Tall Tales From Pitch End

by Nigel McDowell

  He swallowed, and then shouted, ‘Ye were right. About Dr Bloom, about telling us to use the pocket watches to fight the Elders. We just had to listen to him.’

  Nic didn’t reply.

  And Bruno was suddenly tired of thinking and worrying, tired of words too – he ran forwards, weaving between Sentries, leapt the steps and ran the line of statues to Nic, who stayed seated. Bruno took his pocket watch from his satchel. He faced the clockwork statue of his father, eyes on the Rebel symbol, his chest.

  ‘Is this going to work?’ said Louise, arriving behind him.

  Bruno said nothing, nor did Nic.

  Bruno’s fingers went to the catch beneath his pocket watch. He felt it shiver – unseen movements trickling through its insides – and flower on his palm. He had to remember to breathe.

  Then Nic stood. A single tear beaded his cheek. His hands came together like prayer.

  Bruno reached up and settled a hand on the chest of his father’s statue. He felt he should push. The Rebel symbol split, parted like a pair of small doors. And behind was an absence, a darkness, with four radiating, triangular spaces. Bruno settled his pocket watch into the chest of his father. He felt he should turn it. He tried, and was allowed – slowly, and with a sense of many mechanisms within the statue struggling to remember old, intended movements. Turned and turned it until he felt a click so profound it sent shock up his arm, into his own heart.

  He stepped away, standing between and slightly in front of Nic and Louise.

  All waited. Bruno shut his eyes and hoped and then doubted, hoped anew –

  ‘Look,’ said Nic.

  Bruno looked and found his father’s eyes. They were moving. A slow slide, trying to register strange surroundings. His brass fingers twitched, his head turned.

  ‘It’s working!’ shouted Louise, her words bouncing around the cavern. But anything else was set aside, banished by more words –

  ‘Rebels, be warned!’

  Not Bruno’s father speaking.

  ‘Who is that?’ asked Bruno.

  Nic drew in a long breath. ‘It’s Dr Bloom,’ he said.

  ‘Prepare yerselves!’ Bloom continued from further along the line, calling in a voice not quite human, not quite Sentry. ‘Be ready to fight!’

  ‘What is he—’ began Bruno.

  But then another voice, one not recorded but alive, that chilled them like biting Ever-Winter, made Bruno, Nic and Louise turn –

  ‘I think we’ll be doing without the fighting, don’t you? After all, it’s a great sin to be defying the Head of the Elders.’

  They were found. Temperate Thomas had entered the Rebel Chapel.

  XXIX

  Masked

  ‘Rightly-nice of Dr Bloom to put that informative little notice outside,’ said Temperate Thomas. ‘But it gives rather too much of a clue, didn’t ye ever think? But he never was the most modest or rightly-retiring sort of man. Though we did have our helpful little guide.’ He lifted his hand. Between finger and thumb the Temperate held a pitch, but one like no other: one of his fingers slid across its surface, showing the clock face hidden inside. Then the Marshall and two Enforcers appeared, and one other –

  ‘David!’ Louise stood on tip toe, straining towards the edge of the platform and hurling the name. ‘Ye two-faced, bloody—’

  ‘He’s been rightly-useful,’ said the Temperate, and he didn’t need to shout, to fire words, voice flitting across the cavern without effort. ‘Rightly-obedient. Says he’s seen the error of his ways.’

  Silence, and then David’s voice, calm as ever: ‘He’s right. It’s over. We can’t fight on any more.’

  Bruno looked to Nic and saw the same thought: why had David done this? They got an answer –

  ‘I don’t want to be in this mountain forever!’ roared David across the distance. ‘I want a normal life!’

  Bruno didn’t know what to believe, what to allow himself to think. But Louise allowed herself anger – she swore, cursed, and Temperate Thomas chided, ‘Now, now, none of that foul talk. Let’s just be stopping this game. It’s gone far enough. Time to end this and come back to Pitch End.’

  ‘Not a bloody game!’ Louise shouted. ‘It’s a war! Rebels against Elders!’

  The Temperate’s laughter was a torment that Bruno cringed at.

  ‘A war?’ he repeated. ‘And what will ye be fighting with? This collection of rightly-curious but broken, battered, rusted toys?’

