Clockwork Canada

by Dominik Parisien

  He had gone first to Madame Bourget’s house, near his own. Madame Bourget was kind. She did not stare at the wheel in his back or call him names or throw things at his father, and sometimes she brought them extra food, when Maman was at her worst and it was Clock-winding night for Papa. But she had not come today, and when he pounded on her door there was no answer.

  He skidded around a corner and ran into Papa.

  Papa looked stunned. His hair was matted. He blinked as if he had something in his eyes; probably something nasty, because it was a Clock night.

  “Félix, what in the name of God?”

  Papa picked him up under one arm, although Félix was nearly six and so big that his feet dragged on the ground as his father walked. Into the narrowest alley Papa ducked, his breath coming fast. He carried his lantern in the other hand. Félix wished there were a wheel on his father’s back that he could wind, to give his father the strength he needed to get home quickly.

  “Félix, for God’s sake, don’t you know what will happen if the Seven O’Clock Man catches you?”

  Of course Félix knew. All the children of Lagarenne knew. He would turn into wood, like the Seven O’Clock Man and his black dog. He would live inside a little painted doorway in the Clock. He supposed he would keep the wheel he already had in his back.

  He knew because on those nights when Papa did not have to wind the Clock, he put Félix into bed at six-thirty and held him close, and would not let him out, not even to use the pot. And once, when Félix had been little and crying about something and would not stay in the bed, Papa had held him down and screamed, “Just go to sleep, for God’s sake!” Félix did not like Papa at bedtime. He preferred Maman, when Maman was herself.

  “It’s Maman,” Félix said. “She is bad tonight. She frightens me.”

  “She let you out?”

  “She couldn’t stop me.”

  “Wouldn’t, you mean. One of her moods, that’s all it is. I wish she would snap out of it.”

  Félix did not want to defend his mother. He wanted Papa to make her talk again. “It’s bad, Papa. I think she is very sick.”

  To Félix’s surprise, tears ran down his own face and his nose bubbled.

  Papa let out a heavy sigh, hoisted his son higher in his arm and ran. Félix’s feet banged against Papa’s knees. Papa’s arm pressed against Félix’s back-wheel just a little uncomfortably. The world jounced and Félix could not watch it any more. Nothing would stay in one place. He buried his face in Papa’s filthy wet shirt. Papa had him.

  “You must not take such risks, my boy,” said Papa. “Not for anyone.”

  “But Papa, don’t we love Maman?”

  “Yes, we love her,” said Papa. “That’s how the Devil gets in.”

  Félix said nothing, because he might sob, and make too much noise. But he wanted to know: gets into where? Into Lagarenne? Into Félix? Into Maman?

  Around a corner and they came into a thin alley, almost home. Papa’s lantern lit the houses on either side of the alley with orange light, like a giant’s fire lighting the walls of a cave. The alley smelled of old piss. There was the door of their little house at the end of the alley.

  And as it crossed in front of their front door, a dog turned its head and looked at them.

  A black dog. A wooden dog. Félix saw the wheel in its back, the sorcery in the sweep of its head toward him, away from him, toward him.

  The dog turned its whole body to match the direction of its head and slid toward them.

  Jacques stumbled backward a few steps then swung around. One of Félix’s shoes fell to the street.

  Behind them, the Seven O’Clock Man stood with his hand out as if he were waiting for alms. In the other he held his cane. His motionless face was wooden like the dog’s. But he wore real wool and silk, and his hair was a real wig, like a rich girl’s doll. Had Monsieur Martin worn that very shirt, that yellowed cravat, that same long brown wig, in his natural life?

  “You can’t have him,” said Papa.

  The Seven O’Clock Man slid toward him, his empty right hand turning up and down as if he were ringing a handbell. Félix peeked over Papa’s arm. The dog was still sliding toward them, his head turning again, left, right. A pigeon fluttered out of the church tower. A window shutter opened above.

  “You cannot take him!” Papa screamed. “I have done as I was told!”

