Around the Clock (V 4

The Intruder was a woman, sometimes called Gertrude or simply ‘Trude, by those who remembered and bothered to use a name in place of a title, in a place where most people had long since left their names behind. On the World of Clock, in the Valley of the Hours, in the City of Dusk, names had lost some of their urgency. She was what she did, and what she did was go anywhere she got paid to, regardless of what laws, doors, and bodies she had to break to get there. In her world, she served a function somewhere between bounty hunter, repo man, and kneecapper, and though it was a thriving and competitive industry, she was the undisputed best.

She stood six feet tall in bare feet, six-two in her habitual boots. She was wider than most men in the shoulder, and her body was thick with bone and muscle. Her almost unnaturally long arms conveyed a sense of enormous power. Her hair and eyes were the same dull gray, and the face they framed was a solid knot of wrinkles and scars. It was impossible to say in years how old she was, for in the Valley they had given up estimating the counterfactual passage of the still years.

She wore ragged denim and old leather and, always, two pistols low on her hips like a gunslinger’s. She drove a half-rusted convertible that ran, not coincidentally, like magic.

The laboratory was a squat, square converted warehouse, crumbling somewhat with age, screened from the city and the countryside by a dense screen of trees and scrub. Above the door hung the philosopher’s sign, a single black star on a field of gold, below which were painted the man’s name—Regis Aquitaine—and his many abbreviated accolades. The door itself had been a solid one, with many locks. It had been torn free of its hinges and tossed aside. The few windows she could see were broken, and bore traces of color in the starlight that might have been blood.

Aware but not yet alarmed, she drew one of the massive semi-automatic pistols she wore beneath her tattered jacket. It fit snugly in her similarly massive hand, the callous-hardened and thick-boned fingers embracing the cold but familiar metal.

Inside, an ethereal light that seemed to come from nowhere revealed an utter shambles, in the midst of which the philosopher sat in lab-coat and ashes, weeping and whispering a woman’s name—Sophie, she thought—in lament. She tried to get his attention, but he was beyond hearing. She had no immediate way of knowing whether his mind had shattered with his vials and blackboards, or whether he had labored in such a state for years. Philosophers as a breed were not known for their stability, after all.

She set about an examination of the premises, leaving him to sit in the shadows of his equipment, unconsoled. The open space of the old warehouse had been casually divided by screens, blackboards, and tables into several zones, each of a discrete purpose: on the one hand, broken glass and puddles of gleaming liquids with acrid smells marked a chemistry lab; next came upturned anvils and metalworking equipment, littered with thick gold disks and glittering chains, and black slivers of metal that had, perhaps in moments of ire, been hurled at the walls like darts.

She moved deeper into the place, passing several sets-up of more arcane functions that were beyond her ken. In one corner, amid a great mass of fractured blackboards scrawled with equations, diagrams, and notations in dead languages, there was a massive door of steel, which lay, frame and all, prone upon the floor. It had been torn wholly from the weaker wood of the wall in which it had been set—not the outer wall, but a flimsy bit of board that had originally probably helped form an office of some kind. A horde of dead had torn the door out of the rotting wood with rotting fingers, in a war of attrition that had unsurprisingly not favored the defender, though the great smears of blood and the dozens of broken-off fingernails that littered the floor bespoke a valiant effort.

Through the raggedly gaping doorway, Gertrude saw a scene of perfect domesticity—a bedroom done in pink and lace, illuminated by a tiffany lamp presumably drawing power from whatever arcane generator fueled the eerie sheen of the rest of the lab.

The dead hadn’t touched it. Except for some dried blood and shed flesh on the floor, there was no sign of their presence here, and certainly none of the fury they’d shown the rest of the place. Gertrude knew why—it was the esthetic. The greatest love of the dead was the semblance and form of normalcy, which they worshipped as though it were the life they had lost—despite the fact that no one had lived this way since before the world bore the name of Clock.

She knew, then, what had happened. He had kept her here, his Sophie, after she died. He had trapped her with a cage of lace and a door of steel, held her back with them against the call of the deeper darkness that always sooner or later caught the dead and dragged them on. But he had given her a window, too, of something clear like glass but much harder. He’d let her look out into the night, maybe because it was something she’d done in life—there was a little bench by the window, suitable for sitting and pining, as a lady might, watching for her lover’s return.

And, sooner or later, they’d seen her through that window. A foraging party, a wandering loner, or a “family” playing picnic, the dead had found her, and they wanted her. And then they came for her, and they took her away. She wondered briefly whether the girl had gone willingly, or struggled to stay with the man who had gone to such lengths to keep her.

Sophie or her liberators had taken with them the pillows from the bed, and Gertrude assumed from the heart-shaped gap in the dust on the bureau was a make-up kit. It had sat before an empty mirror-frame; the girl must have stood there and stared into the blank wall with her similarly empty eyes while she painted her cold, gray face.

With a little shiver that she would have killed before admitting to anyone else, The Intruder returned to the blackboards with their broken scrawls and tried to reconstruct the nature of the philosopher’s work. The equations and arcane formulae were closed to her, but she could tell from the diagrams and a few of the plainer passages that the philosopher had been designing some sort of instrument after the fashion of the clocks of old, before the world had acquired their name and ended their function.

This puzzled Gertrude, who knew, like any citizen of Clock, that time no longer worked that way, if it could be said to work at all. It was universally known that the hands of all old-fashioned clocks were listless and empty of purpose, fit only for the idle whims of the nostalgic.

This watch, if such it was—for it was apparently small enough to fit the hand and the philosopher often sketched it on a long chain—was unusual in several respects, and not just because the world had lost its use. It had several strange parts beyond the three hands and the ornate sun-and-moon wheel visible through the cut in the face. There were half a dozen small dials of which four, at least, could have nothing to do with traditional timekeeping.

In the wreckage of a great deal of jeweler’s equipment, she found what she took to be a prototype, lacking in ornament and short a crystal, but otherwise seemingly complete. It was not still, as she would have expected, but no more did it move in any orderly fashion; its hands all spun aimlessly, hither and thither, with all speeds and none. She gathered, from the frustrated but not hopeless tone of the notes amidst which it sat, that it did not succeed in its intended purpose, but represented in its crazy motion some step forward from earlier models which could not be coaxed into action at all.

Whether he had ever finally succeeded the notes did not tell, and he was in no condition himself to tell her. She could try interrogating him, but it was clear already that it would profit her nothing; he felt neither fear nor any pain outside his own heart. She could beat him all she liked, but he’d give her nothing but his tears.

His library was a total chaos, from which she could acquire only the vaguest sense of his erudition—history, alchemy, metaphysics, and necromancy seemed predominant, but there were also texts on metalworking and even ancient tomes on time and the technology of its measurement. One of the few texts untouched by the rage of the dead she found locked in a cabinet they had upended but not torn apart. It was a handwritten manuscript in the hazy, fanciful style of Aquitaine himself, entitled Pseudo-chronography and Applied Chronothanatology, and it was a vast hodgepodge only a little more arranged than the wasted lab—here speculative, here experimental, here purely technical, and quite often merely sentimental or autobiographical. It seemed, however, to be a record of whatever research it was that Aquitaine had been conducting, and as such was the only item of certain value to the man who had commissioned this particular intrusion from her. She tucked it into a satchel she carried with her habitually, nestling it in the midst of a diversity of ammo cartons. Then she ventured out into the constant dusk to trace the path of the dead, leaving the philosopher to his ghostly half-light and his lamentations.

Outside, she hopped into her car—one of the principle virtues of owning a convertible being the ability to eschew use of its doors. She tucked the satchel which held the book beneath the passenger seat, which, appropriately enough, was where she kept her shotgun. Once she’d warmed the car up, she put it in gear and drove deeper into the early evening, still hugging the hills that formed the northern edge of the Valley. She knew the dead had taken over a suburb that ran for about ten minutes starting at 6:17, and she figured that’s where they’d taken the philosopher’s girl and the pseudo-chronograph—if, that is, the philosopher had ever finished it at all. If it wasn’t just some madman’s dream.

Behind her she left the city crouched beneath the Barricades of Day. Ahead were the suburbs of the dead, crawling with corpses, memories, and the almost-light of distant stars.

Section 2: The Hyacinth Girl

Is there no change of death in paradise?

Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs

Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,

Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,

With rivers like our own that seek for seas

They never find…

Alas, that they should wear our colors there,

The silken weavings of our afternoons,

And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!

—Stevens, “Sunday Morning.”

