Clockwork Canada

by Dominik Parisien

  On the long train journey here, Laroux had told me about the alchemy of filmstock. “Film’s made of nitrocellulose, which is just cotton exposed to an alchemical process,” he had said.

  Cotton was plant matter. If I had extrapolated the nature of the fellstar correctly, then it might be possible to use Laroux’s film reel to trap the creature of light.

  As the lift doors closed, I pointed the camera up and through the glass at the fellstar and the handle, keeping to the rhythm that I had become so accustomed to whenever Laroux was filming.

  Chymical cylinders above and under us burbled and impelled the limbeck lift slowly upward.

  From this distance, I couldn’t tell if my filming it was having an effect.

  A bell chimed. “Five,” croaked the lift man.

  “Thank you.” Now that I was at the same level as the fell-star, I thought could see it flickering. “Go help them!”

  He nodded and hastened out while I kept cranking the handle. It’d be better if I could get closer. I used the cinetoscope tripod as an improvised walking stick, and hobbled as fast as I could towards Laroux and the fellstar while continuing to film.

  The lift man had his arms around Laroux’s waist, anchoring him.

  The closer I got, the more the creature flickered and dimmed. I was slicing the fellstar with every new frame, binding it bit by bit to the celluloid. The ectoplasm choking its current victims was thinning, allowing Laroux and the boy to draw breath again.

  At last, the fellstar winked out.

  Laroux mustered his strength and pulled the bellhop to safety, then fell on his back on the marble floor, his chest heaving. “That was a close one. Merci, Professeur.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief and replaced the lens cap. “You’re the hero, Laroux.” I turned to the lift man. “You too, my good man. Your name?”

  “Willem, sir.”

  “Thank you, Willem.” I tipped him generously. “I will put in a good word with Sir De Bruin.”

  Laroux and I returned to the Silverbirch Room.

  Both Fay and Madame Skilling were recovering well from their ordeals, it seemed.

  “What was it? Is it gone?” Cesar asked.

  Laroux put his cinetoscope down. “Let’s just say we’ve captured it all on film.” He stretched his arms over his head and yawned. “I need a good, long soak in a sulphur bath after this.”

  Cesar smiled. “Please do, Mister Laroux, and take advantage any other services of the château, on the house.”

  I explained to them my theory as to what the creature was, and recounted how we had defeated it. “Like the legends of the will-o’-wisps, the fellstar would lure its victims to their deaths so that it could feed on the ectoplasm from their bodies. Madame Skilling, your chymical séance revives these deadly creatures from their amber prisons. You must never use the Ektoptikon again.”

  Skilling traced her finger over the remains of her machine. Her eyes were still red from contact with the alchemical substances, but we had washed them clean quickly enough. “Perhaps, Professor. Or perhaps you’ve shown me what’s missing from its current design.” She glanced at the cinetoscope. Then, with a flourish, she made the silver key in the lock seemingly vanish. “You cannot stop the progress of magic and technology.”

  “That may well be,” I admitted. “But now that they march in step, in the wrong combination they also unwittingly cause senseless deaths. I’ve seen it first-hand many times.”

  Fay stood. “Madame Skilling, I thank you for coming to Banffshyre, but my husband and I no longer require your services.”

  Cesar nodded. “My porters will see you safe to the train station in the morning.”

  “We could still contact your son, Lady De Bruin,” Skilling said. “I sense his spirit is near—”

  Eerily, the harmonium played four mournful notes, startling us.

  Fay’s eyes teared up. Did she recognize the music?

  “It seems Poul will always be near, even without your trances,” Fay said, taking Cesar’s hand. “Good night, Madame.”

  THE SEVEN O’CLOCK MAN

  KATE HEARTFIELD

  Jacques did not throw up his hands to protect himself from the eggs. He did not duck the cabbage-core. He let the piss from overhead pots trickle through his hair; this was why he never wore a hat when it was time to wind the Clock.

