The Night Clock Read online

  Sandy was watching, eyes narrowed against the blazing currents. He took his welding mask off the bench and put it on. He glared at Alex from behind the green Perspex rectangle set in the face. He was probably grinning. He pointed at the monumental figures craning against the roof beams.

  “I haven’t just been making art, Alex!” he shouted. The noise outside had increased, as though most of the efforts of the creatures were now solely directed at the barn. The doors and the walls shuddered and dust sifted down from the roof. “I’ve been creating an army!”

  Behind him, something moved. It made a grinding, groaning sound, like hollow cylinders of bronze being bent beneath a great weight. It was an unusually antique sound, but of something old filling with a very new life. Alex thought of a giant squid in a storybook squeezing the hull of an iron ship somewhere far out to sea, crimping its hull like a pipe cutter.

  Alex squinted. Long bluish shadows rocked on the walls and against the roof beams. Sandy went over to the barn doors and undid the bolts.

  And as Sandy pushed open the doors, revealing a scene of slush-churned riot, the creatures jostling in the yard to surround the barn, his sculptures lifted their craning bodies on their metal-glass limbs and marched, beneath their jagged, orchestrating shadows, out to meet the madness.

  ALEX WATCHED IN wonder. He edged down from the bench and followed the energised creations as they ducked beneath the lintel above the thrown-wide barn doors and emerged onto the snow. Flecks still glanced through the air, blown on a light breeze. There were a dozen sculptures, all lit from within. Bladed arms flung out to greet the monsters, mouths that had been the grilles of cars, and the insides of presses and trashed machines, opened and bit at the air. They steamed, they glowed.

  They attacked.

  AND ALEX WATCHED a rout.

  The sculptures advanced, limbs and jaws scything, scattering the monsters across the dirt-churned snow. From around the barn and from the roof they came, absurd, grotesque things, deformed by their malice, shrieking with wrath, to join their falling, gored, splintered collaborators, but they, too, fell, in as great a number, and as fast, beneath the sculptures’ harmonized assault. They pincered, legs scissoring, blades flashing, impaling, chopping, until they had marshalled the monsters into a huddle off towards the entrance to the farm.

  And then they dipped their steaming faces and slashed the remaining monsters to ribbons.

  Alex stood, pale and shivering, just outside the barn door. Sandy stood beside him, a sledgehammer in his fists, his breath steaming from beneath the welding mask. His eyes glittered like the mean eyes of a pike glimpsed rising from the dark emerald water of a lake.

  The sculptures returned to their hangar. Alex stood unmoving as they trooped past, ducking beneath the lintel, and re-took their places at the back of the barn.

  Sandy pushed shut the doors. He turned and looked at Alex.

  Alex felt the shock of the morning’s events begin to do its cold work on him and he shuddered. Tears filled his eyes.

  Sandy bent down and soothed him. “It’s okay, son,” he said. “It’s okay.”

  How was this okay?

  “Who...who are you, Uncle Sandy?” He asked, his voice muffled against his uncle’s overalls. “Who are you?”

  “THAT’S WHAT I’M thinking,” Chloe said, breaking Bix’s attention.

  “Well, you’ll find out,” he said, the tip of his nose about an inch away from the print on the page of the book.

  “Is Sandy a good guy?”

  “Shall we find out?” Bix said.

  “Stories.” Chloe said, snuggling down in her rugs, the dog’s warm flank pressed close, alive and lovely. “I like them. But they take too long. You read slowly.”

  “You’re lucky I can read at all,” Bix said.

  “COME ON,” SANDY said. “I’ve got something to show you.”

  “I’ve seen plenty,” Alex said. He was staring at the ground, at the gouges and impressions left in the dirt and slush. And the blood. And the bits.

  “They’re not human,” Sandy said. “At least, not any more. Don’t fret over them. Think of them like characters in a cartoon. Just, you know, a really nasty cartoon. Anime. That sort of thing.” He leaned the sledgehammer against the side of the barn and walked off, towards the gate at the end of the drive. He pulled off his welding mask and dropped it in the mud.