'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;

'They called me the hyacinth girl.'

—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Od' und leer das Meer.

—Eliot, “The Waste Land”

It didn’t take her long to find them. A horde of the size it would have taken to wreck the philosopher’s lab wouldn’t disperse into the countryside. They’d celebrate. A block party, most likely. And they’d have it at the home of their most prominent member—where they could revel in the same normalcy fetish that marked Sophie’s lace cage.

So she drove until she came to a street crowded with walking corpses in ratty polo shirts and sundresses that only half-obscured open wounds and slowly rotting flesh.

They were in a good mood, so she didn’t worry much about driving right up to the house at the center of the crowd. They clustered on the lawn, staring hungrily at an unlit barbecue where some unidentifiable meat was being flipped slowly and clumsily with a rusted spatula. The spatula was held by a one-armed corpse of great girth wearing an apron that read, “Kiss the Cook.” This might have proved difficult, though, since he was also missing most of his jaw.

She left the convertible running and grabbed her shotgun. From the trunk she took a machete, which she slung across her back, and a flamethrower, which she carried across the lawn and set under the half-rotten stairs leading up to the front porch. Then she mounted those same stairs—despite their protest—and reached for the knob. It was slick with a slimy film, but it still turned, which is what mattered.

Inside it was quiet, still, dark. Dust lay thick on the floor, broken and smudged by many footprints. ‘Trude followed them inside to the living room, where eight dead sat as if in silent conversation, surrounded by empty bottles and cracked wine glasses. None of them looked like a leader. None of them seemed to be in possession of the philosopher’s device. She moved past them quietly, earning no more than a covetous stare.

In the kitchen, three females were laboring over a group of half-dismembered corpses—probably dead who had been taken by hunting parties, or had lost fights, or had simply been unpopular. They were breaking them into smaller, still-quivering chunks, which the little corpses, children who were playing a coveted role in the reconstructed families, carried out to the barbecue.

At the rear of the kitchen was a narrow staircase winding up to the second floor, in a tight spiral that left Gertrude dizzy. A hallway opened off the top of the stairs, with four doors opening off, two to a side. The farthest, on the left, gave off a little artificial light. She made her way toward it, her great booted feet creaking a little. She entered the room cautiously with the shotgun up in a shooting stance.

The room was sparsely furnished, gray and empty, with peeling wallpaper and a naked mattress. On this mattress sat two girls, one a child of eight or nine, one a young woman.

The latter was slender, beautiful, and forlorn. She looked almost alive, having eased her pallor with the contents of the heart-shaped case that stood open on a small writing desk. She wore a long, filmy dress the philosopher must have given her. It covered her corpse well, except for the arms which hung like marble, gleaming and cold. Though her eyes had the blank fixity of death, her face was twisted with living sorrow—but she had no tears, and her face without them was like a desert of painted stone. In her arms she held a lute, marked with a black star. Her fingers moved on the strings without grace or skill, but not without feeling, as the little girl beside her sat, rapt. Gertrude was taken a little aback at this, for she had never before seen the dead attempt music, and she had to be something of an expert on them, in her line of work.

The child was not so kempt as the philosopher’s lover; her dress was of a much older fashion, her skin somewhat discolored, and her left ear missing a goodly part. But her glassy eyes held a lively attention about them that was almost as remarkable as Sophie’s music; the girl seemed almost aware.[i]

But she was not pertinent. ‘Trude turned to the woman, spoke her name, heard the philosopher screaming it into the darkness.

“Sophie?”

She nodded.

“I’ve come for—“ She stopped, hearing a shuffle of feet behind her, seeing the woman’s eyes widen a slow fraction. She turned swiftly to see a closet she hadn’t noticed before, because it had been obscured by the open hall door and because she’d been distracted by the girls.

The floorboards creaked beneath a shifting wait, and then, with a slamming of doors, the dead began to boil up out of the closet.

She swore in a harsh whisper as she fired, pumped, and fired again. They’d set guards! She was angry with the dead for their foresight and with herself for lacking it.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

There were four of them, three dispatched with the five shells in the shotgun. She drew one of her pistols, then, and let the incendiaries blow apart the oozing head of the last. It fell burning and writhing to the floor, sufficiently inconvenienced to allow ‘Trude to escape.

She turned to the girls and growled, “The watch! Where is it?”

They made no move, forced no sound from their frozen throats. She leveled the pistol at Sophie’s head. This gained no response, either. On a whim, she tried pointing it at the child. Sophie flinched visibly, shuddered, and pointed toward the lower drawers of the desk.

Gertrude stood a second in shock; she had never seen the dead show any concern for one another before, not like this. Then again, she had never seen one willing to suffer dismemberment and disfigurement over a mere object, either.

Gun still in hand, she rifled the drawers and found the chronograph beneath a bunch of molding schoolwork from another generation. Its gold case and chain, its luminous face, shone glittering even by the dim light of the room’s one candle. She slid it into her pocket—

At which Sophie rose up, scowling, barely to be balked by the Intruder’s upraised gun. But she backed up and seemed to subside, staring at ‘Trude with a beseeching look that remained clear despite the soullessness of her eyes.[ii] She gestured with an icy hand at herself, at ‘Trude, and at the door.

Incredulous, she exclaimed, “You want to come?!”

Sophie nodded firmly, with a popping of vertebrae. A moment passed, in which Gertrude tried and failed to do the smart thing—shoot them both and have done with it. As soon as her finger began to tighten on the trigger, she heard cascading inside her skull the pathetic voice of the crazed philosopher calling out to his dead love.

So, instead of following instinct honed by years of experience, she turned to go, pausing only to reload her guns before moving back into the hallway with the two dead girls behind her. Unfortunately, the others had heard the shots, and there was a sea of them climbing the stairs. She heard their limbs, like dry trees grating their branches in the wind; she felt the tromp of too many feet unsettling the floor.

She considered the window, but it was too far down; she might break a leg, leaving her easy prey. So she took the familiar way out, cordite and lead and, finally, the razor edge of the machete sliding through flesh and catching on bone. She fell into a dark haze, lost track of herself and her purpose. Without remembering why, she forged ahead, because there was nothing else to be done.

She began to return to herself as she neared the door. Literally dozens of bodies lay in quivering bits behind her, the ones that could feeding on their fellows in the horrible frenzy that violence could not help triggering among the dead.

She burst out the front door and stumbled, breathing hard, onto the front lawn. Here, some of the less-observant or energetic party-goers had not bothered to join the fray. The might have considered taking a try now, but she quickly snatched up and activated the flame-thrower she’d left below the steps. They recognized it immediately and scattered shambling off in all directions.

She circled the convertible (making sure to check for unwanted passengers and the old arm-shooting-out-from-under-your-car-to-grab-you trick), tossed the flamethrower into the backseat, and hopped the door. She started the car and motioned the girls, who had followed her to the curb, to get in. They climbed clumsily into the back next to the flame thrower, which they regarded suspiciously.

Without so much as a “buckle your seatbelts,” she put it in gear and set the pedal to the floor.

Section 3 [1]: Crooked Worms and Roses

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

--Dylan Thomas

She flew out of the hills on humming wheels driven by a silent motor, with the dead at her back. Her spirit and body were as empty as her guns as she fled from the suburbs of the dead and the nightmare of its half-life.

The sky lightened perceptibly, but not markedly, as they approached Gertrude’s apartment at the northern end of Dusk City, where the torches and lamps and electric bulbs guttered dimly, and the streets were mostly empty of both living and dead. As the population shrank, it drew in towards the Barricades and, generally, towards the Central Gate, the main artery for passage between Day and Night. And as the people crept inwards they gave up the outlying neighborhoods, not yet to the dead, but to the criminals, to squatters, and to those who, like the Intruder, valued solitude and freedom more than the company of the living.

To reach it, she took one of the axial roads running the entire width of the valley—though that was, of course, only a few hundred miles. The equatorial roads, which no longer existed but in memory and a few maintained stretches in Dayside and a small stretch of boulevard in Dusk City, once ran the circumference of the world. No one had used them, though, since Clock stopped.

She inhabited the middle two floors of a small, six-story office building. The place wasn’t very homely, but it still drew both water and power, and it had a nice view. It also had a nifty cage that had once been used to store a/v equipment and petty cash, and that she now used to store bounties and other prisoners. She parked the girls there with Sophie’s lute and a couple pieces of steak from the freezer, quickly microwave-defrosted. ‘Trude seasoned them by slicing a long, shallow cut in her left arm and letting a dozen or so drops of blood fall onto the steaming, damp meat. It would round out the meal for them. She took her to cover the wound before taking the food in to them, however.