  Having long since sloughed off the capacity to flinch, he walked the narrow streets of Lagarenne like an automaton, carrying his lantern although the sun had not yet set. It would have been kinder if he were an automaton, if it were made evident, to everyone, that he had no choice.

  The town square opened before him like a surprise, as it did every evening.

  It was some small relief to walk out of range of the town’s windows. Jacques rounded the bricked corner of the bakeshop and there it was, its dirt trampled as hard as stone. Lagarenne liked to think of itself as a second Montréal but the truth was, there was half a day’s hard ride and a half-century of progress between Lagarenne and Montréal, between Lagarenne and anywhere.

  The square was very nearly empty now, at eighteen minutes before seven. Jacques did not usually come this late. He liked to wind the Clock in plenty of time. But his wife, Marie-Claire, was in one of her bleak moods, bleaker than most, and he had feared to leave her with a pot on the fire. Feared to leave her with only little Felix to help her.

  The only people left in the square at this hour, so close to seven o’clock, were those with no children at home, mendicants frocked and otherwise. A few people with faces as wilted as his own watched him as they watched all the works of God, as if they expected nothing better.

  The Clock had grown in the five years since its appearance, spread like a black fungus on the face of the squat grey tower. When it appeared, the year Jacques was sixteen, it had been nothing but a great round clock face, brass wheels and arms clicking against the grey stone, with a man-sized archway on either side of it, and in each archway a black painted door. In the years since, as the children had been taken one by one, new doors opened up, above and below, off to one side or the other.

  At a quarter of the hour, the little black doors opened. The Clock kept angry time.

  In each open door, a statue of a child appeared.

  Jacques watched, speaking their names in his mind as a penance. There was little Augustin, with his stick and wheel. His chubby wooden face looked off to the right, as if a horse and cart were about to run him down. There was Louise, who was perfectly still, always, until she spun her little pirouette. On the other side, Marie-Claude with her cat, and Jérome, nearly twenty-one, a man grown, smoking his pipe. And in the middle, gliding across from one door to the other almost before he could see them and mark them: Pierre, Jacques, Marie-Marguerite, and Anne.

  Eight children in five years. A bleak harvest. Most of the children were Mohawk like him, had been born with other names, like him. Little Louise was blonde; her father had been a wealthy merchant. The Seven O’Clock Man did not make exceptions. The Governor had said, when he first built the Clock, “All children who act like savages will be treated as savages. And all children who keep order, who say their prayers and get into their beds at seven o’clock, will be good French children in my eyes, and the eyes of the Intendant of New France, and the eyes of God.”

  The chimes rang out tunelessly and Jacques bent his head. He trudged to the door on the ground and opened it with his little iron key. He had fifteen minutes for his work.

  He climbed the short ladder, up through the trap door, up through a second to the top floor of the tower, and set the lantern on its hook.

  There were six wheels to wind. The first four were the big ones: two-handed handles that took all his breath and left him puffing. Each one pulled a weight to the top of the tower, weights that would slowly drop over the next two days and power the gears of the Clock.

  The first weight was for the Clock itself.

  Click click click click click.

  The second was
for the chimes of the quarter-hours.

  Click click click click click.

  The third was for the bells of the hour.

  Click click click click click.

  The fourth wheel, the wheel that drove the automata, stuck and would not turn. The weight was nearly all the way down to the bottom. Jacques pushed until he could feel the veins in his temple pulsing. He cursed and forgave himself. He took off his gloves and spat on his hands. No good. There was something in the gears. With a groan, Jacques leaned forward, stretching his hand into the works, scraping the gummy oil and grime out of the wheel.

  Damn Marie-Claire and her broken mind.

  It took him several long minutes but he got the gear clear and the wheel moved.

  Click click click click click.

  This fourth wheel was for the stolen children and for the two other automata, the ones in the big doors on either side of the Clock face. They rolled in and out of their doors using the same gear train as the children.

  But there remained two more wheels to turn, because soon the Seven O’Clock Man and his dog would walk out of the Clock.

  Down he went to the middle level, carrying his lantern, setting it on the nail.