  Alex followed, stepping over lumps and chunks with his eyes half shut. He reached the gate where a vile heap lay steaming. He could see the bodies were already rotting.

  “It stinks.” He said.

  “They don’t last long once they’re dispatched,” Sandy said. “Won’t be anything here in an hour. Just in time for Jean’s late morning drinky. Come on.”

  Alex followed Sandy across the lane and they pushed through a hedge at the side of the facing field. Sandy led Alex across the field. It was fading yellow, a great sea of wilting rape. Alex wrinkled his nose. Everything smelt bad today. Off. The sky was white as a label. He looked around for the promise of poppies, but they remained discrete, bloodless.

  They came to the bottom of the field and Sandy said, “This is the place.”

  Alex stood next to him and peered down. There was a cutting, and a railway line running through it, just a single narrow gauge.

  “What now?” Alex asked.

  “We wait for our ride,” Sandy said. “And while we wait, I’ll tell you more about Quay-Endula.”

  DURING SOME QUIET evenings, when they were sitting by the fire in the living room, or playing cards or board games at the kitchen table, Uncle Sandy would tell Alex stories about the glorious town of Quay-Endula.

  Quay-Endula is a town spread throughout the steep hills surrounding a great blue bay. A place of turrets and spires and fabulous follies, rambling pavilions, markets full of billowing pastel tents and gazebos. Quay-Endula has fountains like cathedrals; it has plazas and parks, open-air theatres, carnivals, trams, funicular railways, cable cars strung between great glittering pylons and a pier like no other could compare.

  The pier of Quay-Endula is a mile long, so they say, stretching out into the sea. It has its own fairground with a Ferris wheel the height of a skyscraper. It has helter-skelters and rocket ships that fly round on gleaming metal arms. It has arcades full of pinball machines and shooting galleries. All this built on a wooden raft held up on fragile, barnacle-brittle iron legs.

  Alex really wanted to go to Quay-Endula.

  It was a place you could go to in your dreams, Sandy told him. It was a safe place. There were people, he said, like angels, who looked after the Quays. There had once been countless numbers of Quays, all unique, all lovely. But something had wanted to destroy them. Something that hated their existence and the hope and love they gave.

  The devil-in-dreams.

  The devil-in-dreams was implacably opposed to the keepers of the Quays. The keepers were called Firmament Surgeons, and they had been created as engineers, to keep the mechanisms of Creation running against the entropy arising from the fall of man. It was a great task and one which would be superseded at the Re-Creation, but for now, while eternal events took their course, and wars raged on Earth and in Heaven, the Firmament Surgeons worked and fought and wove their Quays and upheld the dreams of man.

  But having free will and being able to choose, over time the devil-in-dreams exerted his influence on the Firmament Surgeons as he had on man and angels before them, and many also fell. They became Autoscopes and they began their onslaught of the Quays and their struggle for command of Dark Time.

  It is the Autosomachy, this war, and it is raging to an end.

  “YOU WANT TO know who I am?” Sandy said as they sat together on the bank leading down to the tracks. “Well, I’m your uncle Sandy. But I’m something else, too. Something I could only reveal to you when the time was right, and now it’s come upon us early, but that’s okay. I’ve been preparing for it, ever since you came to live with us. You were sent to me to be kept safe because you
are a Firmament Surgeon and you’re a very rare and important boy. I’m your Paladin, Alex. I’ve always looked out for you.”

  Sandy was watching Alex carefully. Alex hugged his knees and peered down at the rails.

  “You’ve seen enough today to know I’m not making things up. I never was. Quay-Endula is real, as real as all this, but I wasn’t being entirely honest with you when I told you it’s a place you can only visit in dreams. Everyone dreams about it, everyone knows about it, somewhere in their subconscious. Firmament Surgeons can take people there and keep them safe, refresh them, give them hope. But there’s another way in for people like you. It’s called a Gantry and you can open one and we can go there.”

  Alex nodded, still staring off into the distance.

  “You always said you’d love to go there,” Sandy said, and nudged Alex with his elbow.

  “That was different. Like wanting to go in a rocket to Mars. I didn’t think it was real.”

