Chaos Clock Read online

  Kate and David looked at each other, and then at the clock, a huge, brooding presence. Against the glass of the roof and windows the fog flattened itself, seeking entrance. Gordon and Mr Flowerdew were already lost to sight in the gloom at the far end of the hall.

  Kate took a shaky breath and started towards the clock, David hanging back a little. They reached the thick brown rope that kept the public at a distance from it during the day and paused.

  In the dim and patchy light only some of the clock’s detail was visible, so that while the great curved mirror shone like a ghostly eye, the top of the tower with its agonised figures was no more that an indistinct bulk rearing up towards the night sky.

  The monkey’s golden ornaments gleamed softly, utterly still. Kate stepped over the rope and edged towards her, fear rising in her throat. “David, come on!” she hissed.

  Reluctantly he moved to follow her.

  Cautiously, Kate stretched out a hand and touched the monkey’s wooden paw with one fingertip. Nothing happened. The paw was indeed wood, lifeless as it should be.

  More boldly, she moved her hand up and down the monkey’s arm, then tried to lift her paws from the handle. There was no movement at all as she threaded one end of the necklace in a loop around its wrist and got the other end ready to go round the handle. Finished, she took a step back, and bumped into David.

  “Kate, look.” His voice sounded odd.

  She turned around and froze. Not five metres away stood Tethys, streaming water that drained away into the marble floor. The wolves circled her restlessly as though waiting for her to release them. Her smile was gone, and in its place was a look of ferocious anger. “Kate,” she said in a commanding voice, “stop this now. You do not understand what you are doing. Give me the necklace.”

  “No! Go away and leave us alone!”

  David watched the exchange, wide-eyed. How could Kate defy this terrible woman?

  There was a laugh from further down the hallway, and a low growl of thunder. The Lightning King drifted nonchalantly a little above the floor, his robes blowing in the non-existent wind. Everything about him – his robes, his skin, his hair – was filigreed with lightning, crawling over him like tiny snakes.

  “David, who is he?”

  “The Lightning King – the man from my dream.”

  He heard Kate whimper, and remembered how frightened he had been of the King at first.

  “It’s all right. He won’t hurt us.”

  “He is right. I have no desire to hurt you.”

  Lightning flew up from his hand, and a wolf howled, and they heard glass break far above them, but he made no move to come closer to them. Tethys too kept her distance.

  Somehow, Kate made herself turn back towards the monkey, and what she saw shocked her anew.

  All the golden ornaments were still in place and the monkey still gripped the handle tightly, motionless; but where there had been wood, now there was flesh, and instead of paint, there was hair.

  “David!” She tugged urgently at his sleeve. “The monkey’s changing. This is when we have to do it. David!”

  He hung back, watching the King. There was more lightning, and he heard another pane of glass shatter high in the roof. He could imagine the fog creeping in.

  Kate had the end of the necklace in her hand, looped and ready as she watched the monkey blink as though in slow motion. Tethys called out something in words that Kate didn’t understand and the monkey turned its head towards her, teeth bared. She realised that her wrist was constrained and shook her arm, growling as Kate held tight to the end.

  “David! Help me!”

  But David was watching the wolves padding towards them on silent paws, fangs showing.

  The monkey lifted her paws off the handle and made to claw at Kate’s eyes, snarling. She screamed, but held tight to the necklace, and David, like someone waking from a trance, forced his gaze away from the wolves, and rushed to help her.

  He grabbed the monkey’s wrists and forced them back towards the handle as she twisted and bit at them. Thunder rolled around them and lightning flashed and Tethys’ shouts reached a crescendo as Kate managed to slip the loop of gold over the handle.

  “Now!”

  They both brought their weight to bear on the monkey’s arms as she screeched in fury. Down and down they pressed and as her paws touched the handle, Kate saw from the corner of her eye one of the wolves gather itself to spring, and in the same moment the monkey changed, no longer flesh and angry blood, but wood and paint again. Around her wrist and around the handle looped the subtle golden manacle that would keep her tied to the clock. Even as they watched, it seemed to melt away into the wood.

