The Night Clock Read online

  Graham stopped. He smiled, despite the peculiarity of the situation and the lateness of the hour. You never knew what you were going to find on this estate. Now it was some old fucker wanting to play chicken on a mobility scooter. Like the gentleman he was, Graham stood aside and beckoned the driver to come past.

  The scooter lurched forward. Again, Graham got the impression that something was wrong with it. At first he thought it was just an old wreck but as it trundled up the walkway towards him he noticed that it seemed to have things bolted to it. Whoever was driving it had souped it up. Graham chuckled. Good for you, granddad, he thought. Bet the grandkids love it.

  The scooter rolled on. It passed beneath a lit kitchen window and Graham got a better look at it. There were definitely bits of metal and rods of some sort fixed to it. They looked serrated, rusty and sharp. Not quite so cool. Graham pressed himself into Rob’s doorway to allow the scooter to pass and as it came within six feet, he noticed what was smeared over the headlight, dimming it to a reddish glow.

  There was blood on the light. And bits of skin and hair. Graham sucked in a harsh breath. Was it hair? It was white and fluffy and stuck to the metal grille that covered the headlight. It reminded him of the chunks of wool sheep leave on barbed wire fences at the sides of fields.

  And then the driver looked up, revealing its fuming eyes beneath the hood of the blood-flecked reflective jacket, and it showed Graham its teeth.

  Graham froze. He wasn’t the type to make a fuss. He thought he’d seen it all. But then he did scream, in shock and horror, because as the scooter drew level with him, something sharp slid out from beneath the chassis and took his right foot off at the ankle.

  A MIDDLE-AGED MAN of slight build wearing a trench coat and suede desert boots heard the man on the walkway scream. It was a choked, throaty sound, surprisingly low in pitch, but nevertheless loud. It was more a primal bellow than a shriek. It contained both surprise and terror. His ear, attuned to the taxonomy of distress, found this unusual but explicable. It was a virgin scream, penetrating the air from a throat unused to exultations. This was a man who spoke quietly, who kept his thoughts and emotions deeply contained. A good man? Not necessarily. If this man laughed, he laughed at others, and that was often a suppressed, internal glee. No great cheers from this man, no ovations.

  The man in the trench coat listened for the echo of the scream as its blunt wave ricocheted around the estate. He started walking towards the flats. He looked back once. The woman was still standing in her doorway, lit by the glow of a lamp on a small table in the hall. She made a shooing motion with her right hand. Hurry up!

  The man smiled. He had a handsome face, but much lined, especially around the eyes and across a forehead etched from decades of worry and uneasy sleep. He wore a beard that was mostly grey. It was neat but not with any vanity, just a rough scissor trim to keep it in check. The woman had wielded the scissors, tipping his chin back and fussing at him, earlier that day. He had laughed when he had looked down, as he had sat on a stool in her kitchen, at the thick pile of grizzled down that had settled in his lap. He scooped some up and examined it. It looked like a bowl of tiny birds’ wings. He resisted the impulse to throw them into the air and watch them drift around his head. Considering what the woman had told him earlier, that would have been provocative, to say the least.

  He picked up his speed and reached the entrance to the stairwell. He loped up the steps, three at a time, the soles of his desert boots making flat, gritty slaps on the concrete. He sprinted across the landing and onto the walkway, his long coat swinging around the backs of his legs like a cape.

  ROB WHIMPERED AND slid his key into the lock. His eyes were closed and his lips were moving, uttering a mumbled version of the 23rd psalm. He was still drunk and some of the verses were slurred, or obscure interpretations of the original.

  He pulled on the door, intending to open it a crack and peer out, but the weight of something heavy leaning against it pushed it fully open and he stumbled backwards and landed on his backside.

  The body of a man fell into the hall, his head and shoulders landing between Rob’s splayed boots. Rob shrieked.

  He scrambled backwards until his spine connected with the living room doorframe. He stared down at the body. It was that nurse who had visited him on the ward. Gregory. Rob’s eyes were wide in the gloom.