  “It is! Isn’t that great? Only thing is, the war’s cranking up and Quay-Endula is now about to come under attack by everything the Autoscopes can throw at it. That will effect this world very badly. If they get in and they gain ground, then people will stop dreaming, and they’ll stop caring. We have to help save the Quay and warn people here.”

  “You seem very confident, Uncle Sandy.”

  “Once we get there, you’ll see things the same way, lad. You’ll be in your element. Hah! I’ve been looking forward to this!”

  Alex shook his head. He was about to say more, ask more questions, but then, coming from about a mile down the track, he heard something approaching.

  He looked up at Sandy and saw that he was smiling.

  “WHAT IS IT? What is it?” said Chloe.

  “Shall we read on and find out?” Bix said, again.

  Chloe nodded, and bit her lip.

  THE SOUND GREW closer, building and thrumming. They felt the ground beneath them tremble with its approach. Breathless, Alex waited. And saw it rumble into the cutting.

  It drove a great caul of sparks before it, firefly debris from its shearing wheels. It was an iron bulk, a locomotive salvaged from a crusher. It was a square-backed, steam-driven thing of ancient industry. Driverless it thundered, following its route through the forest and the fields surrounding the farms. It had no lights, just the blazing cloak of molten swarf, which cooled and twinkled over its channelled flanks.

  Railgrinder groaned past them, a dreadful, beautiful machine, and as it travelled, it reaped the rails of rust.

  “Come, on,” Sandy shouted over Railgrinder’s noise. They slid down the cutting and onto the tracks, following the stately rocking of the locomotive’s back end.

  Sandy lifted Alex up and swung him into the open cab. He trotted along beside Railgrinder, grinning, and then grabbed a rail and jumped aboard.

  They stood there, rocking and bathed in firebox heat, the whole world full of clangs and ferment and turbulent row. Everything stank of coal dust and old black oil, hot pistons and sparks.

  Alex and Sandy laughed, at the noise, at the furious rocking of the machine, at the absurdity of it. Alex was filled with a strange, drifting relief. It was good. He hugged his uncle.

  “Enjoy it, Alex,” Sandy shouted over the noise. “This is yours. It’s your Instrument.”

  “My what?” Alex yelled, still laughing.

  “It’s your Instrument. It takes you to the Quays. Only you can use it for that. It’s engineered for you, for now.”

  Alex leaned out and looked up the line. Railgrinder swayed and ground its way with cumbersome utility.

  “What do I do?”

  “Wait. There’s a tunnel up ahead. We can use it as an Ingress point.”

  As they came around a bend, Alex saw the tunnel mouth. It was cut into a low hill, a mouldering redbrick arch. Railgrinder took them in.

  Alex looked up at his uncle. “You okay, Uncle Sandy?”

  Sandy said nothing, his eyes fixed straight ahead. His fists were clenched and a sheen of sweat had broken out on his face. It beaded the dome of his bald head; he looked like he had been caught out in a light shower.

  “Don’t like tunnels much,” he said through gritted teeth. “Never have.”

  Alex patted Sandy’s arm. He hadn’t ever considered his uncle to be the phobic type, but he looked like he was struggling now, really hanging on.

  “We’ll be out soon,” Alex said, his voice bright and echoing in the tunnel above the rumble and clatter of the train. Railgrinder’s sparks threw light around them like a cauldron of molten ore. Sandy’s sweat gleamed golden.

  “One way or another,” Sandy said. And then: “There. Up ahead.”

  Alex looked through the porthole above the firebox.

  Less than a hundred yards ahead, a circle of light hung suspended in the darkness. It looked no bigger than a wedding ring.

  “Is that the end of the tunnel?”

  “No,” Sandy said. “There’s more than a mile to go. That’s your Gantry.”

  “It’s tiny.”

  “Railgrinder’s yours, remember. Here, take the throttle.”

  Alex slid past Sandy and took hold of the long, brass lever. He looked up at Sandy, who nodded, and then Alex pushed the lever forward. Smoke blew from its stack and rolled in a low, gritty storm above their heads. Railgrinder lurched forward and gathered speed. As they accelerated, so the circle of light began to grow. It expanded of its own volition, not merely owing to the decreasing distance between them. Its edges rippled outward and as Railgrinder approached, it spanned the tunnel with an opaque, luminous disc. Alex held tight to the throttle and closed his eyes.