She’d found the tip on blood in the back of Aquitaine’s manuscript, a special appendix on the care and maintenance of the dead, which he’d doubtless researched for Sophie’s upkeep. ‘Trude had been almost miffed to learn that the old trapper’s adage about fresh blood, which she’d always regarded as superstition, had a factual basis.

To be kept in good condition, the dead must consume flesh; it is better it were warm, and best it were human, but fresh human flesh is hard to come by. Most commonly, in their natural environment, the dead will eat the flesh of their own kind—those, especially, who have gotten slow in their pseudo-age. Such a diet does little for the condition, appearance, and energy of those who eat it.

The reason the dead should eat the livest and most human flesh available is that they are nourished not by the substance of the stuff, but by the spark of life within it, which fades fast after death.

Thus, if fresh meat is unavailable, fresh blood will liven up leftovers and help maintains the healthy pallor and active lifestyle of your dead.

While she was at it, she defrosted and fried some of the steak for herself. The stuff was expensive, but she was paid well, and it was worth it. It had to be kept frozen until right before use, of course, because it would otherwise spoil, and because it might also wonder away, since animal flesh, too, obeyed the rules of Clock, and must remain eternally half-awake. What could not be used by the butchers was either taken by smugglers to nightside and dumped illegally, to wander the hills as bone and sinew, or else was treated chemically to render it inert and then buried in legal landfills, or, like some of the human dead, was cremated, which tended more to change than to solve the problem, as it generated the strange, quasi-sentient ash storms that wander about the valley, occasionally blanketing cities and fields like plagues of locusts.

All in all, it was generally best that the dead go their own way, into the cities of deep Night that claims that they claimed as their own, and ultimately to that Swarming City beneath the mountains, where they wandered eternally, lost in the catacombs.

Thinking of that place, Gertrude pondered the age in her bones and felt, dimly, as one feels someone’s shadow fall on their back, the weight of her own mortality, of her destiny in those darkened halls.

Then she shook herself, like a wet dog, and returned her focus to the steak, which had begun to squirm.

She did not awaken when the sun crept through her bedroom (once corner office) window, because this place had never, in living memory, seen the sun. And no alarm sounded, triggered by clockwork or quartz. Rather, somewhere in her, something had had its fill of sleep’s fantasies, and let her go from their many folds.

She rose and dressed with deliberate slowness. Setting each button in place, waiting for her spirit to finish returning from the dreaming place, which was full of light and movement and many seasons. She had to give it time to reinsert itself in her chill, thick hands, put her back on as she put on her clothes.

She brushed her hair back with one massive finger and pondered the stony eyes in her weathered face, reflected in an old mirror she’d brought with her from—some other place, that she could almost remember. Her father, she thought, had shaved in it once. But maybe not; she had worked to forget so much, and she was not about to try to get that back.

She greeted the girls and put out coffee for them spiked with blood, thinking that she’d need to find a butcher who could supply it in better quantities. Sophie was still trying to play that black-starred lute, striking the strings with fingers blunted and slowed by death, so that the chords jumbled up into each other, only a little of her sad tune escaping the chaos. Frustration showed in her face, but the little one was still transfixed by her playing, and urged her on with gestures and hungry eyes. Gertrude listened, too, finding any sound beyond her own breath to be music in this silent place.

Perhaps, she thought, she’d been alone too long.

Leaving them to themselves, she went over to the cabinet where she’d left the loot from her excursion, and took out Pseudo-chronography and Applied Chronothanatology. She sat in one of a dozen little cubicles, within earshot of Sophie’s haunting half-music, and began to read.

* * *

She was going to see Murray the Buzzard, a mid-level crook for whom she did some work, including the philosopher’s lab. It seemed Aquitaine had been borrowing money from him to fund his private researches, and Murray’s famed patience had finally given way to his equally famed greed, and he’d sent Gertrude to collect the results.

But she wasn’t going there directly. She knew that the Buzzard wouldn’t be satisfied with the prototype, especially since she didn’t plan on bringing him the manuscript either. She would have to bring him an offering of some kind, to assuage him. Hopefully she could get something good enough to make him forget about the philosopher.

But what do you get the man who’s already taken everything?

You get him the man who’s taken something from him. You get him Hands.

Hands McIlheney was a born thief. They say he stole the watch off the doctor who delivered him and stashed it in the afterbirth, but that’s impossible. No one wears watches anymore.

But the essence of the story was true—that Hands would steal anything from anyone, for little or no reason. He took the obvious stuff—money, jewelry, cars, appliances. But he took knick-knacks, trash, old clothes, too. And he loved taking candy from babies.

He got good, fast, because otherwise he’d’ve gotten dead, faster. Natural selection, baby, he would say. As it was, he’d been caught twice stealing from people like the Buzzard, and they’d used an old-fashioned punishment: they’d cut off a hand, each time.

But the old methods didn’t always work on Clock. And each time, Hands had gotten hold of his severed appendage before it could be destroyed. And he’d simply stuck the hand on the ragged stump and waited for it to taste blood.

And now he was a thief again, even better than before, in fact, since what the hands lost in dexterity they more than made up for by their detachability. But he’d made a third and final slip—he’d taken something from Murray, and one of his men had spotted the hands making off with it. A price was soon declared, and that should have been that.

But hands had made a new friend, a rival gangster who had made a business of smuggling things across the Barricades. Hands’s hands were perfect for him, because the ever-vigilant guards hadn’t been trained for anything like them.

The gangster, named, of all things, Bob, had a hideout not far from Gertrude’s, an old department store emptied of most of its wares. He kept a small army there, and so far no one had put forth the necessary effort to get the bounty from the Buzzard.

‘Trude pulled up a block away and strapped on the necessary weapons—her pistols, a big stick, and a large burlap sack.

The guards at the most obscure side-entrance were easy—bip-bop, and she was on. Once inside, she clung to the shadows of the shelves, and froze like the garishly redecorated mannequins whenever a drunken patrol went by. She was glad that their incompetence enabled her to avoid killing them, at least for now.

On the third floor, where the gangster’s staff lived, she waylaid a guard from behind, bringing her stick across his throat, just tight enough so he could whisper and nothing more.

“Where’s Hands?”

“I don’t—“

She pressed a little more, to make her point. The guard managed to tell her, and then she choked him into unconsciousness and left him beneath an artificial Christmas tree.

Hands, the guy’d said, was living in the sporting goods section on the other side of this floor. He had a tent where he stayed, alone, because no one liked his smell.

Cautious, silent, she went there.

There was a sea of tents, in between a forest of fishing poles and a veritable arsenal of rifles and shotguns and even a few crossbows for the really old-fashioned. The tends were all dark, undifferentiable, no signs of life. She sighed silently and moved amongst them, listening for breath, sniffing for the scent of the dead flesh of his hands. In the dark behind her there were soft rustlings of vermin and leaves blown through broken windows.

She found him in a big, round, all-weather model, awake, and sitting near the entrance. He was a little man, thin and scrawny and vaguely tuberculotic-looking. His hair was the color of hot coals, his eyes the color of dead ones. He was not wearing a shirt, shoes, or hands, but he was smiling like a cat.

She threw herself aside as something whistled past her head and tore through the wall of a nearby pup tent. Then a clatter as a crossbow was tossed aside. She scowled at the thief, then turned to search the ranks of weapons for his errant parts.

As she did so, however, a soft whirring arose behind her, and then a sharp pain pulled at her arm, and she was tugged back by—

A fishing hook.

She started to remove it, then thought better. She grabbed the slender line and pulled; it cut deep into the flesh of her fingers, but she as vastly outmassed the holder of the rod, it came flying toward her. Swinging her stick lightly, she bludgeoned the hand that came flying at her. It fell to the ground a few feet away, broken in several places. Hands writhed on the ground, whimpering. The Intruder snatched the thing off the floor, and twisted.

Hands screamed.

Somewhere in the depths of the building, someone stirred in their drunken slumber. Haste was needed. She spoke to the weapon-filled gloom.

“You gonna come peacefully, or do I have to start lopping bits off your twin here?

* * *

The ride to the Buzzard’s place was uneventful, once she gave up on her usual restraint procedures and just cuffed his feet to the anchor loop and tied the bag of hands to the bumper.

At the gate, the guards waved her straight in, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing, since the territory inside the Buzzard’s demesne wasn’t necessarily the safest place to be, or the easiest to leave at will.

