Chaos Clock (6 page)

She had waited so long to be out in the light; to hear, to taste air; such a long time.

They had taken the wood and carved her and she had waited patiently to be freed by their tools, as she had done already, century after century, and at last there she was: complete and carved, coloured and gilded, with gold on her wrist as she deserved.

She had thought she was free, and they had thought she was their prisoner, and they were both right and both wrong. When she had discovered what they planned, when they trapped her in place, she would have howled if she could, but they had not carved her a voice.

At first she tried to be content out in the light, hearing, tasting air, but she wanted to be free. Truly free.

They had not realised, of course, how she would focus all the power from round about on herself. Stupid. So she waited again, still patient, feeling the power loosen the trap around her, until the first night her spirit stepped free, and left the carved image standing there.

There were many places in the museum where a small monkey could hide unnoticed.

The squeaky gate did its work again and the door opened as they walked under the rowan tree. Mr Flowerdew gave them a brief smile as they entered the house.

“Thank you for coming back,” he said, and handed a small package to David. “The oil pastels you’re supposed to have come to collect, in case we forget later.”

“Thanks.” David put them carefully away in his bag.

“Come up to the study.”

Accompanied by the deep tick of the clock, they went upstairs. Mr Flowerdew waved them to a couple of armchairs but remained standing himself, looking out of the window down the long garden.

After a minute he passed a hand over his face and turned back to the room, pulling an old wooden swivel chair away from the desk for himself. “Is there anything you want to ask?”

They looked at each other.

“No. We want to hear what you have to say first, then we’ll ask.”

“Very well.” He drew a breath. “I am one of the Guardians of Time. There are several hundred of us around the world, always watching for signs that the Lords of Chaos are trying to break through into this existence. The war between the Lords and the Guardians has gone on since time began to flow here,
and now we are both bound to this planet.

“We have feared for a long time that they would attack again in Edinburgh. The past and present are only loosely anchored here – partly because it has been a battleground for us before – so two or three Guardians have made it their home, until now. Now we are stretched so thin that I am the only one.

“I have lived here continuously since 1348 by your reckoning. I have been John Flowerdew for eighty-two years now – the longest I have been any one person. I was born as him so that I could come to know your grandmother, Kate. We thought for a long time that Alice would turn out to be the one, but we had the generations wrong: you and David are the keys, not her.”

“What do you mean, we’re the keys?” Kate asked incredulously.

“From time to time certain people are born whose fate it is to aid or thwart the attempts of Chaos to destroy time. You and David are two such people. Look …”

As he spoke, the room turned misty around them, and in the mist they saw figures, people dressed in skins, standing on the edge of a loch. Behind them, a great fire burned down to embers.

A woman and two children moved away from the group towards the pyre and bent to pick up ash and smear it on their faces. The children were crying, the tears making streaks through the ash. Their faces were so alike it was obvious they were brother and sister; the girl about eight and the boy six or so.

The three of them walked back to the water’s edge
where a man and another woman waited and bent to pick up objects from the ground. One by one they threw them into the water, light glinting on the metal as they did so; axe-head, spearhead, knife-blade and lastly, the broken remnants of a sword, were all cast away by the children.

The mist swirled more thickly and the vision faded, and they were once more in Mr Flowerdew’s study.

“How did you do that?” asked David, wide-eyed.

“That does not matter. It is what you saw that is important. That was the aftermath of the first great battle of the Guardians and the Lords in Edinburgh – at Duddingston Loch. The weapons you saw thrown into the loch are part of the Duddingston Hoard.”

“But what does it have to do with us?” Kate asked, baffled.

Mr Flowerdew held up his hand. “You are the descendants of the children you just saw: the last descendants in Scotland apart from Ben. They were the children of the man who made the weapons, the village Smith – and he died during the battle.

“But we’re just friends. We’re not related.”

“You are, but very distantly. You share the Smith’s children as your ancestors. The Hoard must return to the loch, and the two of you must do it; that is why you are the keys.”

