Beneath Ceaseless Skies #213 Read online

  Elles stood, loped over, grabbed a coin from the jar, and inserted it. “What are they, then?”

  “Corrections.”

  The comptroller’s back had been completely removed, the natural structure of the arms replaced. Unlike the factory owner, though, there was no steel cap obscuring Mr. Tock’s work. All the bones, the lungs, the heart, kidneys, liver, and intestines had been taken out, replaced with pneumatic automata. Pistons pulled and pushed the writing arm, wheezing air bags inflating and deflating, each minute adjustment of the fingers announced by a sharp click. The movements themselves were governed by a row of golden wheels positioned vertically over a revolving wax cylinder. The wheels were cut with hundreds of slim teeth that caught on equally tiny characters stamped into the wax. The input of each character opened or closed a constellation of switches, thousands of which sat in a block in the comptroller’s skull. An infinite assemblage of gears filled the rest of the chest cavity, whirring back and forth hypnotically, lifting and dropping into interlinking combinations. It completed the new line in the ledger and faltered into silence. At the end of every line: Mr. Tock’s hallmark of the dummy with its cog.

  “They’re intimate,” said Latch. Dark, close rooms inhabited by corrupt bodies returned to a purity of purpose. They were parts of a system. Broken parts. It wasn’t that Mr. Tock was transforming them, he was clarifying them, stripping away the graft to expose better functioning selves. What they were and should have been. “They’re letters.”

  “Letters?” said Elles. “We’re not his bloody pen pals!”

  “And yet, here we read.”

  “Fuck that, Latch.” She wrenched the pen from the comptroller’s fingers and snapped it in half. Ink splashed over the ledgers, blotting out the original and its correction. “He can kill people all he wants; it’s got nothing to do with us. You think he’s trying to reach out? Open up a dialogue? Forget it! What’s the point in talking to a psychopath, even in your imagination, when all they say it this?”

  Usually, Latch might have agreed with her. Usually. But usual wasn’t going around lately, and his sleep had been infected by that one repeating dream and its little, ticking girl. The destruction of the Watch Station was specific in its outcome. Only a Justice would be called to deal with it. Again, that feeling of eyes over his shoulder, on his back, watching what he did and how he did it. The more Latch thought about it, the more he was convinced that these letters, these fatal articulations of Mr. Tock’s anger, had been composed for someone like him. This didn’t really bare thinking about, but what else could Latch do. One question manifested and, like the comptroller’s computational kaleidoscope, the turning of this question drove another.

  What if these murders weren’t an attempt to open communication?

  What if they were a reply?

  * * *

  Sunday.

  When Latch hears her knocking on his door, he walks over and clutches the doorknob in his hand. It’s Carver’s sister again. She’s sobbing. His knuckles are white.

  “Help me.”

  Latch can’t speak. His knuckles creak. A Justice can only act after a magistrate has passed sentence, after a case has been brought before this magistrate, after the Watch has made an arrest, after a complaint has been filed with the Watch.

  “Please, help me.”

  The knocking is fainter now, but he feels their vibrations through the door. His hand aches. He rests his head against the door. He just can’t help her.

  “Please.”

  Hours after she’s gone, Latch is standing like this, like he is about to open the door but cannot because his hand is numb.

  * * *

  Saturday.

  He was holding her hand, walking towards the station. Her hand was cold, the grip painfully firm. He knew what she was going to do. She didn’t have any thoughts at all, just a tick, tick, tick, tick as she stepped inside. The girl was ignored. Nobody stopped to ask her if she was ok. It was as if she didn’t exist. She sat down on a bench set against the wall. Latch sat next to her and she exploded.

  Waking, Latch felt removed from his body. It was as if the dream had begun to dilate time, minutes passing between taking her hand and the blast, but when he opened his eyes the night was drained to dregs. Like the details of her face, the station, the swirling fires of the detonation, leached energy from the dull sluggish hours, rendering them into minutes of the highest clarity. His world, the world punctured by Mr. Tock’s designs, had become strange and frightening, its once familiar sights and sounds somehow refracted, askew. It was the same and not the same, and nothing felt as real as the dream.

