Timekeeper

by Tara Sim

  Fear beat against Danny’s rib cage. Sweat dampened his collar.

  Don’t panic, he told himself. Don’t panic. Don’t panic.

  But he couldn’t stop thinking about something happening to this tower. The incident at Shere had been investigated, and Danny had been questioned. Though the authorities had found evidence of a bomb, no one could determine the reason behind the attack. Some thought it was terrorism. Some thought it was a misguided prank.

  An exploding mechanism was one of the rarer dangers mechanics faced. Still, that moment hovered over him, in his sleep and in the back of his mind. A ghost of terror.

  Now clock parts were disappearing from this tower.

  You don’t even know if it’s connected, he reminded himself.

  A cog the size of a dinner plate circled in the middle of the clockwork. The central cog was the most important component of the whole tower. Without it, the rest of the clock would refuse to run, and time would Stop until the cog was replaced.

  The central cog of the Shere tower had sliced Danny’s chin open, turning his white shirt crimson. He could still feel the burn of it, the violent kiss of hot powder against his skin. The jarring skips of time like an arrhythmic heartbeat. Cuts along his body had seeped blood onto the gouged floor created by the skidding of smoking gears, and all the banging, screeching, screaming—

  “Stop it,” he whispered, closing his eyes tight.

  He held himself in busy silence, a stillness that wasn’t still, as there was movement in the tower all around him. Danny opened his eyes and gazed balefully at the central cog. He laid his fingers on the gear and left trails in the dust as it turned, like ripples in a pond.

  “What are you doing?”

  Danny jerked back and nearly tripped over the package. The blond apprentice stood on the staircase, frowning down at him.

  “I …” How many times had a mentor told him not to touch the central cog, or that his fingers would be crushed if he played with the gears?

  “I was just checking it,” Danny said. “To make sure it’s … there.”

  You’re such an idiot.

  Brandon’s amber eyes flashed, not even glancing at the cog. “It’s there.”

  “Ah, you’re right. It is. Good.” Danny lifted the package to his shoulder, attempting to hide his burning face. “You like to arrive early, don’t you?” He received no answer. “Let’s get started.”

  When they reached the clock room, Brandon’s frown dissolved into his earlier expression of curiosity. Danny noticed that the apprentice wore the same outfit as last time: tight trousers and a baggy shirt. His clavicle peeked out from underneath his collar. Danny swallowed.

  “You know,” he started, then lost his nerve, unbuttoning his coat instead. When he looked back up, the apprentice was staring at him. “You need to wear different clothes for this sort of work.”

  Brandon tilted his head to one side, then looked Danny up and down with a small smile. It was such a thorough assessment that Danny felt his earlier blush return like a wave of heat.

  “Should I dress like you?”

  “Yes, I suppose.” Danny typically wore a brown or black work vest, the silver chain of his timepiece hanging from a small pocket. His tall boots were worn, but most of the decorative copper gearwork near the heels remained intact.

  The apprentice continued to smile. Danny had no clue what was so funny but wanted to change the subject as soon as possible.

  He shifted on his feet and outlined the plan to install the minute hand. Brandon wouldn’t have much to do beyond serving as an extra pair of hands, and to observe. Brandon’s light eyes flitted around Danny’s face as he talked, sometimes glancing down at the chain of his timepiece or the still-wrapped minute hand.

  Danny noticed the apprentice was as tall as he was, his waist slim under the large shirt, his body made of wiry sinew like a wound mainspring. Brandon had a nice face. Almost too nice. It was lean and smooth, and Danny wondered if he ever had to shave. He suddenly had the absurd urge to touch the boy’s jaw. Would that be strange?

  His eyes trailed lower, and he barely stopped himself from gasping.

  The apprentice’s left hand was deformed. It curled in on itself, shrunken within its baggy sleeve.

  How did I not see that before? Danny thought, furiously trying to recall their first meeting. Perhaps he had been too preoccupied, but to not even notice …

  Danny’s ears burned with silence, and he realized he had stopped talking. The apprentice watched him warily.

