The Clock People

by Mark Roland Langdale

  ‘What was that noise?!’ exclaimed Tippy in great trepidation.

  ‘Your imagination up to its old tricks again,’ Wilbur replied.

  ‘Either that or my heart about to leap out of my chest!’ Tippy snapped looking anything but amused by Wilbur’s off-hand remark.

  Then a shadow appeared above them, as a blinding light forced them to shield their eyes with their hands.

  ‘It’s, it’s the giant. Hide under here!’ Tippy cried as she pulled on Wilbur’s arm and scrambled for the cover of the big hand of the watch.

  ‘I thought I saw something move under the glass. An ant perhaps or a flea. I must need my eyes testing. Either that or my head!’ exclaimed a man squinting as he held a candlestick close to the face of the fob watch.

  ‘Don’t worry, dear, it’s only the travelling flea circus playing under the big top, the one made of glass. Nothing to see, not for you anyway, unless you’ve got a microscope to hand,’ the man’s wife said seemingly talking in her sleep, for she did not open her eyes or stop snoring!

  ‘Don’t say a thing, don’t move a muscle, don’t even breathe. No, better scratch that last one.’ Tippy mouthed the words to Wilbur who remained silent and whose bottom lip was quivering like a jelly on a plate on a ship in a storm in a tea cup. But he was sure in the circumstances Tippy would let this slide, as even heroes are not immune to fear.

  Wilbur sucked in some air and held his breath, hoping the giant would disappear as quickly as he had appeared as if by dark magic, like a genie out of a giant lamp. The man picked up the fob watch and examined it closely as if he were a clockmaker or a jeweller holding a lens to his eye. As for the two younger apprentices, they stood rigid with fear as if frozen in time… tick tock, tick tock, as one tick followed one tock…

  8

  An Escapement of Sorts

  ‘Come out, you ants, I’ve got neither the time nor the patience to play games with you at this hour of the night!’ grunted the man shaking the watch violently as if it were a child’s Victorian maze game, the sort with tiny metal balls that rolled about until they disappeared down a hole.

  ‘Hold on!’ Tippy cried as she and Wilbur slid violently towards the side of the face of the watch. ‘Ouch!’

  The man’s hot breath steamed up the glass of the face of the watch so he could not see into it properly, and he was forced to clean it on the jacket of his nightgown.

  ‘What are you doing, dear? Come to bed, you’ve got work in the morning,’ a distant voice moaned. Wilbur and Tippy hoped this wasn’t a ghost, as the spirit realm to a child was not much better than a land full of giants and giantesses. And with that the man turned around and set the watch back down upon the bedside cabinet.

  ‘We’ve got ants again. Need to put some sugar out although how they got into my fob watch I have no idea,’ the man yawned as he got back into bed and blew out the candle. ‘You know, for a second I thought I saw people under the glass of the dome.’

  ‘Ants in your pants more like,’ the woman muttered under her breath as she finally awoke from the dream she was having. ‘I know glass magnifies, dear, but unless that is magic glass and there is a genie hiding in the watch then I think you’re letting your imagination get the better of you, or is that the worst,’ chuckled the woman as she kissed her husband on the top of his head and then turned over and tried to go back to sleep.

  ‘But I don’t have an imagination, haven’t the time for such luxuries. The man who sold me the watch told me it never had to be wound or repaired, and the face was made of pure moonstone said to be magical by the Romans or some such codswallop. Of course I thought he was simply telling me a fairy story to sell me the watch. However, it’s true, I’ve had it three years and I’ve never had to get it repaired,’ the man replied blowing out his cheeks.

  ‘It was an antique, wasn’t it? Probably made by a master craftsman. It will probably go on forever, outlast us both. It may even have once belonged to Old Father Time,’ the woman muttered under her breath, half in and half out of a dream which, if it went on much longer, she was sure would turn into a nightmare and a waking nightmare at that!

  ‘Yes alright, no need to overdo it,’ the man yawned.

  ‘Overdoing it is what is causing your mind to wander,’ the woman mumbled as finally she drifted back off to sleep.

