Clock Work Read online

  Clock Work

  by

  Jameson Scott Blythe

  © 2014 Jameson Scott Blythe

  All rights reserved.

  For Krista

  1.

  Heart pounding inside her chest, feet pounding against the floor, Parker ran down one dark aisle and turned onto another. She was in the warehouse behind the shop. She was going to die because she'd left her iPad at work.

  Or rather, she was going to die because she'd gone back for it.

  Should have just left it here and gotten it in the morning and gone one night without checking Facebook or playing Angry Birds.

  I could have read a book.

  Watched a movie.

  Taken a bath.

  Instead, she was running for her life.

  After locking up for the night, Parker had met a friend for a drink. As she left the pub, she realized her iPad wasn't in her bag. The last place she'd had it was on her workbench, back at the shop. There was a moment where she considered going home, leaving it there till morning, but she'd shaken off that idea and walked back.

  The shop had been closed for almost two hours. She let herself in with her copy of the key.

  Three men were waiting inside. Each wore blue coveralls and a Halloween mask—scaled skin, pointed ears, fanged teeth. Very realistic, at least from a short distance. Parker hadn't let them get too close. One moved to block the front door, the others closed in on her, and Parker bolted for the only available avenue of escape—the door that led to the warehouse.

  As far as escape routes went, the warehouse was a good option. Like a much larger version of the shop that preceded it, the cavernous building was a near-maze of randomly placed shelves and aisles, with every available inch of storage space packed with junk—some of it worthless, some of it priceless, none of it organized.

  Parker reached the end of an aisle and paused, catching her breath, thankful for the morning runs she'd made a habit these past months. She'd put some distance between herself and the masked men. No one had followed her into the warehouse. She wondered—and hoped—that they would just leave, forget about her and whatever they had come here looking for.

  What could they be looking for?

  The shop was so disorganized it wouldn't surprise her if there was some priceless artifact unknowingly buried amid the horde.

  A door opened and light from the shop spilled through the aisles. Parker stepped into the shadows. The door was held open for a moment before slamming closed, snuffing out the light. She listened, but heard nothing. No footsteps, no breathing. She wanted to pull out her phone and dial 9-1-1, but the glowing screen and the sound of the call would broadcast her location.

  Slowly and stealthily, she moved between the scaffold-like shelves, deeper into the warehouse. Tiny, dim bulbs in the ceiling above gave just enough illumination that it wasn't pitch black. Her head turned constantly, eyes and ears straining for any clue to her pursuers' locations, but finding none.

  Minutes ticked by. She found the far wall and followed it. She knew there was an exit back here somewhere, could probably have found it easily if the lights were on, but the vast and cluttered room was unfamiliar in the dark.

  At least the creeps in here with me haven't found the light switch.

  Up ahead, something caught her eye. A thin sliver of light. She stared at it a moment before her mind recognized what it was—light from outside, slipping under a door.

  Very faintly, a few feet above the sliver, she could make out two words printed in the shadows: FIRE EXIT.

  She had found a way out.

  Parker looked around, seeing that she was alone, but sensing that she was not. The darkness was getting to her. Everywhere, she could feel eyes on her skin. Calm and steady, she walked toward the exit.

  When she was six paces from the door, the dim lights above went bright. She raised her hand to shield her eyes. Through her fingers she saw that one of the masked men was crouched down next to the exit.

  He lunged.

  Parker kicked, her foot stomping his gut, knocking him back down. A pair of strong arms seized her from behind. She fought. One of her arms squirmed from the grip and she stabbed her elbow back, felt it connect with something soft, and her attacker let go.

  She spun, swinging her fist. She had her keys in her hand, the points protruding between her knuckles.

  The clawed fist caught her attacker in the side of the face, just below the eye.

  She was drawing her foot back to kick him between the legs when she was grabbed from behind, again. The other attacker, the one who'd been crouched by the door. She'd momentarily forgotten about him. Parker was pulled off her feet. She landed hard. The man held her in some kind of wrestling hold.

  She continued to struggle, twisting her body, kicking her feet. The other man, the one whose face she'd raked with her keys, knelt next to her. Close enough to smell his breath, which reeked of spoiled meat.

  He was bruised and bleeding where she had hit him, and Parker realized that he wasn't wearing a mask. This was his face—lipless, scaled, hairless. The face of a snake stretched onto the skull of a man. Had her rational mind been fully able to process it, she would have screamed.

  She didn't know what she expected to happen next. A hard punch to the jaw to knock her unconscious, maybe. Not teeth.

  But teeth was what she got.

  The snake-man grabbed her by the wrist with a cold hand. Time seemed to slow. She heard herself scream and watched as the thing opened its mouth, revealing a black tongue, and clamped its rows of sharp teeth onto the pale flesh of her forearm.

  Pressure and piercing pain, beyond the point she would have imagined possible. She felt as if her bones would snap. Numbness spread throughout the limb and every ounce of her strength seemed to evaporate. She felt her body become dead weight. Her vision blurred and then went black.