  Around them, there was a profound silence. The wolves were gone. As Kate watched, Tethys shimmered and dissolved like a reflection in rippled water.

  Further away, the Lightning King too was growing indistinct, merging into the fog that had poured through the broken panes of glass. His blue eyes were fixed on David.

  “You have another chance,” he said, and was gone.

  ***

  Kate and David stood shakily, panting as if after a race.

  “What did he mean?” she managed to ask.

  “I don’t know.” The lie came out glibly, disguising the turmoil of his emotions. He should have stopped Kate; he had meant to, but then when the monkey was clawing at her he’d acted without thinking, and by the time he’d realised what he was doing it was too late.

  But it was all right; the King had said he had another chance. What it was he didn’t know, but he would make no mistake next time. He couldn’t; everything depended on getting it right.

  They stepped back over the rope. Fog trickled in from the roof, pooling on the floor here and there. Moving round it, they set off to find Gordon and Mr Flowerdew.

  DUDDINGSTON

  As they made their way down to the round chamber at the root of the museum, Gordon and Mr Flowerdew did not speak. The air brushed against them heavily, as though trying to slow them down, and they seemed to move with painful slowness towards their destination.

  It was even worse when they got there. The air smelled as it does during a storm, crackling with unseen electricity, and buzzing with angry, indistinct voices.

  Gordon had disabled a security camera in the hall with the striding figures, and now all there was to do was unlock the display case with the key he had pocketed earlier that day.

  At the threshold of the room Mr Flowerdew put a hand on his shoulder to stop him for a moment. “The presences in this room are waking. I will do what I can to hold them at bay. Open the case and put all the pieces of the Hoard in the bag. Do not stop, whatever seems to be happening.”

  Gordon threw him a rather wild-eyed look, but went to the cabinet without comment.

  Mr Flowerdew stood in the centre of the room, eyes half-closed, face tilted towards the ceiling.

  Gordon unlocked the cabinet and slid the door open.

  There was a sound that was not quite a human voice, not quite singing. It made the hackles rise on the back of Gordon’s neck as its keening noise grew, rising higher and higher. He glanced round at Mr Flowerdew, standing erect in the centre of the room. The old man hadn’t moved, his face turned to the ceiling, arms by his side.

  Gordon forced himself to turn back to the case and with clumsy fingers began to lift the hoard of broken weapons into an open holdall.

  Angry voices swooped about him like birds trying to strike at his head, and unconsciously he hunched lower as he transferred the fragile pieces of metal.

  Above everything rose the dreadful inhuman keening.

  Gordon found he was panting for breath, though his movements seemed slow as a swimmer’s.

  As he put the last of the weapons in the bag there was a new sound, as if something heavy was breaking through twigs and branches.

  “Hurry! I cannot hold them.”

  The old man’s face was running with sweat. From across the room Gordon could see him t
rembling with exertion. He forced himself to lift the bag and walk towards him.

  Just as he thought the noise was so loud that the walls must start to crumble, everything stopped.

  The absence of sound was a physical relief that brought him momentarily to a halt before he lurched forward again to offer his arm to the old man, who looked on the verge of collapse.

  “Thank you,” he said shakily. “The children must have succeeded. They have won us a little respite, but we must leave this place.” They left the circular chamber on uncertain legs.

  Gordon looked back once and suppressed a cry. The ancient carved figure from Ballachulish lay half out of its case in a welter of broken glass and twigs.

  By the time they reached the children in the Main Hall, they had regained some of their composure. The children were wide-eyed with fear, but calm. Fog poured in through the broken roof panes, pooling on the floor and sending out tendrils. Gordon led them back a different way so that they could avoid it completely.

  They opened the door on a world run mad.