  The man tried to sleep, but sleep did not come easy when the self-impelling steam wheels of the mind were turning like a dark and satanic watermill. When the man eventually drifted off to sleep he had a dream of being trapped under a glass dome cornered by two giant ants who, it seemed, preferred eating humans to eating sugar!

  ‘That was close!’ exclaimed Wilbur blowing out his cheeks.

  ‘Too close, far too close,’ replied Tippy trying to get a handle on all that had happened in what seemed like a blinking of a cyclops’ beady eye.

  ‘We’d better get back inside before the Elders realise we’re not there,’ Wilbur grunted slowly getting to his feet.

  ‘Oh, we’re not there alright or at least you’re not there,’ Tippy replied caustically as she too got to her feet and crept back inside the mechanism.

  ‘So you’re implying I was eaten by the giant and now I’m a ghost. Oohhh!’ Wilbur moaned, trying to be whimsical as he theatrically felt all over his body with his hands.

  ‘I am implying nothing of the sort as you well know, Wilbur Wigglesworth. I’m half imagining the spirit of old Codswallop has got into you, even though he’s not dead. Mind you, at times he looks like one of the undead like in the storybook which still gives me nightmares – Dracula!’ Tippy shivered as if somebody had just walked over her grave then she gave Wilbur a dressing down and as they were both still in their dressing gowns this was about right.

  ‘Look, if anybody sees us sneak back into the mechanism we’ll just make up some story about you having a nightmare and not being able to sleep,’ snapped Wilbur thinking on his shaky feet.

  ‘A nightmare? How is that telling a story? Isn’t that exactly what we just had albeit a waking nightmare?’ Tippy replied through gritted teeth.

  ‘Yes, so then we won’t look guilty because we will be telling the truth – well, a half truth – and as Grandfather is always telling me, a half truth is better than telling a fairytale, or lie, if you prefer,’ Wilbur said letting his mouth run away with him which was better than Old Father Time running away with the giant hourglass and burying it in quick sand!

  Inside the clock the inhabitants thought they were having a collective nightmare of an earthquake as the man shook the watch to see if he could shake the ants free. However, the ground soon stopped moving as the mechanism righted itself and most, if not all, of the good folk of the clock quickly drifted back off to sleep.

  ‘You can’t sleep either. I had quite a nightmare, the whole room was shaking,’ groaned a young man bathed in sweat as he pulled his dressing gown tightly around his body as if he were suffering from a bad case of the night horrors.

  ‘It, it was the mechanism. One of the cogs got jammed. Don’t worry, we’ve sorted it out,’ Wilbur said lying through his teeth, as it was two of his fellow apprentices who had jammed up the works in the first place. But not with jam or marmalade, as that was more Paddington Bear and Winnie the Pooh’s style!

  ‘Nice work, apprentices, the Elders will be pleased with your quick thinking,’ the boy said rubbing his eyes.

  ‘Oh, we won’t tell them, there is no need to brag. It’s all in a day’s – or night’s – work. In this case you could say it was a lucky escapement!’ Wilbur said overwinking at Tippy who overwinked back equally theatrically as if the two were performing in a farce on stage. It was true that the Clock People sometimes stage theatrical evenings on the face of the watch – the Shakespeare play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Sleeping Beauty, the ballet by Tchaikovsky – often performed on a hot summer’s night when the inhabitants of the clock could not
sleep.

  ‘I thought you said it wasn’t so bad telling a half truth, and you just told a whole truth and that joke rather escaped me, I’m afraid!’ snapped Tippy referring to Wilbur’s so-called witticism of replacing the word escape with the word escapement – a part of the clock. Tippy could almost hear the boy’s brain ticking over as he thought of a suitable witty reply that for the moment was not forthcoming. But it didn’t take Wilbur long to think of a reply and when the reply came Tippy Handle did not think the remark witty in the slightest, certainly not the wit of the great raconteur, novelist and playwright Oscar Wilde. More twit than wit in fact.

  ‘Sorry, not only don’t boys think, they have a terrible aversion for telling tales,’ replied Wilbur as a smug grin slowly spread across his freckled face like quicksilver across a sea of mercury.

  ‘Poppycock!’ Tippy said coughing loudly in a feeble attempt to disguise what she had said.

