound of the sea, and of brine flaking from rocks dried in the sun. There was orange in it, a perfect synaesthesia both men could apprehend.

  They closed their eyes and went back.

  Outside, entirely covering the dome of the pavilion, the starlings had settled, all their slicked little heads tilted towards the window set into the wall of the now empty office at the end of the deserted corridor.

  I OPENED MY eyes and saw that I was standing on a path at the side of a narrow, dusty road running through a village surrounded by hills. Les stood beside me, his face turned up to the sun. His eyes were closed and he basked there for a moment, the most composed expression on his face. Then he opened his eyes and looked at me.

  “This is it,” he said. “Thank you.”

  I shrugged. I hadn’t done anything.

  “Who’s that?” Les asked, nodding his head towards what I held in my hands.

  I held up the large glass jar and peered into the murky fluid it contained. It was heavy, that jar. Something peered back at me, a momentary glimpse of an eyeball hooded with a translucent lid. Something forever dead, having never really lived, yet lived now and always had.

  I knew its name, too, knew it intimately; and always had.

  “Dr Natus,” I said.

  Les nodded, but his focus was gone from me now. It was all on the corner of the road and the sign that hung there: The Dog with its Eyes Shut

  I looked across the road. There was a scrubby lot and another pub to the rear of it. It looked derelict. There was an old wooden bench beneath one of the windows. Someone was sitting there smoking a cigar. I couldn’t see his features because he was wearing a parka coat with the hood up. As we walked towards the corner of the road the figure in the coat did something startling.

  Holding the stub of the cigar between the fingers of his left hand, the man—I assumed it was a man, because of the cigar and the evident size of his hands—reached up and gripped the sides of the hood of the parka and pulled them across his face. And then he shouted, an unintelligible sound muffled from within the hood, and stood up and darted around the back of the building.

  I stopped and looked at Les, but Les was now standing at the door of the pub on the corner and had lifted a trembling hand to the latch. His face was still serene but there were tears in his eyes.

  “Don’t try and follow him, Daniel,” Les said. “He’s not really here yet.”

  I wasn’t intending on following him. The man and that empty pub had given off a vibration that had deeply unsettled me. The sun gleamed off the windows like pools of white, milky scum. If there was life inside it moved with the slow dreamlike glide of fish dying in dense, polluted water. Yes, it was polluted, that place, I could tell. It had a hole at its heart and dark dreams were welling up inside there, dreams from others like me, but not like me. They had been like me once, I realised, but what they brought here was foul and full of despair. There was a sign hanging from a chain on an iron rod attached to the wall above the door. It was faded but I could read what it said: The Night Clock. There was an illustration beneath the words of a clock face with no hands. The numbers were all there but ordered randomly around the edge of the face: 11,2,6,8,4,3,12,7,10,1,9,5. Somehow those muddled numbers disturbed me more than anything else, their sequence an equation mocking good order and progression.

  Les had opened the door and was standing on the threshold. The sunlight illuminated an oblong of worn green tiles on the floor and Les stepped into the pub and the sounds of raised voices and laughter. I approached and came behind him. I could see the place was full; I could smell the stale yet contented aroma of beer and cigarettes. There was a low plaster ceiling stained brown and ribbed with thick dark beams. The bar was packed.

  Les continued standing for a moment. He was looking around. And then his knees buckled slightly and he reached out and held onto the doorframe. He gasped, almost a sob and said, “There they are.” He spoke in a hushed, reverential voice, as though he had just spotted something incredibly rare and wonderful, something he felt he might never have had the chance to see, and might never see again. It was like he had glimpsed a portion of God and apprehended what holiness really was.

  As he turned to me, I expected somehow that his face would be glowing like brass, like an angel, reflecting glory, but it was just Les, in partial shadow, the only gleam the sunlit tears on his cheeks.

  “Thank you, Daniel,” he said. “Thank you again, so very much.”

  Across the road that rundown building hunched beneath its roof of moss and broken tiles.

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked Les.

  Les smiled. “Do what you want. If you want to go back, shake the jar. If you want to stay, then stay and look around. This is your Quay, Daniel. Dream it as you want it. But watch out for that thing over there. It’s an incursion. There have always been incursions. Get strong. One day you’ll have to fight what comes out of there.”

  I held the jar closely to my chest. The sediment had thinned, settled. I could make out better the grey, suspended shape of the preserved foetus, forever floating, its mind somehow alive and glorious within the billion dead cells of its unfired brain.

  “Will I have to come back for you?”

  “Yes, this time you must.”

  “How will I know when to get you?”

  Les pointed to something on the wall next to the bar. It was an old Bakelite payphone.

  “I’ll call you,” he said.

  I didn’t question this because everything here made sense.

  A man’s voice sounded above the general noise: “Les! What do you know?”

  Les turned and grinned. “All I need to, Andy. All I need to.”

  The man laughed. “They’re over there, Les. they’ve been waiting for you.”

  “I know,” Les said. “I’m coming.”

  He turned and lifted a hand and then walked off through the crowd, his arms already raised for an embrace he had longed for, had dreamed of, for so many years.

  THE DOOR SWUNG shut and the voices and the laughter were muffled. Despite what Les had advised, I crossed the road and stood looking at the derelict building. I put the jar down on the pavement in the cool shadow of a low, crumbling wall and walked onto the lot. It had been a beer garden once, I assumed. There was that bench beneath the window and this scrubby terrace on which I stood was scattered with pieces of broken crockery that spewed hunks of dry, root bound soil. There was a concrete trough filled with a knotted rug of vine that had struggled to lift itself from the earth and had died trying to climb the cracked plaster on the wall at the corner of the pub.

  And then I heard footsteps. A tip-tap sound, trotting, non-human.

  I turned and saw, coming along the path, a large, handsome-looking dog. It stopped when it saw me and barked once, and wagged its tail.

  “Hello, boy,” I said.

  The dog lowered its head
and woofed, its long elegant tail doubling its efforts. It came onto the lot and approached me. I squatted down and opened my arms. The dog came over and let me stroke the dense fur of his neck. I could feel his warm breath panting against my cheek.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “My name is Bix,” the dog said.

  I remember feeling a frisson of shock when he spoke, but it was a thrill rather than a feeling of alarm, and I remembered the voice of the crab and how right that had been. In the depths of my psychoses I had heard voices, commands and commentaries, ideas of reference from inanimate objects, but this was very different. Despite the circumstances, I knew this was real.

  I stood up and looked down at the dog. It was a beautiful animal. Tall and slender with a barrel chest and a long, graceful snout. He looked like a greyhound but a more stylish version. I think he was a saluki but I wasn’t sure.

  Bix was looking up at me, his head tilted slightly to one side. What are you thinking? His expression asked.

  “Are you a Saluki?”

  “You know your dogs,” Bix said.

  “I’ve surprised myself.”

  Bix laughed. A proper doggy ho ho.

  “Come with me,” he said, and started off towards the side of the pub, where previously the man in the parka had fled.

  “Les said I shouldn’t.”

  Bix stopped and turned his head. “Les is being cautious for your sake. But Les has other things on his mind. If you want to go, just shake the jar. If you want to see more, come with me.”

  “Who is Les?”

  “He is your Paladin, Daniel,” Bix said. “A guide, and a protector.”

  “Why did he want to come here?”

  Bix lowered his head. “I’ll let him tell you, when he’s ready.”

  He trotted off. I decided to follow him.