  “Greg!” he hissed. “Greg, mate.”

  Rob shifted around and crawled over to Graham Knott’s body. His hair hung over his face as he looked down at it. He gripped a shoulder and gave the body a quick shake. It groaned.

  Rob gripped the padded shoulders of Graham’s jacket and started to pull him into the flat. He had succeeded in getting most of him through the door when he looked up. His heart was trying to burrow out of his chest and he was sweating, both with exertion and fear. Whatever had done this might still be outside. It had been Gollick, he realised with horrible certainty. He squeezed his eyes shut and recommenced misquoting scripture.

  Rob dragged Graham backwards into the hall and stood up. He groaned and pressed the palms of his hands into the small of his back, and then he looked down and saw the thick trail of blood that had followed the unconscious nurse into the flat. For a moment, Rob just stood there, perplexed and confused. He was weaving in and out of a kind of sobriety brought on by seemingly endless mindfucks. He didn’t seem to be able to stay drunk for very long and this was a new cause for concern. He took a step forward and wondered why his enhanced perspective was failing to bring the nurse’s right foot into view.

  And then he saw why and fell to his knees.

  “No, no, no, no, no,” Rob said in a hoarse whisper. He plucked at Graham’s trousers, revealing the shredded flesh and splintered bone where his foot had been. A blood-darkened, sodden ring of sock still clung above the stump, neatly sheared off from the foot two inches above the anklebone. Blood was still pumping from the wound, but slowly, as if the instrument that had inflicted this had been hot as well as sharp and had partially cauterised it.

  Rob looked up, swiping his hair away from his face, his eyes wild. He pressed his hands together over his mouth and moaned.

  The amputated foot, still clad in its casual loafer, was on the doorstep, toe facing away from the door. Nearly out of his mind, Rob reached a trembling hand towards it, meaning perhaps to retrieve it, or poke it out of sight. He wasn’t sure what he was doing. And then he heard a noise, a mean-sounding reeeeeeeeee. It was loud; it was outside his flat.

  Rob froze.

  Grinning his splintered-glass grin, eyes smouldering with that soulless oceanic radiance, the thing that had once been Neil Gollick slowly rolled back across Rob’s doorstep riding a mobility scooter. Its back wheel reversed over Graham’s foot, crushing it with a sharp chicken-bone crack.

  “Oh,” Rob was saying. “Oh.”

  With a sudden wrench of the handlebars, Gollick accelerated forwards and swung the scooter in a tight arc. It drove into the doorframe and smashed a four-foot portion of it into a flimsy sheaf of splinters. A chunk of plasterboard the size of a paving stone blew out and hit the floor with a dusty smack. Gollick reversed, twisted the handlebars again and shot forwards. The front wheels bumped up the step and propelled half the scooter into the hall. Its low chassis caught on the lip at the bottom of the doorframe and it rocked there, back wheels whirling an inch above the ground. The engine squealed as Gollick twisted the accelerator. REEEEEEEEEEEEE.

  Rob was still rigid with fear but somewhere in his brain thoughts were forming, fruiting and dropping away, like a poor person’s meagre firework display in a cold back garden for a child who never had much. A couple of Roman candles and a sparkler were Rob’s last thoughts, but they were valid.

  I don’t know how many times I’ve tripped over that fucking step.

  And: What are all those metal things sticking out of that scooter? They look horribly sharp.

  And finally: What’s that fluffy thing rolling about in the shopping basket on the
back of that scooter?

  It looked like Ethel Gollick’s head. Surely not. Rob’s face took on a serene expression and then his eyes rolled up in their sockets and he fainted.

  THE MAN IN the long coat could see the scooter rocking on the step trying to get purchase. He was still running and as he approached, he leaped and hit the rider in the side with both feet. The rider shrieked and spilled from the scooter where it lay stunned on its back on the walkway. The man in the long coat landed neatly, legs astride the body.

  He held out a hand, as if to help the creature up. It stared at the man, eyes glowing, teeth grinding and scraping together with the bitter sound of nails on a blackboard. It lifted a black, taloned claw.