The Buzzard held court in a place with no shadows; he spent a fortune regularly on lights—electric, oil, wax, ethereal, biochemical—efficient illumination derived from dead fireflies, certain fish, and a number of emergent species adapted to nightside through self-luminescence. The Intruder had never divined precisely why he disliked the dark so much; perhaps it was simply his personal way of flaunting wealth.

Murray perched at the head of a long hall. He sat behind what must once have been a judge’s pulpit, and while he didn’t go so far as to don the black robes, he loomed above his minions, gazing solemnly and cruelly down his hooked nose at them like some ancient god of merciless retribution.

‘Trude had practically to carry Hands down the length of the hall, and in truth she couldn’t blame him.

“Gertrude, my dear,” Murray purred. “You bring me a gift. What is the occasion? Have you forgotten our anniversary?”

She shivered a little. He’d never called her by any name before, and she doubted it was a good sign.

“It was on my way,” she said honestly enough. “It was no trouble.”

The Buzzard liked the sound of that. He liked it a great deal. He laughed long and hard, until windows rattled and candles fluttered.

“No trouble,” he said. “No trouble. We’ll see.” A pause, and the grappling of eyes in the dancing light. “Tell me,” he said after a while, “About the Philosopher.”

Oh yeah, she thought. Trouble.

She gave him the short version. She left out her houseguests, she left out the book and the chronograph. She ended by walking forward, reaching up to the top of his pulpit, and placing the prototype gently yet firmly onto the polished surface.

He ran his fingers over the case lifted it carefully in his hand. He looked at it, really looked, with the entirety of his being. His eyes swirled and wobbled with the twirling arms. He saw something there, something more than Gertrude saw. And then she understood that Murray the Buzzard was not just lending money to one of the ten thousand disaffected sons of morning who came to night to burn out slow. He possessed, if not the knowledge of what Aquitaine had done, some canny intuition of it, the upshot of which was that ‘Trude was screwed. He knew what it was, maybe even why it didn’t work. And if he didn’t know that the finished product had been taken from the lab, he still wouldn’t be satisfied with this.

Hopefully Hands was enough.

He put the watch down and slid down off his high stool. He came around to face ‘Trude and Hands. Even without the added height of the stool and the added dignity of the pulpit, he loomed subjectively and objectively. He towered over even the Intruder, lanky and grim in white shirtsleeves and black suspenders, smiling down at them without humor.

“Hands, my gift, how are you tonight?” He picked the sack out of her hands, squeezed the contents, tossed it back and forth. Hands, during this time, stood stock-still, growing paler and paler until the lights of the hall shown through him as through a filmy cloth.

“You stole from me, Hands, and you’ll be properly punished this time. Gertrude,” he turned, using her name again, “You get credit for bringing him to me.

“But you brought him to me for a reason. You brought him because you know you failed to bring me either the Philosopher or some return on my investment in him.

“So you bring me this lovely trinket. A nice thought, indeed, but I am not a child!” he slammed his fist against the front of the pulpit, “To be distracted by shiny objects. And between us grown-ups, it isn’t the thought that counts.

“You have never failed me before, Gertrude. And you did, of course, bring this insulting but valued trinket. These factors will mitigate your punishment accordingly.”

“Hold on a minute,” she said, easing one hand toward her gun. “I can think of three objections to your little summation there. The first is that you judge failure hastily, since the philosopher and his lab are still there, and may still yield some ‘return,’ second—“

“Not so.”

“Huh?”

“The man’s family decided to take back their errant son. He’s in a sanitarium morningside as we speak.”

“The lab?”

“Empty. They’ve given it all to the doctors treating the boy. Might provide some insight into his madness. Except for what’s illegal or too heavy to move, and that’s being guarded by our Sheriff herself. Go figure.”

Gertrude sighed. She’d had no idea the family was so influential; they must be someone serious to the dayfolk. If she’d had any inkling of their speed and completeness in tidying the lose end that the Philosopher must represent to them, she’d have taken him along, from the lab and probably to Murray tonight. But now it was obviously too late for that, and now she knew why Murray was so irate.

“Second,” she forged on regardless, “I am not your toady, your minion, your creature, like these—“ she gestured vaguely to the others in the hall. “You do not mete out punishment to me. You pay or do not pay my fee, according to my performance. If you’re disappointed with what I brought, simply send me away with empty pockets. I owe you no advance.”

“What you owe me, Gertrude, is an opportunity. You did not fail at a task to which I can now set some other. You failed at a task which is now impossible to complete. It is gone forever. And that is what you owe me. This transcends mere money.”

Mere money?! Was this really Murray? She knew no greater greed than his, and could conceive of no stronger force than it within his pocked and twisted skull. Except, possibly—

She looked closer, looked into the bottomless eyes like black shadows in black pools in darkened valleys, sunk too far for Murray’s thousands lights to reach fully. And there she saw fear, the same grim fear that hid in her own eyes, writhed in her own chest.

The Buzzard was old, and he, too, felt the ever-tightening grip of age. He was motivated by the same dim impulse that had driven her to keep the book and the watch. He hoped, she saw now, for the same—but what was it for which she hoped, really? She had only the cryptic ramblings of the Philosopher, who believed he had found the key to his lover’s freedom. Maybe Murray knew, but if he did, it would never profit her, as he would share such a secret no sooner than he shared the blood of his body.

“Well, then, I suppose we arrive at my third protest. Which is simple really. You see—“

Two things happened then, one motion really, with two consequences. The first consequence was that the sack containing Hands’s hands flew from the Buzzard’s grasp. The second was the sudden, half-seen motion of the Intruder rolling, hard, out of the bare central hall, into the midst of the lightweight spectators.

Then it was chaos, running, and gunfire.

The survivors of the shootout said little about it afterward. Mostly they claimed not to have seen much in the confusion beyond running and falling bodies, and the occasional scream. The woman in the dark coat was everywhere, and nowhere, even in the pervasive, penetrating light that the Buzzard had paid so much for.

She was lost in the fray and after considering the bleeding bodies on the ground they made no special effort to find her. Also lost was all of Hands McInhereny, to whom she was apparently as disposed to do incidental kindness as harm. And, of course, the Buzzard’s left eye, caught by a flying fragment of lantern-glass.

Since then, the gangster has grown more taciturn and more vengeful, but he has never again spoken of Gertrude the Intruder. It is unknown whether he plotted some revenge or was content to add her to his great list of unrequited hates, which sat, unseen by any but his eyes, atop his pulpit, next to a shorter list, unguessed at as well as unseen, as his vanished loves and hopes, all long since lost or bargained away.

* * *

She arrived home bloodied and bruised, but whole. Mostly, she was tired, tired with a fatigue that transcended the physical. She felt that the black half-orb of nightside Clock was the half-seen surface of the Buzzard’s eye, and the night with its horde of watchful, distant, above all dim stars was the dark cavern of his face in which that eye was set. And at the heart of it all, and everywhere in its midst, the spectre of death, and age, and their child fear.

She tried to find shelter in the walls and drawn shades, but she could not: they were ephemeral barriers, that could not shout out the night or permit the illusion of day.

She found Sophie and Pearl in good enough shape, though. They’d dug their way into the chest of diversions that she kept in the wire prison to entertain her captives. They might have been playing chess, ‘Trude thought, but the pieces didn’t move right. Their paths were attenuated and crooked, so that the knights moved in circles or spirals rather than decisive “L”’s, the bishops stumbled off their angled paths, and the queen seemingly pursued interests all her own, unaware of the game entirely, or playing some other in her dreams, until she was awoken.

She fed them again and tried to find some comfort in a sleep of her own. There would be no tomorrow morning, she knew, but the next waking would nevertheless be a dire one, and require her to be rested.

Section ?: The Bones of Time’s Philosophers

And what heroic nature of what text

shall be the celebration in the words

of that ovation, the happiest sense in which

A world agrees, thought’s compromise, resolved

at last, the centre of resemblance, found

under the bone’s of time’s philosophers.

—Stevens, “Of Ideal Time and Choice”

She slept long—she felt it in her bones—and when she woke it took her a while to move across the halflands between sleep and waking. When she arrived, she found the world a cold place, and hard.

She dressed, and made breakfast for herself and her houseguests. She allowed herself the luxury of grinding some of her closely guarded coffee beans, grown in the carefully tended greenhouses built around Noon, imported, or, more often, smuggled across the Barricades at considerable expense.