  Jacques checked the watch the Governor, always cruel in his kindnesses, had left him in his will. Mother of God, two minutes left. He was a fool, had always been a fool. He took too many risks, even now. Left too many openings in his life for the Devil to come in.

  If the Seven O’Clock Man did not walk, his Félix, his darling boy, would die, his heart winding down to a stop. Jacques should have left earlier. He should have trusted that Marie-Claire would be fine. There was always something keeping him at home: some pot burning on the fire, some scrape on little Félix’s knee, some reminder that his boy was still soft brown flesh despite the wheel in his back, but that if Jacques ever failed, even once, Félix would be up here in the Clock, wooden like all the rest. Some hope that the sorrow would clear from his beloved Marie-Claire’s dark eyes and she would look at him just for a moment as she used to.

  In the first year of his task, the Governor used to come with him, to watch him wind the wheels, watch the weights rise. “You have done well, Jacques,” he would say. “In rectitude there is strength. You are learning to regulate yourself. And in bringing order to yourself you bring order to Lagarenne. The town is grateful.”

  A few weeks later, the Governor had caught fever and died. How astonishing that a sorcerer could die of fever. Now the old man was rotting in his tomb while his decrees still staggered on in relentless motion, while the town showered its gratitude upon Jacques’ head every second night.

  And what did they do about it? They could have burned the Clock down, set fire to the Seven O’Clock Man. Jacques had to be grateful they did not, for the sake of his own boy. But the town hated him while praising the Clock, praising the old Governor’s rules, saying that yes, order was necessary. The new Governor was no sorcerer but he was a weak-willed man who was afraid of what might happen if the rules relaxed, if the Clock were no longer there to keep the people in their place. The priests said the Clock was a miracle, God’s will. And the people believed that. Yet still they cursed Jacques.

  Jacques stepped out onto the beam beside the Seven O’Clock Man, reached over the brass wheel on its back. His last and most despicable task was to wind it and the dog. Jacques put his gloves back on, and not only because of the stink of oil and metal that got onto his hands and kept him awake on Clock-winding nights.

  One day, he felt sure, the Seven O’Clock Man would turn around and look at him, here inside the tower. Jacques feared the face that had belonged to his former owner, Monsieur Martin. It had frightened him in life but in the way of living things, a fright that sped the heart, not a fright that chilled the blood.

  It was not mere fancy, this fear Jacques held that the Seven O’Clock Man might turn to stare at him, even before the thing was wound. Who among the living could understand the decaying sorcery that made the Seven O’Clock Man leave the Clock and walk abroad, the sorcery that made him see the children who were out of bed and turn them into wood? Why, God, couldn’t that sorcery work without wheels and gears, and leave Jacques out of it?

  “You must not think of this as punishment but as a blessing, as penance is not punishment but expiation,” the Governor had said. “You were born a savage, but now you have a chance to redeem that condition.”

  And sometimes Jacques would nod and think: Yes, Governor. I am trying.

  And at times Jacques would think: My father was a warrior.

  He finished winding the Seven O’Clock Man and scrambled over on the slippery, worn beams to the dog. In here, in the workings of the machine, the light from the lantern was mutilated and strange. He had barely finished winding the dog when there was a loud clack and the gears overhead groaned and whirred. The doors flung outward and let the grey light of a summer evening in.

  Jacques nearly wept with relief. He held onto a beam and panted for a moment. For two more nights, Félix was safe, because Jacques had done his awful duty.

  Somewhere, someone cried the alarm, as if the bells were not warning enough. “Bonhomme, sept heures!”

  Out the Seven O’Clock Man slid, never turning to look at Jacques but performing his task as he always did. He flipped his right hand, in time with the great hour-bells of the Clock, as if he were ringing a handbell. In his left hand he held a cane.

  Jacques could see the near-empty square below. If it were not a sin, he might leap out into that void. If Félix would not suffer for it. The bells boomed seven times in his ears as he scrambled back onto the platform, took his lantern and climbed down the ladder.

