Timekeeper

by Tara Sim

  “Uh, sorry,” Danny croaked. “I, er …”

  Not good. He probably looked like a lunatic.

  Danny forced a laugh. “Sorry, I just had a thought, but it’s gone now. What’d you say your name was? Brandon …?”

  “Summers,” the boy finished, the name clipped around his frown. “They should’ve told you.”

  “I see.” Brandon Summers. The blond boy had said his name was Brandon Summers. Danny couldn’t recall half the names of his past apprentices, but he had remembered that one.

  Danny felt as if eyes were on him, and the space between his shoulder blades tightened. He heard a faint echo of laughter in the whirring of the clock’s gears.

  “You all right?” New Brandon asked. “You want a lie-down, or—?”

  “No, no, I’m fine. Let’s … let’s get to work.”

  They settled in to discuss the plan of action. Danny could barely concentrate, and his explanation was filled with pauses. He turned to his tools and quickly looked around.

  There he was: standing so that New Brandon couldn’t see him, wearing his white billowy shirt and tight trousers. The boy met Danny’s eyes and smiled, his mouth a mischievous curl. In a blink he was gone again.

  “Losing my mind,” Danny muttered. “Losing my damn mind.”

  Thankfully, the repair could be done without having to use the scaffolding. The clock room allowed them access to the clock face, gleaming yellow and white as the sun slanted through. The floorboards had been stripped of color after decades of sun exposure, but the light turned the dust motes floating through the air into specks of gold.

  Danny and New Brandon—Real Brandon?—each donned goggles before preparing the sharp-smelling cleaning solution. They wiped the length of the fissure with it, making sure there were no small pieces of glass residue, and waited for the surface to dry. Then Danny sealed the crack with strong resin, which was specially formulated to mimic the glass.

  He felt the strange boy’s gaze the entire time, resting like a hand upon his back.

  Once they’d sanded the resin and chipped the extra away, Danny told the apprentice to watch as he set his hands upon the crack. He closed his eyes and felt the fibers there, intact, but with a line through them that threatened their delicate system. Danny erased it until there was only the thinnest hairbreadth remaining. He sealed the rest of the gap by taking tiny amounts of each thread and pinching them together until time rolled like an air current through the fibers.

  He opened his eyes and saw the crack was healed. The apprentice whistled appreciatively as Danny stepped back.

  “Nice work, mechanic.”

  “Uh, thank you. If you would help me clean up?”

  With nothing left for him to do, Real Brandon prepared to leave. He hesitated by the stairs.

  “You won’t tell the office about the mix-up, will you? About them sending payment for the other jobs?” At Danny’s silence, Brandon turned fully toward him. “I normally wouldn’t ask. But my family—”

  “I won’t say anything.”

  “It’s just that I’ve five siblings,” Real Brandon said in a rush. “They need new clothes, and—”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t mention it.”

  The apprentice had taken something out of his pocket: a tiger’s eye marble, a sphere of dark amber with a black slit running down the middle. He fiddled with it, but not nervously, as Danny tended to fiddle with his timepiece. Rather, he rolled the marble around in his fingers as though he was in the practice of doing it often.

  “You sure, mate?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. You’re free to go.” He watched as the apprentice galloped down the stairs, eager to be away before Danny changed his mind.

  Danny sat on a box near the clock face and listened to the ticking at his back. He took out his timepiece and checked the time, pocketed it, forgot the time, and checked again.

  When he looked up, the blond boy was standing before him.

  Danny swallowed. He looked like an average boy Danny’s age. But there was something about him—something that had been there from the start—that was more than average, like the evasive unknown between the time fibers Danny reached for in the darkness.

  It couldn’t be true. He didn’t want it to be true. But the threads of the story kept unraveling, wanting him to find the truth hidden inside. The question emerged before he could stop himself.

  “You’re the clock spirit, aren’t you?”

  The boy didn’t respond, but smiled with a glimmer in his amber eyes.