As she drank the black brew, its heat and bitterness flooding her mouth, its rich earthy smell deep in her sinuses, she opened Aquitaines book and began again to read, now in more earnest.

It took her awhile to get used to the pace of his rantings. The Philosopher wrote a difficult mixture of autobiography, technical manual, philosophy, and mad raving. But it was possible for her to make out something of the events that had driven Aquitaine across the Barricades and into debt to the likes of Murray the Buzzard. As she’d figured, he’d been engaged to Sophia when the girl had died unexpectedly, in an accident—a fall of some kind. His grief had distanced him from his friends and family; it was here that his madness, she thought, began.

In any case, he was far enough into his own patterns to act secretly, decisively, and illegally within the first twenty-four hours. That’s the time in which the body would have been sequestered, sealed, and transported across the barricades for release in the wild, or burned, or treated chemically. During that time, he’d stolen it, arranged for some highly illegal storage and transport that an upstanding young member of a wealthy family should scarcely have been able to imagine, let alone arrange.

But he had, and then he’d run, taking her with him, not to mention a fair chunk of the family fortune. He’d spent that getting the laboratory set up and Sophie in her cage. That was when he’d started spending himself into the red—he was too immersed in his project to keep himself in food and his bride in flesh. He’d gone to the Buzzard, shown him some shiny objects and some pretty rhetoric, and he was in business, sort of.

The research he performed was an extension of certain of his studies at the University of Noon, the only real center of learning on Clock, located in and around the great cathedral. These were studies that were not exactly sanctioned by the Powers at the University—the episcopate and its network of underlings. These areas were not forbidden, because they were in fact offshoots of the hallowed central function of the Cathedral itself. But these inquiries were at the same time somehow—it was unclear—counter or at least foreign to this function, to its purpose.

The animosity was far from clear to Gerturde, because, probably, it was all too clear to Aquitaine, and he’d had no motive for laboring to explain it. In any case, his research was in the area of Chronothanatology, the interrelationship of death and time, an investigationship into the peculiar situation of the dead on Clock, where neither time nor death functions properly—where they have been pulled “sideways,” beat back, retarded.

More specifically, the Philosopher wanted to know how to mitigate the effects of his lover’s death. His desires seemed to vary from moment to moment—now he wanted to give her speech, now he wanted to give her breath and pulse, now he wanted to restore her mental function, now he wanted to see her pallor lessened. These were not many facets of one vision, but a henotheistic wavering procession of mixed memory and desire. He was trapped in a vicious spiral, his sanity disintegrating as his knowledge firmed. His work became increasingly a holy quest for him.

It took Gerturde a while to get to what she regarded as the point—the function and use of the device.

It proceeded, apparently, from a generally known generalization—the rule that the dead go nightward. But this was, apparently, imprecise. The proceeded not merely nightward—toward the dark, but east in the old parlance, or late in the new. They did not go away from Dusk into Night because it was closer, or because the Barrier barred their way, but because, with the passage of enough of what Aquitaine called pseudo-time, real time exerted some faint pressure, and the dead became subjected to this, as apparently would the living if they persisted long enough while alive.

However, the effect was not uniform. There were variations that could be calculated, variations that occurred at certain Cardinal Points. Noon was unique, and Aquitiane could not discern the precise nature of its strangeness. But all of dayside would be somehow different nightside.

To find out precisely how would require direct experiment, and this was difficult since the dead were forbidden to tread dayside by the laws and customs of social hygiene. The last time he had been dayside with Sophia had been when they crossed the barricades by way of the sewers beneath them. The result of that crossing had been a sudden diminishment of function and liveliness. It would be likely, Aquitaine theorized, that the dead, or rather most of the dead, would lose more and more of their vitality as they passed Midnight, and would wane entirely (not to mention being lost in the warrens of the Swarming City), long before they could ever reach dawn, and ascertain the result of bringing the dead full circle, which Aquitaine was certain would be of fantastic importance. Alternatiely, Aquitaine theorized, it was also possible that the transformation would be unique at each of the cardinal points. There was no way to be sure but to try.

In some of his most bizarre ramblings, Aquitaine had named dusk the youth, midnight the kingdom, and dawn the senescence, of death.

But the journey, which in fact many explorers had contemplated, would be rife with an number of problems, most geographical. Distance was the most obvious, but more important, the valley was cut off at around the region of 2:30 by an incursion of mountains that, like the mountains and plateaus which surrounded the valley on either side, stretched up beyond the breathable atmosphere.

These mountains were riddled, as was much of clock, with subterranean tunnels—the tunnels of the swarming city, where all the dead eventually drifted and subsided, lost in the endless, winding catacombs, unable to find their way free, towards morning.

These would be truly impassable to all comers without a navigational tool of some kind. Old-fashioned compasses were of no use, because the caverns where riddled with magnetic elements. And, unlike in the rest of clock, the sky and valley were out of sight and no aid to navigation.

The primary function of the device was that it told the hour—that is to say, it told the user precisely where on the circumference of Clock she stood. As such, it could be used to distinguish latitudinal and longitudinal motion, and to measure the ----------. Given enough time, one could use it to find a path to the other side, if such were possible.

Sighing, she closed the book, and could not say, even to herself, what use she might make of its knowledge.

She knew only that the age in her bones spurred to choose, and choose quickly. And for quickness, too, spoke her mortal fear, because her escape from the Buzzard would not lest forever, and she would have to find some more permanent shelter than the walls of this lovely home.

What she needed, she knew, was someone with whom to talk things over, to whom to make her shadowy logics clear by the telling. Unfortunately, she didn’t have many friends left, just employers and victims and obstacles. She could not, quite, bring herself to confide in Sophie or Pearl. Not yet. She was still too much alive, if not by much.

So she went back to the philosopher’s lab, to see the Sheriff of Dusk, to whom she had now and again been all things, and who had now and again been all things to her.

Section 5: Strange Meeting

…Whatever hope is yours

Was my life also; I went hunting wild

After the wildest beauty in the world.

Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,

But mocks the steady running of the hour,

And if it grieves grieves richlier than here,

For of my glee might men have laughed,”

And of my weeping something had been left,

Which must die now.

—Wilfred Own, “Strange Meeting”

Gertrude found her in the parking lot, sitting on the ground beside her squad car, and smoking as she peered out toward the distant Barricade. It took her a while to notice the Intruder, or at least to stir from her reverie sufficiently to acknowledge the visitor.

“Stormy, husky, brawling—Gertrude of the big shoulders,” she greeted. She could have been speaking of herself, for they two were much alike. Not as sisters are alike, but as those who by mixed chance and choice have lived similar lives; they were alike for the same reasons a bat and a bird both have wings.

Gertrude approached her slowly, at once reluctant to see her and anxious, too. She could not recall whether they had last parted as friends or enemies.

She took the proffered cigarette and lit it with her own lighter. She perched on the hood of the car, beside the Sheriff, and felt a little of her contemplation.

“I hear you’ve been involved in this,” she said, flicking her cigarette toward the lab, “nosense.”

Gertrude nodded, slowly, acceding but not adding. Instead, she asked, “And what are you doing here? I heard the family has you playing guard dog.

The Sheriff snorted. “The family. You know how much—and how little—dayside coin will buy here. Just like our money over there.”

Gertrude let that “our”slip by, because although the Sheriff was a citizen and servant of dayside, and therefore hardly one of “us” duskies, they’d long ago exhausted that fight, and they had the scars to remind them of it if memory failed.

“So why the hell are you here?”

“Because there’s more to the dayside ecology than money. There’s politics, too. There’s people I answer to. And they said, ‘Jump.’”

“The Church.”

The Sheriff shot her a suspicious glance, and then gave up a nod. She pointed to the gold robe dimly visible inside the lab, sparkling in lanternlight. The robe moved to and fro, as the priest’s attention shifted.

“The seem to have some interest in this man Aquitaine. They hope to find what they want here, in the ashes, or else in Aquitaine himself.”

“I heard the family had him locked up, too.”

“Let me guess, Murray jumped to some conclusions?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, if they don’t get what they want here or in a padded room, then Murray will have his assumptions adjusted forcibly, I guess.”

“They’ll go after him?”

“They’ll go after him. It’s a long shot, but sooner or later they’ll check it out. Too bad for Murray. And,” she added, her face hardening, “too bad for you.”

“You mean—“ Gertrude’s hand tensed instinctively, and quivered in the general direction of her gun.

“I haven’t given you up. Yet. But I will if it gets hot enough for me. And besides, Murray’ll toss you up like a drunk over a toilet, anyway.”