  The man smiled, and then slapped the hand aside. He reached down, took the hefty reflective jacket it wore by the collar and lifted the creature one-armed so that they were face to face. The creature’s boots dangled a few inches from the ground.

  The man spoke again. The creature cocked its head and hissed. Its eyes burned with an even greater intensity and it started to raise its arms, its claws reaching for the man’s throat.

  The man leaned forward so that his face was an inch away from the creature’s and he said, “I am the hypnopomp.”

  The creature’s arms fell to its sides. The light in its eyes dimmed and its jaw hung open.

  The man smiled again and held the creature at an arm’s length, and then dropped it over the side of the walkway.

  THE MAN TURNED back to the doorway of the flat. He raised his eyebrows at the spectacle of the two men sprawled in the hallway. They were both unconscious.

  He stepped over the threshold, past the scooter that had toppled against the doorframe. It was still running and the man reached over and turned the key, cutting it off. He knelt and examined the wound to the leg of the man nearest the door. This was the one who had screamed. No wonder. The man pulled a rag from his coat pocket and pressed it against the stump. There was now hardly any blood loss and when he took the rag away and looked at it, it was only blotted in a few places with a sticky, pinkish serum. He stood up and stepped over to the second man. He was snoring and otherwise unharmed.

  The man returned his attention to the amputee. He searched his jacket pockets until he found a mobile phone. He scrolled through the address book until he saw the name he had hoped would be there. As he thumbed the dial button he thought, as he often did, about fate, and hope, and synchronicity. These, and faith, were the tools of his trade. And, as it says elsewhere, without faith it’s impossible to please God.

  “Hello, Phil,” the man said when the phone was answered. “My name is Daniel. We need to meet.”

  The Night Clock hangs from rusting chains, from the roof of some immense and desolate terminal, its painted face upon a disc of slats of wood cut from reclaimed gallows planks. Its painted hands say ten past three.

  MY FRIEND ELIZABETH has one eye. She lost her left eye when she was a child. She was playing in the unruly cottage garden at the back of her grandmother’s house and tripped on a verge and fell headlong into a blackberry bush. Her face had been terribly scratched, as had her shoulders and upper arms, but the worst injury had been to her eyeball. It had been lacerated by the prickles. That’s how she describes it: lacerated by the prickles. Maybe that’s how the doctors described it to her as they tried to explain to a five-year-old girl that the eye was so badly damaged by infection it would have to be removed. If she hadn’t turned her head as she’d fallen, they said, she might have lost both eyes.

  At first, Elizabeth had experienced hallucinations. Her eye was dead in her head and sightless but still it saw things: vivid, complex and recurrent visual phantasms. She saw shapes, and colours, scaffolding patterns and swirls like piles of wings taking flight, lifting off from the ground. She was diagnosed with Charles Bonnet syndrome and six weeks later the eye was removed and the visions stopped. This had made Elizabeth sad because she’d thought that the visions were perhaps the beginning of some special extrasensory gift, but it had just been a mundane neurological phenomenon, and that was it.

  Elizabeth has a glass eye. She calls it an ocular prosthesis. It’s made from cryolite and it fits over an orbital implant and under the eyelids. It doesn’t have much motility but it’s quite lifelike if she stares straight ahead, and she’s a pretty woman, so people tend not to notice or remark on it very often.

  I met Elizabeth on a boating lake in Eastbourne when I was there on holiday with my parents as a child. It rained for the first few days of the week and we were staying in a guesthouse near the front. We had breakfast and an evening meal provided but between times we had to be out of the house. Across the road from the guesthouse was a little park. There was a playground with some swings, a seesaw and a tall iron slide, and the lake itself. It was more of a large pond but it had a wooden jetty with a modest fleet of shabby fibreglass pedal boats moored to it.

  It had been a dry afternoon and so we wandered over to the park and had a look at the boats. There was a man and a woman sitting on a bench at the edge of the path eating sandwiches from out of a blue fabric shopping bag. A thermos flask sat erect between them like a dutiful tartan-clad pet. They both smiled as we passed. They were getting on a bit but seemed happy enough. We all smiled back.