  “No. No, that can’t right. That’s not …” Danny stared at him, at a loss. The boy stared back. “Possible.”

  Anything is possible, his father had said.

  “God,” Danny breathed. “I didn’t think—I mean, when you’ve never seen one before—Do you really live here? You’re actually the …?”

  The spirit cocked his head to one side. The scar on his cheek had gone, sealed like the crack on the clock face.

  “Silly question, of course you are.” Danny was trying to remain calm, but every second only heightened his amazement. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You thought I was your apprentice. I wanted to help.”

  “Yes, but, you weren’t. And I looked like an idiot.” Danny groaned and rested his forehead on his palms.

  The spirit sat on the box beside him. “I should have told you earlier. I’m sorry.”

  Danny dropped his hands and looked up. This close, the spirit’s eyes were mesmerizing, almost as striking at the glint of the opal glass behind them.

  “What’s your real name?” Danny whispered.

  “Colton.”

  Of course. The name of the tower.

  “Another silly question. God, I’m thick.” He rubbed his eyes. “Why didn’t you show yourself to Brandon? The real Brandon?”

  Colton linked his hands together between his knees. “I’ve never revealed myself to anyone.”

  “And yet here you are. With me. Why?”

  The spirit tipped his head so that some of his bright hair fell forward. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?” When the spirit only shrugged, Danny rose and began to pace around the room. “You show yourself to me, help me repair you, but you don’t show yourself to anyone else. You speak to me, and yet you … Hang on.” Danny stopped, his excitement tripled. “Why do you keep falling apart? Who’s doing this to you? If anyone knows, it’s you!”

  Colton looked away. Danny knelt before him, but the spirit wouldn’t meet his eyes.

  “It’s all right, you can tell me. I’m a mechanic, it’s my job to know if someone’s tampering with your tower. I mean, it’s not as if you’re the one doing it.”

  No response.

  Danny stared at him, heartbeat quickening. “Did you do this to yourself?” When Colton still didn’t answer, Danny’s frustration boiled into anger. “What’s the matter with you? Why would you do that?”

  The spirit disappeared. Just vanished. Danny gasped and fell on his backside.

  Colton winked back into existence a few feet away. “No one comes here,” he said, eyes blazing. “No one cares about this place. The cleaners come and faff about, and leave me dirtier than before. I haven’t had a real mechanic set foot here in a year.”

  Danny ran a hand over the front of his waistcoat, speechless. Eventually he murmured, “You shouldn’t do that to yourself. It harms you, and the town.”

  Colton lowered his gaze. “The numeral was rusting, and the minute hand was slowing. I had to do something.”

  They stayed like that, motionless, for a full minute. Then Danny stood up carefully, worried that the spirit would disappear again at any moment. Something had changed between them, and it made his frantic mind slow down. He should have been angry; he should have told Colton what a mess he’d made.

  But he couldn’t. Because he understood.

  Coming nearer, Danny raised his hand.

  “Can I … Would it be all right to touch you?”


  Colton didn’t move at first. Then he took a step forward and held out a thin, bronze-colored hand. Danny cupped it with his bigger, paler hand, his fingers first skimming the inside of Colton’s palm before their hands clasped.

  Danny held back another gasp. A peculiar ripple traveled up his spine, and the hairs on his body stood on end. It was much like touching the time fibers, brushing a finger across them to feel the yawning of time open and swallow him whole. He was scattered across the cosmos and deep within the earth, within himself and outside of himself. A miniscule star in the infinite sky. A tiny speck of life in the flow of time.

  He came back to himself a few seconds—hours?—later, breathless. Their hands were still clasped, a seam of gold and silver. How could something with such a gentle touch melt an iron numeral or bend a minute hand? The spirit was much stronger than he appeared. A dangerous thrill shot through Danny’s body.

  He tried to imagine being stuck in this tower for years without end. To have no other option than to pretend he was falling apart to get attention.