  His voice echoed. Somewhere, not far, the bark of a real dog ended in a stifled yelp.

  If only Maman had not let her face get so still. If only she would have looked at Félix as if she were looking out of her own eyes, just once. He would like that better than a bedtime story. He would get into bed every night well before seven o’clock if only he knew Maman was well.

  “Maman!” the cry bubbled out of him wet with tears. He sounded like a baby, he knew, but he couldn’t help it. If only Maman knew that he and Papa were coming for her. If only she knew that they loved her.

  Their door opened and Maman came out, like a figure in a clock.

  “Maman,” he said again, reaching out his arms over Papa’s shoulder.

  The dog leaped up, as if it thought Félix were trying to pat its wooden head. The jaws clamped down and the metal teeth bit into his hand. He screamed.

  Maman screamed too. Her face moved again and she was there, she was his Maman again. She ran toward him and pulled the dog off but his hand only hurt more as the teeth tore into his flesh. The dog did not growl or snarl. It made no sound at all.

  Papa eased him down to the ground and began to pound upon the dog’s head with his fist. He squatted and tried to pull the jaws open.

  “Behind you, Jacques!” Maman cried.

  Jacques turned.

  The hands of the Seven O’Clock Man were gloved in soft kid leather that had been white. These were the hands that held the punishment in them, the long wooden cane that reached out toward Félix, hook first.

  It would not take his boy.

  Jacques picked up the lantern and if he hesitated a moment it was because he wondered what was left of Monsieur Martin in this abomination. Monsieur Martin had not been a particularly good man but he had been a man. When the lantern smashed against the wooden head, the wig went up like corn silk, each curled strand glowing crimson until the Seven O’Clock Man was a walking torch, its gloved hands still reaching for them, the cane not yet on fire, protected by distance and the leather of the gloves.

  Jacques kicked the dog but it did not yelp or loosen its grip. So he reached around its body, lighter than a real one’s would have been, and picked it up.

  “Carry Félix,” he gasped to Marie-Claire. “Let’s get him away from here.”

  Marie-Claire was herself again. For the moment. She had always been a mystery to him. She was a mystery to herself; she was born in Portugal, Monsieur Martin had said, a slave born of slaves, but she did not remember her own parents. Neither of them ever spoke of their parents, of anything in the past.

  Jacques and Marie-Claire ran, or rather lumbered, as Félix’s body shook with pain and sobs, the pudgy little arm dangling from those horrible teeth, the dog’s legs moving patiently as clockwork. Behind them the orange light grew brighter and hotter as if the door to Hell was coming for them, ready to swallow them up.

  As the Man’s cane knocked against his shoulders Jacques pushed Félix away, pushed him into the doorway, into the house. Jacques turned and grabbed the cane out of the Man’s arms but the cane came too easily; it hit Félix behind him. He saw the dog open its maw to let go of his boy’s bleeding hand. He felt all the aches disappear and heard his heart stop, the way one can almost hear a clock stop, if one is listening very carefully at just the right moment. The way the world stopped the moment he first saw the face of his beautiful boy.

  Félix’s face was turning to wood, too, in front of him. Jacques tried to reach for Félix again but his muscles were inert. He could not open his hand to drop the cane. Some force was pulling him down the length of the alley. The little h
ouse and the door and Marie-Claire and the dog grew smaller as Jacques and Félix slid backward, away from them, and away from the burning wreck as it fell to the cobbles.

  * * *

  The morning was grey and wet. Jacques could see it through the crack of the Clock door. He could smell the damp and fear in the air, and the fire that still lingered in his own scorched and filthy shirt. All his senses survived, like phantoms of life.

  He took some comfort in how quiet it was, here where he could almost hear his son breathing across the gears and beams. Félix was there with him. Jacques tried not to be grateful for that; perhaps death would have been better for the boy. But at least now Jacques knew that his son’s mind, his loving little heart, was still in the world. He knew he might even see Félix, catch a glimpse of that face, now motionless.

