Chaos Clock (3 page)

Saturday morning was bright and chilly – autumn arriving properly at last, said Ruth when David arrived at Kate’s house.

It was the noise he always noticed when he was there. There were only four of them, but they seemed to make an incredible din. Even when not all of them were there, it hardly made any difference. Ben made the most noise and Robert, Kate’s dad, the least, but people were always talking at once and interrupting. Trying to get a word in was like trying to find a gap in the traffic to dodge across Princes Street.

Kate’s dad wasn’t there this morning. He ran a decorating business, which – although in theory he didn’t do any of the painting and papering himself – seemed to always require his presence to get some job completed by the deadline.

“Come on, we’ve got to get out of here fast,” said Kate.

“Why?”

“Ben’s expecting some friends over to play. Trust me, you don’t want to be trapped in here with three four-year-olds.”

“No way. Let’s go.”

They walked down through the sloping grassy park called The Meadows, where the inevitable group of people was involved in a rag-tag game of football.

Kate and her dad were avid Hearts fans; not a happy interest the way the league had gone last season. David, who’d never been that keen a supporter, although he liked to play, had developed a taste for American football during his stay in Houston, which he was maintaining via satellite TV. He was trying to convince Kate of the superiority of the American game and getting nowhere.

“At least come round and watch a match with me and see what you think then.”

It was the fourth time they’d had this conversation.

“Okay, I’ll watch it, but it won’t be a patch on real football,” Kate sighed.

They were almost there now, coming up Middle Meadow Walk. They bought sweets at the newsagent to sustain them until lunchtime and were on the steps outside the museum in time to see an attendant unlock the doors at ten o’clock.

One and a half hours later they decided they were finished. Kate gathered up their papers while David put the last touches to a sketch he had done for a picture of a hill fort.

“Good morning, Kate.”

Kate looked up, surprised; she hadn’t thought there was anyone else near them. She smiled when she saw who it was. “Hello, Mr Flowerdew. How are you?”

“Very well, my dear. And you and the family also I hope? Ah, David, good morning to you. Is that a picture for the project?”

How did he know about it?
, David thought again, but all he said was, “Yes, just a sketch. I’m going to work on it at home.”

“May I see it?”

David opened his sketch pad.

“Ah, yes. A good choice of subject. Plenty of detail to be included if you wish, but it won’t suffer if you leave it out. What about the Pictish Stones? You could draw them beautifully.”

Kate and David looked blank.

“Don’t you know them? The carved stones in the little circular room?”

“I don’t think we’ve ever seen them,” said Kate.

“They’re just across the hall. Come along, I’ll show you.”

They followed Mr Flowerdew around display cases through the gallery and into the hallway where the metal men stalked. Mr Flowerdew walked briskly past them to a corridor that sloped gently downwards. Glass cases, set into the white walls at shoulder height, held coins and jewellery – much the same as they had seen elsewhere.

The corridor opened out into a circular room. In a case at the entrance was a crudely carved wooden figure about a metre high, with pebbles for eyes. Beyond it were great carved stones, lumps almost as tall as the children, some covered in spiral or geometric patterns, others with stylised animals: geese, fish or wild boar.

“This is the lowest part of the museum,” said Mr Flowerdew as he moved between them. “These are the oldest things. No one now understands what the
carvings meant, but they were powerfully made.”

As he spoke, Kate was aware of a faint buzzing sound coming indistinctly from all around them, an uncomfortable noise somehow. When Mr Flowerdew stopped speaking, it was the only sound she could hear, although it was so quiet. From the busy museum around them, not so much as a whisper penetrated this room. She looked at David to see if he could hear it too and saw him shake his head as though he was trying to dislodge an insect.

Now the sound was growing stronger. She longed to break through it, but found that she was afraid to speak, afraid to disturb it.

She turned to Mr Flowerdew. He was listening intently and he looked angry. As she watched, he dropped his walking stick. It fell to the concrete floor with a clatter and Kate and David both jumped forward to pick it up. As they did so, Kate realised the noise had stopped.

David got to the stick first and handed it back.

“Sorry,” said Mr Flowerdew. “How stupid of me. Perhaps not the stones after all, eh David? Time we had something to eat, I think. Come along.”

And he ushered them somewhat hurriedly past the watching wooden figure and up the short corridor back into the ordinary noises of the museum.