But she’d receive no special protection. Was it because the Sheriff didn’t have it to give, or because she didn’t care to give it? ‘Trude tried to meet her gaze, but the woman’s eyes were fixed upon the softly glinting crenellations of the Barricades. She’d always let her gaze stray that way, in all the years ‘Trude had known her. She knew the Sheriff had history on the other side, but she had no clear idea what that history was, what she’d left behind to wield her fists and her guns in the twilight. Or, for that matter, why she’d done so.

“You know something, don’t you, Trude? You saw something in there, or heard it?” She rose now, and stood before her. She grasped her shoulders, and now at last their eyes met and held.

“No,” the Sheriff said. “You took something, didn’t you?” She’d always had that talent, to look into your eyes and steal the truth. She sighed and tightened her grip until the pain burned in Gertrude’s shoulders. But somehow she knew, the other was not trying to hurt her so much as keep herself erect. Their bone-weariness was not quite the same there was no solace in sharing its burden.

“What was it, Gertrude? Tell me.” Her hands fell away, to her sides. For a brief instant, both tensed, suddenly ready for whatever combat. They’d fought before, with every kind of weapon, and when they fought it was with a ferocity that knew nothing of the several loves they might once have felt. Or maybe that was what so fueld the fury.

But this time, the Sheriff let the anger drain off into the darkness. She turned away, and once more considered the Wall.

“You have to go. You know that, don’t you?”

“Before, when it was just Murray, I might have stayed. I have it in me to take on all of Dusk, but no one had ever done well against armies of Day. Who could?”

There was something unreadable in the other’s eyes as she nodded agreement. “But where can you go?” The question was little more than a whisper.

Saying nothing, Gertrude turned away.

Caught up in themselves, neither woman saw nor felt the gold-robed priest watching from a crazed window, noticing their motions, listening to the vague outlines of their words. And noting, if nothing else, the name of the one who turned to leave.

Section 6: Going

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day…

—Dylan Thomas

She thought, though she had no way of knowing, that it took her longer to stand in the middle of her home deciding to leave than it did for her to pack. Because of who she was, there was little to take. A little clothing, a lot of ammunition, a trunkload of guns, were all there were.

Then she came up for her guests.

She went to them, where they sat, now resting, Sophie with her arm around the child. ‘Trude brought the philosopher’s device with her now, because it held their attention and because she intended from now on never to part with it, until the voyage was over.

“Sophie, did you know what your fiancé planned to do with this? The dead girl made no sign, but recognition crossed her face. “He was,” she repeated anyway, “going to take you through the night, past it to the dawn. And now I’m going to take that trip. Do you want to go with me?”

A nod. She asked the same of Pearl, who looked uncertainly to Sophie before nodding her agreement as well. She led them down then, to the car, Sophie with her lute in one hand and the child’s hand in the other. Gertrude carried, in addition to the book and the watch tied now to her belt, what food from her pantry as would readily travel. They could hunt, fish, and forage for more, as they went.

They loaded themselves into the convertible and Gertrude silently said her goodbyes to the only place she’d ever run to, or hid in from the night.

She was about to start the car, when from out of the alleys there seemingly materialized the Sheriff and the priest, following behind her, his unvoiced promise or threat of power driving her ahead.[2]

“I’m sorry, Gertrude. I can’t.” She flinched as though the gold-robe had stabbed her with his ire. “I can’t let you go.”

She pondered driving for it, but knew she’d never make it if she had to wait for the thing to wake up first. They were well armed, and all three fugitives would be cut down where they sat.

So she got back out of the care, and stood in the gunfigher’s stance. The Sheriff nodded to herself and idly stroked the pearl handle of her revolver. By mutual consent, they stepped a little closer, so that perhaps a dozen yards separated them. The Sheriff discarded her rifle and stood ready.

“What are you doing,” demanded the priest, bitter as men are who acquire their power too young and have the wit to know it, if only dimly. The Sheriff shook her head a little, and said no more.

She looked Gertrude in the eye, then, and their breath was sharp in the stillness. ‘Trude inhaled deeply all the memories that bound and split them, and then exhaled until she was empty of everything but her readiness, her anticipation, balanced between the present moment and the dawning sliver of the next.

The draw was mere reflex, the gentle pressure on the trigger a parting handshake, a last kiss. By chance, fate, or choice, the Sheriff was too slow. Knocked from her feet, she sent her own shot wildly up and out, in the vague direction of the distant day. ‘Trude killed the priest as an afterthought, then walked to the Sheriff and knelt down beside her gasping body.

She somehow managed to speak despite her wound, but it was neither accusations nor benedictions she offered.

“When you meet the next one, say hello for me.”

“Who?

She was dead.

It took a moment to begin to stir. Gertrude waited for her, though she worried whether some of the deputies might not come by to investigate the shots. When the Sheriff’s corpse sat up and tried, abortively, to stand, Gertrude asked, “Do you want to come? We go toward the dawn.

Their eyes locked for the final time, and Gertrude read in them, as clearly as words spoken out loud, “Not yet.”

She allowed herself a moment more to mourn, and then rose and returned to the car. She gave it the time it needed to warm its ethereal motor, and then eased it out into the blood-strewn street.

It did not take her much driving to get out of the city; it was as though there were a quiet but constant tidal force pulling her out into the night, deeper into the darkness. It greased her wheels and drew her foot ever down upon the pedal. It was inexorable.

She’d read in Aquitaine’s manuscript that “It is not that when you die some force pulls you later into the night, it is that when you die you stop fighting the force that was pulling you all your life.” She felt that force now, and felt no qualm about embracing it, so long as it was going her way. And she had nowhere to go but into the dark.

She picked one of the old roads, worn and rutted but trustworthy, at least for a while. It passed through the thick of the Suburbs with their restless dead, but so long as they were rolling, they’d nothing to fear from them. But eventually they passed beyond even these vestiges of civilization, into the great empty valley that opened up, empty but for the occasional trapper’s tent or hermit’s shanty, where no grass could grow, and only the silent hunters of the night give the lie to the apparently perfect peace of death that lay upon the place. it was a place of utter gray—of colorless lichen and fungi crowding the cold ground, of nightbirds, some the color of ash, and some the color of the aching void, of raccoons who coated themselves in dirt and pale mud for camouflage and stalked the birds and the wandering corpses with their mirror eyes.

They soon developed a rhythm. She would drive until she had to stop, and then they would rest for a while, and then forage—fishing and frogging in the trickling streams that spiderwebbed the valley, hunting the occasional owl or raven or pigeon, trapping raccoon and possum. Then they would sit around a fire—the life of it, the fury of its crackling brilliance, blazed like lightning in that empty place—and cook the catch, along with the contents of a few cans and packets. Gertrude would cook for them while Sophie played on her lute, and sometimes, if the air was right and the mood took her, Pearl would dance for them, her feet moving without seeming effort through the intricate steps of another age. She danced, with extraordinary grace, considering, the dances that had frustrated Gertrude as a child when her parents had tried to teach them to her. And beneath the rounded china-doll face Gertrude glimpsed the sort of pride that only comes with great age, with having experienced it all. This was an Old Child, no doubt about it.

Her relationship with Sophie was complex; at times they were sisters, at times mother and daughter—though which was which was often hard to pin down. Pearl had the needs of a child, to be seen and held and cared for, but at the same time she could be seen holding Sophie up when she seemed close to falling into some too desperate despair. Both seemed largely to ignore Gertrude, except when they had to communicate to forage or to cope with the dangers of the untamed night. It was, for a little while, almost like being a family.

Section 7: Carrion Comfort

“Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, despair, not feed on thee…”

--Hopkins

Section 0: Prelude to Felicity

It is time that beats in the breast and it is time

That batters against the mind, silent and proud,

The mind that knows it is destroyed by time….

Even breathing is the beating of time, in kind;

A retardation of its battering,

A horse grotesquely taut, a walker like

A shadow in mid-earth…If we propose

A large-sculptured, platonic person, free from time

And imagine for him the speech he cannot speak,

A form, then, protected from the battering, may

Mature: A capable being may replace

Dark horse and walker walking rapidly.

Felicity, ah! Time is the hooded enemy,

The inimical music, the enchantered space

In which the enchanted preludes have their place.

