Timekeeper Read online

  Danny unlocked the front door and threw his things on the floor. The house stood tall and narrow, with a treacherously steep flight of stairs leading to the bedrooms above. Green wallpaper ran from floor to ceiling, a color long since faded from emerald to celadon. The kitchen on the right was separated from the hall by a push-through door that tended to stick. He had to shoulder his way inside.

  His mother sat at the kitchen table reading a newspaper in the dim glow of a lantern. The light caught her mane of curly brown hair, unmanageable even in the best of weather. She held a half-burnt cigarette between two fingers yellowed by years of addiction.

  “Hello, darling,” she said. “How was it?”

  Danny answered with a shrug and walked by a pile of dirty dishes to check the pantry. His mother drew his attention to a sausage roll on the table. He tore into it at once.

  “Thought you’d be out later than this,” Leila said, resting a pointed chin on one hand as she blew smoke from her slightly puckered mouth. His father had often joked she had sucked too hard on a lemon as a child.

  “Thought so too, what with that rubbish auto I’ve got.”

  Leila’s eyes flashed. They were dark brown and lined with crow’s feet. Danny was more an image of his father, from his green eyes to his gangly limbs.

  “You best be taking good care of it.”

  “It’s not me making it break down, it’s the bloody engine.” He wanted a new auto, and was secretly saving his money, but his mother refused to be rid of this one. His father had worked hard to afford it, and it was a miracle they had one at all. Families like theirs, in the lowest rung of the middle class ladder, usually couldn’t boast such a luxury. “I’ll have Cassie take a look tomorrow.”

  Leila dropped her eyes to the paper spread out before her on the table. He spied a report on recent events in India. Beside that were job adverts.

  Nothing about towers.

  “Mum,” Danny said carefully, “the Lead told me there’s no news. About Maldon.”

  Leila paused, then took another drag from her cigarette. She let it out as a smokey sigh.

  Just as easily as Danny could sense the fibers of time, so too could he sense the strain between them. He never understood what his mother needed, especially now, when they were two boats drifting into separate currents. Danny could fix clocks, but he didn’t know if he could fix this. Not on his own.

  He inhaled as if to speak, but remained silent. Eventually Leila lifted her head.

  “I’m off to bed. Douse the light, will you?”

  He flattened the rest of the roll between his fingers, leaving imprints in the thick dough. “Mum? Don’t work so hard. The job today was worth at least five pounds.”

  Leila paused again as she stood up, one hand resting on the tabletop as she studied her son across the seemingly immeasurable distance.

  “It’s all right, Danny,” she said. “Don’t you worry about me.”

  He listened to the clack of her high-heeled boots on the stairs and the muffled closing of her bedroom door. Sighing, he stuffed the last of the thick bread in his mouth and turned to the pile of dirty dishes. His jittery hands scrubbed and soaked until he found some minor relief in the chore, his mind filled only with suds. One less thing for his mother to worry about.

  He stared at the empty counter for a few minutes, then doused the lamp.

  The clock tower hummed all around him. His hands were on the clockwork, admiring the design of the cogs, the punctuality of it all. Every second tripped onward, one after the other, each tick a breath of air. It filled his lungs, his chest. Seeped through muscle and bone until it fused with the beating core of him.

  He was connected to time. It was the greatest feeling in the world.

  But something was wrong. A shift in the air, a crook of misfortune’s finger. As he reached for the nearest gear, it exploded outward, cutting his hand. He scrambled back, but not before the rest of the clockwork blasted away from the wall—all the metal, the smoke and splinters, rushing at him like a tidal wave.

  He was smothered in gray. He choked on blood. Copper filled his mouth, chipped his teeth, gouged his eyes, seared his skin. A gash on his chin seeped crimson onto his white shirt. He couldn’t hold it in, couldn’t stop it, couldn’t reach for time any longer. It danced out of his grasp, wild, unobtainable. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t. He couldn’t. He couldn’t—

  Danny’s scream cut off when he hit the floor. Struggling, he realized he was tangled in the sheets. His bedroom was dark.

