The Ouroboros Lock

by Mark William Chase

  The Ouroboros Lock

  by

  Mark William Chase

  “And Night bore the ruthless avenging Fates who give men at their birth both evil and good to have. They pursue the sins of both men and of gods, never ceasing from their dread fury.”

  - Hesiod’s Theogony, c. 700 BCE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locations, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 Mark William Chase. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the author, except by virtue of being electronic book which necessitates storage on an authorized device, or by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in an article or review.

  ISBN: 978-1-7325456-0-1

  Edited by R. N. Washburn and Lee Burton

  Cover art by Fellix Fell

  For more information about the author and his latest projects, please visit https://mwchase.com

  Table of Contents

  The Hand of Atropos, or the Theif’s Tale

  The Eye of Lachesis, or the Assassin’s Tale

  Clotho’s Lock, or the Warlock’s Tale

  Book Description

  About the Author

  Part I

  The Hand of Atropos

  or

  The Thief’s Tale

  Stolen! I dropped to my knees before the hearth of the fireplace, my guts clenching in anguish. The crowning achievement of my departed father’s labors had been stolen by some wretched thief in the night!

  Reeling in disbelief, I blinked and looked again, but the place upon the mantel was just as empty as it had been when I first stumbled into the sitting room of my humble, pond-side cottage. How had I not heard the thief enter? How had I slept through him breaking in and rifling through my most treasured possessions?

  I staggered to my feet, my head pounding from the night’s indulgence, and I knocked aside the empty bottles as I shuffled to the kitchen to see what else the burglar had purloined. Unwashed plates and grubby pans lay scattered about the table, while greasy paper wrappings and discarded crusts of week-old meat pies lay heaped upon the floor. All was as I remembered it from the night before, the bachelor’s mess being of my own careless habit, but the open window was evidence enough of the intruder’s entry. Hadn’t I locked the window bolt? I went back to the sitting room, then to my father’s cluttered workshop, and finally to my small bedroom, but found nothing else out of sorts. Yet that fact brought no relief to my cruel misery, for the loss of the Ouroboros Lock was the most injurious I could have suffered. Of all that I had inherited from my father—the renowned locksmith and clockwork tinkerer, Avery Guissant—the Ouroboros Lock was truly the most precious.

  A police inspector and one rather rotund constable of the law showed up a few hours before noon, which quite surprised me as I had not yet sent for them. A neighbor had apparently spotted a shadowy figure prowling about the shrubbery near the short garden wall surrounding my cottage, and being concerned, had passed the word along through the county bailiff.

  “A lock, you say?” the police inspector asked hesitantly, his notepad in hand. He glanced at his corpulent companion, who merely shrugged. “I assume you mean the thief broke a lock. What did he actually steal?”

  I sighed, rubbing my temples against the throbbing morning headache. “No,” I answered frustrated, looking to the mantel where the Ouroboros Lock had been. “The thief took a lock. That was all he took, from what I can tell. The lock was a very special, a priceless clockwork lock, created by my father.”

  “Oh, yes, yes!” the inspector chuckled. His hitherto silent partner produced a jocular snort. “The famous locksmith Guissant! One should think Guissant’s son would know how to button up his own home at night, eh?”

  His partner nodded emphatically, snorting once again.

  I looked away from the men, fuming at their flagrant disrespect. I should have expected as much, for the police had done no better solving my father’s disappearance the year before. Why should they bother investigating the theft of a family heirloom, the true value of which they could scarcely comprehend, when they so flagrantly wrote off missing persons as “presumed suicide,” simply because it was that much easier for them?

  “So you say nothing else was stolen…” the inspector confirmed, writing something in his notebook. He glanced around my rubbish-strewn cottage, rubbing his waxed mustache as he made a poor show of a cursory once-over. “Of course, I don’t see much else of any value to take. The burglar probably entered through that open window in the kitchen, then left through your front door. There is a bit of mud or blood on the carpet near the hearth, but no telling if that was already there, what with the mess and all. I should note that it was a new moon last night, which is just the sort of night an experienced thief would choose. Whoever he was, he most certainly knew what he was after.” The inspector rubbed his mustache again and sighed, then snapped his notebook closed. “Well, I suppose that’s all we need.”

  I formed a sullen grimace. “But you will investigate further, yes? Surely, there’s something—”

  “We’ll file the report at the local constabulary,” he answered dismissively, then started for the door with his partner following behind him. “If the lock is as valuable as you say, then you should hire a private detective. They’re cut out for just this sort of thing, you know.”

  I sighed. I could no more afford a private detective than I could afford a maid to tidy my cottage. I had, after all, spent nearly all that I owned on their useless services searching for my absent father.

  “Oh, and our condolences on your father’s death,” the inspector added, tipping the brim of his bobby hat. “Always such a tragedy, suicide.”

