Clock Work (2 page)

She smiled, letting it play out before her eyes, her poisoned mind unable to fully grasp the idea of the mortality slipping out of her.

Then something came bouncing out of the shop and rolled unevenly across the floor, stopping when it hit the shelf beside her. She looked down and saw the head of a creature-man. The one that had bit her—it had cuts below its eye where she'd raked it with her keys. Its mouth opened, as if testing its ability to breathe without a body.

A heavy boot kicked it aside. Parker looked up into a pair of blue-green eyes.

He bent down and lifted her over his shoulder. Her body felt like it must weigh several tons, but didn't seem to give him any trouble.

He took her deeper into the warehouse. The last thing she remembered was feeling cool air on her face as she was carried outside.

2.

The man named Reed stood a safe distance from the edge of the bog, watching the three bodies slowly sink below the blanket of live vegetation on top, and into the dead, watery vegetation below. He'd thrown the dead goblins as far into the mire as he could, which was considerably far—though he was as slender as his name implied, Reed possessed an otherworldly strength.

When he was much younger, before he'd moved on to more lucrative employment opportunities, Reed had earned his way arm-wrestling and bare-knuckle boxing. The men he went against were often twice his size. The odds would pay ten-to-one on a bad night. No one in their right mind would bet on the scrawny, near albino. At least, not until they'd seen him throw a punch.

Reed felt his phone buzz inside his jacket pocket. He answered, knowing who it would be even without looking at the number.

"Is the job finished?" he asked, skipping hello and moving straight to the reason for the call.

"We just locked up the shop. All signs of the night's events have been erased."

"Did you find the missing piece?"

"Yes, the hand. We found it. What would you like us to do with it?"

"You can send it along with your invoice. I'll dispose of it."

"Thank you mister Reed. If you require any further services, we always appreciate your business."

"And I always appreciate the quality of your work."

Reed said goodbye and ended the call.

He'd been working with the cleaning crew almost as long as he'd been feeding corpses into the bog. They were good at what they did, and what they did was remove any and all signs of death and violence—blood, gore, missing parts. And they were available on short notice.

When the three thieves Reed had hired to find the device didn't contact him, he went to the
shop and broke in. There, he found that someone had killed the three goblins. Dismembered them.

The bog's surface bubbled, and one at a time, the bodies moved, nudged by something in the black water below.
One, two, three,
Reed thought. This always fascinated him. The beast could count.

The dead creatures bobbed. A moment later, three tentacles emerged—giant, boneless arms of muscle, each thicker than a man's torso. Their skin was slimy black rubber, the underside
s lined with pale suction cups the size of saucers. Their appearance was accompanied by a strong smell of ammonia.

The movement of the appendages seemed almost synchronized as they coiled around the bodies. Reed heard bones cracking under the pressure of their squeeze.

Slowly, the tentacles retreated under the oil-black water, taking the bodies with them. A monster of such proportions did not feel the need to rush.

***

Back in the city, to a neighborhood that was not his favorite. Here, the elements of old and new didn't quite homogenize. The franchise shops, the advertisements, the flat-screen TVs visible through the windows of the pubs—to Reed, they looked undignified on the old buildings and streets.

Reed walked down a lamplit sidewalk, stopping at the entrance to a gated alley. A perfect example of the neighborhood, the gate was ancient, but the lock shiny and new. He paused a moment, his head turning left, right. Alone on the quiet street, he removed a key from a jacket pocket and entered. The gate locked on its own as he pressed it closed behind him.

The alley was much darker than the world outside. The air was frigid and the beam from Reed's flashlight barely cut through the darkness, which was made up of something denser than normal night and shadow. Centuries of lightless cold had been compressed into the ancient stone blocks that made up the walls. Each step seemed to take him miles away from the city.

Another lock and another key brought Reed into a long-forgotten room inside a long-forgotten building. In strong contrast to the path that led him here, the temperature inside was warm and humid.