  We walked over to the jetty. The pedal boats were shaped like little snub-nosed speedboats and there seemed to be quite a bit of dirty rain water slopping about in the bottom of them and wet shoeprints on the seats. I turned my mouth down and looked up at my folks. They seemed intent that I should have a go on the lake though, and dad pointed across the water at something labouring out from behind a screen of rushes in the middle of the lake.

  “Look, Dan,” he said. “That little girl’s having a go. Jump in and have some fun before it rains again.”

  I was doubtful about the whole thing. I looked across the lake again, at the girl in the pedal boat. I could see her struggling, her narrow, bony knees pumping up and down as she worked the pedals that moved the paddles at the stern of the little tub. She was gripping the steering wheel and I could see how her teeth were clenched with the effort of controlling the rudder.

  “This is shit,” she muttered under her breath as the boat drifted up against the jetty. She climbed out and stood beside me. She was wearing flared jeans with turn-ups above a pair of red wellies and a pink fluffy jumper. The turn-ups were soaked. She stomped up the jetty and sat down on the bench next to the old couple.

  I returned my attention to the boats. They were two-seaters with a set of pedals either side of a raised plastic hump in the prow, perhaps where a gearbox would be housed if this thing had any workings. The steering wheel was above the right-hand set of pedals. One person to steer, then, and two to drive the thing. No wonder the girl had been struggling.

  I turned to point this out but mum and dad were over by the bench talking to the old couple. The woman was pouring steaming brown liquid from the little tartan flask into a small plastic cup and nodding and smiling. The old chap looked quite animated. He was nudging the girl who sat next to him so hard she nearly slid off the edge of the bench. I watched all this with curiosity and a strange sense of dread in my heart.

  The girl stood up. Mum and dad smiled over at me. Dad was making exaggerated pointing gestures towards the boats. I sighed as the girl walked back down the path, the soles of her boots dragging with slow rubbery scrapes against the concrete. They sounded like hate-filled, bitter kisses.

  She walked up to me and stood staring at the boats.

  “They want us to take one out together,” she said. “They think it would be fun for us to make friends.” She glanced up at me and for the first time I noticed something wrong with her eye. It remained fixed, as if glazed with defeat.

  I didn’t say anything. Girls filled me with palpitating despair. Especially pretty ones.

  “Come on, let’s get this over with.” And she stepped lightly back into one of the boats. Rainwater sloshed around her boots and the boat pi
tched and she gritted her teeth and hissed, “Come on!”

  Resigned, I took one last look back at the adults. They were all grinning away. The old boy was offering around some biscuits from the picnic bag. Dad was munching on a Bourbon. He waved. I lifted a hand, and then I turned and got in beside the girl.

  I was in the driving seat, so I gripped the wheel and put my feet on the pedals. The girl jammed her boots onto her pedals, looked across at me and nodded, her expression grim. We pushed off.

  It was fun. We got up a good head of steam between us. The nose lifted a bit and we scudded across the lake towards the screen of reeds. I kept my focus straight ahead, guiding the boat with the wheel and liking the feeling of resistance against the rudder and of the suspension above the water as it fashioned and slid beneath the fibreglass hull sending a widening, rippling ‘V’ in our wake.

  I twisted the wheel and we glided right, around the reeds. A duck, caught napping, uttered one cartoon ‘Quack!’ You could almost see the word written in a speech bubble above its head. It lifted its chest and belted off across the lake like a rocket. We both laughed.

  “I’m Elizabeth,” the girl said.

  “I’m Daniel,” I said.

  Laughing we came back around the screen of reeds and began to push for the jetty.

  When we got back mum and dad had already made great friends with the old couple. They were laughing and joking like they’d known each other for years.

  I looked at Elizabeth. She smiled at me. I blushed.

  “Don’t do a cherry,” she said, which made it so much worse. Now mum and dad were looking at me.