  As he always did when the nightmare came, he fumbled for his timepiece, the one his father had given him when he became an apprentice. His hands shook so badly that he dropped it twice, but when it opened, he made himself stare at the hands going around the clock face. Tick. Tock.

  Time hadn’t Stopped.

  I was in an accident. I got out. I’m safe now.

  He touched the scar on his chin, counted the spaces where the stitches had been. There was another scar on his chest, and one on his right thigh, but this one bothered him most. This was his daily reminder, the one the world could see.

  It had been three months. Three months since he had been assigned to a small, out-of-the-way clock tower in Shere, a village outside of London. It should have been easy, quick, uncomplicated.

  As he worked on the clockwork for a much-needed cleaning, the mechanism had exploded.

  For one hair-raising moment, the village had Stopped.

  He still didn’t know how he’d walked away from that place. The Lead said only Danny’s quick work had prevented Shere being Stopped for good. Acting as if someone else controlled him, Danny had reattached the cogs and wound the clock, desperately nudging time to start again.

  And it had.

  But something else happened that day. The world itself had trembled. An unfamiliar energy had overtaken him, flooding the tower. He couldn’t explain it, but he was sure it had played a part in time starting again.

  He crawled back into bed and wrapped the blanket around himself. He listened to see if his mother would come, if she’d heard the screaming, but there was no sound on the other side of the wall. Closing his eyes, he clutched the timepiece to his chest, where it ticked above his rapidly beating heart.

  The next morning, Danny woke to the shrill ring of the telephone downstairs.

  “’Lo?” he croaked into the mouthpiece, rubbing gritty sleep from his eyes while holding the receiver to his ear.

  “Daniel? I’m sorry to call so early, but it’s important.”

  The voice belonged to the Lead Mechanic, and he sounded worried. Danny was instantly more awake.

  “What is it, sir?”

  “Someone’s discovered the missing Enfield numeral.”

  The man from Enfield stood clutching his felt cap in a white-knuckled grip. He fiddled with it as the Lead read the report, turning it over and over in his callused laborer’s hands. Danny watched until he was dizzy.

  They were in the Lead Mechanic’s office, the Lead seated behind his desk and Danny standing to one side. A beam of sunlight struggled to escape the clouds and shine through the window at their backs. It gleamed on the goggles that hung around the man’s thick neck.

  “Tell us again how you heard about the tower,” the Lead said.

  The man swallowed, and his Adam’s apple bobbed. “I ’eard only that the tower was broke, and that the two was missing. Couldn’t tell you how. We all went by to take a peek. I was one of the first, since I wake sooner than most.” He hesitated.

  “Go on,” the Lead said.

  The man scratched his scalp. From his greasy brown hair to the coal dust on his cheek, he looked like he hadn’t seen the right side of a bathtub in weeks.

  “I walked over, saw the tower, and thought it didn’t look right. Others were muttering the same. When I turned to walk back I ’ad me eyes on the ground, and down the street I saw this.”

  He crammed the felt cap in his pocket and lifted a large rectangular slab of black
metal with a small, barely perceivable slit in the middle. The edges were soft and distorted, like it had been in the process of being melted down.

  Danny and the Lead inhaled sharply. A tug of something familiar emanated from the metal, like time fibers around the clock towers. The air around Danny shivered and the hairs on his arms stood on end.

  “What have you done to it?” he demanded.

  “I didn’t do nuffink! I’m an ironworker, and I look for pieces like this to use in the workshop. When I walked back to the shop, I saw this on the ground, all mangled up and melted. Couldn’t think of what’d done it, and I couldn’t know it was from the tower, could I?”

  The Lead rubbed his forehead. “Only mechanics would be able to feel the properties of the clock’s power in that numeral.”

  The ironworker’s shoulders sagged in relief. “The London peelers were going about asking questions. So when they came to the door, I showed them the block readily enough and they led me ’ere. ’M terribly sorry if it’s made a mess.”