  Danny tugged the spirit forward. “Come with me.”

  They walked down a level to the clockwork. Danny heard the swinging of the pendulum below, the heavy weight like a beating heart under their feet. Danny tried to feel for Colton’s pulse, but the hand within his own was still.

  The pendulum was not the heart of the clock. The lungs, perhaps, every swing a breath propelling life forward. But the heart was something else.

  The lines made by his fingers were still on the central cog, creating channels in the dust. Danny touched it.

  “These gears need cleaning. You can’t trust a maintenance crew to do that. Why don’t I come back and do it myself?”

  Colton narrowed his eyes. “You would do that?”

  “I won’t be paid for it, but I’d like to. I can tell it’s been a while, and if the dust keeps gathering, it’ll muck everything up.”

  “Won’t you get in trouble?”

  A mechanic was never supposed to accept a job if it didn’t come from the Lead himself. But in this instance, what could Danny say? He couldn’t tell the Lead the real reason why the clock was falling to pieces. He’d look mad.

  “No, I won’t get in trouble.”

  Colton’s face brightened, shining like the clock face above them. He followed the trail Danny’s eyes had made across the clockwork a moment earlier. “Can I tell you a secret?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m off by about four minutes.”

  Danny blinked, then smiled. Colton sounded like a boy who had just admitted to trampling his mother’s prized flowers.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll fix that, too.”

  He knelt in front of the clockwork, eyeing it with appreciation, the complex structure forged from cleverness and creativity. And necessity. His tools were laid out beside him, from the soft-bristled brush to the screwdriver he’d need for cleaning and disassembly. Although Danny couldn’t stop the flutter of anxiety from being so close to the mechanism, he had to admire it for what it was.

  After the incident with his father, Danny had retreated from society. He didn’t want to mince words and force smiles while the stone that sat within him wedged itself deeper, cutting and bleeding him dry. Because of his distance, he had developed a reputation for being odd. People gave him sidelong looks and whispered as soon as they thought he was out of earshot.

  Out in the world, Danny didn’t feel himself. There was nothing for him there.

  Here, he felt needed. Valued. The tower was a sanctuary, all gold lines and hard curves, glint and glass, standing old and steady under the thrum of time.

  Colton stood at his shoulder. As he looked on, Danny found the small components of the clockwork, the cogs that could be removed without interfering too much with the clock’s running. Even if time paused, the townspeople probably wouldn’t notice if Danny replaced the parts quickly enough.

  When he’d driven into Enfield that morning, he’d worried what the townspeople might say, since there was no noticeable problem with the tower. But there was a wedding taking place at St. Andrew’s church today, distracting many of them. He wondered what would happen if time warped over the assembly, giving a new meaning to the term “forever hold your peace.”

  It was something he wanted to avoid. All apprentices were trained to recognize the signs of Stopping: being enclosed by a solid gray barrier, or time skipping repeatedly. One had to move fast to reverse the effects. A retired mechanic who’d once been trapped in a Stopped town had explained to Danny’s class that people could still move and speak to one another, but were unable to do much else. Items that were picked up returned to their original positions. A woman had run out her door thirteen times in a row, caught in a loop.

  All that training had gone out the window for Danny when the Shere clock blew up. Adrenaline, and what Matthias called his intuition, had prevented disaster then. That, and the strange other power he’d felt so briefly.

  “Look at all this dust,” Danny muttered, giving the gears a preliminary wipe with a cloth. “How do they expect you to keep running under these conditions?”

  “I think they forget,” Colton said, leaning down to inspect what Danny was doing.

  “Forget! How could they?”

  Colton shrugged.

  “More like take you for granted. Don’t worry, you’re in good hands now.”

  The spirit smiled. It was slow and full. “I don’t doubt it, Danny.”

  The sound of his name set his heart off like a firework. He turned his head and realized how close their faces were. Trying not to blush, Danny quickly turned back to the clockwork.