  The curtains were drawn. He frowned. He’d been sitting in this chair, staring across the city, when he’d nodded off. White-blue light boomed off the curtains, the radiance almost painful, whatever was generating it humming steadily. Tears gathered in Latch’s eyes, but he couldn’t look away, couldn’t turn his head, couldn’t stand. It was like his body wasn’t there. Like the little girl beside him on the table, Latch was just a head. Somewhere behind him, the light projected his shadow against the curtains. His shadow, and another that moved back and forth, attaching to and detaching from his silhouette with a scrunch of unrolling plastic. The tears rolled down his cheeks.

  The second shadow enlarged, its head half-engulfing Latch’s. “What is it, I wonder, that you see when you look at what I’ve wrought, Justice?”

  The words were close. Close enough to smell the heat of them, the electrical tang of air limned by fading lighting. There was a slight buzz in them, an overlapping chorus of voices, old and young, men and women, as if a busy street had been recorded, then each individual separated out and replayed in unison. It was like the words didn’t follow one another naturally, selected instead from an immense archive of potential expression.

  “I see you,” said Latch.

  “But I don’t exist.” The shadow dropped back and resumed moving behind Latch. The clink and thump of tools being removed from a bag. Silhouettes of hammers, saws, a long, slightly recurved beam. “You cannot see me, only the revelation of my design. I do not cause a man to become a clock or a calculator. He is those things already.”

  Latch tried to catch a glimpse from the corner of his eye. No luck. “Clarity.”

  “Just so, Justice. Just so.”

  Keep him talking. “So what are you trying to say?”

  “Say?” The shadow paused, a gaunt figure stretching up the curtain and onto the ceiling. “You mistake their function. Those models are pieces in a larger mechanism. This mechanism spans the entire city and regulates all of its many lives. Part of this mechanism is called justice.”

  “Justice?”

  “Your particular brand of justice, to be specific.” The shadow lifted the recurved beam again and attached a length of chain to each of it upturned ends. The chains opened and spilt into three slimmer chains that crossed beneath two wide pans. The voice stepped closer. “I think you’ll be happy with your new arms, Justice. Very fine work, even if I say so.”

  Latch blinked, willed his legs to move, to leap up, to turn and fight, to run, to jump out the window.

  “I wouldn’t worry too much, Justice. The paralytic is quite effective. You didn’t feel a thing when I removed your old ones, so when I hollow out your chest and install these it will be a simple, painless affair. However, when I slice off your ears, out your eyes, tear out your tongue, cut open your skull and scoop out your brain, there may be some discomfort.”

  The shadow put down the completed balance beam and picked up the u-shaped form of a manual hand drill. Its bit was abnormally wide and serrated. More like the sort of thing you’d see during a lobotomy, only larger.

  The light was so bright. “What?”

  “It is said, by some, that a good Justice is deaf, blind, and dumb,” said Mr. Tock as he started boring through Latch’s shoulder. Blood dripped with a tick, tick, tick and he didn’t feel a thing. “We’re going to weigh those words and see how they balance
out.”

  Copyright © 2016 Daniel Baker

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Daniel Baker is a life-long reader and writer of all things fantasy and SF, living in the foothills of Melbourne’s Dandenong Ranges. Holding a PhD. in Literary Studies, he teaches Professional and Creative Writing, Shakespearean Studies, and Supernatural Literature at Deakin University, and through the fantasy that is academic research has presented papers around the world. “The Marvellous Inventions of Mr. Tock” is his sixth fiction publication, with other stories appearing in Aurealis and the CSFG anthologies.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  COVER ART

  “Ambush,” by Raphael Lacoste

  Raphael Lacoste is a Senior Art Director on videogames and cinematics. He was the Art Director at Ubisoft on such titles as Prince of Persia and Assassin’s Creed, winning a VES Award in February 2006. Wanting to challenge himself in the film industry, Raphael worked as a Matte Painter and Senior Concept Artist on such feature films as Terminator: Salvation, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Death Race, and Repo Men, then returned to the game industry as a Senior Art Director for Electronic Arts and Ubisoft. His cover art has been featured in BCS twice before, including “Knight’s Journey” in BCS #100. In October 2016, he will release Worlds, a limited-edition book of his artwork from iamag.co. View his gallery at www.raphael-lacoste.com.

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  ISSN: 1946-1076

  Published by Firkin Press,

  a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

  Compilation Copyright © 2016 Firkin Press

  This file is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 U.S. license. You may copy the file so long as you retain the attribution to the authors, but you may not sell it and you may not alter it or partition it or transcribe it.