The room was circular. Couches—once plush, now sagging and chewed by rats—fit snuggly against the walls, which were covered in molding wallpaper that called to mind the flaking flesh of a leper. At the room's center, a corkscrewing staircase descended into the floor below.

Reed knew nothing of the building's history, only that it had once been splendid, decadent, and now it was in ruins. Much like the man he was here to see.

***

The floor below was occupied by a series of steam rooms and elaborate baths. Reed guessed it had once been an exclusive spa or brothel (or perhaps some combination of the two), and the entryway above the private entrance of a prestigious member—perhaps a vampire who had used the baths as a hunting ground, a buffet of naked flesh and thrumming arteries.

Or perhaps not a vampire, but some other abomination. Like the thing standing before him now.

The thing resembled a skeleton packed with scraps of spoiled meat and tied together with rags. It was dressed in a robe stained with unidentified fluids. It was male and had been human at some point, or at least more human. Reed had speculated that it was in fact the original owner of the bathhouse—a wealthy man who had sought immortality through black magic, or an immortal cursed with a flesh-corrupting plague.

The history of the thing didn't matter to Reed, nor did the fact that its presence disgusted him. What did matter was that the thing's soiled robe had deep pockets; Reed was earning a handsome sum for the simple acquisition of a device.

Or what should have been a simple acquisition. Things had gotten unexpectedly complicated in the past hours.

They stood surrounded by thick, humid heat. Despite the building's ruined appearance, the pipes and boilers were functioning. Reed had removed his jacket and rolled the sleeves of his shirt to his elbows before descending from upstairs.

In the steam-filled room, Reed recounted his progress (tracking the device to a local shop) as well as his setbacks (the thieves he'd hired to steal the device had been killed, and the device was presently missing).

"You came all the way here to tell me almost nothing?" The thing sounded like it was speaking with a mouth full of soup.

"Well, you wanted a status report, and you don't own a phone."

Thick, stringy drool dripped past the round wound of the thing's mouth. A stained sleeve wiped it away. "What are you doing to find it?"

3.

Strange dream,
Parker thought as she woke. She felt warm and comfortable. When had her bed gotten so cozy? It usually felt like a slab of concrete. She'd been complaining about it since she moved into the small, pre-furnished apartment.

She sat up and rubbed her eyes. It was early, still dark. She didn't remember getting home. She'd fallen asleep in her clothes and makeup.

Daylight peered past the blinds covering the window. A window that was on the wrong side of the room. Parker felt spider legs of dread creep up her spine as she realized she wasn't in her apartment, wasn't in her own bed.

She found a lamp and turned it on. She also was not in her own clothes. Or at least not all her own clothes. A bulky sweater had been pulled over her t-shirt. She slipped out of the garment and looked at her forearm. It was bandaged. She unwrapped it. Under the gauze, dark green leaves had been stuck to her skin. She peeled those away too and found teeth
marks, two crescents of evenly spaced punctures in the meat of the limb. They looked small and irritated, but the blistering, the red veins of infection, were gone. So was the pain in her back and legs, and the fogged thinking. She felt tired, but clear. Like she was waking from a post-run nap.

Parker replaced the leaves and the bandages.

The walls of the room were bare, scarred with spackling paste. The bed was massive and old. The other furnishings were simple—a heavy dresser, a large steamer trunk set in the middle of the floor, a full-length mirror. And on the other side of the room, a weight bench and a free-standing punching bag that had been patched and re-patched with tape.

Floorboards creaked as she stepped off the bed.

Parker took a moment to look at herself in the mirror. She might have felt okay, but she looked like hell, like she'd spent a month bingeing on booze and video games. Her dirty blonde hair looked more dirty than blonde, half her curls tangled and the other half flattened from sleep. The eye makeup she'd had on was streaked down her cheeks, making her look like a picture of a panda painted by Salvador Dali.

As best as she could, she combed her fingers through her hair, licked her thumbs, and rubbed away the streaks of eyeliner.