Up in the hallway, Kate said, “What was the buzzing noise back there? You heard it, didn’t you David?”

“Yes, it was horrible.”

“Mr Flowerdew?”

“Buzzing? Horrible noises?” He looked puzzled. “I heard the air-conditioning, as usual. It certainly disturbs
my thinking. Quiet; that’s what you need to think properly.”

“No,” Kate persisted. “Not air-conditioning.
Something
else.”

Mr Flowerdew raised a quizzical eyebrow. “It seems to me that you two have been working too hard and are weak with hunger. I trust your parents would have no objection if I took you both to the café?”

Over cakes and drinks he told them more about the Pictish stones and drew the one with the goose on a page of David’s sketch pad.

“Well,” he said, laying down the pencil and checking his pocket watch. “I must be off. It’s been good to talk to you. I hope to see this great project when you complete it. Perhaps you could bring it round to my house some day? I’ve got some bits and pieces that you might find interesting.”

They agreed and said goodbye, then wandered back to the Main Hall, intent on lunch at McDonald’s. As they passed the Information Desk Kate stopped to read something.

“Look at this!” The poster to which she was pointing was advertising a sleepover at the museum in two weeks time.

“Cool. Can you spend the whole night wandering around?”

They read further.

“What do you think?”

“Sounds good to me.”

“Me too. Do you think the parents will let us?”

“Can’t see why not. We spend enough time here anyway and we’d be locked in. Surely that’s safe enough for them?”

“Let’s take some leaflets and persuade them.”

They were halfway down the steps when they heard barking, quite high-pitched, the sort of noise a small dog would make.

Although they looked around, they couldn’t see any dog, large or small, but the barking continued insistently.

“Maybe it’s in a parked car,” said David, “or it could be lost and hiding under one.”

“It sounds so close,” said Kate, “but where on earth is it?”

“Here boy,” called David, snapping his fingers and crouching to look beneath the cars in the little car park, but there was no dog.

Suddenly the barking stopped and though they waited for nearly five minutes, it didn’t start up again.

“I give up,” said David, “Let’s go and have lunch.”

After one last fruitless look around they set off down Chambers Street. Behind them, at the foot of the museum steps, a small dog sat on the pavement.

The television crew arrived half an hour late. Gordon wasn’t that bothered, but the boss seemed to be taking it as a personal insult.

“Do they think we’ve nothing to do but stand around waiting for them?” Marion Purves fumed, looking at her watch for the tenth time in two minutes. “I’ve got a stack of letters about a foot high on my desk waiting to be answered. Right, that’s it, I’ve had enough. Gordon, would you give me a call when – if – they turn up and I’ll come down – if I’m free.”

“Certainly, Mrs Purves. I’ll let you know as soon as they arrive.”

Marion Purves turned on the heel of one of the shoes it looked as though she had polished specially for the occasion and headed off down the hall at considerable speed.

Slow down
, Gordon wanted to say to her,
and don’t get so worked up or your face’ll be all red when you do get on television
, but you couldn’t really say that to a boss, even one as good-natured as she normally was.

“Gordon!”

Sheila at the Information Desk was pointing to a group of people lugging equipment up the stairs from the front door.

Five minutes later the boss had clicked her way back
up the hall to the clock, all smiles now, while the crew unpacked the camera and sound equipment and started checking levels.

“Sorry we’re late,” said the reporter, a woman called Fiona Mackie who Gordon recognised vaguely from TV. “The last job over-ran.”

“No problem,” replied Marion, with an apparently genuine smile. “Wednesdays are fairly quiet.”

The camera operator muttered something to Fiona Mackie.

“We’re just going to get some general shots first. Let’s step away from the clock, shall we? So we don’t need the public kept out of the way yet.”

They watched the camera operator backing away from the clock, watching the image she was filming.

“We’ll do the voice-over back at the studio.” She paused, looking at the clock as if she was only now seeing it properly. “It really is something, isn’t it?”

Marion nodded in agreement. “It certainly is. The workshop’s through in Glasgow, but they used material from all over the place to make it. The wood for the monkey came from the museum, you know; a big lump of oak that was dredged out of Duddingston Loch with some Bronze-Age weapons years ago. It had been sitting in storage ever since. It’s nice that they were able to use it.”

It took nearly fifteen minutes for them to get their
establishing shots
as they called them, and then Fiona and Marion went up to the first floor to do their bit with the top of the clock in the background. After that they had to block off one of the stairways so Fiona could come down
slowly with the clock in shot, explaining more about it.