  Danny cleared his throat. “Right. Let’s begin.” He wouldn’t—couldn’t—mention it now.

  They again lowered the scaffolding down the clock face, into the bitter cold. Without his coat, Danny was shivering in no time. Brandon didn’t seem affected.

  But it wasn’t just the cold that made Danny shiver. The height blurred his vision, and he triple-checked that the cables were secure. He remembered the easy way Brandon had scaled the clock face compared to the difficulty he’d had locating the right tools.

  “How many jobs have you been on?” Danny asked as they ran the cables down.

  The apprentice looked up, as if the sky held the answer. “Just one.”

  His hand slipped on the rope. “You mean that was your first job?” Brandon nodded. Danny cursed himself, wishing he’d handled the situation better, but it was much too late now.

  “Hold on,” Danny said, “apprentices usually start at twelve or thirteen. Aren’t you a bit old to be starting on assignments?”

  Brandon looked Danny up and down again. “Aren’t you a bit young to be a mechanic?”

  Danny tried not to clench his jaw. Maybe this boy wasn’t so different from the others after all. “Is that what you think?”

  “No. I’ve only ever seen older mechanics.”

  “Apprentices can become mechanics by seventeen, if they know what they’re doing.”

  “Well,” Brandon said, “you certainly know what you’re doing.”

  Danny waited for the sarcasm to register, but it never did. He felt a curious lightness, momentarily driving away the pang of the damaged tower. Danny ducked his head and muttered a sheepish thanks.

  He watched Brandon as they worked. He wasn’t using his left hand much. How had he held up the Roman numeral the last time? Danny tried to remember and found that he couldn’t.

  “Are you ready?” Brandon asked, putting on his abseiling belt.

  “Er, sure.” Danny couldn’t have sounded less certain if he’d tried. Biting his lip, he peered down at the scaffolding. Brandon glanced at him out of the corner of his eye.

  “You look like you know interesting stories,” Brandon said suddenly. “Do you?”

  “Do I … know stories? Make-believe ones, you mean? I think everyone knows at least one story.”

  Brandon gave him a sly smile. “Tell me your one story, then.”

  It was a strange request, but Danny racked his brain anyway, tiptoeing away from the cruder stories that Cassie knew by heart. Riffling through his childhood memories, he recalled the fairy tales his mother would read him from a green leather-bound book they still kept somewhere in the house. He snatched the first one that came to mind.

  “Have you heard the story of Rapunzel?” Brandon shook his head. “I won’t tell it very well, just to warn you.” He cleared his throat. “There was once a witch who lived in a tower …”

  As they scaled down the clock face, Danny told the story of Dame Gothel, who kept the girl Rapunzel in a tower until her hair had grown amazingly long. Then a prince heard her singing, and saw the way Rapunzel pulled the witch up with her hair. Thinking to try the same, he called for Rapunzel to lower her hair.

  “And when she pulled him up and they met, they fell in love, and he came again and again to see her. He asked her to marry him, and they escaped the tower and were married in his kingdom.”

  Brandon listened quietly the whole time. Danny realized they were already on the scaffolding, the minute hand resting h
eavily at their feet.

  “What about the witch?” Brandon asked.

  Danny had asked the same question when he was young, as his mother closed the book. She had paused to think for a moment.

  “The witch never bothered them again,” she’d said, brushing back his hair to kiss his forehead. “Rapunzel and the prince were careful. And they were together. From there on out, the world was theirs.”

  But Danny had gone back to read the ending for himself. Remembering it now, he took a deep breath.

  “Rapunzel accidentally mentioned the prince, and the witch was furious, so she cut off all of Rapunzel’s hair and cast her away. When the prince came, the witch used Rapunzel’s hair to hoist him up. Then she dropped him onto a bed of thorns, blinding him.”