  ***

  Parker had been in Cork for two months. Prior to that, she'd been in Dublin, studying abroad for a semester. With the term over and three months left on her visa, she'd traveled south to work at the antique shop, a job she'd found through her university. She was a studio arts major with a focus in pre-industrial machinery. The shop needed someone to repair clocks and show customers around.

  The repair work was good practice, but helping customers was, for the most part, boring. The majority were middle-aged professionals on day trips from Dublin or somewhere further north, trying to hock heirlooms passed down from dead or dying relatives, impatient and eager for a few extra Euros. Parker preferred the eccentrics, the collectors and art dealers with designer clothes and strange haircuts.

  But her favorite customers were those who brought in some personal item to be fixed—the widowers with pocket watches, the old women with music boxes. Gifts from lost loves and artifacts from long-gone youths. The way they smiled, the way their eyes lit up when some broken thing worked again, it was as if she had not merely fixed some small mechanical function, but restored some part of their life. This work was rewarding to Parker in a way she had never experienced or thought possible. She'd gotten into her area of study because she'd had a thing for steampunk since her early teens. She had vague future career ambitions where her income would be divided between art sales and conceptual design for film and television.

  Even with the occasional days where the work was rewarding on some deep and personal level, most of the time she felt like a piece of clockwork herself, a cog going through the same motions, over and over. Her social life was almost nonexistent. The only friends she'd made in Cork were a local girl who did freelance graphic design (they'd connected over Craigslist) and a waitress at one of the local pubs. Most nights, Parker stayed in, too often playing with her iPad when she could be reading or writing let
ters to friends.

  ***

  The warehouse was dark again. They'd carried her to the front and left her on the floor, slumped against a shelf. Something was digging uncomfortably into her back, but she didn't have the strength to adjust her body.

  The door leading to the shop was held open by a stack of boxes. Through the doorway, Parker could see the three creature-men moving around.

  Her arm burned where the one had bitten her. Blisters had formed around the wound and it looked infected, like it had been festering for a week.

  Some kind of toxin in the bite, she thought. She could already feel it in her blood. She felt drunk and sick and feverish, like she was boiling from the inside out. Pain spread through her body as muscles tightened and cramped.

  The creature-men were searching the shop, aisle by aisle, shelf by shelf. They weren't paying any attention to her, at least for the moment. She could have snuck away if she'd been able to move.

  She saw movement in her peripheral vision, a shifting of shadows. Parker turned slowly, her neck stiff with pain.

  He knelt beside her, blue-green eyes level with hers, the lower-half of his face covered with a dark bandana, like a train robber in an old movie.

  He pulled down his mask to a reveal a handsome, unshaven face.

  A face Parker recognized.

  ***

  He'd been in the shop three or four days earlier. He wasn't the type of guy you forgot. Tall and broad-shouldered and athletic (even wearing a jacket, it was obvious he did some kind of physical training). It wouldn't have surprised her to learn he was a soccer player from one of the country's semi-pro teams. His green-blue eyes stood out in contrast to his dark hair and scruffy three-day beard. He was older than her and handsome in that universal kind of way that would have made him stand out in any city around the world.

  She'd given him a brief tour of the shop, and then he'd browsed for nearly three hours, looking at every item on display. Finally, he'd come over to ask for her help with something.

  The device was a wooden box with a clock face on the top. It reminded Parker of a piece of ancient navigational equipment—perhaps it had been salvaged from a ship and converted into a timepiece. The sides were embellished with ornate symbols burned into the wood, faded with time and obscured by polish. More symbols marked a series of dials set below the clock face, which seemed to be used for setting a date, or coordinates.

  It was unique, expensive, and unusual.

  "Does it work?" he asked.

  A tag with a number was attached. Parker stepped away to find the winding tool, a small crank that wore a tag with a matching number.

  He watched Parker wind the device, and they both watched the hands begin to tick.

  They ticked backwards.

  "That's odd," he said.

  "We see a few of these, actually. Some were built that way, novelty items. Others were rigged as practical jokes."

  "Can you fix it?"

  "We'll have to bill you for labor even if I can't. Store policy."

  "That's fine."

  "Let me talk to my boss, I'll get you an estimate."

  Something so old and in good condition did not come cheap, but the customer didn't bat an eye when she told him the price. She figured him for someone from the tech industry in Dublin, an investor or a very well-compensated developer. She'd seen the type during her time there—young, moneyed, and shabbily dressed (he wore boots, jeans, and a well-worn motorcycle-style jacket). He left a number where he could be contacted when the repairs were done.

  The device was far older than anything Parker had ever worked on. It took her two full days to rebuild it to tick clockwise. When she called to tell him it was ready he appeared ten minutes later. He'd been waiting someplace nearby.

  He thanked her, paid, and left. Later that night, when Parker found herself eating dinner alone, she'd fantasized about being on a date with him. Not a typical thing for her.

  Thinking of this as he knelt beside her now, Parker blushed and found it difficult to make eye contact.

  He isn't even real, she thought. You're dying. This is a fever dream. A fantasy in the last moments of life.