  With that, they were gone, returning to the city proper where investigating murders, muggings, and rape were the bread and butter of their unenviable profession. I sighed, collapsing despondently in the seat near the fireplace. I rubbed my bloodshot eyes, then reached for one of the bottles on the table beside the chair. Finding it empty, I released an even deeper sigh, then looked to the portraits of my father and my long-departed mother that hung on the mantle above the empty place where the Ouroboros Lock had once been.

  It was with my mother that this plight began, seventeen years ago, at the peak of the virulent cholera outbreak of 1849. It was in that year that she passed from this life into whatever, if anything, lay beyond. My father slunk deeper and deeper into despondence, but his despair soon grew into obsession, and that obsession blossomed into madness. Driven by genius I could not hope to fathom, he turned his accomplished skills to the singular task of constructing an instrument of such impossible complexity that it defied the very boundaries of the ordered universe. For fifteen long years he labored on the terrible device, accepting commissions only for the necessity of purchasing what food, shelter, and clothing we required to survive. And so he toiled on, day after day, and night after night, weeping even as he worked, beneath my mother’s portrait hung above his cluttered workbench.

  I was just a boy at the time and could not understand my father’s mad obsession. He told me nothing of his designs, keeping his workshop locked at all times and never allowing me even the slightest peek at the bizarre manuscripts and ancient tomes he’d amassed that must have, in some curious way, aided his fanatical endeavor. By day, he reclused himself to his workshop, coming out only to eat and see to the necessities of
life. At night, I pressed myself beneath the coarse covers of my ill-sized bed, muffling as best I could the strange utterances and spectral light emanating from his workshop door as he conducted whatever occult experiments the hoary books prescribed.

  Neglected, despondent, and fearful of my father’s increasingly erratic behavior, I left home on my seventeenth birthday to seek an apprenticeship in a nearby town. The Guissant name was well-known and proved immediately profitable, for I was hired at once by Cumberland & Worrall, one of the more respectable locksmithing companies of the region. I earned a fine wage of a pound and eight shilling a week, enjoyed comfortable housing and decent enough food, and after a few years was able to begin building a life for myself. I doubted my father even took notice of my absence, and I never once missed the absence of his attention.

  Four years passed. I heard nothing from my father until August of 1864, when I received my first and only letter from him.

  “My son,” he wrote in a quick and scrawling hand, “it is done. Come at once!”

  I felt no obligation or inclination to return home, so I set the letter aside, intending to simply write him back. But the days stretched on into weeks, and I only remembered when a second letter arrived, this time from the constabulary apprising me to my father’s unexplained disappearance. Panicked, I left the very day the constable’s letter arrived, traveling by coach back to the city of dreadful night that I had once called home.

  My father, as I learned, had vanished without a trace, leaving his completed masterpiece sitting in all its glory amidst piles of tools and clockwork parts scattered haphazardly across an oil-stained workbench. The police, with all the feigned gusto of their cursory investigation, concluded that he had simply thrown himself from a bridge into the river. They were wrong, of course. He would never have committed suicide with his magnum opus finally complete, but there was nothing I could do to prove otherwise. My father was never seen nor heard from again.

  The police considered the matter closed. I was forced to hire a private detective to investigate his disappearance. After eight fruitless months and nearly every penny I had to my name, I was no closer to learning either his whereabouts or his fate. Worse, my father’s ledgers showed he had been alarmingly in debt, and I was soon forced to sell what remained of his business to appease the most demanding of his many creditors. But I could not part with my father’s crowning invention—not until I had unraveled the mystery of his sudden and unexplained disappearance.

  Hoping to find some clue, however meager, I spent my days and nights studying his creation and poring over his endless piles of rambling notes. The device was, in fact, an intricate clockwork lock held inside an ornately-carved wooden frame etched with arcane symbols and indecipherable glyphs. The frame housed the device’s complicated movement at its center, and was comprised of countless intricate gears, springs, spindles, and escapements, all arranged in a circular configuration that seemed impossible to move or power by any conceivable means. The entire mechanism was circumscribed by a silver ring molded in the form of a snake eating its own tail. From what I gleaned reading my father’s mantic writings, the strange snake was called an ouroboros—the symbol of eternity itself—and he likewise called the device the Ouroboros Lock. He believed the device could be used to somehow loop time back upon itself, allowing him to step into the past and rescue his wife, my mother, from her fatal malady all those years ago. He was mad, of course—a broken man driven to insanity by crushing grief and single-minded obsession. The Ouroboros Lock was the muse of his genius, the demon of his hubris, and the fateful nemesis that had wrought his untimely demise.

  It was all I had left of him.

  In honor of his memory, I kept the Ouroboros Lock on the mantel above the fireplace, a shrine to the man who fell victim to his own unraveling intellect. But now even that treasured heirloom was robbed from me, stolen this dark and dismal October night. The police would be of no help, just as they were of no help finding my father, and being without any notable means I could not afford even a greenhorn gumshoe. But I had to do something!