  The apprentice barely blinked, so Danny continued. “The prince wandered for days until he heard Rapunzel singing. He followed the sound, and when they were reunited she was so happy that she wept, and her tears healed his blindness. How that happened, I couldn’t tell you. It’s a fairy tale. All sorts of strange things happen in fairy tales.”

  “I see.” Brandon gazed solemnly at the clock face where the new Roman numeral II had been installed. “I’m glad they were together, at least. Although I feel bad for the witch.”

  “What? Why?”

  “She must have acted that way for a reason. She didn’t hate Rapunzel, or else she would have done something worse to her. Maybe she loved her. Maybe she felt betrayed. Rapunzel and the prince had a happy ending, but she didn’t.”

  “She’s the villain. She’s not supposed to have a happy ending.”

  “I know.” Brandon’s eyes were unfocused. “It just makes me wonder. If she’d done something different, she could have had a happy ending, too.”

  Danny stared at him until a blast of wind slapped him back into the present. Shivering, he reached for the minute hand. “Can you hold onto this end, here?”

  Together they aligned the end of the hand to the cannon pinion, Danny being careful to take most of the weight. He screwed in the industrial bolts, checking the ease of movement. All the while he explained what he was doing and why. Brandon listened as raptly as he had listened to the story.

  When Danny fastened the hand, he closed his eyes and tried to grasp the time fibers that flowed around the clock. They weren’t frayed as they had been when the numeral was missing, but they were scattered. He gathered as many as he could, pulling them in tight. His fingers twitched as if he were knitting.

  Finally, with the twelve main fibers drawn together, Danny screwed in the last bolt. Stepping back, they watched as the longer minute hand slowly traveled around the clock’s face until it stopped close to the six position. Just about 12:30. The pain in Danny’s chest vanished.

  People from the market had come over to watch, and just as they had the last time, they cheered. The corners of Danny’s lips turned up.

  There was still the matter of the old minute hand, which had been taken back to the office for analysis. He had half a mind to snoop around the town some more, perhaps take a look at the ironworker’s forge.

  Maybe he really did read too many detective novels.

  But he couldn’t deny that the incident was suspicious. And after what had happened in Shere, he felt justified in his caution.

  “Do you have a theory?” he asked Brandon. “About the missing tower parts.”

  The apprentice hesitated. Danny took his silence as a no.

  “This isn’t normal. There has to be some reason why it’s happening.” At least now, with a second assignment under his belt, he would hopefully be closer to getting the Assignment.

  As Danny gathered his tools, Brandon studied the clock face, an unreadable expression on his own. “You mentioned your father last time,” Brandon said. “What happened to him?”

  Danny couldn’t tell what to be more surprised by: that the apprentice didn’t already know, or that he’d asked. Everyone knew what had happened to Christopher Hart. But there was something annoyingly sincere about Brandon’s gaze as he took in Danny’s reaction.

  “That’s not the sort of story you want to hear,” he said. “It’s a sad one.”

  “I like sad stories, too.”

  Danny’s anger flared like wind through a flame, but he quashed it and gestured to the cables on either side of the scaffolding.

  “Let’s get inside.”

  After they dragged the scaffolding back into the tower, Danny smoothed down his runaway hair. He glanced several times at his apprentice, who was taking in the view of the still-bustling marketplace.

  “He disappeared three years ago.”

  Brandon turned, surprised. He lifted a hand, like he would touch Danny’s arm in sympathy. Danny turned away before he could. He wasn’t sure what would happen if Brandon touched him now.

  “How?”

  Danny brushed the dust from his trousers. “Not disappeared, exactly. He was a mechanic, like me. One of the best. Worked on Big Ben all the time.” Some of his favorite childhood memories were when his father and Matthias told him about the massive clockwork inside Big Ben and the four gleaming faces at the very top, staring out at all of London.

  “He started training me when I was young. We took apart clocks and timepieces, and read books about clock towers around the world. Mum had hopes of sending me to Cambridge or Oxford, but I refused. I wanted to be like Dad. I wanted to be a clock mechanic.” He smiled as a memory unfurled within him, a memory of his father and him laughing when a spring had become lost within his mother’s curly hair. But as he continued, the smile died.