  Her own Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.

  He leaned closer. His breath was warm against her ear as he whispered, "I'll be right back."

  He pulled his mask over the lower-half of his face, and a hood over his head, leaving only green-blue eyes staring out between dark fabric.

  He moved alongside the doorway, where he reached under his jacket and unsheathed a short sword with a wide blade. Behind him, the three creature-men continued their search of the shop, oblivious to his presence.

  He waited at the room's edge, watching the creature-men in the reflection on the sword's blade, his body tense with energy.

  When the creature-men's backs were turned, he shot into the room. Parker stared through the doorway, desperate for any glimpse of what was happening. There was a high-pitched scream, like a howler monkey. A figured stumbled past, blood spraying from a wound in its neck, and disappeared out of sight.

  Parker still believed she was dreaming, enacting some last-moment revenge fantasy on her killers.

  She smiled, letting it play out before her eyes, her poisoned mind unable to fully grasp the idea of the mortality slipping out of her.

  Then something came bouncing out of the shop and rolled unevenly across the floor, stopping when it hit the shelf beside her. She looked down and saw the head of a creature-man. The one that had bit her—it had cuts below its eye where she'd raked it with her keys. Its mouth opened, as if testing its ability to breathe without a body.

  A heavy boot kicked it aside. Parker looked up into a pair of blue-green eyes.

  He bent down and lifted her over his shoulder. Her body felt like it must weigh several tons, but didn't seem to give him any trouble.

  He took her deeper into the warehouse. The last thing she remembered was feeling cool air on her face as she was carried outside.

  2.

  The man named Reed stood a safe distance from the edge of the bog, watching the three bodies slowly sink below the blanket of live vegetation on top, and into the dead, watery vegetation below. He'd thrown the dead goblins as far into the mire as he could, which was considerably far—though he was as slender as his name implied, Reed possessed an otherworldly strength.

  When he was much younger, before he'd moved on to more lucrative employment opportunities, Reed had earned his way arm-wrestling and bare-knuckle boxing. The men he went against were often twice his size. The odds would pay ten-to-one on a bad night. No one in their right mind would bet on the scrawny, near albino. At least, not until they'd seen him throw a punch.

  Reed felt his phone buzz inside his jacket pocket. He answered, knowing who it would be even without looking at the number.

  "Is the job finished?" he asked, skipping hello and moving straight to the reason for the call.

  "We just locked up the shop. All signs of the night's events have been erased."

  "Did you find the missing piece?"

  "Yes, the hand. We found it. What would you like us to do with it?"

  "You can send it along with your invoice. I'll dispose of it."

  "Thank you mister Reed. If you require any further services, we always appreciate your business."

  "And I always appreciate the quality of your work."

  Reed said goodbye and ended the call.

  He'd been working with the cleaning crew almost as long as he'd been feeding corpses into the bog. They were good at what they did, and what they did was remove any and all signs of death and violence—blood, gore, missing parts. And they were available on short notice.

  When the three thieves Reed had hired to find the device didn't contact him, he went to the shop and broke in. There, he found that someone had killed the three goblins. Dismembered them.

  The bog's surface bubbled, and one at a time, the bodies moved, nudged by something in the black water below. One, two, thre
e, Reed thought. This always fascinated him. The beast could count.

  The dead creatures bobbed. A moment later, three tentacles emerged—giant, boneless arms of muscle, each thicker than a man's torso. Their skin was slimy black rubber, the undersides lined with pale suction cups the size of saucers. Their appearance was accompanied by a strong smell of ammonia.

  The movement of the appendages seemed almost synchronized as they coiled around the bodies. Reed heard bones cracking under the pressure of their squeeze.

  Slowly, the tentacles retreated under the oil-black water, taking the bodies with them. A monster of such proportions did not feel the need to rush.

  ***

  Back in the city, to a neighborhood that was not his favorite. Here, the elements of old and new didn't quite homogenize. The franchise shops, the advertisements, the flat-screen TVs visible through the windows of the pubs—to Reed, they looked undignified on the old buildings and streets.

  Reed walked down a lamplit sidewalk, stopping at the entrance to a gated alley. A perfect example of the neighborhood, the gate was ancient, but the lock shiny and new. He paused a moment, his head turning left, right. Alone on the quiet street, he removed a key from a jacket pocket and entered. The gate locked on its own as he pressed it closed behind him.

  The alley was much darker than the world outside. The air was frigid and the beam from Reed's flashlight barely cut through the darkness, which was made up of something denser than normal night and shadow. Centuries of lightless cold had been compressed into the ancient stone blocks that made up the walls. Each step seemed to take him miles away from the city.

  Another lock and another key brought Reed into a long-forgotten room inside a long-forgotten building. In strong contrast to the path that led him here, the temperature inside was warm and humid.

  The room was circular. Couches—once plush, now sagging and chewed by rats—fit snuggly against the walls, which were covered in molding wallpaper that called to mind the flaking flesh of a leper. At the room's center, a corkscrewing staircase descended into the floor below.