  A door banged. Someone was coming up the stairs.

  “My dears,” he heard.

  He would have turned around if he could, for it was Marie-Claire’s voice.

  “I am sorry,” she said, and he knew that timbre, the sound her voice made when she was not allowing herself to cry. He had never seen her cry.

  And Jacques wanted to say: You are blameless. But what did his wooden mind understand of blame? What could he comprehend of the condition of even his own soul in that moment of flame and anger? What of all the moments of cold decision that came before?

  “My dear, I do not think they can hear you,” said a second person. Madame Bourget.

  “Whether they can hear me or not I must tell them. I must tell them that I will come to wind the Clock for as long as I live. And if they hang me for setting the fire, then you will come, won’t you, Madame Bourget? And you will come even if I live, on those nights when I cannot. If… if I cannot. You will. Say you will.”

  “I will. Of course I will, child. Now let’s get on with it and be gone.”

  Jacques listened as his darling Marie-Claire wound the cranks that pulled the weights, listened to the sound of her sobs that finally came, the sound he had never heard before.

  “But what shall we do,” he heard Madame Bourget whisper, “if they walk, as the Seven O’Clock Man and that dog did? What shall we do if he hunts the children?”

  “I shall never wind them,” said Marie-Claire. “I wind the Clock only. They will move on its track but they cannot move on their own. I hope.”

  “And if you are wrong? If there is some sorcery stronger than gears and wheels?”

  “Then I will bring a torch and watch him burn as I watched the other, and I will know that it is for the good of his soul.”

  Then his wife stood before him and kissed his wooden lips, while Jacques could not move, could only feel the dryness of her lips and the wetness of her tears.

  * * *

  The Clock loses time, now. The gears lock and skip. The old Governor’s sorcery is aging, cracking. Jacques has found that at seven o’clock, at the very moment when the gears turn his body toward the clock face, he can through his own will reach out his hands toward the figure on the other side of it. He does this every day like clockwork although he can never reach far enough.

  Every evening when he is out over the square, Jacques can hear the murmurs. They call him Jacques of the Clock now, with affection, or sometimes le jacquemart. They call his boy p’tit bonhomme. They say, Jacques Martin saved the town from a monster. They swear to visitors that the story is true.

  He is glad at least that he never leaves the Clock, that his punishment is not Monsieur Martin’s punishment.

  He is also grateful for the cowardly clockwinders of Lagarenne, for the men and women who take turns winding now that Marie-Claire and Madame Bourget are long dead, now that there is no danger and no sin in it.

  He cannot but be grateful, for though the clockwinders keep him in this purgatory of stillness for most of every day, while the rats run over his body and the bats swoop and he can hear the sighs of the ghosts of children all up and down the Clock tower, though the clockwinders give him this torture of perpetual inaction, they also give him the daily hope of one more glimpse of his son.

  THE TUNNELS OF MADNESS

  HAROLD R. THOMPSON

  I would not have gone to the Exchange Coffee House, a three-storey Georgian structure of red brick that dominated one end of Market Square, if not for the mysterious note I had received that morning, a note telling me to meet a man named Jacob Dorian, who would be sitting alone in the northwest corner of the second floor. When I came to the table in question, I’m afraid that I stopped and gaped a fool. I had not expected Mister Dorian to be a black man, though I suppose I should not have been surprised, given that Halifax, capital of Nova Scotia, was a navy town, the very seat of British naval power in North America, and the coffee house was a haunt of sailors and merchants involved in the West Indian trade. Dorian could have been either. He was also a very large fellow, and apparently prosperous, for when he stood at my approach, I noted the fine quality of both his frock coat and his waistcoat of deep mauve silk.

  “Captain Frame?” he said, his gentle tone at odds with his expression of stern command. Petty officer, I decided, or former petty officer now in business for himself.

  “Yes,” I said, adding, “Though I’m retired,” for my career in the British Army had ended four years before. “You sent me a note, on behalf of my old comrade, Major Edward Blackburn?”