  A clock spirit. A clock spirit. He had tried to get his head around the fact, but spent the night tossing and turning—not out of fear, but fascination. They really did exist. They weren’t just a myth.

  Which meant that Matthias’s story might be true. He had always humored Matthias, pretending to believe him, but now Danny couldn’t help but look at him differently. Understand him differently.

  He could imagine the scene now, in a way he couldn’t before. Matthias standing before the Lead. Being told that his relationship with the Maldon clock was forbidden, disastrous, unacceptable. Stripped of his title and his pride.

  Knowing no one else would believe him.

  Danny removed the first small cog and used the brush to carefully clean its spokes. The weight of the spirit’s eyes was still on him; he was certain Colton was just as fascinated with him as he was with Colton. Danny looked over his shoulder.

  “You don’t have to wait around on my account. Look in that bag, there.” Colton crouched and lifted the flap of the satchel with a thin finger. He dragged out a large book with a green cover. “Fairy tales. Figured you might like to read them while I do this.”

  Colton smiled wider and sat on the floor, the book opened to a random page on his lap. Danny returned to the clockwork.

  The pages turned at a quicker rate than he expected, so he glanced over to find the spirit examining the illustrations.

  “The pictures are nice, but the stories are good, too.”

  “I can’t read.”

  “You can’t—? Well, of course you can’t, you’re a bloody clock. Here.” He leaned over and flipped to the story of Rapunzel. “Look at those pictures. They’re from the story I told you.”

  Colton did as he was told. Since he seemed to be enjoying himself, Danny resumed his work.

  It proved to be a long, labor-intensive process, and he was sweating by the time he cleaned the larger cogs. Time would occasionally slow around them, and he felt as if he dragged his limbs through air turned to jam, but when he replaced the parts he cleaned, it returned to normal.

  He stopped to eat lunch and told Colton more stories. He read about Cinderella—the spirit enjoyed the part about the clock striking midnight—and Sleeping Beauty. During the latter, Colton kept asking about the time dimensions used to make everyone in the kingdom sleep f
or a hundred years.

  As Danny finished the last bit of his sandwich, he looked up and started. A brown mouse was perched on Colton’s shoulder.

  “Uh …”

  Colton looked at where Danny was staring. “Hallo. You’re probably hungry.” The mouse’s ears trembled.

  “Is this normal?” Danny asked, watching the mouse. Its whiskers twitched, nose sniffing the air. “You being friends with the tower mice?”

  “No one else to talk to.”

  Danny winced. Keeping his eyes on the mouse, he broke off a piece of bread and leaned forward. The mouse grabbed it with tiny paws and began nibbling at once, spilling crumbs down Colton’s shirt.

  Danny laughed. “I feel like I’m in my own fairy tale.”

  Colton smiled.

  The larger gears couldn’t be handled without assistance from at least two other people, so Danny reluctantly used the ladder to reach the higher ones and wiped them off as they moved. He attacked between the spokes with his brush and dust and grit flew off, making him sneeze.

  Finally, Danny turned to the main structure of the clockwork. He watched the central cog turn for some time until he knelt to wipe it with an alcohol-soaked cloth. Streaks of grime peeled away, revealing a bright copper surface underneath.

  As he dusted off the spokes, he sensed Colton standing at his back. He was silent, but Danny felt his tension like a pulled bowstring. He would be rather nervous himself if someone were laying their hands upon his heart.

  “No one’s treated me this gently in a long time,” the spirit said.

  Danny looked up at him. Colton’s face was grave, the fairy tales now reduced to nothing but a childish distraction.

  “My father taught me to do it this way. The other mechanics haven’t been gentle?” Colton shook his head. “I’m sorry. Not all mechanics are careful, I’m afraid. A few aren’t even all that good. Just because someone’s born to sense time doesn’t mean they have any skill with it.”

  “You’re a good mechanic,” Colton said. Their eyes met, and Danny fought to swallow. “I want you to be my mechanic.”