  “We saved up to go on holiday to France, since Mum’s always wanted to go, but something happened to Evaline Tower in Maldon. They needed someone to look into it.”

  Danny swallowed. His throat felt tight, like the hand of the past gently squeezed it. “My father volunteered. Mum wouldn’t leave for our holiday without him, so we were stuck at home. He went to Maldon and didn’t send any word back to us.

  “The next day we heard the town was Stopped.”

  Brandon cocked his head to one side. “Stopped?”

  “Lord, don’t you know anything? It’s when the clock stops working altogether. Until it’s fixed, the town Stops, and the people inside are trapped. Time can’t move forward. No seasons pass, days don’t transition to night, people don’t age. And no one can speak to the ones trapped inside, not even through a telephone. They’re all just … stuck there, caught in an endless loop.”

  Danny again recalled the horrifying moment in Shere when the clockwork exploded. If he hadn’t fixed the clock in time, he would have suffered the same fate as his father.

  A voice in his mind whispered that maybe he should have.

  “We don’t know why the town Stopped, or how the clock can be fixed. We don’t know anything. All we can do is wait and see if there’s any change.”

  Danny sat on the staircase leading to the platform and rested his arms on his knees. “Mum keeps waiting for him to walk through the door, but I know he won’t. Once a town is Stopped, it’s Stopped until the clock is fixed.”

  Everyone leaves, in the end.

  The apprentice settled next to Danny, his eyebrows furrowed. “I’m sorry. You’re right, that is a sad story.”

  “You asked to hear it,” Danny reminded him, cross. He wasn’t even sure why he had bothered to tell him. But if Brandon didn’t hear it from him, some other mechanic or apprentice would have been all too pleased to trade gossip.

  There was also something about the apprentice that made Danny feel his words would not be judged. That it was safe to tell his story here.

  “Are you sure nothing can be done?” Brandon asked.

  “Well. There is one thing. They’re building a new clock tower just outside of Maldon. It’s almost complete, but the clockwork needs to be forged and installed. The Lead thinks that if this tower creates a new area of time, it’ll cross into Maldon’s time zone and free the town. Some of the mechanics say it
won’t work. Others don’t want the tower built at all.” He rubbed his eyes. “But it has to work. It has to. If they can’t find a way, I will. I have to see Dad again.”

  I have to tell him I’m sorry.

  Brandon mulled over the story. “I think you’ll see your father again.”

  Others would speak such platitudes with caution, knowing in the back of their minds that it was possible Danny would never be reunited with his father. The words were cardboard condolences, spoken over and over in a bland, frustrating mantra: “Keep faith. It’ll be all right. Be strong, Danny.”

  He looked at the apprentice and saw no pity in his eyes. Just concern. “We’ll see,” he said, standing. He stretched his arms above his head and heard his shoulder pop. “What do you think, drinks to celebrate the repair?”

  Brandon’s head shot up. “Drinks?”

  Danny glanced outside. “I guess it’s a little early. Still, why not?”

  The apprentice hesitated, then shook his head, his eyes averted. “No, thank you.”

  Danny lingered, hoping Brandon would change his mind. When it became clear he was on his own, he reached for his coat.

  He heard his name and turned around. Brandon still sat there, hands on his knees. Danny had to look twice; his left hand was now identical to the right. Unmarred. Whole.

  Then what the hell had he seen? A trick of the light?

  “What is it?” Danny asked when Brandon remained silent, heart beating a little faster. He willed him to change his mind. To jump up and say that drinks were a good idea after all. To explain his damned hand.

  The apprentice chewed his lips and shook his head again. Disappointed, Danny slung his bag over his shoulder.

  “’Bye, then.” He started down the stairs feeling Brandon’s eyes on his back. It wasn’t until he reached the bottom that he realized something.

  He had been too busy reciting the story of Rapunzel to focus on his fear of the scaffolding—or his fear of the clock.