  “Aye, sir,” he said. “I am in the Major’s employ.”

  I sat and placed my hat and stick on the table. My right hand, the one with the scars, I held out of sight, a silly habit.

  “You were a navy man, Mister Dorian?” I asked.

  Dorian’s smile was grim.

  “I have been many things, sir, including a slave in the Carolinas from which I escaped in a row boat to join the crew of H.M.S. Terrible, which had been lying off the coast. In that capacity I was given an opportunity to strike a blow against the slave trade, for a time.”

  “I see,” I said. “I suppose that must have brought you some satisfaction. But tell me, why did Major Blackburn send you in his stead? I had no idea he was in Halifax. He didn’t so much as send me a letter!”

  “I am instructed to take you to him, sir. He is involved in matters of a delicate nature. In fact, he is rather in a bind, and wishes your help.”

  This was very mysterious, and not altogether welcome, but I could not refuse to help an old friend who had suffered alongside me through the trenches before Sevastopol. Though he had been in the Royal Engineers and I in the infantry, our paths had crossed many times in the course of our duties, and we had become fast friends. Since then, I had visited his home in Hampshire on two occasions, but had not seen him since resigning my commission in the wake of the terrible events in India that we call the Great Mutiny.

  “You’d best lead on, then,” I said, standing. “I’m curious to see what all this is about.”

  Dorian nodded, and soon we were making our way through the crowd and down the stairs to the front doors. Outside, we found Market Square filled with vendors and potential buyers. The sun was high and bright, and from the harbour, on my left, a steamer gave a great blast of its whistle.

  “Do you mind if I ask you a question, sir?” Dorian said as we headed south along Bedford Row.

  “Of course not,” I replied. “Ask away.”

  “I’ve heard it said, sir, that you have been an outspoken supporter of independence for the Southern States.”

  I believe I must have smiled. Given that Dorian had been a slave in those Southern States, this was a potentially awkward question, but I do not shirk from awkward.

  “I am not certain what you may mean as ‘outspoken,’ but I have made my views on the subject known, Mister Dorian. And I suppose you wish to know why?”

  Dorian looked straight ahead as he walked.

  “There are many Nova Scotians fighting in the armies of the North,” he said.

  “That is true, but there is also a great deal of support for the Confederacy here, since
an independent South means a weakened United States, and some think a weakened United States is good for the British Empire. However, that is not the basis for my opinion. You see, after the rebellion in India, I decided that men must rule themselves. It is as simple as that. They must rule themselves and be permitted to make their own mistakes.”

  Dorian fixed me with a hard stare.

  “And what of slavery, sir?”

  I met his eye.

  “Slavery is a great wrong, perhaps the greatest wrong of our age, but solutions to great problems cannot be imposed upon nations by other nations or powers. We tried that in India. No, a nation, like an individual, must first recognize its errors, then find solutions itself.”

  Dorian was silent for a moment.

  “And how many men, women, and children must suffer, sir,” he said at length, “before the Southern States realize the error of their ways?”

  I am afraid that I had no satisfactory answer.

  “There is much suffering in the world, Mister Dorian,” I

  said. “I have seen it and been the cause of it. I wish I knew the solution.”

  After that we walked in silence.

  * * *

  We turned west onto Prince Street, climbing the steep slope toward Citadel Hill from the harbour, at last halting at a three-storey house of wooden clapboards painted a dark brown, as so many residences in the city seem to be. I expected Dorian to go to the main door, but instead he entered the alley to one side and stopped at a pair of cellar trap doors.

  “What’s this?” I said in surprise.

  “You have to trust me, sir,” Dorian said. “As I said, the Major is involved in some delicate matters. Secret matters, you might say. This route will take you to him.”

  I had my stout ash cane and was confident that I could best Dorian in a fight, man to man despite his size, but I reasoned that if he wanted to rob me, there were simpler ways of doing so than concocting such an elaborate tale.