“Great,” she said, back at ground level again. “We’ll cut it all together tomorrow or the day after and the piece will go out on next week’s programme. Now, what time is it?”

It was twenty-five to four.

“Oh no. We’re due in the Signet Library at four, but we really must have footage of the clock striking.”

“We can switch it on now,” said Marion. “You don’t need to show the clock face: it’s all the rest that people are interested in. Gordon knows how to trip the mechanism manually, don’t you, Gordon?”

“Well, yes, but I’m not supposed …”

“Oh nonsense, there’ll be no problem. On you go, Gordon.”

Gordon was not a happy man. Yes, he knew what to do, but you didn’t muck about with a mechanism like this unless you had a good reason. They turned off the music at night right enough, but left the working of the figures alone, so that they spun and swung and turned in eerie silence on the hour.

He swung open the side panel and moved all the switches that would bring the clock to life, then stepped back out of shot as the crew filmed the monkey turning her handle.

In the bird biology gallery, a white-haired old man with a walking stick raised his head from a sketch of an albatross, an expression of disbelief on his face.

“Fools,” he muttered to himself. “What are they doing?”

When they’d all gone and Marion had retreated to her 
office, Gordon reset everything and hung around with some anxiety until he had seen the clock behave as normal when four struck, before he went for his tea break.

The old man watched it carefully too, shaking his head gently once or twice. He waited until every bell had stopped trembling, then walked slowly away and out the front door, leaning more heavily than usual on his stick.

At the bottom of the steps he paused, listening to the sound of a small dog barking. The dog itself was nowhere to be seen.

“You know too, don’t you? You heard it and knew it was the wrong time. Where have you gone, I wonder?” he said, half to himself, as he walked away.

Gordon’s shift finished at six that day, once all the doors had been locked and all the galleries and toilets and cloakrooms had been checked to make sure there wasn’t some fool hiding, intent on spending the night as a bet. It was surprising, or maybe it wasn’t really, how often that happened.

He went for a couple of pints in Sandy Bell’s with some of the lads when he’d finished, so that it was nearly eight o’clock when he came out into the misty evening and decided to walk down the hills home to Stockbridge.

In summer, the place would have been busy with tourists, but now at the start of October, in the quiet between the Edinburgh Festival and Christmas, there
were only a few people walking along George IV Bridge. He reached the traffic lights and looked left up the hill towards the rearing bulk of the castle, then right towards St Giles with its stone crown illuminated against the sky, less distinct than usual because of the mist, which seemed to be getting thicker.

Across the road he went past Deacon Brodie’s pub then down the steep hill called the Mound, with its views away over Fife. Not that you could see that far tonight of course, in this mist.

As he walked down the hill he saw that it had gathered thickly in Princes Street Gardens, lying in their hollow beneath the castle rock. He could see it moving in rags and tatters down there, something shining beneath it.

Shining?

He stopped and looked again. There it was, like a gleam of light reflected from water, only there was no water down there, hadn’t been since they drained the Nor Loch, nearly two hundred years ago. Now there were the railway lines and the gardens, but no water, except in a big fountain at the far end.

Even knowing that, it still looked wet. The mist had drawn back in places and he could swear he was looking at a rippling body of water. There were sounds too, like the splash of oars and muffled laughter.

This couldn’t be happening. He was having a dream and he’d wake in his own quiet bed, far away from impossible water.

But he knew he wasn’t dreaming.

He’d only had two pints. He couldn’t be drunk and hallucinating. Sober and hallucinating then?

There was another sound from below him as though oars were being shipped and a boat being bumped ashore out of the shallows and at that moment Gordon was rocked by a cold wave of fear. It brought him to himself. He began to walk fast, crushing the desire to run, the hair rising on the back of his neck.

He went fifty yards, almost to the junction with Princes Street, where other people were walking, off out for the evening, then stopped and forced himself to look again.

Princes Street Gardens lay calm and dim under a sky clear of mist; battalions of roses, tall trees and wide lawns all as they should be. He stared and stared until he became aware of a passing couple looking curiously at him and roused himself to continue walking.

There was no explanation for what he’d just seen and heard except some sort of hallucination. What was happening to him? Maybe he was coming down with the flu. That could be it.

He’d go home and lock the doors and windows carefully and fight it off with a big whisky.