There was a moment’s silence, as they tried to digest what they had just seen and heard.

“You said earlier aid
or
thwart. You mean we could do either?”

“Yes. You could be the means whereby the Lords
triumph, or by which we defeat them once more. Make no mistake; both sides will seek to persuade you to help them.”

“What if we decide not to be on anyone’s side?” asked David.

Mr Flowerdew looked uncomfortable. “I wish I could say you would be left alone to get on with your lives, but I am afraid you are too valuable to both sides for that to happen. You are unavoidably a part of this. You cannot watch from the sidelines.” He gripped the arms of his chair hard and got to his feet. “I am sorry. I thought there would be more time before we had to call on you, but the Lords have stretched us so thinly that we can barely contain them. If there had been another one of us in Edinburgh we might have been able to hold them off without your help even yet … The echoes of the past have grown so strong since the Millennium. There were never so many minds focused on time before … and the clock in the museum draws power to it like a magnet, and has become a tool to help the Lords open the door to the past. When its time was disordered for that television programme it helped their cause even more.

“We are already fighting as hard as we can to close the door to the past. We need your help, or it is likely that we shall be defeated.”

Breaking the tense silence that followed, Kate spoke.

“What happens if you win?”

“Nothing. That is, no one would be aware of it, because time will continue to flow unchanged.”

“And if you lose?”

“Then the world that you know will cease to be.”

There was silence, for what seemed like a very long time, before, finally, Kate spoke again. “How do we know what to believe? It’s all so … Is there any proof?”

“None at all. The only real proof will be in your heart, if you recognise the truth. I would guess though that your dreams have not returned since we last spoke.”

They shook their heads.

“Why does that matter?” asked Kate.

“If the dreams continue to develop you would be more likely to believe me, but that is not what the Lords want. If they are just bad dreams and they stop, then perhaps I’m just a silly old fool.”

Kate coloured, although he was carefully not looking at her.

“You are more likely to be taken in by them if you have dismissed me.”

“Are they here, like you?”

“No. They are
confined
in a different dimension. They cannot reach you physically, but they can influence you. They will try to pressure you to help them, by threat or promise.”

“But isn’t that what you’re doing?”

He sighed. “It must seem so, but we aim to protect the world you know; the Lords mean to destroy it. Which would you rather see happen?”

There was a trace of impatience in his voice for a moment, but when he spoke again it was gone.

“I’m sorry. It is unfair of me to expect you to decide quickly – or at all. Come down to the kitchen and I’ll find you something to eat, and then you can talk to each
other in peace while I tidy the garden.”

In the kitchen he made a pot of tea and produced a sticky lemon sponge, dripping with icing. He pulled on a pair of wellingtons and a very grubby jacket and unbolted the back door. “I’ll be about fifteen minutes,” he said as he went out.

At first, they concentrated on their slices of cake, avoiding talk, but the final crumbs were soon gone.

“It’s true, you know,” said David. “I can feel it. I can’t explain it, but I’m sure. And how did he show us that … whatever it was … if he’s not what he says he is?”

Kate pushed her hair behind her ears. “I know. I’ve been trying to convince myself that I don’t feel like that, but I do. I only wish I didn’t believe him. 1348 did he say?” She shook her head as though trying to clear it. “I can’t work out how old that makes him.”

“So we help?”

“If we’ve decided he’s telling the truth, how can we not help? But what can we do? There’s nothing special about us.”

“He seems to think there is.”

Kate cut an extra piece of cake for each of them and they ate in silence.

They jumped when there was a knock at the back door. Mr Flowerdew put his head around it. “Can I come in? Or would you like more time by yourselves?”

“No, come in. We took more cake – I hope you don’t mind.”

“Goodness, no.”

He wrestled his boots off, then his jacket, washed his hands, poured a cup of tea and sat down, looking from
David to Kate and back.