—Stevens, “The Pure Good of Theory”

The Cathedral rose from the twisted earth, a small thing next to the great things of nature, small too next to the equally great byblow of the wars of men. But it was an impressive achievement for the survivors who’d built it, a mere symbol, some would say, but a powerful symbol, they would have to grant. And he who’d designed it knew more: that there was a vast and arcane Function wrapped in that symbolic form. Like Babel’s Tower it was not only a monument to humanity’s strength, ingenuity, and ambition. It was also a tool, an instrument of those qualities of character as well as their sign. If it had only been a symbol, the heavens would have paid it no heed. It was the practical implications that made the Tower thing a divine controversy.

The Cathedral had generally the shape of a slender cone, reaching up hundreds upon hundreds of feet, its needle tip buried deep in the sky. Along its length, ledges sprouted, and some bearing smaller cones, others different, stranger shapes. Near the ground, the cone grew smoothly outward into a flat base several times the width of the main spire. This base was divided into a tangled maze of chapels and halls, the places of worship and service that were the outward purpose of the structure, its public face. The portions of the spire immediately above were devoted to the Seminary and the University, where priests and philosophers were trained. Higher up, the Church had established its libraries and museums. The upper portions of the spire were for the use of the Cardinal himself; they housed his gardens, some of his private laboratories, and his quarters.

To the Cardinal, too, belonged the depths—the vast basements and subbasements that extended farther belowground than the Cathedral itself did above. Here the great and secret works of the Church were undertaken, and in particular the sacred project that was the Cardinal’s special joy, to which he had secured—by reason, entreaty, bribery, violence, and deceit, as appropriate and necessary—the support of the Church’s inner circle.

Today that great project was almost complete; the hour was fast approaching.

The Cardinal awaited the time in the room at the very tip of the spire—his chronography room. Here were assembled all the myriad devices for the measurement, the precise delineation and specification, of the passage of time. There were sundials, waterclocks, all manner of clockwork—powered by motion or by spring—and analog and digital electronics powered by battery and sunlight, and thousands of hourglasses, along with a few weirder devices crafted by the new philosophy or the old Demon Science.

Soon, he prayed, they would all be rendered catastrophically obsolete.

Soon.

It was 11:45 now, and his inner circle of Bishops, professors, and helpers were gathered before him, standing patient amidst the ticking, the dripping, and the falling sand, beneath the bright rays of the sun almost precisely overhead. He had been speaking to them of the great effort they had undertaken together, its great motives, and the goal so near to hand. Now he was ready to lead them below.

“In the course of knowledge, there are three stages. In the first stage, the scholar can only observe and theorize, making heavy-handed guesses that reveal more of himself than of his subject. In the second stage, the scholar passes on to experiment, by which he tests the real limits of the subject, and finds its true character. In the third stage, the scholar ceases to test and begins to utilize his knowledge, transforming reality, intervening directly in the ways of things.

“In science, we have witnessed the full course of this development—from the wild speculations of the first natural philosophers to the experiments of the great intellectual pioneers, to the triumphant Technologies of the industrial, atomic, information, and later revolutions.

“But this progress became unstable; technology has turned into a tool of destruction that has warped worlds and devastated peoples; this planet, as you well know, was stripped of most of its atmosphere—so that only in the equatorial valley carved by a dying civilization is there any hope of life. The path of science has revealed itself to be inadequate; ask the broken earth.

“Meanwhile, throughout history, the other side of knowledge has been neglected. We have only ever had a passive metaphysics, the speculations of idle priests and poets, whose beliefs became the song of authority, self-perpetuating, mindlessly reproducing.

“But that has changed! With the waning of science, our great minds have turned to religion, myth, and magic; they have brought us the New Philosophy, made vigorous by experiment, giving birth to a wondrous new Technology, a metaphysical Technology to replace that bastard one spawned by science.

“Like physical Technology, this Technology will give us unprecedented weapons. But these will not be weapons for the wars of men against men, but for the wars of mankind against its eternal enemies, those foes that have stood before the path of all humanity, of humanity itself.

“First among these, that which I have assembled now to oppose, is the force called time. The ancient religions called it, “devourer of worlds,” the old philosophers knew it as the only tragedy. Time is what bars us from immortality, and time in the form of never-ceasing change is the root of all loss, all despair.

“Inescapable, omnipresent. Every moment, we are dying. Every moment, wea re losing ourselves, our possibilities. If we could escape time, if we could imprison it, tame it, conquer it, what would we become? Free of death, we might achieve anything.

“Today, humanity reaches once again the third stage. Today, everything changes, and eternity comes within our grasp, while death comes within our gunsights.”

He led them to the elevator, which had been designed for this use on this day by just this party. It was a circular swath cut in the floor of the room, surrounding the pillar at the very center of the room which sheltered the path of a lone sunbeam into the immense darkness. With a flip of the switch, they rode that pillar down from the sky into the depths of the earth.

The facility was composed of a series of vast chambers deep beneath the foundation of the city, in the bowls of the Cathedral. The chambers were steep shafts piercing down into the earth as the Cathedral pierced up into the sky; they were inverted cones narrowing to points like the teeth of some monstrous lizard.

At the base of the central shaft down which the elevator slid, there was a massive machine—an army of machines, really, clustered around a central bell-shaped chamber—thrumming gently with its idle power echoing through the gloom. The machine’s central unit was a bell-shaped chamber, perhaps a hundred feet in diameter, surrounded by innumerable satellite devices burning, turning, grinding and shining in eerie pulses of excess energy. There were two dozen such shafts, and each held such a host of machines. Power for them was drawn from the raging red depths of the world.

In the central chamber, unlike the others, an Operator’s console was positioned at the peak of the Bell. The Cardinal mounted to it by the gilt ladder that was forbidden to all others, enchanted to spurn any living hand but his own. The console itself was featureless, silver sphere which yielded not to the sly fingers, but to the illumined will itself.

He grasped it firmly, and set his eyes to the lenses, which hovered before him on a many-jointed arm. A second arm supported a ring of green stones, which he lowered upon his head, pressing sharp facets into his scalp. At the small but insistent inner pressure he exerted, the gateways were forced open. At that precise moment, the sun found its place so far over head, and its fullest light shone down the mirrored and lensed shaft at the center of the Cathedral, until it fell into the stygian depths, to be caught and warped in the emeraldine gems, so that the whole of the laboratory was bathed in a slow and watery light.

In the lenses, light began as a pinprick and slowly swelled; while all about him the machine worked itself into a frenzy of bright sound. A thousand thousand voices began to sing in that dry space in the earth, and the lenses filled with the essence of time, the very stuff of the universe, naked and menacing in its divinity.

Somewhere inside the Operator, the will that had commanded all the bitter remnants of humanity, the iron force that had carved towers from the desperate earth, faltered just a little as it touched the brutal fullness of the thing before it. Something broke within him, and he dropped down and down, jarred and battered as by a world at every plunge. Still he willed, though, still his mind commanded—

It was as though the thousand voices of the machine were one voice, his one voice, measuring to the hour its solitude, demanding the isolation of a moment, severing it from time as a limb is amputated from a body.

He never again stepped back from that console, or descended the gilt ladder. His lips never again parted in speech, but the thousand thousand voices of the machines spoke for him, shaking the darkness of the world, quivering in the very flesh and bone of those who listened; they said simply, “It is done.”

Appendix 1: Planning

“For I have known them all already, known them all: have known evenings, mornings, afternoons…”—Eliot, “Prufrock”

Around The Clock (Evening) (Or, possibly, Cities of the Dreadful Night)

Section 0: Prelude to Felicity

Section 1: Le Laboratoire Abol(e)(i)(e)????

Section 2: The Hyacinth Girl

Section 3: The Profit and Loss

Section ?: Crooked Worms and Roses

Section 4: Strange Meeting

Section 5: Going Not Gently

Section 6: Carrion Comfort

The Carrion Birds (8:00?)

The Ash Storm (10:00?)

Section 7: City of Dreadful Night (12:00)

The City of Midnight, and its Lord, and his Interpreter

Section x: Swarming City

Section y: A Troop of Spirits/?

The Throne of Morning (Morning)

(Crossing down from the plateau into the Kingdom of Morning, coming into conflict with the authorities there. Perhaps open in said kingdom…This section introduces the Sheriff’s successor, who abides in morning until she is called for. Perhaps lead with her.)

The Reminiscent Bells (Afternoon)

(Having thrown Morning into disarray, our heroes lead their armies against the Cathedral of Noon, and come against the Bright Cardinal, with the bells that keep the hours…)

Appendix 2: Characters

The Three

Gertrude—figure of waning life, of old age which is full of angst, anger, and power, nonetheless confronting its own mortality.