  Around them, buildings flickered in and out of existence, and the light shifted and changed constantly. At one moment the blood moon stood in the sky; at the next, the sun. Trees appeared and disappeared around them. Only Mr Flowerdew’s car remained a constant among the bewildering maelstrom.

  They rushed to its illusory safety and shut themselves in, speechless at what they could see happening outside.

  “Time is unravelling.”

  Mr Flowerdew started the car, which sat, at the moment, on a windswept moor, and it moved off, bouncing slowly over the uneven ground. Gordon sat forward, gripping the dashboard, peering out. Kate and David huddled in the back seat, speechless.

  Buildings and roads flickered around them. It was night-time; gaslights, a horse-drawn cab. The horse shied at the unfamiliar mechanical horror bearing down on it and the cabbie yelled with fear, jumped down and took to his heels.

  A forest now, the trees close enough to touch, but somehow a clear path always opening just in front of them. Dappled light and soft rain.

  The light thickened to the colour of honey and they saw men stripped to the waist building a great wall of dark stone.

  Fog again, their own time returned for a few moments, and they found themselves by Holyrood Palace, at the entrance to the great park.

  David glanced at Kate, saw her face was glazed with fear, wondered what his own looked like.

  It’ll be all right, he thought. I’ll stop them and Mum will come back forever and everything will be all right.

  Now that they were in the park, although the sky changed every few seconds, the shifts in the landscape around them were less marked. Holyrood Park had stood virtually unchanged for thousands of years, since the hill tribes abandoned it.

  The road disappeared again, and Mr Flowerdew slowed the car to negotiate a narrow track across a steep slope.

  “Why does the car stay the same?” asked Gordon, breathlessly.

  “Because I force it to remain,” said Mr Flowerdew shortly, his face gaunt with strain.

  They could see Duddingston Loch now, glimmering ahead and to the right of them. The blood moon shone in the sky again, but it was not the sky of their own time. The loch was much bigger than it should have been, and there was no church at its far end, no building anywhere in fact.

  The track petered out, and Mr Flowerdew stopped the car. “These will be the hardest moments. Be brave and we may still succeed.”

  To leave the tiny measure of safety provided by the car was almost more than they could bear, but somehow they did it, Gordon picking up the bag of broken weapons and helping the children out.

  “This way.” Mr Flowerdew led them through hip-high grass down towards the loch. There was just enough light to see that at this end it extended into a narrow tongue of silvery water.

  Gordon put down the bag a little way from the edge and unzipped it.

  “What the …?”

  He reached into the bag and pulled out a spearhead, whole and gleaming; nothing like the fragile and corroded fragments he had taken from the museum.

  “In this time the weapons are newly forged,” said Mr Flowerdew by way of explanation. “Now we must each return something to the water.”

  He went first, scooping up blades and spearheads. He walked to the water’s edge and threw them, one by one, as far as he could out into the loch. They flew in silvery arcs against the sky.

  As he turned back to the others, Gordon called, “Over there, look.”

  On the other side of the inlet stood three men, dressed in skins and carrying spears and bows. The two groups stood motionless watching each other for a few seconds, then the men melted away into the undergrowth.

  “Pay them no heed. We are in their time. It was men such as them who left the Hoard here in the first place. Come along … hurry!”

  Gordon went next, then came back to where the bag lay to help the children.

  As Kate waited her turn she looked around. “What’s that? What’s happening?”

  In the sky on the other side of the loch, lightning flashed and a glow of golden light spread up from the ground to meet it.

  “It is the battle for which the weapons were made. Quickly. This must be done now.”

  Kate turned and took a bone-handled knife and some spearheads from Gordon. The knife began to glow with the same golden light that was leaping in the sky.

  “What should I do?”

  A wind had suddenly risen from nowhere and Mr Flowerdew had to shout.

  “Throw them in. Now!”

  She flung them and watched the glow disappear beneath the dark waters of the loch.