Cold, she picked the sweater up off the bed and pulled it on again. Time to find out where she was.

A narrow stairwell led down to the floor below and the rest of the apartment.

She found him in a large room at the end of a hall, asleep on the couch, barefoot and wearing jeans and a t-shirt. The sword he'd had with him at the warehouse was on the coffee table. The TV was on, showing the menu screen of a DVD. She didn't recognize the movie.

Parker stood a moment, wondering what would be the best way to wake him, and getting distracted by the little details of his appearance—the length of his eyelashes, the way his arms fit tightly inside the sleeves of his shirt, the shape of his chin.

He stirred, as if sensing her presence, and opened his eyes.

"Hey, you're awake," he said.

"I was going to wake you," she said, trying to cover up her embarrassment, afraid he would think it was creepy that she'd been standing over him. "What time is it?"

He looked at his phone. "Four."

She'd been asleep the better part of a day.

"How are you feeling?" He rubbed the side of his face that he'd been sleeping on. He had a deep voice. The kind of voice that managed to make an Irish accent seem exotic to her ears, even after eight months in the country.

"Much better," she said.

"Can I see your arm?"

She stepped closer to him and rolled up the sleeve of the sweater. The bandage was loose from when she'd unwrapped it before. Gently, he pulled away the gauze and the leaves underneath.

"What is that?" she asked.

"Bog mint. Great remedy for goblin bites. Also works wonders for a hangover."

Parker smiled at the joke before the first part of what he'd said sunk in.

"Did you say goblin?"

"Yes."

"Oh." She pulled the sweater over her arm. The wound itched against the wool.

He smiled, realizing that she wasn't taking him seriously. "You're looking at me like I'm a crazy person."

"Well, you did just tell me a goblin bit me."

"What, you don't believe in goblins?"

"I'd never given it much thought, but no."

"The thing that attacked you, how would you describe it?"

Parker took a moment to think and gather her thoughts. "Like a human. But with green, scaled skin. Pointed ears." She looked down at the wound on her arm. "Fangs. It was like a snake-man."

"So snake-men can exist, but goblins are too fantastical for you?"

This was without question the silliest conversation she'd ever had. It was made more so by the fact that she was having it so soon after she'd nearly been killed.

"So," she said. "What is a goblin, exactly?"

He grinned. A crooked, impish expression. "A goblin's basically a snake man."

4.

His name was Aran, like the sweater. After the discussion of goblins they eventually got around to introductions, and moved from the living room to the kitchen, where he put on a kettle of tea.

"Never met a girl named Parker before."

"It's not a common name."

"It reminds me of a book I read—series of books actually—about a professional thief, an American."

"Speaking of thieves, the snake-men…"

"Goblins."

"Whatever. What were they looking for?"

"Do you remember me coming into the shop the other day? I bought a clock that ticked backwards. Wanted you to make it so it ticked forwards?"

"Why were they after it?"

"Someone hired them to. Goblins are mostly thugs, cheap hired muscle. Not known for careful planning or grand schemes."

"Any idea who hired them?"

"I have an idea."

"Care to elaborate?"

"You're still trying to wrap your head around goblins. Might want to give this some time. Might also be that the less you know, the better."

"So what were you doing at the shop last night? How'd you know they'd be there?"

"Same guy who told me what they were looking for told me when they'd be there. I thought I might try talking to them, find out who had hired them, why they wanted the thing they wanted. Plan changed when I saw you."

"Thank you for that, by the way. I should have said that a lot sooner."

"Think nothing of it. Not every day I get to rescue a pretty American girl from a gang of monsters."

He was joking more than flirting, but still she blushed a little.

***

Parker expected there to be police outside. She expected yellow tape and uniformed patrolmen to be holding back a gathering crowd. She expected detectives in suits and forensic experts in white scrubs.

But the shop seemed as quiet as usual. So did the street in front of it.