  The Lead glanced at Danny. “The issue’s fixed now, at any rate. Are you quite sure you found the numeral as you’re holding it? You didn’t alter it in any way?”

  “No time to,” the ironworker said. “I’d another project to get on with, and the police showed up in the middle. Probably need to start that over, now.”

  “I apologize for that, but I’m sure you’ll agree your town’s well-being is of slightly more importance.”

  “O-oh, well, yes, of course. ’Course it is, sir.”

  The Lead sighed. “Very well. Please leave that on my desk and follow your escort out.”

  Once the ironworker left in the company of the policeman who had been waiting outside, Danny turned to the Lead. “He has to know something.”

  “He doesn’t, Daniel. There was even a witness who saw him find the numeral down the street from the tower. His story seems sound, although I’m sure he must have realized it was a numeral at some point.”

  “If it can still be called one.” Danny picked up the lump of metal, wincing. It felt wrong. Warped. “If it wasn’t the ironworker, then what happened? What could have done this to a piece of time?”

  The Lead frowned at the ruined numeral, then shook his head. “Perhaps time itself will tell.”

  “Blazes, what did you do? Feed it gin?”

  Danny crossed his arms and glared at the auto bonnet, which his friend Cassie had peeled open to reveal the steam engine underneath. The boiler was rusting in places, forming patches of brownish orange like diseased flowers. With months away from work, he didn’t have the funds to replace it yet.

  “The pressure’s off,” Cassie muttered to herself as she knelt before the boiler. Her frizzy auburn hair was tied back, and it gleamed in the watery sunshine. “Have you been forcing it to go on low temp?”

  “I don’t drive it cold,” he said. “It’s old, that’s all. My father bought it years ago. One of the very first models.”

  Cassie hummed in reply and leaned forward to tamper with something on the side of the boiler, one hand absently twirling a wrench as she worked. He had no idea how she knew all of this. For her, it was like reciting the alphabet. He preferred the familiarity of a clock, the mechanics of which made Cassie cross-eyed.

  She turned those blue eyes on him, a smudge of dirt on her freckled nose. “Have you thought about installing a condenser?”

  “A what?” He used a sleeve to wipe away the dirt, and she wrinkled her nose at him.

  “They’ve just patented it, and it saves you the trouble of the feedwater. It’s a lot more weight for the auto to take on, but it’s useful.”

  “How much does it cost?”

  She shrugged. “Twenty quid?”

  “Twenty pounds? I’ll take my chances.”

  Her face fell a little. “A condenser would be safer. Or even a new model. This old thing won’t be around much longer.” She patted the door as she would a dog.

  “Don’t talk about it that way.”

  “What, you’re allowed to whinge about it and I’m not?” Her tone had been joking, but seeing his face, Cassie stood and wrapped an arm around his waist. “Calm down, Dan, it’s just an auto.”

  “You know it isn’t.” He slipped away from her and leaned against the auto door as Cassie leaned on the fence surrounding the Harts’ dying front garden. Danny had thought about maintaining the garden during his time off, but one spider bite had driven him away from it forever.

  “What’s happened, then?” Cassie asked.

  The neighbor’s tabby slinked around the corner and rubbed itself against Danny’s legs. Wanting to avoid Cassie’s eyes, he bent down and scratched behind the cat’s ears, burying his fingers in its soft fur.

  “You and your mum had a row?” Cassie guessed.

  “Not quite.” Unless you considered three years of resentment a row. Leila had grown distant after what had happened to his father, so wrapped up in her loss that she didn’t have the capacity to comfort him in his. Now they could barely last two minutes together.

  He had never told Cassie the reason why. It sat like an unmovable stone in the pit of his stomach. If he tried to pull it free, if he even brushed against its sharp edges, he would be cut open and his shame would pour out.

  The cat took off in pursuit of a pigeon down the road. Danny stood and decided he couldn’t touch that stone. Not yet.