David nodded that Kate should speak for them both.

“We believe you. We want to help, but we don’t see how we can.”

A smile of pure relief lit his face. “Thank you both. You don’t yet know how much this means. Thank you.” He took a drink of tea, collecting his thoughts. “Our problem is that the museum is brim full of power, which is focused by the clock into a form that the Lords of Chaos can use. We must disconnect this power so they can no longer reach it. There are two things we must do to accomplish that: the Duddingston Hoard must return to the loch and the clock must be changed – its spirit must be constrained.”

“Spirit? You mean like a ghost?”

“No indeed. More like a soul. You have seen the monkey at the bottom of the clock?”

They nodded, intrigued.

“She is carved in the form of an ancient Egyptian spirit, but more important than her form is what she is actually carved
from
. Look again.”

Mist obscured their surroundings once more and they were back on the loch edge, watching the children hurl the pieces of the broken sword into the water. This time though, they saw what happened next: two young men wrestled a great tree stump into the loch.

Abruptly they were back in the study.

“The monkey was carved from the oak stump on which those weapons were forged. Some of their power flowed into it. The anvil should also have stayed hidden from the world, but it was dredged up with the
weapons and shaped into the monkey. She is the spirit of the clock, and the power that was in the weapons has shaped itself into consciousness in her. Now she calls their power to herself and her strength grows. She is close to escaping the clock altogether, and if she does so, all the pent-up power in the museum will tip into Chaos. Already she moves away from it sometimes in the night, creeping through the museum. Soon she will grow bolder.

“We must bind her to the clock for good, while we have the chance.”

“How do we do that?” asked Kate.

“You already have the means, although you do not know it. Kate, you have a necklace of your
grandmother’s
, do you not?”

“Yes,” she said, her brow creasing. “How did you know?”

He smiled, the first time he had really looked untroubled all that day.

“I know, because I had it made and gave it to her, and asked her to leave it to her first granddaughter. It was made fifty-four years ago for this moment, to bind the monkey to her place in the clock for all time.”

“But the clock wasn’t made until 1999.”

“But I knew it would be.”

Kate shook her head, completely baffled. “So all I have to do is put the necklace on the monkey and that’s it, everything’s fixed?”

He gave a short laugh. “I wish it was so simple. It must be done in the right way at the right moment by both of you working together. Only together will you be
strong enough.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to get some of the other Guardians to come to help instead of us? Then you’d be sure of winning, wouldn’t you?”

“If Edinburgh were the only battleground that might work, but each one of us faces a part of this struggle wherever we are. The truth of it is that there is no one who can leave their own fight to lend us help here. The four of us must accomplish this alone.”

“Three of us, you mean.”

“Four. Only three as yet, but we need a fourth. We must find someone inside the museum who will work with us and help us steal the Duddingston Hoard so we can return it to the loch.

If we can do both these things, the past should sink to its rightful level again and this particular threat will be over.”

“So now you have to try and persuade someone at the museum about all this?” said David. “How are you going to do that? It was hard enough convincing
us
.”

“It may not be as difficult as you think. Already there are rumours about a small animal which leaves its traces in the museum but is never clearly seen, and a feeling of disquiet is growing among those who are sensitive to what is happening.

“I’ve been a regular visitor for a long time. The staff are used to talking to me.”

Mr Flowerdew looked at the children’s bleak faces and said gently, “We have some time before we will be forced to act.”

“Oh good,” said Kate weakly. “Enough time for us to
grow up?”

“A few weeks.”

“Oh. Right.”

They sat in silence round the big wooden table until David said, “We should be going.”

“Of course.”

Numbly, they gathered their belongings.

“I’ll be in touch soon, but if you want to talk to me before that, just telephone.”

He opened the front door.

“And by the way, I think you know me well enough to call me John, don’t you?”

“John?”

“Even a Guardian of Time needs a first name. You don’t imagine everyone calls me Mr Flowerdew all the time?”

“John.”