  ‘Other things,’ said Nic, and Bruno saw some of the old Nic return, some of the same resolve that had sent him leaping on an Enforcer, killing. He saw him whip his pocket watch from his belt, press his hand to his father’s chest, watch it open as Bruno’s father’s had done, then add the watch to the dark space, Louise observing then doing the same.

  ‘Other things?’ said Temperate Thomas, who had begun a slow descent of the slope on the far side of the cavern. The Marshall was close behind, hand on pistol, David held by the Enforcers.

  ‘Such as us.’

  The reply not from Bruno or Nic or Louise, but from Dr Bloom. The statue of the Rebel leader stepped forwards and Bruno couldn’t help his spirits lifting, hoping, wondering if they might have a chance. He wondered though, how can Bloom move without a pocket watch in his chest?

  ‘Rebels!’ boomed Dr Bloom. ‘Prepare yerselves!’

  The statue of Bruno’s father stepped forwards, clockwork working furiously in battered legs. Then Nic’s father, then Louise’s, both ungainly, arms outstretched like incorrigible dreamers.

  Temperate Thomas stopped halfway across the cavern.

  ‘One more chance,’ he said, holding up a finger. ‘One more, and then I end this nonsense.’

  Not even a moment for reflection. Dr Bloom shouted – ‘Now!’

  Michael Atlas, Nicholas M. Delby Senior, Edgar Green and Dr Jonathan Bloom leapt – a solitary bound that took them high into darkness, reduced them to faint glimmers, faint hopes, Bruno’s head dizzy with the sight. Then down to face the Marshall and the Enforcers who fired as David was forced to the ground, bullets sparking off brass, the sound of metal against metal terrorising the cavern –

  But Temperate Thomas did nothing. Not fight, not flee, only waited, watching the approach of the Rebel statues.

  ‘What do we do?’ asked Bruno, having to raise his voice but keep his words between the three of them.

  ‘We need to get David,’ said Nic.

  ‘Too right!’ said Louise. ‘And once we get him I’ll be beating the living Pitch outta him!’

  ‘No,’ said Nic. ‘We get him, we save him.’

  ‘Why?’ said Louise. ‘He bloody betrayed us!’

  ‘No,’ said Nic. A pause, then, ‘He wouldn’t do that.’

  Louise looked to Bruno, who realised he was being asked, silently, for his opinion. ‘I agree with Nic,’ he said. ‘We have to move quick.’

  But Bruno wasn’t thinking of swift rescue for David – he was almost as torn about David’s motives as Louise – but instead of the Temperate. The sight of the man so impassive, so unconcerned, filled him with a need for action.

  ‘We can make ourselves unseeable,’ said Bruno. ‘We get to David, we escape.’

  ‘No!’ said Louise. ‘I’m not leaving! We stay and fight, we need to—’

  ‘Bruno’s right,’ said Nic. ‘We need to go.’

  Louise folded her arms, didn’t move.

  ‘Bring down the Head of the Elders!’

  Dr Bloom’s fresh shout made Bruno turn and watch as the statue of Louise’s father charged at the Temperate. Temperate Thomas worried only a hand – he sliced the air and Edgar Green’s head was removed. Louise’s folded arms loosened, watching as her father lumbered, clashing against Sentries, blind, and then fell, legs kicking but finding no ground, arms a pitiful paddle. Then still.

  It was enough to give the Marshall and Enforcers nerve – their shots entered the heads of the remaining statues as Bruno told Nic and Louise, ‘Now or we’ll never.’

&
nbsp; He focused his Talent, thought himself free of the cavern – imagined it, as The Book of Black & White had instructed – and knew within moments that he was unseeable. He watched Nic and Louise, then heard the Marshall cry, ‘The children have vanished! They’ll be escaping!’

  ‘They’ll be going nowhere, Marshall,’ Temperate Thomas replied. ‘Don’t worry yerself.’

  Bruno, Nic and Louise left the platform, moving quick to the edge of the cavern, in a creep, clinging close to the wall, avoiding but still watching –

  ‘Bring down the Head of the Elders!’

  Again Dr Bloom’s cry, but it was nothing. Too futile, too wishful for Bruno to bear – too much, too loud, too late. But biddable to the end, Bruno saw his father and Nic’s turn, still reeling under gunfire, and stagger in the wake of Dr Bloom as he crossed the cavern. Bruno, Nic and Louise had to watch too –

  Michael Atlas and Nic Delby Senior met the Temperate first. They attempted attack but each blow was matched by another, mirrored as Temperate Thomas cast his hand – still so very unworried – left and right. And as he’d done with Louise’s father, each flash of Talent removed a limb, a cog, some small but vital piece from the statues. Fingers, then whole hands, then arms. Blunted but still fighting on, blades snapped out to replace hands, but still they were being dismantled by the careful diligence of the Temperate’s Talent.