  ‘Mrs Poppycock where I can’t see her and I don’t want to step on her, what with old Mrs Poppycock being no bigger than a poppy seed!’ Wilbur replied as cool as you like.

  Wilbur had often wondered how food was so plentiful inside the mechanism, although he had seen vegetables grow in pots, parsley, sage and of course thyme. Well, after all, they were living inside a watch! What he wasn’t aware of was that a chosen few trustworthy people known as ‘collectors’ were allowed out of the watch house to forage for food. Most of the food was crumbs left over on the kitchen table, granules of sugar, slivers of meat, that sort of thing, or cheese carefully removed from the mouse traps in the house. Once upon a time one of the collectors tried to remove a bigger piece of cheese from a mouse trap and the trap cut them in two – nasty business! The foraging was always done at night when inhabitants of both the fob watch and the owner of the house were fast asleep. The council made it their business to keep secrets secret. The less the people of the clock knew about the outside world the better. Curiosity often killed the cat and the mouse. Many, many moons ago one of the Clock People disappeared from the mechanism and was never seen again. It was presumed curiosity had got the better of them or the cat or the mouse or both, or at least it was imagined by the children if not the adults!

  The truth was the little people lived in a fob watch and not a clock, although once upon a time the little folk had lived in a clock and as such history dictated they would always be known as the Clock People and not the Watch People. The Watch People did not sound as poetic as the Clock People or the People of the Clock. It made them sound as if they did nothing all day but watch the clock. Watching the clock was the job of the Elders, not the Youngers – the apprentices and the like – as they did not have time to clock watch. Their time was better served trying to outrun the clock, a childish pastime they often persued on the dial of the watch whenever the Elders’ and their parents’ backs were turned.

  But that was an old story. No point in repeating history, especially badly written history, or was that badly rewritten history? ‘History, your history!’ bellowed the Clock God as the Clock of Time clanked, proclaiming another unit of time had passed that would never return… tick tock, tick tock…

  9

  A Clockwork Nightmare

  ‘The clock is on fire!’ Wilbur exclaimed, waking up in a room full of smoke. However, nobody else heard him exclaim anything, as they were all dead to the world. They all would be dead if Wilbur didn’t do something and fast. ‘Wake up, wake up!’ cried Wilbur repeatedly, trying unsuccessfully to stir his parents. Then he rushed through the mechanism stopping in every bed chamber he could find, knocking on doors and banging on walls. But still nobody moved a muscle. The only hands that were moving were the hands of the watch which did not seem in the least bit alarmed. ‘Tick tock, tick tock, it’s time for a cool head. Believe you me, time will take care of everything,’ spoke the clock in metronomic-like fashion, refusing to rush or panic simply because of a small thing like a flash fire!

  Wilbur climbed down the ladder that led to the dial of the watch in a blind panic, twice almost slipping and falling to his death. Now standing on the face of the watch he looked up in abject horror to see the glass of the moonstone face blackened by an enormous flickering flame. Wilbur soon realised that somehow the candle on the cabinet the watch was resting upon had been knocked over.

  ‘I must get the bellows working, they will expel the smoke that is pouring into the mechanism. I could flood the chambers but if I do I may drown everybody in the housing of the clock. Perhaps somehow I can wake the giant. Drop something heavy on him and he will save the day. Actually it’s not the day that needs saving, it’s the night!’ Wilbur puffed and panted like an old steam engine about to combust.

  ‘Forget the giant, I will make myself a giant, a giant amongst the Clock People. I will take on the strength of the giant Hercules. I will lift the watch all by myself, you see if I don’t!’

  Wilbur, in his hurry to play the part of the hero, tripped over his flapping tongue and fell head over heels. ‘Heeeeeelp!’

  The giant opened his mouth and Wilbur fell in, hitting his head on a jagged tooth and of all things a punch bag as he fell headlong down a long, dark tunnel into a churning, burning, hubbling, bubbling, slopping, popping, slurping, burping gastric soup that to Wilbur’s mind seemed as if it were alive!

  ‘Ugghh, I think I’ve swallowed a fly or a bee!’ spat the giant as he was awoken violently from his slumber.