Sophia (The Hyacinth Girl)—figure of doomed youth and the impossibility of love youthfully conceived. Her predicament is to be trapped forever in a love which is meant only for a moment. But while the philosopher her lover breaks beneath the strain of such, she cannot break, for her entrapment is not psychological but ontological.

Pearl—juxtaposed figure of youth and age; a child who is nonetheless a relic of an ancient time. Figure of wisdom and renewal and endurance; the preservation of innocence and potential. Messianic figure.

The Powers:

The Hunter—

6 AM. Youth. Progressive beginning. (Artemis?)

The Cardinal—

12 Noon. Immortality; the eternal beginning. Point of divergence; all else emerges from/flees this point.

The Sheriff—

6 PM. Age. Progressive conclusion.

The Lord (The King of Shreds and Patches)—

12 Midnight. Death; the eternal conclusion. Point of convergence; all else passes through this point.

Notes on The Powers:

The Cardinal and the Lord are fixity, holding posts set before/at the stopping. But the Hunter and the Sheriff both embody change, transition, even after the stop; so they grow older and die, the one replacing the other.

Others:

The Philosopher (The Man of Shadows)—

Murray the Buzzard—

Hands—

The Interpreter—

Appendix 3: Clippings

“The mark of the dead is that they cannot tell in which way lies the light.”

“IT is not that when you die some force pulls you later into the night, it is that when you die you stop fighting the force that was pulling you all your life.”

“Death is what is most terrible, and to hold onto what is dead requires the greatest strength.”—Hegel, P. of geist, in Bernstein, p.21

The limits of death are the limits of life; that is to say, the boundaries of possibility for each are frozen at the time of death. Even under the best conditions, with the greatest preservation, a dead man will never run faster than he did when he was alive. His muscles will only forever slacken, though proper conditioning, medication, and a diet rich in fresh meat can slow this process, indeed potentially slow it almost indefinitely, but from the moment of death, the limits of his possibilities are nonetheless forever foreclosed.

Whereas the deceased have come to constitute a risk to the safety and health of the citizenry, and whereas the private funereal industry has consistently failed to provide sufficient safeguards against their escape and the subsequent loss of life and property, be it here resolved that all corpses shall, upon the declaration of death, be assembled and prepared under the observation of the police, and disposed of according to…

“Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, despair, not feed on thee…”

--Hopkins

in Greek religion, the goddess of wild animals, the hunt, and vegetation, and of chastity and childbirth; she was identified by the Romans with Diana (q.v.). Artemis was the daughter of Zeus and Leto and the twin sister of Apollo. Among the rural populace, Artemis was the favourite goddess. Her character and function varied greatly from place to place, but, apparently, behind all forms lay the goddess of wild nature, who danced, usually accompanied by nymphs, in mountains, forests, and marshes. Artemis embodied the sportsman's ideal, so besides killing game she also protected it, especially the young; this was the Homeric significance of the title Mistress of Animals.

The worship of Artemis probably flourished in Crete or on the Greek mainland in pre-Hellenic times. Many of Artemis' local cults, however, preserved traces of other deities, often with Greek names, suggesting that, upon adopting her, the Greeks identified Artemis with nature divinities of their own.

While the mythological roles of other prominent Olympians evolved in the works of the poets, the lore of Artemis developed primarily from cult. Dances of maidens representing tree nymphs (dryads) were especially common in Artemis' worship as goddess of the tree cult, a role especially popular in the Peloponnese. Throughout the Peloponnese, bearing such epithets as Limnaea and Limnatis (Lady of the Lake), Artemis supervised waters and lush wild growth, attended by nymphs of wells and springs (naiads). In parts of the peninsula her dances were wild and lascivious.

Outside the Peloponnese, Artemis' most familiar form was as Mistress of Animals. Poets and artists usually pictured her with the stag or hunting dog, but the cults showed considerable variety. For instance, the Tauropolia festival at Halae Araphenides in Attica honoured Artemis Tauropolos (Bull Goddess), who received a few drops of blood drawn by sword from a man's neck.

The frequent stories of the love affairs of Artemis' nymphs are supposed by some to have originally been told of the goddess herself. The poets after Homer, however, stressed Artemis' chastity and her delight in the hunt, dancing and music, shadowy groves, and the cities of just men. The wrath of Artemis was proverbial, for to it myth attributed wild nature's hostility to humans. Yet Greek sculpture avoided Artemis' unpitying anger as a motif; in fact, the goddess herself did not become popular as a subject in the great sculptural schools until the relatively gentle 4th-century-BC spirit prevailed.

Appendix 5: Material Construction

If Clock where ever to see publication, it would be in the form of a book of wrong shape, preferably square, so that the standard-issue clock (school-type) on the cover is well-centered. [Alternatively, something vaguely more fantastic—a clock slanting away from the viewer, something with shadowed hands, gears, etc.]

Each section should feature 2-3 illustrations; these should be after the fashion, more or less, of the sort of illustrations that one found in the Sherlock Holmes stories—a dramatic, staged rendering, expressing dynamic action between several individuals frozen for a moment in the artist’s gaze. For the first story, the illustrations should be of the sort one might expect from Gahan Wilson or Edward Gorey; the second book, however, should resemble nothing so much as Erik Desmazieres’s version of Borges’s “The Library of Babel.”—Except that it should also be bright, shallow, and a little empty; it must have something of The Wizard of Oz about it. There is an almost Du Boisian double-consciousness issue at work here—the nightsiders live in the real world, the daysiders in some fictive elysium. The exception is The Hunter; her idyll should have some reality to it...

The front of the first story should provide maps—for the first story is the story of movement, accustoming us to the rules of clock by moving us through them. It is a road trip. The second book should give us not maps but landscapes and blueprints, as it is a story not of movement but of places. The second story will move back and forth between our travelers and the Cathedral with its inhabitants; it will end with the arrival of the former at the latter. The third will take place entirely inside the cathedral, moving between the pitched battle of the travelers and the clergy and the earlier phases of the Cathedral’s existence, from “Prelude to Felicity” on. It is here that we will recover the Philosopher, and at the end of it, Pearl will confront the Cardinal, and be revealed in her glory.

Appendix 6: Geography and Other Issues

elmocrmley (4:28:10 PM): Of course, this sort of ratio would drop if you only had one driver...
elmocrmley (4:29:56 PM): But if we grant that four days is about right with constant progress (which I think is about how long greyhound took me), then we cross three hours of time zone in 96 hours....
elmocrmley (4:30:46 PM): So rough human road-trip speed is 1/32 of a time-zone per hour.

Or, three quarters of a time zone per day.

6:00—Central time

7:00—Mountain time

8:00—Pacific time

9:00—Alaska

10:00—Hawaii

11:00—Midway

12:00—International Dateline West

1:00—N’kualofa

2:00—Fiji

3:00—Auckland

4:00—Solomon Islands

5:00—Vlaidvostok

6:00—Tokyo

Takes about 32 days to drive around the world at this rate...

From 6 to 6 would take, thus, 16 days. Ish. From 6 to midnight would take 8 days. So, we only have to account for one week’s worth of events (or, preferably, nonevents) between their departure from dusk and their arrival at the The City of Midnight. And, as we’ve already scripted a total of two encounters, we’re in good shape.

.0125 days=one zone-minute

=.3 hours; 20 minutes.

Note: Unfortunately, this is all (hopefully) true only for the approximate lattitude of the United States, while I had generally conceived of the Valley as located equatorially. This will require serious corrections. Further note: Alternatively, we can just assume that Clock is a considerably smaller world than Earth. ::shrug::

[1]Originally,

Section 3: The Profit and Loss

PHLEBAS the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea’s swell

And the profit and loss.

A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool.

Gentile or Jew

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

—Eliot, “The Waste Land”

And at one point also…

Earlier also considered titling this section “The Labor of Her Axe,” in which case the quotation would have been:

It was a cord of maple, cut and split

And piled—and measured, four by four by eight.

And not another like it could I see.

No runner tracks in this year’s snow looped near it.

And it was older sure than this year’s cutting,

Or even last year’s or the year’s before.

The wood was grey and the bark warping off it

And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis

Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.

What held it though on one side was a tree

Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,

These latter about to fall. I thought that only

Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks

Could so forget his handiwork on which

He spent himself, the labour of his axe,

And leave it there far from a useful fireplace

To warm the frozen swamp as best it could

With the slow smokeless burning of decay.

—Frost, “The Wood-Pile”

[2] This confrontation will almost certainly be moved to later, as the conclusion of some kind of chase scene.