Section 1: Le Laboratoire Abole

 

The man of shadows, the widower, the unconsoled

The prince of aquitania in the abandoned tower

My only star is dead, and my starred lute

Carries as its emblem the black star of melancholy

—Nerval, “El Desdichado”

 

            In the northern part of 5:35, in the hills above the sprawling outskirts of the City of Dusk, The Intruder came to the philosopher’s laboratory.

            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.