  ‘It was probably just a nightmare, dear, go back to bed. Anyway it could have been worse, you might have swallowed a dragon – well, a dragonfly. Mind you, a hornet would have been worse far, far worse. Nasty sting the old hornet has when it gets into a tizzy!’ the gentleman’s wife said smiling to herself.

  ‘No, look, it’s worse than a hornet, the glass face of my priceless antique gold fob watch is being scorched by the flame of the candle!’ the man giant cried, jumping out of bed as if the bed was on fire.

  ‘Drop it into the glass of water I put by your bedside, that will cool it down,’ yawned the wife turning back over.

  ‘God knows that may crack the glass or ruin the inner workings of the mechanism. After that it will never keep perfect time again. Then where will I be? Late for my own funeral, I would imagine!’ the giant cried as he picked up a leather glove lying on his wife’s dresser and forced it onto his hand then picked up the watch and held it out the window to cool it down.

  ‘They’re my best ball gown gloves!’ the wife exclaimed with one eye half open and one eye half closed to which the giant turned a blind eye.

  ‘Help, I’m drowning!’ Wilbur cried, thrashing around as he tried to find something to grab onto like an onion ring, a crouton or a walnut as the soup in the man’s stomach grew hotter and hotter and hotter. Then something stirred beneath him and a head appeared out of the soup. ‘A dragon, the giant swallowed a dragon!’ Wilbur exclaimed hardly believing his tired eyes. The dragon looked Wilbur up and down then licked him, not as you may have imagined with his long tongue but with a tongue of fire! ‘I’m being cooked alive!’ Wilbur cried as he disappeared under the waves of the boiling vat of soup to avoid the firey tongue-lashing the dragon seemed determined to baste him with. Wilbur was convinced he had cried his last as he felt himself cook from the inside out. TICK TOCK, TICK TOCK boomed the sound of the giant’s body clock, which was the last thing poor old Wilbur Wigglesworth Apprentice Second Class heard before he breathed his last. It was a sad, sorry end to a promising career that had only just begun as Wilbur clocked off for the very last time.

  The next thing Wilbur knew he was on the floor thrashing around trying to fight off a swarm of imaginary fire-breathing dragons. ‘What the… it was a nightmare, just a silly nightmare. Father was right, I should never sleep with the light on!’ Wilbur sighed blowing out the candle sitting on his bedside cabinet.

  However, Wilbur still felt a sense of unease. Perhaps his subconscious had cooked up this nightmare to wake hi
m from his slumbers for a reason. But what possible reason could there be to wake an Apprentice Clockwatcher Second Class at this ungodly hour? For the life of him he could not imagine.

  It was still dark as Wilbur pulled himself together by his bootstraps, the time-honoured fashion of many an apprentice on an early shift, as he sneaked out of the house. The house was of course not a traditional house but a clock house, or an antique fob watch made of pure twenty-four-carat gold if you want the full story. And this time it was not a dream or a nightmare. However, there was still time for the nightmare to come a-calling, plenty of time!

  Wilbur climbed the ladder, opened the hatch and found himself under the glass dome of the watch face. He fully expected to be able to see the ceiling of the house but instead found himself in pitch blackness. He imagined that all the stars in the sky had been extinguished by a giant lamplighter. Then there was a chink of light. He heard loud but muffled voices and as he looked up he could just about make out a large letter, no not a letter, a number, the number nine. No, that wasn’t right either. Wilbur took a few tentative steps then stopped as he gazed at the number again, squinting in the half light as if an old watchmaker working under a flickering candle. From this slightly different angle he could now see it was the number six. From this he deduced he was standing at the bottom of the watch. Wilbur took a brass spyglass out of his pocket and looked up to make sure up was up and down was down. You see, occasionally if the watch had been thrust into a pocket in a hurry, things got a little, shall we say, higgledy-piggledy, topsy-turvy, especially if the righting mechanism was not working as it should with clockwork efficiency! ‘Mrs Higgledy-Piggledy, no, she is in the kitchen making higgledy-piggledy pie made out of old leftovers from the night before! And as for Mrs Topsy-Turvy, well, she’s living up to her name admirably by standing on her head reading the Clock Bible from back to front!’