  Bruno knew it was almost over. He moved on, taking Nic’s sleeve, Louise the most unwilling to move but following too. They came to the slope that could lead them free. David was close, face a bruise, his expression distorted.

  Then Bruno and Nic’s fathers fell, their final acts to tear off their own heads and hurl them at the Temperate. In moments they were no more than metal and daydreams, disintegrating into recorded voices, spluttering unintelligible noise.

  Dr Bloom cried out, more a plea than an assertion: ‘Rebels don’t run!’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ Bruno heard Temperate Thomas say, ‘but they do die.’

  The Temperate raised one hand. He clenched it. Slowly, carefully, he tightened his fist, Dr Bloom’s mechanical head collapsing, last sentiments squeezed through the statue’s tightening mouth –

  ‘… fight … ending … Forgetting…’

  ‘Quiet now,’ said the Temperate, his tone gentle. ‘Quiet, and rest yerself amongst all the filth and broken decency of the other Rebels. Quiet, and be gone.’

  A crack, Bloom shattered, and he was no more than dust.

  The Temperate gasped, staggering for support against the Tiger-Sentry. The effort of destroying the statues had exhausted him, thought Bruno. Louise thought the same thing – ‘Now us.’

  Seeable, she charged from their hiding place, shotgun in hand, scream in her mouth, Nic too on his feet and running, dagger raised –

  ‘Stop!’

  The word from Bruno but the action from the Temperate; exhausted but not powerless, Nic and Louise were seized by Temperate Thomas’s Talent.

  Bruno watched, still unseeable, unmoving.

  ‘No use in fighting any more,’ said Temperate Thomas. He breathed deep. ‘Just be good, decent children and we’ll have no more trouble. And Bruno too. Bruno Atlas? Hiding, are ye? We have yer mother, I’m sure ye know.’

  Bruno crept, careful, towards David, towards the way out. Any image of escaping was slipping from him though; he could scarcely conceive success. He had no weapon but his Talent, and even that was fading as doubt attacked it. He tried not to look at the Temperate, felt that if their eyes met he would falter, be seen as he was in the chamber beneath the Clocktower. Bruno looked to the Tiger-Sentry, like it might help. Instinct took his hand to his pocket and he found its winding key. He clung to it like something talismanic.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Temperate Thomas went on. ‘Yer mother was most eager to protect her wayward son. Most well speaking of his decency, bravery and so on. If she could see ye now – hiding. Rebels fight, do they not, Marshall?’

  ‘They do,’ said the Marshall. ‘Brutal and rough as animals.’ His middle finger touched the scar on his face.

  Bruno stopped. By his feet was a blade from his father’s statue.

  ‘No Rebel in Bruno Atlas,’ said the Temperate, and Bruno knew what the Head of the Elders was trying at. ‘No bravery in his actions, no courage or decency. Ye’re a shame, Atlas! To yer mother, to yerself, and to yer no good father. To think that yer indecent mother screamed yer name like a blessing when she was tortured.’

  As Temperate Thomas wanted him to, Bruno did what he couldn’t resist doing: he showed himself to cry out, ‘I’m here!’ and charged forwards as Louise and Nic had done, as his father had done, cavern a blur, no fear, winding key in one hand, blade in the other –

  Feet from the Temperate he stalled. The blade was whipped from his hand, fell somewhere distant. As in the town hall, Temperate Thomas had him in his Talent.

  ‘That’s better,’ said the Temperate, running eyes over Bruno, Nic and Louise. ‘Marshall, have yer men collect the hearts of the Rebels.’

  The Marshall passed the command to his men, who picked their way towards remains, toes turning over hollow chests, kneeling to pluck out the pocket watches.

  ‘And The Book of Black & White,’ said Temperate Thomas, ‘is, I’m guessing—’

  He tore Bruno’s satchel, the book sailing out and into his waiting hands.

  ‘And to think,’ the Temperate said, fingers running over the cover, ‘I was almost afeared of the Rebels all over again. Afeared of this Atlas boy being as much of a fighter as his father.’

  ‘What do we do with them?’ asked the Marshall.