  As he emerged, the Seven O’Clock Man and the dog were just finishing their hourly ritual. The hand had flipped seven times. The black dog had turned his head right, left, right, left, right, left, right, until he was looking expectantly at his master. Then they both slid out into the air and floated down. They hit the ground and slid forward, the dog still looking from side to side as they went.

  The evening’s hunt had begun. All children in Lagarenne must be in bed, or the Seven O’Clock Man would take them.

  * * *

  Félix ran through the streets, looking for his father. He was used to Maman’s moods but he had never seen Maman’s face so still, as if she were dead. She blinked. She even closed her eyes and sighed, and opened them again. She answered him with a muttered word or two. But she wouldn’t talk to him.

  His legs were so tired. But as he rounded the corner by the bakery, he felt the wheel in his back slip and catch and turn. Papa was winding the Clock. That meant Félix had another two days of life, and a little more life in his legs, as if he’d taken a big breath.

  It also meant the Seven O’Clock Man was abroad. Félix had always been curious about what the Seven O’Clock Man looked like when he was alive. He had been a rich man, Maman told him. A rich man named Monsieur Martin, with a beautiful African slave named Marie-Claire. That was Maman.

  Were you happy in those days? Félix would ask. Sometimes, Maman would say. In the same house there was a Mohawk boy of just the same age, not a slave but a ward. Taken from a village in battle. That was Papa. And what was Papa like? Jacques was just like any other boy except he was bright and sharp as a knife, and he made Marie-Claire laugh, and when he looked at her she loved him with her whole heart. She knew she always would.

  Marie-Claire’s tummy grew big, with Félix inside it.

  Monsieur Martin had been angry. It was all right for slaves to have children but they had to wait for instructions first about who the father should be.

  The Governor was angrier still at Monsieur Martin. He said he had had great hopes for his Mohawk boy Jacques, that he could rise above his race and show the world what came of Christian education. And now what?

  Then came the uprising, “l’émeute des sauvages,” people called it, although there were a few French boys involved too. The Governor had sent troops to destro
y five Mohawk villages, the same villages where his soldiers had taken the children a few years before. They burned the crops and slaughtered the people. These were Félix’s grandparents, Maman explained. That’s why Papa was so angry.

  Is he still angry? Félix would ask.

  Of course not, Maman would say, as if she was afraid someone had heard. They signed a peace treaty, the Mohawks and the French, not long after that. But that was after Papa and the other boys set fire to the Governor’s mansion. The Governor was able to escape; some said, even then, he must have been a sorcerer.

  The following Sunday after mass, the Governor spoke in Lagarenne’s town square. He said the children were running wild. There must be order. There must be virtue. There would be punishments. There would be a curfew, for anyone younger than twenty-one.

  That was when the Clock appeared.

  It was a very lazy man who would let his slave get a baby in her belly without permission, the Governor said. Laxity! Disorder! Vice! So Monsieur Martin became the Seven O’Clock Man, as an example, and Papa had to wind the Clock, as another example, and Félix had a magic wheel put into his back. As an example, he asked Maman? No, she said. To make sure that Papa would do his duty.

  That was what Maman told Félix, on one of the days when Maman would talk.

  That old Governor was dead now. He had given Maman and Papa their little house, near where they used to live with Monsieur Martin. Father had told him that. But the Clock, and the Seven O’Clock Man, still wound down every two days, just like Félix.

  Félix had peeped out of the window once, and his mother had yelled at him, said he was acting like a savage, out of control. Then she cried.

  Today when Papa left she said nothing. When Félix asked her if it was time to get into bed, if it was seven o’clock yet, she only stared, as if she were turning into a statue too.

  Félix had cried out, screaming out the open window. No one came, whether because it was almost seven o’clock, or because it was his voice calling out, he did not know. To his face they called him p’tit bonhomme, unkindly. He could only guess what they called him when he could not hear. Félix had given up on trying to understand; he only wished someone had come when he had called out, “My mother is ill, I need help.”