  Both he and Sandy bellowed with a thrill of terror as Railgrinder roared through the Gantry.

  ALEX OPENED HIS eyes. He pulled back off the throttle and Railgrinder slowed to a crawl. Alex looked at Sandy. He was beaming, the weathered skin around his eyes, and his nose, were black with soot. His teeth looked very white. Alex rubbed a hand over his own face and the palm came away begrimed, smelling of cinders.

  “I can’t believe I’m finally here again,” Sandy said. “Outside of a dream.”

  They had emerged from the Gantry into a different world. The sky was clear, unclouded, cooling to twilight blue. The tracks followed a ridge and beneath, on both sides, fields of purple flowers set off to the distance.

  “Lavender,” Sandy said. “Beautiful.”

  Beyond were mountains, a barricade of low, red rock against the sky. Further on, a stand of forest, and the tracks headed through it. Sandy breathed deeply.

  Alex leaned against the side of the cab and looked out across the lavender fields. He could smell the dense, blessed perfume of it.

  “It’s later here,” Sandy said. “Nightfall soon.”

  “Is this Quay-Endula?”

  “No,” Sandy shook his head. “This is your Quay. This is Quay Fomalhaut. We need to get to Quay-Endula as fast as possible.”

  “Are we safe here?”

  “Not like we would have been once. There have been incursions, Alex. Parts of this Quay have been taken.”

  Alex watched the fields roll by, silent, breathing their scent. After a moment, he turned back to the Railgrinder’s controls and thrust up on the throttle again. Their speed increased and they headed into the forest.

  THEY TRAVELLED ON through the darkening stands of trees.

  For a while, the track followed the curves of a stream and Alex watched the sparks from beneath the grinding wheels casting out in a continuous wave and alight in the shady water, brightening for the briefest of moments the gleaming pebbles just beneath the surface.

  Soon the stream meandered away and he could see where it ran off into a channel built into the hillside. He could hear it frothing and chopping against the stonewalls at the channel mouth.

  Sandy stood up and stretched. Railgrinder drove on, riding its endless flickering wave of embers. Ahead more obscurity beckoned.

  “Can you hear the mines?” Sandy s
aid. “The Fomalhaut mines are working again.”

  Alex stood still and listened. Above the continuous chafing of Railgrinder’s plates and the incendiary crackle of its firebox, he could just make out the sound of something distant and industrial; it was like the clanging of dull iron bells and the muscular hiss of great plunging pistons. The more he attuned his ears, the clearer it became. They were approaching a place of heavy engineering.

  “We’d better hide ourselves,” Sandy said. He gestured for them to crouch down behind the low sides of the cab.

  After a mile or so Railgrinder swept around a bend and they came into a clearing. They kept their heads down and Sandy peered over the side of the cab.

  The noise was immense here, an endless clatter and thunder of machinery.

  Alex peered past Sandy’s shoulder and saw that they had entered an enormous yard. Railgrinder took a route around the outskirts and he could see that they were passing through a mining plant. There were pitheads and pylons, ranks of fat hoppers, rumbling conveyor belts and low, dark single storey factories. Flashes of cold, blue light illuminated the grimy windows, the spitting radiance of arc welders. Railgrinder rumbled over a set of points and Alex could see that more rails ran off towards the middle of the yard where rows of trucks full of coal waited in a siding. Everything was moonlit and coated in a thick, grey dust.

  As Railgrinder took them behind a row of sheds, Sandy stood up and went to a lever by the firebox. He grasped the handle and wrenched it down. Railgrinder’s wheels screeched and Alex staggered as it came to a halt.

  “Don’t worry,” said Sandy. “Just going to make a bit of trouble here, then we’re off.”

  He jumped down out of the cab.

  “What are you doing?”

  Sandy pointed to the closest pithead, a tall pylon supporting a drilling rig. It looked ancient, and it creaked and groaned as it worked.