  ‘Atlas and Delby Junior,’ said Temperate Thomas, ‘will come with us.’

  ‘And the other two?’ said the Marshall, throwing looks on Louise and David.

  Temperate Thomas examined them.

  ‘Leave them,’ he said.

  The Marshall blinked.

  ‘Leave them to rot,’ said the Temperate. ‘Ye see, Marshall, these so-called Rebels don’t have that sense of solidarity that we have. They bicker, they blame each other. They’re broken now. As useless as these clockwork toys.’

  Bruno looked to Louise, and saw in her eyes all that Temperate Thomas had seen – she blamed David, and the anger she’d shown too freely was being used against them. Without Nic, without Bruno, Louise and David would have no chance to reconcile. And the Temperate knew it.

  One of the Enforcers said, ‘This one here – Bloom – he hasn’t got a watch in him.’

  Temperate Thomas smiled. ‘He wouldn’t do,’ he said. ‘Knowing him as I did, I’d guess Dr Bloom would’ve wanted a statue of himself rightly-free of such a dependency as a pocket watch or winding key. He’d have wanted something that could be living on without any help, without a heart even.’

  Bruno saw the truth of this, saw the arrogance of Dr Bloom. Saw, felt, mourned. Grieved a little, ashamed of his own naivety.

  ‘Leave them,’ said the Temperate, again, turning away. ‘And let us return to Pitch End quickly. We don’t want to be missing the three-hundredth year celebrations.’ He slapped a hand to the Marshall’s shoulder. Something in the gesture made Bruno bristle and, unable to move, with only words as weapons, he cried, ‘Where’s yer daughter, Marshall? Where’s Sabitha?’

  The Marshall looked at Bruno.

  ‘She’s missing, isn’t she?’ said Bruno. ‘Since the night I escaped from Pitch End. It was him that took her, he took her youth, he—’

  Talent struck Bruno, made blood rush from his nose.

  ‘Liar,’ said Temperate Thomas, rubbing his whitened knuckles like he’d struck Bruno with a hand. And then he smiled. ‘I say let them be permanently silenced. Let them have what they want so badly. Let them truly be their father’s sons.’

  His hand, so adept, moved once more, and the statues of Bruno and Nic’s fathers stirred. A snapping, a wrenching, and the brass faces of the statues – dented, torn, defeated – rushed at Bruno and Nic.

  Bruno had a moment of p
rotest, looking to David and telling him, ‘Ye haven’t given up! I know it!’ before the masks of Michael Atlas and Nicholas M. Delby Senior forced expressionless appearances on their sons. A snap, a tightening around the jaw and Bruno couldn’t speak or think. He saw through his father’s eyes, through small spaces, sight shrunk to two slits. Had to breathe in a low hiss. Behind the face of his father, Bruno was glad the Temperate couldn’t see his weeping.

  Then long threads of brass that served as Dr Bloom’s hair were ripped from the crushed shell of his scalp, lashing themselves across and around Bruno and Nic’s wrists. Bruno heard Nic’s whimper above his own.

  Then Bruno felt the Enforcers lift them, taking them.

  He glimpsed David, untied by the Marshall, pushed forwards to fall.

  Bruno heard Louise say, ‘I can’t believe ye did it, David.’ But she sounded as though she’d forsaken anger for heartbreak, clenched fists for tears. David looked away from her, looked to Bruno. Though reduced by his father’s mask, Bruno crammed so much into that look, directed all he had at David and held it as, unseen by Temperate, Marshall or Enforcers, he opened his hand and dropped the winding key for the Tiger-Sentry at David’s feet.

  David saw but didn’t speak.

  Before they left, the final words were reserved, as always, for Temperate Thomas –

  ‘Long live the Elders!’ he cried.

  But the cavern stayed silent, reeling with no known reply.

  XXX

  The Ways Back

  Bruno was somewhere between the Rebel Chapel and Pitch End, between sleep and painful waking, when he heard the Enforcer carrying him mutter to the other, ‘Obvious why we were brought along, int it? Traipsing up a bloody mountain, through caves and all, and then back having to carry these two. And meantime, himself and the Marshall get to go above ground, get to be going back quicker to town.’

  So they were alone? thought Bruno. Himself, Nic and the two Enforcers?

  Bruno thought the voice familiar, thought it was one he might come to recognise if he hadn’t been behind his father’s mask.