  He turned to another problem instead, one Cassie already knew. “Things have just been odd. Ever since I told her …”

  He trailed off, and Cassie nodded. It still made him uncomfortable to say it out loud, but Cassie, his friend since childhood, never needed words to understand him.

  A few months ago—before the disastrous job that had given him his scar and his nightmares—Danny had finally announced what he had known since he was eleven: that he preferred boys over girls. It used to be a capital offense, punishable by hanging or worse, but that law had been abolished in the last decade. While the rural parts of England were still offended by the notion, more civilized areas such as London accepted it with barely a “good heavens.”

  But much like the protesters condemning the clock towers, that didn’t prevent some from thinking it was unnatural.

  He supposed he should feel lucky. The ghosts of those before him, the ones who hadn’t been so lucky, were a constant weight reminding him he had to make the most of this new freedom.

  So he’d told others the truth, his heart knocking against his chest and his breaths like daggers in his lungs each time. The reactions had ranged from wide-eyed “oh”s to sage nods, as if they had known all along. Most people, like Cassie, treated him the same.

  His mother hadn’t reacted at all. She’d merely sat at the kitchen table and stared at a point over Danny’s shoulder, as though she couldn’t bear to look at him directly. The space between them had grown tight and still. It was the hollow ache of air devoid of words, a breathless subtraction. He’d swallowed that air until pockets of silence sat cancerous in his bones, threatening to expand. To crack.

  He knew she kept her distance for another reason. The stone that Danny could not touch. This new information was only another cog in their complicated clockwork.

  Cassie gently kicked his boot. “Don’t worry, she’ll get used to it. She’ll have to, or else what’ll she say when you bring a handsome young man home?”

  “Shove off.”

  “Not quite what I had in mind.” She laughed and noisily kissed his cheek. “Now then, about this boiler. You got two quid on you?” He dug in his pockets for the money. “There’s a good lad. Oh, you haven’t said if there’s been any news.”

  “News?”

  “You know. About the Assignment?”

  Danny thought back to the heaviness in the Lead’s eyes, the pity he was tired of seeing. His stomach dropped. He wanted the Assignment so badly it hurt.

  “The Lead says there’s been no progress. He won’t make a decision yet.”

  “I’m sorry, Dan. I
know how much it means to you. It’ll probably take time, though, won’t it? Building a brand-new clock tower?”

  Not just that: the first clock tower to be built in hundreds of years. The time zones of every city were firmly locked in place by the towers, which had been built to regulate time more efficiently. But the builders had destroyed all knowledge of how to create them. The idea of a new tower had first been met with scorn, but the Lead was determined to see it through.

  “No one knows how to build them anymore,” Danny said. “Just how to repair them.” He dropped his voice to a bitter murmur. “Fat lot of good that does us now. If we don’t get this tower to work …”

  I’ll never see Dad again.

  Cassie watched him somberly. The stone inside him ached, begging to be pried free.

  Cassie knew what it was like to live with guilt. Danny saw it in the way she kept glancing at the auto beside them, her fingers twitching to double-check the engine.

  But he remained silent, and Cassie wrapped a hand around his arm. “It’ll all work out. At least you did good with the Enfield job, yeah?” He nodded. “Then that’s something. They’ll see you’re back in the game. Do you think you’ll have to go there again? To Enfield?”

  He remembered the fear that had choked him, the sense of dread he felt just from looking at the clockwork. Maybe the Lead was right to keep him away from the new Maldon tower.

  “Not if I can help it,” he said.

  Fate must have taken a dislike to Danny, because he was called into the Lead’s office a couple of days later.

  “Colton Tower?” Danny said. “But I was just there.”

  The Lead raised his hands, just as confused. The little amount of hair he still possessed stuck out awkwardly, as if he’d run his hands through it several times.

  “The maintenance crew’s phoned in with another problem.”

  Danny’s heart gave an extra-hard thump. “Which is?”

  “The minute hand’s gone missing.”

  Fate didn’t dislike Danny. Fate despised him. He took a moment to rub a hand over his face, hoping that when he was done, the world would be a little less upsetting.