  My only recourse was to investigate on my own. Once the inspector and constable left, I began searching my house for clues. Apart from what the inspector had already pointed out, namely that the thief had entered through the window and that there was what appeared to be a bloodstain near the hearth, I found one other clue they had overlooked—and it was a most remarkable clue indeed. The revolver was almost completely buried in the cold ashes of the fireplace. I could only assume the thief had dropped it while lifting the Lock from the mantel. I was no connoisseur of firearms, but the six-chamber revolver was of remarkably fine craftsmanship, complete with an ornate mother-of-pearl handle and silver engravings along the cylinder and barrel. The weapon was quite distinctive, and seemed far too elegant to be the sort of gun a mere thief might use. Ferreting out who owned the revolver would be a difficult, but not insurmountable, task.

  Although I was certainly no detective, I had read enough penny dreadfuls to know my best chances were to frequent the city’s shady underbelly, where I might find someone who knew the gun’s owner, or perhaps overhear one thief bragging to another about the burglary or looking to hawk the stolen item. And so I set about scouring every currish pub and ill-reputed gambling den, placing oblique inquiries about a fanciful clockwork device that might be for sale, quietly asking about the pistol, and listening to the banter and bragging of thieves. As the weeks passed into months with nothing to show for my effort, I began offering small rewards for any credible information. Although I received more than a few frivolous “tips” from those seeking a quick payout, one sordid miscreant appeared to have some genuine details.

  “T’wasn’t but a few months ago that Macey came asking ‘round about some kind of fancy lock, just like you,” the beady-eyed scamp recalled as we sat in the back of one dim and grimy pub.

  “Macey?” I asked.

  “Yeah, Mister Macey,” the scamp repeated, as though his name should have been instantly recognizable. “You know, Lord Voger’s right-hand man. Ain’t nobody gonna cross Mister Macey, eh? He’s got a gun just like the one you’ve been asking about. A Lefaucheux custom job, with mother-of-pearl handle. If you’ve got some kind of grudge, you’d best be backing off, I think.”

  Lord Voger... I might not have known who this Macey was, but Lord Voger’s name was indeed known to me. He was mentioned in my father’s ledgers, not only as having been customer, but also as the creditor of a rather shady, off-the-books loan amounting to some two hundred pounds. Lord Voger himself was not a well-liked gentleman, if a gentleman that lord of criminal enterprise could properly be called. His family once ruled over the Barony of Fellmoor and possessed substantial holdings in the East India Company. But with the decline of the Empire and the assumption of the Company by the Crown, his family’s holdings had plunged into debt. As for Lord Voger himself, the shrewd criminal mastermind found other means of reclaiming his lost fortunes. Not only was Lord Voger a prominent underworld financier and usurer of off-the-books loans—including the loan to my father—it was common knowledge that he dealt in stolen diamonds and works of art, as well as artifacts smuggled out of Egypt and the Holy Lands. As a connoisseur of all things rare and occult, he was a man who would lust for a device as unique and inscrutable as the Ouroboros Lock.

  Given the fact that my father had owed him some two hundred pounds plus several years of interest—a loan I had not yet repaid, as he had never come calling—it now seemed most probable that he was the one who had commissioned the theft. Unfortunately, the police would be of no use as I had no tangible evidence to implicate Lord Voger, to say nothing of the fact that the notorious crime lord held the constabulary and courts firmly in his pocket. Nor did I wish to directly confront a man as powerful as Lord Voger. As such, I was left with the grim prospect of having to reclaim my property on my own.

  According to my father’s own records, Lord Voger had purchased numerous locks and safes crafted by t
he Guissant business. That should have given me an advantage, but, ironically, the blueprints for those locks had gone with the rest of the files, equipment, and inventories when I sold his business. I was familiar enough with the basic design of my father’s locks that I could probably crack one of them, eventually, to enter Voger’s manor. Unfortunately, I had never committed an act of burglary, and if I were to be detected, it would surely be Voger’s attack dog, Mister Macey, whom I would face. And so, as much as I desired to reclaim my father’s masterwork, I could not conceive of any plan or strategy that would give even the slightest chance of success.

  But no sooner had I exhausted all possibilities than the light of hope was unexpectedly rekindled. The overcast day was unusually cool for early April, and I was just returning home after spending the afternoon brooding on the waterfront. I took a shortcut through Lower West Park, all but empty on account of a persistent, misting drizzle, and was astonished to find three young girls laughing and playing near the edge of an overgrown fishpond. Their parents were nowhere to be seen, and although the children did not appear to be in any kind of danger, a sense of dreadful trepidation hung palpably in the air. One of the girls kicked the ball they had been playing with bounding in my direction. The eldest of the girls, who could not have been more than ten, rushed to me giggling with delight.

  “You want to play with us!” the girl exclaimed, as though it were a fact and not at all a question.

  I patted her on the head and handed the ball back to her. “I’m sorry, but I have no time to play. Run back to your sisters.”

  She laughed again, pirouetting like a ballerina. “No time! No time! No time! Never heard I such a crime!” she sang.