  “It’s your turn, David,” said Gordon.

  He hesitated, then dug his hand into the bag and pulled out the last weapon, a golden, glowing sword. It was cool under his fingertips, though it looked as though it should have burned.

  “Now comes the moment when you must decide, David.”

  He looked up sharply, into the eyes of the Lightning King, barely five metres away, in the opposite direction from the loch. He was drenched in lightning and now it ran down, not up, pooling around his feet, to form a miniature silver lake.

  “Throw the sword in here, and your mother can be with you for ever.”

  Beside him, Gordon stood frozen. At the loch side, Kate and Mr Flowerdew stood, appalled.

  Kate found her voice first. “David! Quick! Throw the sword in the loch.”

  He didn’t move.

  Mr Flowerdew and the Lightning King locked gazes.

  “You are an old man, Guardian. A weak old man,” said the King, smiling his wolf’s smile. “And you have failed.”

  With an obvious effort, Mr Flowerdew turned his eyes to David. “David, please, think about the things I told you. Think of what you have seen tonight. Would you have this happen to your world?”

  “I’ll get my Mum back.”

  He heard Kate gasp. “But she’s dead, David.”

  “Not if time comes apart. She’ll come back. We’ll be together forever.”

  The King spoke again. “It is time. Throw the sword to me. See, here is your mother.”

  He lifted his head and saw his mother, her red fleece bright even in the ruddy moonlight, walking down through the grass towards him. He swung his arm back.

  “Wait, David!”

  He lowered his arm again and waited for her to reach him.

  She was crying.

  “Don’t cry, Mum. It’ll be all right, you’ll see. In a minute it’ll be all right and you’ll be back with me and Dad forever.”

  Her hand was on his arm, preventing him from throwing the glowing sword. “No, David. Throw it in the loch. You mustn’t do this.”

  “What?” he shouted in disbelief. “You don’t understand. If I throw it in the loch you stay dead. If I throw it into the lightning, you won’t be dead anymore.”

  “No, David.”

  He had never seen her look so sad.


  “I won’t be dead anymore and I’ll be here somewhere like this, but I’ll be here every day that I was ill as well, and you and Dad will have to go through it over and over again … for ever. Don’t do that to us. Let me go.”

  It was as though she had asked him to tear out his own heart. “No. I can’t. Don’t ask me to do that.”

  “You can. Remember, I told you before: I am here,” – she touched his heart – “and here,” – his head – “always. Close your eyes and I’ll be there. You don’t need this. Be brave. You know what you must do.”

  “No.” He whispered, his head against her chest, wrapped in her dear arms. She was asking him never to stand like this again. “I can’t.”

  She tilted his head with her hands so he had to look her in the eyes. “You can. Come on, I’ll walk down to the water’s edge with you.”

  She took his free hand and led him, no longer protesting, to the shore of the loch, paying no heed to Kate or Mr Flowerdew as she passed them.

  Through tears she smiled and bent to kiss him for the last time. “I’m so proud of you. My brave son.”

  Then she turned him to face the water and stood behind him as he hurled the final piece of the Hoard in a golden arc into Duddingston Loch, and when he turned back she was gone.

  He fell to his knees with a sob.

  ***

  The ground under him shuddered as the Lightning King gave a great cry of rage and the silver pool about his feet began to boil. Around him, Kate saw figures flicker in and out of time: Tethys and others whom she did not recognise, some human-looking, others horned or animal-headed, called from whatever other battles they had been fighting elsewhere, too late to help in this one. Howls and shouts split the air. The King began to waver, but as he did so he raised his arms and launched a tremendous thunderbolt at them.

  There was a noise so loud it was like a physical blow, and Kate found herself on her knees in the wet grass. Gordon was struggling to rise to his feet, David still at the water’s edge. Mr Flowerdew lay sprawled on his back.

  Gordon reached him first.

  “Are you hurt? What should I do?”