Parker pushed the door open. The shop was undisturbed. She hadn't been witness to the entire fight that took place here the night before, but she'd seen and heard enough to know there had been a mess in the aftermath. She looked at Aran then stepped forward, quickly moving through the aisles. There wasn't a single drop of blood. Not a single shelf item was out of place. No sign whatsoever of the events of the evening before.

Mr. Connolly, one of the shop
's owners, appeared from between two rows of shelves. "Miss Parker," he said in his usual, jovial voice. "I thought you had the day off."

Parker nearly screamed. The normalcy of it was more terrifying than carnage. Fear on a deeper level. Fear that she'd lost her mind. That she was inside a waking dream. That she'd lost her grip on reality. It was like being underwater without being able to tell which way was up.

"Hi," Parker said after a long moment. "Mr. Connolly," she added.

"You alright, dear?"

"Yes."

Parker turned toward Aran, as if his presence would
confirm that she was sane.
If he's real, what happened here last night really happened.

Mr. Connolly looked at Aran, and Parker was suddenly embarrassed—her strange behavior, walking around with a guy she barely knew, wearing the same clothes she'd had on the day before, it must look like she'd been out all night. Mr. Connolly was old in an indeterminate way—a prematurely aged sixty or a youthful eighty. He wouldn't approve of such things.

Another terrifying thought—had Mr. Connolly disposed of the bodies, cleaned up the blood? Was he lying to her now? Was he hiding something?

Again, Aran came to her rescue.

"Hi, my name's Aran. Bought a clock here the other day. Miss Parker did some repairs on it. I was hoping to acquire another, same model. She said she'd look around and see if she had anything. We ran into one another at the cafe down the street just now."

He shook hands with Mr. Connolly, who immediately went into salesperson mode, telling Aran about a new selection of pocket watches that had just been refurbished and how, even if they didn't quite have the clock he was looking for, he might consider another item.

This gave Parker enough time to compose herself. She left the two men alone and wandered over to her workbench. She had to fight off a fresh wave of panic when she saw what had been left there: her keys. The same ones she'd jabbed into that thing's face the night before. Like the shop itself, they bore no trace of blood. They looked clean and polished, like a set of sharp metal dentures. There was something menacing and purposeful about the way they had been left there.

Parker shook away the feeling. She grabbed her iPad and keys and went back to find Aran and her boss.

"I do have the day off, Mr. Connolly," she said, interrupting the conversation. Mr. Connolly was showing Aran the selection of pocket watches. "I was stopping in to pick up my iPad—I left it here last night. But since Aran is here, I'd like to show him a few things in the warehouse, if you don't mind. I won't count it toward overtime or anything."

Mr. Connolly smiled. "Be my guest."

Parker led Aran into the warehouse where, only hours before, she'd been run down and bitten by a human-sized reptile.

"Am I losing my mind?" she asked when they were out of earshot.

Aran walked around, looking at everything closely. "Does the floor look cleaner to you?"

"You mean it hasn't got blood all over it? Yeah, that's the reason I'm freaking out. I'm afraid you're my imaginary friend. That all those nights alone I've been spending put me off the deep end."

"No, look at the floor. Did it look this clean when you showed me around a few days ago? Or yesterday morning when you got to work?"

Parker looked down at the area around her feet. It was polished concrete. The gray looked lighter than she remembered. Less scuffed.

"I see what you're saying."

"This place looked like a butcher shop last night. You didn't see the half of it. Someone cleaned it up, and they did it fast and they did it well."

Parker whispered. "Do you think it was Mr. Connolly?"

Aran shook his head. "I did a background check on him and anyone who works here. They're not hiding anything. Not anything serious anyway. And it wouldn't make sense, why would Connolly hire someone to rob his place of something he didn't even know he had."

Parker mentally scolded herself for the dumb, paranoid theory. She wasn't used to this type of thinking. She made sure her next question was better.

"What is this thing? The thing they're after, the thing you bought from here the other day?"

"Something very old and very valuable."

It was half an answer. He was dodging the question.

Aran smiled. "I'm hungry, would you want to have dinner with me?"